Paxton and Arendt are the best. Yes, fascist movements are characterized by
rejection of thought in favor of feeling. Paxton calls them mobilizing
passions. There are apparently too many people in the U.S. "who feel that
government has let them down" as Hillary Clinton noticed, people who believe
"nobody cares about them, nobody worries about what happens to their lives and
their futures". Since this core problem has not been solved and inflation is
still a problem (it was also a big driving force that made Hitler popular), it
is likely that next week will be a disaster. If Trump wins most of us will
agree it is a disaster. If Harris wins Trump will most likely not accept it,
and another coup would be disastrous too.-J.
-------- Original message --------From: Santafe <desm...@santafe.edu> Date:
10/31/24 12:08 PM (GMT+01:00) To: Russ Abbott <russ.abb...@gmail.com>, The
Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam@redfish.com> Subject: Re:
[FRIAM] What if Trump Wins? 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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