Politics As Theater For The Traumatized
Dec. 1st, 2020 08:11 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
nemorathwaldPopulations everywhere have a lot in common. You cannot understand the redness of this November's election results unless you understand the parallels between the culture of America and cultures in the Middle East. You cannot force democracy on those who prefer autocracy. Neither can you force democracy on Americans who prefer the American equivalent of the Taliban. The terrorists and autocrats and supporters in other nations, and the terrorists and autocrats and supporters in our culture, differ in wealth, and in the level of their privilege and safety, but otherwise are identical in motivations and style of thinking and feeling.
I have been saying this for years. I was raised among them. This is not new.
The American Confederacy, and the American cultures that descended from it, can be understood in the "moral foundations theory" of Jonathan Haidt. You and I have two moral foundations:
1. fairness.
2. harm-prevention.
The Taliban and the modern Confederates have five moral foundations, which include the first two, plus three more:
3. loyalty to an insider favoritism group, so outsiders are competitors and can get stuffed.
4. respect for a hierarchy which is supposedly a "natural order". Whites over blacks. Men over women. Predatory animals over prey animals (i.e. the philosophy of gun culture and rape culture).
5. sexual and dietary purity.
You probably didn't expect me to tell you that there are ways the Taliban and their American equivalents are in the right about something. And that one thing is: Institutions are increasingly failing to do their jobs due to corruption. Where you and I might insist on reforming institutions, they abandon them, and turn to close bonds, like family (nepotism) and their co-religionists. There is a level of "belief" at which they don't actually "believe" the weird religious doctrines and conspiracy theories they spout. They say something outrageous as a social signal of group membership. Not in spite of its obvious falsehood, but because they all know it's false, and it's so outrageous that the outsiders (you and me) would never believe it. I'll say that again-- they don't actually "believe" it in the way you and I understand "belief". The outrageousness is a feature, not a bug.
"Credo quia absurdum." "I believe because it is absurd."
I'll say it again. They know COVID is real, and the earth is round. They know the guy who they "caught changing the votes" was actually a cameraman loading a new data cartridge into his camera. They know votes don't go in cameras, and the people they're saying this to are not fooled either. They deny these things as a unified social group, in order to defy the rigged institutions. And make no mistake-- our institutions are, in point of fact, actually rigged in a way that screwed the middle class. They take it to an insane extreme, knowingly, because the insanity is a feature, not a bug. You and I still believe in institutions like electoral politics and science, as an alternative to making it even worse. Therefore, we would never say these insane things, which is how they detect us vs them. That's how they can find each other. And organize. And mobilize.
I originally posted this to social media, in which A.J. asked this: "Okay Matt, and this is a great piece of writing, but it seems like the only times that we have ever defeated people like that is with violence. Every time I can think of that these people tried to assert power, the only way we prevented them was by killing them. Is that where we are again?" I replied:
The violent examples, like Sherman's march to the sea, or dropping nuclear bombs on Japan, come to mind because they are sensationalistic enough to grab your attention. To the degree that civilizations have defeated them, they have usually done so by sidelining and placating the rank-and-file with symbolic gestures to make them feel validated. Violence was the exception, when the systems of validation broke down.
The rank and file of a fascist quasi-religious movement have a pathetically desperate hole inside, a gaping void that prevents them from ever feeling valid, no matter how much validation is heaped on them. It's identity politics for privileged identities.
Don't mistake the five moral foundations as some kind of Star Trek scenario, where one planet has two species on it. It's not. It's stages of cognitive development that take place during adulthood, and most people never get past adolescence. See "In Over Over Heads: The Mental Demands Of Modern Life" by Robert Kegan. Depending on how it's measured, up to half to two-thirds of adults globally never grow out of stage 3, which is an adolescent cognitive mode. Those are the rank and file. The ideologues are at stage 4. You cannot understand what you are seeing until you realize empty gestures to make their demographic feel valid is all they care about. I mean, making them feel valid for which demographic categories they fall in.
Notice that this administration appealed to its supporters by doing nothing, because stage 3 is exclusively interested in symbolic gestures, not COVID prevention plans, or emissions standards, or mortgage regulation. Look at 2020, and try to tell me with a straight face that boring administration such as disease prevention is inconsequential to our material well-being. Administration is boring, but it's everything. Telling depressed and traumatized people how valid they are is not consequential; it's reality TV. It's low-stakes, but it's high stakes to Trump supporters. Their self-image is based on thin ice, like "being a manly man" or whatnot.
