Emerald

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Of course if you frame it as "Our policy position is drag shows for kids." people aren't going to moved towards supporting politicians who run on that platform... nor is any politician actually doing so. That's just another right wing talking point that's like "Kamala and Joe Biden support drag shows for kids." and you're proliferating it and doing their propaganda job for them. So, that's not what I'm talking about or disagreeing with. I'm disagreeing with you conceding to the rightwing framing with regards to social issues and framing those as "woke goofy stuff", when it's actually about asserting the values of freedom and acceptance... and a rejection of authoritarian control over social issues and personal choices. All that does is weaken the left and strengthen the right when you cede this ground to them and put an arbitrary dividing line between protecting social freedoms and economic populism... because you can't really have one without the other. It's like Neo-Nazi women who complain about misogyny in right wing spaces. Don't expect gender equality in your ethnostate, lady! Similarly, don't expect normalized transphobia in your anti-corruption Social Democracy movement of the people.

The way to have political influence is to be able to create and put out simple narratives and visions that people can understand and get on board with... and to assert your paradigm onto the world in a way that dovetails off of how people already think. And nothing needs to be nefarious or untrue about the narratives. They just need to be simple and give people a sense that they belong within that story and that that story is leading them to deeper levels of connection and movement towards a vision. Right wingers understand power a lot more than left wingers do. And they have a very well-funded apparatus for influencing people. So, they tend to be better at these things and less ideologically opposed to them. But the only way to avoid ceding power to the right and adding to their propaganda is to avoid conceding to their ideological framing... and to assert the normalcy of our own frame.

That mindset is just a way of submitting to the right wing and losing by default before you've actually lost. First off, you're not trying to get dyed in the wool conservatives who strongly hold onto some principled traditional values. That's a minority group anyway. You're trying to get the majority of people who are deeply influenceable and are changing their views based off of what is considered normal and moderate in the eyes of society. And if you go conceding that being anti-trans is the normal thing, those "moderate" people will moderate themselves right into the clutches of the far right. Remember that the Nazis were moderate and "normal" for their era and location... as whatever is normalized will be considered normal. Plus, the tides are always shifting... and the time is ripe for people to start getting increasingly agitated at the right wing status quo, especially with the upcoming economic recession that's about to happen. People are on the look out for the "other side" of the binary to propose something very different and better than what is now.

This again, negates the power that we have to work together to impose a political narrative and paradigm... including what the political camps actually are and how we understand them. We get too locked into working with and around what is and making concessions where we shouldn't be making concessions... that we forget that we also have influence to assume the dominant frame and redefine the whole game. Have you not seen the right wing do just that over the past 10 years?

When you have a very sophisticated and well-funded propaganda machine at your disposal, you can change people's views very quickly.

It all depends on how your frame things. If you frame things as woke socialist crap, they'll run away. And the more you call the lefty position woke socialist crap, the more you scare people away and they go to the right (who you've already foolishly conceded are more normal for being anti-woke and ceded power to). But if you frame it as freedom, the Golden Rule, and mind your own business... and let's work together for a more economically fair system, they'll eat it up. The same thing is true that people will run away if you come right out the gate wearing Swastika armbands. But if you drip feed people false but believable ideas like "more immigration equals more crime" then you can get the normies on board. And in a few short years, they'll be goose-stepping with the worst of 'em.

That's just not correct. The current right-wing narrative became so dominant because there is a billionaire-funded and multi-layered right-wing propaganda machine tasked with creating slogans and narratives and normalizing increasingly more and more extreme viewpoints. And because social media has become a lot more sophisticated in the past decade, it's been the perfect conduit for this well-funded propaganda machine to have more and more influence. People will get mad at who and what they're conditioned to get mad at. I've seen this in people that I know who were very accepting of gay people 10 years ago... but now believe that gay people are groomers who want to abuse children because they've been conditioned to think that way. And I've heard people's values get brainwashed out of them in favor of rote right wing narratives. If there were no such apparatus of power, we would not be in this position.

