Thanks, Eric. Great to hear from you today. ________________________________ From: Friam <friam-boun...@redfish.com> on behalf of Eric Smith <desm...@santafe.edu> Sent: Wednesday, November 9, 2016 7:19:31 AM To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group Subject: [FRIAM] Fwd: what other subject is there this morning
Sorry Friam. I sent this before from the wrong address, and then I foolishly forwarded the bounce, which had been reformatted and partly chopped up. This was what it looked like the firs time. E > I think what this all is about is the power of resentment. > > I think the engine underneath the rejection of Hillary is that people look at > her and see a face that they think believes itself better than them and that > looks down on them. For people who were already under the power of > resentment, that sets it on fire and opens this thing that is weirdly > borderline with hatred. All the other stuff, news items or whatever, is just > opportunistic window dressing that gets recruited after the fact as > rationalization. Nobody cares about emails. If that hadn’t been available, > it would have been something else. What they care about is indulging in rage > at being “disrespected”. > > I acknowledge the sophistication as well as the goodness of the Dalai Lama, > and I defer to the willful positivity of the Buddhists who have been thinking > about this systematicaly for nearly a thousand years, and I understand that > they know things I don’t know. But I also work with primatologists, of which > anthropology is a sub-discipline. The meanness of chimpanzees is probably > retained from the recent ancestor, and it isn’t that far below the surface in > humans. Whatever it is about social status, that gets wrapped up in the > phrases “looking up to” or “looking down on” is big in us like it is big in > them. Humans on some occasions have other layers of culture that put some > checks on it, but that superstructure is not all that robust. I am not > compelled by the Dalai Lama’s interpretation (for which I am nonetheless > grateful) that this is about the loss of feeling needed. It is much meaner > and more primitive than that; it is the resentment of feeling looked down on. > > But now we have trouble. Americans seem to have a kind of negligent optimism > that the mechanisms of democracy will still be there as a path to backtrack > from mistakes they didn’t escape before. But the keys to everything have > just been given to a strange hodge-podge of people, to none of whose members > are the mechanisms of democracy anything particularly desirable. They are > merely obstacles to their own small and predatory ambitions. I don’t take > for granted that there will be mechanisms of backtracking the next time a > calendary cycle rolls around. > > The motive power here is the power of resentment, at the bottom. But > mechanisms matter too, and individuals matter. A few articles here and there > seem to me to capture large chunks of this in a way that seems coherent and > clarifying. > > There are architects like Newt Gingrich, as he is called out in the article > from (2012) “Let’s just say it: the Republicans are the problem”. There is a > systematic effort on all fronts all the time to dismantle the institutions of > democracy to capture spoils in a competition. The method, for me, is best > brought into clarity in the Malcolm Gladwell parable on David and Goliath, > about the girls’ basketball team that won without particular skill by > implementing the full-court press on every play of every game. Gladwell > dwells on this as an honorable strategy because it employs conditioning as > the thing that can be bought with discpline when there isn’t native talent. > He comments, obliquely, that the teams of more skillful girls who were beaten > in games were annoyed at being beaten by a full-court press. He doesn’t > develop this, but I think it matters. For the skilled girls, they were in a > _game_. The point of winning was to be a reward for being good at the play > of the game. Their upset was that suddenly there was no game any more, there > was no skill, there was no aesthetic to be aspired to or served. Winning > became its own currency separate from whatever art the game had been meant to > enable. The story has both sides, and there is credit due both where Malcolm > calls it and where he bypasses it. But the analogy to me here is what > happens when winning is separated from the game’s having a purpose in doing > something else, which one might call “bigger”. In basketball, the bigger > thing was the cultivation of an art. In politics, it is the preservation of > a society. > > We have seen the full-court press. It is middle-American right-wing talk > radio. It is the constant campaign of hysteria, over everything, everywhere, > all the time, that Paul Krugman notes over and over in his columns. It is > the congress’s commitment to demolish everything, to obstruct and to block > everything. Because there is nothing they are trying to build or to > accomplish, there is no currency with which to negotiate with them. Where > there are no values, there is no foundation for rules of play. It is the > district gerrymandering, and the voter disenfranchisement acts of closing > polls and DMVs in southern states. These things work. Once a democracy is > dismantled, the tools to oust the ones in power can only come from outside. > But where is “outside” when the keys to everything are handed over at the > level of a country. > > There are those who aren’t “architects”, like Gingrich, but rather these > skinny venomous little blonde women who come out of the woodwork to fill > local roles, or minor con men like Paul Ryan, or various slimy and disgusting > and yet dangerous things like Ted Cruz. > > I feel like these are the machery that channels the motive power of > resentment and enables it to do things. The machinery matters, but if the > motive power of resentment were not there, the machinery would have nothing > to drive it or flow through it. Conversely, as long as the motive power is > there, there are always architects and local operators who can come in and > try their hand at machinery, and a kind of Darwinian dynamic will filter out > the ones that succeed. > > Under the power of resentment, there is no choice so mean, or so stupid, or > so self-defeating that people cannot be led to make it. The ones who thought > this was a good idea will plough themselves under as fast as they take down > others, but there is no value in looking forward to that in vengeance. Facts > matter in the real world of cause and effect, but in the choice world of > resentment, they are beside the point. People under the power of resentment > are unreachable in all those terms; they have shifted into a different space. > > Somehow that is what we have to deal with. Any pleasure or luxury in > analysis or speculation is no pleasure now. There is just what options are > left. I do think that the mistake was, and will continue to be, not finding > ways to stop the growth of resentment. A line in one of the English-language > translations of the Dao de Jing goes “The wise rule by emptying hearts and > stuffing bellies.” I won’t claim to understand what original Chinese > political theorists intended this to mean, but I do think the failure to take > seriously the need to stuff bellies (and the more subtle and perhaps > honorable human needs for safety, fulfillment, and freedom from want) hasn’t > been taken seriously enough, for decades now, by any of those who were > comfortable. > > Now that all the keys are in the hands of the predators, we have fewer tools > to work with than we had before. It would have been good if the sense of > urgency to stop the undermining and the feeding of resentment, which I think > Bernie felt and tried to speak for though without a serious plan to deal with > the complexity of the mess, had weighed on more people before. But we are > where we are now, and the question is what can hold off or reverse the coming > active damage from here. > > > > ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove
============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove
