We don’t think, therefore we are

The advertising industry learned decades ago that there is no money to be made by appealing to our outer selves. All advertising is subliminal. The surface message, the croaking frog, merely conceals the underlying appeal to some primal motive.

It is no different with the political parties. We only have two, and they are not ideological camps. They are merely brands. I clipped this yesterday from Glenn Greenwald’s piece on the state of mind of liberals in supporting Obama as he has morphed before our eyes into the new Bush. GG cites Tom Paine from The Age of Reason:

[I]t is necessary to the happiness of man, that he be mentally faithful to himself. Infidelity does not consist in believing, or in disbelieving; it consists in professing to believe what he does not believe.

It is impossible to calculate the moral mischief, if I may so express it, that mental lying has produced in society. When a man has so far corrupted and prostituted the chastity of his mind, as to subscribe his professional belief to things he does not believe, he has prepared himself for the commission of every other crime.

We are not honest in ourselves. We profess to believe things we do not believe, and do not examine our own motives. Consequently, as I stand off with (mostly) Democrats who profess to know that their party is ideologically superior to the other, I marvel at the impenetrable shield they have built. It’s a fortress against reason, a means of validation, and a tribute to the innate irrationality of our species.

But there are 7 billion of us, so it works. If we really thought for ourselves, as we all profess to do, we’d probably not be here to do that thinking.