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The Classic Psychology Text That Predicted Today’s Urban Decay
americanthinker.com ^ | 7/18/2023 | Lewis M. Andrews

Posted on 07/19/2023 10:51:31 AM PDT by bitt

It’s a question that most Americans who follow the news ask themselves daily: “How can the residents of so many of the nation’s largest cities keep supporting local officials who tolerate the ongoing destruction of their communities?”

Why this May, for example, did the citizens of Chicago -- a city where 21,000 students cannot demonstrate a basic competence in reading, science, and math -- choose the teachers union-backed candidate, Brandon Johnson, for mayor? Especially when Johnson’s chief opponent, Paul Vallas, had promised the electorate sensible school reforms?

Why, a few years earlier, did San Franciscans elect a mayor, London Breed, whose obvious reluctance to crack down on criminal behavior has since forced the city’s largest mall to close, two of its best hotels to declare bankruptcy, and tens of thousands of high-earning taxpayers to move away?

Why has there been no serious movement to get New York Gov. Kathy Hochul to initiate proceedings to remove Alvin Bragg, the Manhattan district attorney who refuses prosecute “low-level” crimes, all while promising to downgrade felony charges and to decriminalize resisting police arrest?

And why, in 2022, did Los Angelinos pick another progressive Democrat to be their next mayor, rather than the candidate who promised to finally do something about the city’s exploding homelessness problem?

In 1954, three academic psychologists -- Stanford University’s Leon Festinger along with Henry Riecken and Stanley Schachter -- described a very different kind of social dysfunction, but one that helps us understand why so many urban Americans refuse to demand saner government. As reported in the still-widely read college text When Prophesy Fails, Festinger and his colleagues followed the activities of a religious cult, whose leader claimed to have received messages from the planet Clarion. These communications warned of a massive flood

(Excerpt) Read more at americanthinker.com ...


TOPICS: Culture/Society; Editorial; Government; Politics/Elections
KEYWORDS: anarchotyranny; cities; culture; dystopia; urbandecay
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1 posted on 07/19/2023 10:51:31 AM PDT by bitt
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To: null and void; aragorn; EnigmaticAnomaly; kalee; Kale; AZ .44 MAG; Baynative; bgill; bitt; ...

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2 posted on 07/19/2023 10:51:48 AM PDT by bitt (<img src=' 'width=40%>)
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To: bitt

3 posted on 07/19/2023 10:56:24 AM PDT by ClearCase_guy (It's not a government. It's a criminal enterprise. Fear it, but do not respect it.)
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To: bitt

4 posted on 07/19/2023 10:56:56 AM PDT by MtnClimber (For photos of Colorado scenery and wildlife, click on my screen name for my FR home page.)
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To: bitt
The lesson of Festinger et al’s 1954 study for our own time is that when people encounter information which contradicts their view of reality, many will adjust their thinking to logically accommodate what has happened. But those with stronger convictions will do the exact opposite, entertaining even the most far-fetched ideas to preserve some semblance of their original beliefs.

********************************************************

“It appeared that there had even been demonstrations to thank Big Brother for raising the chocolate ration to twenty grams a week. And only yesterday […] it had been announced that the ration was to be reduced to twenty grams a week. Was it possible that they could swallow that, after only twenty-four hours? Yes, they swallowed it. [...] The eyeless crature at the other table swallowed it fanatically. passionately, with a furious desire to track down, denounce, and vaporize anyone who should suggest that last week the ration had been thirty grams. Syme, too-in some more double complex way, involving doublethink-Syme, swallow it. Was he, then, alone in the possession of a memory?”

― Orwell George, 1984

5 posted on 07/19/2023 10:57:24 AM PDT by Red Badger (Homeless veterans camp in the streets while illegal aliens are put up in hotels.....................)
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To: bitt

The real danger here is that they will scape-goat the rational objector and persecute them. The hostility of the woke progressive sets off all sorts of alarm bells for me.


6 posted on 07/19/2023 10:57:40 AM PDT by Frapster (Life finds a way.)
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To: ClearCase_guy; bitt

“It’s easier to fool people than to convince them that they have been fooled.”
― Mark Twain


7 posted on 07/19/2023 11:00:28 AM PDT by Red Badger (Homeless veterans camp in the streets while illegal aliens are put up in hotels.....................)
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To: Frapster

“The real danger here is that they will scape-goat the rational objector and persecute them.”

