DROWNING IN WHAT IF:I came across something on the Internet this morning that's a perfect example of a process which I wrote about earlier this week---THE WHAT IF syndrome. Here's what I wrote.
"The left hemisphere's capacity to imagine the future can conjure up all kinds of fantasy futures by using the "What if" syndrome and that's the evolutionary snag. A seven year old may think, "What if daddy comes home drunk and beats me again?" The lower, repetitive levels of his brain will react to this future thought exactly as if daddy had come home and was presently beating the seven year old. Hence at a very early age we introduce the concept of self promulgated anxiety based on learned repetitive patterns. It's also important to understand that the R and limbic systems don't have the capacity to imagine anything, they just react to everything as if it's real and in the present. This is why the 'what if' syndrome causes so many problems with excessive anxiety."
It's also why political groups who want to change our votes by engaging directly with our fear centers, are all over using the "what if" syndrome for their own ends. The following is the preamble to a fantasized letter written by Focus on Family Action:
Letter from 2012 in Obama’s America
What will the United States be like if Senator Obama is elected? The most reliable way
of predicting people’s future actions is by looking at their past actions. Jesus himself
taught, “You will recognize them by their fruits” (Matthew 7:16). Anyone who has hired
employees knows that – the best predictor of a person’s future job performance is not
what he tells you he can do but what he has actually done in the past.
So here is a picture of the changes that are likely or at least very possible if Senator
Obama is elected and the far-Left segments of the Democratic Party gain control of the
White House, the Congress, and perhaps then the Supreme Court. The entire letter is
written as a “What if?” exercise, but that does not make it empty speculation, because
every future “event” described here is based on established legal and political trends that
can be abundantly documented and that only need a “tipping point” such as the election
of Senator Obama and a Democratic House and Senate to begin to put them into place.
Every past event named in this letter (everything prior to October 22, 2008) is established
fact.
This letter is not “predicting” that all of the imaginative future “events” named in this letter
will happen. But it is saying that each one of these changes could happen and also that
each change would be the natural outcome of (a) published legal opinions by liberal
judges, (b) trends seen in states with liberal-dominated courts such as California and
Massachusetts, (c) recent promises, practices and legislative initiatives of the current
liberal leadership of the Democratic Party and (d) Senator Obama’s actions, voting record
and public promises to the far-Left groups that won the nomination for him.
Many of these changes, if they occur, will have significant implications for Christians.
The full letter can be accessed here. Should you bother reading it you will find all kinds of catastrophic things have happened by 2012. Things like four American cities have experienced terrorist bombs, Russia has taken over the entirety of Eastern Europe, Al Quaeda has risen to political prominence in most of the Middle East and Iraq is their's and the Taliban's little fiefdom and terrorist breeding ground. Apparently Obama has been impotent to change any of this because he relies on diplomacy and the UN. Oh, and let's not forget Israel:
That's just foreign affairs, the domestic scene is even worse for Christians, because the Supreme Court is now 6-3 in favor of those activist liberal judges and our entire legal system has been infiltrated by godless communist homosexuals and the homosexual agenda is apparently our only social agenda, (along with tax payer funded abortions and infanticide, and making sure anyone over 80 is refused hospital access and encouraged to 'do the right thing and go home and die.')
The boy scouts have disbanded in righteous indignation over being forced to put homosexual leaders in the same tents with boys. The same kinds of righteous choices are being forced on medical personnel over the abortion issue, and therapists are quitting in righteous anger over being forced to adopt children out to gay couples. AND HORROR OF HORRORS, right wing talk radio is legislated off the air.
Anyway, you get the idea, this piece of "What if " perfectly illustrates the use of the logic of the left hemisphere to gain access to the R and limbic systems of early childhood development and tweak fear based anxiety from anyone who reads it. Obama becomes the bogey man in the closet and the only way to save ourselves is to cry in the night for our heroes McCain/Palin to come and turn on the bedroom lights and hold us in their nurturing arms.
That this tripe passes for political discourse in this country might work for Joe the plumber, but it only turns my stomach, and not because of fear based anxiety, but because of it's blatant attempt to circumvent my higher reasoning centers by appealing to my fear centers. Enough already.
Here's an article from Huffington Post which illustrates the purposeful use of psy ops to engender fear about Obama by the McCain/Palin campaign. It's sobering reading.
