A providential polity operates on the principle of optimal fairness. That polity significantly widens the input of the common people. The people are, in a sense, resultantly empowered. The polity dubs its fairness arrangement democracy.
But nothing remains static; for democracy to maintain at the same vibrancy and integrity with the people involved, society and culture are required to grow and adapt. And because of the very essence of what democracy presupposes – that the whole of the people are capable of governing themselves – adaptation perforce includes that people must increase the scope of what they, the whole people, discern, perceive, and interpret regarding all that does or may impact their lives, their world, and the world to come. They are not necessarily limited in where they go for this deeper and wider understanding, but democratic peoples absolutely must learn; democracy is required to attend seriously and equitably to educating its people.
This universal education agenda is wrongly assumed to be an intent benevolence. It is not necessarily. A democracy’s interest in educating the people could be merely practical, and the practical will often expediently discount equality in affordance of education. Other values and interests and dynamics impact extant realities, and predictably then, unequal education eventually produces starkly different outcomes. At a certain point, due to the extreme differences in all that affects fortuitous intellectual development – genes, blind kismet, exemplary parenting, superb teachers, social support systems, and family wealth which may afford private tutoring, & etc. – the nation becomes essentially divided – and some end up superiorly learned and others relatively simple-minded. And here we witness a flow of causation that has led the United States of America to the straits it now ails in, where that simple-mindedness has proven instrumental in elevating imbecility to the highest office in the land.
Ignorance is and always was the enemy, but the nation’s major political parties allowing education to be treated as an ordinary agenda item, one that could be conveniently short-shrifted and demoted, has contributed immeasurably to grossly unequal outcomes, for individuals and especially with at-risk groups.
Vital freedom begins and ends with the interests, functions and instrumentalities of the individual human mind. The private workings of the mind are invisible, and this caliginousness has aided the allowance of disparity among different minds. When the divide can be traced to something as intimate and difficult-to-measure as the inner workings of the brain – in some instances what might be called a ‘dumbness handicap’ – it becomes a force multiplier; one divide – itself the child of narrow experience, misconception, propaganda dependence, unsophistication, contradiction, failure to grasp long-term consequences, etc. – becomes two; the two divides deepen and become four; the four deepen and become sixteen. At some point we take stock of what happened and realize that nearly half the people are too far afield to be retrieved. Half believe things that are so far removed from corroboration, informed evaluation, additional evidence and effectual accountability that they are outside the reach of any educative or illuminating experience or learning. The United States now has over a hundred million eligible voters who believe all sorts of absurd, unproven and unprovable, conspiracist, and logically fallacious things, and they cogitate with deep conviction. One group, relatively small, believes in its own biological racial superiority; another group believes that science is hogwash if it tries to claim the world is over 7,000 years old; another group is convinced of what 99% of the most informed persons in the pertinent field would call a myth, another group adheres steadfastly to still another myth. These ideational, political, conspiracist, ideological, “psychic”, contrived and rumor-driven divides deepen one citizen’s estrangement from another. And it is a short step from there to political debilitation, because the belief distance is sometimes great enough for the indoctrinated individual to believe that some new bit of information, some new assertion is wrong or irrelevant, or it is an outright lie. What is to happen to the whole political entity when factionalism in the body politic produces a leadership likewise, in its essence, factional? The divide then deepens. And it can deepen to a point beyond redress. The individual people, tirelessly affirming their own uninformed and unexamined beliefs, unbeknownst, bring about the diminishment of the whole nation.
And all this began with a politics that shrugged and acted as though it had no alternative but to allow considerable educational disparity between demographic groups within its borders and the confounding ignorance of its people.
Democracy has more aggravations and affronts, however, than the problem of ignorance. Democracy is fundamentally at odds with equality. Democracy designs not at holistic justice in its “fairness”, but at freedom – more specifically, freedom of the individual. It is natural that democracy would esteem individual freedom; given the chance, that’s what people would confer upon themselves, of course. But freedom and equality work at cross-purposes: freedom allows that each person can, by effort, clever ingenuity, or serendipity, etc., rise above his or her peers – in renown, political power, prestige and wealth. Surely genuine freedom includes the freedom to improve oneself! As people are individually different from each other, so their talents, energies, affairs and realizations will also be dissimilar. Bona fide individual freedom predicts inequality. Thus, equality has a paradoxical relationship to the fairness-to-all principles of democracy. The founding moral rationale for democracy, if there were such a thing, was fairness. Yet, when one person is born into a kind of aristocracy, arrives to his or her life with all the benefits affluence affords, and another person in the same political state is obviously born into improvidence and inauspiciousness, even the semblance of fairness is not at all there evident. Thus, neither is equality. But is the parent citizen of a righteous, authentic democracy not free? Is she or he not free to deliver substantial nurturing, helps and advantages to her or his children? Indeed, she or he is free in these pursuits. Freedom gains in the world, it almost seems, at the cost of veritable equality. And in this logical, predictable way, an originally well-meaning and well-considered democracy inadvertently facilitates the sowing of seeds of social injustice and discontent. This is detrimental. Discontents can grow, evolve, mutate, stiffen, grow further, and become ruinous.
The democracy that lasts through every downturn and tumult is the democracy that can change its laws to meet contemporary needs. Equality of opportunity, as wonderful as that idea is, cannot be directly established in a nation that cherishes individual freedom utmost. A freedom-loving nation may want in the majority of its democratic citizenry to work toward the ideal that is equality, but equality is always aspirational and conjectural, a fancy. And aspirational equality is always a lesser sibling; individual freedom is the sine qua non of liberal democracy from the outset. The result of this irreconcilable tension between Big Brother Freedom and Little Brother Equality is that it frustrates and deepens inequality, leading to disunity.
