If it's any consolation, I waded through your entire bounce-formatted post, it was that good.
On Wednesday, November 9, 2016, Eric Smith <desm...@santafe.edu> wrote: > 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
