Consistency of Messaging
Why Are Our Leaders Incompetent Garbage?
I took the day off today to try and get a Covid booster shot. After wrestling with the online portal for an hour, and making phone calls to various locations, I was finally able to secure an appointment for Friday.
Since I take manufactured bioweapons very seriously, I didn’t think Friday was soon enough, so I visited a few pharmacies in person to see if I could get the vax shot sooner. No dice - apparently they don’t accept walk-ins, only scheduled appointments. Since each pharmacy schedules only 4 appointments an hour - and the people administering these shots work 8 hour days - that means that your average pharmacy can only vaccinate 32 people a day. Does this behavior seem consistent with a society that tells us Covid is a grave threat that is worth shutting down our whole economy over? I mean, the economic damage that we have suffered from Covid - not to mention the death toll - is huge. So it seems to me kind of ridiculous that our leadership is willing to shut down the economy indefinitely until the crisis is resolved, but doesn’t show any sense of urgency towards implementing the solutions that would actually solve the crisis.
I don’t want to just dunk on Democrats here, so let’s talk about the Republican position also. Isn’t it interesting that Republicans talk about the lab leak hypothesis - a theory that seems more and more truthful every day as new evidence comes to light - but are unwilling to take even basic steps like masking up, because that would signal weakness? I mean, maybe it’s just me, but when it seems like a foreign adversary has accidentally released a deadly biological weapon which has been artificially enhanced to increase the lethality, that doesn’t seem like the kind of thing we ought to shrug off, dismissively saying that “natural resistance” will take care of it. It seems like the kind of thing that we ought to be hyper-vigilant about and take active measures to prevent.
To me, the real problem here is that none of our political parties has consistent messaging. Instead of advocating a unified worldview and taking positions that are consistent with that worldview, the only unified position that our main parties hold is that the other team is bad and therefore anything that hurts the other side is good. Democrats say that racism is bad and Republicans are racist, except when it is minority groups and Democrats being racist - then it is totally OK. Republicans say that pedophilia is bad and Democrats are pedophiles, but conveniently turn a blind eye towards Republican politicians who like to experiment with how closely they can skirt the age of consent. It’s no surprise that your average voter is cynical and disillusioned when both parties demonstrate such utter hypocrisy. It’s sort of like how many Democrat celebrities pretend to be concerned about climate change but have no problem with taking private jets everywhere they go, despite the massive environmental damage their behavior causes. Or how many Republican politicians pretend to be very concerned with free speech and issues of censorship but have passed almost no laws to protect people from being fired for the opinions they hold or things they publish on social media outside of work hours.
This may surprise you, but things didn’t always used to be this way. In the past, political groups used to have think tanks which would do things other than using focus groups to test interesting cliches and catchphrases to dunk on their opponents. Once upon a time, the purpose of a political thinktank was to come up with a unified worldview, which they would then spread throughout society. Because this worldview was consistent and had no internal contradictions, it was mentally “sticky.” People naturally gravitate towards ideologies that are consistent, because the whole point of an ideology is to give you a useful way of interpreting the world. When people hear an ideology that lets them understand the world better, they naturally appreciate it and want to spread it, since consistency of principle resonates in a way that self-interested partisanship does not. It doesn’t even have to be a good ideology, all it has to do is be consistent. In less than five years, Communism was able to conquer half the globe, collapsing governments that had existed for centuries. This wasn’t because Communism was a particularly great ideology, it’s simply that it was a coherent ideology which didn’t have huge internal inconsistencies.
When our main political groups are so stupid and hypocritical that they don’t even have a coherent ideology or consistent principles, it’s not surprising that even a grassroots conspiracy theory spread on the internet has more appeal than the nonsense that they’re trying to sell to voters. At least the “conspiracy theory” has consistent messaging. Maybe instead of trying to suppress ideologies that threaten their grasp on power, our main political organizations should be asking themselves how to imitate them. After all, the “conspiracy theories” seem to be gathering power a lot faster than the main political parties, despite the attempts of the media and academia at “deplatforming” them. At the current rate of spread, what happens when the conspiracy theorists themselves are the majority, and the people dismissing them are in the minority? At that point, who deplatforms whom?
