Dave -
First, why Win Bigly
recommend. Adams' book is his attempt to understand, to
deconstruct and analyze, why he "knew" with complete certainty
that Trump would win simply by observing one of his first
political rallies. From where did that conviction arise? Why was
it so absolute? Adams eventually comes to the conclusion that he
was so certain because he non-consciously, at first, recognized
a master communicator. Most of the book is a series of anecdotal
'experiments' that fleshed out and confirmed his instinctual
reaction at the first rally. Ultimately it is a cautionary tale:
if you can't (my own editorial position, if you won't) recognize
why — despite all the negatives — he won, you will not be able
to defeat him next time.
I think I got this point in a post several weeks ago and maybe even
during the election runup/aftermath. It opens as many questions as
it closes however. I didn't engage (much) then, and am perhaps
still (2 years later?) still trying to form the question.
As to the ethics dimension; you
quoted one of Adam's reviewers: "But,
when I was in school, we always discussed ethical
responsibility of the persuader and Adams does not. As
long as Trump was persuasive he was going to win and
that’s what matters." This misconstrues what Adams,
who is definitely NOT a Trump fan or even apologist, is
saying.
I appreciate your own explanation of "Win Bigly". It isn't that
surprising that many of his reviewers would miss his point in favor
of some slightly askew but fundamentally different.
A different
metaphor: I am standing on a hill watching as a Tanker truck
filled with, but leaking, 5,000 gallons of gasoline rushing
headlong towards a family minivan and state the obvious,
"that truck gonna crush that minivan and immolate every
person nearby," and "the truck outweighs the minivan by 5
tons, it has no breaks and the truck driver is slumped over
behind the wheel," and "there is nothing the minivan can do
about it unless it is a Transformer in mufti." I am not
saying that the truck crushing the minivan is "what
matters." I am in fact saying that avoiding the disaster is
what matters and we might have prevented the disaster
if we had recognized and addressed the factors that made it
inevitable instead of wailing and gnashing teeth about the
driver being a drunk sex offender working for a company that
skipped safety inspections ...
Yes to this, I think. Both the point that avoiding the disaster
is at least what is most important in the moment, and some kind of
understanding of how we might have avoided it in the first place
has a less urgent but similar if not equal level of importance.
If we *imagine* that the driver of the 5 ton truck with failed
brakes was slumped over his wheel in a drunken stupor while
reviewing child pornography on his electronic tablet, then I
suppose being incensed about those factors is relevant to the
imminent disaster and possible future replays by trucks from the
same or similar companies with drivers with the same or similar
questionable habits.
I do believe you might be referring to the common tendency to
take the facts of a (dire) situation and apply them immediately
through the lens of your own agenda-structured worldview, letting
the current imminent incident be fodder for promoting some subset
of one's agendas... say like what the White House has been doing
around the southern border "crisis".
Trump's
communication skills ensured that he would win as long as
the opposition focused on the cretin instead of the policy.
I'm surprised you (and Scott Adams?) would call this
"communication skills"... he IS effective at what I would more
aptly call *mis*communication. It is not that he has a
complicated or subtle or exotic idea to share which he then
serializes into a series of communications (talking points in a
speech, or a series of tweets), but rather that he spews something
which may or may not be well crafted, but has a quality which
misdirects the listener in a way that supports is *goals* which
are very likely far from the ones he is stating overtly.
My father used to say, when watching a rodeo clown, "you have to
be really good to be that bad!" referring to the apparent clumsy
buffoonery being played out to distract the recently goaded bull
from the bullriding goader trying to get up off the dirt and back
to the safety of the arena fence.
Second, Individualism. The list recently struggled with the idea
of labeling (categorizing) people and my response to your question
and observations about individualism will echo some of the
labeling conversation.
I will resist being labeled an
"individualist" because every characterization I have seen on
this list is grounded, in one way or another, on "individual
rights." I do not believe that indivdiual's have "rights," even
the inalienable ones, that are not derived entirely from
"individual responsibility."
I think I share some analog to your rights/responsibility duality.
But I also think they are part of a social construct/contract.
"Rights" and "Responsibilities" only make sense to me in the context
of some group. I think in most cultures *many* of the rights and
responsibilities of the "individual" are so implicit in the culture
that we don't think much about them until we get around to conjuring
up a constitutional governance document or facing a judge in a
courtroom.
