An upside I could see of another Trump presidency is that economic
productivity in the United States would further consolidate. States
and municipalities would evolve more defensive mechanisms to preserve
productivity and health of its businesses and residents. Areas that
did not, would continue their downhill slide. As it became clear the
national democracy didn’t work, the federal budget would become
increasingly restricted. Medicare and Social Security would fall
being replaced by state-level programs. At some point the U.S.
starts defaulting on its debt. What’s not clear to me is how to break
up the military and the nuclear arsenal. (About now I bet Ukraine
regrets their decision..) I could see that functions like the FAA or
the FDA could be coordinated.
My sense is that, well, about 50% of the population in the United
States just isn’t worth the trouble. AI is going to make a lot of
jobs unnecessary. Maybe Trump catalyzes a dramatic change in
society? It could all be a fascinating, if terrifying, final chapter
in my life?
*From:*Friam <friam-boun...@redfish.com> *On Behalf Of *Pieter Steenekamp
*Sent:* Thursday, October 31, 2024 7:38 AM
*To:* The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
<friam@redfish.com>
*Subject:* Re: [FRIAM] What if Trump Wins?
The Case for Trump
I'm not suggesting that Trump is a model leader; he has many moral
shortcomings. And yes, if we view the U.S. President as the de facto
leader of the West, it's fair to ask: Can’t we do better? I also won’t
debate whether someone like Harris might make a better president. My
point is this: If Trump is elected, might there be areas where his
unique style could actually make him an effective leader?
One thing Trump can do is negotiate. As a potential leader of the
West, there are benefits he could bring in negotiating with
adversaries, including BRICS countries. Let me explain using an
analogy: the character James Dean played in Rebel Without a Cause. In
a game of chicken, Dean's character pretended to be drunk, making his
opponent believe he was reckless—eventually causing them to back down.
Trump has a history of employing similar tactics. For instance, when
building in New York, he once proposed a design that violated height
limits. When this was denied, he proposed a much uglier building that
followed the code. Ultimately, he got approval to build his original
design, with the height exemption he wanted. Whether or not he would
have gone through with his threat is unclear, but he got what he
wanted by throwing a calculated tantrum.
In the same way, Trump's current claims about what he would do
internationally could simply be part of his proven negotiation
tactics. World leaders see him as “reckless” in the same way James
Dean’s opponents did, making them reconsider their own moves.
Ultimately, Trump may be an unconventional choice, but he is a skilled
negotiator—one who could, in his own way, secure some advantageous
outcomes for the West.
On Thu, 31 Oct 2024 at 13:07, Santafe <desm...@santafe.edu> wrote:
The newspapers, and any number of writers, do a good job spelling
all this out.
I have this frustrated feeling that doing this misses the point
that is driving the dynamic.
One of the good things that Paxton emphasizes about what drives
fascist movements from the ground up is the determined rejection
of thought in favor of feeling. Hannah Arendt goes on at length to
get the same thing across.
I envision it (with some discomfort about misfits of the metaphor)
as being like a social counterpart to berserking, or (even less
apt) elephants going into musth. It’s not even “rage” per se, but
something about as destructive, only chosen.
I see the various repubs that make communities with the dems, and
speak as if they hope this will “accomplish” some “change”. For
the Bannon-followers, I feel like I know exactly what this looks
like. It is the various subcategories of hated ones
self-identifying, and sewing on their sleeves a marker of
“establishment characters”. Bannon preaches to the mob: “You see;
they’re scared! We have them on the run. If you’ll just push a
little harder we can corner them, and we’ll give them the beating
of their lives. Imagine how powerful you will feel. They’ll want
you to stop, and they won’t be faking it, but they won’t be able
to make you stop. Won’t that be the best feeling you ever had?
You’ll be able to feel, finally, that you actually exist.”
(Bannon doesn’t put in the final line; I put that in.)
I guess I don’t want to argue against the things people are trying
to do (Michael Luttig, various Cheneys, and whoever). The voting
block that can cause the calamity is certainly a coalition of
non-identical groups. If we think there are categories of
Spontaneous Racists and Stimulated Racists (to borrow a term from
spectroscopy), the part of the voting bloc that is made up of the
spontaneous ones may not be all that large; maybe 20%? Not as
large as the evangelicals (35–40%?, with some overlap). There
presumably are some genuinely out-to-lunch types, and maybe one
can imagine that talking has some place with them, which could be
enough to move the margin of this winner-take-all event we are
stuck with. And then the ones that can think enough to be
strategically greedy or hoarding, but not circumspect enough to
have every cared or understood how the society they suck from
actually functions. _Maybe_ talking could have some effect with
them.
I have thought, too, since some NYT article by a guy from Bucks
county PA going home, and thinking that the trump voters actively
wanted “the trump vibe; the meanness, bullying and name-calling,
etc.” that this is an expression of a certain component of nihilism.
Whoever wrote the screenplay for Apocalypse Now was very good.
Kurtz’s line in one of the soliloquays:
“Have you ever wondered what it would be like to be completely
free? Free from the judgments of others; even of yourself?”
There is a core of nihilism in that freedom. What would it feel
like to go punch somebody for no particular reason, except that I
felt like it? Burn whatever some people mean by “the bonds of
human affection” that “include us in humanity”. Yes, I sort of
understand (and this probably is important) that whoever I hit
will now know he has to fear me, and he may even dislike or hate
me, and it may be irreversible. But if he can’t do anything to
me, why do I care? In fact, if he wants to and still can’t, even
better: that will give me that experience of power that I imagine
must be so nice to feel, but that if it is, I certainly don’t feel
now.
