Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, wingnut media represent modern-day brainwashing cult?
This post started as a series of comments on Dickday's recent post,
Rush Limbaugh is a Big Fat Liar and so is Joe Scarborough
I thought it was worth putting out as a blog entry.Someone here at the Cafe recently posited, quite accurately, that Fox and The Lump have such high ratings because EVERY ignorant knuckledragger watches or listens to them, while the other 79% of the population spreads their attention around to the other networks and wouldn't listen to Rush or watch Fox if they got paid to do it.
That "class" of people hooked on trash talkers like The Lump is very similar to a cult.
Robert J. Lifton's standard 8-point outline for identifying a cult can be quite accurately attributed to them.
1. Milieu Control; "they (cult members) can be warned under threat of punishment to stay away from the world's educational media,"
2. Mystical Manipulation; If a person leaves for any reason, accidents or ill-will that may befall them are always attributed to God's punishment on them... The organization is therefore given a certain "mystique" that is quite alluring to the new recruit.
3. Demand for purity; "The world is depicted as black and white, with little room for making personal decisions based on a trained conscience.
4.The Cult of Confession; Serious sins (as defined by the organization) are to be confessed immediately. (How many times have we seen conservatives criticize Rush, only to turn around and apologize fearfully the next day?)
5.The "Sacred Science" The cult's ideology becomes the ultimate moral vision for the ordering of human existence. The ideology is too "sacred" to call into question, and a reverence is demanded for the leadership. The cult's ideology makes an exaggerated claim for possessing airtight logic, making it appear as absolute truth with no contradictions.
6. Loading the language; The prolific use of "thought-terminating cliches," expressions or words that are designed to end the conversation or controversy. Such cliches are easily memorized and readily expressed. They are called the "language of non-thought," since the discussion is terminated, not allowing further consideration.
7. Doctrine Over Person; Human experience is subordinated to doctrine, no matter how profound or contradictory such experiences seem.... The person is only valuable insomuch as they conform to the role models of the cult.
8. Dispensing of Existence; The cult decides who has the "right" to exist and who does not. They decide who will perish in the final battle of good over evil. The leaders decide which history books are accurate and which are biased.
Check it out at http://www.freeminds.org/psychology/mind-control/eight-marks-of-a-mind-control-cult.html
You can see the similarities between say, the teabaggers, the birthers, the Palinites, and these identifiers of what constitutes cult members, it really explains the profane relationship between the Fox/Rush listeners and their cult idols.
Rush is a cult idol, and his listeners are brainwashed lemmings. I've said it before, but it probably sounded like your everyday barebones complaint.
Here I am attempting to put more meat on the bare bones. I meant it seriously, not just as a lament, but as a warning to those lemmings.
If you don't learn to think for yourselves, you can never be free from the likes of The Lump, and you will waste your lives parroting other peoples' pernicious words.
When Lifton wrote his seminal piece "Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism, A Study of 'Brainwashing" in China, on which the movie "The Manchurian Candidate" (hey, Rachel, me too...) was based, the Democrats wouldn't touch it because they were afraid of association with the word "Communist."
It was published in 1961.
But both the Republican Party and Madison Avenue (Mad Men, literally) found it very valuable. Anyone who doubts it is blind and deaf to the brainwashing we see and hear every day from the wingnuts.
Here's the Google online version of his book; if you think my little paraphrase of Lifton's whole work was scary, Flowerchild, wait until you read this, or some of it.
Long URL, but it leads to one of the most pertinent but obscure works of research in the past 100 years. If you want a glimpse into the dark places of the mind, and the pernicious people who tap them for power and profit, take the time to check it out.
My short take on it is that Totalitarianism, by any other name, would still stink just as bad.
Read the forward, Lifton recognizes that his work transcended it's original intent, to prove what I just paraphrased.
Here's the URL for browser pasters.
