Business

The Gaslighting of America

The Left wants to play pretend forever: Truth is regarded as hatred by those who hate the truth.

Published

5 months ago

March 2, 2021

Jeff Davidson

The 1970 movie A Guide for the Married Man features a husband who is cheating on his wife, in his own bedroom. When his wife walks in, the husband and his female lover calmly get dressed. The female lover walks out of the house. He makes the bed, in view of the shell-shocked wife.

The husband walks into the living room. His wife follows and accuses him of adultery. He asks, “When?” His wife refers to the woman who just left. The husband asks, “Who?” The conversation goes on like this, and in a minute, his wife is doubting what she saw with her own eyes.

This is a 51-year-old example of gaslighting: Sowing the seeds of doubt in a targeted group, for the purposes of inducing them to question their perceptions and judgments.

“Nothing Happened Here”

So it is with the 2020 election fraud. The Left will have you think that nothing happened here. They will have you believe that more than 2,500 eyewitnesses who filed legal affidavits under penalty of perjury did not witness anything and there were no potentially unconstitutional changes made to state election laws.

The Left aptly continued this guise. They paraded on CNN and MSNBC and the nightly news of the major broadcast networks and said that Trump supporters essentially are insane. “They’re under his spell.” “They need to be rounded up.” “They’re a disgrace to the country.”

Actually, the exact opposite in each instance is true. It is the Democrats and the Left in general who are a disgrace to the country. They are perpetuating the ruse. My goodness, do they think that they can maintain their gaslighting efforts for the rest of American history? Perhaps they do.

Congenital Liars?

Why does the Left lie so often and so easily? Why are they the source of fake news and propaganda the likes of which the world hasn’t seen since the 1930s, in the Soviet Union? Two fundamental reasons: They congenitally strive for power – power over you, power over your neighbors, power over your community, and power over your state. Today, they’re seeking the ultimate prize, power over the nation, fraudulently obtained and never to be surrendered.

The second reason why they can lie so often and so easily is that they share a near infantile fantasy about a “one-world global government” that will reign over each of us, concocting wonderful edicts which we must all follow. The Left is swept up in visions of Utopia, where enlightened leaders hand down rulings that benefit us all. Yeah, right…

Maybe in two or three hundred years when humanity reaches some new epoch. For now, I’ll stick with sovereign nations and the leaders who were duly elected to run them.

Utopia Doesn’t Live Here

If you know anything about Thomas More’s Utopia, Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan, Plato’s Republic, or any other classic novels from literature defining and describing utopian type states, then you know that in each case the inherent flaws within these governments ended up making societies far worse than simple democracies.

Is the American Left a bunch of communist sympathizers, or are they simply power-hungry dregs of the Earth? While we can’t know exactly what the Left’s endgame might be, the first 42 days of the Biden Administration have demonstrated that democracy, liberty, and justice are all in peril.

The Quest for Truth

Merriam Webster’s dictionary defines “truth” as, “the body of real things, events, and facts: actuality.” Truth is a valuable asset in an age where lies are abundant and fake news – actually full-fledged propaganda – rules the day.

Truth is regarded as hatred by those who hate the truth, and many people despise and hate the truth. The Left has demonstrated, time and time again, that they hate the truth. Hence, their spontaneous, reflexive reaction to squelch the freedom of speech of those who disagree with them.

Truth matters. Getting the truth out to others matters.

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Jeff Davidson

Jeff Davidson is the world's only holder of the title "The Work-Life Balance Expert®" as awarded by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. He is the premier thought leader on work-life balance, integration, and harmony. Jeff speaks to organizations that seek to enhance their overall productivity by improving the effectiveness of their people. He is the author of Breathing Space, Simpler Living, Dial it Down, and Everyday Project Management. Visit www.BreathingSpace.com for more information on Jeff's keynote speeches and seminars, including: Managing the Pace with Grace® * Achieving Work-Life Balance™ * Managing Information and Communication Overload®

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Business

Multitasking Renders You Less Productive

Multitasking sends a message to your subconscious that this is how you must proceed to stay competitive and succeed

Published

12 hours ago

August 3, 2021

Jeff Davidson

Dividing your attention to complete multiple activities at once can make you less effective at everything you’re doing.

From CEOs to newbie hires, everyone has numerous tasks to manage throughout the course of a day, week, month, and year. The multitude of responsibilities on your plate requires the capacity for self-management, time management, and the effective allocation of your resources. However, don’t confuse legitimate workplace skills with the contemporary, ill-advised phenomenon called multitasking.

A False Promise

Multitasking might appear to be a reliable way to tackle many issues that compete for your time and attention. It seems intuitive that if you can juggle both A and B concurrently, you’re achieving a productivity gain and saving significant time. But the fallacy in that argument is surmising that the human brain can double-up or triple-up on tasks with no loss of attention, focus, or effectiveness.

A plethora of psychological studies have shown that the human brain can only give “sharp attention” in one direction at a time. Seeking to give this level of attention in multiple directions yields a reverberating type of attention allotted to each activity and predictably results in a loss of mental acuity and productivity.

A clear example of multitasking is when you’re driving along the highway and speaking on a smartphone. Even if you switch to the hands-free speaker phone feature, both activities compete for your brain’s vital sharp attention. So you execute neither activity as effectively as you could by undertaking one activity at a time. It’s also prudent to point out that driving while talking on the phone-hands-free or not-contributes to distracted driving and an elevated rate of vehicular accidents.

Multitasking Coexists Best With Routine

Certainly, it’s okay to multitask while completing some repetitive and familiar work activities. You can run a print job while you work with a file on your screen, for example. As long as the printer has adequate toner and the paper feeds through as designed, there is no deficit in multitasking in this manner.