What is the break point? What is that point at which inequality becomes something perilous to a whole nation? It might be when the unequal, unwittingly perhaps, act politically to make their aggregated station more unequal. It would be evident, for example, when the poor uneducated go to the polls and, for reasons beyond the scope of this writing, vote to give the wealthy class even more economic benefits. It would be evident, for example, when poor (uneducated) whites vote in an impressive plurality, to elect a wealthy, racist, misanthropic businessperson as their president.
That has happened. The United States is a nation broken. The United States has arrived at this condition consequent to many causes. Among those causes is the failure of the majority of influential, educated people themselves to do what was necessary in educational opportunity – to work at lessening inequality by strenuously holding up the principle of real equality in educational experience. The American people never undertook what they needed to in this regard. Americans were permitted to start off in the very first years of their susceptible lives at shockingly disparate trajectories. This has been the nation’s downfall. The horrible injustice of it rings as a stentorian indictment – for all those who uncover their ears and minds by enlightenment. (I could have provided a massive array of statistics to support these inequality-of-education claims, but I’ve opted instead to respect the reader’s existing knowledge base.)
These political manifestations are generally underappreciated. People overlook the fact that every idea that is embraced as worthwhile or doable is necessarily obliged to conform or agree with a philosophy or principle of some sort. And the American individual freedom ethic is in no way exempt from dynamics and causation laws; American freedom is also obliged. And when in the late 1800s, for example, white Southerners sought to establish legal institutions that fully separated the races within the respective state and community, they needed to follow some self-agreeing logic. Today we dismiss their “logic” as stupid and backward, but their thinking was still consistent within itself. If you believe that God made people so very different in appearance for a sound, “godly” reason, then you must also form an opinion about what those reasons are. This writer believes that “God’s” supposed “reasons” for making people different are a marvelously fascinating topic of philosophical discussion, but profoundly ill-advised in designing at a comprehensive, coherent, and practical here-and-now social justice.
Why is the United States united? Why, for that matter, should any collectivity or association unite? The most accessible answer to those questions is that unity is a condition of generally greater power and stability, and these tend to yield a more imposing defense (or aggression), ease of continuance and advancement. When polities unite, as when the several British colonies of coastal North America became states under a united government, there is always a context, an immediate purpose. That purpose back in 1776 was not any ethical, sublime or eminently civilized function of unity, but to merely use unity as a tool, an empowering strategy in the fight against what the influential class of colonists viewed as an oppressor. The act of uniting, in that “Enlightenment” example, was not aimed at any sort of justice or virtue separable from the paramount aim of prevailing; it was a smart political agenda: the practical enterprise of gaining independence.
This basal design of unity is true of labor unions and political parties too. They function on the ultra-simple principle that there is relatively greater strength in numbers. And strength is always a plus, especially when the ambition appears steep.
We move in our sociality toward a kind of understanding, a hinted “unity”, not with valorous, noble-minded ideals aforethought. Unity is either, by design, an empowering strategy, or it is a providence of nature, a happenstance whose antecedents are mostly opaque. Happenstance is aimless; unity is morally neutral, at best.
And unity, an axiomatic political (not moral) good, is not measurable. This is because there are infinite gradations in unity. How united is the United Steelworkers Union? How united are the United Farm Workers? How about the United Auto Workers? Will their constituent members continue without demurral or discontent through unsparing winters of strikes and demonstrations? Unity is a plastic, variable thing. But unity – inasmuch as there is genuine substance in it – is still perennially useful in gaining toward political objectives. There is no doubting the political clout of the American Association of Retired Persons – the AARP – with its over thirty-eight million members.
In everyday experience, we do not so much unite as agree, and ninety-nine percent of our routine sociality is means and means only – “unity” in present compromise, assent and accord, and these as a way to move cooperatively forward. We follow conscious and unconscious assessments and expectations recommended by the culture we inhabit. For associated persons to warrant that commonplace appellation “society”, they must somehow agree to the rules and expectations regarding interactions with other human beings in that society. Even clichéd “tolerance” can be considered a non-optional social expectation.
On a better-than-most winter day here in New York, the air is brisk on the skin. The sun smiles effusively; its resplendence overspreads all and everything. The initial part of my day’s out-of-house activities is a forgettable several-seconds jaunt to my car, six meters from the condo’s front door. In that transitory movement, I encounter my neighbor, a congenial man a few years younger than myself but physically similar. He addresses me by name and voices for my ears a terse bromide about the weather. My reply is equally unoriginal, equally perfunctory.
We maintain these folkways, and we think nothing of them. But they constitute an essential of our civilization. Any well-functioning society requires elemental trust between individuals. Trust is established in its undermost essence when we engage our commonplace, unelaborate interactions following familiar conventions. We need to connect to other human beings for our efforts to gain better traction toward coordination of effort and goal attainment. (Salespeople, players on a sports team, business executives, competent managers, journalists and political practitioners learn this.)
Social interaction is also necessary for mental health reasons. An illustration of this mental health-supplementing function appeared in the motion picture Cast Away. In that cinematic telling, the main character is forced to try to somehow survive on a small, isolated island in the South Pacific. He is absolutely alone. He paints a face – with his own blood, of all sober elements – onto the surface of an available volleyball. He begins to speak with the painted face, and this action – itself of dubious sanity – keeps him from completely losing his mind. I saw Cast Away with my wife recently. I turned to her and exclaimed, “Wow! He has to do something as looney as that so that he doesn’t go crazy!” The inner voice, let alone to its own devices, will become less and less able in elemental decision-making. The sufferer is, in such straights, at considerable risk of madness.
