RUSH: Mark in Cincinnati. I’m gonna grab a phone call here and hope to cool down a bit. How are you, sir? Welcome to the program.
CALLER: Doing pretty well. Rainy day here in Cincinnati.
RUSH: Great. Thank you, sir, very much, for calling.
CALLER: Now, I have a question for you.
RUSH: Yeah?
CALLER: It’s a little bit about me. I have two college degrees in finance and real estate and I’m going back for a masters, an MBA; and I’ve been trying to reach out to the Occupy Cincinnati protesters, and explain to them the realities of what they’re protesting against. Now, I use facts, I use logic; I use black-and-white sources, government data, everything; and you can’t explain to these people the realities of the situation we’re in. How do you reach out to these people and show them, logically, where the real problem with corruption is: In Washington?
RUSH: Well, you know, I have a slight advantage over you, so my answer to your question will be frustrating to you. My answer is: “I don’t.” I don’t try to convince them. We had a guy call here yesterday. He is exactly what you’re talking about. I spent 20 minutes with this guy. I could tell talking to him he wasn’t interested; none of it was penetrating. However, millions of people were listening — and among those millions, I am confident there were countless converts, countless people who had their eyes opened. This guy? They don’t want to be convinced. They don’t want to live in a reality outside the phony one they have created. It’s their security blanket. They have created this reality to explain their own loserness. They have created this reality in which they live to explain their failures.
They’ve created this to explain away the fact that they don’t matter. Now, they’re like everybody else. Everybody wants to matter. Everybody wants to be known. Everybody wants to have accomplishments that everybody else is aware of. These people have concluded that they don’t have anything like that, there aren’t any accomplishments, so they’re gonna be known some other way. Everybody wants to matter. There are rare exceptions, but they are not persuadable. They don’t want to be persuaded. They are the product of years and years of indoctrination at every level of education they’ve had. A couple of conversations with them is not going to change their minds. Even a couple of earth-shattering life experiences which show them the exact opposite of what they believe are not going to change their minds about things overnight.
It is a slow process for most of them. There are exceptions to this. The way I deal with it — and the reason, Mark, why… You’ve got a good question. I know a lot of people who are in the media who live and die with the desire that they are changing millions of minds, and it’s very tough to deal with when you realize that you’re not doing that. You get depressed. You can think you’re working for nothing, that there’s no purpose to what you’re doing, and you can’t look at it that way. All you can do is what you’re doing. The best thing you can do — and this is what I’ve told everybody who’s asked me since the get-go — is you just live your life and let the life you live set the example. And when somebody asks you or you have the opportunity to talk to ’em, you tell ’em the truth.
If you make it look like you’re trying to persuade them they’re gonna build a wall because the last thing they want to admit is that you’re smarter than they are. The art of persuasion, thus, really rests on your ability to make them think they have come up with the right answer rather than you forcing them to face it or accept it. They’ll oppose that — and not just these Occupy Wall Street people, but anybody in any walk of life with whom you have a fundamental, philosophical, political, or any other kind of disagreement with. Unless there is a really special bond of affection and mutual respect — and you don’t have that with these people you’re talking about; you don’t even know them — you start out as the enemy. You are what they’re protesting, they think. You have what they don’t have. You matter. You’ve succeeded. You just told me when you described yourself.
So they hate you and resent you to begin with, and they think that you don’t know what you’re talking about because somehow you only got lucky. You haven’t done anything on your own. So you start preaching to them and walls gonna go up and they’re gonna hate you even more. They’re gonna discount what you say. But don’t let that deter you. There’s nothing wrong with being right. It’s not your problem if they choose to go through life being wrong. It’s not your problem if they choose to go through life being absolute idiots. It’s theirs. (interruption) No, there’s nothing wrong in being right. Now, when these people vote en masse, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, that’s a problem. I’m not trying to soft sell this. But they are not in any way, shape, manner, or form anywhere near the majority of thought in this country. If they were, there wouldn’t be any economic growth. We would already be living the movie Idiocracy. If you haven’t seen it, rent it. You’ll laugh and cry at the same time.
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RUSH: You know, there’s an ancient Navajo proverb, ladies and gentlemen, that suffices here with our last caller: “You cannot awaken someone who’s only pretending to be asleep.” It’s wasted effort. Just can’t do it.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: I got the number of e-mails during the break. “I heard your answer to that guy that called about persuading people. You really expect us to believe that you’re not trying to persuade people?” Let me see if I can explain this. I wouldn’t be honest if you told you I wasn’t interested in that, but it’s not the objective here, and it never has been. I remember when this program started and didn’t take long for the left and the media to start publishing false stories of how it happened. The biggest false story was that Roger Ailes and agents of the Republican Party scoured the landscape of the media and they discovered that there was a huge niche in conservative programming, and so they found me minding my own business in Sacramento and brought me national for the express purpose of filling that niche.
I never met Ailes when this program started. I didn’t know Ailes until 1992, 1991, somewhere in there. Never once when this program was in the planning stages was it about politics or was it filling a “niche” or any of that. It was about business things (attracting an audience and charging confiscatory advertising rates) and it really hasn’t changed. So I don’t prepare the program and I don’t perform or execute the program with the objective being or my success defined by, “How many minds did I change?” A, I’ll never know. B, that’s not living my own life. That’s making myself a prisoner to other people and what they think and there’s no way I’m going to do that.