I am ultimately and absolutely responsible for, not only myself,
but, labeling again, all sentient life. While this seems absurd on
its face, it is directly analogous to the Bodhisattva. (A goal,
not an achievement!)
Why draw the boundary around sentient life? Why not include *all
consciousness* or *all life* and then extend that to *all patterns
of matter and energy*? I'm not asking this challengingly... I'm
suggesting that in the same way expanding past "me" to "my family"
to "my tribe" to "my nation" to "my race" to "my species" to "my
genus" or "family" or "order" or even "kingdom" makes some real
sense.
Corollaries follow: 1) absolute
responsibility also means absolute accountability, including if
a mistake is made ("do the crime, do the time");
I think the question of "accountability" vs vaguely related concepts
like "retribution", "revenge", "rehabilitation", "recovery", even
"return to grace" is important but probably worth deferring here.
2) a critical dimension of
responsibility is acquiring the kind of 'omniscience' that
assures non-attachment;
These are somewhat the opposite of "Willful Ignorance", methinks?
3) every act (behavior) I exhibit
is both informed and intentional;
In some limit, yes. But along a spectrum it would seem. Until
one has achieved said "Omniscient Non-attached Enlightenment"
there is room for weakly informed and therefore mis-applied
intentions. The truck-driver hurtling toward the minivan loaded
with a model family (including a couple of cute dogs) may well
have been swerving to avoid a deer when his poor information lead
him to believe that he could do so without crossing lanes, jumping
a barrier, and flying headlong into said family (in this version,
the truck-driver is neither a sex offender nor substance abuser
and the brakes may or may not work but in either case aren't being
effective enough to avoid the inevitable fiery collision).
And then we have the concept of "willful ignorance". Are you
perhaps suggesting that every act/behaviour has a component of
willful ignorance?
and 4) the necessary assumption
that everyone else is an "individualist" of this same stripe.
We can assume that every one else is the same animal, whether they
know it or not. Harping on my willful ignorance, we could accuse
those who don't know it of extreme ignorance with or without extreme
willfulness.
In the above I am an admitted
fundamentalist fanatic. However, the culture I grew up in, both
secular and religious, strongly echoes these ideas. Growing up,
I was exposed, pretty much constantly, to the "Paradise Built in
Hell" kind of individual, group, and social behavior.
(Obviously, that was not the only thing to which I was exposed.)
I think I was as well, though some reflection exposes various
pockets of hypocrisy that I was unprepared to recognize at the
time. I think something actually *changed* during my generation,
where *willful ignorance* (still harping) replaced engaged
responsibility.
This is a lot of what I am curious about... what that equation
is, how it is balanced and how we got from there to here (or even
whether here and there are anything but the same thing?).
A Geography professor at
Macalester College sparked a lifelong interest in Utopian
communities. In addition to the physical environment,I was
interested in the 'mental' environment of values, principles of
social organization, etc.. I have found a lot of other 'echoes'
of my concept of individualism in those that managed to survive
multiple generations (a rarity).
Intentional Communities (almost by definition Utopian?) have been
around for a very long time and often fail within a generation,
sometimes under the weight of their own extremism, sometimes under
the weight of "backlash" from trying to overconstrain human
instinctual drives (e.g. all the things that the 10 Commandments
feels compelled to be explicit about).
Complexicists might prefer Utopian societies exhibit Utopian
qualities through emergent properties. Jenny Quillien's writeup
on her trip to Bhutan exposed a partial example of this (perhaps).
Hope this was on point to what you
asked about.
I think more to the point is to stimulate some off-axis
discussion which perhaps provides a little parallax relief from
the familiar left/right debates (rants) that we (not just this
group, but society at large) seem to lock into. I sense that
your own experiences and unique path through life leads you to a
similarly unique perspective. The topic of categorization
recently seems mostly to be an issue I think Glen calls
"over-quantization" or perhaps it is "premature-quantization"?
This is also why I harp on breaking the RNC/DNC stranglehold on
election (including debate) processes... I want to be making my
own choices in a much higher-dimensional space... even if I might
be resigned to the hazards of representative gov't (as opposed to
the hazards of a direct democracy).
- Steve
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