Nevertheless, for whatever task you are attempting to handle, the fact that you are running a print job at the same time is likely to diminish your overall effectiveness.

The loss in mental acuity will be relatively minor, and you might not even be aware of it. The real risk of workplace multitasking, however, is that you never quite retreat to that mental space where you can offer concerted concentration and, hence, your best work. But if you trace your actions over time, you’ll likely see that for the larger tasks you executed effectively, you stopped multitasking and focused on the task at hand.

Sending the Wrong Message

Multitasking sends a message to your subconscious that this is the way you have to proceed to stay competitive and succeed. When multitasking becomes ingrained in your psyche, you’re telling yourself deep down that you can’t make it in real estate any other way. You end up missing the benefits derived from practicing the art of “doing one thing at a time.”

Multitaskers have trouble “seeing the forest for the trees” and often fail to focus on the most critical components of their day-to-day operations, abandoning less palatable tasks because they require creativity, concentration, and analysis.

As an everyday practice, repeated often, multitasking separates those who continually scramble to keep pace from those who rise to the top.

Avoid the Bind

Since we all face multiple priorities on the job, it’s easy to equate managing multiple priorities with multitasking. The larger and more vital the task, the more essential to focus on it intently. Practice doing one thing at a time. When you’ve finished a project or have taken it as far as you can, only then should you switch focus to your second most important task, and so on.

As your day and work unfold, mastering the art of doing one thing at a time is the best way to proceed. You may, however, multitask on issues that represent the routine or familiar and that carry few consequences for lost time on the trail. In general, though, your best strategy for high productivity is to forsake multitasking and its false promise as you handle the multiple priorities that you face.

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Business

Culture Jamming, by Kalle Lasn

America has been subverted by corporate agendas and its elected officials bow before corporate power as a condition of their survival in office

Published

2 days ago

August 2, 2021

Jeff Davidson

Here are excerpts from the culture-shaking book, Culture Jamming by Kalle Lasn, published by William Morrow in 1999, which rings truer now than ever!

A Multitrillion-dollar Brand

America is no longer a country. It’s a multitrillion-dollar brand…. essentially no different from McDonald’s, Marlboro or General Motors. It’s an image “sold” not only to the citizens of the U.S., but to consumers worldwide. The American brand is associated with catch-words such as “democracy;’ “opportunity” and “freedom.” But like cigarettes that are sold as symbols of vitality and youthful rebellion, the American reality is very different from its brand image.

America has been subverted by corporate agendas. Its elected officials bow before corporate power as a condition of their survival in office. A collective sense of powerlessness and disillusionment has set in. A deeply felt sense of betrayal is brewing.

By The People?

American culture is no longer created by the people. Our stories, once passed from one generation to the next by parents, neighbors and teachers, are now told by corporations with “something to sell as well as to tell.” Brands, products, fashions, celebrities, entertainments, the very spectacles that surround the production of culture, are now our culture.

Our role is mostly to listen and watch-and then, based on what we have heard and seen, to buy.

A free, authentic life is not possible in America today. We are being manipulated in the most insidious way. Our emotions, personalities and core values are under siege from media and cultural forces too complex to decode. A continuous product message has woven itself into the very fabric of our existence.

Most North Americans now live designer lives: sleep, eat, sit in car, work, shop, watch TV, sleep again. I doubt there’s more than a handful of free, spontaneous minutes anywhere in that cycle.

Smile Button Culture

The human spirit of prideful contrariness and fierce independence has been oddly tamed. We have evolved into a smile-button culture. We wear the trendiest fashions, drive the best cars industry can produce and project an image of incredible aff1uence-cool people living life to the hilt.

Behind that happy mask is a face so ugly it invariably shocks the hell out of my friends from developing countries who come to visit, expecting the giddy Americana depicted on TV and finding instead a horror show of disconnection and anomie.

Our mass media dispense a kind of Huxleyan “soma.” The most powerful narcotic in the world is the promise of belonging. And belonging is best achieved by conforming to the prescriptions of America™. In this way a perverted sense of cool takes hold of the imaginations of our children. And thus a heavily manipulative corporate ethos drives our culture.

The Facade of Cool

Cool is indispensable, and readily, endlessly dispensed. You can get it on every corner (for the right price), though it’s highly addictive and its effects are short-lived. If you’re here for cool today, you’ll almost certainly be back for more tomorrow.

American cool is a global pandemic. Communities, traditions, cultural heritages, sovereignty, whole histories are being replaced by a barren American monoculture.

Living in Japan during its period of sharpest transition to a western way of life, I was astonished by the speed and force with which the American brand took hold. I saw a culture with thousands of years of tradition behind it vanquished in two generations. Suddenly, high school girls were selling themselves after class for $150 a trick so they’d have cash to buy American jeans and handbags.

The Earth cannot support the lifestyle of the cool hunting American-style consumer. We have sought, bought, spewed and devoured too much, too fast, too brazenly, and now we’re about to pay.

Killing the Planet

Economic “progress” is killing the planet. This did not fully hit home for me until nightmarish environmental stories suddenly appeared on the news: acid rain, dying seals in the North Sea, medical waste washing up on New York beaches, garbage barges turned away from port after port, and the discovery that the milk in American mothers’ breasts had four times the amount of DDT permitted in cow’s milk.

To people like me, for whom time had always seemed like a constant, eternally moving train which people got on and, seventy years later, got off, it was the end of innocence. The premonition of ecocide — planetary death — became real and it terrified me. It still does.

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