Individual vs. Society, pt. 3

Among those building fame and influence via podcasting on YouTube is Michael Malice. Malice is a journalist (for what organization?) and the author of several books, so he has better preparation and content than many who (like me) offer only loose opinion. He latest book (no link) is The Anarchist Handbook (2021), which appears to be a collection of essays (written by others, curated by Malice) arguing in theoretical support of anarchism (not to be confused with chaos). I say theoretical because, as a hypersocial species of animal, humans never live in significant numbers without forming tribes and societies for the mutual benefit of their members. Malice has been making the rounds discussing his book and is undoubtedly an interesting fellow with well rehearsed arguments. Relatedly, he argues in favor of objectivism, the philosophy of Ayn Rand that has been roundly criticized and dismissed yet continues to be attractive especially to purportedly self-made men and women (especially duped celebrities) of significant wealth and achievement.

Thus far in life, I’ve disdained reading Rand or getting too well acquainted with arguments in favor of anarchism and/or objectivism. As an armchair social critic, my bias skews toward understanding how things work (i.e., Nassim Taleb’s power laws) in actuality rather than in some crackpot theory. As I understand it, the basic argument put forward to support any variety of radical individualism is that everyone working in his or her own rational self-interest, unencumbered by the mores and restrictions of polite society, leads to the greatest (potential?) happiness and prosperity. Self-interest is not equivalent to selfishness, but even if it were, the theorized result would still be better than any alternative. A similar argument is made with respect to economics, known as the invisible hand. In both, hidden forces (often digital or natural algorithms), left alone to perform their work, enhance conditions over time. Natural selection is one such hidden force now better understood as a component of evolutionary theory. (The term theory when used in connection with evolution is an anachronism and misnomer, as the former theory has been scientifically substantiated as a power law.) One could argue as well that human society is a self-organizing entity (disastrously so upon even casual inspection) and that, because of the structure of modernity, we are all situated within a thoroughly social context. Accordingly, the notion that one can or should go it alone is a delusion because it’s flatly impossible to escape the social surround, even in aboriginal cultures, unless one is totally isolated from other humans in what little remains of the wilderness. Of course, those few hardy individuals who retreat into isolation typically bring with them the skills, training, tools, and artifacts of society. A better example might be feral children, lost in the wilderness at an early age and deprived of human society but often taken in by a nonhuman animal (and thus socialized differently).

My preferred metaphor when someone insists on total freedom and isolation away from the maddening crowd is traffic — usually automobile traffic but foot traffic as well. Both are examples of aggregate flow arising out of individual activity, like drops of rain forming into streams, rivers, and floods. When stuck in automobile congestion or jostling for position in foot traffic, it’s worthwhile to remember that you are the traffic, a useful example of synecdoche. Those who buck the flow, cut the line, or drive along the shoulder — often just to be stuck again a little farther ahead — are essentially practicing anarchists or me-firsters, whom the rest of us simply regard as assholes. Cultures differ with respect to the orderliness of queuing, but even in those places where flow is irregular and unpredictable, a high level of coordination (lost on many American drivers who can’t figger a roundabout a/k/a traffic circle) is nonetheless evident.

As I understand it, Malice equates cooperation with tyranny because people defer to competence, which leads to hierarchy, which results in power differentials, which transforms into tyranny (petty or profound). (Sorry, can’t locate the precise formulation.) Obvious benefits (e.g., self-preservation) arising out of mutual coordination (aggregation) such as in traffic flows are obfuscated by theory distilled into nicely constructed quotes. Here’s the interesting thing: Malice has lived in Brooklyn most of his life and doesn’t know how to drive! Negotiating foot traffic has a far lower threshold for serious harm than driving. He reports that relocation to Austin, TX, is imminent, and with it, the purchase of a vehicle. My suspicion is that to stay out of harm’s way, Malice will learn quickly to obey tyrannical traffic laws, cooperate with other drivers, and perhaps even resent the growing number of dangerous assholes disrupting orderly flow like the rest of us — at least until he develops enough skill and confidence to become one of those assholes. The lesson not yet learned from Malice’s overactive theoretical perspective is that in a crowded, potentially dangerous world, others must be taken into account. Repetition of this kindergarten lesson throughout human activity may not be the most pleasant thing for bullies and assholes to accept, but refusing to do so makes one a sociopath.

