Have you ever looked at a belief, and wondered how it is that someone can believe that thing, whatever it may be? Have you ever wondered how it is that people can be so easily indoctrinated?
Indoctrination is actually very easy to accomplish, and the purpose of this post is to expose exactly how indoctrination works.
People think that the trick to indoctrination is to control the narrative, but it is not. The trick is to control what is perceived as ‘true’. Narratives follow.
Controlling the perception of ‘truth’ starts with virtue-signaling. The left constantly portrays their positions as virtuous, and other positions as lacking virtue. Once someone buys into the notion that a position is, or is not, virtuous, then being a ‘good person’ comes from agreeing with the right positions, making it impossible to separate one’s self-identity from the political positions one holds. Once someone’s sense of virtue becomes tied to their political positions, they will defend those political positions as if their lives depended on it, as not doing so would, to them, make them lack virtue. Conversely, anyone who opposes their political positions becomes, by definition, evil.
You might notice that Democrats are often dismissive of facts. This is because they gauge the validity of different facts based on how well those facts fit their political positions, rather than gauging their political positions based on how well those positions square with the facts. Once someone accepts a position as virtuous, and ties their sense of self-virtue to holding the right positions, they become immune to facts, and will find convenient ways to blow off any facts they don’t like.
In fairness, Republicans can be just as dismissive of facts, and in fact conservatives can be just as indoctrinated as liberals. The difference is that liberals control our public schools, colleges, and media, with the vast majority of journalists, actors, directors, and others working in the media, being liberal. The vast majority of conservative college professors are in hard sciences, business schools, or engineering schools, whereas the vast majority of students go into liberal arts, where they are ‘taught’ almost entirely by liberal professors.
Imagine two people finishing their degrees. One has an engineering degree, and the other has a degree in feminist studies. The person with the engineering degree is apt to become an engineer, but what will the person with the degree in feminist studies become? What job skills has college bestowed upon this person, other than to continue to study until he or she has a doctorate in feminist studies, and can become a college professor him or herself?
Perhaps more to the point, what has the person with a doctorate in feminist studies learned? That is an absolutely worthless degree, bestowing the opposite of knowledge upon the recipient. If we are honest with ourselves, degrees like this one show only that someone has spent eight years being indoctrinated into a very dangerous political ideology, to the point where they will probably never be able to gauge truth from fiction again. Everything they believe, not only about the world, but about themselves – their entire sense of their own worth – is tied into believing the B.S. their degree program contained. How do you reach someone whose entire sense of self-value is based on not being reached? How do you give truth to someone who would be destroyed by it?
Answer? Generally speaking, you don’t reach them. People like this are intellectually dead. The few that are reached speak of red-pill moments, and become conservatives, but the vast majority of indoctrinated people spend their entire lives in intellectual purgatory, and the more of an ‘education’ they have in that indoctrination, the harder they become to reach.
We all know that the vast majority of college professors in liberal arts programs are liberal, but did you know that 72% of public school teachers are liberal as well? To make matters worse, the conservative school teachers tend to have degrees in math, science, or engineering, whereas the people teaching art, English, social studies, and history almost universally went through liberal arts programs, where they became indoctrinated into the left.
Our public schools have become indoctrination centers. Without the Department of Education, each school system would be able to define ‘truth’ as it sees fit, and there would be no way to tie that all together into a national indoctrination campaign. The Department of Education made the nation-wide indoctrination of our youth possible.
I’m a student of history, and I’m often appalled at the half-truths and outright lies my children are taught. We teach history, not from the lens of historians, with a focus on historical accuracy, but with political axes to grind, focusing on those facts that fit the correct narratives. I’ll give my son other facts, after he has ‘learned’ something in school, and the stories he tells me after going back to school and sharing those facts with his teachers are priceless. Just as one example, my son was taught that free market excesses caused the Great Depression. I explained to my son the role of the Federal Reserve, which used loose monetary policies in the twenties to cause a stock market bubble, and then allowed the supply of money to drop by 1/3 after the stock market bubble burst. I told my son that after the stock market crash, unemployment topped out at a little over 9% (never hitting 10%), and then came back down to under 6% by June of 1930. When my son went back to school and shared these facts with his history teacher, the history teacher did not believe them to be true, as they showed quite conclusively that the Federal Reserve, and not the free market, caused the Great Depression.
