“George W. Bush Has Moral Values”
June 30th, 2008 | by Tom Harper |A voter in West Virginia actually said this. He was a lifelong Democrat until 2000, and then: “Bush was a good man and had good morals. I felt he was the better man.” This year — “I don’t care for Obama.”
Words like “morals” and “values” have been thrown around so much, they’ve lost whatever specific meaning they ever had. They’ve become completely subjective.
It’s like what they say about pornography: “I can’t define it but I know it when I see it.”
Rightwing think tanks have been very busy over the last few decades. They’ve been manipulating the public consciousness, using the most sophisticated psychological and neurolinguistic techniques available. And it’s worked like a charm.
Thanks to these manipulative techniques, millions of Americans now have negative associations with the word “liberal.” “Liberal” means “soft,” “socialist,” “nanny state,” “well intentioned but fuzzy-headed.”
“Conservative” on the other hand equals “strong,” “upright,” “a pillar of the community.” Think of Ward Cleaver giving a kind but firm fatherly lecture to The Beav.
And the words “morals” and “values” now have a very strong mesmerizing hold on millions of voters. It doesn’t matter that they couldn’t define either of those words to save their lives. They’ve been hypnotized.
When a rightwing talking head utters either of those words, it’s like one of those scenes from The Manchurian Candidate where the subject hears a certain key word and flies into a hypnotic trance, ready to carry out his pre-programmed commands.
There have been numerous jokes and cartoons about Bush and “morals,” where a person admits Bush was wrong about invading a sovereign nation that wasn’t a threat to us, wrong about overturning several decades worth of environmental protections and wrong about waging economic war against the middle class. And at the end he says “but I like him because he has moral values.”
For millions of voters, this is no joke. For reasons they could probably never articulate, they really do think George W. Bush has “morals” and “values.”
Hey, he goes to church, he quotes the Bible from time to time, and he’s never had an affair with an intern (that we know of). So what if he’s killed thousands of American soldiers and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians. Pulling the rug out from under millions of working-class citizens? Taking a shit on the Constitution?
Whatever. At least he has Values.
4 Responses to ““George W. Bush Has Moral Values””
By Liberal Jarhead on Jun 30, 2008 | Reply
People’s moral codes are at different stages of development, and often we show through what we say which levels we’re at. Harvard psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg studied this back in the 1960s and came up with a scale of 6 stages. Ideally we would all start at stage 1 as toddlers and progress until we reached stage 6 in early adulthood, but most people never get that far.
So when someone thinks Bush “has good morals” because he goes to church, professes to be born again, doesn’t get caught cheating on his wife, and goes through the technicalities of acting legally - but subverts the clear intent of the law frequently, demonstrates cruel indifference to the suffering he causes others, lies without remorse, and willing and knowingly causes the unnecessary deaths and maimings of tens of thousands of people - where does that person land on this scale?
Stage 1: Naïve moral realism; action is based on rules, and motivation is the avoidance of punishment. So if you can find a technicality that makes what you do legal, or you don’t get caught, you’re good.
Stage 2: Pragmatic morality; action is based on desire to maximize reward or benefit and minimize negative consequences to oneself. This is the “greed is good” mentality of corporations and their management.
Stage 3: Socially shared perspectives; action is based on anticipated approval or disapproval of others and on actual or imagined feelings of guilt. In other words, fit in - do what everyone else is doing. Conformity is virtue.
Stage 4: Social system morality; action is based on anticipation of formal dishonor (not just disapproval) and guilt over harm done to others. Here we start to see thought about the principles behind the rules, the spirit as well as the letter of the law, and the awakening of real conscience. Still very conventional and usually conformist.
Stage 5: Human rights and social welfare morality; the perspective is that of a rational moral person considering the values and rights that ought to exist in a moral society; action is based on maintaining the respect of the community and one’s self-respect. At this point principled civil disobedience becomes possible. Doing what is right by a moral code that may or may not coincide with the laws.
Stage 6: Universal ethical principles; the perspective is the moral view all human beings should take toward one another and themselves; action is determined by equity, fairness, and concern about maintaining one’s own moral principles. The rare person at this stage has done a lot of hard work to figure out a moral code that makes sense to him or her, based on justice, empathy, and the Golden Rule, and is determined to live by it regardless of society’s reaction.
I’d say Mr. Bush’s fan sounds as if he’s stuck at Stage 1, the stage we consider normal in first-graders but hope to see kids outgrowing by the middle of elementary school. But as a lot of fundamentalists prove, many never budge from that stage throughout their lives. And those people are the “base” for Bush and others like him, demagogues who insist on rigid, simplistic worldviews where everyone is good or bad and you can do awful things and be a good person as long as the rules allow them.
By rube cretin on Jun 30, 2008 | Reply
Lib,
very interesting stuff you have served up. Can’t really say i disagree, but believe a respect for all forms of life should also be woven into your universal ethical principles. The question i have is as follows. Do you believe Bush’s morals and ethics accurately reflect the development stage of American culture as a whole? Hell we elected him twice. Remember also that our ancestors came here by choice were most likely folks who did not fit in socially for one reason or another. By any measure i believe one would have conclude there are some aspects of the American psyche which would have to be judged as anathema to a world of diminishing resources.
tom,
the attached link is to a BBC documentary which goes into great depth on the subject. it is a 4 part series, but explains the problem in detail. I highly recommend it to anyone wishing to understand how human nature can be manipulated.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbcfour/documentaries/features/century_of_the_self.shtml
By Tom Harper on Jun 30, 2008 | Reply
LJ: That’s excellent information. Thanks. I was thinking of some of your posts when I was writing this one — your work with George Lakoff, etc.
Rube: You’re right, the fact that we elected Bush (twice!) is a terrible reflection on all of us. We can’t just look away from ourselves and say “It’s Them!”
Thanks for the link.
By Chris Radulich on Jul 2, 2008 | Reply
A further example of conservative moral values
The military trainers who came to Guantánamo Bay in December 2002 based an entire interrogation class on a chart showing the effects of “coercive management techniques” for possible use on prisoners, including “sleep deprivation,” “prolonged constraint,” and “exposure.”
What the trainers did not say, and may not have known, was that their chart had been copied verbatim from a 1957 Air Force study of Chinese Communist techniques used during the Korean War to obtain confessions, many of them false, from American prisoners.
The recycled chart is the latest and most vivid evidence of the way Communist interrogation methods that the United States long described as torture became the basis for interrogations both by the military at the base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and by the Central Intelligence Agency.