Guilt and redemption in a hyper-divided America
David Kupelian explains how the left manipulates people into betraying their deepest values
Published: 18 hours ago
David Kupelian

It has become increasingly clear that the left’s ever-more-bizarre agenda for America – from passing laws prescribing imprisonment for those who fail to use the correct transgender pronoun (out of over 50 new genders!), to importing into the U.S. as many migrants as possible from impossible-to-vet, terrorist-hotbed regions of the world, to demonizing centuries of American history and destroying statues of the nation’s founders – is simply insane. Not “progressive,” not “radical.” Insane.

How and why, then, is the left able to “sell” this suicidal agenda to millions of otherwise rational people? By what magic do they convince decent, law-abiding Americans to allow men to use women’s restrooms and changing rooms and showers? To support abortion up to the very moment of birth, which is in every way identical to the heinous crime of infanticide? To believe that all white people, just because of their skin color, are automatically racists?

The answer is simple. They manipulate other people’s emotions, and thereby their thinking. And one of their most effective tactics is the guilt trip – essentially an emotional manipulation in which one party tries to induce guilt feelings in a target person or group for the purpose of controlling their behavior.

Of course, in this fallen world, people manipulate the thoughts and feelings of others all the time for the sake of power and advantage. But what happens when an entire political movement/ideology adopts these tactics wholesale?

Today’s left, which increasingly dominates the Democratic Party, attacks, demeans, demonizes and shames all those with whom it disagrees every day from morning until night – branding them as bigots, racists, misogynists, fascists, deplorables, homophobes, xenophobes, Islamaphobes and so on … in a word, haters.

On one level, the process resembles simple intimidation and compliance: If you oppose the radical, unconstitutional, far-left policies implemented by former President Barack Obama, you’re a racist. If you disagree with unfettered abortion-on-demand throughout all nine months of pregnancy, you want to oppress women. If you are troubled by illegal immigration’s negative impact on America’s economy, culture and security, you’re anti-immigrant. If you oppose same-sex marriage or recruiting open transgenders into America’s armed forces (obligating taxpayers to shell out millions to pay for “gender reassignment surgery”), you’re a hateful bigot.

Such is the warp and weft of current American politics – all day, every day, to the point that America has grown used to it. The left advances a shockingly destructive agenda; the right complains; the left accuses the right of being fascists and Nazis … and the right shuts up.

But there’s more to it. Much more.

The left specializes in literally playing on – one could say preying upon – the good conscience of Americans.

Conscience – a human being’s inborn moral compass – is arguably his most important faculty. And how do people know when they’ve violated their conscience and done the wrong thing? Guilt – the unique human sense of inner conflict experienced after one deviates from the dictates of conscience.

Alas, many people have discovered how to manipulate others’ emotions, including guilt. People can also be tricked into feeling guilty even when they haven’t actually done anything wrong. And of course, one’s guilt over long-past wrongs can be resurrected and weaponized by others.

One manifestation of the left’s guilt-tripping is its almost universal practice of “shaming.” The left shames and demonizes ordinary Americans over issues as fundamental as their having voted for Donald Trump for president. During the election season, Hillary Clinton famously described tens of millions of American citizens who supported Trump as “deplorable” and “irredeemable.”

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The left’s ceaseless quest for redemption, restoration of lost innocence and a return to paradise (not to mention the raw political power to force their version of it on everyone else), as with so much else the left thinks, says and does, amounts to a rabid counterfeit of the real thing.

In earlier generations, most Americans saw fit to rely on a higher source than government for redemption, for moral laws on which to base a righteous society, and for the canceling of guilt and sin. Somehow the left determined it had found something better – and for the past century has attempted to coerce much of the world into embracing this strange religion, at great cost. Indeed, the just-passed 100th anniversary of the October 1917 communist revolution was largely ignored, even by the left. But then, 100 million deaths must be a difficult thing to celebrate.

Leftists perpetually strive to elevate government to the status of a god, just as they try desperately to perfect man by restructuring society by force, rather than through individual repentance and inner transformation. In the end, their angry and misguided pursuit of societal salvation is only a pitiful, perverse – and inevitably violent – imitation of the genuine freedom ever available to mankind from the true Redeemer and Forgiver of human sin.


http://www.wnd.com/2017/11/guilt-and-red...ivided-america/