I never said that you could talk a person out of their level of development. People are where they are. But people are VERY influenceable and malleable. You can get a Stage Green person to join the Nazis... and you can get a Stage Blue person to get on board with Social Democracy if you know how to influence people. And you can utilize your awareness of their level of development to loop them into your movement... not by conceding the content of your paradigm, but by framing the content of your paradigm within the structure of their paradigm. You're not going to get anywhere with conceding to the right wing framing that accepting trans people is weird. Instead, you have to make it clear that their lack of acceptance and desire to control is weird... and you must not concede as it just add more normalcy and power to their POV when it's anything but normal. Consider this... As a child, I was a very absolutist thinker that had a Stage Blue mentality. I can recognize that I was in this phase until I was about 13 or 14 or so when I started to become aware of social constructs. But I was taught as a Stage Blue child to be against racism and prejudice by parents, teachers, and pop culture. And I believed it as an absolute in a very Stage Blue dogmatic kind of way, where there was an absolute value of "Those with lighter skin shouldn't be mean to those with darker skin." It was the content of Stage Green views framed in the structure of a Stage Blue absolute dogma. And I believed it like someone believes a scripture of a holy book. And I didn't perfectly understand why the rule only applied in one direction (only from white to black... and not from black to white)... and I didn't even question that until I entered Stage Orange as a teenager. And I didn't even understand the answer to that question until I opened up to a more Stage Green perspective in my early 20s. So, you can load the content of any stage into the structure of any stage if you frame it the way that that stage thinks of things. The Left unnecessarily ties its hands and accepts the right wing framing so often. And it's one of the major reasons why we have such little power compared to the right wing.

That's an incorrect assumption. And it's a total misunderstanding of how power and influence works. You can always shape and form people's viewpoints regardless of where they are Spiral Dynamics-wise. People don't need to be on the same level of development as a political movement to get on board with a political movement. You just need to frame things in a way that normies will respond to and inch them closer to your position over time. It's just like how the far right has gotten a lot of Stage Green hippie folks to go Fascist by posing the right wing as the rebellious contrarian anti-establishment position and the left wing as the establishment position. Of course Fascists aren't Stage Green. But the creators of the propaganda machine that's tasked with normalizing Fascism understands Stage Green enough to know how to rope them into their movement. So, you just have to use language that fits within the prevailing paradigm of society and that will resonate with most normies (which is mostly Orange with a bit of Blue)... and you can get people on board with just about anything. And this should be obvious at this point... given all the outlandish extreme stuff that's been normalized over the past decade. Now, most people won't resonate with a deeper Green message about where trans identities come from and bla bla bla. But that wasn't going to carry any rhetorical weight anyway, as it's too complex. The narratives and slogans themselves have to avoid being too complex, ideological, or wonky. Instead, you have to appeal to the value of freedom... and to the idea of minding your own business... which are already normalized in society and are situated smack in the middle of the Overton Window. And you have to frame people who get hung up about trans people as weird and neurotic and anti-freedom... because they genuinely are weird and neurotic and anti-freedom. You have to make it a taboo where people will try to avoid having that social stench on them because it's associated with creepy guys who never bathe or go outside and who post on 4-chan everyday. And you do it just the same way as the right wing did with blue-haired SJWs back in 2015-2016. They took a mainstream viewpoint of "accept people's differences"... and they found a group of screeching weirdos that held that viewpoint. And they used these same images of screeching weirdos to stigmatize the idea "accept people's differences" to the point where some would want to run away from association with that value because they didn't want to be seen as belonging to the group of screeching weirdos. The left needs to learn to do our own version of that to re-normalize the "accept people's difference" viewpoint after 10 years of heavy right wing propagandizing and re-affirm it as the norm. We on the left may be developed enough to understand Green values. But we need to be smart enough to figure out how to wield power well enough to re-normalize this value through the current societal lens. And you need to show crazy creepy weirdos obsessing about trans people and transvestigating everyone in the same light as those blue-haired SJWs... and put it out there as a popular meme. Then, have the progressive politicians be like "Duh. In our party we're pro-freedom and we mind our own business... and we focus on the real issues (insert economic populist vision here) instead of getting hung up on neurotically fearing people like the other side does."

