RICKRUCKER.COM
The Audacity of Bitterness
Obama's
"bitter" remarks are a couple off-the-cuff, boring observations about certain
hicks:
"You go
into these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the
Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced
them...and it's not surprising, then, they get bitter, they cling to guns or
religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment
or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their
frustrations."
To slit
the throat on the "controversy," the fact the lower middle class clings most
fervently to nationalism, xenophobia and religious devotion, increasingly so in
hard times, is a truism. The literate have read it in dozens, if not hundreds,
of articles and history books. You could see how Obama might blurt it out in all
innocence.
Of
course, saying "You go into these black slums in Chicago, and like a lot of
slums, the jobs were never there. And it's not surprising, then, they get
bitter, they cling to drugs or religion or blaming Asian shop-owners as a way to
make it through the day," could be said by Bill Cosby, Jay-Z, Don Imus, Spike
Lee, NPR, Howard Stern, a Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan or Rush Limbaugh, and
considered too tame by everyone. Perhaps the lower middle-class whites don't
want to think of themselves as being in the same boat as blacks. Which now that
I think of it is the other thing the lower-middle class is politically famous
for. "Controversy" "explained."
Hillary Clinton,
in PR, demographic Bat-Computer mode, retorted to Obama's
banalities: "Pennsylvanians don't need a president who looks down on them!"
Just
try reading Hillary's response again and not puke. Stare at it. You, gentle
reader, are wise, but I'd argue even the most dull-witted and cognitively
loathsome human might read such a statement from Hillary with suspicion. People
are stupid, but their brains are smarter than them: and their brains are really
good at detecting deception.
Guess
what, Hillary! This is going to make you laugh, as you drift into possibly
sapphic, geriatric doom (that gold-digger will drop you when you lose). All the
number-crunching of public opinion your Ivy-Leaguers do doesn't capture the
vague, non-verbal sense of unease the human species feels around
liars!
You're going to lose because you weren't smart enough to
figure that out! Plus the last thing Bill wants to do is be trapped in the White
House with you for eight years. And I feel authorized heckling you because:
you're lying. It's been obvious for thirty years that the public feels a vague
telegraphing of dishonesty from Democratic presidential candidates. Year one on
this was Reagan, the ACTOR! Your people are Excel-sheet, Powerpoint idiots!
You're going to lose because you don't understand people are intuitively attuned
to detecting deception. Every single presidential campaign since 1980 has made
this overwhelmingly obvious. People "trust" Bush because he believes much of the
nonsense he says. That's what the Roves mean by "character." People get "a good
feeling," from him, which is all that matters, because people don't reason! The
issues barely matter: issues are for Republicans and Democrats. Voters
susceptible to campaigning mistake their feelings for thoughts every
time.
So the
"bitter" controversy demonstrates why Obama
beat Hillary. What Hillary, her computers, pollsters and Ivy
Leaguers failed to grasp is that, no matter how gullible the common man
is, evolutionary psychology dictates when humans meet someone, they
unconsciously seek to determine whether that individual is trustworthy through a
variety of subtle cues. These include tone of voice and body language. It may
include learned data known in their secret archives, but not brought to
consciousness awareness.
Think
about it, next time you think somebody's lying. Usually you aren't consciously
weighing the probabilities of a thing being true. The conscious brain, and the
majority of superficial "personality" are above-water, when a lot of thinking
happens underneath. This calculation of probable truth in an utterance or idea
is happening under the hood, then pops up, like a fully-formed artifact, into
consciousness. When somebody asks you how you know it's a lie, what you say is
not going to be of much value, and you'll have a harder time convincing them.
You just know it's a lie. Your brain told you. Similar modules tell a man a
woman is attractive, and more complicatedly, tell a woman a man is
attractive.
