Public Education is the Whole Ballgame
A meandering and arguably endless sequence of ramblings that would have been much easier to write and read in parallel, if such a thing were possible.
The Universal Constant
Throughout the history of life on this planet, and possibly even life in this universe, there is at least one singular anchor that binds us all to the same reality, which is that those who do not acquire the resources needed to survive will not survive. This needn't be a failing on the part of the dead - it has as much or more to do with the resources available in an environment as it does one's ability to acquire them1 - but correctly faulting the environment doesn't change the outcome. Everyone needs to reconcile with the fact that reality is our superior and we must adapt to it if we want to change it, not expect it to change magically to suit our needs. Well, most of us. On the other side of that spectrum, a person could live their whole life never thinking of this universal constant if they are adequately sheltered by others.
But those who fail despite extraordinary ability (due to a lack of resources) and those who succeed despite a lack of ability (due to extraordinary resources) aren't the focus, here (at least not yet). This is about the rest of us and how the average group of people responds to either an abundance or a scarcity. It is little more than speculation, but I've come to believe whenever there is an abundance of resources it tends to shift our attitudes towards cooperation, generosity, and an overall mindset that can best be described as “liberal.” There may even be studies that show this. I know of at least one that is adjacent to it, but this is hopefully not what one would call 'hard to believe' for anyone - intuitively, it makes some sense that, for most people, if they have more food than they could ever store or consume, they would want to share it if for no other reason than so it doesn't rot. But the larger point is the other direction of this causal relationship - and that is while abundance inspires liberalism, so too does liberalism strive (mainly through the sciences) to create more abundance.
On the other hand, whenever resources are scarce, our attitudes trend towards competition, self-reliance, and an overall mindset that can best be described as "conservative." One would think that, because nearly everyone should like having things in abundance2, nearly everyone would prefer a liberal society that prioritizes pursuing a path of least resistance to this potential abundance. So, why is the conservative mentality still here? And not just still here but also dominating much of The Conversation? Why aren't we actively pursuing that easy abundance we all should naturally prefer and have a reasonably good idea how to achieve? The problem, from a bird's eye view, would appear to be that just as abundance leads to a liberal mentality which then pursues more abundance, so too does scarcity (which leads to a conservative mentality) then pursue more scarcity. In so many words, conservative leaders seem to have set out to intentionally sabotage efforts to pursue abundance.
Crowd Sourcing and Crowding the Source
The motives behind outright sabotage are a little tricky to explain, particularly because they’re not so nefarious as it might sound3. The thing is, in being a species that has the mental capacity to be self-aware, we have also developed mental needs - not just physical ones. And probably the mental need in highest demand is validation. Validation is everything to some people - there's even an argument to be made that it should be, in a species that relies as heavily on cooperation as we do4. But validation can never be pursued autonomously. It is necessarily something that must come from outside the mind that seeks to consume it - a resource, in that regard like any other. But it is not a resource that is easy to cultivate, in that we can't always know what others will think is worthy of their validation. Nor are we necessarily going to value everything that everyone else does validate - even if we see the value in it, if it doesn’t benefit us personally it is often considered a privilege just to have the spare time needed to voice appreciation for it.
However, the role of "provider" is one our species has been pretty reliable about validating - that is, sharing one's own ability to acquire resources with those who might be less able, be that due to the environment, preoccupations, or their own shortcomings doesn't usually matter5 . But this is on the scale of a family or, at most, a neighborhood. There is a long overdue discussion to be had on the role of what I'll call "gatekeeper." I don't know how a gatekeeper is defined elsewhere but here I mean someone who controls other people's access to a needed resource - which is just a provider but on a scale that starts including some critical mass of strangers. And while gatekeeping as I’ve defined it can be of immense value when a resource needs to be properly managed or rationed for sustainability, it's also a role that is particularly prone to corruption. Unlike food, for which there is a physical rate beyond which consuming any more can be lethal, there is no real maximum for how much validation someone can receive before it becomes painful to consume any more. This means once a gatekeeper gets a taste of the relatively reliable validation they get from massive numbers of people depending on them6, it's hard for a human mind to know when it's enough and they should share.
But remember, the efforts of liberals are in the complete opposite direction of gatekeeping, thus eliminating the need for rationing. This is perceived as nothing less than a direct assault on the validation of gatekeeping, an assault on the validation of self-reliance, and an assault on the validation of competition. But a reason people already value these things is because they have had to do them to survive thus far – or at least they think they have (some have surely been lied to). To ask them to consider that it might have all been for nothing is asking a lot. It is worth mentioning that we will never be at a place where our resources need no management, just as we will never be at a place where absolute self-reliance will ever be possible. Both directions are unreachable ideals. But that's beyond the scope of this... essay. It may suffice to say that, because both directions are necessary, both are worthy of validation. There is no need for one to dominate the other, but it is a 'feature not a bug' of the competitive side that they would want to try, anyway - and so they must be (often reluctantly) pushed back upon by a side that has no interest in such a competition, or end up dominating. Ideally, we would just calculate what the optimal mix is, all agree with the math, whatever that might look like, and call it out of bounds thereafter. But in the meantime, I guess we just have to keep butting heads.
Anyway, the result is a sort of competition over validation. The point of a competition when limits on physical resources are not of genuine concern, is for one person to emerge as “better” than another by some standard that is agreed to. Some people cannot feel good about themselves at all unless they feel better than someone else - it is their source of validation to ‘win’ something. And that can work out peacefully for most things, but not when the competition is over the definition of validation. You can't win bragging rights when what you've defeated in your opponent is all context for what bragging even is7. But there's also a weird element to this competition and that is that our species has come up with something that is both physical resource and mental validation while also being neither. I am referring, of course, to money. Money allows everyone to be a gatekeeper on an extremely small scale (also known as having a job - I suppose that's more "gate guard" than gatekeeper) in exchange for extremely small denominations of validation. A weird system if you think about it (or is it just me?). But for all its flaws, it at least gives everyone the illusion that it's working. And since we are talking about a mental need, we're talking about perception - so the illusion of functioning is interchangeable with actual functioning. As much as some of us would like to imagine that if we are panicked it would be better if everyone else were panicked, too, I think most people would find that's not such a good idea in practice. I would agree with anyone who says it eases our own quest for validation to imagine that other people have found a source that satisfies them, even if we don't think it would be adequate for ourselves. We all know money is kind of a subdimensional abstraction, but it still soothes us when other people are compensated with it in the face of tragedy - having no better idea means conceding that it was in the direction of a good one, however short it falls. In any case, it seems to be something of an ideal of the left to eventually just do away with money and instead derive all validation from our intellectual contributions (whereas the right seems to be doubling down with cryptocurrencies, creating a competition over who can make the best money source. Or at least that’s what it looks like is going on.).
Satisfying our intellectual curiosities seems to be another mental need, perhaps second only to our need for validation. And so we make our first foray into education. Liberals seem to figure, why not just combine our need for validation with our need to satisfy our intellectual curiosities? Go all in on unmitigated education and everyone can be validated - since the total knowledge, creativity, and understanding there is to have is infinite, anyone can find a niche if they don't have to worry about selling it to feed themselves. And everyone can appreciate whatever art or ideas there are to offer since they wont need to worry about budgeting their time and attention around a job they, too, mostly only take to feed themselves. The problem (apart from the obvious: so, who's going to do the work no one wants to do?) is this would completely undermine all the work that gatekeepers (which, again, is nearly everyone) have done thus far. It is basically asking that we accept that the validation upon which many have built our self-worth was a lie, and so our self-worth is also a lie. But this is awkward because self-worth is a perceived notion that can't exist in any tangible form (apart from money, but that's weird - though I will say money is the cheapest organizing tool), which is similar enough to the definition of a lie that we've all instinctively spent some time developing mental defenses to exactly that sort of attack on our validation. Undermining all the work to bring us to this point can activate all those defenses causing a lot of people to reject it on instinct. So, seeing that is the direction the liberals would like to take us in, the conservatives try very hard to stop it.
