The Nationalization of the American Psyche
Four concepts that take away from individual citizenship.
Perhaps one of the most important questions we have failed to answer in these dark days of rampant memes and mainstream innumeracy is the proper way to understand free speech. My grand theory on this doesn’t have a name yet but there are many conceptual arrows pointing in a similar direction. Here are some of my premises.
We don’t know what it means to have as many literate people communicating instantaneously with each other as we do. It is unprecedented in human history.
The premises of democratic self-rule are undermined by the standard urban lifestyle and skillset of the American middle class. We are overdependent.
The trend of all media is to aggregate mass audiences. This swamps demand for specialized, expert information and creates intellectual capture.
Our standards for judging the effectiveness and morality of organizations is posed in terms of the character & personality of its primary leader rather than benchmarks appropriate for organizations themselves.
This final insight was gestated over the month of September in my gameplay of Starfield, which is the landmark achievement of Bethesda Softworks, a premier game studio which has been developing the ideas behind it for decades. In my other collection of technical and game writing, I unpack my ideas behind premise #4.
I also spent a lot of time, relatively speaking, in the boondocks of South Dakota last month. It was isolated, but not desolate. It was lonely, but comfortable. It was outside of the mainstream but readily recognizable. Everything felt like 1957, which in many ways was a very good thing. I met a good number of Californian expatriates - or maybe I was unconsciously drawn to speak to them amongst all of the small crowds. South Dakota excess deaths from COVID are somewhere between +3 and +6% depending upon whether the calculations are age-adjusted. Once again I forgot to bookmark Twitter which is useless when you’re not dead-on specific. So the CDC says <800 dead in 2021 in a population somewhere around 850k. What is sustainable in South Dakota is very different from what is sustainable in California. Our national collective inability to reconcile the difference distorts our very notion of the concept of sustainability - which we generally associate with climate impacts of our consumer consumption patterns.
I would say that if an election was held today, we would not have any reasonable consensus on the net impact of China’s industrial base on climate change as compared to our own, or that of the EU. I could be wrong, but my understanding is that China depends so much on coal fired power plants that there is little outside of a shooting war that would stop their great burden of increasing greenhouse gases. If you’d like to debate the details, you could go here and pretend that you’re more patient than I am and say “It’s complicated.” But it’s really not. They didn’t start the fire, but they’ve got the biggest bellows today. Promises made today about 2060 are just jawboning in my book.
My point is that Rulers and Geniuses today are embroiled in irreconcilable controversies concerning many unsolvable problems that are not nearly as world-historical as they are made out to be in today’s aggregated media spiels. It truly is important that we consider both the Overton Window and Dunning-Kruger. This explains to me why America both villifies and distrusts its own infrastructure and government agencies so much that we’d elect to abuse them with dictatorial powers from the Executive Branch. Our electorate is all in playing bad hand after bad hand. It’s practically customary to expect a government shutdown around this time of year.
I think the reasons we are subject to these forces is different than the reasons we allow them to take over our imagination. At some point, we become unable to think outside of the box that seems to promise the most. But what can we expect this box to actually deliver? Lottery tickets for sure, but lottery winnings? We should expect it to deliver some modicum of fundamental liberty - but how is that even on the table given our national obsessions with:
Sam Harris speaks with David Brooks about the state of American democracy and the liberal world order. They discuss the weakness of moral individualism, the loss of social trust, the dangers of identity politics, what happened to the Republican Party, the hatred of elites, the 2024 Presidential Election, the Trump indictments, the war in Ukraine, moral force, the roots of liberalism, the various flavors of Trump support, the Biden presidency, Hunter Biden’s laptop scandal, Biden’s prospects in 2024, Nikki Haley, economic inequality, the problems with meritocracy, the state of media and social media, the lure of conspiracy thinking, the politics of recognition, our handling of the Covid pandemic, our difficulties acknowledging uncertainty, our withdrawal from Afghanistan, the limits of American power, and other topics.
My assessment suggests to me that Rulers, Geniuses and other elites have few difficulties conforming to the radical excesses of the ideologies that ride herd on the Peasants. Item #2 is the limiting factor, because for so many people, the time and skill required to succeed beyond the conventional social pathways to Ruler, Genius and other elite status is daunting. I don’t like the fact that this situation keeps bringing me back to the unique independence of those who serve in the armed forces and the rural elite. I wonder if we’re stuck. I mean Sam Harris and David Brooks - when do they get replaced? It’s the same pundits talking to each other that were engaged 20 years ago and they still don’t know whom else to talk to.
There’s probably no better dumb example of this than the rhetoric of Republican candidate Vivek Ramaswamy who can spit out a soundbite on the go, boiling down three massive subjects {American Interests, Afghanistan War, War in Ukraine} in under 30 seconds. All that and a prediction too.
It reminds me of a busker juggling a pingpong ball, a bowling ball and a chainsaw. Still, the question is as inane as the answer, and the posing of the question and the expectation of an answer from someone between appointments is the demonstration of the short attention span theater that pays. It’s not profitable for anyone who thinks like a collegian, but for a YouTube audience of millions of subscribers, VOA is doing ok.
All of this is my weirdly backhanded way of circling back to Citizens United and the way that Donald Trump is campaigning while under indictment. There’s a philosophical and logical thing being broken here and I’m trying to get my finger on it through refinement of the terms one through four above. Yet I still don’t have the political motivation to even read the entirety of this Atlantic article on the very subject. Still, I will talk to my attorney friend about it. Still, I can say that I am in total agreement with this excerpt.
The problem is the kind of simple-minded interpretation of the Constitution I have discussed elsewhere. The current Court in Citizens United claimed to be choosing between a system in which corporations would have no free-speech rights and one in which corporate "persons" must have precisely the same free-speech rights as natural persons do. There surely is a middle position. In fact, our laws treat many kinds of "persons" differently for various purposes--citizens differently from non-citizens, minors differently from adults, members of professions differently from non-members. Each group's rights--even important rights like free speech--are treated differently for some purposes. High-school students do not have the right to criticize their school administrations; college students do. Minors do not have the right to purchase sexually explicit entertainment; adults do. Non-citizens cannot contribute to federal political campaigns; citizens can.
So here is a distortion of the very concept of citizenship that citizens are not making a political priority. Was that just an all-in game from way back in the day and, oh well what the hey? You win some you lose some? There’s the subtlety of our mainstream media and political topics. I’m truly glad my day job involves IT systems in which complexity and inefficiency are demons to be battled. Speaking of which, I have several schemata to migrate. I’d better get to it.
Stoic Summarization
These four concepts contribute to the undermining of the individual psyche. I think of them under the following shortcuts.
Global Literacy
The Idiot-Proof City
Diversity Dumbs Down
Cult of Personality
All of these, in their specific ways, contribute to the erosion of the defense of liberty. We are at risk.