CIVIL RELIGION

Posted by Ron Patton




CIVIL RELIGION

IGNORING THE BETTER ANGELS OF OUR NATURE

It is obvious the world is in turmoil, angry with nothing constructive to occupy the minds of the public. We see uprisings and demonstrations that are not inherently evil, but are there to encourage criminal behavior in some circles and cult like behavior in others.

The blind following of those in the throes of anger can be evident and we are at point in history where anyone with the right words can hypnotize and guide people into committing acts they wouldn’t normally do.

The media has been the ringmasters of what appears to be a violent circus, waiting with baited breath for moments transpiring in the political climate which has turned from mere cheerleading to violent uprisings.

During the weekend, I had moments where I could review the fighting and the violence that occurred in Chicago during the Donald Trump rally and Trump’s so-called close call during a speech in Ohio.



The acts of resistance and disruption appear troublesome, and whatever is happening the media has found a way to compress and boil them down to their very essences so that you can quickly take in what is being offered and try to stomach what can be considered information junk food and thereby, damaging the health of the body politic.

The rooms and auditoriums are now filling up with upset, embarrassed, and discomforted individuals who believe their vote is not enough. Some people believe they have the responsibility of becoming the moral guardians of everyone and have developed a hypersensitivity to any information that criticizes or otherwise, shines a bad light on the one prospective leader they wish to align themselves with.

There’s no ambiguity among those who attend the rallies; there are those who wish to hijack these events to promote their own political dogma, there are those who are there to bury Caesar rather than praise him, and of course there are the worshipers of the cult of personality, promising them everything from making America great, to taking it back, making it a socialist state, and sewing it up for the raping by the establishment.

I always get an uncomfortable feeling when I see these political figures have more than just mere support from their constituents. I become sickened when I see they have developed or have cultivated a cult of worshipers and cheerleaders that utterly refuse, in the face of all the evidence to admit the failings, hypocrisies and in some cases, outright fraudulence of their political idols.

The political arena this time around has been very successful at using neurolinguistic programming, neuromarketing, micro targeting, and data mining to engender and refortify the societal lies and myths that we tell ourselves in order to sugarcoat harsh realities.

If you feel you are witnessing a group of people brainwashed into worshiping a new prophet – a king of the monarchial civil religion – you are right and the response is a violent one.

What if this particular election and the process of creating a messianic candidate is a product of MK Ultra style tactics? Would you then re-evaluate what is triggering your impulses and passions for a cadre of candidates that you know are far from capable of repairing the nation?



I know this may sound like some paranoid conspiracy theory, but there has to be a reason why rallies for the candidates are becoming more violent.

Hot buttons like religion and race are essential talking points with the entire exercise which is very telling of what can be manipulated deep inside the core belief of every American.

This election is more than just an election; it is now become a watershed for testing new methods of group manipulation and hive mind control mechanisms.

The public has a right to know and the public also has to learn they are being manipulated.

The first step was to mentally disarm the American people by conditioning them into believing the debates and town hall meetings presented by the networks were mere entertainment with elements of showmanship and theater provided by producers and sponsors.

Most Americans absorb whatever happens to be the prevailing belief by what is called, “critical mass.” The demographic substance is evaluated and processed so the coordinators know what the public wants to see and what they don’t. They are also in tune with what candidates the public wish to hear from the most, and the ones that the public are least impressed with.

The candidates are schooled in the art of the use of “magic words” and “powerful euphemisms” which play on the idea that America is more than just a country, more than just the United States.

The candidates are coached in using grooming phrases and words that define the United States as blindingly perfect, naively innocent, incapable of critical reflection over both its strengths and weaknesses and utterly convinced of its capacity to shape the world in its own image.

This is the equivalent of a pickup line that men use in order to impress women to sleep with them. These males extol the qualities of the women they see and wish to capture. There are women who buy into the “lines that flatter” while others are more cynical and wish to run.

However, a country in despair wants to hear it can be great again especially when it feels misused by the previous administration. This is an easy call.

