Ladies and Gentlemen, the 2nd American Civil War is upon you., page 1

reply to post by neformore

The problem stems from the fact that there are two camps that believe their way is the best way for the US. The Conservatives distrust any type of government oversight and fear taxes as if they were mustard gas falling from the sky, preferring to believe that an unrestrained society free of government intervention will lead to Utopia for all (all who care to work). The Liberals believe government oversight is the answer to individual protection and realize taxation comes with this oversight, and believe that since the government represents the populous (supposedly), it will inevitably act all of the population's interests with its laws and regulations.

Note that I am talking about basic human mindset of preferring the individual vs. the group, and not about the political parties. The parties are just an ill-fitting shirt for people to wear because it's better than having no shirt at all (which it isn't but that's another conversation!).

In the age of the internet and Twitter communications, blogs that the ignorant take as gospel because they're too uneducated to know the difference between journalism and opinion, 24 hour news that focuses 10 seconds to a story, and news "commentators" - that just like blogs the ignorant parade around as gospel - people have become inundated with more information than they've ever been exposed to before.

It all happened too fast for the common person to cope with. In about a decade, the internet transformed every desk into a portal to a library 1,000,000 times more vast than the Library of Congress, and in this library, everyone has their own story to tell.

Now we have the "Powers that Be" finally capitalizing off of this information ocean. They have crafted a massive media machine to utterly destroy the average attention span and make us hysterical, shrieking monkeys that believe every sensationalized issue broadcast on CNN or FOX is some call to patriotic action to keep some shadowy enemy from destroying ourselves.

My firm belief is that it all comes down to our attention span and our "thin slicing" ability. Thin slicing is the snap judgement your subconscious makes when it's presented with new information. Before your conscious mind has time to read and interpret the information, your unconscious mind has taken a polaroid of the situation, compared it the mind's previous experiences, and made a snap judgement on how to react to the situation.

The best people in Marketing, PR, and "public opinion" know this, and capitalize on it by using your mind's thin slicing combined with your stunted attention span to drop subtle cues immediately, thus captivating your attention and forming your opinion on the subject before you move on to the next issue.

Anyway, that's my contribution to our ongoing mental Civil War in America, and one of the WMDs they use to divide the people.