I used to do that in my life way back when I was a kid, as we all did, in high school, but no more. I’m not gonna try to live somebody else’s life or get the approval of other people. You know, Steve Jobs… I watched last night PBS had One Last Thing, a one-hour special on Jobs, and they had an interview that apparently had never been broadcast with Jobs from 1995. He said something that fascinated me. He said, “Once you figure out…” He said, “You look around you and you see life. You see buildings and roads and bridges, and you see people, and you see cars and see everything around you that compromises life was built by people no smarter than you are. Once you figure that out, you are home free.”
What he meant by that is that if you go through life assuming that everybody is smarter than you or more connected than you are — or if you subordinate yourself simply because of societal pressures or whatever — you’re forever going to be seeking the approval of those that you’re elevating above you. I thought it was pretty intriguing. For my part, yeah, I had this guy on the phone the other day; yeah, I was trying to persuade him. He asked questions. I was trying to convince him he was wrong. But when I failed, it wasn’t the end of the. I certainly didn’t define, you know, how I felt about myself or the quality of my own ability about whether I succeeded in convincing that brain-dead locoweed that he was wrong about things.
Not my problem. He wants to go through life being wrong? It’s his prerogative. He can suffer the consequences. I’m not interested in pure persuasion, ’cause I’d be depressed every day if that were the objective. That’s a very fine line. Of course I’m passionate about what I believe and I want everybody to believe it because I think it’s the best way to live and best thing to be and the best for the country. But that’s not why I’m here. I’ve explained this on previous occasions. It’s a real fine line attitudinally, but you have to understand if you’re in a business what the requirements of that business are for success. What is the persuasion business? What is the business you get into if your objective is to persuade people? What is it? (interruption)
News? Did you say “news”? (interruption) Sales? Sales, okay. I’ll take that — and, of course, there’s nobody better at sales than I am — and in that regard, persuasion is fundamental to success. But in this case, talking about the content portion of the program, it’s a very fine line as to what the purpose here is. I’ve always been very open and honest about it. It’s to create largest audience possible and to hold the audience for as long as I can so as to charge confiscatory advertising rates. The only way I can get away with charging confiscatory advertising rates is if the people paying them think it’s worth it, and, frankly, they don’t care about anything but, “Does their product move?” pure and simple. That’s a focus for me. Now, I don’t go home depressed…
I’ve written two books. Let me say this. Maybe I can explain it this way. This might be a better way to explain this. I’ve written two books. If I had expected the nation to change — if I had expected because of those two books, for liberalism to forever lose, for the media to be relegated to insignificance — do you realize how disappointed, sad, angry I would have been since those two books? Because that didn’t happen. I think it can screw up your psychology if that is an objective. (interruption) Yes, it did. (interruption) Yeah, but… (interruption) Snerdley is shouting at me. “But the country did change and the media did lose its monopoly,” and blah, blah. All of that’s true.
All that’s true but Barack Obama still got elected. Bill Clinton still got elected during all of that.
I’m talking about expectations here. Don’t make this any harder than it is. I’m just trying to be as honest with people as I can on this because I think it’s a recipe for psychological disaster that single-handedly anybody is going to — no matter how much exposure they have to people — forever dramatically change people’s mind or what have you. That presumes that everybody has no mind of their own, and that’s certainly not the case. So, anyway, I just wanted to try to answer you, because I was inundated. I got a lot of questions. (grumbling) “I don’t believe you! I know what you said to that guy, but I don’t believe you’re not doing this to change minds.” It’s not the reason. It’s not the primary reason I show up. If it happens, icing on the cake and I’m very happy when it happens — and, yeah, I am trying to be confident and all that, but at the end of it all, it’s up to whoever’s listening to change their mind or not. I am not gonna pronounce myself a success or failure based on whether they do or not. That’s all it is.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Cindy, Austin, Texas, welcome to the EIB Network. Hello.
CALLER: Hi. Hi, Rush.
RUSH: Hi. How are you doing?
CALLER: I’m fine. I think you’re wonderful, and I like Ann Coulter, too.
RUSH: (laughing) Thank you.
CALLER: You’re welcome. Hey, I was just wanting to comment on what you said before the break. You were talking about how the liberals think you’re out there trying to change minds. I don’t think you’re trying to change minds. I think you were just in the right place at the right time. You knew that there were a lot of conservatives out there who wanted a voice.
RUSH: Yeah. In fact, that’s really what happened. Everybody’s had their opinions validated. There wasn’t a national conservative voice. Mine comes along, “Oh, wow, I agree with that,” and what happened. But everybody, the critics were trying to say that you and others were just a bunch of mind-numbed robots. I was a pied piper and you couldn’t think for yourselves and I was telling you what to think and what to do, and that was a way of discrediting both you and me.
CALLER: Right. And you just capitalized on it, I think that’s great. You took capitalism and you made money on the whole system and you found a niche, and I think it’s wonderful.
RUSH: Well, thank you. I appreciate that. You’re very perceptive and I gotta give you credit.
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