Lots of folks have been scratching their heads wondering how genderless marriage — which seemed just a fantasy on the fringes just a decade or so ago — so quickly became a reality of American public policy today. There are a lot of pieces to this puzzle. A few of them include activist judges, the monied LGBT lobby, and President Obama’s disingenuous “evolution” on the subject after being elected.
But the bigger picture shows something very different, very calculated, and decades in the making. It’s possibly been the biggest propaganda campaign in human history.
Do you believe the biggest manipulators who push same sex marriage really and truly care about the canard they label “marriage equality?” I don’t. In fact, it seems more likely the power elites among them have simply been engaged in a social experiment, testing the limits of propaganda and how easily people can be controlled and manipulated, even to the point of accepting an implausible idea. Of course, “marriage equality” is a great test case for them, because it could pave the way to ending family autonomy, giving them greater control over the relationships of others.
Are you familiar with the term “availability cascade?” It’s related to Richard Dawkins theory (The Selfish Gene, 1976) about “memes:” that any idea injected into public discourse can potentially spread like a virus and change the culture in much the same way that genes replicate and evolve. Of course, to make it work you need an unwitting citizenry.
I think the only way around this is a proliferation of education and information on the subtle techniques of coercive persuasion. If our society produced lots of non-partisan webinars and classes taught by citizen-activists on “Propaganda 101” people could be exposed to the uses and abuses of social psychology so that they’re not such easy targets. More on that in a later post.
In 1999 the Stanford Law Review published “Availability Cascades and Risk Regulation,” an article co-authored by Cass Sunstein and Timur Kuran. Sunstein served as Obama’s regulatory czar during 2009-2012. Kuran is an economist and author of Private Truths, Public Lies: The Social Consequences of Preference Falsification (1995) a fascinating look at how our individual willingness — or reticence — to express our real beliefs is what drives all of public opinion.
In fact, our willingness to say what we believe is what drives all public opinion. All of it. Yes, what you say or don’t say to your co-worker, classmate, or neighbor makes a difference in how they perceive the world. At the epicenter of the ripple effect is our daily conversations in our daily lives.
The coddling of an idea like “marriage equality” through repetition — and the suppression of dissent — projects the illusion that “everybody’s believing it.” People shift their “beliefs” to conform to what they perceive everyone else believes. Soon enough you’ve got a chain reaction. It’s a bandwagon effect that’s helped along by political correctness which, through the threat of smearing and isolating anyone who speaks “out of line,”enforces that illusion by creating a spiral of silence. In essence, this teases out a reverse bandwagon effect in dissenters.
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