Wilhelm Freidrich Nietzsche wrote about the slave morality and the master morality. The two are locked in an eternal dance through human history and psychology. Nietzsche abhorred the slave morality and saw himself as a champion or a savior for the master morality.
And he may have been on to something these strange days, although not in the way he would have anticipated. How many people do you encounter on a daily basis who, although having attained higher degrees and professional success, are so out of touch with what is really going on, that you find it hard to apprehend? Have you encountered these types in your daily life? It may go something like this. (The names have been changed to protect the guilty.) You have a neighbor or someone you know at work. You typically only talk about the yard, if it's your neighbor, or work, if it's your co-worker. Then something slips into the conversation, seemingly innocently. These days, it may involve something about the government, a look into the invisible Iron Curtain that runs between Blue America and Red America, or, worse, something about religion.
So it falls into the conversation. You suddenly realize that this person is one of them. Almost like the aliens from the movie "They Live," this is one of them, and now you can see it. Somehow, they have bought into the media lies that stream and spill 24 hours per day, seven days per week. They have bought into the lie that the government is evil and that its supposed spending habits somehow resulted in this person's slavery. It doesn't even make logical sense, and you have been over it in your head again and again. It still doesn't make any sense. Yet this person has been led by the nose to believe it, and believe it this person did.
It could also be about Barack Obama. I recall speaking with a long-lost friend who kept referring to "him" and what "he" was doing. After some time of politely nodding, hoping that it would end, I finally ventured to ask him, "who is 'he'"? Silence. He looked at me testingly. Perhaps it was for him the reverse of the experience I was having. Perhaps he was questioning, wondering whether I was one of "them," albeit a "them" diametrically opposed to him and all that he apparently stands for. Then he suddenly and nervously laughed. "Surely," he thought, I "can't be one of them." So he continued. "Yeah, so he bought not one but two black buses, and he had them flown around the country." There was a litany of things that "he" (or "He") had supposedly done or been doing, and it sounded bizarrely conspiratorial, and very personal. Eventually, I asked him about economic policy. Back to "him" it went. "No," I asked him, "forget 'him' for just a minute, and focus on the policy aspects and implications of what we are talking about." He looked at me for a split second, then responded with "But you can't." I tuned out, having peered into the chasm separating us, and realizing it was a waste of my time and energy to try to help this person.
You see, people must be viewed more than just by their intelligence. Because some moderately intelligent and very capable people can be so lost in the media brainwash that one would think intelligence would allow them to think their way out of it. But it doesn't work that way. In addition to intelligence, each person has a level of slave morality. The level of slave morality corresponds directly to their ability to think for themselves and escape the media matrix. A low level of slave morality means that the person is not likely to succumb to the lies about the government and forced to vote as their religion tells them to vote. A high level of slave morality is the exact opposite: such a person is a mental slave.
This convention allows you to deal with the dissonance much better, the dissonance between the truth as those with a low slave morality can discern it, and what we are told by the media -- Fox News, AM radio, and the Republican presidential hopefuls -- and what we know to be the unattractive truth.
Because being in the middle of that dissonance for long periods of time is difficult.