When
you go around saying lies and garbage your gay little Excel macro determined
would resonate best with voters, people get a "bad feeling" about you because
your behavior shows all the classic indicators of lying. The gay little
microprocessor-macro in people's head told them. And macro is a
good metaphor, because your underbrain is crunching information you imagine your
overbrain is, based on sensory and rational data. A person can be a moron, but
their deception-detection macros are fine. As it happens, getting nailed on this
happened to virtually every Democratic presidential candidate for
decades.
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|
People's subconscious modules to detect deception are smarter than they are. "Bitter" remarks are less a liability than the "image" of deception, which transcends words, gestures, phrases, images and video. |
Here's
the thing about the "bad feelings" keyword and catchphrase-spouting Democrats
engender: plain people don't reason! You ask them questions, and they make up answers that have
nothing to do with why they actually feel the way they do about a person or issue. A majority of
the opinion-asking and quantification and polls and data being used by Democrats
are sheer moonshine.
So when
your lying candidate says "military spending should be increased," when they
believe that's gibberish, or "let's have a conversation!", when they feel false
and performer-like, they create a feeling of unease in people. You ask people
why. They very well might say "she's a liar." More likely, they will rationalize
that bad feeling in retrospect and say something that has nothing to do with why
they get a bad feeling about the candidate. Like "he's too bitter." "He's an
elitist." Nonsense.
Steven
Pinker makes the point about moral rationalization in the New York Times,
relating this incest story people just "know is wrong":
"Julie
is traveling in France on summer vacation from college with her brother Mark.
One night they decide that it would be interesting and fun if they tried making
love. Julie was already taking birth-control pills, but Mark uses a condom too,
just to be safe. They both enjoy the sex but decide not to do it again. They
keep the night as a special secret, which makes them feel closer to each other.
What do you think about that ? was it O.K. for them to make
love?"
Pinker
notes people will rationalize why brother/sister sex is wrong with anything that
sounds good. In actuality, the "wrongness" pops up, fully-formed, and people
reason from that. None of it can be "rational," because the incest taboo is not
rational. It's a human universal based on the genetic dead-end of inbreeding. Of
course, people, when pressed, will be forced to say: "I don't know, it's just
wrong," and rest content with that. But this trap tricks people, since the
incest taboo is obviously indefensible. In explaining why they like and dislike
candidates, people can spin nonsense indefinitely. The press is drip-feeding
them nonsense to spin!
Most of the data Democrats have used to mold their political platforms and
campaigns is based on the essentially meaningless rationalizations of voters
trying to wrap their heads around their unconscious aversion to people they
determine to be liars. Some of this makes it to the surface: talk of the "have a
beer with him" test, people openly noting Democrats are liars, and at least the
Republicans believe the things they say. But much of it never comes out. The
overwhelming majority of vacillating voters go with their "gut," which means
their zombie-like subconscious character-evaluation modules, bred into humans so
you don't enter into exchange relationships with charlatans.
 |
|
"I can provide you with a reasoned opinion on any issue. Bush is the man I'd like to groom the fur of, socially." |
You
don't say "this milk has so much fat in it, I love the taste!" You say "this
tastes good!" Evolution does not require you to know why something tastes
good.
Democrats,
Republicans, reporters and pollsters have taken specious self-reporting at face
value. Democrats have changed their presentation based on what people say they
want to hear. The process has resulted in Democrats functioning as bigger and
more obvious liars, as their scripts ("looks down on them!") grow more
preposterous. If you don't think Karl Rove knows this, why are the Republicans
always running on the rationally preposterous notion of
"character"?
When somebody like Obama appears to believe things he is saying--actually believe them--he can win. Listening to what voters say they believe about rational issues is like trying to get your dog to help you with your calculus homework. Okay: it's not that bad, but seriously, democracy is a joke, but a good one. A fine check on the imbecility of power.
When
Eric Cartman tries to appear nice on South Park, Kyle tells him: "that's not
being nice. That's wearing a nice sweater." Jimmy later
explains: "the best way to seem nice, Eric, is to be g-g-g-genuinely nice." Like
Gary Brecher said: "stupid people learn stupid lessons."
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