We have, in English, the familiar idiomatic phrase “touch base.” It is understood to mean that the speaker/writer will connect with another human being or group of human beings and get his/her/their perspective before proceeding. We always look at this touching base as elective, but that is because we have lots of people around us, intercommunication aplenty. Touching base is thus almost never thought of as something intended to help maintain mental health. But invisibly, incalculably, inevitably it does that too.
Destitute that spare element of quotidian sociality, civilization isn’t civilized at all; it’ll go nuts. To really listen to any outer voice, and well and earnestly consider what is there asserted, requested or alleged, we must enjoy some intrinsic of trust. And this is not at all automatic. Trust is built up by repeated gestures of respect (for the other and for commonly understood truth) and in the tireless observance of social conventions. I presently recall a story I read in a now-forgotten book many years ago. The writer told how strangers from different twentieth century Aborigine tribes encountering one another in the Australian Outback would evince utmost distrust. And they would sometimes, each wanting to just survive the day, sit down and try to talk with one another. Their conversation aimed at finding some tribal link – some way, however obscure or semi-contrived – to establish that the two were “related”. And the design of this colloquy was for a specific and very important purpose: they needed to find a reason why each should not immediately kill the other. That killing madness is what you have when you have no civilization. Doubtless civilization includes several indispensable and defining qualities, circumstances and institutions (cities, language, law, culture, etc.), but it is also implicitly about shared conceptualizations and postulate rapprochement. And we never ponder why we haven’t sat down to discuss why we might not kill each other.
For all marginally-civilized times, humans have inhabited a social space where they were required to deal cooperatively, non-oppressively, with non-tribe members. People always existed in groups or classes of various sizes and conceptions, and some not based on proximity per se, but on blood ties, religious ties, political interests, socioeconomic status, allegiances, and the sort of work or endeavor in which one was engaged. And there has always been a kind of tension between the city and the rural areas. Throughout, people continued to see themselves each as part of a subgroup that was not tribally based. Each person was counted among the beggars, the farmers, the artisans, the youth, the landed gentry, etc. Poverty did not remove social standing; poverty just meant low social standing. Even those who did not know precisely where they stood in a social sense still understood that others were likewise displaced, disadvantaged, destitute, persecuted, marginalized or otherwise afflicted; each person was part of a larger group, however desperate, forsaken, or stricken.
For several hundred years, Western European society changed languidly. And when at last a liberal, inchoate hopefulness arrived in the form of democracy in the late eighteenth century (in North America), women and people of color were not included in that contrariety. Massive changes to the basic structure and understandings of Western society occurred later – in the twentieth century. In 1900, a young woman, part of a thriving putative “democracy”, was prohibited from voting in political elections. Hence, in a fundamental sense, she was not a full citizen. By century’s end, women were not only voting in elections, they were organizing into powerful groups politically, taking pills that would thwart formerly immutable laws of procreation, and venturing unchaperoned into outer space with a group of unrelated males. In 1950, 5.2% of American females over age 25 had graduated from college, but by 2000 that statistic had risen fourfold to over 22%. (1) (By comparison, the statistic for males at that time was approximately 26%.) Presently, more females than males attend college and University in the United States. This is certainly progress! But we like to site these things not for their intellectual integrity, because we always enjoy the self-congratulatory pat on the back. Look for the word “we” in the speaker’s or writer’s assertion.
Some social and political trajectories are positive and hopeful, but many are highly problematical. We can bring the student to the fount of learning, but cannot make the student figuratively drink most fruitfully of it. That “student” may be the child of a voting citizen of a democracy such as the United States. That student is then subject to American laws that place the student under the direct control and authority of the citizen adult. In that simple, commonsense arrangement there are insurmountable problems that do not jibe with the principles of democracy; in the family there is no equality whatever, but in the world of democracy the billionaire and the peasant are each equally afforded a single political vote. (And the “vote” of the child within the family’s affairs is the whim of the parent.) Though the family is often thought of as the core unit of society – even democratic society – it is, in its inmost constitution, antipathetic to democracy. The family is dysfunction, and dysfunctional at root because it is radically hostile to equality.
A democratic polity will attempt to work at social equality, ever underestimating the difficulty. All a democracy can proactively pursue is some particular of “opportunity”, perhaps, housing, obtaining credit, or hiring regulations. American politics works only toward educational opportunity so as to move toward a suggestive equality of opportunity more generally, because the elemental rubrics and mechanisms of democracy do not allow access to working directly at comprehensive, unabridged equality of opportunity for everyone; politics, lives and societies are too complicated.
Opportunity is positive – so we are led to believe. On balance, it is an axiomatic good. But, what happens when an American man circa 1950 has the opportunity to attend college 3,000 miles away from where he was raised in his youth? What happens when a young woman circa 2000 sees professional opportunities a thousand miles away from the area where she has lived all her years? What happens when opportunity appears on another continent? People are, unarguably, seekers after opportunity, and this propensity is not likely to change. In this sort of appraisal of opportunity, the life of the American Anthony Bourdain is perhaps instructive. He was a person entirely representative of contemporary urban, Western culture. He became a renowned chef in New York City, became an activist in that same city, and became a success as a nonfiction writer. He is most famous for his CNN TV show, Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown. In doing his work for that show, he became the most unpretentious, quintessential world traveler. Here was a thoroughly modern man, fulfilling his most adventurous and decadent ambitions. He was popular, it seemed, with everyone. He was healthy, intelligent, enlightened and personable. One could easily sense that he was surely the focus of genuine envy. On June 25th, 2017, four years into his success with his CNN TV show Parts Unknown, Anthony Bourdain celebrated his sixty-first birthday. On June 8th of the following year he was found dead in his hotel room. He had committed suicide.
