By Steven Yates
January 28, 2023
“Whoever tells the best story shapes the culture.” ― Erwin McManus
“It is pictures rather than propositions, metaphors rather than statements, which determine most of our philosophical convictions.” ― Richard Rorty
Someone named Jill Lawrence at USA Today recently opined:
… the Republican Party is on a dark path and should not hold power anywhere until it comes back into the light. That’s especially true on Capitol Hill. Congressional math is unforgiving. If there is just one more Republican than Democrat in the House or Senate, a power-obsessed party in thrall to election deniers and conspiracists will control committees, agendas, investigations, and leadership positions.
This is from an article entitled “If you care about your country and your rights, don’t vote for any Republicans in 2022.” Since the article was dated Tuesday, January 24, 2023, I presume she means “don’t vote for any Republicans in 2024.” Proofreading does not appear to be USA Today’s strong suit (or Yahoo’s, which aggregated the article).
That aside … “dark path”?
It’s an interesting image Lawrence has foisted on us, one presumably be shared by a lot of Northeast-based pundits and fake-pundits.
The rest of the paragraph expands: “a power-obsessed party in thrall to election deniers and conspiracists….”
Weaponized code words, as I’ve noted repeatedly. But however indirectly, they point to what terrifies the mainstream in this New Normal.
It’s the opposition to globalism, a movement that has advanced by any means necessary.
It’s the opponents’ desire to live as they see fit, and not be subject to forces they cannot control or defend against.
But let’s think about the images conjured up by phrases like dark path versus back into the light. And why the weaponized phrases continue to paralyze people’s brains?
Because we anti-globalists have a messaging problem, and until we understand how the propagandists of the other side are programmed to operate, we’ll continue to have a messaging problem.
To lay the groundwork, let’s first ask ourselves, are human beings truly “rational animals” as the ancient philosopher Aristotle said? Are we primarily reasoning beings, that is, whose emotions are add-ons, like decorations, to keep life interesting, sexy, and colorful?
Or instead, are we fundamentally emotional beings who happen to be able to reason — usually using it to justify, after the fact, beliefs we’ve already formed or decisions we’ve already made.
If it’s the latter, it makes sense that most humans respond better to stories and images than to didactic arguments and long chains of reasoning.
The eighteenth century Scottish philosopher David Hume believed that only emotions — or passions, he called them — could motivate action. If Hume were alive today, he’d invoke his analysis to explain the sweeping cultural changes of the past 30 – 40 years as well as the intractability of the culture wars.
For it bears asking, how did homosexuality go from being abnormal and repugnant back in the early 1980s to something novel and fascinating in the 2000s?
The answer: storytelling. I’m surprised so few conservatives have noticed.
This is what happened: by the early 1990s Hollywood writers and producers were inserting gay and lesbian characters into the scripts of popular sitcoms and middle-of-the-road TV programs aimed primarily at younger audiences. These scripts portrayed such characters sympathetically, even heroically, facing problems all of us can relate to: at work, in relationships, etc.
They simultaneously depicted Christians as arrogant, unfeeling, and potentially violent.
An actor or actress, or star athlete, or some other celebrity “influencer” — someone millions of people identify with emotionally — would then “come out of the closet.”
By the mid-2000s the country was ready for Brokeback Mountain. In the early 2010s Lady Gaga (who is highly intelligent and knew exactly what she was doing) released “Born This Way,” an anthemic dance tune which did more than became a club hit and top-10 single, it defined the mindset of a generation.
The avalanche of sympathy for LGBTQ+ was unstoppable. Obergefell v Hodges was inevitable.
That’s how you change a culture. You change its dominant narratives and ethos, which are just storylines and images delivered and promoted by the influential.
Why was The Matrix so popular with a different subculture?
Knowing that film much better than I do 1990s television, I can be more specific.
That film’s premise was that we are all plugged into a computer-generated virtual reality designed to keep us under total control, and that the only way we would ever be free was to unplug from the machine and destroy it. That meant fighting the gatekeepers — including some of our own.
The Matrix embedded this message, with compelling images (e.g., “red pill” versus “blue pill”), into a riveting action story involving clear protagonists (Morpheus, Neo, Trinity) and antagonists (Agent Smith and his lookalikes). It placed the protagonists in situations which many of us can relate to (e.g., the sense of being an outsider), within a plot leading through tense confrontations and crises building to an edge-of-your-seat climax and thought-provoking finish (Neo, to the power the Matrix represents: “I’m going to show these people what you don’t want them to see. I’m going to show them a world without you…”).
Replace the idea of a computer generated virtual reality world with the fictions created by corporate mass media and most formal education, in which (1) we live in democracies, (2) our military-industrial complex is the world’s “protagonist,” Russia is evil, evil, evil; (3) the coronavirus “evolved in a bat,” and the mRNA shots are “safe and effective”; (4) Election 2020 was the “more secure in history”; (5) Trump is a proto-fascist whose supporters tried to overturn a democratic election on January 6, 2021; (6) Putin’s attack on Ukraine was “unprovoked”; etc., ad nauseam.
