House of Eratosthenes

7. Find Out What People Are Missing

Once you’ve demonstrated a connection between your concerns and the concerns of your audience, you’ll find people are quite forgiving when confronted by disconnected, trashy logic. So don’t be afraid to turn your dumb idea into a solution-in-search-of-a-problem. Dumb ideas get sold that way pretty much all the time.

Once again: What you are doing is not putting together a meritorious argument; instead, what you’re doing is dispelling the requirement for you to put together a meritorious argument. It would be highly difficult to assemble a meritorious argument that a weak economy will recover through an ambitious “stimulus” program financed through record-setting debt and draconian tax increases against the most productive citizens. Or that the unemployment rate will go down when the minimum wage goes up. Or that when we activate a “disarmament” treaty with a belligerent foreign power, things will work out okay because there’s just no way our former enemy would stockpile some secret weapons and fail to tell us about them.

None of those things make any sense, but they’ve been sold over and over again, quite successfully, through a suggestion that the plan is substantially conducive to the declared goal. Once that suggestion is planted, people don’t check it out to see if it makes sense. They think they did, but they didn’t.

That’s Item #7 from the list of ways To Motivate Large Numbers of People To Do a Dumb Thing, Without Anyone Associating the Dumb Thing With Your Name Later On.

And perhaps I should make a mental note to begin writing about the flawed human condition with just a little bit more optimism. Sometime in the future. If recent events constitute any indication of what will continue to happen indefinitely…

President Barack Obama made a “public option” his centerpiece not because it’s the answer to what’s broken in the U.S. system, but because it’s a halfway house to a single-payer setup that liberal Democrats have always wanted. Team Obama also knew the public is concerned about rising costs, so they jammed together a hooey-filled argument that the public option was somehow the solution to rising costs.

The public is not as dumb as it’s made out to be, and Mr. Obama’s public option died a bipartisan death yesterday in the Senate Finance Committee.

I don’t entirely share Mr. Jenkins’ optimism; I think the public is, generally, just as dumb as it’s made out to be. The public smartens up at breakneck speed when pain is coming. Personalized, individualized, “Yeah I Mean You” pain…not some other guy’s pain. We’re ready to indulge in all kinds of whacky theories about how much water may or may not be in the pool, when it’s the other fellow diving in; factual statements about the volume of water, and gravity, are just too dry and time-consuming for us, messing up our precious schedule of downloading tunes to our iPod-whatever. And we don’t have any patience for anybody else paying attention to such boring stuff either.

Once our own feet are on the diving board our interests suddenly change.

That’s why “The Man Who Can Sell Anything” suddenly met His match. He tried to sell us something that was bound to mess things up, and soon. Crafty as He is, I doubt like the dickens Mr. Juice ever saw it coming. I really doubt it. Don’t ever forget — this is the guy who argues with dictionaries.

Don’t ever forget — this is the guy who argues with dictionaries.

Now there’s a political cartoon begging for a sketchin’.
- philmon | 09/30/2009 @ 10:18

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Why Obama Bombed on Health CareWednesday, September 30th, 2009

Why Obama Bombed on Health Care
Wednesday, September 30th, 2009