HOW DAVIS GETS WHAT HE WANTS

How Davis gets what he wants from you.

Davis is fond of legitimizing himself by stating that Members “overwhelmingly” voted for (whatever the issue is). But you are being played for the fool.

Gustave Le Bon in his book “The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind” (original French 1895, English translation 1897) wrote:


The most striking peculiarity presented by a psychological crowd is the following: Whoever be the individuals that compose it, however like or unlike be their mode of life, their occupations, their character, or their intelligence, the fact that they have been transformed into a crowd puts them in possession of a sort of collective mind which makes them feel, think, and act in a manner quite different from that in which each individual of them would feel, think, and act were he in a state of isolation. There are certain ideas and feelings which do not come into being, or do not transform themselves into acts except in the case of individuals forming a crowd. The psychological crowd is a provisional being formed of heterogeneous elements, which for a moment are combined, exactly as the cells which constitute a living body form by their reunion a new being which displays characteristics very different from those possessed by each of the cells singly.


This observation serves to explain why MEBA Members at Union Meetings “overwhelmingly” vote in favor of whatever the Union leadership wants.

But not everything that we vote on gets the vote the Union wants. What about that?

There are isolated incidents where Members vote against the will of the Union Leadership. All it means is that the Leadership fails to successfully manipulate the Members on occasion.

This is why the Davis Administration will never present you with important information in a manner which allows the careful consideration which many things deserve. You will never be given the chance to have all the information required and have the conditions needed to reach a rational, carefully considered position. By manipulating the voting Members into upholding the wishes of the Leadership, Davis gets what he wants. But it does not end there. Davis then seeks to legitimize this by saying the Members “overwhelmingly” voted in favor of whatever it was he needed from you.

Does this mean that everything you vote on is against your greater interests? No, of course not. But what it does mean is that your judgment is in effect impaired by the conditions under which you decide what would be good for the Union and the Members.

But the crowd mentality problem goes even further. Even if you are given a chance to look at the information and make a rational choice, you then are influenced by the Union Official running the meeting to vote the way he wants. In a crowd situation people tend to look for Leaders and put there trust in them, rather than themselves.

To think that you are too clever to fall for such a ruse is denial. Read the Le Bon excerpt again carefully. Also, if you think that Davis is not clever enough (the “I’m too stupid to cheat” defense) to put one over on you, remember, he can hire consultants (with your dues money) who are experts at this sort of stuff.

So now that you have this important knowledge should you automatically vote against everything Davis wants? Not necessarily, you just have to learn everything you can about the issue at hand, make your own decision and then TRUST YOURSELF and stick with YOUR decision.