The Toothpaste Principle

Understanding how the Left creates a weak and pliable society that will embrace its own demise

Watching the Olympics, which for Team USA, is apparently an extension of some woke college seminar or anti-law enforcement rally, it keeps coming back to me just how brilliant the Left’s strategy has proven to be historically at stripping the common sense from otherwise intelligent individuals.

It’s something I call the Toothpaste Principle. I’ve used it for years to discuss with students how to craft effective messaging that resonates with virtually any target audience. But it also is a simple way to explain all the screaming, blue-haired activists, the angry anti-ICE mobs, the No Kings people and the nicely coiffed Olympians who are so triggered by America society today.

The Toothpaste Principle works because it is based on the way the brain makes decisions. It’s basic psychology and something the Left has understood and deployed for more than a century - even long before the method was adopted by Madison Avenue marketing firms in the 1950s.

Take the hypothetical decision of purchasing the tube of toothpaste.

The marketers of this toothpaste need a powerful differentiator in order to grab market share. They also know they’re not selling an honest product. Their motives for creating and selling the toothpaste is pure profit and therefore focused solely on convincing the buying public to move away from their current brand to buy theirs. They’re charlatans (socialists, Marxists, etc), competing with Crest (American freedom the Constitution and the rule of law).

So, what do they do? They create a marketing scheme to tell people that their toothpaste does something no other toothpaste in history has ever done. Their toothpaste makes your teeth and gums tingle, and your mouth feel so fresh it’s almost euphoric.

Let me be clear. It does those things. They’re not lying.

Here’s the problem. They focus exclusively on this product differentiator to the exclusion over any other aspect of the purpose of the toothpaste. They don’t talk about whether it cleans your teeth or whether it’s approved by the American Dental Association or whether the ingredients are safe for your gums and enamel.

The rational aspects of making a toothpaste-buying decision can and are often many. However, the company doesn’t quite care about most of them.

They’re asking the buying public to make a purely emotional decision. Their commercials show people in a state of euphoria after brushing their teeth. They’re happy and feel great.

Your brain makes a thousand decisions a day and most all of them are based on some measure of both rational and emotional processes. As a tactic, the toothpaste company’s move is brilliant to get people to buy-in. How something makes you feel is after all more powerful. In fact the ‘emotional’ side of your brain is more powerful than the rational.

You can’t make good decisions on emotion alone, however. You see, the toothpaste company made good on their promises to make users mouths tingle with delight, but the chemicals in the toothpaste over time erode enamel and enflame gums.

They create a customer base through the feeling of cleanliness but not the reality of it.

Much like the Russian people following the Bolshevik Revolution or the Chinese after Mao’s conquest of the mainland, by the time they realize their teeth are rotting, it’s too late. By then, few will attempt to change course. A fanaticism has set in that also denies the reality of the decay or alternatively blames someone other than the toothpaste company for the condition.

I’m so often asked why liberals are so miserable, angst-riddled and angry. The painful and sad truth is that they’ve been conditioned to be that way. Words used by the Left to increase their ‘customer base’ like ‘fairness’ and ‘equity’ or alternatively, ‘racist’ and ‘Nazi,’ are all emotional language. They are so overused in the context of emotion and without rational foundation, they mean nothing.

There is a reason that woke schools and left-wing commentators, organizations like Public Citizen, and the teachers’ unions drive wild claims of rampant racism, phantom threats of Nazism running amuck and catastrophism over anything that has to do with Donald Trump.

Miserable, scared and angry people are using the emotional side of their brain far more than the rational. People who are encumbered by heavy emotional burdens are often totally irrational. That’s why a man who walks in on his wife being raped and kills the attacker is deemed in our legal system to be treated by a different standard. Crimes of passion or “heat of the moment” mitigate the murder charge.

Overemotionalism is why we see so many women and effeminate men partaking in today’s left-wing protests. Women are biologically more emotive than men. That may make them more susceptible to the strategy of the toothpaste company. That strategy also poses legitimate conflicts for people of faith as well. Faith isn’t based on rationality but is more of an emotional construct because of the supernatural components to the belief system.

Christians, in particular, can be conflicted about the Left’s messaging for this very reason, even though Marxist or Leftist ideologies run almost totally counter to Christian teaching.

To be sure, the toothpaste company does ultimately go bankrupt. After all you can fool people only so long before they appreciate in enough numbers that the product sucks. Ultimately, there is too much negative data to ignore. The rational side of the brain is forced to reengage. The only alternative is a slow demise of the soul.

So, every time you see one of these people who aren’t making rational arguments about politics, public policy, history or science, know they are among the victims of that predatory toothpaste company who sucked them in, but ultimately will leave them toothless. When it comes to the Left, toothless is exactly the way they want people.