The Politics of “No!”

Jimmy Dore at his YouTube channel (traffic now being throttled) has been positively hammering various politicians and political analysts for their utterly unbelievable rationalizations and gaslighting regarding political strategy. In short, despite divisiveness sparked, fanned, and inflamed by the ownership class to keep the proles fighting amongst themselves rather than united against it, Americans are united in many of their desires. As W.J. Astore puts it,

Supposedly, America is deeply divided, and I’m not denying there are divisions. But when you ask Americans what they want, what’s surprising is how united we are, irrespective of party differences. For example, Americans favor a $15 minimum wage. We favor single-payer health care. We favor campaign finance reform that gets big money donors and corporations out of government. Yet our government, which is bought by those same donors, refuses to give Americans what we want. Division is what they give us instead, and even then it’s often a sham form of division.

I observe that $15 is only a starting point, not an endpoint, and that healthcare in a wealthy, modern democratic country is regarded (by those outside the U.S. — we’re the outliers) as a fundamental human right. Add the widely shared (perhaps banal) desire to live peacefully, prosperously, and freely (especially in the post-Enlightenment West) and contrast with what has been delivered — ongoing war and strife, massive diversion of resources to provide bogus security and safety from the very wars and strife initiated by the American Empire, and total surveillance of the citizenry under the false promise of safety — makes it fundamentally clear that Americans are being told emphatically, “No! You can’t have what you want.” Yet the ownership class gets what it wants, which appears to be uniformly MOAR!

When even modest pushback appears, the ownership class, through its bought-and-paid-for functionaries in academe, journalism, politics, and elsewhere, steps up its continuous narrative management to flummox and destabilize even the most sane thought and analysis. The deluge, barrage, and bombardment is so broad and noisome (as with all the irrationally shifting policy, opinion, and received wisdom regarding the pandemic) that few can keep their wits about them. I’m unsure how well I’ve succeeded, but at the very least, I don’t allow others do my thinking for me; I evaluate and synthesize the tornado of information best I can.

Only a couple executive administrations ago, the Republican Party, because of its assiduous opposition to anything and everything remotely popular or progressive while out of power, earned the sobriquet The Party of No! The Democratic Party took the lesson, and when it was Democrats’ turn to be out of power, made turnabout fair play under the banner The Resistance (no relation to the French Resistance (Fr: La Résistance)). No doubt many earnest progressives and die-hard Democrats consider themselves members of The Resistance. However, the real action is with Democratic political leadership, which clearly adopted the Politics of No! in denying American citizens the same things Republicans deny. Is it fair to conclude (read: not conspiratorial) that the two major U.S. political parties, at the behest of their owners, are united against the people?

Deploying Stupidity

Supporting the Vietnam war was dumb. Supporting the Iraq invasion after being lied
to about Vietnam was an order of magnitude dumber. Supporting any US war agendas
after being lied to about Iraq is an order of magnitude even dumber than that.
—Caitlin Johnstone

Upon rereading, and with the advantage of modest hindsight, I think I got it exactly correct in this 5-year-old blog post. Even the two brief comments are correct. More specifically, the United States is understood to be the sole remaining military superpower following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Never mind that numerous countries count themselves members of the nuclear club (cue Groucho Marx joke) and thus possess sufficient power to destroy the world. Never mind that the U.S. failed to win the Korean War or the Vietnam War (the two major U.S. military involvements post-WWII), or in fact any of numerous 21st-century wars (undeclared, de facto, continuing). Never mind that the U.S. has been successful at multiple smaller regime-change actions, often on the back of a civil war instigated by the U.S. and purposefully designed to install a puppet leader. And never mind that the capitalist competition for control of economic resources and capture of perpetual growth is being won handily by China. Nope, the U.S. is no longer the only superpower but is instead busy transitioning from superpower (military and economic) to failed state. Or in the language of that old blog post, the U.S. is now a geopolitical Strong/Stupid hybrid but is actively deploying stupidity in a feverish play to be merely Stupid. The weirdest aspect, perhaps, is that it’s being done right in front of god and everybody, yet few bother to take notice.

