Brushfire of Freedom
The Irritable Pundit
Stockholm Syndrome", Nils Bejerot, acclaimed criminologist and psychiatrist, first coined the term after assisting police in a long standoff with bank robbers. After days of enforced close cohabitation with their captors, the hostages began to empathize with the men holding the guns. Infants display it, in one degree or another, in their bonding with a powerful (to them) adult, but in a grown person it is an emotion-driven crippling of ones sense of self, infantilizing, and generally destructive to reasoning.
"But what", you ask, "is the point of this definition oh wise and yet Irritable Pundit?"
Glad you asked dear friends!
It explains something that for some reason eludes many of our own thinkers.
Q: Why do <insert racial/socio-economic/general group here> continue to support the democrat party and its leadership?
A: Stockholm Syndrome.
"What?" you ask, "Are you, our preternaturally clever and staggeringly handsome guide-to-life, kidding?"
Not at all. At its heart, Stockholm Syndrome is a psychological response to others having complete control over you. A blending of identity, and a releasing of ones own wishes/desires to instead mirror the wishes of those with power. A submerging of the individual to the group. It is a defense whereby you give up your own thoughts, regressing to a childlike state, following other drives than your own.
It is easier than railing against something you do not think you can defeat. Easier than feeling the constant stress of never-ending and never-succeeding resistance. It is seductive, and liberating in its own way. "Don't worry. Let them handle it, they are right anyway." And with those thoughts, absolutely at odds with reality though they may be, you simply turn off the will to fight and accept the bliss of self-imposed and defensive ignorance, and enter the welcoming embrace of a larger gestalt.
But what about when the moment is gone? Oddly enough, not much changes.
One of the things that simply defies easy explanation, is that sufferers of Stockholm Syndrome often continue in their altered world view even after the original stimulus (hijackers, bank robbers, totalitarian regimes etc..) is gone. Sometimes, years later, they would still defend their own kidnappers as being correct, right or simply "good people at heart", all evidence to the contrary. To readjust ones mindset, absent a powerful force, is hard. It is even harder when lingering emotions reinforce your original mind-shift. It would require great strength of will.
Uncharitably, it could be said that if such will existed, they would have not fallen prey to Stockholm Syndrome in the first place. More charitably one could say it is simply a matter of damaged self-esteem and fear of recrimination. How do you admit to yourself that you believed the lie, and in fact may have then done things to enable the wrongness perpetrated by your captors to continue? That, and its ensuing guilt would be genuinely painful, truly psychologically damaging.
So when you ask, as many constantly do, the questions of "why" over and over, such as:
How could Jews vote for Democrats again and again? How could they believe campaign promises when the Democrats' real feelings for Israel always found expression in destructive policies?
How could African Americans have believed that the Democrats would help them, even with a black president? Have they ever done anything but keep them down while promising salvation? What was the party of Slavery again?
Why do the people of Detroit still vote blue, when their own city crumbles around them? The proof is before them, how can they deny the very evidence of their own eyes?
How can <fill in the blank here> believe that socialism can work when it has failed time and time again?
Keep in mind, that these unfortunates have been told for their entire lives, that their belief and membership in the cause of those who they follow is all that has sustained them. And absent the will, knowledge, or a hand to help them from the abyss, they have had their own sense of self submerged within that of those with power. They are a merged group of endless victims.
It is time to educate, to teach, to help them break through the barriers of group-think. We need to, with patience and honor, show them their own dignity and allow them the opportunity to rise up and become that single most important being -- the individual.
A true individual refuses to be a victim of anything or anyone. A true individual will not try to understand the motivations of the robber, but instead plans to jump the robber the minute he blinks. A strong individual does not come to "feel for" the man doing wrong, but fights him. The individual leaps towards the man holding the woman against her will, against the mugger holding he gun, against the terrorist holding the box-cutter. A true individual raises his or her voice whenever liberties are threatened, when fiscal responsibility is left to lie by the wayside. They do not give in, they do not give up.
We have to help our friends break free from Stockholm Syndrome. We have to show the path, to point the way out from despair and recrimination. Tell them they do not have to give in, they do not have to give up. They can be anything they wish, they can achieve anything they want. They can take their destiny into their own hands and succeed. We have to help the individual be born anew from the masses. Above all we must forgive completely those who do so of any past transgressions --- even voting for Obama.
So, I implore you as one individual to another. When next arguing with a liberal well and truly mired in victimology and leftist group-think, don't try to win the argument -- try to win the mind.
Bring them home from Stockholm dear friends, bring them home.
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