To this teacher’s credit, rather than ridiculing my son (as Gregory Salcido would undoubtedly have done), this teacher googled, and quickly found that my son was correct, which he then shared with the class. That said, I’ve told my son to be very careful presenting conservative viewpoints in school, no matter how well grounded they may be, lest teachers try to fail him for failing to fall for the correct indoctrination.
The left is not devoid of facts. The left actually makes very good use of facts, but one who studies on their own, outside of school, will see that there are a great many facts that are not taught, and that if one looks at all of the facts available, the most logical assumptions to start with are very different from those that are taught. One will also see that, as with the case of the free market supposedly causing the Great Depression, many things are taught as fact, that are simply not true.
The left does not only separate themselves from a great many facts, but from the quest for solutions to societal problems as well. If the left was interested in finding solutions, we could have a discussion about how to provide, just as one example, high quality, affordable healthcare that is widely available. The left already has their solution picked out, so rather than look for a solution, they sell socialized medicine as if it were not only infallible, but also as if it were the only solution possible.
If we were all rational, we would understand that there are trade offs between quality, affordability, and availability, not only in relation to healthcare, but in relation to just about everything. Somehow, we all understand that if we wanted everyone to be able to have whatever new car they might want, every three years, provided by government, our tax rates would have to go up a great deal (particularly when everyone would want the most expensive cars out there), but when you tell people the same thing is true with medical care, suddenly basic economics gets thrown out the window, and socialized healthcare is sold as ‘universal’ and of ‘higher quality’ than what we have today.
I’ll stick with healthcare, as it is such a great example. If we had universal healthcare, then we would all have access to whatever medical care we want, whenever we want it. Show me a socialized healthcare system where anyone who wants medical care can get it, whenever they want it. I’ll make it easier for you: show me one where anyone who needs medical care can get it, whenever they need it.
No such animal exists. The left sells ‘universal’ healthcare that by any definition is not universal. Really, they are selling government rationing over price rationing.
Let’s talk about quality and affordability. We do pay more for medical care than do other countries, and we are often told we have lower quality medical care, but look at the facts that go along with that. Leftists will show the amount of money different countries pay for medical care against things like average life spans, deaths per 100,000 people, and other measurements that relate more to lifestyle choices (like eating and exercise) than to outcomes from medical care. We are one of the fattest nations on Earth, and we don’t exercise anywhere near as much as we should, but that has nothing do to with the quality of our medical care.
Who has the best cancer treatment outcomes in the world? If you have to have heart surgery, in what country do you want to have surgery? The United States has, far and away, the best medical outcomes in the world, and as a consequence, you will not see the mainstream media use medical outcomes as measurements. There is a reason for that…
Healthcare is of course just one example. Pick any societal problem you want. If it is a real problem (there are plenty of fake ones), then the left already has the only solution they are willing to discuss picked out. Any dissent from their solution makes you an evil fool.
Understand when you are talking to someone who has been indoctrinated, they can’t see past their indoctrination. Since you are questioning positions they hold as virtuous, they will see you as being evil, and will attribute all kinds of evil things to you, not only calling you every name in the book, but assuming that you really are all of those things. To the indoctrinated, the fact that you do not agree with them proves that you are all of the terrible things they are calling you. You cannot reason with such people, but you can understand them, and understanding them is half the battle. Spreading how indoctrination works can help people who are not yet indoctrinated avoid becoming so, and over time, if enough of us become immune to indoctrination, we can return to a discussion based on truth.
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