Our post-modern society has basically caused a generation to form their views based on feelings, which has made them susceptible to demagoguery and emotional manipulation. Their passions are often inflamed by the charged rhetoric, spread across news and social media.
Catch-phrases and buzzwords automatically invoke rage and anger, as a trained response, instilled and programmed into the public mind, by the mass media. Hence you frequently find outrage among increasingly mainstream radical leftist ideologues—and as soon as you press for reasons and facts, all you hear is basic platitudes like, "he's a racist, misogynist or bigot," with little substantiation.
People have been conditioned to respond in particular ways to certain stimuli—charged buzzwords stimulate intense feelings of moral repugnance and disgust, leading to predictable behavioural responses: verbal hostility, judgemental and oppositional attitudes and protest.
Buzzwords and invectives are used to mark the enemy. Once marked you carry the stench of death. The hateful and often violent reactions whipped up by the media demagogues against their targets is staggering, considering that "hate" is one of the things they claim to oppose—it seems they have plenty to throw around themselves.
The "victim" metanarrative
Words designed to incite abhorrence and disgust, like "bigot" or "_____ phobic," are packed with meaning. These buzzwords form part of a bigger narrative or story, often involving the fictitious abuse of some victim group. Every time the term "homophobia" is used, the mind conjures up thoughts of Christians denying gays their "civil rights," or services they feel entitled to. Thus a sense of injustice is created in the sympathetic mind.
This story or trope is repeated so regularly in the mass media that mere association with these buzzwords reflexively invokes popular disgust and condemnation. However in the real world the stories are generally hyperbolic, if not grossly exaggerated, accounts and have little genuine reference to real instances of abuse or oppression.
For instance, a Christian holding to his convictions by not servicing a gay wedding is construed as staging some sort of assault on civil rights. Gays are free to patronise likeminded and sympathetic businesses, but to force Christians to provide services, and so participate in gay weddings against their consciences, violates the basic freedom to engage in trade volitionally, without force and duress. This is what I mean by the exaggerated narrative of injustice in the public mind.
Do not be deceived
The mass media are experts at distorting, mischaracterising and taking opinions out of context—and then affixing buzzwords to the caricatures and character-puppets they invent. You may oppose illegal immigration for the goal of social order and for economic reasons, but you are then portrayed as a "xenophobic" racist who hates foreigners.
The mass media has been employed as a weapon of psychological warfare and deception. Jesus gave the command: "do not be deceived" because He knew that the last days would be characterised by mass deception due to moronic and reprobate minds.
Our rejection of God, has wrought subjectivism, the substitution of reason for feelings-based beliefs, and made people dumb—prone to stupid beliefs.
Amos is an evangelical conservative who cares about where the world is going, and seeks to understand why it is happening, especially in light of prophecy and the spiritual powers behind the scenes. Amos currently lives in Auckland, New Zealand.
He pursues salvation for the lost, and considers himself a defender of traditional Christian values, liberal democracy and the historically unprecedented freedom and liberty established and defended by our forebears—which unfortunately, is gradually being eroded.
Amos Sale's previous articles may be viewed at www.pressserviceinternational.org/amos-sale.html