The art of the emotional appeal, aka “emotional blackmail,” is usually mastered by around age 3. The first time your child’s chubby little hands rise up and they pout, saying, “Pweeeeeze?” you can feel it, that tugging of the heartstrings. As responsible adults, it’s our job to teach our offspring (and local offspring in our vicinity) that you can’t get everything you want, and sometimes the answer is going to be no.
Saying no isn’t something that comes easily to the current crop of newly minted adults out there. Those who fall between the ages of 25 and 35 seem to have no concept whatsoever of “no” or “FAFO.” They’ve essentially never “found out” about anything, because they so rarely hear the word no.
While I don’t always put a lot of stock into certain theories of civilization, there’s one going around that seems to have at least some grasp on reality.
I don’t know if the dates are accurate, but it does seem to be grounded in factual research. Excuse the article I pulled it from; it was the only one with a decent enough graphic explaining it. The article is horrid, poorly written (imo), and not well grounded. But the theory that Ingraham’s study is based upon is real, and not too bad. If you want to really go down the rabbit hole, check out this post by Noema. You don’t have to do that, though. The graphic does a fairly decent job of making it easy to understand.
The general idea is that society, civilization as a whole, goes through these multi-stage cycles that last somewhere between 180 and 280 years in length. This is borne out by history, which does indeed seem to follow such cycles. They’re not perfect, but they are present, and they can be seen quite clearly. Drop in the history of Greece, and it fits. Rome, it fits. Early China, it fits. And so on.
The theory, followed through for America, states we’re in the end stages of one complete cycle. This isn’t too difficult to believe, considering we’re 248 years old as a country. Things were bound to break. After all, no one had previously attempted to run a country under a President, an elected official, prior to America. Our Constitution was radical in the most vast understanding of that word. The fact that so many other world leaders are now attempting to use our methods to run their countries is a testament to how well it has worked.
The thing is, though, I believe our Founders knew it wouldn’t work forever, as given. That’s one reason why they created the Constitution. It was created in such a way as to allow We The People to change and ratify it, as we became better as a People, and as we matured as a country.
So what does that all have to do with emotional blackmail and a colorful graphic I found on Da Interwebz? So here’s the thing… No matter which of the colorful charts and wheels you look at online, we’re coming up on a failure, or a collapse. It’s just the next thing that happens. The four generalized stages of society are expansion, stagflation, crisis, and depression (Jakub). Again, you can follow these stages or curves or whatever you want to call them throughout history. By all accounts, we’re passing out of crisis and into depression right now. Some people feel we might be able to shortcut depression and move back into expansion, but I don’t know.
I have no doubt we’re in the depression part of the cycle right now. And that, my friends, is where the emotional blackmail comes in. When you take immature people (and frankly that describes “this generation” better than anything else I can think of) and you dump them into a place where things don’t go as planned, they panic. But they don’t panic by going out and trying to fix the problem. They panic and demand SOMEONE ELSE fix it. And that’s right where we are.
Over the past few weeks, I’ve seen videos of late teen and early adult workers having mental breakdowns because managers “just didn’t understand” that things like “eight hour days” and “not abusing sick leave” just aren’t going to work for them. I’ve seen folks keying and otherwise vandalizing vehicles because they believe somehow that it’s going to affect the maker of the vehicle rather than the owner of it. I’ve read articles explaining that deporting violent criminal people is somehow bad and that we should have pity on these people. I’ve listened to liberals explain to me how horrible it is to lay off people who no longer have a purpose at a job, as if it’s somehow a business’s responsibility to keep someone on and pay them for doing nothing. It all goes right back to that 3 year old and the pout.
Whether it’s the school system purging teachers rather than defunct programs or excess admin, or the government clinging tenaciously to the people who can’t even come up with ONE thing they did last week, never mind five, the big names involved in all of this mayhem are choosing layoffs and budget cuts not from the fat in their programs, but from the meat. It’s a form of emotional blackmail, and one that no longer hoodwinks me, even while I still feel the bite emotionally. They seem to believe that if they cut the useful people and leave everything an open, gaping wound, that somehow the budget issues and cutbacks will be reversed. That’s not how it works, though.
There’s a finite amount of money out there. When a part of government is told it needs to run on $X, then it either needs to find ways to do that, or it folds. It’s no different than any other entity out there. If a business doesn’t provide a service people want, in a price range they can afford, that business goes under. We don’t feel bad (or not much) when it happens, because we know if they’d just pulled up their Big Boy/Girl Panties, they could have made it through. But when you expect the DoD, or USAID, or any of the other letter agencies out there, or a school or library system, to work within a budget, that’s apparently “different” somehow. Except it isn’t. We can WANT it to be different all we want, but if we’ve only got a certain number of dollars to spend, then that’s the end of it. It’s time to make it work, somehow.
The fact that the people in charge of these budgets have chosen to batter their employees with tears, threats, and cajoling rather than a calm voice and a call for cinching up the metaphorical belt before moving on, is heinous. I am aghast at the number of government employees who are willing to sell out what little is left of their souls just to keep whatever special project they’re on alive.
So folks… tighten your belts. It may be hungry and lean for a few years. If we do this right, if we REALLY want to avoid the worst of the depression part of the cycle, then we’re going to have to slim down tons of high end stuff. We’re going to have to start paying farmers to actually farm rather than sit fallow. We’re going to have to get American workers out there, picking tomatoes and getting sweaty. Choices have to be made. If I’m not willing to pay more for my lovely hothouse tomatoes, then I either have to do without, or I have to grown my own (do the work myself). Those are the options, and no amount of pouting, wheedling, or lashing out is going to change it.
Yeah, I know, this isn’t so much from the left. This is me being me. But it’s political, and it’s real. So there.
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