Low stakes are high stakes for them. Depressed, traumatized people, are low-stakes people. Take one look at the cesspool of Tumblr-- where validation is just as fragile as fragile masculinity, if not more so-- and tell me the identity politics left is not just as much of a suicide cult. They're just not having their moment. That was in the 70s during China's Cultural Revolution.
Our material well-being as a society and a species is crucially threatened by depression and trauma. Sacrificing our material best conditions makes our mental health even worse, which makes it even more pressing to sacrifice boring governance to create more empty gestures to validate the traumatized. This repeats in a downward spiral.
About ten years ago, I had a moment where I realized I was a low-stakes person; all I had the ability to do was to have my sympathies in the right place. I realized that's nothing. I didn't know yet about the transition from Kegan stage 3 to 4, but that's what I embarked on.
I recently heard an idea of how to save humanity from extinction, which seemed promising to me. We create a reality TV show which controls social media algorithms to set the correct percentage of exposure and promotion for social media users based on various factors of intersectional disadvantage. Its decisions are non-binding on policy outside of social media, but also controls empty symbolic gestures to make you feel a sense of validation and belonging: who is pictured on currency, on the walls of our courtrooms, the flag, the motto.
The idea is that on election day, you can either vote in the normal election for legislators and the Presidency who need to do the boring task of administrative governance, or you can vote for who will be judges on the social-media-algorithm reality TV show.
They would decide whether JK Rowling will be on the dollar bill, and whether our national motto will be "God Hates Fags", or whether Latinos will be punished in search engine rankings for having voted for Trump in such large numbers. Every suicidal Tumblr or murderous gun cultist, whose pathetically desperate lack of feeling-valid gives them fantasies of incinerating the entire surface of the earth, will tear each other to shreds over it. Meanwhile, the other election will result in boring legislators and executives who are not reality TV stars, to set our climate policy, ban redlining, enforce affirmative action in employment, protect gay marriage and abortion, legalize drugs, institute basic income, and in all other ways ensure the material conditions necessary that no human beings suffer murder/suicide levels of trauma.
Our existing form of democracy can probably only give us one or the other.
I have been saying this for years. I was raised among them. This is not new.
The American Confederacy, and the American cultures that descended from it, can be understood in the "moral foundations theory" of Jonathan Haidt. You and I have two moral foundations:
1. fairness.
2. harm-prevention.
The Taliban and the modern Confederates have five moral foundations, which include the first two, plus three more:
3. loyalty to an insider favoritism group, so outsiders are competitors and can get stuffed.
4. respect for a hierarchy which is supposedly a "natural order". Whites over blacks. Men over women. Predatory animals over prey animals (i.e. the philosophy of gun culture and rape culture).
5. sexual and dietary purity.
You probably didn't expect me to tell you that there are ways the Taliban and their American equivalents are in the right about something. And that one thing is: Institutions are increasingly failing to do their jobs due to corruption. Where you and I might insist on reforming institutions, they abandon them, and turn to close bonds, like family (nepotism) and their co-religionists. There is a level of "belief" at which they don't actually "believe" the weird religious doctrines and conspiracy theories they spout. They say something outrageous as a social signal of group membership. Not in spite of its obvious falsehood, but because they all know it's false, and it's so outrageous that the outsiders (you and me) would never believe it. I'll say that again-- they don't actually "believe" it in the way you and I understand "belief". The outrageousness is a feature, not a bug.
"Credo quia absurdum." "I believe because it is absurd."
I'll say it again. They know COVID is real, and the earth is round. They know the guy who they "caught changing the votes" was actually a cameraman loading a new data cartridge into his camera. They know votes don't go in cameras, and the people they're saying this to are not fooled either. They deny these things as a unified social group, in order to defy the rigged institutions. And make no mistake-- our institutions are, in point of fact, actually rigged in a way that screwed the middle class. They take it to an insane extreme, knowingly, because the insanity is a feature, not a bug. You and I still believe in institutions like electoral politics and science, as an alternative to making it even worse. Therefore, we would never say these insane things, which is how they detect us vs them. That's how they can find each other. And organize. And mobilize.
