It's A Small World After All

Who can you trust, really?

I’ve been thinking about the extent to which it’s actually reasonable to expect political partisanship to be a good proxy for trust. Since there aren’t really Nazis in the streets and I don’t worry about being stabbed on public transportation, this year’s 9/11 week is making me rethink.

The thing that resonates most with me is Scott Adams’ recent admission that he feels sorry for the cancelled people who thought it was safe for them to air their blatantly obnoxious cruelties. They’re so accustomed to living in their bubbles that they had no idea that everyone isn’t as self-righteous and convinced.

What we’re dealing with in America is fear and idolatry. I’ll privately publish that video to subscribers because it’s a more personal look, and I’m rather ambiguous about talking about what I’m feeling in the moment as opposed to what I have thought about for a very long time. What I have thought about for a long time is where I should take a clue and study - how I should curate the information that drives my thinking.

The T50
Longterm readers know I’ve had a category called T50 for the top fifty writers whom I am convinced are so prescient and wise that I want to read everything they write. At the time of this idea’s conception, I was trying to limit my influences and fifty was a reasonably small number for me. A couple years ago I realized that 50 wasn’t enough, because quite frankly as soon as you talk about more than 10 subjects, five in each is good, but really insufficient. And silly me, I’m interested in 20 subjects. The name remains, the limit does not. Why, because Discovery is a hallmark of my ethos, and it made me panic when I couldn’t find anything to fill the Republican shoes I abandoned a long time ago.

Nevertheless, certain things have proven themselves to be true. The Right wants to talk. The Left wants to be hermetic. But I don’t even like that duality. (Stay tuned for a libertarian-ish manifesto). Furthermore I cannot accept from the perspective of my studies, that American conservatism is as practically useful as Buddhism, because so much of it is augmented by, if not rooted in, Christian proselytizing, if not Christianism itself. I consider the late Charlie Kirk a Christianist unwilling to yield to Caesar. Kirk was a young charismatic preacher. If he had a real church, people would have come to him and deservedly so. So while Kirk would certainly be worth hearing out, he’d never replace Karen Armstrong or David Graeber who both have anthropological chops Kirk was too young to have developed. And while Kirk would be on the same side as Ayaan Hirsi Ali, I would never take his word over his on the nature of Islamism.

In short, I cannot afford for my study to take sides in the context of American thought, which is simply abused for political or marketing ends. That would erase Wisdom as a goal and Humility as another hallmark.

Small World
Adams correctly says that the wannabe Nazi punchers are living in an ideological bubble. Yes and they are living in a idea bubble as well. They don’t even recognize that the groupthink to which they wish to adhere limits their thinking entirely. There are philosophical constraints which are inevitable when one accepts certain premises. For example, if you assume that America must be a superpower to be America, then you have to distort and disregard the truth of American history. If you assume that American slavery is the defining characteristic, the sine qua non of black American identity and prospects, then you actually cannot use the term ‘black’, you’re still talking about The Negro Problem.

There is a limit to the ultimate value of folk culture and mythology to scale to a nation with a population this large. One has to ask if one’s culture is truly a culture with multigenerational possibilities, or as Michael Pollan said “If your grandmother wouldn’t immediately recognize it, it’s not food.” Hashtag Watermelon Lean

Since I’m going to use AI in my white collar work, and those of us who don’t will soon be unemployed, I know I’m going to need network analysis to find out where to find a set of enquiring minds and politically neutral experts who are actual human beings.

I will be surfacing the results of that here, as I get a handle on things - things being my 10,000 essays, and all of my Evernotes and RSS clippings, along with a better quality of research.

Thus, without being hermetic, it’s going to be a small world. Trust is the fundamental currency of civilization, but civilizations rise and fall. Those who take the best lessons of civilization may end up in the underground. We will need to establish better communications, especially with the courageous, but also with the patient and kind.

Empowerment
It is important to note empowerment. Because of the tremendous infrastructure and wealth of America, empowerment is relatively easy for us Peasants. I say that because I know a plethora of excess choice is at our disposal. We really don’t need three grades of gasoline. So long as it is unleaded 91 octane, we’ve done the satisfactory thing. Moreover, every car in America could run on diesel, but there’s only one formula for it. In fact, a small change could make it identical in Europe too. But we have choices. We can eat at McDonalds or TGIFridays or Cracker Barrel. We’re empowered. Some of these are significant choices, most of them are Scooby snacks.

The most important thing about empowerment, ie, the public infrastructure in which we are embedded as Americans, is that it’s foundations are secure. That no heretics get to arbitrarily decide that basketballs can identify as pumpkins, or that diesel can identify as gasoline. We have to have rigor in the standards presented as the bedrock of our civilization, otherwise all empowerment fails, and what remains are real power and the rest of us subjects.

We therefore must be very careful in what we curate, because the slope is not so slippery as the barbwire fences are sharp. We are seeing the sharper edges of taller fences these days, and the honest middle class and human desire to commune with our fellow humans may find us making irreversible distinctions. Republicans today pretend that none of them admire Joseph McCarthy and that they fully respect the wisdom of George Orwell. I don’t trust those sentiments. The Parties are full of charlatans. They are not empowering, they are capturing. As the poet said, “Everything is fair game in their game.”

Hostility
What are we supposed to do with the hostility on display in the US? Well, first of all, I want to explain it away. There’s a kind of asymmetry we should understand. It takes a lot of energy to build something, and what’s built is often imperfect. It takes a lot less energy to tear that thing down, and that too can be done without precision and rigor. Consensus is difficult. Chaos is easy. Courage is difficult. Fear is easy. The lies can spread around the world before truth gets its pants on.

Of course hostility exists. Of course 17,000 people are murdered every year in America. Of course there are over 30,000 suicides. But have you seen a dead body outside of a funeral? Have you seen a vicious assault in person? We are reacting to news of atrocities we do not face. Our reactions are what fuel our attention, and our attention is what bankrolls the news and propaganda that generates more chaos and fear inducing drama. So instead of reacting to hot news about hostility, we need to think about our real proximity to kinetic violence. The fact is that the overwhelming majority of us cannot fight, wield or shoot, but we can surely talk a lot of shit.

So in this regard we need to curate ourselves. Stoicism works. The point is that we reorient our listening. Listen more intently to a smaller world that is not hostile at all. I’m going to suggest Braver Angels. Chances are, they’re busy diffusing hostility somewhere near your town. What they deserve is a television show.

The mission of Braver Angels is simple. Bringing Americans together to bridge the partisan divide and strengthen our democratic republic. I’m interested in that. How about you?