Truth
12th January 2016
Sarah Hoyt opines.
If you want people to believe the most outrageous things, you have to tell them something that is true and that they know is true. This is why the crazier philosophies that sell themselves to humans sell themselves by telling them something that the people know is true.
Communists used to be really good at this. They told people what everyone knew to be true. The Noblemen had it better. And they’d (by and large) had done nothing to deserve it. Or they told them what people wanted to be true: your failure is not your fault, the rich are holding you down. Or a million other such things. And then on top of that they slid the nutcakes: because you can’t trust any other human you can trust the government (which is, of course, composed of angels.) Or if you make the state big enough, it will eventually disappear. (Wait, what?) Or even if you just take other people’s things, you’ll be happy (because no one can take them from you, right?) And of course, a lot of other crazy cakes stuff, including but not limited to that value is created by labor and that things are worth the labor put into them.
No one would believe any of those things undiluted. But they believe them when they’re packaged among homey truths that everyone knows to be true.