I originally posted this to social media, in which A.J. asked this: "Okay Matt, and this is a great piece of writing, but it seems like the only times that we have ever defeated people like that is with violence. Every time I can think of that these people tried to assert power, the only way we prevented them was by killing them. Is that where we are again?" I replied:
The violent examples, like Sherman's march to the sea, or dropping nuclear bombs on Japan, come to mind because they are sensationalistic enough to grab your attention. To the degree that civilizations have defeated them, they have usually done so by sidelining and placating the rank-and-file with symbolic gestures to make them feel validated. Violence was the exception, when the systems of validation broke down.
The rank and file of a fascist quasi-religious movement have a pathetically desperate hole inside, a gaping void that prevents them from ever feeling valid, no matter how much validation is heaped on them. It's identity politics for privileged identities.
Don't mistake the five moral foundations as some kind of Star Trek scenario, where one planet has two species on it. It's not. It's stages of cognitive development that take place during adulthood, and most people never get past adolescence. See "In Over Over Heads: The Mental Demands Of Modern Life" by Robert Kegan. Depending on how it's measured, up to half to two-thirds of adults globally never grow out of stage 3, which is an adolescent cognitive mode. Those are the rank and file. The ideologues are at stage 4. You cannot understand what you are seeing until you realize empty gestures to make their demographic feel valid is all they care about. I mean, making them feel valid for which demographic categories they fall in.
Notice that this administration appealed to its supporters by doing nothing, because stage 3 is exclusively interested in symbolic gestures, not COVID prevention plans, or emissions standards, or mortgage regulation. Look at 2020, and try to tell me with a straight face that boring administration such as disease prevention is inconsequential to our material well-being. Administration is boring, but it's everything. Telling depressed and traumatized people how valid they are is not consequential; it's reality TV. It's low-stakes, but it's high stakes to Trump supporters. Their self-image is based on thin ice, like "being a manly man" or whatnot.
Low stakes are high stakes for them. Depressed, traumatized people, are low-stakes people. Take one look at the cesspool of Tumblr-- where validation is just as fragile as fragile masculinity, if not more so-- and tell me the identity politics left is not just as much of a suicide cult. They're just not having their moment. That was in the 70s during China's Cultural Revolution.
Our material well-being as a society and a species is crucially threatened by depression and trauma. Sacrificing our material best conditions makes our mental health even worse, which makes it even more pressing to sacrifice boring governance to create more empty gestures to validate the traumatized. This repeats in a downward spiral.
About ten years ago, I had a moment where I realized I was a low-stakes person; all I had the ability to do was to have my sympathies in the right place. I realized that's nothing. I didn't know yet about the transition from Kegan stage 3 to 4, but that's what I embarked on.
I recently heard an idea of how to save humanity from extinction, which seemed promising to me. We create a reality TV show which controls social media algorithms to set the correct percentage of exposure and promotion for social media users based on various factors of intersectional disadvantage. Its decisions are non-binding on policy outside of social media, but also controls empty symbolic gestures to make you feel a sense of validation and belonging: who is pictured on currency, on the walls of our courtrooms, the flag, the motto.
The idea is that on election day, you can either vote in the normal election for legislators and the Presidency who need to do the boring task of administrative governance, or you can vote for who will be judges on the social-media-algorithm reality TV show.
They would decide whether JK Rowling will be on the dollar bill, and whether our national motto will be "God Hates Fags", or whether Latinos will be punished in search engine rankings for having voted for Trump in such large numbers. Every suicidal Tumblr or murderous gun cultist, whose pathetically desperate lack of feeling-valid gives them fantasies of incinerating the entire surface of the earth, will tear each other to shreds over it. Meanwhile, the other election will result in boring legislators and executives who are not reality TV stars, to set our climate policy, ban redlining, enforce affirmative action in employment, protect gay marriage and abortion, legalize drugs, institute basic income, and in all other ways ensure the material conditions necessary that no human beings suffer murder/suicide levels of trauma.
Our existing form of democracy can probably only give us one or the other.
no subject
Date: 2020-12-01 11:30 pm (UTC)Slightly off topic: Innovation worship also ignores the value of basic maintenance. I'm not against innovation, but its drama is too often crowding out boring administrative tasks. As a maintainer/administrator, this affects me. Coding at the bleeding edge can be exciting, but I've had to pick up the pieces for way too many cowboys.
Unfortunately (meandering back to topic), the glitzy people sometimes deride the admin/maint tasks as boring, etc., and sometimes they like to pump people up against it, like the reality TV star who railed against the hard, undramatic work of the US-Iran nuclear deal as somehow taking something away from America, and gutted it when he got in. So I'm not sure your dual approach would work, but say on, say on. :-)