Pronoun Magic! Tips For Aspiring Politicians/Criminals

[mac_hine]

"We" is a powerful and dangerous word. And peaceful people should avoid using it when talking about the actions of violent strangers.

Imagine you lived in a neighborhood controlled by a violent gang...
What if you started using first-person plural pronouns, like "we," "us'" and "our" when discussing the gang and their activities, even though you were not in the gang, you didn't know anyone in the gang, and no one in the gang knew or cared about you?

Is it possible this linguistic programming could eventually lead you to identify with the gang and accepting their activities? Or resistance to the idea that what they were doing was wrong? What if everybody in the neighborhood started doing this?


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QY2XuNyq9jw

Based on podcast 011: First-Person Plural Pronouns...and YOU
http://schoolsucks.podomatic.com/entry/2009-10-18T05_33_37-07_00

[TheGrinch]

Very true. "Us vs. them" is human-nature and is probably the msot frequent theme of effective propaganda.

That said, I use "we" all the time when speaking about the liberty movement, because it is still valuable as a term to band together folks of similar ideals, rather than dividing over more minor differences.

So it's not the term itself that is damaging, it's the way it's used to dehumanize "them".