SilverBoat
Posts: 257
Joined: 7/26/2006
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With regard to the last 20 years, various psychosocial studies have demonstrated that it only takes getting about a 10% group of a human population convinced so strongly of something (regardless of whether the something is true, false, or irrelevant) that they exhibit all the usual obstinant group-mentality traits (confirmation bias, constructive psychoses, etc, etc, etc) to make them a self-sustaining, and even self-propagating phenomena. That's been repeatedly proven and published in the journals.
What are the results and applications of that for society, culture, economics, politics, etc?
Basically, if the demagogues or whatever charlatans du-jour can get 10% of the population conned into some plausible delusion, such as belief that a 'religious' (christianity, islam, etc) or 'economic' (trickle-down, communism, etc) dogma is the *one-true-way* and all others are *enemies*, then entire group will dismiss all gross hypocrisy by their leaders, and spend their disposable resources trying to impose that belief on everybody else.
The studies only tested one-belief against the prevailing norms, cases of two or more competing beliefs (at last I read) hadn't produced definitive results.
So, to start with external examples, the Middle East and elsewhere are polluted with competing islamic sects, who upon gaining the upper hand such other sects out of jobs, gov't, etc, engage in purgings, mass-murder, wars, etc. The christians have some european examples of the same sort of intramural 10+% warfare, and versus the muslims. The 'commies' dealt with it by getting about 10% into the party cadre, to act as spies and enforcers on the rest.
And then there's the PNAC-neocon version, which involves the 1% aiming to bribe about 10% into the 'manager' class of attitude and income, and combine that with the 10% nutcase evangelicals to make sure they could control elections that only run about 40% turnout. Sure, they drag enough wannabe-superior lunatic sycophants in the next 30% along to poll more than that at times, but that's the reality nowadays: a big fraction in the top 5-10% of income vote RNC authoritarian because it really does serve their own economic interests, and another 20% of the christian devotees vote however their clergy tell them, and swath of the middle 60% income get conned into voting themselves into economic wageslavery because they're addicted to the trickle-down prosperity-gospel koolaid.
... I mean, really, how many of the posters who rant rightwing talking points here really have multi-sixfigure incomes? ... I know lots of rightwingish people in those income brackets, and there ain't a dog-one of them who spends much time on any kind of chatsite. They're mostly too busy chasing the money tree for that, and the few that are comfortably wealthy are so moderately middle-ground that they'd probably boggle that I'd even bother arguing political details with rightwing idiots. But then I'm a details guy, engineer, granular when I gotta be.
When the political phenomena present a puzzle that votes against itself, I start looking into why. And the only reasonable answer is that a lot of people have been hornswaggled, and the swagglers aren't that tricky to spot ...
LOL ...
Anyway, I was headed out of here to do some writing ... Y'all have a fun evening ...
SB
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RE: Income inequality - 
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LOL!!! 
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