Sowing the Flock of Fury
Perhaps the pencils-down final argument of the left is "Don't you like trusting strangers?" Whereas the final argument of the right is "Don't you like distrusting people?" And of course the answer in both directions is no. Trust makes things easier in an environment of abundance just as distrust makes this easier in an environment of scarcity. So, really it’s a question of which environment one is more comfortable with. This is probably in part why republicans in my state (Iowa) are implementing so many policies that seem to be aimed at eroding university attendance. Their voters perhaps don't think of it in the neutral terms I've tried to put things in, but they do see people around colleges appearing to live comfortably and resent them for it - amplified, of course, by right wing media telling them that's what's happening to glut them with victimhood (to keep them mad8 and coming back). The goal seems to be to get all the left-leaning people out of the state because then all chance of resistance to the rich taking all the money will be gone - it's not like republican voters will ever object to republican leaders stealing money, after all, when the only way to object is by voting democrat9. They are kept resentful and angry specifically so a story about ‘how republican leaders stealing money angers the left’ is more satisfying than stopping the republican leaders from stealing money - that's why republican leaders focus their messaging entirely on keeping their base mad.
And to be clear when I speak of anger I usually mean anger, fear, and (to a lesser extent) entertainment10. They all serve at least one common function, and that is to obscure our view of The Big Picture. I don't meant the big picture as some kind of human plan, but the Big picture, which is our incomprehensible insignificance when it comes to the life span of the planet, let alone the whole universe. A lot of people don't want to think of that because it is too painful and so are prone to an addiction, or at least a dependence, to things that will stop them from thinking about it. And whenever there is an opportunity for addiction or any dependence there is always an aspiring gatekeeper that will be eager to step in to take it over. But at least one problem with having a gatekeeper in this role is they will naturally want their source to be the only source of fear, anger, and entertainment. As such they will try to dissuade their addicts from being afraid or angry over any narrative they can't control - for example the narrative that they are being led around like an addict.
I don’t like using the word addict but I can’t see any other way of viewing most modern anger other than as an escape, like any other drug, only it is one the human body creates naturally and, in fact, can be commanded into existence by others. There are various realities people turn to drugs to escape from but I think what people turn to anger for is to escape from the reality of powerlessness. They see the scale of the problems and would like the power to fix them but that would necessarily require having more power that everyone they are told is causing the problems, combined. Anger makes someone feel powerful while narrowing their perception of the scope of what it would take to accomplish their goals, and also allowing them to feel like they've preemptively escaped the responsibility for their actions - everything they do should be justified because they were mad. That's the idea. Or afraid. Anger and fear are basically the same emotion with the difference seemingly having to do with how large the object of anger or fear is (i.e. anger makes people feel powerful and fear makes them feel powerless. That's the only difference.) - so, like I say, please keep in mind I'm using them interchangeably.
What both do, however, is override empathy. Empathy is a real problem in this environment because there is so much pain and abuse but nothing any individual can really do about it. Even the average republican voter of ~50 years ago, if you sat them down and explained the history of the country, would probably agree that black people should be owed some compensation. And so, right wing media has set out to quash that by making empathy as unbearable as possible. The fundamental assumption right wing misinformation pushes with every narrative appears to have once been if you can't fix everything you have no business trying to fix anything. Instead you should be content with imagining it already being fixed. Over time this narrative morphed from content when asked to imagine it is already fixed to being angry when asked to imagine it being broken still further in an previously unknown way. And if you can get angry at imagining things get broken then you can get angry imagining malicious intent. And if you can get angry at imagined malicious intent then you can get angry imagining you are the victim. And if you can get angry at imagined wrongs then you are hooked, because anger is addictive. It paints a cartoon surface over one's entire perception of reality, overriding that pesky empathy. In so many words, anger turns someone into a temporary narcissist.
Anger also helps a person focus. I think people largely know that they aren't very good at focusing and are even a little relieved when they discover some life hack that does it for them- just be mad all the time. This is little more than speculation but I wonder if this is also in response to academia. We know right wing leaders have been demonizing "the intellectual elitists" for some time, but messages like that don't work unless there's some reason for them to resonate on the receiving end. Perhaps this is that reason - be it in underfunded public schools or even taking a shot at a university, people found that unless someone was going to sit over them and hit them when they didn't pay attention to a lesson, they couldn't bring themselves to pay attention on their own. And so they bowed out, thinking it shouldn't matter anyway, but then tropes and trends started to pop up like 'the nerd you stuff in a locker today might be your boss in ten years,' and while people can't bring themselves to regret their decision to walk away from academia, as that would be admitting it was a mistake, they can bring themselves to resent it. One thing they did learn, however, is that they can't trust their own long term decision making11. This distrust in one's own decision making seems to have also caused a lot of people to despise their free will. They want to be told to do the things they want to do instead of deciding to do them on their own. They want it to be someone else's fault if it goes wrong. And that's exactly what christian nationalism, authoritarianism, and/or fascism offers - forfeit your power and your responsibility goes with it.
Of course this has always been a classic bait and switch, as the moment an authoritarian leader gets that power, they don’t want to be responsible either and so they deflect as many consequences onto their subjects as they can. In the beginning this usually turns out well as there are plenty of hated people to displace blame to. But once they are all murdered, eventually the leader is going to have to start blaming subsets of his own supporters. It happens every time but people keep grasping for it anyway, just for that first era of relief when all the people they fear and hate get buried. It is, at least, consistent that they do so: we are possibly the only species in the universe that can learn to circumvent pain by being told about it. It's a piece of delayed gratification to know that a thing that you want will cause pain, in advance of actually getting it, and then choose not to have it. Academia is also a piece of delayed gratification. Exercise as well - though less so, as you get the endorphins from exercise right away, but still the decision to begin exercising is a wrench for a lot of people. To be taught to rely on the pain, fear, and anger to learn instead of being taught to rely on our inherent mechanisms of delayed gratification through informed awareness is exactly the sort of thing people end up not trusting their own decisions over, resenting those who do, and wanting pain, fear, and anger for all to keep their own experience validated.
Anger is great for whipping up support but when it comes to practical and lasting solutions to the problems people are angry about, level heads always prevail12. This is the benefit of having advocates with minimal emotional investment in your problem (as opposed to advocates who try to cultivate and harness your anger) and what makes an opposition party useful. If you want to make sure a problem is fixed, the ones most angry about it are not the ones who should be working on it. Angry people will be disappointed by practical solutions that don't involve revenge and reckoning (this is how republicans win: not despite the hate and bullying but because of it), but the solutions will be solutions and practical all the same.
The Game
The idea of controlling people doesn’t really mean anything, but controlling what people need allows one to coerce or coax them into agreeing to any meaning one wishes. And so, conservative leaders have positioned or are actively trying to position themselves to be the centralized gatekeepers of everything. Food, water, sex, healthcare, community, security, time, validation, energy, a.i., information, money (which again is, in a way, all of those things while also being none of them - the entirety of Maslow's hierarchy of needs printed on a piece of paper), etc... Anything a human needs, conservative leaders want to control. It's difficult to imagine why that would be necessary, so of course they also want to control information on whether or not these things need to be controlled. Which includes controlling information on whether or not these things are being managed properly or possibly if supply is being sabotaged to force rationing - the difference between tricking people into believing what you do is necessary, or what you do actually being necessary, doesn’t change the belief, only your knowledge of it.
The key to movement in either direction (towards more gatekeeping or towards more abundance) is to take it slow so a critical mass has the time to adapt. Ultimately, the fact that so many have built their self-worth out of "the old system" is why they are reluctant to try a new one. The solution, for either direction, is to change that old system slightly over time such that it becomes a new one after several generations with no clear moment where one could say that's when everything changed. It seems critical to point out: wanting the Utopia but not wanting to put in the slow work to get there (because we might not be the generation that reaches it) is yet more undermining of all the work of the people who did exactly that to bring us this close - the people still working to inch us closer. But that has to do with inter-generational conflicts, which is again beyond the scope13.
The point is, as long as both liberals and conservatives are honest and are, at every moment, approaching the competition in a natural way, seamless with any other competition in nature, it's not really nefarious or corrupt. I'm obviously a big fan of pushing us to the abundance14 but I understand the resistance (or at least I think I do). And the gentle push against that resistance is The Work. Conservatives have been doing it for decades. After a mere 40 years of this radical incrementalism the right has obtained very nearly everything it set out to obtain. And they did it in a way that was almost entirely fair - even if they used a lot of misdirection to keep their priorities out of sync with the priorities of their voters, they still openly achieved those true priorities, and their voters rewarded them with more votes. Complaining that they were tricked only would have worked the first time four decades ago. At some point you have to consider the possibility that this is what the people voting for these politicians actually want - having become accustomed to scarcity, many ‘gate guards’ must want there to be value in keeping our resources away from “others," even if there is such an abundance that some of it would, indeed, rot. And the victimhood. They want the validation of being victims and so keep voting for people who are willing not only to tell them they are targets and victims but also to create pain and problems so they can feel like victims. This toxic addiction to defending themselves can make them feel useless if they don’t always see attacks, which they will need to keep watching right wing media to see. The victimhood is a validation that right wing media can speak into existence for its audience without spending hardly any money on it - perhaps even turning a profit instead (the dream of any gatekeeper is to have the resource they have locked down manage itself). And it works. It doesn't matter that it's a trick - all validation is, really - it is still fair game.