Yup—we are seeing this with “climate change”.

1. Make up an insane theory and keep pushing it decade after decade.
2. When the prophecies fail ignore the failed prophecies and double down.
3. Accuse anyone who objects of not “following the science” and ban them from academia and government.
4. Ban the speech on social media of anyone who raises even the slightest issue with the insane theory.


8 posted on 07/19/2023 11:00:47 AM PDT by cgbg (Claiming that laws and regs that limit “hate speech” stop freedom of speech is “hate speech”.)
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To: bitt

Leftism is a cult. Simple as that.


9 posted on 07/19/2023 11:02:25 AM PDT by ChuckHam
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To: bitt

This is why Liberals always double down on stupid.

They believe their policies are sound and are never given enough time to work or they weren’t implemented properly or the Republicans’ dirty tricks caused them to fail or anything but their own ineptitude and wrong headed thinking...................


10 posted on 07/19/2023 11:02:56 AM PDT by Red Badger (Homeless veterans camp in the streets while illegal aliens are put up in hotels.....................)
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To: bitt
Why this May...did the citizens of Chicago--a city where 21,000 students cannot demonstrate a basic competence in reading, science, and math--choose the teachers union-backed candidate for mayor

Because the voters in the ghettoes have been thoroughly indoctrinated and enslaved...AGAIN.

People are taught that plantation safety is better than freedom in the big wide world.

Students of the Bible will remember that even some of those Israelites who followed Moses around in the desert demanded to be returned to the safety of Egypt knowing full-well that it meant slavery.

History repeats itself...and the Democrats know it.

Former slaves in America need Moses...not Al Sharton and Barack Obama.

11 posted on 07/19/2023 11:03:28 AM PDT by RoosterRedux
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To: bitt

1. MOST of the really rich don’t really care.

2. The very poor on one hand want their entitlements and yet on the other hand feel they don’t count in the minds of authorities.

3. MOST woters don’t vote all that much on crime issues. The suffering hard working middle class is outvoted by the combination of the lower classes and the not-caring upper class elites.


12 posted on 07/19/2023 11:04:10 AM PDT by Wuli
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To: bitt

“ As the early twentieth-century writer Upton Sinclair famously observed, it is more “difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”

Thanks for posting.


13 posted on 07/19/2023 11:05:21 AM PDT by Chgogal (Welcome to Fuhrer Biden's Weaponized Fascist Banana Republic! It's the road to hell.)
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To: Frapster

“ The hostility of the woke progressive sets off all sorts of alarm bells for me.”

Agreed.


14 posted on 07/19/2023 11:06:20 AM PDT by Chgogal (Welcome to Fuhrer Biden's Weaponized Fascist Banana Republic! It's the road to hell.)
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To: Frapster

15 posted on 07/19/2023 11:08:06 AM PDT by EEGator
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To: bitt

I don’t think there is a connection in the mind of the voters as to what they vote for and what they get. Half of the people are below average intellegence, and are unable to process a connection between who they vote for and how things turn out.


16 posted on 07/19/2023 11:14:07 AM PDT by Fido969 (45 is Superman! )
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Comment #17 Removed by Moderator

To: Frapster

“The real danger here is that they will scape-goat the rational objector and persecute them.”

That has happened all over the West already, especially in Canada, the UK, much of the EU, and Australia plus, to a lesser extent (so far) the USA.


18 posted on 07/19/2023 11:22:38 AM PDT by ProtectOurFreedom (We are proles, they are nobility.)
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To: SpaceBar

I don’t know why, but your link tries to make me post to FReeper “bitt”...


19 posted on 07/19/2023 11:22:39 AM PDT by EEGator
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To: bitt
From the article: ...did the citizens of Chicago -- a city where 21,000 students cannot demonstrate a basic competence in reading, science, and math...

It is fallacious to assume that those students or their parents desire a basic competence in reading, science, and math.

It seems counter-intuitive but the solution is to end compulsory education. Those that want any education will get it like their grandparents and great-grandparents did. Those that don't want education will learn the hard way.

20 posted on 07/19/2023 11:22:43 AM PDT by T.B. Yoits
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