That old trick again

I sometimes think about the development of the "social movements" that seem so cohesive today: anti-abortion activism, anti-gay activism, anti-science activism and I try to imagine a few decades ago, when these discussion topics were being dreamed up. I am inclined to imagine a conspiracy theory when I see this development of groups who expend so much energy for things which cannot adversely affect them. Surely many feel odd about homosexuality, but is it really necessary to castigate the gay? Surely abortion is distasteful, but why do so many people care that a few thousand people get abortions? (They just would have raised atheist children anyway.) Sure, it's confusing stuff, but how can so many people disavow the entire discipline of biology, and also be on blood pressure medication simultaneously? It must take a lot of effort to maintain such strong beliefs.

Much more satisfying to me is to imagine that these movements are the result of organized efforts to rouse people who would not otherwise care particularly. In fact, it occurs to me that an it might be advantageous to specifically seek out people who wouldn't care, and to encourage them to care.

I think an argument can be made that a political group which had an agenda which would not be in accordance with common values would do well to seek out and court constituents with unexamined prejudices. I should say unexamined prejudices which are of no consequence to that groups main goals. The beauty of unexamined prejudices is that they work on people without the people knowing why.

If you were in a group that wanted to, for instance, reduce taxes for themselves at the expense of social programs you didn't use, since you are rich, but at the same time wanted to maintain high government spending on, say, military weapons manufacture, oil development or cattle ranching, because you are invested in those businesses, you might have trouble getting poor people to support your cause. You're basically fucking them over, after all, and they're bound to notice that at some point. So you need to develop some outer hull of political philosophy, if you will, a streamlined set of ideas that will strike at the heart of normal people. And that's where it would be handy to recognize the unexamined prejudices of your target group.

Religion is the major unexamined prejudice which people typically harbor. To the degree that it is possible to do so, it is always a good idea to attempt to equate the work of your group with the dominant religion. If there isn't a dominant religion, per se, then seek to be as vague as possible about the actual details of the religion, except where it aligns with other unexamined prejudices.

killing babies is something that you will be likely to get people to disagree with. In fact, infanticide is so universally despised that almost no one ever does it, which if you've ever spent much time around little kids will probably strike you as unlikely. Killing babies is universally frowned upon, so no one does it, so the next-best thing is to equate abortion with baby killing. Abortion doesn't kill babies. Here's how I know. Babies have birth certificates. It's how you prove they were born. Fetuses don't have them, so they can't be killed. But, fetuses turn in to babies when they're born, so they're pretty similar. That's good news, because according to wikipedia, 50 million abortions have been performed in the US since 1973. This is an enormous number! in that same stretch of time, about 130 million people have been born in the US, so, like a quarter of all pregnancies end in abortion. If those fetuses are the same thing as babies, then that's baby killing on a scale that would make King Herod envious. Get a few religious leaders to do some pulpit work, and you'll have a nice big group of people who will let you do whatever you want, so long as you also try to stop the baby-killing.

Suppose you were from another planet, a non-human, but intelligent and rational. Imagine you came to the American civic debate without any context, and somebody appointed themselves as your Virgil and was giving you a little primer by walking you through the circles of US politics so you can go back to your planet and write an epic poem about Your visit. Imagine they were trying to explain the way things are, and you, completely ignorant of the ways of Americans, but with some basic familiarity with animals, are trying to connect the dots.

Spose that your Virgil gets to the part where they describe that there are two groups of people who experience a fair amount of enmity. One of the groups has major problems with the mere existence of the other, and the other group mainly objects to the efforts of the first group to oppress and marginalize them. Your Virgil mentions their names to you, but honestly you think most human names sound almost exactly the same, and you're always losing track of which group is which. So you get this jumbled collection of facts about the two groups, and you try to apply a little logic to the situation to parse the pile of attributes to give two coherent groups with these facts nicely divided among the two.

Here are the facts, which for your benefit I will construct as a series of "us" and "them" statements which one group might make
1. We hate them because we feel that their existence threatens our existence.
2. We believe that they choose to be the way that they are.
3. We believe that they are wrong to choose to be the way they are.
4. We dislike that they choose to openly express something which is private and which they could conceal if they chose.
5. Many of them are secretly us.
6. They are misled, while we possess the truth.
7. they use lies and prejudices to malign us publicly.
8. We have a history of being oppressed.
9. We are just trying to live our lives, but they won't let us.
10. They recruit children to live their lifestyle.
11. They have an organized agenda.
12. They are aberrant and unnatural.
13. We must eradicate them to preserve our lives.
14. They actively seek positions in government to further their aims.
15. We are normal, they are not.
16. We are a group because of our common beliefs, while they are a group because they are collectively deceived.
17. We are a group because of our common nature, while they are a group because they are collectively misled.
18. We are Christians, they are Satanists.
19. We are gay, they are bigots.

I think you would find this to be an inconvenient set of facts to separate. I think you would be liable to make errors when you went to write your poem, because it wouldn't occur to you to think that a group which identifies itself by a religious philosophy, which must be acquired from other people, are the people accusing the group who is identified by a sexual orientation, which is largely determined by an individual's biology, recruits children. Surely, you might think, a group that must necessarily recruit to spread, a group which organizes countless Summer camps, Sunday Schools, etc. wouldn't accuse a group that occurs naturally throughout the animal kingdom of recruiting children. That would be simply too rich. No one would attribute them with any credibility at all, if they went around saying that.

Surely humans cannot have such poorly formed thinking organs that they would imagine that another group would voluntarily take on the personal attributes which other people would lynch them for displaying. You obviously hide those traits that are similar to those you have witnessed be persecuted. That's as natural to a social animal as being polite to those who are bigger and stronger than you.

This is why I say we are doomed. It is easy to prey on the stupidity of people, but it is very difficult make people less stupid. To some degree it is impossible. So the bad folks will be able to control the agenda forever, and there's not a lot to be done about it.