Wicked Minds

(More politics. Man, I’ve gone all political this week. Some non-political stuff will come soon, I promise.)
A couple of commenters have pulled me up for not making clear that the either/or rhetoric isn’t exclusive to the political right. It isn’t, of course, and it was remiss of me not to make that a bit clearer. However, I do identify the creation of false dichotomies as a major current rhetorical tactic by the political right, all over the world. I also think it is far less common in the rhetoric used by the political left. Both sides use it, but it fits the right’s agenda more.
This is not to say that the left use less rhetoric than the right – just that this one tactic turns up more on the right than the left.
A counterexample would be the left’s tendency to demonize the right. A great deal of leftist rhetoric revolves around revealing the ‘true motives’ behind a political act, and pointing out how abhorrent the motives are. This rhetorical strategy is appeals to the left’s people-base, because lefties almost by definition tends to view acts in terms of the purity of their moral intention. It is used by the right, but much more so by the left.
A great deal of this commentary is vacuous. (Especially at the extremes, where David Icke-alikes construct ever more absurd conspiracies around what are often fundamentally sound insights.) It’s an effective rhetorical strategy playing to the converted or the wavering, but it is rarely legitimate. Ultimately, it’s too reductive – it reduces complex human beings acting in complex systems to units of simplistic motivation. This is the irony of this talk from the left – the side that prides itself on its humanity is constantly dehumanising its opponents.
A subset of this is to characterise the mass of rightist voters as dupes of the wicked minds of those pulling the strings, along the lines of the old Marxist idea of ‘false consciousness’. This is a rhetorical strategy too, but I am not as quick to dismiss it as vacuous.
While too simplistic, I believe that there such a thing as ‘false consciousness’, after a fashion. I believe that the mass of all people are not ‘self-aware’, in the sense that we do not truly comprehend the implications of our own actions or the meaning of the words we speak.
In fact, I think that this is scientifically and spiritually undeniable. It’s also a pretty tough-sell of an idea.
Hmm. There’s more, but it can wait.

One thought on “Wicked Minds”

Comments are closed.