The Transition to Political Emotionalism

Around the time when the political franchise was expanded to include women, an interesting shift occurred. Political leaders, media, cultural markers, and the managerial elite all shifted their argumentation strategy from logos (logic/reason) to a mixture of ethos (authority/credibility of the expert) and pathos (emotional appeal).

A quick rundown of these terms for the unaware:

Ethos: Appeal to Ethics

Ethos is a means of convincing an audience using the authority or credibility of the persuader, whether it’s a notable or experienced figure in the field or a popular celebrity.

Pathos: Appeal to Emotion

Pathos is a way of convincing an audience of an argument by creating an emotional response to an impassioned plea or a convincing story.

Logos: Appeal to Logic

Logos is a way of persuading an audience with reason, using facts, figures and rationale.

In effect, what happened was a transition from reasoned political discourse to political emotionalism.

Where political emotionalism is placing overt focus on emotions. If you check the definition of emotionalism, it’s hard for a dissident to not immediately recognize it as the prevailing argumentation strategy of modernity:

emotionalism

noun

-excessively emotional character

-strong or excessive appeal to the emotions

-unwarranted expression or display of emotion.

The first thing that jumps to mind when I first started considering the prevailing emotionalism theory was the Saint George Floyd riots from the past couple of years. They were driven in totality by media manipulating emotions (anger/sadness/injustice) in the black population and the useful idiots which drove them to display further emotions (anger/sadness/injustice) by destroying cities.

There was no logic in the entire George Floyd incident. Floyd died of a fentanyl overdose during his twentieth-plus arrest. But we live under pathos/ethos now, so the logos didn’t matter. All that mattered was the feelings that the incident provoked. And how rapidly the media nursed that fire.

The institutions control both pathos and ethos through manipulation and gatekeeper access. They decide who is an “expert” and who is a “conspiracy theorist” for the grey masses on the ethos side. But they also control the pathos side by controlling the institutions, which means they can manipulate the emotions of the grey masses far easier than those who do not control those prevailing institutions. Just review the emotional actions of the media, corporations, academic institutions, and so forth during the Floyd incident for proof of concept.

Logos, however, cannot be controlled by anyone. It is what it is. So, as the centralizers attempted to gain more consolidation, it made sense for this transition to occur from logos to pathos/ethos. It gives them more ability for power.

We could also see this transition clear through Covid.

Covid was fully ethos and pathos driven:

• “If we can save just one life.”
• “Two weeks to flatten the curve.”
• “You wearing a mask protects me.”
• The endless billboards stating: “I care about my x (input sister/mother/daughter/etc), so I got vaccinated.”
• Every single “expert” that was paraded around that demanded failed lockdowns, masks, jabs, etc.

So on and so forth. Whereas all the logic and reason went out the door. Especially after the first half year, by the time we all knew the death rate was miniscule and masks did nothing to help.

But we still kept going.

If you think emotionalism only occurs in the big picture items, you’d be wrong.

One of my favorite examples is AOC when she went to see an illegal alien detention center and received a photoshoot of her crying at the fence:

That one was pure pathos gold.

But there are plenty of more recent examples. In fact, for this article, I decided to just open up a few mainstream media websites and see what I found.

Pretty much everything was pathos or ethos, so it was actually hard to pick examples. There were too many to decide from. So, I just picked the top articles on their homepage.

I encourage you to go to CNN, MSNBC, Slate, or some other leftist asylum and test it out for yourself. It even works with places like Fox.

But the very top article I found for today fit the bill perfectly. (Notice the bold):

Kansas had a choice: vote to help women or hurt them. It chose well.

Democracy shouldn’t be a weapon to harm the rights of minorities. Kansas voters understood that.

And the next one:

Oklahoma uses racist education law to punish schools for offending white people

And if you thought I left out an example of ethos, you’d be wrong:

Initial strategy of vaccinating only known monkeypox contacts was ‘doomed to failure’ in the US, experts say

There was even a video of Jon Stewart raging and crying like a lunatic over a veterans bill that got denied because Democrats inserted hundreds of millions more in discretionary funding at the last minute. Thus, a few select Republicans that had agreed on the bill before changed their position. But Stewart didn’t care about the reason the politicians denied it. We had to save the veterans, and no one else cares about them as much as him. So, he had numerous rage-filled and sadness-filled breakdowns over the bill not immediately passing while ignoring any reasoning behind it.

I was laughing as I tested this theory, because it was nearly impossible to even find a logos option anywhere on these sites.

Go try it for yourself. You’ll never stop seeing this once you do.

I’m not sure if emotionalism is solely due to the centralization effect of benefitting centralizers (which I already explained above) or due to the franchise being extended to women. It is probably both. They likely have a synergetic effect together.

Naturally, women are far more emotional than men, so when they became half of the voting block it would make sense for politicians to shift their focus to women’s emotions. Emotions can be manipulated. Logic cannot. So, it would be a viable strategy for politicians to take that route. Politicians will always cater to the easiest vote, and emotionalism is much easier than conquering cold hard reality. An emotionalist political strategy can capture most women and a minority of men, whereas logic would only capture maybe half of men and a small minority of women. It’s simply a numbers game.

It’s why even the Red Team has to be emotionalists now. As a nation, we’ve all become so used to deciding things by emotion that even many men are enthralled and encapsulated by it now.

The centralizers definitely would not fight this shift, as it greatly benefits them. It may be why we had such a strong push for a full citizen-wide franchise in the first place, so they could begin that pathos/ethos transition much easier.

Who knows for sure? But what we do know is that both play their part.

Emotionalism has truly taken over. The only question is if we can escape it without a full collapse.

-By Kaisar and originally published at The Hidden Dominion