The Invasive Species
The problems start when a narcissist finds themselves in the position of gatekeeper. Narcissists do not imagine they take advantage of people but only take what is there for the taking, and it is self-evident that it was there for the taking or they wouldn't have been able to take it. A narcissist tricking someone into believing the narcissist is necessary isn’t the sort of thing that will bother a narcissist. A normal person would want the validation to have a tangible or otherwise real basis. A normal person will think themselves clever for getting the same thing with less work. A narcissist will think themselves the most clever for getting the same thing with no work15. Further, narcissists seem to be defined by the grasping intensity of their resource insecurity - as narcissism often seems to begin as a defensive response to desperate circumstances - and one thing being a gatekeeper accomplishes is that the gatekeeper, themself, will never have to worry about their own access to the resources they control. As such, it is completely natural that a narcissist’s instinct is to obtain a source of validation by some secure means that can’t run dry due to their own failings - as that would result in the narcissist dealing with the consequences of inadequacies they've convinced themselves are strengths or are at least are someone else’s fault. And further they will want that source of validation to be something everyone else should need, too, as that’s kind of the way validation works. Being in the position of a gatekeeper allows them to tacitly coerce other people into providing that validation, be genuine about it, and hold the gatekeeper up as a role model others should strive to be like. So, narcissists tend to thrive in the role.
It seems like a good time to mention that I'm in Johnson County, Iowa - a county bluer than California. And a truth of Johnson County that is perhaps a bit harder than some might want to admit is that much, if not all, of any abundance it has is due to the University of Iowa (Iowa’s largest employer) bringing what is basically "student tourism" to the area. But most people in the republican run towns scattered across Iowa have no such mechanism going for them. The majority of land mass in this state seems to be dedicated to farming. And while farmland is certainly a thing that needs to be properly managed, running such operations is just as susceptible to narcissists as any other form of gatekeeping. So, those many rural dwellers who don't own enormous farming companies with multiple governors in their pocket are left to spend all their time working - be they someone who owns their own independent farm or ranch or someone who has a more conventional job in a rural town - with the money they earn by trading their attention and energy evaporating without much trace.
I don't know how the media in these areas explain that scarcity, but it clearly has nothing to do with the wealthy gatekeepers who suck all the money out of the air. Or the fact that it is entirely Republicans who want to ensure the wealthy can continue to do more of it. Perhaps there are just too many steps between the extra nickel-and-dimes they are charged or denied as pay and the mountains of cash the wealthy hoard for any individual to trust that everyone else would understand there is a causal relationship. Or maybe they have been repeatedly hit over the head with the narrative that it is socialism to demand the wealthy stop doing that or to force the wealthy to stop by taxing them, and socialism is bad no matter what. Maybe they, too, have spent so much time in this grind that it would be taken as undermining their struggles to have it fixed - especially those who have clawed their way into the ranks of those with enough income to save for some conveniences or even retirement. Perhaps it is all calculated - keeping people just desperate enough that they can identify with a narrative in defense of extreme selfishness. Or could it just be that some critical mass thinks it would be more satisfying to spread the pain instead of having it removed? That the life they built around the pain and the validation they get for being able to endure it on their own without complaint would all be meaningless if someone just removed the pain and possibly even looked down on them for not letting someone remove it sooner? Maybe all of the above. Maybe something else. Probably everyone has slightly different reasons.
In any case, it doesn’t help that republican voters16 seem like they would rather be right about our government taking our money and giving it away than admit they are wrong about who it is being given to; The government is supposed to take our money and then give it back in the form of services that take advantage of the economies of scale17 - it's not supposed to take our money and give it to wealthy people so they can gatekeep it back to us, making self reliance impossible except to the extent they allow and acquiring the power to put their thumb on any scale for any competition. And yet, at least 58% of Iowa's voters (about 709k for Reynolds in 2022) would rather drag the rest of us down to Hell with them than admit they made a mistake and could use a hand getting out of it18. I've often thought that the damnation of Hell need not be eternal: if it lasts only until one admits to their soul that they were wrong, the sort of people sent there in the first place would still be there forever. I suppose it was my own narcissism showing to imagine that thought was enlightened instead of just plain observation of the world around me.
Living with conservatives who cheer and cherish gatekeepers means living with the certainty that you will be taken advantage of by narcissistic gatekeepers. It is wise to push back as much as possible, but you will drive yourself mad if you resolve to do so completely. And I suppose there's no real argument against going mad, other than that it will be yet another advantage taken; in the form of free entertainment provided to people whose only objective was to 'trigger the libs.' I don't know why that's important to them - surely there are more productive ways to get the validation of our attention - but it's not a problem that can be fixed by understanding it. It can only be solved by getting out ahead of the misinformation. I don't know how that is done, though my guess would be by educating people at a young age about how powerful people manipulate the rest of us with misinformation to solidify their own power. Never mind the violence of fascism - that's the end point, not the start - teach about the tricks of populism that precede it. Teach the history of how toxic misinformation gets in its candy shell of wisecracks and pseudoscience. Instead of demanding people pay attention against their will, teach the fact that people in general don't like politics because it seems like a whole lot of responsibility but almost negligible power; a well-funded mix of psychology and civics19. I don't know if that will work but trying to force it seems to have only given the entertainment value of misinformation a foot in a door left open by exhaustion, apathy, and, after so many steps, hate groups.
The Only Power is Other People
Because, really the responsibility and the power are exactly equal, as they are the same thing: voting. The overhead to voting is the knowledge of who to vote for, but knowledge is supposedly also power so the responsibility of obtaining knowledge pays for itself once you get it. Unfortunately, the task of figuring out who has the better intentions is exhausting, because even if only one person out of a hundred is lying maliciously, it's still going to muddy the water. We have the problem of nearly everyone lying - it doesn't seem to matter that some are lying to be accessible (simplifications necessitate lies by omission, fast paced media necessitates simplification) if the people that are lying to grab for more power can point to the other people lying and say they are the same. By the 'letter of the law' they are correct, and the fact is that appeals to a lot of people. But, in addition, the right has been chewing at the problem of how to make politics seem like fun instead of responsibility. Hate, victimhood, outrage, internet trolling, red-pilling, doublespeak, and pretty much everything we think of as 'toxic' is what they seem to have come up with. Of course, they call it all just "humor" but are strangely not so quick to tell their most zealous followers that it's supposed to be a joke.
Outside of right wing entertainment, the idea that politics might not be entertaining and fun seems to be a vulnerability for a lot of people. This is again beyond the scope but personally, I think the problem is that an entertaining world is perceived as a safe world, so to acknowledge that it is boring is to acknowledge that it is unsafe, and people don't want to do that. In this way, entertainment has become the dominant religion. It is responsible for maintaining the membrane between us and reality so that we don't freak ourselves out. Whatever else there is to be said about past religions, one thing they had is a reality check, in that if you believed other people needed to believe what you believe, eventually you had to deal with the real world to ensure that was being done. But with entertainment there is no such requirement. It is the nature of entertainment to be highly potent and to condition people to be stingy with their attention unless it maximizes the pleasure they extract. An entertained person can "live in their mom's basement" in perpetuity, constantly diminishing their awareness of reality, becoming increasingly intolerant of the lesser pleasure they extract by paying attention to the real world, never able to deny themselves the micro pleasure of the next mouse click. And while that may only appeal to a fringe, the point is reality has a bit of an 'acquired taste.' No one is born loving it. Our self-awareness is a byproduct of our imagination, not the other way around. And with this substantially more potent religion dominating the world, it is becoming more and more difficult to teach anyone to love reality, or even accept it. Let alone vote in a way that acknowledges it.
