Amerika

Have you ever noticed that in democracy, every group must find not something but someone to blame for all that has gone wrong?

The average citizen now believes that he has been manipulated into acting against his interests by wealthy people and politicians. He thinks things were done to him without a vote; he is half-correct, in that law is precedent and the administrative state has taken over most functions of the legislature. But he is not fully correct.

The grim fact of politics is that the voters are in power, and the voters in the stupidity of committees and bureaucracies everywhere adopted means-over-ends (categorical) thinking, which means that they eliminate certain methods, actions, practices, and techniques as a means of avoiding what they fear.

For example, we like to ban violence because violence against the good is abhorrent, but we forget that violence against the bad is purifying, eugenic, and positive. This is what natural selection reminds us: it is not the method that is bad, but the result if it makes us weaker.

People like to think that if they ban guns or discrimination, they will live in Utopia. The UK has shown us that this is not true. Ban guns, and people use bats, knives, and beer bottles until they produce enough of a market for self-defense that black market guns piggyback a ride over the border with the latest shipment of drugs.

Voters filter out anyone who thinks differently. We cannot agree on what our purpose is, therefore we have trouble agreeing on some results being good; as a consequence, we try to ban “bad” acts in the hope that only “good” acts remain, and in the process neuter and domesticate ourselves into cheerful saps like California and Canada.

Like any group of consumers, the voters influence the product. Voters do not want politicians who might do risky stuff like Hitler, and they want to believe that everything is going well, so they filter out anyone but the narcissists. They also want people to connect with emotionally, which means they get only manipulators.

The same is true of celebrities, whether in Hollywood or just hipster influencers on social media. People want good emotions, humor, and tame but novel controversy, so they get the worst people in humanity and give them gobs of money. The voters and customers are their own worst enemy.

Politicians and celebrities make their living by making emotional gestures. They find controversy, fan the flames, then offer feel-good solutions. That these never work is academic; the game involves getting votes, not getting real-world results.

If you wonder why your leaders are such a mixture of incompetence and narcissm, consider this: they specialize in emotional gestures. This means that they cannot think in real-world terms. Therefore, everything they do is bungled and they do not care, since the emotional gestures are what gets them the votes.

This comes up when we see (for example) the press wailing about Trump on Ukraine. The strategy Trump endorsed — “use diplomacy” — is the commonsense and most likely successful method. Your politicians, celebrities, and Right-wing influencers however are too busy using emotional gestures to even consider it.

Considering that Trump armed Ukraine, he is obviously not pro-Russia. However, he also remains critical of forever war in Ukraine. This degree of nuance is beyond the comprehension of the voting audience and journalists.

Populism the movement recognizes that every people has a spirit, but it needs spirit-guides or shamans to channel it because if you throw the decision back to the herd, they avoid the big questions and focus instead on drama and novelty. We have met the problem, and the problem is us.

Tags: democracy, donald j. trump, narcissism, votards