The real violence exerted by propaganda, Thomas Merton

Quote:

The real violence exerted by propaganda is this: by means of apparent truth and apparent reason, it induces us to surrender our freedom and self-possession. It predetermines us to certain conclusions, and does so in such a way that we imagine that we are fully free in reaching them by our own judgment and our own thought. Propaganda makes up our mind for us, but in such a way that it leaves us the sense of pride and satisfaction of men who have made up their own minds. And, in the last analysis, propaganda achieves this effect because we want it to.

This is one of the few real pleasures left to modern man: this illusion that he is thinking for himself when, in fact, someone else is doing his thinking for him.

And this someone else is not a personal authority, the great mind of a genial thinker, it is the mass mind, the general “they,” the anonymous whole. One is left, therefore, not only with the sense that one has thought things out for himself, but that he has also reached the correct answer without difficulty – the answer which is shown to be correct because it is the answer of everybody. Since it is at once my answer and the answer of everybody, how should I resist it?

– Thomas Merton 1915 -1968

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We all believe many things that are obviously untrue.

The most destructive untruth is how easy it is to make money.

They do not love each other because they do not love themselves.

– Kurt Vonnegut 1922 – 2007

Men will grow accustomed to the idea that they have always been in subjection

[Men] soon learn to enjoy displaying their harness and prance proudly beneath their trappings

Quote:

Custom becomes the first reason for voluntary servitude. Men are like handsome race horses who first bite the bit and later like it, and rearing under the saddle a while soon learn to enjoy displaying their harness and prance proudly beneath their trappings. Similarly men will grow accustomed to the idea that they have always been in subjection, that their fathers lived in the same way; they will think they are obliged to suffer this evil, and will persuade themselves by example and imitation of others, finally, investing those who order them around with proprietary rights, based on the idea that it has always been that way.

The Discourse of Voluntary Servitude, Etienne de La Boétie 1530 -1563

Exaggerated sensitiveness is an expression of the feeling of inferiority.

Exaggerated sensitivity: I’ve met that in myself and a few franchisees over 14 years.

Quotes:

Meanings are not determined by situations, but we determine ourselves by the meanings we give to situations.

Every therapeutic cure, and still more, any awkward attempt to show the patient the truth, tears him from the cradle of his freedom from responsibility and must therefore reckon with the most vehement resistance.

My difficulties belong to me!

To be a human being means to possess a feeling of inferiority which constantly presses towards its own conquest. The greater the feeling of inferiority that has been experienced, the more powerful is the urge for conquest and the more violent the emotional agitation.

– Alfred Adler 1870-1937

The logic of business is coercion, monopoly, and the destruction of the weak, not ‘choice’ or universal affluence.

The leaders of the backlash may talk Christ, but they walk corporate.

Quotes:

Corruption is uniquely reprehensible in a democracy because it violates the system’s first principle, which we all learned back in the sunshiny days of elementary school: that the government exist to serve the public, not particular companies or individuals or even elected officials.

While earlier forms of conservatism emphasized fiscal sobriety, the backlash mobilizes voters with explosive social issues…which is then married to pro-business economics.

Grandstanding leaders never deliver, their fury mounts and mounts, and nevertheless they turn out every two years to return their right-wing heroes to office for a second, a third, a twentieth try. The trick never ages; the illusion never wears off. Vote to stop abortion; receive a rollback in capital gains taxes. Vote to make our country strong again; receive deindustrialization. Vote to screw those politically correct college professors; receive electricity deregulation. Vote to get government off our backs; receive conglomeration and monopoly everywhere from media to meatpacking. Vote to stand tall against terrorists; receive Social Security privatization. Vote to strike a blow against elitism; receive a social order in which wealth is more concentrated then ever before in our lifetimes, in which workers have been stripped of power and CEOs are rewarded in a manner beyond imagining.

– Thomas Frank 1965-

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Franchisee organizations need legal standing in civil litigation

It’s only fair to both sides and will stop the continuing carnage.

Independent franchisee associations, IndFA and their consultants should be treated as if they were individuals within a franchise agreement.