It’s no stretch to assert that in the U.S. in particular (but also true of nearly every regime across the world), we’re piling stupidity upon stupidity. If I were inclined to go full conspiracy like some QAnon fool, I’d have to say that the power elite have adopted a deep, 3D-chess strategy that means one of two possible things using the Rock-Paper-Scissors power dynamic algorithm (which, unlike tic-tac-toe, produces a winner) modified and inverted to Strong-Stupid-Smart: it’s either (1) very Smart of them to appear so Stupid, granting victory (against all appearances) over Strong (but only Strong in a three-legged contest), or (2) they reject the algorithm entirely in the misguided belief that nuthin’ beats stoopid. That second option would indeed be entirely consistent with Stupid.

Take for instance three looming issues: the pandemic (and its follow-on effects), the U.S. presidential election (ugh, sorry, it’s unavoidable), and climate change. They loom threateningly despite being well underway already. But with each, we’ve acted and behaved very stupidly, stunningly so I would argue, boxing ourselves in and doing worse damage over time than if we had taken proper steps early on. But as suggested in a previous blog post, the truth is that decision-makers haven’t really even tried to address these issues with the purpose of solving, resolving, winning, remedying, or ameliorating entirely predictable outcomes. Rather, issues are being either swept under the rug (ignored with the futile hope that they will go away or resolve themselves on their own) or displaced in time for someone else to handle. This second option occurs quite a lot, which is also known as kicking the can down the road or stealing from the future (as with sovereign debt). What happens when there’s no more future (for humans and their institutions, anyway) because it’s been squandered in the present? You already know the answer(s) to that question.

All Cats are Girls, All Dogs are Boys (redux)

Years ago, I broke with my usual themes and styles to offer a listicle, mostly inanities and hyper-irony, which began as follows:

• All cats are girls, all dogs are boys. Everyone knows this from childhood. Additional discussion is moot.

I’m not a good writer of aphorisms, so I haven’t returned to that brief experiment until now. For inspiration, I’m quoting numerous examples by Caitlin Johnstone, who is a frequent and fantastic writer of aphorisms under the repeated subtitle “Notes from the Edge of the Narrative Matrix.” The long-running theme we share is that we are all being programmed and propagandized continuously through the shaping of narrative by folks with obvious agendas. Johnstone believes we are collectively waking up — as if from a nightmare — to the dark realization that our minds have been colonized (my term) and that a worldwide transformation of consciousness is currently taking place. I don’t quite see it yet, but I’m sympathetic to the possibility that, as in the famous rant from the 1976 movie Network, “I’m as mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore!”

• The essential character relationship of the 1% to the rest of us is predator/prey or strong/weak. Strong predators behave precisely as one would expect.
• Trying to restore peace using the same violent police force whose violence disrupted the peace in the first place is a bit like trying to put out a fire using lighter fluid. The same lighter fluid that was used to start it. (Johnstone)
• Rioting and looting are not constructive responses to society’s ills, but then, neither have various nonviolent forms of protest and dissent been effective at petitioning government for redress of grievance. Packing up and going home merely cedes the field of play to bad actors already stuffing everyone down.
• Believing cold war is no big deal because nuclear war hasn’t happened yet is the same as believing your game of Russian roulette is safe because the gun hasn’t gone off yet. (Johnstone)
• According to the movies, realizing one’s potential is achieved by developing punching/fighting/domination skills sufficient to force your will upon others, which is true for criminals, saints (good guys), men, and women alike.
• Ecocide will be a problem as long as ecocide remains profitable. War will be a problem as long as war remains profitable. Politicians will cater to profit-seeking sociopaths as long as profit determines what drives human behavior. (Johnstone)
• The most influential news outlets in the western world uncritically parrot whatever they’re told to say by the most powerful and depraved intelligence agencies on the planet, then tell you that Russia and China are bad because they have state media. (Johnstone)
• Wanting Biden because he’s not Trump is the same as wanting cancer because it’s not heart disease. (Johnstone)
• Capitalism will let you starve to death while sitting meters away from food. (Johnstone)