And on the other side of that screen are the entertainers, just as deep into it as the entertained. Each visible instance of validation can raise the bar on the amount of praise others should expect to be validated, themselves. Social media has also hit our time and attention like an invasive species - showing people getting high praise from millions of followers, subscribers, etc, for doing very little - and has cast the normal gratitude given to providers or even non-narcissistic gatekeepers as insufficient to some critical mass, resulting in a scarcity of validation. This, I think, is the attractive quality of narcissists. Other people who are insecure about their own ability to gather resources (particularly validation) may like the idea of falling under the umbrella of a narcissist who will take everything they can reach, under the assumption that they can survive off the leavings - if the narcissist will pull out all the stops to feel validated, based on their beliefs, and you agree with the narcissist’s beliefs, then you can also feel validated when they accomplish their goal. But the narcissist will not be able to accomplish goals on the scale of a whole nation without the help of those who want him to succeed. Unfortunately, this help must come in two forms to be effective: loyalty and violence. Which brings us to the fascism.
Reaping the Flock of Fury
I've raised chickens and so can say with some authority that fascism is a natural state. Their tendency to establish strict hierarchies realized by bullying and culling the weakest among them for the safety of the rest, coupled with inconsolable terror of anything outside the flock (which is probably how ‘chicken’ became synonymous with fear) is a way of living that makes sense for dumb social animals. And, as anyone who has worked in retail can tell you, we are a less intelligent species than we like to imagine - barely a baby step in distinction from other animals. Yes, we have a lot holding us back and it's not just people who are clinging to validation for how they lived their life under the circumstances of the way things were - there is the ever-present hard limit that is our existential dilemma. It is the burden of the would-be civilized to constantly fight nature. Mowing the lawn, trimming hedges into unnatural shapes, fighting back fascism... these are all important maintenance routines that must be taken seriously or nature will take over.
We can try to justify trying to double down on the laws of nature, conquering our environment, and calling it dominance - like an adult going back to high school to show off their skills and intellect. Or we can try to justify trying to transcend the laws of nature, maturing our collective minds in a way that contributes to an idea that could very well be timeless, and calling that dominance. Either can be attempted, really. All arguments for democracy hinge on the assumption that you are talking with someone who shares a desire to transcend the laws of nature. All arguments against democracy hinge on the assumption that you are talking with someone who wants to double down on the laws of nature. There is no right answer but the arguments can frustrate and enrage you when trying to talk with someone who assumes we should be going in the direction opposite of what makes sense to you. It is the left’s general assumption that ‘survivor mode’ is agreed to by all to be an unpleasant and degrading way for a human to live. Our unique human privilege is to be able to elevate absolutely everyone (sometimes even animals) out of the barbaric rules of the animal kingdom. And the left has the pride in humanity needed to do that work voluntarily, as long as distributing the burden keeps it light enough. The wrench is that living in fear of being the ‘slowest gazelle’ can actually be a satisfying way to live, as long as one is not the slowest gazelle; Instant and tangible validation just for continuing to exist with moments of heightened self worth whenever witnessing other slower gazelles get eaten. And if you are that slowest gazelle you don't get to stick around long enough to voice your opposition to that way of life. Of course, the whole thing is all largely fantasy as there is often very little one can become "faster" at to avoid such fates - it is just random. But with only the survivors surviving, and wanting to feel good about it, there is no one to contradict the fantasy.
I have found that one thing that eliminates all fascism in chickens is food. Sprinkle enough boon worms on the ground and suddenly nearly everyone gets along - less than “enough” and the pecking order gets real important again. One thing authoritarianism does efficiently is deal with scarcity. While a democracy might deal with a shortage by carefully supplementing or rationing, authoritarianism excels at generating moral excuses for simply murdering anyone who wants the same resources as the authoritarian regime - when people say "the cruelty is the point" this is sort of what they mean20. Easy and effective, and as long as no one tells the descendants it was entirely about trying to avoid inconveniencing themselves, it isn't like there would be anyone left to argue - history is written by the winners, as it were; I like to quip that this is why we all know the story of the idiot that brought a knife to a gun fight but no one knows the story of the asshole that brought a gun to a knife fight. The blood lust for political violence against the left seems to really be just this squabble over validation between people who want objective reality to be the standard and those who want subjective competition to be the standard. I don't know if the right is pushing to re-segregate schools because they are intentionally trying to deny the path towards objective reality or if it is an unconscious reaction to noticing that diverse academic environments tend to "ungroom"21 children and young adults. I'm convinced that one or the other is a reason, though. Removing the opportunity for children to be raised alongside children of other backgrounds not only entrenches this subjectivity but also entrenches income disparity by ensuring those who can't afford to make attending private schools worth the owner's while will continue not to be able to afford it.
We are a species whose success has rested almost entirely on our skills at delayed gratification. And while we've certainly surpassed every other species in terms of skills in delayed gratification, we're still pretty bad at it. Delayed gratification has allowed us to build anything we've built that couldn't have come about by a species that lacked self awareness by sacrificing the instant gratification of consuming whatever whatever we can in our vicinity to instead waiting until it grows into something better or more abundant. But such systems need to be maintained or they will fall to ruin, ultimately returning to their place in the natural order. If we want to set ourselves above this natural order, it requires an additional application of delayed gratification to put in miniature sacrifices needed to maintain it. Neglecting to do so would result in a need to repair it, which will increases the needed sacrifice by orders of magnitude, or orders more to build it anew. Civilization itself is certainly among those things that we've built that must be maintained. Hate and despair are forces of nature that seek to relegate human civilization back to the primal hierarchies from whence we came and authoritarianism is the best weapon for accomplishing that.
But on the other end, democracy is the best known tool for maintaining a civilization by keeping authoritarianism and hate clipped short. If we don't use it the magnitude of the sacrifices that would be needed to build civilization anew could end up being measured in acres of mass graves. Authoritarianism is notorious for simply killing off everyone who makes ruling even a little bit complicated - remember the goal is to ensure there are enough resources for the regime, so purging people outside of or at the bottom of the regime is a feature not a bug. Authoritarianism allows itself to mass incarcerate or murder for imagined grievances or even just convenience. It might do it reluctantly. It might do it with a lot of loud internal arguing. But it will still do it again and again with no one to stop it, because democracy does not allow itself to murder for convenience or even real grievances or for any reason, really, other than to stop an immediate threat to the innocent (at least it isn't supposed to).
There are ultimately only two ways to stop a murderer with power - to either murder them back or to take away their power. But the murdering authoritarians do isn’t random - they direct it in such a way that, in addition to freeing up resources, it also stops their power from being taken away22. It is deeply unfortunate that there will never be any magical intervention on our behalf, but the plus side of our fact is that nor will their ever be any on theirs. Everything they take beyond what they could accomplish with their own muscles must come from the efforts of others and that would drive them mad if they didn't come up with a system for believing that getting people to serve them is another reason to think they are better. Thus they tell themselves should they ever need to murder their own subordinates. And thus they tell themselves when they sabotage their own supply of resources to ensure their subordinates stay subordinate. They need to hide their dependence from others from their own sight and conscious awareness. While the leaders tacitly agree to keep everything tacit, the people who give authoritarian leaders their power are happy to leave it alone - as long as they aren't personally singled out for culling. And even if they are they'll be dead or in prison, so it's not like they will be able to organize with others who haven't yet been singled out because they’ll have invested so much of their identity and staked so much of their self worth on the worldview presented to them by far right misinformation that it would be easier to just go on pretending it's all true until they die than it would be to do the slow and tedious work of extracting themselves from it.
The most reliable alternative solution is to give everyone something productive to do so that the bonds formed by shared accomplishments supersede manufactured cultural grievances. But of course an authoritarian regime isn’t going to do that. And even in a democracy that sounds too much like keeping the workers who don’t know what’s good for them busy and out of politics so the privileged few can make all the decisions, which is precisely the future the left is trying to steer us away from through democracy. And yet, it's hard (but not impossible) to make a convincing case for why people who have been spoon-fed misinformation that has been tirelessly engineered for maximum potency should be making any decisions for themselves, let alone everyone else. It is as though the thought leaders of the right discovered this potential flaw in democracy and rushed to make it as unnaturally prominent and obnoxious as possible just to demoralize the left. We think everyone should have a voice? Then the right will whip up a third of the population into a frothing rage and we will have to listen to their very real agony and pain over the grievances they made up. We will have to take their joke as seriously as they tricked their audience into taking it, even though we can see the trick plainly, and if we falter or are dismissive even a tiny bit then we are admitting that some people just plain aren't worthy of engaging in politics: Of course, that isn't an actual counterargument of the left. The left does not argue that no one is unworthy of engaging in politics, only that everyone starts out worthy. If people tarnish themselves with crime or treason, obviously they are no longer worthy (though there are conditions where they could earn it back). But if people are tarnished by other people, that gets tricky. A handful can be absorbed - that is heard out, and an overwhelming consensus reached that they are being unreasonable. But when the media that covers 90% (that's only a guess) of the land mass in this country has been bought up by far right entities pushing that tarnish, it is no longer a handful but enough to form or take over their own political party.
