Musings on How Demagoguery Works...

Research has shown that demagogues are dependent on an ignorance is bliss red faced emotionalism in order for them to do their work. They play off of it in order to convince some of the masses, for instance, that someone who did not win the presidential election of 2020 won it and to make them angry about it. They play off of it in order to convince some of the masses that American liberals are actually socialists who are part of a cabal to take over and ruin the United States and to get angry about it. They are dependent on it to make some of the elderly and debilitated masses believe that a pill, a fountain of youth pill, will make them feel like they are seventeen again, something they desperately want to feel. They are dependent on it to make some of the masses think that if they simply use their product they will get the gay or gal of their salivating dreams. They are dependent on it to make people who probably have little idea where a country is on a map and who know next to nothing, at best, about it and its history, that another country, not the one, of course, that is as responsible if not more responsible for the situation, is the embodiment of Boris and Nastasha Badonov and is "raping" that country because they are the embodiment of evil and to get red faced about it. Demagoguery, in other words, is grounded in a healthy dose of comic book, i.e., mythic moralising and manichean bullshte. But then bullshit and the amnesia it cultivates really does make the world go round.

Speaking of bullshite that makes the world go round, research has shown that humans are conforming animals. The Milgrom I was just following orders experiement shows that significant numbers of human subjects will conform to what authority figure are demanding even when those authorities are demanding that they kill others. A recent experiment looking at an online music site shows that significant numbers will conform to the musical choices of their peers when they know what their peers are listening to. The Asch experiment shows that significant numbers of human subjects will ignore the empirical evidence of their eyes and conform to clear falsehoods or bullshite if their peers maintain that these falshoods are true, and here is where demagoguery comes in since demagoguery is generally nothing but bullshite driven by ideology or the seeking after power and money.

Realising that bullshite makes the world go round, by the way, does not mean there isn't, to qoute the X-Files, truth out there. Nor does it mean that Russia, the Ukraine, or fictional Belgian women whose babies are bayonetted by Boris Badanov Krauts are the embodiment of John Wayne goodness in the modern world. It simply means that we have to, if we can, recognise that things are more complex in the modern world than the Hollywood melodrama that far too often passes for the thinking life in the modern world. That this is difficult given human socialisation for conformity everywhere in every time and in every place, is a given. Few, sadly, are able to get outside the hermeneutic circle in which socialisation places us.