Not one of these is true.
The idea of being “red pilled” had crept into the Patriot community in the early 2000 decade and has remained ever since.
That film is almost 24 years old, though. We need new messaging in new packaging, for our present New Normal. A world in which we are gaslighted routinely about all the above. A world whose death culture defends a woman’s “right to control her body” so long as it kills her unborn baby but cannot be invoked to refuse a shot.
A world in which central banks scheme to impose systems that will monitor and potentially control every aspect of our financial lives (central bank digital currencies).
I’m surprised Dystopian fiction and films are not more popular than they are. But then again, the 2020s have seemed to make Dystopia redundant!
We should take Dystopian messaging and turn it against globalism. Globalism, after all, is the “dark path” if it leads to a world based on total control.
And if our thesis above about our being primarily emotional beings is true, people will respond better to stories and images depicting such than to didacticism. Especially if the stories and images are repeated over and over until they are burned into brains and prompt action. This is how social engineering worked before, through positive messaging and “nudges” people responded to, believing the choice was theirs.
I’ll admit, I’ve been as bad as anyone, hanging onto the idea that arguments changed minds, far longer than I should have. It’s the way I was trained — or perhaps programmed. I’m having to deprogram myself in certain ways, too.
But look at any good picture of Klaus Schwab. Does he not look like a Dystopian sci-fi movie villain? Or a caricature of such?
The memes are there: we’ve probably all seen the one of Bill Gates with an evil grin on his face holding up a needle.
We need storylines with compelling characters in which to embed such images and give them a fuller context.
These storylines will portray Patriots not as “insurrectionists” but people you would want as neighbors: truthful, trustworthy, helpful, principled, and protective if need be.
Those who openly promote global domination are antagonists in this script, depicted as the opposite: deceitful (often lying by omission), immoral, hypocritical to the core and apt to break every promise they keep, ruthless enough to mass murder anyone who gets in their way.
Propaganda? Or hard reality? Even Greta Thunberg has called out the hypocrisy of the World Economic Forum globalists, including CEOs of major energy corporations, flying in from all over the world on private jets, to run their mouths about man-made climate change.
A good satirist should be able to portray these people as objects of ridicule.
Compelling storylines of whatever sort, if they can be gotten in front of an audience hungry for entertainment can portray globalist minions as Darth Vaders, their political pawns no different than Coriolanus Snow (of The Hunger Games).
Over the top? No less than the left’s ludicrous depiction of “MAGA Republicans.”
It’s true: many if not most Dystopias, and discussions of them, present leftist messages (The Handmaid’s Tale is the most obvious example).
But others, interpretations aside, just depict their fictional tyrants as all too many real tyrants have been: ruthless and psychotic (think of Adam Sutler in V for Vendetta).
Dystopian protagonists offer hope. In The Matrix, Neo promised freedom from the control grid. The character V, in V for Vendetta, fomented a mass uprising against the tyranny, with the Guy Fawkes mask as his symbol.
Is it an accident that Guy Fawkes masks have been seen everywhere in the world at protests against elite power ever since.
It’s in the messaging.
We need messaging that portrays globalism as the real “dark path” the world has been on, and for quite some time, given its ongoing campaign to use laboratory-created diseases and induced impoverishment to create an inescapable control grid.
Defenders of freedom, then, are struggling against enormous odds against descending techno-tyranny trying to bring as many people as possible “back into the light.”
© 2023 Steven Yates – All Rights Reserved
E-Mail Steven Yates: freeyourmindinsc@yahoo.com
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ANNOUNCING: an online course/tutorial entitled The Philosophy of Responsible Freedom, directed by Jack C. Carney with myself as chief partner: a Zoom-based intellectual encounter between an atheist (Carney) and a Christian (Yates) exploring the history of ideas using Academy of Ideas videos and supplementing them with the thoughts of others. Carney is an autodidact in areas ranging across psychology, psychiatry, and anthropology who emphasizes the importance of human relationships in a world where loss is omnipresent (he also teaches English online). I am an author and trained philosopher with a doctorate in the subject who taught philosophy courses in years past, walked away from academia, still writes philosophy emphasizing the need to identify, clarify, and evaluate the success (or failure) of worldviews in civilization, stages of civilization, the quest to build free societies, and how worldviews either enhance or hobble responsible freedom. Course/tutorial outline here. For more information or to get on our email list: freeyourmindinsc@yahoo.com.
Steven Yates’s latest book What Should Philosophy Do? A Theory (2021) is available here and here. His earlier Four Cardinal Errors: Reasons for the Decline of the American Republic (2011) is available here.
While admittedly the real world can be scary enough, he has also written a novel of cosmic horror. The Shadow Over Sarnath will be published soon.
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