As human beings, our neural chemistry and wiring is far closer to our cave man ancestors than any of us care to admit. It makes perfect sense – the humans who created successful strategies to survive and reproduce passed on their genetics. Those who didn’t, perished, and their neural programming went with them. We are tribal by our very nature. Beneath all the real societal constructs of laws, traditions and “rules of thumb” lie our subconscious survival instincts – and these are leveraged against us every day by companies trying to sell us something, and by politicians wanting to control our votes, movements and behaviours. At the very basic level, politicians use language to leverage our “fight or flight” instincts in a very simple and effective way. Create a “tribe” --> Identify the “dangerous enemy” --> use emotional calls to action so the “in group” polices itself. Creating the tribe: Most human beings long for the same feelings: safety and belonging. We want to feel part of the group, and naturally fear being “ostracised” – as this was essentially a death sentence for our caveman ancestors, particularly women. So, politicians will always seek to position themselves as the “safe” team. We constantly see bad policy being sold to us “for our safety” – covid response, climate alarmism, superannuation just to name a few. Each of these policies was sold to the public the same way, but the actual result of them is more power to the government and more taxpayer dollars flushed out of our hands and into the control of the government and their crony friends. One of the most powerful motivators for human beings is “peer pressure” – simply being told that everyone else is doing this, so you should too. This is why polls should ALWAYS be taken with a grain of salt – not only are they are often inaccurate, but they are far more useful as a signalling tool for the government to show you “what everyone else thinks about this subject”. We also saw this with the “covid vaccination rates” on TV every day during the pandemic, and are often told “97% of climate scientists agree that humans are causing irreversible climate change”. Hilary Clinton was polled as a 90% favourite to defeat Donald Trump in the 2015 Presidential race ONE DAY before the election, and we all saw how that went. When I was a sales manager, I would show my staff an old video about a hotel that tried convincing their customers to reuse their towels – their reason was to save on the cost of cleaning them daily. After trying various signs in rooms, their discovery was the most effective sign said: “To help protect the environment, 85% of our clients reuse their towels”. Therefore, to create a tribe, all you need to do is position yourself as the “safe” option and then pretend that the majority of people agree with you. Then comes step two. Identify the “dangerous enemy”: “The enemy of my enemy is my friend”. Identifying who the dangerous enemy is does two fantastic things for people seeking control: it keeps members of your tribe in line and also taps into their irrational minds – emotion overrides logic. Fear has been a primary survival instinct for millennia, but these days politicians utilise it in the popular acronym way: False Evidence Appearing Real. Covid and climate change are perfect examples: an invisible enemy that can kill you and your whole family, and the only way to keep everyone safe is to do EVERYTHING WE TELL YOU. Last week Prime Minister Albanese made a speech following One Nations electoral victory in Secret Harbour – watch it here: https://x.com/ausvstheagenda/status/2093951155810574545/video/1?s=46 The whole and sole purpose of this speech was to paint One Nation as a dangerous tribe and rally his supporters around him to defeat them. Every word in his speech was carefully chosen to evoke images in your mind associating One Nation with Hitler’s Nazi Party: “hard right populists are on the march”, “pedalling politics that is DANGEROUS divisive and downright dishonest” (first descriptive word chosen on purpose), “we owe it to history to defeat them”, “turn Australian against Australian” and so on. This is even more concerning with the recent hate speech legislation his government has passed, as he not only seeks to associate One Nation with Nazism for marketing purposes, but we have been wondering how long it will take for the Labor government to designate One Nation as a “hate group” and ban them from running for office – just like they did to the White Australia Party (you don’t have to agree with the White Australia Party to see how dangerously undemocratic it is for the ruling party to block opposition parties from running against them). Labor has designated One Nation as the “dangerous enemy” – not because they are dangerous to Australian citizens, but because they are dangerous to Labors political domination. Using “emotional calls to action” so that your tribe polices itself: The stage is set. Your tribe are the “good guys”, any rival tribe are the “bad guys” – so how do you make sure you keep control of your members, regardless of the real-world results of your policies? Political trends have shown that for the majority of people, emotion overrides logic. In a democracy, you don’t need to convince everyone, the majority is all you need. This is one of the reasons why our political discourse is so toxic these days. Every policy is sold using emotional calls to actions instead of on its merits. Nuance is removed so the political class can position you as either FOR or AGAINST everything. You’re either FOR the renewable energy transition or AGAINST saving poor islanders from rising sea levels. You’re either FOR covid vaccine mandates or AGAINST saving the vulnerable from covid. You’re either FOR “gender affirming care” for minors or AGAINST trans people EXISTING. It’s all rhetoric with zero substance. This is also where you see the divergence between men and women. Women are naturally more vulnerable and therefore have a far stronger inbuilt urge to “go along just to get along” with what they perceive the “group” wants. George Orwells famous quote from 1984 illustrates this: “It was always the women, and above all the young ones, who were the most bigoted adherents of the Party, the swallowers of slogans, the amateur spies and nosers-out of unorthodoxy.” Women evolved to value safety and social cohesion and are biologically programmed to enforce it. Men, while less vulnerable and more willing to stand alone, are also biologically programmed to procreate – and you can’t do this without women. So many men will just go along with what women say, purely to avoid losing sexual opportunities. Two commonly used phrases perfectly illustrate this: “happy wife, happy life” and “post-nut clarity”. Women have traditionally been the gatekeepers of sex while men have been the seekers. This is why politicians target women with emotional calls to action: if you can control the women, you can control ENOUGH of the men to retain power. So, how do we take our power back? Ask the same question over and over again: who benefits from me believing this? Who benefits from the climate hysteria? Green Billionaires. Who benefits from the covid response? Big Pharma and Big Government. Who benefits from Labor designating One Nation as a “dangerous enemy”? Labor. Every single time a politician uses emotive language to sell a policy, ask that question: who REALLY benefits from this policy going through? Look back at policy decisions made over the last 20 years and ask yourself – how many of these policies actually made my life better? Education is the key. Understand the word games that are being played. Understand how your own in-built survival instincts are being weaponised against you, every single day. And if you really want something to be offended by: be offended at the fact these politicians think you are SO DUMB that they can sell you a dream, deliver you nothing, hand your taxpayer dollars to their crony mates, then manipulate you into supporting their political careers and their golden handshake jobs post political retirement. They don’t really care about us.