To what extent did a sort of extravagant, leave-town-today opportunism contribute to Bourdain’s end? Yes, he suffered from ‘depression’, we are told, but does this causal explanation really refute the idea that rootlessness and endless, culture-affirmed, opportunistic adventuring played no part in his demise? (Do not miss the point of this writing: that opportunity got for the self alone cannot satisfy; only opportunity got in the wholesome pursuance of equality of opportunity generally will satisfy – following the assumption that the satisfied are also enlightened, as Bourdain certainly was.)
What is happening, and what is destined to happen, following the hypothetical that we do not experience a major world tragedy, such as global thermonuclear war, is that humans will enjoy, in fantastically high numbers – billions even – opportunities wider and more “fulfilling” than Bourdain’s. Following the forecasting logic that artificial intelligence will arrive between 2040 and 2080 – as it most assuredly will – and as the superior entity rapidly evolves itself, it will afford everything, literally everything! (And, nothing that is so valuable to prosperity and advantage as AI can ever be voluntarily disavowed. The more useful something is, the more certain it is that it will be maintained. And this causation law allows almost no exception.)
What does the provision of everything mean for a society and a civilization? What we are discussing here is every practical, material boon, not to be confused with the solving of interminable political conundrums. Remember, the best scenario is the one where government institutions function excellently and afford all peoples – irrespective of distinctions of any kind – reasonable access to a fair share of societal wealth. In this scenario, it is impossible not to see that our social connectedness will suffer. This is especially the case when there are certain to be an almost infinite span of distractions available to every person. We already see innumerable instances where people communicate more in social settings via cyber-reality, with the ideational over the physically present, with thumbs and tips of phalanges than with audible voices and visual gesturing and touching. Even the 45th president of the United States is a daily exerciser of undisciplined digits.
There is also the problem hidden deeply within the boon that is provision; people will be free to do whatever they choose. We childishly assume that freedom will afford all healthy eventualities. But Bourdain was surely among the freest 1% of people on the planet. Individual freedom, even fully maintained (which is the optimal outcome), will not be as free of corruption, indecency, moral compromise and travail as we reflexively think. Imagine a life where you’re affluent, you don’t work, and everyone else is likewise blessed. In what sort of workshop shall such unfettered, idle hands find employment? Profligacy is there in that ever-changing and ever-challenged brave new world.
Something worrisomely pernicious is happening to our sociality. And these concerns extend exhaustively beyond the already-well-documented contemporary fixation with our smart devices. In the first twenty years of the present century, we are already separated by colossal disparities of wealth. We are separated and disunited – in respect to urban/non-urban perspectives, unlike naissance-afforded intelligence, privileged birth, age, ethnicity, race, education, geography, physical ability, artistic talent, occupational connectedness, attractiveness, health, ideology/outlook, religion, irreconcilable gun enthusiasts and gun haters, citizenship status, and diverse but intense interests. All that was needed, it now seems in retrospect, to turn these inexpedients into something palpably worse was the contrary-to-original-Framers-intent, ouch-function of the Electoral College and the scurvy, nationalism-obliging subterfuge of thousands of computer- and Internet-enabled Russian misinformation peddlers.
But the foregoing are trifles. Lasting, healthy democracy always necessitated something implied, but never expressly stated in the United States Constitution: sedulous dedication to a sort of education that nurtured youth to fullest, most excellent citizenship. (And an equality-exalting value needed to be centered therein.) American education today mostly “prepares young people for the work world.” This is an extremely narrow focus of education when people are charged by their political heritage with the monumental task of determining what should and should not be done by government. The American government treated the citizen mostly as if she or he were a cog in a capitalist design rather than an integral of a democratic civilizational design.
Americans brought on the calamity of 2016 by default: they neglected the integrals of healthy, vital, forward-looking democracy by many decades of affording millions in their nation, finally and fatefully, a substandard, abjectly unequal education.
Nothing works so fabulously insidious as the device invisible to the victim; this democratic-will-thwarting eventuality occurred within the historical context of there being tens of millions of Americans who had swum fatefully in their sop-freedom individualism to a flailing and drowning in reprobate education and resultant ignorance-victimhood. As many political pundits have already articulated, poorer, less educated Americans in 2016 voted against their own interests. Economically poor, poorly uneducated whites significantly helped to elect not just a man who had never known poverty, but one also famously disdainful of anything that suffered misfortune or looked in the unavailing moment like “a loser”. What looks more like a loser than the poor, the grievously destitute, the homeless? The presidential candidate also stated flatly that he did not view Senator John McCain as a war hero, as the vast majority of Americans certainly did. McCain was captured by the enemy Vietcong in the late 1960s and suffered frequent torture during his over five years of captivity. The 45th president, a self-caricatured Scrooge, said he liked people who “didn’t get caught.” (It is entirely logical that such a fiendish attitude may have stemmed from his having adroitly evaded ‘capture’ – indictment – in the metaphorical jungles of you-can-get-away-with-it capitalism in his adult lifetime.) What are the poor if they are not people interminably caught – in a cycle of poverty, desperation, disadvantage and despair? In Scrooge logic, one is not condemnable because of what he or she does, but because of what he or she suffers. Within such an unfeeling, morality-eschewing way of thinking, affliction and inculpation are conflated.
The unintelligent are easily manipulated. By definition needful and status hungry, the uninformed and ill-informed are dupes in a political scheme that passes decades and centuries little changed. That players and continuers of that scheme, aware of the status-want of the intellectually pitiable, support the idea that the flag, the nation, the government, the president, the military, or “veterans” need to be honorably treated. It is natural and noble to treat individuals kindly, of course, but the dupes are encouraged in their ignorance to “support veterans,” while, unwitting, they are also being led to support the American military, thus support military policies of the government, among them that very largeness and puissance of the American military. They are suckered into increased political partisanship by routine compassion for disabled veterans and “those who have served their country,” a phrasing that suggests unselfishness, when joining the military does not necessarily jibe with unselfishness at all. I myself joined the United States Air Force in 1977 not because I was “unselfish” but because I had no path to getting into and through college. I’d heard that people get funds to go to college from their career as an enlisted person. I have three brothers. Two joined the Army in 1976, and one joined the Marines the same year. None of them joined with any sort of “unselfishness” as a central motive. None had any career prospects, no clear path to success in business or the trades, nor a path to college education. They joined because they wanted status, adventure, and to prove to themselves and to everyone else that they were each “a man.” Millions join for these reasons.
