I recently attended the memorial service for a friend of mine. He was an attorney, and highly respected human rights advocate. We had a talk just before he passed, in which he imparted to his grandsons, who were also in the room, how he had raised his children. He said, “I had just three guidelines for them. This is how they should live life. This is how I raised them.” I will give you the first two in this blog. “Do as much good as you can. Do as little harm as you can.”
There you have it. You can pretty much sort out life along those two guidelines. One could make decisions on difficult issues strictly by asking how much good does this do, and how little harm does this do? So, it begs the question then why the world today almost seems as if people have inverted that and are trying to do as much harm as they can, and as little good as they can. It’s perplexing, but it rests on some issues we will address in this and the next few blogs.
First, in order to overwhelm reason and turn it into hysterical, contagious rantings of extreme and irrational emotion, all the Black Propagandist has to do is figure out what would cause you to become irrationally emotional. In the novel “White King and the Doctor,” the Doctor teaches his propaganda chief Samir exactly how to begin the process. And the scene on the French President’s balcony is a stunning example of how Samir compromised the top media mogul in the world, and eventually brought down his empire. It began with a generality.
A generality takes something specific and turns it into something general, where the one can equal or represent the whole of society, and where one can no longer differentiate or distinguish one thing or person from another. Words that will alert you to a generality are something like, “Everyone knows…” “Everybody thinks…” “They say…” Absent a specific identified person or thing, the propagandist can overwhelm the lone individual’s reason by causing you to think in categories, lumping everyone into a whole. You no longer see the differences or individuality. You have been made to think that one specific person or behavior now represents the whole behavior of a group. And you believe the statement, whatever it is, reflects volumes of people, not just one–or possibly even none.
Generalities are often sneaky, and gradually corrosive. Generalities are at the root of all lynchings–literal or figurative. They are the foundation of witch hunts and inquisitions and social branding. They are also accompanied by anonymous accusations, rumor, and hidden inferences, And they seem to be impossible to refute. (I will address in the next blog how to refute these, how to regain control of the emotion and become restored to reason.) If you have found yourself stymied and agitated by someone blathering at you about, “Well everybody knows that everyone there was BAD…They are ALL like that. So, we can’t let them get away with it…,” you know how helpless you felt since there was no one specific individual being called out. It seemed unfair or unjust somehow to you. Without the ability to differentiate and isolate specifics, your mind became progressively more agitated, confused, and progressively less discerning.
This is the very essence of mob mentality. Each person’s reason is overtaken by emotion and blurred by the lack of precision to the point they can be made to take action against an entire group of people, rather than isolate and handle the one culprit–if any.
The problem is that you can’t be effective in doing as much good as you can if you think and operate on equations that include such thoughts as “all cops are killers, all women are manipulative, all Blacks are lazy, all white men are wrongfully privileged, all women are victims, all men are abusive, and the list goes on and on. You can play a game right now to see how many generalities you hear on the TV news, and see if you can spot how that makes it almost impossible to sort out fact from fiction, fact from opinion. And see what happens to reason. Note how you FEEL. Angry? Sad? Frightened?
In the absence of reason, the BAD (those whose goal is to destroy) have a field day doing–not as LITTLE harm as possible–but rather as MUCH harm as possible. Remember, their goal is to destroy, and they need to recruit unwitting allies to promulgate the destruction. Luring you into repeating generalities, you start to see everyone the way they want you to see them.
Be very aware now, as the American Media has been compromised by master propagandists whose intellect is greater than members of the Media. I would call today’s Media a wandering generality, attracting to them like a magnet those who can not differentiate, and who can only parrot what they heard someone else say, and who can be provoked into mindless emoting and histrionics.
You may say, “Lee, that was a generality, what you said about the Media.” Indeed it was! I wanted to see if you were alert, and I challenge you to now find amongst that group the journalists you feel represent their group with distinction, and independent thinking. Look for any who seem to want to do as much good as possible, and as little harm as possible. Those who want to Create rather than Destroy. Have fun, and let me know who you find.