I wish more of them were my own, but the opportunity to choose some of Johnstone’s best was too good to pass up.

The Disorientation Protocol

I watched a documentary on Netflix called Jim & Andy (2017) that provides a glimpse behind the scenes of the making of Man on the Moon (1999) where Jim Carrey portrays Andy Kaufman. It’s a familiar story of art imitating life (or is it life imitating art?) as Carrey goes method and essentially channels Kaufman and Kaufman’s alter ego Tony Clifton. A whole gaggle of actors played earlier incarnations of themselves in Man on the Moon and appeared as themselves (without artifice) in Jim & Andy, adding another weird dimension to the goings on. Actors losing themselves in roles and undermining their sense of self is hardly novel. Regular people lose themselves in their jobs, hobbies, media hype, glare of celebrity, etc. all the time. From an only slightly broader perspective, we’re all merely actors playing roles, shifting subtly or dramatically based on context. Shakespeare observed it centuries ago. However, the documentary points to a deeper sense of unreality precisely because Kaufman’s principal shtick was to push discomfiting jokes/performances beyond the breaking point, never dropping the act to let his audience in on the joke or provide closure. It’s a manifestation of what I call the Disorientation Protocol.

What Fresh New Hell?

As time wears on and I add years to this mostly ignored blog, I keep running across ideas expressed herein, sometimes long ago, recapitulated in remarks and comments elsewhere. Absolutely disparate people can develop the same ideas independently, so I’m not claiming that my ideas are stolen. Maybe I’m merely in touch with the Zeitgeist and express it here only then to see or hear it again someplace else. I can’t judge objectively.

The latest coincidence is the growing dread with which I wake up every day, wondering what fresh new hell awaits with the morning news. The times in which we live are both an extension of our received culture and yet unprecedented in their novelty. Not only are there many more people in existence than 100 years ago and thus radical opinions and events occurring with extraordinary frequency, the speed of transmission is also faster than in the past. Indeed, the rush to publication has many news organs reporting before any solid information is available. The first instance of blanket crisis coverage I remember was the Challenger Disaster in 1986. It’s unknown to me how quickly news of various U.S. political assassinations in the 1960s spread, but I suspect reporting took more time than today and imparted to those events gravity and composure. Today is more like a renewed Wild West where anything goes, which has been the preferred characterization of the Internet since its creation. We’ll see if the recent vote to remove Net Neutrality has the effect of restraining things. I suspect that particular move is more about a money grab (selling premium open access vs. basic limited access) than thought control, but I can only guess as to true motivations.

I happened to be traveling when the news broke of a mass shooting in Las Vegas. Happily, what news I got was delayed until actual news-gathering had already sorted basic fact from confabulation. Paradoxically, after the first wave of “what the hell just happened?” there formed a second wave of “here’s what happened,” and later a third wave of “what the hell really happened?” appeared as some rather creative interpretations were offered up for consideration. That third wave is by now quite familiar to everyone as the conspiracy wave, and surfing it feels inevitable because the second wave is often so starkly unbelievable. Various websites and shows such as snopes.com, metabunk.org, MythBusters, and Penn & Teller: Bullshit! (probably others, too) presume to settle debates. While I’m inclined to believe scientific and documentary evidence, mere argument often fails to convince me, which is troubling, to say the least.