Because slavery had to do with the economic interests of the rich and powerful... and the rich and powerful were using their power to impose their own "narratives of normal" onto society. And they had created many narratives for why slavery was normal, right, good, and justified that the populace bought into despite very few white people having enough money to have slaves. To appeal to liberal types of the time, they basically said that black people couldn't govern themselves properly because they were inferior and uncivilized and needed their white masters to take care of them. To appeal to traditional conservative types, they needed to emphasize the superiority of their culture and people over the enslaved people's culture and people. And they could always appeal to poor white people who wanted to feel like they weren't on the very bottom of the social hierarchy... who could imagine that the power of the white ruling elite would rub off onto them. And I'm sure that abolitionists were framed as a bunch of screeching abnormal Quaker SJWs whose anti-slavery views were so extreme that it would be political suicide for any serious politician at the time. But you don't make any changes like this by conceding to the framing of slave owners and normalizing these viewpoints. You remain steadfast until the only acceptable and serious position in society is that "Slavery is bad" and that anyone who doesn't agree is a crazy stupid racist weirdo who's probably just bitter because they smell bad and women are creeped out by them. That's how you wield power. You don't play defense... and you don't meet weirdos and crazies in the middle. Instead, you give them a disgusted look like you're smelling something bad and say, "You don't ACTUALLY think that way. Do you?" And if they say yes, you laugh at them like you're suprised and you believe they're joking and like they can't possibly be serious. Then, when they say they're serious, you press them... and you make them have to defend the indefensible. You make them play defense and you pose your point of view as the "duh" position.

The concept of moderate and normal are very malleable for people and highly contingent upon the narratives that are mimetically imposed and framed as normal and moderate. If the prevailing narrative is that it's normal to hate trans people and be Nazis... people will hate trans people and be Nazis. And you can notice how so much extreme outlandish stuff has been normalized just because the right keeps insisting all the extreme outlandish stuff is normal. But if the prevailing narrative is that it's normal to live and let live and mind your own business... and that only weird people are hung up on what's in other people's pants... then people will avoid getting caught up in these neurotic anti-trans panic movements.

I know that OCD is involved, so this might not be that reassuring. But there is nothing wrong with being attracted to breasts and at the initial appearance of a woman. All heterosexual men have that as a part of their sexuality, and it's just a normal neutral thing. It's not inherently negative, gross, or bad. And women generally like the fact that men have this component of their sexuality as it makes the sexual dynamic fun because men get really excited about the woman and the woman feels desired. And sex wouldn't really be that exciting for women if men didn't have this component of their sexuality. The problem arises when a man only values women that way... and if he has a paradigm and behaviors that are objectifying... and he directs that tendency towards women who aren't interested in him. There are plenty of men who relate to these components of their sexuality in a gross way. But that's not about their sexuality itself.... it's about their relationship to their sexuality. But I have a friend of mine who had a similar aversion to these components of his own sexuality. And before I met him, he was with a really controlling jealous partner who would always accuse him of ogling other women in public when he wasn't... so that exacerbated the dynamic. She even made him look at the ground when they'd go out grocery shopping together so he wouldn't look at women. And he was so self-conscious about simply noticing when a woman is physically attractive that he would oblige her. He even stopped watching movies with attractive women in them at her request (when most movies have attractive women in them). So, needless to say, this relationship made him feel even more negatively about his maleness and his sexuality. And he was always trying to think of himself as "not like the other guys"... and to try to get rid of his tendency to notice and be attracted to women's' appearances. He was thinking it was a problem that he even noticed when a woman is attractive and he was trying to train himself to not recognize attractiveness in women. But of course, even the straightest of straight girls can notice when a woman is attractive. So, it didn't work. But he eventually came to a point of acceptance and appreciation of this element of his sexuality... and he was glad to have that component of his sexuality. He realized that he'd rather have it than not have it. That's what will likely have to happen for you to come to a sense of peace with your sexuality and maleness.

Again... you're focusing on conforming to old-school values from the 40s as opposed to influencing others with your own values. And it's a show in unsavvy weakness and submissiveness to the conservative paradigm. That's the difference between someone who asserts their power and wins... and those who conforms to the other side's framing and reasserts the normalcy of the other side, even as the other side is certifiably cuckoo crazy.

The bold above is exactly where you assert your position and the normalcy of your position. And then, you put your opponent on defense and having to defend their own neuroticism. The whole game is to put the opposite side on defense.... and you do this by going on offense and press people about "Why are you so obsessed with trans people?". NEVER play defense. It's a losing strategy.

100% People on the Left forget that we have that power too... and they act like everyone's mindset is already set in stone. But people are so malleable and prone of the forces of normalization regardless of where it's coming from or what their starting point is. And Right wingers are the only ones actually molding the clay... while Left wingers are like 'the clay is set in stone' and we have to work around it and avoid imposing our will at all costs.

