I find what I’ve studied helpful when I watch those ads because if nothing else you get the basics. Things that are Bad are shown in black-and-white, usually accompanied by an ominous soundtrack. Things that are Good spring to life in vivid color, with the soundtrack switching to powerful, moving audio that helps reinforce the Good you are now watching. This technique goes way back, but you’re very likely to keep seeing it because it works.
I’m tempted to keep running with the pure propaganda thing, but what I want to talk about here is conditioning, which in itself contains elements of propaganda because the basic idea is to alter your behavior. All of us get some kind of conditioning our entire lives, but where I’d like to go with this is some of the more recent American social conditioning, and how well it’s starting to pay off.
I believe the first major step came in the form of Political Correctness, born in the 1980’s if memory serves and a great step forward for those looking to condition the thinking of the American public forever. I don’t think PC really took off until then because prior to that it would have had difficulty taking root, in that most Americans had no problem showing some backbone and had little or no hesitancy in showing some personal responsibility.
So why the switch? What was it about the 1980’s that enabled this fundamental shift? In my opinion it was the introduction of fear by means of a legal system that had transformed itself from a profession into an industry, manifested by the dawn of frivolous lawsuits and reinforced by the rapid introduction of things like safety stickers on products. Do you remember how this came to be? For me, the start was the 2 million dollar settlement to a woman who dumped hot coffee in her lap at McDonalds. It was the talk of the office: How could this be? What part of “duh” did she not understand? I remember a bit of an uproar but the judgment stood, and the gates opened: Suddenly, every crack on every sidewalk was fair game, and “ambulance chaser” seemed to go from a passive lawyer joke to a viable business strategy. Bye bye backbone; bye bye personal responsibility: You want to get sued? No? Then play ball.
I’m pausing here, trying to remember the last time I heard the words Tort Reform. I remember it in elections gone by, but as we move toward the 2012 elections I don’t think I’ve heard the term once. My own opinion and observation is that the looming legal threat is less than it used to be, primarily because I think it finally hit a point where people realized that legal action is really expensive, and I think there was some awareness that individuals without a lot of visible means were less of a target because there was probably nothing to go after. Nevertheless, I would say that PC, built on a foundation of litigation fear, managed not only to take root but to grow to a point where speaking out has to be done with seemingly extreme care else someone or some group perceive their chain to be yanked and all Hell break loose.
All that said, I wondering aloud where we might hit a stopping point for all this and maybe even find some way of throttling back to a point where Americans can feel good about their backbones again and once again show some of that personal responsibility and initiative which I believe helped make America the great nation that she is.
So please, stop trying to condition me if that is your intent. Below is a video that triggered me to think about all this; it is a fairly recent video done by the Department of Homeland Security using our tax dollars, and in addition to being some of the worst acting I think I’ve ever seen I believe it is a form of conditioning designed to predispose guilt on a specific class of Americans. Watch it for yourself (you might as well…you helped pay for it) and make up your own mind.
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