National Divorce (or a Civil Culture War)
In any case, assuming we could sort out education as a way to deter misinformation, that's still more a thing for younger or future generations. Back to the point six paragraphs ago, the only way to completely avoid being taken advantage of by conservative leaders that is available to adults who are already done with education (apart from mass organization to perpetually thwart demagogues - now there's a dream) is to separate. But that's not permanent. Conservatism is a mindset, not a region or race. It's always going to be easier to wish our baser instincts were validated as virtues, as that would mean our inability to pry ourselves from our self-indulgences was actually just us being smart and our missing symptoms of success are someone else's fault - that is, in fact, what makes anyone easy to take advantage of. Some form of resource insecurity will always be born into this world and people to take advantage alongside it. So, we who share a world with conservatives must learn to cope with getting caught up in it.
Because, even ignoring this creeping conservativism always growing from within, while the idea of cutting conservatives loose may sound appealing, there are practical problems we can expect by ‘divorcing’ from the confederacy. The most immediate would be a new border. Right wing narcissists would want a disproportionate size of the fresh water and farmland and would never agree to a border line - demanding more for as long as there is more to take. But pretending that gets settled, the next task would be relocating all the confederates to Trumpland and everyone else out - not to mention there would be a bit of a ‘custody battle’ over the apolitical. The right would want them so they would have a better claim at ‘child support.’ The left would want them because they would know the right is going to be an unhealthy environment for them. But the right has spent billions marketing itself as ‘the fun parent,’ and by being apolitical they have opted to ensure their opinion remains uninformed. But again assuming that all gets settled it is still going to cost lots of money to relocate everyone. But narcissists absolutely hate paying their debts. It is debilitating for them to be in a universe where there is any suggestion that they might not be inherently better than everyone, and owing someone for propping them up rubs their nose in the fact that their superiority was not inherent or earned - a literal Hell for them, too, even if from the perspective of the throne. They will never pay their share. Indeed, if conservative leaders just suddenly decided to pay their debts and taxes without complaint - focusing on spending it efficiently (like a normal person) instead of burning it all down to avoid it - there wouldn't even be a republican party.
But perhaps most importantly, in the long run, whatever it is the confederates are angry about won’t get resolved (since whatever problems that weren’t completely made up from the start were scapegoated). They will continue to want the time they spent indulging in entertaining role play conspiracy theories to be just as valuable as the time others spent trudging through journals or textbooks for understanding of the dull real world. They will continue to blame the Union for their problems, complaining that we took too much of the farmland, too much of the freshwater, and not enough of the debt. Their leaders will continue, in so many words, to enjoy tinkering with the same levers of power they currently enjoy. And we would have a hostile neighbor instead of a hostile roommate. If anyone is thinking they will come to their senses once there is no one else around to blame, that's just not the way it has ever worked. If republican voters (and again, the ones right wing media chooses to showcase - not the average republican voters) discover their trusted media has lied to them, they get mad at reality for not being the lie - they don't trust their media any less. This applies even to horrible things that people ordinarily shouldn't want to be true - if their media tells them, for example, that all Democrats think all Republicans are racist, and then they come across a Democrat who does not think they are racist, they’ll get mad at the Democrat for not thinking they are racist (or at least for “refusing to admit it”) before they’ll ever get mad at their media for lying to them, which it did.
Republican voters want their leaders to get them what they want, as we all do. But there seems to be a missing layer of decorum on the right these days, where there seems to be no concern over what getting what they want might cost the rest of us in real damage. So, if the law or even reality itself is in the way, they don't see why that's even worth mentioning. Just ignore it. To them the law seems to be a silly joke to keep Democrats fighting among themselves and to justify violence if "others" try to take our stuff. It has no intended purpose beyond that. The very idea that their leaders would let the law impede them from getting them what they want is infuriating to them, because it means they were tricked into picking stupid leaders. Furthermore, the idea that "others" could follow the law and still succeed induces a madness some are becoming increasingly inept at keeping in check - or maybe the media is just covering it more.
That's at least partially why conservatives launched their culture invasion23 - a framework with no rules that they can drag any conversation into, no matter how objectively obvious the conclusion or dire the stakes, and win there just by associating a losing battle for injustice with a winning battle over culture24, then keep hammering on the culture aspect until a critical mass thinks that’s more important than justice and the law. Every role can be arbitrarily assigned in the culture war. Anyone can be a victim no matter how much power they have. Anyone can be a perpetrator no matter how powerless. Whatever is most convenient to The Narrative is what becomes truth. And the ecosystem where all this takes place isn't going away. They will absolutely continue to say their problems are our fault, even if we are all on the other side of the continent - the whole point of owning all the media to push a narrative is to avoid telling any facts that don't push that narrative. Even if there is no argument whatsoever that it is any fault but their own (which is impossible, because they are happy to lie), they'll probably just say we should have tried harder to save them from themselves, because their media told them we made such a big deal about how we were supposed to be the educated ones, so we should have known not to expect them to know better25. And as long as it continues to get the leaders access to the resources they want, they will continue to say more and more extreme things, without us there to keep their narrative in check (though that is a continuous and exhausting task - notably, it would be less exhausting, but no less continuous, with organization). In so many words, splitting does not buy peace of mind - only lends it. The debt would need to be paid eventually and we are not the side that gets to make a life out of borrowing but never paying it back.
Common Ground
On the other hand, the political reality seems to be that the 35 and older crowd is just too mad at each other to fix this. And no one seems to have a satisfying answer for why, which makes it more frustrating instead of less. Of course, I'd prefer we not be at each other's throat, but I don't see a way to accomplish that. If the left's plan is to just kind of wait for the right to decide they don't want to be lied to anymore, that's not going to work - because the lie is their validation, as all validation is kind of a lie anyway. And if the right is waiting for the left to decide to join in on preferring more directly lie-based validation because at least it's limitless, I'm afraid that just can't satisfy some people: people generally can't consciously decide to unsee the dominant traits of objective reality once they get a glimpse of it. Our best chance – maybe our only chance - is to teach the next generations how to identify and value common ground. But the only way to accomplish this is by providing some common ground for them. My guess is this is a main reason Republicans want to privatize schools so badly, apart from pulling more of our money out of the air. Properly funded diverse public schools are the foundation of a diverse civilization. Crippling them would give segregation a boost that would undermine decades of effort others have spent trying to eliminate it, and then common ground will cease to be even theoretically possible. Perhaps an understanding of wholly objective reality is unavailable to us, but our shared understanding of reality becomes more objective as more diverse perspectives are added to it. Even conspiracy theorists can be valuable as it prompts the question of what makes an otherwise rational person susceptible to believing something so bizarre. But segregation risks putting all the conspiracy theorists in the same room, offering no course correction to them. This is how cults gain steam and turn in to hate groups. Hate groups (a fringe that is over-represented by right wingers by enormous margins), which seem to basically just be support networks but using hate to make it seem “manly” to need support26, direct that hate towards who they blame for needing that support. It’s never directed at the people who are actually responsible, though, because the narrative doesn’t undergo any course correction. And even when faced with reality, redirecting their blame is still generally out of the question as it means not only repurposing their life from whatever their ambitions were to instead atoning for the damage they caused pursuing those ambitions, but also it means admitting they need help - which is admitting they have failed to be self reliant. The hate allows them to accept needing support because it’s someone else’s fault that they need it - and not just "someone else's" but specifically someone else that they can dominate. They’ll even do the work of fixing the situation if the government would ever stop saying it’s illegal to do so; this is probably a main reason why in almost all hate groups (even those that hate each other) a common target of that hate is the government. The other main reason is because the government is a support network that one decidedly doesn’t require hate to justify using (unless hate groups take over the government, which they’re always trying: that, in fact, is A Problem) - if people in hate groups accepted that bland reality, it would put hate groups out of business.
