Moral Relativism And Mesmerizing The Masses

100 Years Of Democrats Demagoging Altruism  

   ~ How Democrats Control The Narrative

“A population weakened and exhausted by battling against so many obstacles—whose needs are never satisfied and desires never fulfilled –is vulnerable to manipulation and regimentation. The struggle for survival is, above all, an exercise that is hugely time-consuming, absorbing and debilitating. If you create these “anti-conditions,” Your rule is guaranteed for a hundred years” ~ Ryszard Kapuscinski

Altruism is a deeply held ethical ideal held by many who consider moral acts are made with the intent to promote the happiness of others.  It was identified and named by a French philosopher, Auguste Comte who named the activity altruism.  It is applied not only to people (psychological altruism), but also to animals and even plants. In modern day linguistics this idealistic passion of seeking and identifying doing good deeds is often abused manipulatively to shape political activisim, based on the often emotionally rewarding feelings humans experience as a result of doing good deeds.

Democrats have become masters of manipulating emotions of voters.  Talk to a Democrat and most of their political ideology will begin with I feel.  Not I think.  Not I believe.  Not based on the Constitution, or law but on emotion.  Based on 'caring for the downtrodden' and the have nots, who may or may not be in a lesser or worse financial, workplace, or educational situation.  Every despot, tyrant, and totalitarian has mastered this manipulation which feeds and drives class warfare, relying on jealousy, malcontentment and is used as a means to inspire and activate social economic or environmental change.

Think about it, no one wants nuclear war, or to see polar bears die, and if you are a have not you have been led to believe the rich deserve to be taxed because they have taken advantage of those who are poor.  Goldwater's Presidential campaign was eviscerated by this ad that Lyndon Johnson ran in 1964:

Demagogue: A leader who obtains power by means of impassioned appeals to the emotions and prejudices of the populace.

Altruism: Unselfish concern for the welfare of others; selflessness. Instinctive cooperative behavior that is detrimental to the individual but contributes to the survival of the species.

Manipulate Synonyms: exploit, play (upon)

From The Use of Language in Political Rhetoric: Linguistic Manipulation:

"It is generally accepted that the strategy one group of people takes to make the other group of people do what it intends to be done is known as a linguistic strategy.  It involves manipulative application of the language.  Therefore, "linguistic manupilation conscious use of a language in a devious way to control others.  Pragmatically speaking, linguistic manipulation is based on use of indirect speech acts, which are focused on prelocutionary effects of what is said...  Linguistic manipulation can be considered also as an influencial instrument of political rhetoric because political discourse is primarily focused on persuading people to take specified political actions or  make crucial political decisions.

To convince the potential electorate in present time societies, politics basically dominates the mass media, which leads to creating new forms of linguistic manipulation, e.g. modified forms of press conferences and press statements, updated texts in slogans, application of catch phrases, the connotative meanins of words, a combination of language and visual imagery.  To put it differently, lanaguage plays a significant role because it is an instrument by means of which the manipulative intent of politicians become apparent."

I have taken excerpts from Woodrow Wilson, father of the Progressive Movement of the Left, Calvin Coolidge, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and Ronald Reagan, and underlined passages that have been used by Democrats again and again.  I also underlined the Conservative thoughts of Reagan and Coolidge.  Democrats are in blue and Republicans in red.  You will note that both Coolidge and Reagan were focused on the rights of the individual as opposed to the Progressive focus of the left to the collective and masses.

Excerpts From Woodrow Wilson's First Inagural Address:

With the great Government went many deep secret things which we too long delayed to look into and scrutinize with candid, fearless eyes. The great Government we loved has too often been made use of for private and selfish purposes, and those who used it had forgotten the people.

At last a vision has been vouchsafed us of our life as a whole. We see the bad with the good, the debased and decadent with the sound and vital. With this vision we approach new affairs. Our duty is to cleanse, to reconsider, to restore, to correct the evil without impairing the good, to purify and humanize every process of our common life without weakening or sentimentalizing it. There has been something crude and heartless and unfeeling in our haste to succeed and be great. Our thought has been “Let every man look out for himself, let every generation look out for itself,” while we reared giant machinery which made it impossible that any but those who stood at the levers of control should have a chance to look out for themselves. We had not forgotten our morals. We remembered well enough that we had set up a policy which was meant to serve the humblest as well as the most powerful, with an eye single to the standards of justice and fair play, and remembered it with pride. But we were very heedless and in a hurry to be great.

We have come now to the sober second thought. The scales of heedlessness have fallen from our eyes. We have made up our minds to square every process of our national life again with the standards we so proudly set up at the beginning and have always carried at our hearts. Our work is a work of restoration. ..

...Nor have we studied and perfected the means by which government may be put at the service of humanity, in safeguarding the health of the Nation, the health of its men and its women and its children, as well as their rights in the struggle for existence. This is no sentimental duty. The firm basis of government is justice, not pity. These are matters of justice. There can be no equality or opportunity, the first essential of justice in the body politic, if men and women and children be not shielded in their lives, their very vitality, from the consequences of great industrial and social processes which they can not alter, control, or singly cope with. Society must see to it that it does not itself crush or weaken or damage its own constituent parts. The first duty of law is to keep sound the society it serves. Sanitary laws, pure food laws, and laws determining conditions of labor which individuals are powerless to determine for themselves are intimate parts of the very business of justice and legal efficiency. ...