It’s not as simple a category as all that, because they are
willing to do this only if they believe they are members in the
mob. Whether that’s community or just a release from the
requirements of either responsibility or courage I can’t say.
But I do think that, in the U.S., a crucial conversion that Arendt
articulates, from a mere mass into a mob, has now been achieved,
and the mob is awake and self-aware as a mob. It took a sociopath
to go charging out across the minefield that normal people are too
chicken to venture into, to show how far out the actual
shooting-boundary is, beyond where they had drawn back before.
But now that the boundary has been identified, that’s public
information, and the others don’t need to be sociopaths to use
it. It changes the problem, because there are a lot more of them
than of the true sociopaths.
I agree, we would like to first get through the next week without
an acute disaster. But the system organization has passed through
a re-arrangement by now. I would like to know what a program
looks like to reverse that, without having to go through the whole
Hodgkin-Huxley circuit of the society’s destroying itself before
there is enough exhaustion to try for a reset. Since, under the
conditions that are likely by that time, it’s not clear what kind
of “reset” might even be available.
Eric
> On Oct 31, 2024, at 4:59 AM, Russ Abbott <russ.abb...@gmail.com>
wrote:
>
> To help prevent such a disaster, let's do our best to help
people imagine what the world would look like if Trump wins.
>
> For example, Trump has said that one of his priorities would be
to throw off the occupying army of invading immigrants and
criminals. Ask people to think about how this occupying force is
currently ruining people's lives. I suspect that very few people
have any experience of such a noxious invading force. Most people
find their lives relatively peaceful. But if Trump begins to
implement his plan to throw off this occupying force, the streets
would be full of armed deportation agents chasing down the evil
occupying forces. Gunfights would erupt between the deportation
agents and immigrants running for their lives. Many of us would be
caught in the crossfire--or holed up at home trying to avoid the
bullets. Ask people to imagine such a world and to compare it to
the relatively peaceful world we now occupy. Ask them if that is
really what we want and if that is what we will be voting for next
Tuesday.
>
> -- Russ Abbott
> Professor Emeritus, Computer Science
> California State University, Los Angeles
>
>
> On Wed, Oct 30, 2024 at 11:48 PM Jochen Fromm
<j...@cas-group.net> wrote:
> Here in Europe most people are indeed worried that the candidate
who is a convicted felon and wears orange makeup will become
president again. Have his fans all forgotten he mainly played
golf, praised dictators and created tax cuts for the superrich?
But there is also a bit of hope that a woman will stop him this time.
>
> A hundred years ago there was already a group in America that
hated Blacks and immigrants. As Timothy Egan writes in his book "A
Fever in the Heartland: The Ku Klux Klan's Plot to Take Over
America, and the Woman Who Stopped Them" one of the Ku Klux Klan
leaders was a charismatic charlatan named D.C. Stephenson. He was
eventually brought down by a woman, Madge Oberholtzer, who would
reveal his cruelties, and whose testimony stopped the Klan. When
Europe fell into darkness, America was able to stop the con man. I
hope it can do it again.
>
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/558306/a-fever-in-the-heartland-by-timothy-egan/
>
> -J.
>
>
> -------- Original message --------
> From: Nicholas Thompson <thompnicks...@gmail.com>
> Date: 10/30/24 10:54 PM (GMT+01:00)
> To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
<friam@redfish.com>
> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Evolutionary transitions between
egalitarian and despotic societies
>
> Hi, Jochen,
>
> Not sarcastic. It was to show the exploratory nature of such
models. I do believe that the most mysterious feature of
charisma is the behavior of the charasmees. However this election
turns out, almost half the country is about to willingly offer up
it's political autonomy to a potential dictator. Whatever my
faults, I try, try, TRY not to do sarcasm. I do wonder if we
could build models that explore under what circumstances it is
better for everybody to do SOMETHING then to take the time to
pool information and do the right thing.
>
> In general evolutionary history has no actual power to constrain
our present behavior. Our behavior is constrainted by present
events and present behavioral repertoire.
>
> Nick
>
> On Wed, Oct 30, 2024 at 2:37 PM Jochen Fromm
<j...@cas-group.net> wrote:
> In her book "The Social Instinct" Nichola Raihani mentions in
chapter 17 the article "An evolutionary model explaining the
Neolithic transition from egalitarianism to leadership and
despotism" from Simon T. Powers as a model how despotic regimes
and dominance hierarchies have evolved in early human societies.
> https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/abs/10.1098/rspb.2014.1349
>
> It reminds me of our recent discussion triggered by Nick's
(sarcastic?) proposal to explain parts of the MAGA movement in
terms of evolutionary psychology. Simon T. Powers is an
interdisciplinary researcher working at the University of Sterling
> https://www.stir.ac.uk/people/2013555
>
> A more recent article from him about "Modelling transitions
between egalitarian, dynamic leader and absolutist power
structures" can be found here
> https://www.stir.ac.uk/research/hub/publication/2041639
>
> -J.
>
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> --
> Nicholas S. Thompson
> Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology
> Clark University
> nthomp...@clarku.edu
> https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson
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