Many people who don’t have time to evaluate what is truth usually fall in line with “crowd think” or “group psychology” and while you can’t avoid it, the media knows they can set the itinerary for what issues are important or what parts of history need to be reported and used as a conditioning tool for an approximated outcome.

While objective truth, objective reality, fixed principles and standards are rare these days we have to admit – or at least understand – that well programmed and conditioned pragmatism is what rules our thoughts today. The media and the propaganda machine controlling “group think” is banking on the idea that timeless truths and history can be challenged or even padded with pleasant myths and emotional opinions and arguments can replace truth.

The question is, how do the candidates know what buttons to push and what words can be used to mesmerize or control a crowd?

The answers are, psychological targeting and data mining from Twitter and Facebook. The test data is supplemented compared to issue surveys, and together they are used to categorize supporters, who then receive specially tailored messages, phone calls and visits.

The Ted Cruz campaign has used these methods in order to tailor his campaign to those who see America as more than just a country.



The campaign has found a niche in targeting its psychological manipulation to those who have a deep fundamentalist view of America having an established civil religion that relies on time-honored myths to characterize the United States as a nation guided by providential destiny.

This type of thinking has always been used an exploited as a kind of patriotic trope where the grooming which exists pushes the idea America is a nation that is set apart from world history, and is more of a nation that has shaped world history and the human experience.

The targeting used in the campaign strategy also cultivates the idea that America should see itself as blindingly perfect, naively innocent.

Those that reflect on the heart of America have always wanted to believe that we are shaping the world in our image, and there are many average Americans that data shows want to have that mythology prove true. We all want to believe that there were always the good old days, but the present has brought about harsh truths that cannot be eliminated through a civil religion.

The data that has been gathered seems to be selective.

To build its data-gathering operation widely, the Cruz campaign hired Cambridge Analytica, a Massachusetts company reportedly owned in part by hedge fund executive Robert Mercer, who has given $11 million to a super PAC supporting Cruz. Cambridge, the U.S. affiliate of London-based behavioral research company SCL Group, has been paid more than $750,000 by the Cruz campaign, according to Federal Election Commission records.



To develop its psychographic models, Cambridge surveyed more than 150,000 households across the country and scored individuals using five basic traits: openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism. A top Cambridge official didn’t respond to a request for comment, but Cruz campaign officials said the company developed its correlations in part by using data from Facebook that included subscribers’ likes. That data helped make the Cambridge data particularly powerful, campaign officials said.

The data appears to have surveyed and data mined those who appear to value faith and ideology over critical examinations of the world’s complexities. This is why it appears that Cruz has used “proselytizing as an electoral strategy,” which is a tactic that has been used in the past in the Middle East and South America. It is a rather divisive strategy, which can be deployed politically by those intentionally selecting a very specific gathering of supporters. In some cases, it makes the candidate above criticism, because to do so is an affront to faith.

Why would we not elect someone who has faith? The answer is also an even more obvious question: When have we not elected a President that has said he has no faith in God?

When such a strategy is deployed amid the reality of an increasingly toxic and divisive anti-religious populist leftism, the approach is strengthened. However, it is obvious the appeal is narrow. It also reduces God to a mere political branding which is deplorable.

It is the equivalent of bumper sticker patriotism where you can highlight the letters U, S, and A in the middle of the phrase, “Jesus Saves.”



It is painful to realize that, even though you may like an opinion or a particular political ideal, you could be taking part in perpetuating a lie or a dangerous bias which leads to a destructive dynamic.

The failure to realize this has led to the brainwashed masses following dangerous leaders in the United States. These so-called leaders have literally brought the country into a dissociative mind set and the lack of a cynical or skeptical media has given these leaders carte blanche to manipulate and even dispose of timeless truths and moral standards in the United States.

If you do not wish to be coerced into blindly voting for cult like affiliation to your leadership and country, then perhaps you should be aware of the psychological targeting that is breeding an unhealthy view of righteous absolutism in the United States.

We need a president not a high priest.

March 14, 2016

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