Fending off all the mis- and disinformation, or separating signal from noise, is a full-time job if one is willing to undertake it. That used to be the mandate of the journalistic news media, at least in principle. Lots of failures on that account stack up throughout history. However, since we’re in the midst of a cultural phase dominated by competing claims to authority and the public’s retreat into ideation, the substitute worlds of extended and virtual reality become attractive alternatives to the fresh new hell we now face every morning. Tune in and check in might be what we think we’re doing, but more accurately, we tune out and check out of responsible engagement with the real world. That’s the domain of incessantly chipper morning TV shows. Moreover, we like to believe in the mythical stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, such as, for example, how privacy doesn’t matter, or that the U.S. is a free, democratic, liberal beacon of hope, or that economic value inheres in made-up currencies. It’s a battle for your attention and subscription in the marketplace of ideas. Caveat emptor.

Sandwich-Board Prophets

Commentary on the previous post poses a challenging question: having perceived that civilization is set on a collision course with reality, what is being done to address that existential problem? More pointedly, what are you doing? Most rubes seem to believe that we can technofix the problem, namely, alter course and set off in a better, even utopian direction filled with electronic gadgetry (e.g., the Internet of things), death-defying medical technologies (as though that goal were even remotely desirable), and an endless supply of entertainments and ephemera curated by media shilling happy visions of the future (in high contrast with actual deprivation and suffering). Realists may appreciate that our charted course can’t be altered anymore considering the size and inertia of the leviathan industrial civilization has become. Figuratively, we’re aboard the RMS Titanic, full steam ahead, killer iceberg(s) looming in the darkness. The only option is to see our current path through to its destination conclusion. Maybe there’s a middle ground between, where a hard reset foils our fantasies but at least allows (some of) us to continue living on the surface of Planet Earth.

Problem is, the gargantuan, soul-destroying realization of near-term extinction has the potential to radicalize even well-balanced people, and the question “what are you doing?” is tantamount to an accusation that you’re not doing enough because, after all, nothing will ever be enough. We’ve been warned taught repeatedly to eat right, brush our teeth, get some exercise, and be humble. Yet those simple requisites for a happy, healthy life are frequently ignored. How likely is it that we will then heed the dire message that everything we know will soon be swept away?

The mythological character Cassandra, who prophesied doom, was cursed to never be believed, as was Chicken Little. The fabulous Boy Who Cried Wolf (from Aesop’s Fables) was cursed with bad timing. Sandwich-board prophets, typically hirsute Jesus freaks with some version of the message “Doom is nigh!” inscribed on the boards, are a cliché almost always now understood as set-ups for some sort of joke.

It’s an especially sick joke when the unheeded message proves to be true. If one is truly radicalized, then self-immolation on the sidewalk in front of the White House may be one measure of commitment, but the irony is that no one takes such behavior seriously except as an indication of how unhinged the prophet of doom has gotten (suggesting a different sort of commitment). Yet that’s where we’ve arrived in the 21st century. Left/right, blue/red factions have abandoned the centrist middle ground and moved conspicuously toward the radical fringes in what’s being called extreme social fragmentation. On some analyses, the rising blood tide of terrorists and mass murders are examples of an inchoate protest against the very nature of existence, a complete ontological rejection. When the ostensible purpose of, say, the Las Vegas shooter, is to take out as many people as possible, rejecting other potential sites as not promising enough for high body counts, it may not register in the public mind as a cry in the wilderness, an extreme statement that modern life is no longer worth living, but the action speaks for itself even in the absence of a formal manifesto articulating a collapsed philosophy.

In such a light, the sandwich-board prophet, by eschewing violence and hysteria, may actually be performing a modest ministerial service. Wake up and recognize that all living things must eventually die and that our time is short. Cherish what you have, be among those you love and who love you, and brace yourself.