But a clever-as-hell political culture inculcates nationalism, but the term they use themselves is “patriotism”. The culture and its innumerable abettors allow the poor, poorly educated, and status hungry to gain self-esteem by attaching their identity more firmly to the success of a “great” nation – their own. PhDs don’t have much reason to do this, of course. But the unintelligent are easily manipulated. Hug a flag publicly, and you stand to get tens of thousands of more supporters (who themselves adore that flag, and adore it because they are status hungry); hug it again and get tens of thousands more supporters. (In late 2016, I saw a picture of a political candidate hugging the American flag, and I immediately thought of how very idiotic so many Americans are, and that that cretinous act probably won him tens of thousands of more votes nationwide. If I love the nation, and the nation is represented by the flag, and that guy is doing something so weird as literally hugging a flag, then it is, by a sort of extended relationship, hugging my values and hugging me. I (being a dupe) will then vote for that person who has so kindly and generously “hugged” me. It is the millions of status-starved poor, most of them also poorly educated, that were far more susceptible to this visual device of the political aspirant.
Am I, the writer of this essay, really so smart? Or, more accurately, are these people who voted for the imbecilic dastard themselves imperceptive? Were they wrong? Were they wrong despite the predictable defense that people are always perforce trapped within the limitations of their always-wanting cogitative capacities? Were they wrong in the same sense, if not necessarily to the same degree, as the identically ‘trapped’ Hitler was wrong?
Aren’t we all trapped? Aren’t we all trapped within whatever gray matter and whatever chemistry exists between our ears, seeing only partially and with bias and ignorance always in the mix, determining our thoughts and decisions? The answer is an unequivocal Yes! And the sociological answer has to be a passion-filled dedication to excellent and excellently equal education.
That such a political agenda is not easily worked out is beside the point. Americans and their leaders have not even attempted a full commitment to education at the federal level. They never have. The word “education” does not even appear anywhere in the Constitution of the United States.
Education is essential. Everyone claims this. But education in the United States has been allowed is to become itself a divider. One person’s intellection can be only so different than another’s before it becomes too extremely disparate to reconcile. Then, there are private enterprises and crafty politicians ready to exploit those with the extremely poorer educational background and understanding.
In a free society such as that in the United States, it is expected that anyone can express their views unreservedly. Free expression invites punditry. Fox News uses fantastical references and claims so frequently the viewer simply cannot imagine that fabrications and misstatements of facts are everywhere in its reportage. Viewers’ mental misfortunes plague them unrelentingly. Millions of Fox viewers are so aloof, jumbled or imperceptible that they don’t know or attend to their news being ideologically contaminated, that their “news” is designed to exploit cognitive deficiencies. Fox News exploits this. Fox is a detriment intensifier. And it also functions as a division intensifier.
An irreparable kind of Eloi and Morlock rift has begun.
Some readers here will object that I’ve not criticized “liberal” news, such as MSNBC. That “news” is also open to informed and intelligent critique; it has also functioned to harden the political divide. But I would also argue that, even though this is so, there is no equivalence. Fox is perhaps hundreds of times more condemnable because it causes people to be increasingly scornful of informed study and statistical methodological uprightness, and preferring what one already ‘feels’ and experiences as ‘true’ over that which has been established by careful, peer-reviewed researches.
This story might be funny if it were not so tragic. Narrow ideology-driven media functioned to further divide people politically and ideologically. Bigotries, scapegoating, xenophobia, homophobia, distrust of science, resistant, antipathetic “tradition”, disdain for university education, and the notion that America was so far superior to all other countries that it could not be compared to them… all figured in this free provision of the day’s “news”. Belief became a sort of religion, and what one “felt” was esteemed as vital and defensible as any truth anywhere. (Are we to answer to the thought police?) If one felt that minorities were usurping more than they were due, this did not require substantiation. If one felt that “politicians all steal,” that too did not require evidence. Feeling, especially hostility and resentment, became both means and end; one felt things for a reason, and the reason was surely some identifiable “fact”. Belief has begun to markedly separate from reason. The castaway no longer talks to his ball.
And the poison in the water he drinks is not perceptible to him; for his tangible, fleshy, gratification-thirsty essence, it quenches. We are all prisoners of grey matter, and the unquestioning-impressionable are unable to even identify their affliction, much less treat it. The foxy beverage is offered, and it is taken without hesitation.
America goes from the deficient education of its least enfranchised quintile of population, then to the exploitation of that adversity by a capitalist cultural ethic that told everyone that he or she only needed to work hard. The hard work fraud never cared to acknowledge that people come from discouraging environments, and working hard and in good faith is always logically and causatively less likely when the immediate surroundings are dirty, unappealing, dangerous, insulting, degrading, or otherwise unhopeful. Hence, Americans allow that millions will grow to adulthood in very stressful circumstances, with prevalent violent crime, poverty, a feeling of being “different”, and a persistent, gnawing feeling that few really care about your plight.
At some point the perspectives of ignorance may get their way. (Why should only the thoughtful and informed get their way? Is that democracy?) The uninformed leader of the uninformed is still their leader, and he is thus, in their partisan eyes, beyond reproach.
