Flawed models of society... (Some kinda work). And why our worst foe is certainty.

I plan to be more general and deal with bigger-broader issues this time since, well, we have to pause now and then. Take a breath, saying (about today's political ructions) "this, too, shall pass."

Still, before diving into "social and political "charts" and the theory of totalitarianism, I will throw out there two vital and timely news items. First...

You must read the text of Sen. Jeff Flake’s speech, declaring that he can no longer stand by, while American discourse, politics, and even civil peace are wrecked by “reckless provocations, most often for the pettiest and most personal reasons, reasons having nothing whatsoever to do with the fortunes of the people that we have been elected to serve."

Another excerpt: “Leadership lives by the American creed, “E pluribus unum.” From many one. American leadership looks to the world and just as Lincoln did, sees the family of man. Humanity is not a zero sum game. When we have been at our most prosperous, we have been at our most principled, and when we do well, the rest of the world does well.”

The Arizona Republican does a humble mea culpa about having been too quiet in the era that led up to Donald Trump, and he implicitly calls Trump a devastating symptom of a deeper sickness in his own party. 

So, then… might this lead to what the Republic desperately needs? A critical mass of grownups who will disown the whole Murdoch-owned maelstrom of lies and cheaters, coalescing instead to form a Party of Sane American Conservatives, or PASAC? Elsewhere I show that this sort of thing sis happen in the past. See "The Miracle of 1947."

Alas, we have been waiting for such a gathering of sane conservatives for at least a decade. If it were going to happen, would they not have saved us from the nation-rape of the recent Tax Bill?

See Also: Why Military Chiefs Are Condemning White Supremacy.  

Seriously, the GOP political caste is cowardly. But if I am wrong about the Officer Corps, then we are well and simply screwed. 

If I am right, then we have powerful allies who want the American Republic and the Great Enlightenment Experiment to succeed. And they are caught in a terrible, terrible bind. God bless em.

Do your part. See how to take advantage of the revulsion-momentum and help reduce the Hannity-Fox ad revenue.

== “Charting” politics? ==

I have long inveighed against the absurdly lobotomizing so-called “left-right political axis,” which crams all issues together along a scale that no one can even properly define.  Others have agreed that one-dimensional politics is unworthy of a sapient people. My recently departed colleague, Jerry Pournelle, was among those who have tried to offer an improved landscape.

One problem with most such models – like the "Nolan Chart" often handed out at Libertarian gatherings – is that the two axes all too often overlap, meaning that there will be a tendency for persons traveling along one coordinate to automatically travel along the other. In other words, using the terminology of science, the variables are neither independent nor orthogonal. Also, many of these mental calisthenics have been created with a specific political message in mind. In other words, they suffer from tendentiousness, a gross logical sin that occurs when the arguer claims to be seeking a neutral process, but is driven all along to reach a foregone conclusion.

Their very purpose is not illuminating but polemical, to lure others who are viewing the chart to drift toward the corner that the chart-makers want you to go. Or - in Jerry's case - to a definition of "moderate centrist" that happened to be his view on everything. Jerry's 2-D chart is better than the tendentious "Nolan Chart," though alas, it is still non-orthogonal and "rationality" is a judgment call. e.g. I deem Randians to be spectacularly irrational. 

My own 2D (and 3D!) charts use measurable metrics that are truly orthogonal and the resulting landscape is not tendentious... not designed to lead you to my favored direction.They also happen to eviscerate the standard assumptions that you are used to. So be prepared to re-evaluate!

As happens even more thoroughly, if you dare to try on the socratic probings of my Questionnaire on Ideology, which speaks to none of today's hot-button issues. None at all. Still, you'll go huh!

== Stuck in a rut ==

Let me illustrate the stupidity of our current “spectrum” simply: Many of our supposed "left-right" rigor mortises collapse if you ask the right questions. e.g. Competition is clearly a mighty generative force and "right" people claim they are defending it from being stifled by lefty meddlings.  

