What The Damned People Want

"It's called tailoring the message to the audience."

That's a comment on David Weigel's post about Newt Gingrich over at Hit & Run. As Weigel minutes, I like Gingrich's tone. I could use a lot more of calling people in Washington "pygmies". That's because there is always value in identification. Of course, we're not really talking about small naked savages crouched in a jungle ready to boil each other if the root-dig goes badly... we're only talking about the ethics and politics of the nicely-dressed savages of the mandarin class, and it is a most apt metaphor.

Newt's got a problem, just like everybody with anything of a mind for these affairs. It's that grasping the sublimely simple set of ideas underpinning the political treasure that was born with America actually requires some bit of intellectual initiative and ability in any given individual who might audit any given "debate". "How to win those debates?" asks Weigel. Well, an enormous part of the problem is that one can lead a mass to ideas and still never make it think.

I might point out that it's possible to have "an awfully dim view of the average voter" and not be of "the political class" -- at all -- but in fact hold them in blasting contempt.

For all that, though, the comment-quote excerpted above reminded me of the footnote in Arendt's "Totalitarianism" (Part III -- "Origins"), where she quotes Konrad Heiden's conclusion that "propaganda is not 'the art of instilling an opinion in the masses. Actually it is the art of receiving an opinion from the masses.'"

People want socialism, now. Freedom simply is not a political value to them. That is the hardest nut of the worst problem that anyone even slightly inclined toward -- nevermind standing quite beyond -- Gingrich's politics faces now. Resort to history and the implications of experience are no good; people just don't think on that order when it comes to the value of freedom. The long revolve of events as consequences of ideas is as far from most peoples' mental ability as the village hind at his plow is far from geostationary orbit. The most dire question necessarily becomes: will these principles of individualism ever take practical root again? If so, then how and when? The ideas themselves can never be actually expunged from human memory. At this point, however, whole generations' worth of work are necessary to just reverse philosophical trends, let alone establishing a rational American politics. This is where the enormous problem of education becomes crucial: the state must be excluded from the business of education, as instantly and drastically as possible. Not "practical" -- possible.

Gingrich might understand that part by now.

I see a lot of sense in Heiden's premise, especially as it becomes all of American electoral politics today. Mass opinion is tailored to its audience. (In the next election and its aftermath, this will be most obvious in the field of medicine.)

So far as peoples' cognition is currently applied to the actual ideas present in the distilled concentrate of the "tailored message" represented by candidates and their propaganda, what you have here is a feedback loop descending into the depths. People not thinking will be taking political decisions -- democratically -- on the words of agents (candidates) telling them what they want by listening to what they want.

This includes, one hastens to point out, people groomed to not think from early ages in the public schools.

In any case, people just don't want freedom, now.

This is principally a matter of ethics, and I don't know what it might take to make this clear to a nation being bred to the cannibal pot.