Moving the Ancient Boundaries: Create a Victim
Part 3 in a series on factors behind cultural decay.
Previous essays on Moving the Ancient Boundaries:
Our natural empathy as human beings can be used as a powerful tool for breaking down societal restraints, traditions and moral principles. The key is to play on people’s fears while you manipulate their compassion, always offering a simplistic solution to a difficult problem.
First, you must find a case which best exemplifies the need to move the boundary. Norma McCorvey, a poor, single Texas woman who claimed to have been gang-raped (a claim she later repudiated), and who could not afford an illegal abortion, served as the catalyst for Roe v. Wade decision. Euthanasia proponents will always put forth the terminal cancer patient in intractable pain, or the end-stage ALS patient, presenting assisted suicide or euthanasia as the compassionate solution, driven home by showing heart-breaking pictures of their slow, agonizing demise. Parenteral notification laws for minors seeking abortions must be opposed because “not all teens come from perfect families,” and because they “put teens’ health and rights at risk” — thereby making the underage teen a victim if she is not allowed to abort her pregnancy without her parents’ knowledge. If you wish to blur the distinction between good and evil be sure to point out how the perpetrator of some horrible crime was abused as a child. How many times have we heard that the root cause of crime is poverty? Poor people should take great offense at such shallow and baseless accusations.
The anecdotal victim you have chosen must then be generalized to the whole, always couched in terms of “freedom” and “rights”: the woman must be free to choose; the suffering have a right to end their lives as they wish; children must be free to have abortions lest their parents abuse and beat them. All who oppose such changes must be portrayed as intolerant, hateful, uncaring, or religious fanatics, caricatured in simplistic slogans: “Keep your rosaries off my ovaries;” “Hate is not a family value;” “Equal rights are not special rights.”
The answers proposed to resolve the victim’s “oppression” invariably invoke a false dichotomy: we must provide condoms in schools or face teenage pregnancy; abortion must be legal and easily available or coat hangers will be back in fashion, killing untold thousands; euthanasia must be legal or everyone will die in agony, without dignity, hooked up to machines. Legitimate alternatives to these solutions must be dismissed, ridiculed, or ignored, or treated as heartless and hateful: discouraging teenage sexual promiscuity is impossible; unwed mothers must never be criticized for lifestyle choices which condemn them and their children to a life of poverty and privation; preventing the suicide of the suffering is cruel and heartless; compassion and support for the dying is an unreasonable “burden.”
If you cannot find a suitable victim, then you must create one — or better yet, invent a whole class of victims. This is most easily done through the use of statistics or “facts” — which can be pure fabrication, becoming “truth” only by virtue of their repetition. Dr. Bernard Nathanson, a founder of the pro-choice N.A.R.A.L. organization, in his eye-opening book Aborting America (p.193), tells of the origin of the oft-cited figure of 5,000-10,000 annual abortion-related deaths prior to its legalization:
How many deaths were we talking about when abortion was illegal? In N.A.R.A.L., we generally emphasized the drama of the individual case, not the mass statistics, but when we spoke of the latter it was always “5,000 to 10,000 deaths a year.” I confess that I knew the figures were totally false … But in the “morality” of our revolution, it was a useful figure, widely accepted, so why go out of our way to correct it with honest statistics? … In the last year before the Blackmun era [Roe v. Wade] began, in 1972, the total [abortion-related fatalities] was only 39 deaths.
Ahh, the beauty of postmodernism: when there are no absolutes, “truth” can be molded like putty into any desirable shape or form, in order to serve the higher good of removing restrictions to desired behavior. Therefore, abortion must be legalized, not for its real utility in mitigating the consequences of licentious sexual activity, but rather to prevent the “cruel, unnecessary deaths of 10,000 women a year.” The tables have been turned: those who oppose abortion now become guilty of the slaughter of the innocents, while those who support it are protecting the true victims: 10,000 mythical murdered mothers, coat hangers clutched in their cold, dead hands.
Slick.
These are but two of the many means which push back the boundaries of societal mores and ethics, substituting relativism and individualism for the integrity of solid boundaries based on absolutes, ethical consensus, and moral values which are transcendent rather than transient.
Next: Moving the Ancient Boundaries: Class Warfare - coming Soon…