The instrumental (prevailing, though minority) American voters of 2016 voted as if to state frankly that the presidency was a negligible thing… any dog could do it. But the president has the ability to put ideas and values into people’s heads – some of them ridiculous, and some of them incontrovertibly false – and they fit into the ways people think about right and wrong, what is justified and unjustified. Our psychology is beholden to all that is alleged. (A book published many years ago called The Secret alludes to this discovery of psychology.) We are beholden too to all that is reiterated. Recall the legalistic claim “innocent until proven guilty?” Our credulity is so capable and so adroit that we function often as if something stated were true until proven otherwise. And, even when proof arrives, the wary onlooker will resort to a rationalization in order to blunt the rude intrusion of cognitive dissonance: people are, finally, abettors in the mechanisms of getting duped. Though they themselves may not know the English term, they become tantamount sophists. And, indoctrinated into a practice of ignorance-embracing, myth-adhering rationalization, the American thus ego-ensnared can soon come to a tipping point, a point of no return. Very like the terrorist, one can learn the unassailability of his or her own mental constructs and become so attached to his/her god-like flawlessness (in reasoning and purpose) that he or she will never find the way back to a careful intellectual weighing of political and ideological questions. In 2019, we have obviously reached that perilous point. In 2018, the president of the United States (transgressing a reality where ‘normal’ was still understood to have parameters) responded to the news of a spate of mail bombs being sent to about twelve prominent critics of the president by using his Twitter account to immediately claim that it was the work of scheming Democrats trying to further his unpopularity. Any normal commonsense intelligence would reveal that there was obviously a significant possibility that the bombs were sent by one or more people radically opposed to the politics of the president’s outspoken critics. The president was wrong again and without contrition again.
This idiocy too has to be understood by the president’s minions as something worth stating (that critics of the president ‘might’ have been behind the mailings) or otherwise excusable in being mistaken. But eventually the mind becomes robust in its ability to rationalize wrongs and insults and detriments apparent to non-indoctrinated minds. The human mind has been recently shown to be infinitely talented in twisting every bit of awkward news and truthiness to fit into a reassuring, self-agreeing, self-confident narrative. Fox News anchors and reporters sometimes challenge the falsehoods of conservative pundits, Republican lawmakers and bureaucrats, and Republican enthusiasts and apologists, but this only serves to make the devotee still more certain that he/she is getting the unadulterated truth. And both peg and hole are eligible to be manipulated as needs arise.
On the evening of 24 February 2019, the Academy Awards were televised around the world. During that live telecast, the famous movie director Spike Lee used his moment of accepting an award to urge Americans to take their franchise very seriously in 2020. He did not mention the sitting American president by name (and did not use any other epithet such as “idiot” or “imbecile” to reference that person, as I’ve often done here in this blog), and Lee’s politics had to be merely inferred from what he actually said. Lee is known to be a person who has spent virtually all of his adult life employing cinema to tell stories that held lessons concerning racism in the United States. And Spike Lee’s most recent movie, Black Klansman, was very much on the racism theme, and was nominated in the Best Picture category. Still, the “individual” residing in the White House, fully aware that there are considerable and adamant accusations of racism against him, used his Twitter account tweet to criticize Lee by name, and he did this less than twelve hours after Lee’s award acceptance speech. This action of a president, this sort of tweety-bird imprudence, cannot other than further divide an already fractious citizenry. Tipping points are not impactful only at something like fifty percent. Impact doesn’t necessarily work that way. Ofttimes, there is a subunit, a segment of the whole that passes its subunit tipping point, and that 40% or so tips over the edge. That 40 percent has tipped, regardless of what happens with the majority. It can still be hugely significant.
If the president still enjoys a support base of 38% in the wake of all his craven, indecorous, indecent, mendacious, uninformed, ill-informed, excuse-making idiocy and consternating derangement of the past twenty-four months, what does that tell about what has happened with the electorate that still say they support the president? They have gone in their impugnable ratiocination much the way of the decency-sacrificing, non-self-critical radical terrorist. An ordinary murderer, for example, rather than entertain an emotionally unsettling self-inculpation, often prefers a rationalization of his or her misdeed, and commonly saying or writing, “I thought…,” “I meant…,” or “I was trying to….” Similarly, terrorist and ideologically intransigent American dupe alike drink of the elixir of certitude and worship at the altar of I am right, and my actions unambiguously affirm that I am. Theirs is, in a sense, self-apotheosis. From such a corroboration addicted paragon-perch there is prospect of neither gain of wisdom nor atonement.
A majority of American people cannot relate to each other in the ways they consume news and construe reality. Each has come to believe the other side is out of touch. Countless millions of Americans are too deep into a prepossessing, echoing worldview to find their way back to anything approximating reconsideration or understanding. This is, sadly, only the beginning of this fragmented political condition. It will get far worse. And this is because for those who have been initiated there is no going back. They will seek and find rationales to continue believing as they do, even while tens of millions in the world and in their own society continue in educational exploits that run counter to ninety percent of what the News and gold microphone radio pundit sees and believes. Even when the famous conservative radio pundit is called out as a rabble-rouser, he will predictably assert that the righteous are rightly roused. There you have it: whatever is done in self-righteous adamancy is not subject to redress. Social scientists have claimed and are claiming repeatedly that Americans are becoming more (socioeconomically) unequal through time. “The gap between the richest and the poorest continues to expand,” they warn. But what is also present but harder to grasp is that those who are now so information-resistant are mostly incapable of finding their way back; their wants have brought them to what for them is very personally rapturous, but for its historical resonance just cynicism and gloom, and there’s no route to an evenhanded, dispassionate, informed appraisal of things; they’ve gone to a cordoned dark side, a sneering, ego-infatuated wasteland whence none stand to be gainsaid.