But Adam Smith, Hayek and common sense show that competition is best when regulated to maximize the number of confident, skilled and ready participants!  Well, nothing ever expanded that pool of competitors more than liberal interventions in mass health, education, infrastructure and rights.

And keeping things flat-fair. After 6000 years, we know that brief eras of open-fair competition are always ruined by oligarchic cheaters. Regulations (e.g. anti-trust) that keep competitive markets flat-open-competitive are not "stifling."  They ensure a fair game, as do regulations and referees in sports.

For these two reasons, it is insane to call liberals "leftists" who want socialism, just because they want some socialist interventions that increase the number of skilled participants and regulations to keep competition fair.  In fact it is the exact opposite!  Liberals are the only friends that a fair and open market system have! If he were alive today, Adam Smith would be a Democrat. And the folks at Evonomics show this by citing Smith more than anybody. 

In contrast, most "libertarians" today seldom mention or have read Smith, and the C-Word... "competition" ... is never mentioned at all, amid the idolatry of unlimited aristocratic property.

Those five paragraphs, alone, show how insane "left-right" is, since it does not even mean what it claims to mean in the narrow realm of market economics! Not while the "right" is the chief force destroying flat-fair competition today.

== A flawed but improvable system ==

Lawrence Lessig is at it again.  Last year he tried to get on the Democratic Presidential debates — not aiming to win nomination, but to elevate the conversation, trying to discuss corruption and the poisonous effects of Big Money in politics. Among the many huge mistakes made by Democrats was squelching such participation in the first few debates. They missed an opportunity to draw in viewers and make themselves decisively the party of thoughtfulness, by bringing in diverse voices, at least for a while.

(I was so disappointed Jerry Brown didn’t run… not to win office, but to bring his stunning mind onto that stage and shattering all the standard models.)

Regarding Lessig’s anti-corruption campaign - let’s be clear: Republican Congresses are not only the laziest in the history of the Republic - holding the fewest hearings, votes or days in session and passing almost no bills, including none of their proclaimed priorities… but they are also the most corrupt, spending nearly all of their time doing “fund-raisers.” 

Democrats do some of that, too! But much less and (crucially) most of them would vote for Lessig’s reforms.

Now, while continuing his efforts on campaign funding. Larry is pushing another endeavor, filing a lawsuit against a major distortion of our political process, the “Winner Takes All” apportionment of electors in 48 states, in presidential elections.

The Electoral College itself is in the Constitution. But “Winner Takes All” is not! It is a corruption instituted by party hacks - like gerrymandering - to cheat American voters.

I know Lawrence Lessig has seen my essay on this matter, first circulated in the last century and posted on my site in 2008.  

To be clear, this is no panacea. Ending “Winner Takes All” will generally ensure that the Electoral College is apportioned closer to the popular vote… but there is an inherent advantage to the GOP in the plethora of low population red states, each of which has two senators and hence two bonus electors. (We need two Dakotas? Seriously? Read up on how that came about.)

Still, fairness will improve some if we do this simple reform. And candidates will pay attention to more than just a few swing states. So I urge your support.  Here’s the fundraiser for Larry’s effort. Do sign up! Though also circulate my 2008 link, since… well… fair is fair.

== Monstrous Certainty ==

Let me finish with a riff on the nature and roots of despotism.

One of the more important unsung corners of our renaissance is the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College, where director Roger Berkowitz runs the “Amor Mundi” (love of the world) Newsletter, offering many off-angle modern insights.  Here he discusses the way that many on the far-left have chosen to veer their passionate interest away from traditional topics like class warfare and economics, over to critiquing the way the masses have been hypnotized into false cultural beliefs.  

'This “cultural left” has specialized in “what they call the ‘politics of difference’ or ‘of identity’ or ‘of recognition.’ This cultural Left thinks more about stigma than about money, more about deep and hidden psychosexual motivations than about shallow and evident greed.” Losing interest in labor unions and laborers, the “academic, cultural Left” this wing argues that “the system, and not just the laws, must be changed.” And by “system” they mean the programming that combines racism and classism with the memic repression cult called science.'