These are some of the things we ought to do, and not leave the others undone, the old-fashioned, never-to-be-neglected, fundamental safeguarding of property and of individual right. This is the high enterprise of the new day: To lift everything that concerns our life as a Nation to the light that shines from the hearthfire of every man’s conscience and vision of the right. It is inconceivable that we should do this as partisans; it is inconceivable we should do it in ignorance of the facts as they are or in blind haste. We shall restore, not destroy. We shall deal with our economic system as it is and as it may be modified, not as it might be if we had a clean sheet of paper to write upon; and step by step we shall make it what it should be, in the spirit of those who question their own wisdom and seek counsel and knowledge, not shallow self-satisfaction or the excitement of excursions whither they can not tell. Justice, and only justice, shall always be our motto.

And yet it will be no cool process of mere science. The Nation has been deeply stirred, stirred by a solemn passion, stirred by the knowledge of wrong, of ideals lost, of government too often debauched and made an instrument of evil. The feelings with which we face this new age of right and opportunity sweep across our heartstrings like some air out of God’s own presence, where justice and mercy are reconciled and the judge and the brother are one. We know our task to be no mere task of politics but a task which shall search us through and through, whether we be able to understand our time and the need of our people, whether we be indeed their spokesmen and interpreters, whether we have the pure heart to comprehend and the rectified will to choose our high course of action.         

From Calvin Coolidge's First Inagural Address

In a republic the first rule for the guidance of the citizen is obedience to law. Under a despotism the law may be imposed upon the subject. He has no voice in its making, no influence in its administration, it does not represent him. Under a free government the citizen makes his own laws, chooses his own administrators, which do represent him. Those who want their rights respected under the Constitution and the law ought to set the example themselves of observing the Constitution and the law. While there may be those of high intelligence who violate the law at times, the barbarian and the defective always violate it. Those who disregard the rules of society are not exhibiting a superior intelligence, are not promoting freedom and independence, are not following the path of civilization, but are displaying the traits of ignorance, of servitude, of savagery, and treading the way that leads back to the jungle.

The essence of a republic is representative government.

Excerpt from Franklin Delano Roosevelt's First Inagural Address:

If I read the temper of our people correctly, we now realize as we have never realized before our interdependence on each other; that we can not merely take but we must give as well; that if we are to go forward, we must move as a trained and loyal army willing to sacrifice for the good of a common discipline, because without such discipline no progress is made, no leadership becomes effective. We are, I know, ready and willing to submit our lives and property to such discipline, because it makes possible a leadership which aims at a larger good. This I propose to offer, pledging that the larger purposes will bind upon us all as a sacred obligation with a unity of duty hitherto evoked only in time of armed strife.

From Ronald Reagan's First Inagural Address:

In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem. From time to time we've been tempted to believe that society has become too complex to be managed by self-rule, that government by an elite group is superior to government for, by, and of the people. Well, if no one among us is capable of governing himself, then who among us has the capacity to govern someone else? All of us together, in and out of government, must bear the burden. The solutions we seek must be equitable, with no one group singled out to pay a higher price.

We hear much of special interest groups. Well, our concern must be for a special interest group that has been too long neglected. It knows no sectional boundaries or ethnic and racial divisions, and it crosses political party lines. It is made up of men and women who raise our food, patrol our streets, man our mines and factories, teach our children, keep our homes, and heal us when we're sick -- professionals, industrialists, shopkeepers, clerks, cabbies, and truckdrivers. They are, in short, ``We the people,'' this breed called Americans.

...So, as we begin, let us take inventory. We are a nation that has a government -- not the other way around. And this makes us special among the nations of the Earth. Our government has no power except that granted it by the people. It is time to check and reverse the growth of government, which shows signs of having grown beyond the consent of the governed...

From the Ayn Rand Lexicon, Even though altruism declares that “...it is more blessed to give than to receive,” it does not work that way in practice. The givers are never blessed; the more they give, the more is demanded of them; complaints, reproaches and insults are the only response they get for practicing altruism’s virtues (or for their actual virtues). Altruism cannot permit a recognition of virtue; it cannot permit self-esteem or moral innocence. Guilt is altruism’s stock in trade, and the inducing of guilt is its only means of self-perpetuation. If the giver is not kept under a torrent of degrading, demeaning accusations, he might take a look around and put an end to the self-sacrificing. Altruists are concerned only with those who suffer—not with those who provide relief from suffering, not even enough to care whether they are able to survive. When no actual suffering can be found, the altruists are compelled to invent or manufacture it."

“The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. ...We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society. ...In almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons...who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind.” ~ Edward L. Bernays

The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use the words. ~ Philip K. Dick

Situational Ethics

Democracy--the domination of unreflective and timorous men,

moved in vast herds by mob conditions. ~ H L Mencken

Madison Avenue is a very powerful aggression against private consciousness.
 A demand that you yield your private consciousness to public manipulation. ~ Marshall McLuhan

As Conservatives we must make certain that when we are engaged in political dialogue that we first speak the truth as best we understand it.  Our facts must be valid and verifiable and from reliable known sources. The best weapon to defeat the practice of Democrats and the left of manipulating voters with straw man arguments and manipulative rhetoric which preys on an unsuspecting audience is the truth. Shakespeare said "To thine ownself be true" and I seem to recall in my youth the freqently quoted addage "The truth shall set you free". The truth unlike agenda driven rhetoric has no motive, no secret message, however if you are trying to discuss the truth with a Democrat you will know immediately it is so, as they will break out in a harangue filled with obscenities, call you names and blame G.W. Bush.