The disadvantage objective reality has is that eventually it runs up against our existential dilemma, which is that we live in a random and indeterminate universe in which the only certainty is death. This is objective reality and there is no way to make it pleasant or even bearable other than by plastering it over with subjectivity: because everyone else is acting like there are more important things, that allows us to make our own brains behave like there are more important things, and since importance is ultimately a perception, that’s the same as there actually being more important things. And that works until it doesn't, but usually when it doesn't work then the person it didn't work for is dead and the people it continues to work for continue to be alive, so everyone contributing to this mosaic of a perceived higher order offers a survivorship bias to keep it reinforced. This is how we shield each other from terrifying thoughts. And when people from a wide diversity of backgrounds contribute to maintaining that shield, it’s more effective and we are far less likely to use it as a bludgeon. Segregation is thus critical to those who would in fact prefer to use that shield as a bludgeon.
However, it's critical to keep in mind that I don't just mean racial segregation. Yes, certainly that, but conservatives have a long history of getting the white working poor to vote against their interests by simply telling them that it is the interests of minorities. Republican leaders aren't clever; They're just cynical27 and repetitive. They will keep doing this same trick even if it stops securing power and control over resources, certain that it will work again eventually. But, as a possibly encouraging aside, it should be noted it doesn't currently work quite as well as they would like. One gets the impression that right wing leaders delight in taking a sideways approach to telling people what to think and then seeing them actually think it. It validates their narcissism to be able to trade lies and be given everything other people work for in return. However, when this doesn't work out, it deals a particularly devastating blow to their ego. Not only does it threaten to invalidate their narcissism but it also comes with the threat of them being left with no choice but to work for a living, like the rest of us. This assaults both their fantasy and reality at the same time, just by being outnumbered. And that is when a narcissist becomes truly hostile, doubling down on the lies to squeeze more loyalty out of the believers they did retain, in hopes of things like an armed rebellion on their behalf. But despite the threat this poses, I still find it to be encouraging that they are not as confident as they boast.
But again, I digress. They have been pulling this same trick for decades, using “it helps black people” as an excuse to cut funding for something. Continue underfunding it until it fails. Then use its failure as an excuse to hand it out to private profit (i.e., a gatekeeper). This is at least one of the reasons why they tell their voters over and over that everyone on the left thinks everyone on the right is racist (surely they false flag some accusers if none can be found) - it trains them to get mulish about anything at all being called racist, so when actual racism occurs, they get mulish about that being called racist, too. Then suddenly it is tidy instead of clumsy to say things like "we shouldn't fund public schools because it's a handout to black people"28 as it forces their trained voters to get mad in advance of the fact that liberals are going to call that racist. Because angry people don't think, and if they were allowed time to think about it, it would risk them understand that the overwhelming majority of them rely on public schools, too, and so maintaining them is objectively more important than "owning the libs." But the latter is a more satisfying balm to an angry soul - never mind the fact that the ones who told them to be angry are the same ones who told them what they should want to hear to satisfy that anger (any industry that sells both the disease and the cure is a scam).
Anyway, while I'm not sure that they have leaned too much on using race to turn people against public schools (yet), they have certainly tried their other usual tricks: defunding public schools until they fail, attacking public schools with over-regulation, and so on. Public schools have only held out this long because of overwhelming community support. Unfortunately, the right has become wise to that and has been attacking that support relentlessly with CRT, anti-masking, “grooming,” and I suspect even their frankly bizarre reactions to mass shootings are just them exploiting an opportunity to make public schools just a little more miserable. I don’t think this has actually withered community support for public schools much, but it has given the appearance that community support might be withering. And that’s all they really need to keep everyone from thinking that everyone else might also be mad about giving just a little bit more of our money away to the wealthy. As long as everyone believes they are one of a few to have a problem, the problem remains (organization would allow everyone to tell each other they don't believe it, by the way..).
Probably the most fundamental function of public education is it gives kids a space to develop that is shielded from the worst of the adult world. However, that only really counts for anything if they are not so shielded from each other - across classes and backgrounds - to terraform what the uncharted common ground between them will look like when they become the adults who must then pioneer it. Common ground is critical for teaching people to identify misinformation by making a more objective view of reality available. In this way, common ground is the foundation for any civilization - even if there is no diversity in race, religion, or income there will still be a diversity of ideas. Teaching kids to pursue their best ambitions instead of their most profitable ones is also nice but there is little enough reason for that to occur in Iowa anymore, because the anger and resentments (and the thrills of satisfying them) pushed by right wing misinformation has hooked too many people. Too many Iowans seem to be thinking that civilization itself must go if they are expected to contribute to it in a way that benefits anyone other than the exceedingly wealthy. I suspect a reason so many in Iowa (and probably the whole nation) are so quick to be dismissive of civilization is because it appears as a pie in the sky without any common ground to anchor it to - a fantasy like any other conspiracy theory would be, except not even a little bit entertaining. This is what defunding public schools has brought, whether intentional or not doesn't matter anymore. Public schools are supposed to be how kids learn common ground as reliably as they would learn a language - by immersion.
Though, it can certainly be said that Democrats have had a part in perpetuating income (and racial) segregation in schools. It doesn't change the fact that when we speak of which direction is the direction of providing an abundance of inclusive education opportunities to everyone, there is no way to argue that as anything but “to the left,” and the direction of increased gatekeeping and segregation in education as any direction but “to the right.” Democracy starts and ends with public education and, at least in Iowa, we're about to lose it. After Kim Reynolds puts her voucher scam in place, that’s pretty much game over for Iowa. I understand the vouchers are sold as a way to allow everyone to attend private schools, but that's not the way it actually works. It doesn't even make mathematical sense, as there is no learning aid, teacher, or resource that a private school can buy that a public school couldn't also buy with the same money - in fact less since public schools don't have to worry about profit. Yes, it is an uphill battle to get a school to do something en mass on your behalf, but it’s supposed to be in a democracy. Everyone gets a hand in every result. If you don’t like it you need to explain why in a way that others can agree with or accept the possibility that you are wrong29. The only one who benefits by taking this away is the owner who makes that profit - and of course the governor/legislators who almost certainly get a cut in campaign contributions, if not other ways.
Mutually Assured Reconstruction
So that's the beginning of the epilogue in the story of how the chances of Iowa ever seeing common ground again were sold off for profit. It may be a slow decline, but reversing it is too uphill for us to resist it as a state, without any common ground between rural, suburban, and city Iowans to push back from - I think that common ground might have been similarly sold off long ago with whatever transaction took place to allow right wing misinformation to dominate rural areas of the state. But that's just my suspicion. In Iowa, instead of rewriting history our Republican leaders seem content with just not teaching any of it. The assault on public schools has been pretty much out in the open for at least a decade, yet few seem to be aware of it. Republicans have worked hard to install the stranglehold of right-wing misinformation in the red counties, and were barely able to contain their glee when they pretended to complain about national Democrats seeming to concede the state is lost to them. After all, who will contradict them? Everything they say is the only narrative, now. They've worked very hard to be the gatekeepers on information, and now they are. Their last fight in the state was to be the gatekeepers of education, and Kim ousted members of her own party for not going along with her voucher scam: You can't blame that on the Democratic brand being toxic in rural areas. The voters chose one Republican over another. I don’t know what they were told for why they should do that, but I do know they had every opportunity to know the primary challenge was entirely about helping Kim take their public schools away, and they did it anyway. Twice in a row, in fact, as after that, they proceeded to re-elect Kim, herself. But they won’t blame themselves or even Kim for it. When the problems this causes inevitably comes up, they will wait for right wing media to tell them who to blame - who to hate for screwing up their schools. And right wing media will tell them “Democrats.” Hearing that will in no way fix any problems, but it will give limitless validation for the republican voters suffering that problem: it’s not their fault, they are the victims, keep doing it. Until voters can wean themselves off their addiction to voting for Republicans, there will just be more painful symptoms like this. Democrats can’t do it for them - well funded right wing misinformation has done everything it could, with unprecedented success, to hamstring Democratic messaging around Republican voters. This is how they've won the war. Like taking honey from bees and replacing it with corn syrup, the Republican party takes money and services from its voters and replaces it with “blame democrats.” And that works somehow. People are actually subsisting on that validation instead of the validation that would have come from being fully compensated for the benefits to society brought by their own labor. Whatever Iowa was when we were 1st in the nation in education, it isn't anymore.