Here’s a link to Roger’s excellent and informative missive. And before I continue, let me make clear that this critique is qualitative.  In any quantitative sense, this wing of “leftism” is minuscule, compared to the mad cults that infest and have hijacked America’s currently jabbering-loony right.   Shills like Sean Hannity point at far-lefty shriekers and claim “See? All liberals are like that!” Um, not. In fact, we are able to critique our own fanatics. You confederates cannot. 

Alas, the decline in discourse in American life is, I believe, rooted in something biochemical. The bilious rage of extreme partisans - of all stripes - has a component that's entirely orthogonal to the actual merits or faults of the cause, itself.  That driver is the addictive high of self-righteous indignation.

I've been writing and speaking about this for a long time... once even at the National Institutes for Drugs and Addiction. Barbara Oakley included my piece in her terrific tome PATHOLOGICAL ALTRUISM.

The word "addiction" should be expanded to include so many of the fine and good things that we do, that are reinforced by chemical feedback loops in the brain -- e.g. love of music, or skill, or our kids.  Sanctimony is a mental state that - like many religious experiences - can tap into these reinforcement systems, triggering release of endorphins and dopamine and getting the user to repeatedly return for another hit, another high.

One understands why indignation can do this. Across our evolution, there have been a myriad times when some added force-of-will made the difference between success and failure. Even life or death. Moreover, there are many things - like injustice - that are worthy of volcanic ire! In no way am I implying that liberal activists should back off from their causes.

Still, we have all seen how the passionate can take over advocacy groups and causes. And then there comes a race-to-the-top in competitions to show who is most passionate -- comparison contests that leave many movements under command of the angriest, the most-intense, those least likely to accept partial allies, those least able to negotiate half-step-forward, pragmatic compromises.

== Certainty is the core enemy of our renaissance ==

Of course this flame is stoked by many Hollywood-modern memes, like the relentless lesson of Suspicion of Authority (SoA) that's preached in every film and in so many songs. So many of the passionate proclaim (in effect) "I invented indignation at injustice and suspicion of authority!"  

No, in fact you suckled these lessons from the very society that you've been trained to despise.

Where this relates to the Berkowitz missive is the fact that polemical passions are endangered, whenever they focus on realms that might be amenable to factual analysis, wherein even being right is likely to lead to some tepid, 90% validation, calling for at-least a little compromise and pragmatic negotiation. This quandary means the farthest left can no longer focus on economics or matters of law or governance -- these call for focus on hard and gritty reality, wherein the detested pragmatists can trot out their hated and feared weapon of oppression -- facts.

The postmodernists' war against fact-users - especially science - is thus rooted in exactly the same elements of human nature as the War on Facts waged by the Mad Right. And while of course these two polemical wings are very different -- blatantly the entire U.S. right is far larger and more dangerous for now -- it is not untoward for reasonable people to bear in mind that there are more dimensions here, than just the hoary-lobotomizing "left-right axis."

It was not any calmly-parsed argument of Marxism that made Lenin and Stalin willing mass murderers. It was the thing that Jacob Bronowski denounced in the very last episode of his fantastically wonderful "The Ascent of Man."

Monstrously passionate certainty.

If you binge on anything this year.... binge on that show, which set the template for COSMOS and so many others. 

(And compensate for the 1970s less-PC language; it's worth it.)


== And finally, here is my incantation ==

Try repeating it, aloud.

I am a member of a civilization

It’s good that we have a rambunctious society, filled with opinionated individualists. Serenity is nice, but serenity alone never brought progress. Hermits don’t solve problems. The adversarial process helps us to improve as individuals and as a culture. 

Criticism is the only known antidote to error — 
Elites shunned it and spread ruin across history. We do each other a favor (though not always appreciated) by helping find each others’ mistakes.

And yet — we’d all be happier, better off and more resilient if each of us were to now and then say:

“I am a member of a civilization.” (IAAMOAC)

Step back from anger. Study how awful our ancestors had it, yet they struggled to get you here. Repay them by appreciating the civilization you inherited.