Messenger, Message & Masses

It's time that we learned to separate them, and be more analytical about each.

The thing is, it is so obvious that many people will just gloss over it as if to say, "Yeah yeah- Everybody knows all about it," but they clearly don't. Just in this election cycle alone the question has come up every day, "How does Donald Trump get away with saying such ridiculous things and still be the leader of the free world?" The usual answer is just as silly as his behavior because everyone else is held to standards.

WHY? The uncomfortable truth here is that Trump wasn't selling what we thought. The message wasn't what the media keeps putting in front of us, and the masses were not buying into either of them.

Although this has also been staring me in the face for a long time, I happened upon it while working on my last book. There is a history within the field of psychology of repetitive deadlocks in terms of popular theories and narratives that, once noticed, cannot be 'unnoticed'. You can't unsee it, and swiftly realize that it's more than just a common strategy. It is not just about whose research is getting funded but about power, and it is almost always the same unincorporated subset of men either taking it or jockeying for proximity to it. Psychology is just where I noticed it. It's been going on since the dawn of civilization.

In our time, we have enjoyed the sense that we (our Grandparents, actually) were victorious over the threat of authoritarian dictatorship because the Nazis were defeated by the Allied Forces in WWII. It's a fine narrative that was allowed to evolve into other stories, stories that were misinformative to say the least. Nazis, and "the Third Reich", for example, were not "THE" face of evil, and Hitler was neither a genius nor the mastermind behind the movement. The struggle was very real but the rest was smoke and mirrors.

We have been allowed to believe it was all over when Hitler died, but as Rachel Maddow pointed so clearly in her book, "Prequel", it was never over. It never stopped, but only perfected itself with time and technology. With the results of this last US election, that is what Liberals, in Canada, and Democrats in the US are waking up to.

So let's back up a second, take a beat, and recall some of the things that "everybody already knows". Firstly and foremost, crowds are the key. Secondly, the masses respond to membership in the crowd. Thirdly, 99.99% of individuals everywhere are deathly afraid of being seen as non-members and they are right to be afraid. Not finally, crowds come in several variations that make the behavior of individuals more predictable than psychology would have us believe. Y'all want to review Canetti.

Here is what nearly all of the pundits missed about the US Election 2024 results: Donald Trump was and is irrelevant; The issues raised and argued about during the election were irrelevant; The Democrats have a reputation and a history of deciding crowd membership by exclusion and the Republicans merely allowed them to exclude themselves; The Republicans successfully signaled that their membership was popular and American; The Republicans also signaled that non-members would be threatened. Once that is understood, the election results are anything BUT a mystery.

The Liberals, and the NDP, in Canada should already be catching on to these dynamics, because we are next, and the fascist elements here have a twenty-year head start.