Balancing Act

I often review my past posts when one receives a reader’s attention, sometimes adding tags and fixing typos, grammar, and broken links. One on my greatest hits (based on voting, not traffic) is Low Points in Education. It was among the first to tackle what I have since called our epistemological crisis, though I didn’t begin to use the epistemology tag until later. The crisis has caught up with a vengeance, though I can’t claim I’m the first to observe the problem. That dubious honor probably goes to Stephen Colbert, who coined the word truthiness in 2005. Now that alternative facts and fake news have entered the lingo as well (gaslighting has been revived), everyone has jumped on the bandwagon questioning the truthfulness or falsity behind anything coughed up in our media-saturated information environment. But as suggested in the first item discussed in Low Points in Education, what’s so important about truth?

It would be obvious and easy yet futile to argue in favor of high-fidelity appreciation of the world, even if only within the surprisingly narrow limits of human perception, cognition, and memory (all interrelated). Numerous fields of endeavor rely upon consensus reality derived from objectivity, measurement, reason, logic, and, dare I say it, facticity. Regrettably, human cognition doesn’t adhere any too closely to those ideals except when trained to value them. Well-educated folks have better acquaintance with such habits of mind; folks with formidable native intelligence can develop true authority, too. For the masses, however, those attributes are elusive, even for those who have partied through earned college degrees. Ironically worse, perhaps, are specialists, experts, and overly analytical intellectuals who exhibit what the French call a déformation professionelle. Politicians, pundits, and journalists are chief among the deformed and distorted. Mounting challenges to establishing truth now destabilize even mundane matters of fact, and it doesn’t help that myriad high-profile provocateurs (including the Commander in Chief, to whom I will henceforth refer only as “45”) are constantly throwing out bones for journalists to chase like so many unnourishing rubber chew toys.

Let me suggest, then, that human cognition, or more generally the mind, is an ongoing balancing act, making adjustments to stay upright and sane. Like the routine balance one keeps during locomotion, shifting weight side to side continuously, falling a bit only to catch oneself, difficulty is not especially high. But with the foundation below one’s feet shaking furiously, so to speak, legs get wobbly and many end up (figuratively at least) ass over teakettle. Further, the mind is highly situational, contingent, and improvisational and is prone to notoriously faulty perception even before one gets to marketing, spin, and arrant lies promulgated by those intent on coopting or directing one’s thinking. Simply put, we’re not particularly inclined toward accuracy but instead operate within a wide margin of error. Accordingly, we’re quite strong at adapting to ever-changing circumstance.

That strength turns out to be our downfall. Indeed, rootless adjustment to changing narrative is now so grave that basic errors of attribution — which entities said and did what — make it impossible to distinguish allies from adversaries reliably. (Orwell captured this with his line from the novel 1984, “Oceania was at war with Eurasia; therefore Oceania had always been at war with Eurasia.) Thus, on the back of a brazen propaganda campaign following 9/11, Iraq morphed from U.S. client state to rogue state demanding preemptive war. (Admittedly, the U.S. State Department had already lost control of its puppet despot, who in a foolish act of naked aggression tried to annex Kuwait, but that was a brief, earlier war quite unlike the undeclared one in which the U.S. has been mired for 16 years.) Even though Bush Administration lies have been unmasked and dispelled, many Americans continue to believe (incorrectly) that Iraq possessed WMDs and posed an existential threat to the U.S. The same type of confusion is arguably at work with respect to China, Russia, and Israel, which are mixed up in longstanding conflicts having significant U.S. involvement and provocation. Naturally, the default villain is always Them, never Us.

So we totter from moment to moment, reeling drunkenly from one breathtaking disclosure to the next, and are forced to reorient continuously in response to whatever the latest spin and spew happen to be. Some institutions retain the false sheen of respectability and authority, but for the most part, individuals are free to cherry-pick information and assemble their own truths, indulging along the way in conspiracy and muddle-headedness until at last almost no one can be reached anymore by logic and reason. This is our post-Postmodern world.

