Eric Smith writes: “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.” Can we conclude that filling bellies will stop the growth of resentment? I don’t know about that. The economy is in relatively good shape right now. The unemployment rate has been at or below 5% for a year and jobs have been added to the workforce month after month. The participation rate is about 62.4% which is just about where it has been for 50 years on average. However, the mean incomes in the large population blue states are higher than in rust belt states, but the cost of living is really much higher in those blue states too. From: Friam [mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com] On Behalf Of Gary Schiltz Sent: Wednesday, November 09, 2016 8:37 AM To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam@redfish.com> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Fwd: what other subject is there this morning 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<mailto: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