At least that walk she's going to take will only take an hour.

I'm not saying to frame it as the "culture war"... because that too is right wing framing that we've conceded on for far too long. It isn't a culture war at all! It's normal people who want to live their lives in peace... while others are neurotic and controlling about it and want to be busy-bodies and stop them from living their lives in peace. And frame it as the Golden Rule... and minding your own business... and not being a neurotic weirdo asshole who obsesses about what's in people's pants or what goes on in people's bedrooms. And frame it as a pro-freedom stance... while demonstrating how anti-freedom the opposition is who tries to control the lives of strangers. It's honestly not that difficult to frame these dynamics in a normal light... because normal people tend not to obsess about gay and trans people. And normal people tend to be unphased by these types of differences and have a live and let live attitude. Then, frame the majority of your message around working together towards an economic populist vision without letting petty neurotic hatreds divide us and get in the way of our common cause to fight against the corruptions of the powers that be.

People are actually quite malleable and easy to influence, if you know how to wield power and you give them repeatable narratives that normalize a certain point of view and de-normalize and stigmatize its opposite. All you have to do is convince people that anti-wokeness is abnormal and associated with strange socially maladapted people... and people will run from it at 1000 miles per hour. And luckily, anti-wokeness is associated with many socially maladapted people, so it isn't that difficult to find examples. And the entire reason why wokeness has the stigma that it does... is because the right wing understand power and has brand-jammed basic concepts like "accept people who are different from you" and made that which used to be a mainstream reasonable viewpoint seem unreasonable by associating it with ugly blue-haired freaks who shout at the top of their lungs. Also, politicians on the left are almost never focusing on these identity politics issues... and they still get tarred and feathered with it because the right wing has imposed its frame so thoroughly and imposed their power onto society so well. And now, even a Joe Biden gets viewed as an extension of weirdos with blue hair shouting at the top of their lungs. That's what power is... you get to set the tone for what's normal. And all this "the left need to distance themselves from wokeness" talk is just more right wing normalization... and just adds more and more power to those narratives. People on the left need to stop playing defense and trying to fit into people's current paradigms (which have been both subtle and overtly influenced by the well-oiled right-wing propaganda machine)... and start recognizing that we have the same power to influence people's paradigms. We just refuse to wield that kind of power... and instead feel like we need to work around and work with the right wing propaganda. But we don't have to do that. We can actually wield power and impose our frame on reality instead of conceding on everything all the time like little philosophical cucks.

Kamala did abandon all identity politics. She was VERY careful to avoid it. And she lost. So, we already know that that's a losing strategy. The reason why Trump is getting people over to his side is because he is demonstrating certainty... and influencing people into his way of thinking and he isn't giving concessions to anyone. Stop conceding to the right wing on these things and stand firm with conviction. It just adds more fuel to their fire when you're acting responsively to whichever way the wind is blowing... as opposed to imposing your own vision. And we don't need to create a lukewarm vision where we concede to the right wing framing on social issues.

That's a misread of the situation based in the belief that everyone's paradigms are fairly set in stone and must be conformed to and never influenced. And that misread will keep Democrats losing the power game, over and over. Regardless of who the candidate is, you need a strong economic populist vision and the right power-based tactics.... and you need to be able to assert a dominant paradigmatic frame and assert that that paradigmatic frame is just normal and that disagreeing with that frame is fringe and wacky. The right wing does this all the time... and that's why they have an outsized influence of people's paradigms. I've seen lifelong hippies who were anti-racist in the 60s go Facsist! That's how powerful it is to assert a dominant paradigmatic frame onto reality. So far, every single Democrat candidate has been weak-sauce... including Bernie Sanders because there is a tendency to avoid imposing their paradigmatic frame onto reality. Instead, they try to play defense and fit their economic vision (or lack thereof) like a puzzle piece into people's current paradigms without trying to influence the paradigmatic center of the Overton Window. And there is no way to win if we're aren't challenging and influencing the Overton Window.... and brand-jamming every single shred of anti-woke propaganda as neurotic and embarrassing.

None of that would have helped her cause. Taking time to state "Don't worry. We're anti-trans too." isn't going to be a winning strategy as you'll just push away more progressive members of the base without energizing anyone else to vote for the Democrat. The only thing that will work is a statement of unity and an acceptance of differences... and then putting forward a Social Democrat Populist vision for our economy.

