Diegetics

Excellent post skyhook!

People are only too ready to believe in the special mojo of the new challenger, square circles, free lunches, and that Uncle Sugar can kiss their self-inflicted wounds and make the hurt go away..... if.... their belief system allows them to escape any form of personal responsibility.

In the last few decades I have found it distressing that so many wish to organize into demographic blocks or PACS rather than view themselves as individuals.

As "there is no form of govt so good that it will survive bad men" (clumsy paraphrase), there really is no way to govern those who view life as children view life. That life is somehow inherently unfair, and that if I can only install my guy/gal in power, he/she can fix the world.

Bread & circuses..... are time tested.....

Skyhook,

For lack of a better term, I like to call it "the McThinking of America." but the ideology really is prevalent thruout the Western Hemisphere.

As one of your favorite authors once said (again clumsily paraphrased) "when people choose to abandon personal responsibility, what choice do the leaders have other than to pander to them and be corrupt, or to impose upon them by force the leader's standards of what is right."

simple minded....

tragically what is right exists primarily only in campaign rhetoric...

same is true of what is left....


as we were cautioned centuries ago.....


A democracy is always temporary in nature; it simply cannot exist as a permanent form of government. A democracy will continue to exist up until the time that voters discover that they can vote themselves generous gifts from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates who promise the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that every democracy will finally collapse due to loose fiscal policy, which is always followed by a dictatorship.

Alexander Fraser Tytler, Lord Woodhouselee
15 October 1747 - 5 January 1813
Scottish-born British lawyer and writer,
and Professor of Universal History,
and Greek and Roman Antiquities
at the University of Edinburgh

does that leave use yeomen with only

the Jeffersonian hydrodynamic therapy

for our withering tree of liberty?

Good points.

""Binary thinking at the amygdala level? Maybe "us or them" is a mental default that is hard wired into humans?

SIMPLE MINDED

you are on to something here.


life's road map (DNA) seems to program

mammals to protect offspring and blood relatives

against all outside the group bloodline...

xenophobia as a dna survival mechanism.

the problem with the mind your own business individualists is they cant stand politics and they dont get involved, because they are off living their own lives and minding their own business.

rallies and speeches and things attract the mob types - especially the ones without jobs.. or something better to do.

granted their is a lot of stereotyping and prejudice that puts the "other" into "them" when a decent interaction might have discovered they were actually "us", the fundamental condition of different priorities and different moralities creating different requirements is always going to put someone into "them" on different issues.

i think the jews called these situations "cut the baby in half"

--edit--

gak, my usually poor language is even worse than usual.. might have another crack at this later