October 28, 2009
By Ed Tubbs
To compose conclusions about someone else's motivations, thoughts and likely behaviors that are based exclusively on one's own predispositions, prejudices, fears and bigotries, and not a whit on any actual evidence may be the most abhorrently dangerous of all human endeavors.
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Yesterday, October 25th, AOL ran the story, how Rush Limbaugh, falling for the Obama thesis hoax, â??Aristocracy Reborn,â? went off on bombastic tear, ripping the president for, according to what supposedly was his Columbia University thesis, criticizing the Founding Fathers and the Constitution for first not addressing, then seeking to correct, the maldistribution of wealth.
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Within minutes of wrapping up the tirade pillorying the president, â??Much of what he is doing is unconstitutional, and I'm waiting for the lawsuits to be filed â?? how's that hope and change working out for ya folks?â? the ranting talk show host learned the whole thesis thing was a hoax.
Okay â?? no big deal, that someone, anyone is taken in by something like that. None of us are immune. Whether fact or fiction, we recall the tale of the Trojan horse. And for centuries, much of Christendom was bamboozled by the Shroud of Turin. Examples are limited only by the stretch of history. So let's not jump down Limbaugh's throat simply because he's an odious sort.
In Spielberg's 2002 futuristic Minority Report, starring Tom Cruise as detective Chief John Anderton, the public policing mission was to sleuth out pre-crimes; maintain public order and safety by arresting the perpetrators of criminal activity for what they would do, unless checked â?? not for what they did do. It was an advance turn on the thought police of Orwell's epic 1984.
Or brought real, it was the social psychology that was the at the root of the white racism that permeated and was predominate in our own South. In his sweeping novel Texas, Michener lays it raw: â??. . . one of the strangest aspects of Southern life: many slaveholders were convinced that their slaves, at least, were supremely happy in their position of servitude; but at the same time, the owners were desperately afraid of slave uprisings, or of Northerners inciting their slaves; there was a constant tattoo of hangings, beatings and terrible repressions whenever it was suspected [emphasis mine] that the â??happy' slaves might be surreptitiously preparing a general slaughter.â?
In other words, to compose conclusions about someone else's motivations, thoughts and likely behaviors that are based exclusively on one's own predispositions, prejudices, fears and bigotries, and not a whit on any actual evidence may be the most abhorrently dangerous of all human endeavors.
Now I want to include what the late conservative commentator Paul Harvey called â??The Rest of the Story.â? Being fully apprized of the hoax and of his falling for it, Limbaugh acknowledges on the air that it was a hoax and one he'd been taken in by. But then he goes on to what at best can be described as both most dishonorable and dastardly, yet is moreover a pair of scissors to the thin thread by which all civilization precariously hangs. â??But we know he [the president] thinks it!â?
â??He thinks it.â? Think about that, and think about the implications subsumed within such thinking. And now think back to the recent rants of the summer and the murder of a physician and how easily everything that protects us from one another can be undone.
It's dangerous for a couple reasons. First, it's dangerous because â?? fortunately â?? it's completely untrue: that any of us ever really knows what another person is truly thinking, until they tell us. You might live with another for 50 or more years, and though you may think that you know what the other is thinking, you do not really know. Indeed, you may think you â??knowâ? who that other person is, what he or she is capable of doing and what he or she would never do, for example. But you don't. The reason you don't is because humans are dynamic; always changing to fit the ever changing context in which they live their lives and which mold their most fleeting thoughts and emotions. Humans are never in precisely the same place twice.
It's also dangerous because, based on the immediately preceding, the probability, as observers of another, we'll be wrong, perhaps very wrong, concerning any assumptions we might draw, and the behaviors we respond with, is extraordinarily high. It's not merely talk-show entertainment. It's unthinking animalistic mob mentality brought down to the individual level. Permit Rush Limbaugh, or anyone else, to get away with â??we know he thinks it,â? and we voluntarily put ourselves and our neighbors and everyone we know or will meet at the edge of the horribly dark abyss.
Authors Bio:
An "Old Army Vet" and liberal, qua liberal, with a passion for open inquiry in a neverending quest for truth unpoisoned by religious superstitions. Per Voltaire: "He who can lead you to believe an absurdity can lead you to commit an atrocity."