If it's any consolation, I waded through your entire bounce-formatted
post, it was that good.
On Wednesday, November 9, 2016, Eric Smith <desm...@santafe.edu
<mailto:desm...@santafe.edu>> wrote:
Sorry Friam. I sent this before from the wrong address, and then I
foolishly forwarded the bounce, which had been reformatted and
partly chopped up.
This was what it looked like the firs time.
E
> I think what this all is about is the power of resentment.
>
> I think the engine underneath the rejection of Hillary is that
people look at her and see a face that they think believes itself
better than them and that looks down on them. For people who were
already under the power of resentment, that sets it on fire and
opens this thing that is weirdly borderline with hatred. All the
other stuff, news items or whatever, is just opportunistic window
dressing that gets recruited after the fact as rationalization.
Nobody cares about emails. If that hadn’t been available, it
would have been something else. What they care about is indulging
in rage at being “disrespected”.
>
> I acknowledge the sophistication as well as the goodness of the
Dalai Lama, and I defer to the willful positivity of the Buddhists
who have been thinking about this systematicaly for nearly a
thousand years, and I understand that they know things I don’t
know. But I also work with primatologists, of which anthropology
is a sub-discipline. The meanness of chimpanzees is probably
retained from the recent ancestor, and it isn’t that far below the
surface in humans. Whatever it is about social status, that gets
wrapped up in the phrases “looking up to” or “looking down on” is
big in us like it is big in them. Humans on some occasions have
other layers of culture that put some checks on it, but that
superstructure is not all that robust. I am not compelled by the
Dalai Lama’s interpretation (for which I am nonetheless grateful)
that this is about the loss of feeling needed. It is much meaner
and more primitive than that; it is the resentment of feeling
looked down on.
>
> But now we have trouble. Americans seem to have a kind of
negligent optimism that the mechanisms of democracy will still be
there as a path to backtrack from mistakes they didn’t escape
before. But the keys to everything have just been given to a
strange hodge-podge of people, to none of whose members are the
mechanisms of democracy anything particularly desirable. They are
merely obstacles to their own small and predatory ambitions. I
don’t take for granted that there will be mechanisms of
backtracking the next time a calendary cycle rolls around.
>
> The motive power here is the power of resentment, at the
bottom. But mechanisms matter too, and individuals matter. A few
articles here and there seem to me to capture large chunks of this
in a way that seems coherent and clarifying.
>
> There are architects like Newt Gingrich, as he is called out in
the article from (2012) “Let’s just say it: the Republicans are
the problem”. There is a systematic effort on all fronts all the
time to dismantle the institutions of democracy to capture spoils
in a competition. The method, for me, is best brought into
clarity in the Malcolm Gladwell parable on David and Goliath,
about the girls’ basketball team that won without particular skill
by implementing the full-court press on every play of every game.
Gladwell dwells on this as an honorable strategy because it
employs conditioning as the thing that can be bought with
discpline when there isn’t native talent. He comments, obliquely,
that the teams of more skillful girls who were beaten in games
were annoyed at being beaten by a full-court press. He doesn’t
develop this, but I think it matters. For the skilled girls, they
were in a _game_. The point of winning was to be a reward for
being good at the play of the game. Their upset was that suddenly
there was no game any more, there was no skill, there was no
aesthetic to be aspired to or served. Winning became its own
currency separate from whatever art the game had been meant to
enable. The story has both sides, and there is credit due both
where Malcolm calls it and where he bypasses it. But the analogy
to me here is what happens when winning is separated from the
game’s having a purpose in doing something else, which one might
call “bigger”. In basketball, the bigger thing was the cultivation
of an art. In politics, it is the preservation of a society.
>
> We have seen the full-court press. It is middle-American
right-wing talk radio. It is the constant campaign of hysteria,
over everything, everywhere, all the time, that Paul Krugman notes
over and over in his columns. It is the congress’s commitment to
demolish everything, to obstruct and to block everything. Because
there is nothing they are trying to build or to accomplish, there
is no currency with which to negotiate with them. Where there are
no values, there is no foundation for rules of play. It is the
district gerrymandering, and the voter disenfranchisement acts of
closing polls and DMVs in southern states. These things work.
Once a democracy is dismantled, the tools to oust the ones in
power can only come from outside. But where is “outside” when the
keys to everything are handed over at the level of a country.
>
> There are those who aren’t “architects”, like Gingrich, but
rather these skinny venomous little blonde women who come out of
the woodwork to fill local roles, or minor con men like Paul Ryan,
or various slimy and disgusting and yet dangerous things like Ted
Cruz.
>
> I feel like these are the machery that channels the motive power
of resentment and enables it to do things. The machinery matters,
but if the motive power of resentment were not there, the
machinery would have nothing to drive it or flow through it.
Conversely, as long as the motive power is there, there are always
architects and local operators who can come in and try their hand
at machinery, and a kind of Darwinian dynamic will filter out the
ones that succeed.
>
> Under the power of resentment, there is no choice so mean, or so
stupid, or so self-defeating that people cannot be led to make
it. The ones who thought this was a good idea will plough
themselves under as fast as they take down others, but there is no
value in looking forward to that in vengeance. Facts matter in
the real world of cause and effect, but in the choice world of
resentment, they are beside the point. People under the power of
resentment are unreachable in all those terms; they have shifted
into a different space.
>
> Somehow that is what we have to deal with. Any pleasure or
luxury in analysis or speculation is no pleasure now. There is
just what options are left. I do think that the mistake was, and
will continue to be, not finding ways to stop the growth of
resentment. A line in one of the English-language translations of
the Dao de Jing goes “The wise rule by emptying hearts and
stuffing bellies.” I won’t claim to understand what original
Chinese political theorists intended this to mean, but I do think
the failure to take seriously the need to stuff bellies (and the
more subtle and perhaps honorable human needs for safety,
fulfillment, and freedom from want) hasn’t been taken seriously
enough, for decades now, by any of those who were comfortable.
>
> Now that all the keys are in the hands of the predators, we have
fewer tools to work with than we had before. It would have been
good if the sense of urgency to stop the undermining and the
feeding of resentment, which I think Bernie felt and tried to
speak for though without a serious plan to deal with the
complexity of the mess, had weighed on more people before. But we
are where we are now, and the question is what can hold off or
reverse the coming active damage from here.
>
>
>
>
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