I've seen that too in my research into OCD that I've done for my daughter where there can be a particular person we're trying to avoid harming or to maintain a relationship with. There was one woman who has Homosexuality OCD, where she has to check and check and check to try to be sure she isn't gay. And it's because she fears that she will realize that she is gay and have to end her relationship with her boyfriend... or that it means she doesn't love her boyfriend. So, hers is about avoiding the dreaded outcome of hurting her partner and losing her relationship. I also had a client who had the same thing, who had a fear of disappointing a family member... as this family member would sometimes make homophobic comments. And there is the compulsion to check and re-check and re-check to make sure that the dreaded loss won't occur.

My daughter has OCD. She takes Prozac for it, and it's really helped her as her intrusive thoughts aren't quite as paralyzing as they were before. And since looking into OCD more deeply for her sake, I've realized that I have it as well (the Pure O version of OCD)... though I haven't sought diagnosis. I wish I had known that as a teenager because I didn't know what was going on with me because I had this crippling fear of harming people emotionally and physically... either accidentally or on purpose. So, I had Harm OCD as a teenager... and then I also had Religious Scrupulosity OCD as a child. And there was also this sense of needing perfect knowledge of good and bad to ensure that I'm good... and a checking and re-checking to seek truth. And it was all based around having to check and check and check to make sure that I'm not a bad person... which came to me in different forms over the years. And I still have it now... though it comes up in different ways. My experience has been that OCD attaches itself to whatever the most feared outcomes would be... and there's this anxious checking to try to make sure that those feared outcomes don't come about and to even give a sense of control over things outside of my control through checking when intrusive thoughts arise. Like my major fear was about being bad person and being rejected socially because of it... and having to check and check and check to make sure I wasn't bad. But it can be different for different people. Is that something that you've experienced as well, regarding using the checking to try to avoid certain dreaded outcomes or to get certainty that the dreaded outcomes won't arise? And do you think the avoidance of dreaded outcomes relates to the anxiety you experience when you're around people in public? Also, I used to get a lot of panic attacks when I was a teenager and I used to smoke weed... which really exacerbated my OCD tendencies and put me in this really paranoid and fearful state, even when I wasn't smoking. I haven't smoked weed in 16 years or so because it really messes with me. But I currently work with Hapé a couple times per week. Hapé is a ceremonial tobacco that grows in the Amazon rainforest, and it helps to disconnect from the constant mind-spinning and grounds you more in 3-d, physical relatity. It makes me wonder if you're using the tobacco for the same effect... but from a different frame of mind, more like a self-medication.

You're welcome! One thing that can help in these repeat dynamics is to understand that you're repeating it to put yourself back in the emotional state that an unconscious part of you has stayed in since those chaotic events in childhood. And that's because, when we experience traumas and chronically unmet needs, we fragment our personality to cope with it... and we relegate those fragmented off parts of ourselves to the unconscious (the Shadow). And those parts stay frozen in time in the Shadow... and they keep looping around like a broken record, forever stuck in those vulnerable and painful feeling states. And it allows the rest of your personality to move on and grow... while that fragmented off part of you stays stuck in a state or arrested development experiencing and re-experiencing the pain on repeat on an ongoing basis until you become conscious of and resolve the pain this part of you is constantly dealing with. So, this part of you in the unconscious has its NUMBER ONE GOAL to put you (as the conscious personality) back in the same painful experiences from childhood to get you to reconnect with it. And it does this so that the unconscious repeat pain cycle can finally resolve and this fragmented off part of you can be reintegrated and grow past that moment. But the issue is that the conscious personality is fairly numb to these unconscious dynamics... and so it's much easier to stay in that less vulnerable state, using coping strategies to avoid the pain that your Shadow Aspect is constantly feeling. So, this Shadow Aspect is likely unconsciously manipulating you into getting into relationships where the same pattern will play out... with partners who are dealing with the same pain but the opposite coping strategy. And in order to get this pattern to stop playing out, you'd need to allow yourself to be present with the pain this Shadow Aspect so yours (which has bore the brunt of the traumas around the chaos from childhood) is going through. It keeps using this relationship dynamic as a means of attempting to get you to face it and to be with it in its pain by making you feel the way it constantly feels. So, you would need to consciously and deliberately feel the feelings associated with the chaos. Here's a video on made on this topic...