Sunday, November 17, 2019

Herd mentality: A Psychological Tactic in Politics

Excerpted from:
Against the State: An Interview with Lew Rockwell

QUESTION: Government is theater. Would you agree?
LEW ROCKWELL: Yeah, a bloody theater, a terrible theater, but it is a theater, and they know it. They know this is how to appease the people.
QUESTION: Two psychologists have studied the use of words by politicians in recent years. The most used word now by politicians in America is the word “we.” The use of this word actually gets people to form into a group where essentially they stop thinking. That is connected to the theater concept of controlling people, and I guarantee you that the government hires behaviorists and psychologists, and they study how to manipulate people. What do you think about that?
LEW ROCKWELL: I remember one of the critics of the Nazis saying that it is an indication of totalitarianism when politicians refer to “our children.” They are not your children. They are God’s children, and they are the parents’ children. They are not the government’s children, but the government, of course, feels they are and they want to shape them. They want to mold them and they want parents to have less and less to do with it. They want them in the public schools from 6 to 6, eating all their meals there and that sort of thing. You know they are not that kind of villain, but they are, in fact, villains. Even if they seem like nice, decent people, they are actually not.
I was once in politics myself before going straight, and I can tell you they are not good people. I encountered only one man whom I thought was thoroughly good, and I had the honor of working for him eventually, and that was Ron Paul, and also the only person in politics I have ever encountered who did not have the lust to rule, the lust to dominate. Ron Paul doesn’t have that, so he was a very odd bird in politics. For him, politics was an educational mission, but most of them want to dominate. Again, most of us are not interested in running the next door neighbor’s family. We don’t want to run the next town. We don’t want to run the next country. We have enough to do with our own families, mowing our lawn, doing our job, earning enough money, and so forth, that is what we want to do. But there are people who want to run the family next door. They want to run the next town. They want to run the world.
QUESTION: So they become government officials.
LEW ROCKWELL: They go into politics.

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