Any comments, please send them to dadofprince@gmail.com. Thank you!
Sometimes, you pick up a book you really haven't spent time with. It shouts to you and you wonder why the hell it wasn't the first thing you did to understand something.
So it was for me and 48 Laws of Power, by Robert Greene. It's been sitting in one of my bookcases for a couple of years now. You want ex-'s playbook, even though he isn't likely to have read it? Right there.
All 48 laws apply incredibly well, though in their execution, he's done better in some than in others. But Law 27? Applies in a frightening way. Applies because of mass gullibility. Of mass irresponsibility. Of mass thoughtlessness. In other words, perfectly.
Here it is, #27: Play On People's Need to Believe to Create a Cultlike Following. All of Greene's "laws" have a "judgment" described beside it, an explanation as to why the person seeking power should engage in the behavior to succeed in grabbing power. The judgment behind #27 is: People have an overwhelming desire to believe in something. Become the focal point of such desire by offering them a cause, a new faith to follow. Keep your words vague but full of promise; emphasize enthusiasm over rationality and clear thinking. Give your new disciples rituals to perform, ask them to make sacrifices on your behalf. In the absence of organized religion and grand causes, your new belief system will bring you untold power.
That is exactly what he's doing. It's as if he's following this book word-for-word.
He's offering a cause: Make America Great Again. It doesn't matter if it means nothing, or it means to create wishful thinking in people's minds that we can be successfully transported into some imaginary past some 50 or 60 years ago that begins and ends nowhere. It's vague enough, but it allows people to forget that they contributed, and still contribute, to our problems, that that burden belongs to someone else, someone who can be, and should be, shunned. It lets them think that, with behaviors that are obsolete or tried and untrue, they can settle into a worryless future without stress.
Giving the new disciples rituals to perform: Wearing the cap and paraphernalia. Going to rallies. Laughing at anything, however ridiculous or mundane, when it's called for. Creating a new belief system: The religious right, mindless as it is, is clinging to him for dear life and connecting their beliefs with his, thus putting the implied (and not so implied) label of religiosity on him, blurring his dundering foolishness with a kind of supernatural gifting. It is the "new faith to follow."
When the distracted masses cheer for him, they're not even sure what they're cheering for, but they feel better because they're doing it with all who surround them. They act mindlessly. That's the idea.
Think he doesn't know exactly what he's doing? Someone else did. From Mein Kampf (as recorded by William L. Shirer in The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich):
The power which has always started the greatest religious and political avalanches in history rolling has from time immemorial been the magic power of the spoken word, and that alone.
The broad masses of the people can be moved only by the power of speech. All great movements are popular movements, volcanic eruptions of human passions and emotional sentiments, stirred either by the cruel Goddess of Distress or by the firebrand of the word hurled among the masses; they aren't the lemonade-like outpourings of the literary aesthetes and drawing-room heroes.
Which is why, by the way, all the books written (as thorough and good as they are) about the horrors and dangers of this awful, despicable man which have happened and which might very well start happening again in the very near future don't amount to a drop in the bucket. The people who should be reading them won't. They don't need to. All they need is the next rally, the next rambling, illogical speech, the next hate-filled rhetorical twist of a phrase. Like addicts, they crave it.
Let Carl Sagan summarize:
One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we've been bamboozled enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We're no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It's simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we've been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.
Nobody who supports ex- reads the "literary aesthetes." They are too sweet, "lemonade-like." The words must be tough and unsparing toward someone else, the scapegoats, whoever they are. Once you hear him and fall prey, you don't need anything else. Or at least they won't admit it.
They are fanatical in their unity. Yes, it's a cult. It's a big part of their attraction, along with the Goddess of Distress: There always must be some catastrophe just around the corner, and someone else has to be to blame.
If this takes over, we will never be close to a democracy again. We will go to war, probably with Mexico. Ukraine will fall to the Russians with devastating effects on Europe. You think inflation's been bad? Just wait. He will try again and fail to create both guns and butter. He will use a war footing to control the press and educational system.
Read The 48 Laws of Power. Read it because you should know the enemy.
Be well. Be careful. With some luck, I'll see you down the road.
Mister Mark
No comments:
Post a Comment