Social media, without conscious intent, is helping people divide further into tribal and quasi-tribal identities. Social media titans such as Facebook endlessly reassure themselves with their “We bring people together” claims. But they bring them together into increasingly reality- and reason-resistant factions. And this is the major reason the so-called “Arab Spring” has been an unequivocal failure.
In January of 2019, the American nonfiction writer Thomas Friedman made a guest appearance on CNN with Wolf Blitzer. Friedman was cogent, compelling and straightforward in his analysis. He said that the president of the United States had lied so frequently and so unabashedly that he could no longer be trusted at all. Friedman then proffered that in such a “through the looking glass” case as this, where the president has lost all credibility, when some major international incident occurs and the nation needs the president to take responsible action, the people around him and in the Congress no longer trust that he’s a person who can be relied upon – “trusted” to do the responsible and wise thing.
The 45th president of the United States is the focus of a cult of personality. His followers do not merely trust, but very nearly worship. His station among his followers is very like the position of Osama bin Ladin among Islamic militants. But when the president is so egregiously parting from familiar truths, believers have to go one way or the other; they cannot remain in precisely the same place in relation to the focus of their adoration. Constant lying does that. It pushes people off the fence and into being either a supporter or a critic. And if you want to comfort yourself by citing the fact that the president’s supporters are a “minority”, you are obliged to admit that even after such dizzying untrustworthiness his American supporters doubtless number in the tens of millions. Literally all of them have had to rationalize what they too certainly recognize as patent prevarication. Precisely none of them do not remember him saying that Mexico would pay for his border wall, and none do not recall him saying that his inauguration crowd was the largest ever, when photographs and videos were taken live on his and others’ inaugurations that glaringly disprove the statement. He also said that he “never said” Mexico would pay for the border wall, another of the lies that now toll into the thousands. His supporters have had to move into more passionate support because of the unease in their own conscious awareness, between their own ears; they will affirm with red-faced adamancy that he was either justified in what he said, or must, for any of a million reasons, be forgiven for such “minor” errors. When he is doing such admirable things – such as, maybe, debasing democracy, intensifying racism, degrading longstanding political alliances, elevating and complimenting tyrants, ignoring human rights, treating the presidency as something to be used in the service of the wealthy class and his own financial interests, and arbitrariness in the performance of his sworn duty to “preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States” by directing his attorney general to prosecute where laws were violated. On this last point: after he was sworn into office in early 2017, he said candidly to the media that he did not intend to prosecute his political opponent Hillary Clinton, as he’d promised he would upon assuming office. And he gave an explanation why he wasn’t proceeding with that through his Attorney General. He said, regarding the Clintons, “I don’t want to hurt them.” But he is not sworn to arbitrarily do what he personally likes and dislikes. He’s sword to the laws of the Constitution, not to his personal “want”. Nonetheless, the president’s defenders can be predicted to laud him in this instance as a wonderfully gracious man who does not want to hurt anyone. But, if the election year allegations against Hillary Clinton were valid – and we must assume they were – they cannot be rightly brushed aside because (perhaps) your skin is white enough and you know the president well enough to incur his favor. Whatever is done by the personality central to the cult is unimpugnable.
The point of the present writing is that these people, his supporters, because of the very freakish behavior of their hero, are not salvageable; they cannot be successfully beseeched by the voice of reason. The “wall” referenced so much in the political news in recent years, and especially in late 2018 and early 2019, has become yet another point of cynical alienation utterly separating American citizens themselves, and now each American is obliged by time and locality (2019 and the United States) to reside wholly on one side of that impermeable, Berlinish (political) monument to fear and antipathy.
Divisiveness is a funny thing. Once you’ve got people divided one way you can divide them other ways more easily. And it is frighteningly simple to do this. Many experiments in behavioral psychology have illustrated how easy it is to get people who have no natural animosity toward one another to become extremely hostile in only a few short hours. Bill Clinton was a master rhetorician. What the United States now has as its executive is a master divider. The divider has managed, with the aid of the Electoral College, to get a sufficient portion of males and females to support an “assertive” America (code for manly, which is itself associated with security, respectability, success and inviolability), the poor to believe that a wealthy person who has never been near poverty knows their rights and needs and values, the ignorant to believe something so preposterous and dangerous as supporting the nuclear arming of Japan and South Korea. And there can be no doubt that he will make efforts – and succeed – in dividing rural people from city folk, the educated and the uneducated, the “true Americans” from others – unstated, but always suggesting liberals and nonwhites. When your strategy is to use fears to divide, you cannot abandon that strategy just because it is uncomfortable and something that cannot be openly confessed as a stratagem. No. You use what has worked for you in the past. He was most famous before he was president for saying two simple words: “You’re fired.” What do those two words ultimately mean? It means you are utterly divided from the rest of us. Dividing is a lifelong practice of this individual, and he cannot and will not abandon it, irrespective of how unethical and scurvy such a practice is or how it harms the nation. His supporters (his “base”) however, view this divisiveness as a kind of genius. If they recognize what he’s doing they will not condemn it, but praise their Dear Leader for it. They are already fully divided from mainstream Americans – who may still criticize what the 45th president does.
Two divided and irreconcilable realities are turning to twenty. Twenty will evolve into two hundred. This is a bad thing for civilization, because 199 of the 200 will in many instances be counted dissenters of some character.