Labor Without Laborers

This past Thursday was an occasion of protest for many immigrant laborers who did not show up to work. Presumably, this action was in response to recent executive attacks on immigrants and hoped to demonstrate how businesses would suffer without immigrant labor doing jobs Americans frequently do not want. Tensions between the ownership and laboring classes have a long, tawdry history I cannot begin to summarize. As with other contextual failures, I daresay the general public believes incorrectly that such conflicts date from the 19th century when formal sociopolitical theories like Marxism were published, which intersect heavily with labor economics. An only slightly better understanding is that the labor movement commenced in the United Kingdom some fifty years after the Industrial Revolution began, such as with the Luddites. I pause to remind that the most basic, enduring, and abhorrent labor relationship, extending back millennia, is slavery, which ended in the U.S. only 152 years ago but continues even today in slightly revised forms around the globe.

Thursday’s work stoppage was a faint echo of general strikes and unionism from the middle of the 20th century. Gains in wages and benefits, working conditions, and negotiating position transferred some power from owners to laborers during that period, but today, laborers must sense they are back on their heels, defending conditions fought for by their grandparents but ultimately losing considerable ground. Of course, I’m sympathetic to labor, considering I’m not in the ownership class. (It’s all about perspective.) I must also admit, however, to once quitting a job after only one day that was simply too, well, laborious. I had that option at the time, though it ultimately led nearly to bankruptcy for me — a life lesson that continues to inform my attitudes. As I survey the scene today, however, I suspect many laborers — immigrants and native-born Americans alike — have the unenviable choice of accepting difficult, strenuous labor for low pay or being unemployed. Gradual reduction of demand for labor has two main causes: globalization and automation.

Barstool Wisdom (redux)

The U.S. election has come and gone. Our long national nightmare is finally over; another one is set to begin after a brief hiatus. (I’m not talking about Decision 2020, though that spectre has already reared its ugly head.) Although many were completely surprised by the result of the presidential race in particular, having placed their trust in polls, statistical models, and punditry to project a winner (who then lost), my previous post should indicate that I’m not too surprised. Michael Moore did much better taking the temperature of the room (more accurately, the nation) than all the other pundits, and even if the result had differed, the underlying sentiments remain. It’s fair to say, I think, that people voted with their guts more than their heads, meaning they again voted their fears, hates, and above all, for revolution change. No matter that the change in store for us will very likely be destructive and against self-interest. Truth is, it would have had to end with destruction with any of the candidates on the ballot.

Given the result, my mind wandered to Hillary Clinton’s book It Takes a Village, probably because we, the citizens of the Unites States of America, have effectively elected the village idiot to the nation’s highest office. Slicing and dicing the voting tallies between the popular vote, electoral votes, and states and counties carried will no doubt be done to death. Paths to victory and defeat will be offered with the handsome benefit of hindsight. Little of that matters, really, when one considers lessons never learned despite ample opportunity. For me, the most basic lesson is that for any nation of people, leaders must serve the interests of the widest constituency, not those of a narrow class of oligarchs and plutocrats. Donald Trump addressed the people far more successfully than did Hillary Clinton (with her polished political doubletalk) and appealed directly to their interests, however base and misguided.

My previous post called Barstool Wisdom contained this apt quote from The Brothers Karamazov by Dostoevsky:

The more stupid one is, the closer one is to reality. The more stupid one is, the clearer one is. Stupidity is brief and artless, while intelligence squirms and hides itself.

We have already seen that our president-elect has a knack for stating obvious truths no one else dares utter aloud. His clarity in that regard, though coarse, contrasts completely with Hillary’s squirmy evasions. Indeed, her high-handed approach to governance, more comfortable in the shadows, bears a remarkable resemblance to Richard Nixon, who also failed to convince the public that he was not a crook. My suspicion is that as Donald Trump gets better acquainted with statecraft, he will also learn obfuscation and secrecy. Some small measure of that is probably good, actually, though Americans are pining for greater transparency, one of the contemporary buzzwords thrown around recklessly by those with no real interest in it. My greater worry is that through sheer stupidity and bullheadedness, other obvious truths, such as commission of war crimes and limits of various sorts (ecological, energetic, financial, and psychological), will go unheeded. No amount of barstool wisdom can overcome those.