As Americans go about their daily lives as individuals,many are brilliant and completely adept at what they do. When they participate in groups or aggregations of people, all but a few are completely stupid.
Notice the discourse in the political arena. Do you hear are read anyone making well reasoned intellectual arguments as to why one way is better than another. How often are attempts made to get you to change your mind or adopt an idea without thinking. Look and read, you won’t find an exception. Politics is the art of getting folks to act according to another wishes without thinking.
Politics turns out to be an animal brain activity. When politics begins, the human mind sinks into the survival mode and is concerned with winning only,with activities based on whatever notions, one’s animal brain has recorded as facts. From genius all the way down to moron, the instinctive brain takes over and thinking is shut down. Survival calls for tribal or herd positioning far more than it does on complex reasoning. Citizens engage in virtue signaling to try to elevate their status in the group. Living things, are all hard wired to gain a great deal of their essence from the resources of the group as whole.
Humans automatically try to sustain themselves as much as possible by exploiting the efforts of others in their given groups. Herd behavior can be overridden by using the larger intellectual part of the brain. That explains the 3% who use their larger brain most of the time. In times of great stress, or when reality imposes itself on the fantasy lives of citizens, the portion of the population which engages its intellectual brain might elevate to as much as 7% of the population.
For the most part completely stupid people make up at least 97% of the population. The remaining 3% devote their lives to exploiting the stupidity of all others. Most of this is because people’s actions are mostly instinctive when functioning in groups. While instinctive behavior is pervasive and the path of least resistance all of mankind does have the capability to think and act as individuals.
Common instincts include worshiping leaders, treating government as a parent and trading freedom for comfort. Instinctive behavior is responsible for at least half of the maladaptive behavior (stupidity) Americans engage in. Much stupidity in the political arena comes from what I call the expanded Stockholm Syndrome.
Definition (The Free Dictionary by Farlex)
Stockholm syndrome refers to a group of psychological symptoms that occur in some persons in a captive or hostage situation. It has received considerable media publicity in recent years because it has been used to explain the behavior of such well-known kidnapping victims as Patty Hearst (1974) and Elizabeth Smart (2002). The term takes its name from a bank robbery in Stockholm, Sweden, in August 1973. The robber took four employees of the bank (three women and one man) into the vault with him and kept them hostage for 131 hours. After the employees were finally released, they appeared to have formed a paradoxical emotional bond with their captor; they told reporters that they saw the police as their enemy rather than the bank robber, and that they had positive feelings toward the criminal. The syndrome was first named by Nils Bejerot (1921–1988), a medical professor who specialized in addiction research and served as a psychiatric consultant to the Swedish police during the standoff at the bank. Stockholm syndrome is also known as Survival Identification Syndrome.
The Expanded Stockholm Syndrome, applies to people as they relate to their leaders. The relationship is the same as what and individual experiences when held captive. In politics, people have a strong tendency to become loyal to anyone who is their leader or elected representative. This is completely instinctive. The majority are to this quirk of human nature. This is why bad incumbents get re-elected over and over again.
Then human beings reject the truth and replace it with euphemisms. The result is that persons, places, things and actions are defined as different than they really are. Great comfort comes from the use of euphemisms. The fastest way to become happy is to believe lies. The truth is really not that awful but it is unchanging. The truth can’t be any better than it actually is. Change the truth a little and people like it a lot better and it becomes a lie. So the truth has a tendency to get squeezed out of discourse.
But then there are the 3% who are not stupid. While the 97% of the population keeps themselves busy with jobs, kids, school and other things, the non-stupids (3%} work full time extracting wealth and income out of the masses.
The truth is a hard sell. Fantasy Free Economics gains readers one at a time. Major search engines simply do not list blogs which disagree with their political agenda. As long as folks share the link to this blog and others speaking out against the grain, the truth will at least trickle into the public consciousness.
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