We have ourselves a Big Think to talk about, thanks to a post on Twitter this past week.
You have to make your values cool, and your opposition cringe. Not evil, CRINGE.
— Dead Hardware (@deadhardware) April 27, 2022
Look at the faces of modern American gun culture. These dudes are confident, masculine, fit, and handsome.
They have beautiful wives and children, and all of them have successful ventures. pic.twitter.com/mvToUpPEqj
Go ahead, tell this guy that he's wrong.
He just gave you the cheat code for how Empire used its Thralls over succcessive generations to get, keep, and expand control over the nations that these Thralls dominate.
This is why the Culture War matters. It is wielding the power of social pressure via manipulation of what is High Status and what is Low Status in a given society in order to make the Death Cult morality acceptable to a population.
Yes, this means that the Moral Majority of the 1980s and 90s were entirely correct. Not only that, but their predecessors that decried unregulated social mixing in soda parlours over a century ago--leading to the genesis of contemporary "dating" (i.e. hook-up) culture--were also entirely correct.
The enemy openly acknowledged this power almost a century ago when Edward Bernays, Father of Contemporary Weaponized Psychology (and nephew of Sigmund Freud) that is Public Relations, said this in Propaganda:
The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. ...We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society. ...In almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons...who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind.
That was 1925, and said with the benefit of his time as an official propagandist for the Federal Government of the United States during World War I (along with Walter Lippmann).
What does Vox Day consistently say? "Most people only understand Rhetoric.", which is him paraphrazing Aristole. This is validated time and again by review the histories of Greece, Rome, China, and many other past cultures from around the world.
Men follow status and sentiment, not ideas; if you ever witnessed someone successfully steal credit for an idea that someone else expressed moments before, chances are good that you saw Status and Sentiment in action. The originator was lower in status and held in no or poor esteem by the crowd; the creditor held superior status and positive sentiment, so the same idea gets accepted when it was previously ignored.
This, by the by, is why optics matter.
You want to know what #Comicsgate succeeds? It's cool and its enemies are cringe. You want to know why the #OSR succeeds? It is cool and its enemies are cringe. #PulpRev is cool and enemies are cringe.
This also explains why Empire and its Thralls are so censorious. They cannot out-cool, so they use information control to artificially create the illusion--to maniupulate populations, almost all of which are only moved by Rhetoric--of them being cool and their enemies being cringe.
This explains so much seeming insanity. (Not all of it, but a lot.) Find out what a people deems cool and cringe, and you can hack their society and seize control of it. Get into that position and you can shape over time, like a potter shaping clay on a wheel, that society into whatever you want it to be.
Make Empire cringe, and Empire falls.
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