In the previous post I pointed out that liberals are committing group suicide by living childless and by aborting many of the fetuses they do happen to beget. Also, I noted that they work to make the above seem sensible, even necessary, by actually fabricating the scarcity they say is proof that the current human population is unsustainable, and that a future catastrophe of biblical proportions is inevitable, if we do not reduce our numbers. They do this by encumbering human productivity via increased regulation, making resources off limits, and creating scares such as global warming, the extinction crisis, the End of Oil, the overpopulation scare by wishing for famine and pandemics, and even by touting an upside to war (see previous post)
In spite of all of the above, I warned at the end of the previous post that conservatives couldn’t just sit back and wait for Liberals to remove themselves from the scene via this self-inflicted suicide. The reason? Unlike the Shakers (the old time religious group that renounced reproduction and died out because they couldn’t convince enough newbies to become Shakers) Liberals are unsurpassed recruiters.
How do they do it? By achieving what appears, on the surface, to be impossible. They recruit us supposedly greedy, gluttonous Americans by promising us less…. less food, less comfort, less abundance, and, in the end, less independence and freedom.
Liberals have mastered the ability to sell Less to a culture that is universally considered to be totally obsessed with More—the U. S., Americans, us.
I’ve puzzled and puzzled at why Liberals have chosen this apparently impossible course. And, of course, I’ve puzzled at how they have made it work so well. The obvious answer to the first question is that they have chosen it because it works very, very well. But they couldn’t have known it was going to work so effectively because they were certainly aware of American’s reputation for being obsessed with More. At some point it had to be a leap of faith for them, an immense leap. Why did they take what was apparently a suicidal leap?
I’m convinced that Liberals got in the business of selling less for the simple reason that they had no choice. They had nothing else to sell.
Liberalism is doomed to selling less because ”more” is already taken. Nothing produces ”more” better than free enterprise capitalism, the economic system that has been the basis for our economy here in the U. S. for as long as our nation has existed. Capitalism, operating within a high degree of individual freedom, has been the most productive economic system humans have ever devised. Here in the U. S. it has enabled us to achieve a greater and broader prosperity than any other system in human history.
Faced with serving as perpetual also-rans if they tried to compete directly with the unsurpassed producers of more, Liberals had to find an alternative that they could tout as, in some way, better than more. For better or worse, they chose less.
This may sound like a sure ticket to the graveyard of failed political movements. Instead it has served as a spectacular windfall. In fact, it ranks as one of the greatest political discoveries of all time. Selling Less, especially to Americans, is actually a whole lot easier than selling More.
For one thing anyone can do it. Selling less is a wide open field. Anyone of any age, sex, ability, or appearance can do it without any qualifications, training, education, or experience.
Selling more is not so easy If you’re selling more, you have to produce something: more food, more cars, more TVs, more energy, more something. That usually means you have to have skills, training, experience, and know-how. Most likely it also means you have to work within an organization set up to produce whatever you’re selling more of. That means you’ll have to pick up more skills, higher levels of training and accumulate experience if you wish to excel and move up the ranks.
Producing Less involves no such requirements. You can go as far as your persistence, hard work, creativity, energy, etc., will take you. To get started all you have to do is say, ”We have to use less,” and you are automatically brilliant, a realist, a prophet, a hero. Even a child can become an unimpeachable authority just by saying this, and children are used to make these pronouncements for this very reason.
If someone engages you in a debate the only argument you need to win is, ”You mean to tell me you think we can keep consuming this much stuff and not wreck the planet?” Never mind that this is a recognized logical fallacy named the Argument From Ignorance. If you use the above in any argument against any authority, you will be declared the victor, even by logicians. If your opponent persists, all you have to do is say he or she is probably a pawn of the capitalists and Rush Limbaugh, and they will be hooted down by your supporters.
Here are some more reasons that Selling Less is an unsurpassed recruiter.
When I was a math major at Ohio State, on ”Career Day” I learned that the major opportunities available to me were: I could become an actuarian for an insurance company and calculate the rate at which people died or had car wrecks so my employer could better calculate insurance rates; Or I could become a math teacher.
I found all this much less than exciting, but then I learned about a much better offer. In this alternative, I could start right out arguing as an equal, eyeball to eyeball with governors and congressmen, even the president. I could immediately be considered as much an authority on a variety of topics as my old college professors, even more of an authority if they were proponents of More. All I had to do was say those magic words—”We have to use less.” If I was good, I could start chocking up victories that would make the newspapers and even go down in history.
The appeal of this alternative offer is so obvious it is painful: Instead of working on what I considered to be an inconsequential, unfulfilling job trying to produce a profit for some soulless corporation, I would be saving the planet, mountain lions, butterflies, rare plants, even the human race.
Which offer would you take? Needless to say, I took the latter.
That’s not all. There are still more advantages to selling less over welling more. If you’re selling less, you don’t have to prove that what you’re doing won’t harm the planet or that it won’t cause us to run out of something, or that it won’t cause too much pollution, or even that it won’t make the rich richer and the poor poorer. What you’re doing is reducing our human impact, our carbon footprint. You’re living simply that others may simply live…..
All of those who oppose you are fossils, soon to be dead old white men or their allies merely to make a profit. You are doing what you do to save the planet. You are selfless, the wave of the future, the great bright hope.
That’s not to say that selling less is not hard work. Those who are best at it work very, very hard. Many are incredibly creative, inventive and persistent. Ironically, many of those who are best at selling us less today are the entrepreneurs, the venture capitalists, the pioneers who would normally be selling us more. In truth they are selling us more… more of less. Lots more of it. How they’re doing it is extremely revealing. That is the subject of the next post.
