False Dichotomy – The suggestion that two things are mutually exclusive, “you are either with us or against us” suggests that there are only two types of people: those who think and act identically and those who are enemies.
After the mass shooting events last weekend in El Paso, Texas and Dayton, Ohio, I started thinking again about the collectivist paradigm. Do you ever wonder why the media is so quick to rush to a conclusion and immediately blame one thing or another after these tragic events, before any detective work or analysis are even performed: Guns, video games, Trump, young white men, mental illness and medication for these tragedies? The media jumps in and pastes it across every newspaper, web site and social media stream – How could someone do this? They must be mentally ill, over medicated or stimulated by the nationalistic talk of Donald Trump. We need more gun control, more laws, less privacy and bigger government – Collectivist Propaganda.
Let’s be honest, we have been slaughtering each other, as far back as we have recorded our history and it does not take much effort to determine what the main driver was in the majority of those tragic events. It wasn’t mental illness, medication or access to guns. It was ideology and collectivism.
The classic example is of course Nazi Germany; Mein Kampf contains the blueprint of later Nazi propaganda efforts. Hitler writes in chapter VI: Propaganda must always address itself to the broad masses of the people. All propaganda must be presented in a popular form and must fix its intellectual level so as not to be above the heads of the least intellectual of those to whom it is directed. The art of propaganda consists precisely in being able to awaken the imagination of the public through an appeal to their feelings, in finding the appropriate psychological form that will arrest the attention and appeal to the hearts of the masses. The broad masses of the people are not made up of diplomats or professors of public jurisprudence nor simply of persons who are able to form reasoned judgment in given cases, but a vacillating crowd of human children who are constantly wavering between one idea and another. The great majority of a nation is so feminine in its character and outlook that its thought and conduct are ruled by sentiment rather than by sober reasoning. This sentiment, however, is not complex, but simple and consistent. It is not highly differentiated, but has only the negative and positive notions of love and hatred, right and wrong, truth and falsehood.
The mind falls into the dual-polarity trap rather easily and the propagandists and collectivists recognize this and use it against us to divide us or convince us to choose a side, the right side, their side. Over 20 million human beings were destroyed in that thirteen year reign of terror and the really sad thing is that the majority of Germany was all in, convinced by the propaganda of Hitler and Goebbels that they were doing the right thing.
The perennial gun-control debate in America did not begin here. The same arguments for and against were made in the 1920s in the chaos of Germany’s Weimar Republic, which opted for gun registration. In 1933, the ultimate extremist group, led by Adolf Hitler, seized power and used the records to identify, disarm, and attack political opponents and Jews. Constitutional rights were suspended, and mass searches for and seizures of guns ensued. Police revoked gun licenses of Social Democrats and others who were not “politically reliable.”
See Excerpt from National Review for complete information.
The 20 million human lives that were lost during the Third Reich’s thirteen year reign of terror was an astronomical number but pales in comparison to the 56 million Chinese lives sacrificed during Chairman Mao’s, Great Leap Forward campaign. Both of these horrific events and many others have one thing in common: Collectivist Propaganda. The Great Leap Forward created the belief in China that communism and Mao’s leadership was the best option and convinced them to follow Mao, that he was going to make China the greatest country in the world. Sadly Mao Zedong is still worshiped throughout China today for one reason, propaganda. The propaganda created while he was ruler was so powerful that it convinced all of China; to this very day that Mao did great things and was a great ruler. When the truth is that Mao’s policies and ideas actually led to the deaths of millions and did not advance China even a little bit, yet he is still worshiped and praised in China today. The power of Propaganda!
Is it a stretch to compare two of the worst genocidal atrocities in the history of mankind, to two mass shooting events, by a couple of twenty something’s in modern day America? My judgment is that whether you slaughter 56 million or 8, you can’t pull that trigger unless you really believe that what you are doing is the right thing, however distorted that belief is. It’s not access to guns or mental illness. Both Hitler and Mao may have been complete psychopaths but they convinced entire nations to take up the torch and follow them through the use of well-orchestrated propaganda initiatives. It is this False Dichotomy of right and wrong, the us vs them, herd mentality that steers people to make such wrongheaded decisions. Like Germany and China, these two kids had to really believe what they were doing was the right thing, whether it was true or not, it was their truth.
I could easily list another hundred examples of how humanity was manipulated and coerced into acts of murder, slaughter and genocide through the creation of a false dilemma – the invalid assertion that there are only limited options in a given situation, ignoring all other possibilities. The false dilemma is often an aggressive form of influence or propaganda. Example: You are either a liberal or not, suggests that there is only one kind of liberal as opposed to a diverse set of ideologies that don’t always agree. False choice – is the lie that there are only two choices, true or false, my way or the highway, when there are actually, degrees of truth between extremes.
It actually gets much worse, when we go back in history a little further. It is estimated that well over 100 million indigenous people were killed in the Americas and Australia during the Spanish conquest and British colonialism. Which is nothing compared to the Muslim conquest that conservatively slaughtered 200 million in North Africa and India alone and this was from; the religion of peace. There were no video games, medication, guns or Trump back then, only toxic beliefs, tyranny, totalitarianism and the collective. If we really want to change things we need to wake up and quit buying into the collectivist propaganda. There is no right and wrong, one and only way!
“You have your way. I have my way. As for the right way, the correct way, and the only way, it does not exist.” ― Friedrich Nietzsche
There is no dichotomy! No right and wrong, only degrees and magnitude. We need to embrace the beauty of multiculturalism, as exemplified in nature and have respect for the individual. The fundamental conflict as it has been for centuries is individualism vs. collectivism. Does the individual’s life belong to him – or does it belong to society? Individualism is the idea that the individual’s life belongs to him and that he has an inalienable right to live it as he sees fit. It’s the idea that the individual is sovereign, an end in himself. Collectivism is the idea that the individual’s life belongs not to him but to the society of which he is merely a part, that he has no rights, and that he must sacrifice his values and goals for societies “greater good.” “Man has no rights except those which society permits him to enjoy.”
As individuals we need reason and awareness to defeat the constant bombardment of collectivist propaganda. Do you believe that the answer is more government, more laws, more rules and less individual freedom and privacy? The Collective is coming for us again, like it did a hundred years ago and a thousand years ago. It is responsible for the most evil totalitarian regimes in our history but it didn’t win, we evolved and persevered. The lies will continue, they will repeat them again and again; using false dichotomy to trap your mind into believing it’s true, playing on your feelings and sensibilities. They’re good too. Entire countries were convinced that it was acceptable to slaughter millions of people in the name of an ideology.
I agree that the recent tragic events in El Paso and Dayton were ugly and despicable acts. What I’m not buying is that lax gun laws, video games, medication, Trump tweets or the quest for infamy, caused them. These kids believed that they were justified, that their cause was more important than the sanctity of individual freedom and life. How could they believe anything different and mow people down with automatic weapons? It was a form of jihad for them. We don’t need stricter gun control, and more laws that rob us of our individual freedom to pursue life as we see fit; we need to fight against collective propaganda every chance we get. It looks pretty good on a big poster with all the pretty rainbow colors, but it’s a lie. Historically the outcome is always the same, death and destruction. Diversity and individualism provide the ecosystem we need for evolution and growth. The time has come for us to move beyond the false dichotomy of collectivism! To live and let live!
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