Eric - I’m a lurker on this group from the East Coast. I think you have written an essential truth here. Would you (or anyone else here) object to my sharing this (just a copy/paste of the content, no names) to another private group I participate in? People on it are really struggling to make sense of things this morning, and this might help ground them.
Thanks. Robert > On Nov 9, 2016, at 9:19 AM, 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