It has always been considered “normal” for a person to speak the truth. And even though psychologists assert that “we all lie all the time,” we are more frequently truthful because truth is useful, efficacious; it isn’t that we’re so moral for speaking much more truth than untruth, but it just avails itself so routinely to getting what we want. If the waiter asks what you’d like, you speak the truth because that gets what you’d really like to receive. The question arises, what happens when speaking untruthfully becomes more and more familiar, more and more commonplace? It cannot other than become normalized. And this is an awful danger to our sociality. Recall early in this writing where I referenced a brief wintertime interaction with my next door neighbor? That was nothing of note; I called it “forgettable”. You know why? It was because the man said something referencing it being sunny on an unarguably sunny day, or something acknowledging the coldness when the same was agreed. What if he’d said he was an angel of God, or that he was a reincarnation of Julius Caesar? Would that affect any future relationship with him? My answer to you, reader, is predictable. I would not only have a “changed” relationship to him, I would probably discreetly council others to be wary of him and not place any faith in him. And his words would not be “forgettable”! I would remember them for many years. And I probably would not wait for my wife to come home from work to tell her what happened; I’d very likely text her, telling of my “weird” experience with a neighbor.
No, mental health issues do not help us sustain deep friendships. Lying and delusional behavior don’t help either.
But consider this: I can go on the Internet and find literally thousands of people who think the federal government knows about alien visitations and is hiding this information from the public, thousands also who believe that the moon landing was faked, thousands who believe Jews control the American government, thousands who believe that the Roman Catholic Church controls the world, and millions who believe in their unremitted racism that Barack Obama is a Muslim. The Internet pretends to bring us together, but the sad reality is that social media frequently brings us together into skeptical, fact-resistant, self-corroborating groups, and sometimes each representative no more than perhaps 1% of the total adult population and maybe 2% of the uneducated adult population.
Where are we going now? Humankind, if it retains the possibility of saving itself – from global thermonuclear war or other catastrophe – must abandon its timeworn myths and accept the findings of substantial scientific researches. Humankind cannot depend on how people “feel”, especially when the decision making more urgently requires awareness, circumspection and scholarship in the person of key decision makers – as when humankind has not solved neither its nuclear weapons threat, its other WMD concerns, problems with rogue dictators, human rights enforcements, climate change, pollution and environmental degradation, species extinction, nor solved the numerous and dire threats of artificial intelligence, now just on the horizon.
Among the falsehoods to be most urgently addressed is the myth of ‘free will.’ There’s no such thing! No volition can arise apart from three sources: extant (neurological) circumstances, outer influence (experience), or accident (such as brain injury). No genuine free will exists! Several articles appeared in Psychology today and other scholarly periodicals between 2012 and 2016 on the subject of free will and what neuroscience has revealed about “free will.” (Articles on much other research on this subject has been published in academic journals in the last two years.) We are obliged to disabuse our species of free will. Though it is essential, this is but one of millions of steps that must be taken to hold out the possibility of civilizational survival. Some scholars have speculated that a “belief in free will” may be necessary despite the findings of neuroscience. But this is because their thinking is deeply attached to that myth. They haven’t thought much about how a “free will free” civilization might work. It would be very different than this civilization, which is based deeply on the myth.
Before you judge me too harshly, reader, let me assert that I have almost always held out a significant hope of some sort. Many of our difficulties stem ultimately from a hypocrisy we allow ourselves. We try, as individuals, to get and to enjoy, and we do not attend much to the availability to pursue satisfactions likewise for everyone everywhere. It – this inner candor – distracts, finally, from our getting. And when the guilt demons come nigh, too close, we simply open the wallet and produce a twenty or a “generous” item of plastic. The demons are appeased, and one needed not the Church to sell indulgences; freedom also affords the selling to oneself.
We humans are stuck in a reality of unavailing causation law, and free will a pitiable myth. We cannot, we must not entertain the free will notions of our forebears! To extricate ourselves from our tribulations, we must be willing to accept that things do not always proceed as we’d like. Neuroscience is going very much the way of evolution science one and one-half centuries ago: it doesn’t die, but gets endlessly corroborated. The result, for those of us shrugging unfortunates, is that we see that we do not have what used to be called “free will,” and this is a bad circumstance when we feel it is necessary to “finding the will” to do what must be done politically, socially, environmentally.
If volitional will is, for modern scientific and philosophical reasons, unavailing, and we are forever subject to heartless laws of causation, there ought to be availing elements of potential human fulfillment somewhere. If we are, it seems, destined to fly away to remote comforts – so distressing is this traitorous, chameleon modernity – we can still find comfort and commonality combined in available rights doctrines. And we can further inure what we intend to feel and experience in affirming the same value scheme that equally serves others. This is the human rights regime.
We cannot know with utmost certainty that strong and abiding human rights affirmations worldwide will have the impact on helping us solve our problems that we’d hoped they would have. But we need to recognize that we drive to work each day without being 100% certain that we’ll ultimately be paid; we have children without any guarantee that they won’t grow up to be mass murderers; we love, knowing that heartbreak is infinitely available to all who hazard thusly; we continue living into old age, all the while knowing how dreadful it must be to witness one’s own self slowly rot before one’s own eyes. That we cannot know things with certainty and we enjoy no guarantees does not render nil the value of something. The value of human rights are in what they are likely to inspire when they are promoted tirelessly all over the world. Human rights is a kind of tantamount Trojan Horse. It comes in and produces something no one had anticipated. But this Trojan Horse of human rights affirmation suggests (not ‘promises’) something excellently auspicious. It rebuilds the trust that was lost long ago, that invisible faith that existed back when we still spoke to the unanswering ball.
Human civilization is fast losing the elemental trust between its constituent persons. And we need to work toward trust with not impositions and arrogations but philosophical consistencies. We can, and should, encourage people to affirm themselves by affirming their human rights. And in doing so, we include, significantly, that it is always axiomatically best to affirm something without the slightest taint of hypocrisy or insincerity. In that political affirmation-shout – of me, the lone, irreconciled self, working in supreme concert with everyone else, lays all hope.
Hope is not enough. We must have a plan.
The very first step, for anyone, is to learn what human rights are and must be.
(1) Source: www.census.gov