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America's Favorite Little Tree
- The Christmas Tree -
and the Factors that Drive Our Behavior

By Scott Rohter, December 2014

"We need to be very careful about starting any new government programs or establishing new
patterns of group-think and behavior based upon the dangerous influence of the mainstream media.”

Every year in December we celebrate another Christmas. There are so many little things that we do around the Holidays, and customs we follow that we can hardly find time to think about them all, but they all just seem to fit together perfectly every year at the Holiday Season. So how did all of this happen? How did all of these customs which we follow so religiously become a part of our annual Christmas festivities?

Christmas customs help us get into the annual holiday spirit. They range from decking the halls with holly to stringing lights on the eaves of our houses to setting up a little nativity scene on our front lawn. It is a custom to purchase gifts for our family and friends and place them under the Christmas tree. Each of us has our own favorite holiday customs to be sure, but all of the traditions we follow have been handed down over time. One of the annual traditions that has come down to us through the years is the annual custom of putting up a little Christmas tree in our living room and then decorating it with festive ornaments and lights.

It is the Christmas tree that I want to talk about which is a perfect illustration of the importance of social programming in our lives. This story then is a about a little tree… America’s favorite little tree… the Christmas tree. It offers a brief glimpse into the basics of social engineering. I am not going to talk to you about whether having a Christmas tree in your living room has any real place in Christianity or not. That is a subject for another day. I am only going to use the example of the Christmas tree to illustrate my point about the enormous power of social engineering in our lives... This programing is subtle, quite arbitrary, almost imperceptible, extremely effective, and very widespread, and it affects us in a variety of different ways.

Christmas trees are Evergreens. There are many different kinds of Evergreens. There are Pines and Firs, Spruce and Cedars, Larch and Hemlock, and Junipers and Cypress. There are also various kinds of each of these different types of conifers. For instance there are Jeffrey Pines, Georgia Pines, White Pines, Sugar Pines, Loblolly Pines, and Ponderosa Pines.

There are different varieties of Fir trees as well. There is the Balsam Fir and the Douglas Fir, which by the way is really not a Fir tree at all but rather a Spruce tree if you really want to get technical. There are many different types of Spruce trees too. There are White Spruce and Black Spruce, Red Spruce and Blue Spruce… and about thirty six other different varieties of Spruce trees.

But when it comes to Christmas trees most Americans pick a tree that has a certain kind of a look to it. We usually pick a Noble Fir or a Douglas Fir. These are the two most popular kinds of Christmas trees that Americans pick year after year after year. There is nothing written in stone that says it has to be this way but it is. There is nothing carved into clay tablets about it yet it's true. It is almost certain that this year’s two best-selling varieties of Christmas Trees will be the Noble Fir and the Douglas Fir just like it was last year. America’s Christmas tree could just as easily have been a Pine tree or a Cedar tree or even a Birch tree for that matter. We could all be hanging our ornaments on a leafless Birch tree in December were it not for something. That something is the subject of this article. It is powerful and effective. It ensures that you probably won’t be hanging your ornaments on a dead birch tree next year. Whatever that something is illustrates my point that social conditioning is totally arbitrary, imperceptible, and everywhere around us.

We are all conditioned to think that a Christmas tree has to look a certain way. It has to have a certain smell and feel to it. It has to be a certain size and shape. This idea is re-enforced year after year and re-affirmed by our family and friends and by our neighbors. So what is my point? Re-enforcement, social conditioning, and programing are everywhere all around us in our daily lives and even in politics. You knew I was going to get to politics sooner or later didn't you?

The more Americans get used to the idea of a new government program like the Affordable Care Act or some further governmental over reach, the more likely we are to accept even more of these excesses from Washington in our private lives. We may even grow to depend upon them. Thus we are creating a nation that is becoming more and more dependent upon big government. That is why it is so important to overturn ObamaCare right now while we still can before we get accustomed to it. We need to repeal it immediately. The little Christmas tree in your living room illustrates how important familiarization and repetition is over time and how effective they are at conditioning our lives.

That is why television is the perfect handmaiden for Big Government and why the liberal media broadcast the news which is little more than progressive propaganda three times a day and around the clock on cable. That is also why those thirty minute or sixty minute T.V. shows you watch are called programs. That is just what they are doing. They are programing you. These television sitcoms serve to perform two very important functions… They make money for their owners and more importantly they are a driver of social behavior.

There is nothing inherently wrong with attempting to drive behavior. It just depends on where it is being driven and by whom and for what reason. The mainstream media is always trying to drive our behavior in the wrong direction and for the wrong reason.

Have you ever heard the phrase which is often used in politics that he or she doesn’t look or sound very presidential? Is that why good candidates like Michele Bachmann, Jim DeMint, or Ron Paul never seem to be able to launch a successful Presidential campaign? They never make the final cut because they are either a woman, or too short, or they speak with an accent, or they just don’t fit the stereotype in some way. It's just like the little Christmas tree in your living room.

That is also why the Democrat Party began to promote Barack Hussein Obama for President all the way back in 2004 which was a full four years before his first successful Presidential campaign. He was chosen to become America's first Black President but he had the obvious disadvantage of having a Muslim name so it was going to take a lot more time to condition the American people to get used to the idea of having a Black man named Barack Hussein Obama as their President. We never had a Presidential Primary begin a full four years before the General Election. The first time that ever happened was in 2008 with Barack Hussein Obama. Do you remember how the Democrats launched Barack Obama’s national political career? They picked him to deliver the keynote address at their National Convention in 2004 when they nominated Al Gore. That was four years before Barack Obama became a candidate for President in 2008.

We need to be very careful about starting any new government programs or establishing new patterns of groupthink and behavior based upon the dangerous influence of the mainstream media. Michele Bachmann was supposedly too short. She was also a woman. Media analysts thought Ron Paul was just a little too different and Jim DeMint spoke with too much of a southern drawl. What difference does any of that make? They were all reputable people of impeccable character and the mainstream media destroyed their Presidential aspirations and look what we elected instead.

They were all people of faith and competence who were better able to lead our country than the pretender who occupies the White House now or some tall, dark, handsome ex-Governor from Massachusetts who has wandered all over the political spectrum during his long career in public office. The fact that we don’t have Michele Bachmann, Ron Paul, Jim DeMint, or Rick Santorum in the White House instead of Barack Obama or why Florida doesn't have Alan West representing them in Congress anymore illustrates precisely how powerful the mainstream media is in driving our behavior and influencing our way of thinking. It shows how dangerous the tools of social engineering are when they fall into the wrong hands.

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"The truth, the political truth, and nothing but the political truth. A journalist has no better friend than the truth." - Scott Rohter
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