• Franchisors’ corporations get to accumulate over decades information, expertise and capital.
• Franchisees should have the same advantages by building their own IndFA and contracting with a consulting firm that specializes in leadership development,  conflict resolution and system reform.

Dr. Gillian Hadfield: Amend the Bill to include mechanisms for low cost enforcement of the rights and obligations. Mechanism could include permitting franchise association/class standing in civil litigation; dispute resolution mechanisms including mediation that would operate outside the civil litigation system.  SUMMARY OF RECOMMENDATIONS, BILL 33 – Franchise Disclosure Act, 1999, Legislative Assembly of Ontario, Canada, March 31, 2000

– Justice, Plaster model created by Walter Allward between 1925 and 1930 and used by stonemasons in the construction of the Vimy Memorial in France. The figure of Justice leans her forehead against a sword hilt.

The silence of possible betrayal

Franchising is a technology that borrows methods from totalitarian strategies.

The Womb State

Totalitarianism  is a  man’s escape form the fearful realities of life into the virtual womb of the leader. The individual’s actions are directed from this womb – from the inner sanctum. The mystic center is a control of everything man need no longer assume responsibility for his own life. The order and logic of the prenatal world reign. There is peace and silence, the peace of utter submission. The members of the womb state do not really communicate; between them there is silence, the silence of possible betrayal, not the mature silence of reticence and reservedness. Totalitaria increases the gap between the things one shows and communicates and the things one secretly dreams and thinks deep within oneself. It develops the artificial split-mindedness of political science. Whatever little remains of individual feeling and opinion is kept carefully enclosed. In the schizophrenic world of Totalitaria, there is no free mutual exchange, no conversation, no exclamation, no release from emotional tension. It is a world of silent conspirators. Indeed, the atmosphere of suspicion is the big attacker of mental freedom because it makes people cling together, conspiring against mysterious enemies – first from outside, then among themselves….

The deep hate the sick individual feels toward the parental figure cannot be expressed directly, and so it is displaced onto the self or onto scapegoats. Scapegoatism is also part of the totalitarian strategy. As we pointed out before, the scapegoat temporarily absorbs all the individual’s inner fury and rage. Kulaks, Negroes, Jews, Communists, capitalists, profiteers and warmongers – any or all of them can play the role. Perhaps the greatest dangers, to the totalitarian mind, is the use of intellect and awareness and the “egg-head’s” demand for free, verifying thinking. Aberration and perversion are chosen by the citizens of Totalitaria, as they are by the inhabitants of madhouses, over tiring, intellectual control.

– Dr. Joost A. M. Meerloo,The Rape of the Mind: The Psychology of Thought Control, Menticide, and Brainwashing, 1956, p. 121 – 2

Any form of leadership may gradually turn into dictatorship.

Thinking of the recent challenges faced by a specific franchisor.

Quote:

Being a leader, carrying great power and responsibility for other people’s lives, is a monumental test for the human psyche. The weak leader is the man who cannot meet it, who simply abdicates his responsibility. The dictator is the man who replaces the existing standards of justice and morality by more and more private prestige, by more and more power, and eventually isolated himself more and more from the rest of humanity. His suspicion grows, his isolation grows, and the vicious cycle leading to a paranoid attitude begins to develop.

The dictator is not only a sick man, he is also a cruel opportunist. He sees no value in any other person and feels no gratitude for any help he may have received. He his suspicious an dishonest and believes that his personal ends justify any menas he may use to achieve them. Peculiarly enough, every tyrant still searches for some self-justification. Without such a soothing device ofr his own conscience, he cannot live. His attitude toward other people is manipulative; to him, they are merely tools for the advancement of his own interests…

It is because the dictator is afraid, albeit unconsciously, of his own internal contradictions, that he is afraid of the same internal contradictions of his fellow men. He must purge and purge, terrorize and terrorize n order to still his own raging inner drives. He must kill every doubter, destroy every person who makes a mistake, imprison everyone who cannot be proved to be utterly single-minded…

– Dr. Joost A. M. Meerloo, The Rape of the Mind: The Psychology of Thought, Control, Menticide, and Brainwashing, 1956, p 115-6.