There are those who acknowledge that if enough people come together, they can create just about anything. But there are also those who acknowledge that if enough people come together, they can destroy just about anything. Sadly, the latter requires substantially fewer people. And, because no one actually likes it when narcissists crowd the source of money and validation - thus positioning themselves as gatekeepers over who else is allowed to have some - conservative leaders seem to have instead fashioned their messaging strategy around the philosophy that most people find destruction more fun. So, they push as many people as they can reach into assuming creators are naive for thinking anything they might create will last, which attracts other destroyers or even grooms new ones. This makes it easier for republicans to reach the threshold they need to accomplish their goals. The problem is, they are absolutely right. Even if they only took up this philosophy as a distraction because "give all the money to the wealthy" wasn't something anyone would go for directly, it doesn't matter - it's still accurate. And they keep proving it by winning - by continuing to successfully destroy things and being perpetually rewarded with voter loyalty despite doing so. Public schools are next - imminently in Iowa, surely not long thereafter nationwide.
There is only one wild card that could throw the whole conflict decisively in one direction or another, and that is the apolitical/moderates. I understand much of the available common ground has been ripped out from under us so moderates may feel like they have no quarter, but if the moderates decide they want things to stay as they are or even have a slight preference for what the creators want to bring, then they should do the bare minimum (i.e. vote) to help. However, they have to make that decision soon or the destroyers will make it for them, and remember they require far fewer numbers. If nothing else, the moderates should strive to solidify their own power by strictly voting for the party with the best chance to end gerrymandering - a practice that pushes representatives to either extreme; it is not a coincidence that the party pushing for gerrymandering is the party that wants to end public education. I’ve tried to lay out the case for valuing public schools, and not just the things we all already know they are good for but also some of the things public schools may have done for us without us really knowing it was being done. Whatever else one has going on in their life, no attention set aside to support public schools is wasted. To summarize, public schools are the best territory for establishing common ground, the best cocoon for sheltering young minds from the adult world while they build a resistance to misinformation, and of course a provision of intellectual potential for any who are interested in pursuing a more civilized society - something not exclusive to public schools but is exclusively better if not done for profit. If nothing else in politics is of any interest to the apolitical, fine, but we just can’t balk on public schools or it’s all over. Centrists are forever burdened with making up the difference in reduced numbers destroyers require to destroy anything, including public schools. They will need to step up soon if they don’t have any particular desire to trend back towards the caves. Because again, the destroyers are winning.
It is usually the case, however, that (barring some catastrophe like a flood or fire) if an area has the resources to build a creature in the first place, then it should have the resources to sustain them. Humans are unique on this planet in that we can (and do) move massive amounts of resources further than any human would walk to acquire them on their own, to sustain large populations. So this perhaps doesn’t quite apply to us in as blunt of a sense anymore. There are still a lot of extra added steps to acquire resources in the environments we’ve constructed, though, and that’s sort of where this whole thing is going.
Or at least I would assume it is essential to our sense of dignity to be secure in the knowledge that we do not have to struggle to survive. And anyone who reaches that plateau would strongly oppose going backwards. The mechanisms by which some relatively static percentage of people are denied access to that plateau are a topic that needs to be brought out into the open, in my opinion, but are not quite discussed here - I still take the opportunity to snipe at them, of course.
Probably most people understand by now the idea that few villains think of themselves as the villain. It’s kind of a hobby of mine to speculate on neutral language for how our real life villains are likely explaining themselves to themselves - I just think it’s important if truly reforming anyone is ever to be our goal. Like when someone asks a question, if you respond to why they are asking instead of just answering the question at face value, it can cut through a lot of mistrust and insecurities - as long as you are correct about why they are asking. Understanding a villain without making them admit anything is, I suspect, the only way to get them to invest in a conversation. When someone wrongs you, you almost always have the choice between having them make a genuine attempt at atonement in pursuit of fixing the problem or ridiculing them to make them feel bad. Generally, you can not have both. Indeed, I suspect a substantial number of those who are hostile to higher education are primed with the automatic assumption that the prior is not possible and so anyone who tries to teach them anything is, on some level, ridiculing them for not already knowing it. But that’s a whole other topic.
Validation relies on the ‘wisdom of the crowd,’ in a sense. And so perhaps for any action to have been validated, it must have been of benefit to that crowd. In general, if something is of benefit to a crowd that is nearly by definition how cooperation is supposed to work. Unfortunately, if the crowd is sufficiently large (i.e. so no one is surprised if there are strangers among them), one can appear to benefit only a subset of it and get the approval of the rest, under the right circumstances. Which is probably how a ‘planted audience’ came to be.
Though validation can be tricky when someone doesn't want to admit their lack of ability - it is still easy to imagine future gratitude, or to simply know that they should be grateful, which counts for the same thing making it the only nearly autonomous source of validation available.
Or perhaps, as importantly, can imagine into existence on their own just by imagining people depend on them (see (4)). As one might expect, thus gatekeeping can also produce validation autonomously - or at least anonymously, which is nearly the same thing when it comes to validation - the ‘strangers in the crowd’ effect works both ways, alas.
This, of course, assumes both sides are approaching it as a competition of thought. But we as animals come from a world where the rule is that you are either fed or you are food. That has been the only competition for probably millions of years. Complete annihilation and consumption of the opponent thus makes sense for the side representing a desire to return to the structures of those prior millions of years.
From the outside, it's easy to confuse people with an ambition to better themselves living in an environment with some amenities are provided so they can do that work with people who just want to get paid to be themselves without improving.
I think people regard it as some huge chore to pick the Democratic side. To back a Democratic candidate means endorsing all of their failures, real and imaginary, past and future, whereas you don't have to worry about that with Republicans because they are happy to just lie and say they didn't fail, with a whole media industry that would hemorrhage ratings if they ever forced a republican to be honest. But in addition I think there is the despair that no one else is going to do it, either. This is at least one reason why people seem to consider just letting power be centralized - if just one person controls it then that person is responsible.
The connection between entertainment pulling in large crowds of people who want to escape from the tedium of real life for a bit and a dictatorship where anger pulls in large crowds of people who want to escape from the challenges of real life forever is illustrated in the framing. This is why right wing misinformation must style itself as entertainment. Not just legally but literally. If they don't entertain people they will lose their reach. Political awareness is not instinctive. People are completely new to politics every day at about the same rate that they are born.
In my personal opinion this is the biggest flaw in spanking children, as it teaches them to rely on pain, anger, and fear for their motivations to focus, thus making it harder to focus in a civilized or academic setting.
Indeed, any non rich person voting for republicans, in the first place, can only be reasonably attributed to an extended knee-jerk reaction. The wealthy seem to have discovered the practical solution to their problem of us peasants inevitably getting mad about what the wealthy have done seems to have been to make us mad at something else first - namely each other. An angry person has a lot of energy and feels fewer insecurities at the moment. So they nearly all look for something or someone to target that anger with that is also a righteous direction to target it. If they cant find that righteousness they find other reasons and make them righteous, quite open to suggestions (the two main sources of righteousness anger are "they're taking out stuff" or "they are hurting our people" - indeed it the ideal of civilization to extend "our people" to include absolutely everyone). And when they are done they will be primed to justify themselves after the fact. Like when the lights come on in a movie theater and one has to deal with objective reality once again, revealing the fantasy world they have been in for the last little while was merely a bunch of flickering lights. That the anger has a fabricated source does not make it less real or dangerous. Maybe even more so as fake problems can't be fixed so no visible problems will result in no visible solutions and the frustration that they are not seeing the problem they are imagining getting solved in real life could make that anger more volatile.
Perhaps it suffices to point out that younger people are more likely to look forward to accomplishments that will be meaningful and valuable, whereas the older one gets the more they will come to understand they have less time for additional accomplishments and need to start depending on the validation from the things they have already accomplished. And so, if younger people have a completely different idea of what should be valuable, their opinion ultimately wins out, but if it doesn't include valuing the accomplishments of the older generations there will be resistance, and the young will be left to recover the world from their elders' continuous attempts to take it with them. Ideally, we would establish a perpetual and systematic handoff of power from the old to the young. But again… beyond the scope.
Accountability scares the crap out of some people because it threatens to force them to revisit a time of unmitigated resource insecurity. They know what they did was wrong but at the time they didn't see any right way of getting what they were convinced they needed. It doesn't improve things to explain they didn't actually need it, nor that there were right ways to go about getting it; possession is nine tenths of the law when in an environment of scarcity, and the winner of any competition is ultimately the person who consumes the resource everyone is after - not the person who saw it first, not the person who played by the rules, not the person who got to it first, not the person with honor, not the person who touched it first: the person who gets it in their belly won. That's the rule all life has lived by for millions of years.
