How do people know conservatives favor reptilian empathy?Image by: Derek Bridges
How is it that the majority can’t win anything?
I can name two reasons, one more comprehensive than the other.
First the easy part, pure salesmanship: You’re making the wrong pitch to the wrong prospects. Either of those is death to any sale, so it’s extra-zealous of you to double up on failure like that.
Sorry. That’s mean – and that’s the messaging problem. No one was ever scolded or scorned into better behavior, so all that lamenting and chastising and rending of garments may thrill the choir, but it sways no one else.
Still worse, all your persuasive efforts are aimed at adults – most of whom have zero plans to change their habits of mind. The only people you can persuade reliably and in bulk are Toddlers – which is why I’m focused on ThriversEd. Adult-outreach is all but entirely futile, except for socialization and choir-retention.
The only times adults rethink their basic predispositions is when they’re on the bubble: When they have to make a difficult choice. Accordingly, if you want to influence their future thinking, you need to be involved in their lives at those times.
I like marriage every which way, most especially because marriage makes adults out of adult-babies. If you want to catch an adult mind in a temporary state of renewed plasticity, the group you want to start will be devoted to pre-marital, marriage or post-marital counseling and support. People will be more likely to listen to your ideas then, and with deeper understanding, than at any other times in their lives.
I’m building tools to help with an effort like this, if you want to get something started. Helping people avoid or recover from pain – and pursue greater joy – is a mitzvah, regardless of any didactic, social or political benefits.
But that leads right to the more comprehensive problem:
You can’t fight unilateral empathy with unilateral empathy. Even assuming you were pitching to the right prospects, this is the substance of your presentation:
“Buy this for MY benefit!”
That doesn’t sell? Can’t imagine why…
Our enemy is a Ci tyranny, and so the weapons we deploy against it are… Ci displays. Our grave scholars are just-that-close to impressing their Marxist slave-minders – while marriage and family go to hell. We cultivate the minds of only the most Ci of our children, whom we then pay to have turned into Marxists by those Marxist slave-minders. We neglect all the rest of our kids, but the Marxists leverage that to their ends, too, yielding adults who are simultaneously lost and obstinate about staying that way.
Who’s the problem?
That would be you. You want the effects of leadership without having to lead. You want for there magically to be a Cautious leadership, but there is only ever Driven leadership. People can be repelled by threats – the entire conservative ‘strategy’ proves that – but they can only be inspired by action. Leadership is more than just going first, but if you don’t go first, no one can follow you.
Marxism is Ci, but so is libertarianism, Objectivism, Austrian and Chicago-school economics, neo-conservatism, etc. When you put abbreviated academic credentials behind your name, you are Bat-signalling the world that you are Ci and that only Ci displays will be entertained. Their ‘official’ world is entirely Ci – but so is ours.
In response to that sort of exclusion, everyone else says, “Feh!” – mostly silently. Why should they love you when you go out of your way to tell them that you deplore and despise them? Even if they were willing to listen to your arguments, you lost the sale before you opened your mouth: No one voluntarily trades with contempt.
Reliable leadership is Driven and Sociable: “I’m driving us all where we need to go.” Ci displays are either futile or conflagratory, with nothing in between. With enough amplification, you can scold and scorn people into prison – or into the grave – but you must lead them to virtue, if this is what you want to have happened.
Your victory condition is? Civil society.
Composed of? Self-responsible adults.
Cultivated by? Self-responsible parents.
In their turn cultivated by… whom…?
Must be Underpants Gnomes, since it ain’t you.
Instead, you yell at people for failing to practice the virtues you hide from them. How’s that working out for you?
The change you’re shaling for starts with you: You have to move away from Cautious and Incandescent values and displays and toward more Driven and Sociable pursuits. The absence of the civil society you’re looking for is partly explained by your own absence from it. But if you’re not willing to help people identify and pursue the good, the Marxists and all their unwitting minions will find ways to profit from your indifference.
After you’re all straightened out – that was easy, wasn’t it? – Toddlers matter most, by which I mean almost everything. If you want to help fix broken adults, I’ve shown you where to go to make the most difference. But raising our kids right, into a Ds culture, will effect the change you’re looking for in a blink of history’s eye.
What is it you actually want to change?
Your goal is to undo the Ci Marxist tyranny, restoring the Ds civilization that had obtained in The West until very recently.
But you can’t fight Ci with Ci, which is why you must always lose, lose, lose to Marxism.
You can fight Ci with Ds, and, accordingly, that’s the change you need to make: Supplanting Ci with Ds culture.
That’s what I’m doing. How about you?