No matter the means it is considered a good thing to win and they should feel proud and validated for overcoming the struggles they had to endure to do so, in a competitive environment. To be asked to retroactively feel bad about doing a good thing they felt proud of is a threat to their validation. They don't want to be responsible for the consequences of their actions because they never agreed there should be consequences. It doesn't matter that that's just the way reality works - they didn't agree to that, either. Which is why a competitive environment isn't a good idea when it comes to the things people depend on - the consequences of winning is that someone else goes without. Generating our needs in abundance would negate the validation they got from winning in the past but it would also negate the guilt others get from winning in the future. But of course the older generations don't want their validation negated so they try to push younger generations into ignoring the guilt when they win so they can also become addicted to the same mechanisms of validation. This is reflected even in their election strategy as they have no guilt over voter suppression, campaign finance law violations, outright fake candidates, or even trying to get those who would vote against them killed - as long as they win that's all the validation they needed. Asking them after the fact about their deceptions is pointless. They already have the prize in their belly and are on to thinking about the next meal.
They can't be sorry for doing what they needed to survive. No one should, really. They might be convinced that they should be sorry for not knowing there was a better way but most attempts I've seen to get started on this are largely received as trying to make them sorry for surviving. It is too tangled to describe separately and too tangled to hear separately. They want to eat our validation to get some in their own belly. But how can anyone reach a place where they can be content eating something even as it begs them not to in clear words? It starts with the fact that there is no other visible option for survival and is layered with years of well funded psychological influence to encourage people to cling to the belief that "others" are subhuman no matter how they might sound otherwise. This is all an elaborate way to use our minds to justify behaving like animals. I content that we should, instead, use our minds to figure out how to be better than animals, and so I prefer we pursue that abundance.
Though that may be reflexive as they seem to decide before even knowing what they want that they are absolutely not going to do any work to get it; calling it ‘smart’ to figure out how to not do work instead of directing their intellect to figure out how to do better work is definitely on-brand for a narcissist. The difference, of course, is that the prior benefits only the narcissist whereas the latter benefits everyone - that is, in fact, part of the problem. They can’t stand the idea of benefiting other people in a way they don’t get the maximum return for, lacking any moral obligation to consider the possibility that the person they are negotiating with should receive fair value, as well. Where I’m going with this, of course, is to point out that when such a person gets themselves into a position where they control everyone else’s access to resources, their complete disregard for whether or not that is fair to anyone else is going to be a problem. No matter what exchange is agreed to they will always try to push it further in their favor - which isn’t even unwise in the general case but narcissists can’t concern themselves with consideration for limits of what other people should have to tolerate. That’s what a narcissist is. So they will take everything if they are ever in a position to do so. And you can be sure they are all trying very hard to get in that position by any means possible.
To be clear I don't mean all republican voters - I do think right wing media over-represents people slightly but notably to the right of the average of their base in an effort to push the rest of the base in that direction - what else are republican voters going to do, after all, if the choice is between accepting that the party took another step to the right or admit they've been duped from the start? So, when I speak of republican voters I am mostly only talking about the ones granted visibility by right wing media
It may be worth mentioning the argument for gatekeepers is parallel to this. That is, the quest for profits will push business owners to climb the economies of scale in the first place. There is nothing wrong with this perspective but those who advocate for it typically leave out putting in writing any requirement that the savings get passed down to the consumer. The theory behind that is the business owners can then reinvest that to climb the economies of scale still further. But of course those who advocate for it also leave out putting in writing any requirement that that must happen, too - nor do they put in writing that they can’t spend it on other ways to get money such as lobbying to have their taxes cut. Though, you could even argue that there is nothing wrong with this, either, so long as it shows that competetors who don’t spend on this sort of thing end up doing better. The end of the line seems to be when a company can simply buy competitors. That negates all of the arguments in favor of more gatekeeping. And of course there is no one putting in writing any requirement that when some maximum benefit has been reached it’s time to return 100% of the profits to the people who contributed thus far.
To me it is painful when I discovered I have wasted time being wrong. But for others, especially on the right, they seem to double down under the assumption that the challenge of actual importance is to convince enough people to pretend to go along with the incorrectness. Then they can be validated the same as though they were right. And if many people find themselves in this position, then it only adds to the effectiveness of this validation for each individual to have it echoed by additional others - a validation pyramid scheme, of sorts. The only possible problem is if, in being incorrect, they have made some false assumption about the nature of reality - or the reality of nature - and so expect some physical resource that doesn't magically manifest.
I don't know that it still applies but I remember when I was in high school civics was the least popular class and psychology was the most popular. It seems an obvious solution is to find where they overlap and teach that.
Not only does the cruelty get more attention by the media (as it probably should) but there is also a fear among those who gravitate towards authoritarianism: a fear of bullies among the “others.” Public cruelty towards those others signals to the fearful that the authoritarian shares their grievances and is, themselves, a bully that people are invited to hide behind. It is already known that when people get behind a bully the bully becomes more powerful. This tacit invitation is thus perceived as win-win.
That is, "grooming" is specifically exposing a child to a hyper-subjective environment - or at least as I understand it - which is why the right pretends so hard to have a problem with grooming; because they want their kids to stay groomed.
Refugees could soon be massively over-represented by the decedents of those who could have stopped the rise of authoritarianism by just showing up to vote. Although that assumes there will be a place for refugees to find refuge, which authoritarianism is rising globally so that’s unlikely.
A war necissarily requires both sides to be fighting each other but it’s an invasion if only one side is doing all the attacks. The right has figured out an emphasis on culture and identity is how they can drive a wedge into any issue that was ever uncontroversial.
It is a little odd that the fight seems to be between culture warriors and social justice warriors. This suggests either the culture warriors are defending a culture of injustice, or the social justice warriors are defending our justice system’s awful culture. I haven’t spoken with everyone on the left, but I’ve never even heard of anyone defending the culture of our justice system. So where does that leave us.
In any case, one thing the culture war does is provide cover for the wealthy. For decades, probably the top priority for liberals is a living wage for everyone, and it is the wealthy who are preventing that. But, if the wealthy side with liberals in the culture war, it takes a lot of heat off the wealthy without them paying a penny more to their employees. Seems like a shady coincidence that it’s the media funded by the wealthy that created the culture war in the first place and kept it propped up thereafter. Not suggesting it was intentional, because it didn’t need to be. All that groundwork laid out to keep people voting for tax cuts for the wealthy required training people up to be masters of manipulation. Once such people are already in place it no longer requires someone to think ten moves ahead to create yet another red herring.
Indeed, they’ve already done this with George Santos. Blaming Democrats for not researching him enough, as though we should all expect that Republicans are too inept to vet their own candidates, but should still be given the power to run the country anyway.
Someone (not me, obviously - if you haven’t noticed by now I’m not the most organized of writers) could or maybe should write a whole book on how projection works out so well for the right. But this is a pretty simple example: The right wants something (i.e. fascism) they know they shouldn’t have (either because it is wrong or because they are told it is wrong). So the very first thing they do is mock the left for wanting it. If the fairness doctrine was still a thing anyone on the left would say “we don’t actually want that” and that could be the end of it. But with unchecked right wing misinformation dominating the media environment, this mockery gets repeated with slight changes at each iteration until it morphs into “the left already has the thing.” At which point viewers of right wing misinformation get mad at the left for having a thing it was previously established someone should be mocked for wanting, and resentful because they secretly want it, too. At that point any right wing candidate is free to say they are pursuing that thing themselves and right wing voters will applaud it, freed from the burden of admitting they want the thing to feel less sad since they are given the excuse of wanting the thing because they are mad.
It is republican leaders who believe republican voters are racist. This is why so much of their campaign ads feature brown people crossing the border with their metaphorical hand out. Whereas democratic campaign ads are more about plans to fix roads and use tax dollars in a way that takes advantage of the economies of scale.
Which to my knowledge they haven't said yet but, if history is any guide, it's inevitable. Indeed, they sort of have, as the false alarm over CRT - apart from a way to make public school boards a little more miserable - was really just complaining about black people getting a "validation handout;" the built-in validation of being a victim is certainly some substantial portion of the reason the right tries so hard to paint themselves as one. It is thus not too much of an abstraction to use the fact that money is designed to be the universal resource as a means to at least arouse the suspicion that identifying someone as a victim could be assigned a monetary value.
Unfortunately, this does require that everyone is playing by the same rules of logic. In this way the pursuit of objective reality is ultimately self sustaining, but only after some threshold is reached. We clearly have not reached it yet, though.