Dave -
First, why /Win Bigly/ recommend. Adams' book is his attempt to
understand, to deconstruct and analyze, why he "knew" with complete
certainty that Trump would win simply by observing one of his first
political rallies. From where did that conviction arise? Why was it so
absolute? Adams eventually comes to the conclusion that he was so
certain because he non-consciously, at first, recognized a master
communicator. Most of the book is a series of anecdotal 'experiments'
that fleshed out and confirmed his instinctual reaction at the first
rally. Ultimately it is a cautionary tale: if you can't (my own
editorial position, if you won't) recognize why — despite all the
negatives — he won, you will not be able to defeat him next time.
I think I got this point in a post several weeks ago and maybe even
during the election runup/aftermath. It opens as many questions as it
closes however. I didn't engage (much) then, and am perhaps still (2
years later?) still trying to form the question.
As to the ethics dimension; you quoted one of Adam's reviewers:
/"//But, when I was in school, we always discussed ethical
responsibility of the persuader and Adams does not. As long as Trump
was persuasive he was going to win and that’s what matters."/ This
misconstrues what Adams, who is definitely NOT a Trump fan or even
apologist, is saying.
I appreciate your own explanation of "Win Bigly". It isn't that
surprising that many of his reviewers would miss his point in favor of
some slightly askew but fundamentally different.
A different metaphor: I am standing on a hill watching as a Tanker
truck filled with, but leaking, 5,000 gallons of gasoline rushing
headlong towards a family minivan and state the obvious, "that truck
gonna crush that minivan and immolate every person nearby," and "the
truck outweighs the minivan by 5 tons, it has no breaks and the truck
driver is slumped over behind the wheel," and "there is nothing the
minivan can do about it unless it is a Transformer in mufti." I am not
saying that the truck crushing the minivan is "what matters." I am in
fact saying that avoiding the disaster is _what matters_ and we might
have prevented the disaster if we had recognized and addressed the
factors that made it inevitable instead of wailing and gnashing teeth
about the driver being a drunk sex offender working for a company that
skipped safety inspections ...
Yes to this, I think. Both the point that avoiding the disaster is at
least what is most important in the moment, and some kind of
understanding of how we might have avoided it in the first place has a
less urgent but similar if not equal level of importance. If we
*imagine* that the driver of the 5 ton truck with failed brakes was
slumped over his wheel in a drunken stupor while reviewing child
pornography on his electronic tablet, then I suppose being incensed
about those factors is relevant to the imminent disaster and possible
future replays by trucks from the same or similar companies with drivers
with the same or similar questionable habits.
I do believe you might be referring to the common tendency to take the
facts of a (dire) situation and apply them immediately through the lens
of your own agenda-structured worldview, letting the current imminent
incident be fodder for promoting some subset of one's agendas... say
like what the White House has been doing around the southern border
"crisis".
Trump's communication skills ensured that he would win as long as the
opposition focused on the cretin instead of the policy.
I'm surprised you (and Scott Adams?) would call this "communication
skills"... he IS effective at what I would more aptly call
*mis*communication. It is not that he has a complicated or subtle or
exotic idea to share which he then serializes into a series of
communications (talking points in a speech, or a series of tweets), but
rather that he spews something which may or may not be well crafted, but
has a quality which misdirects the listener in a way that supports is
*goals* which are very likely far from the ones he is stating overtly.
My father used to say, when watching a rodeo clown, "you have to be
really good to be that bad!" referring to the apparent clumsy buffoonery
being played out to distract the recently goaded bull from the
bullriding goader trying to get up off the dirt and back to the safety
of the arena fence.
Second, Individualism. The list recently struggled with the idea of
labeling (categorizing) people and my response to your question and
observations about individualism will echo some of the labeling
conversation.
I will resist being labeled an "individualist" because every
characterization I have seen on this list is grounded, in one way or
another, on "individual rights." I do not believe that indivdiual's
have "rights," even the inalienable ones, that are not derived
entirely from "individual responsibility."
I think I share some analog to your rights/responsibility duality. But I
also think they are part of a social construct/contract. "Rights" and
"Responsibilities" only make sense to me in the context of some group. I
think in most cultures *many* of the rights and responsibilities of the
"individual" are so implicit in the culture that we don't think much
about them until we get around to conjuring up a constitutional
governance document or facing a judge in a courtroom.
I am ultimately and absolutely responsible for, not only myself, but,
labeling again, all sentient life. While this seems absurd on its
face, it is directly analogous to the Bodhisattva. (A goal, not an
achievement!)
Why draw the boundary around sentient life? Why not include *all
consciousness* or *all life* and then extend that to *all patterns of
matter and energy*? I'm not asking this challengingly... I'm
suggesting that in the same way expanding past "me" to "my family" to
"my tribe" to "my nation" to "my race" to "my species" to "my genus" or
"family" or "order" or even "kingdom" makes some real sense.
Corollaries follow: 1) absolute responsibility also means absolute
accountability, including if a mistake is made ("do the crime, do the
time");
I think the question of "accountability" vs vaguely related concepts
like "retribution", "revenge", "rehabilitation", "recovery", even
"return to grace" is important but probably worth deferring here.
2) a critical dimension of responsibility is acquiring the kind of
'omniscience' that assures non-attachment;
These are somewhat the opposite of "Willful Ignorance", methinks?
3) every act (behavior) I exhibit is both informed and intentional;
In some limit, yes. But along a spectrum it would seem. Until one has
achieved said "Omniscient Non-attached Enlightenment" there is room for
weakly informed and therefore mis-applied intentions. The truck-driver
hurtling toward the minivan loaded with a model family (including a
couple of cute dogs) may well have been swerving to avoid a deer when
his poor information lead him to believe that he could do so without
crossing lanes, jumping a barrier, and flying headlong into said family
(in this version, the truck-driver is neither a sex offender nor
substance abuser and the brakes may or may not work but in either case
aren't being effective enough to avoid the inevitable fiery collision).
And then we have the concept of "willful ignorance". Are you perhaps
suggesting that every act/behaviour has a component of willful ignorance?
and 4) the necessary assumption that everyone else is an
"individualist" of this same stripe.
We can assume that every one else is the same animal, whether they know
it or not. Harping on my willful ignorance, we could accuse those who
don't know it of extreme ignorance with or without extreme willfulness.
In the above I am an admitted fundamentalist fanatic. However, the
culture I grew up in, both secular and religious, strongly echoes
these ideas. Growing up, I was exposed, pretty much constantly, to the
"Paradise Built in Hell" kind of individual, group, and social
behavior. (Obviously, that was not the only thing to which I was exposed.)
I think I was as well, though some reflection exposes various pockets of
hypocrisy that I was unprepared to recognize at the time. I think
something actually *changed* during my generation, where *willful
ignorance* (still harping) replaced engaged responsibility.
This is a lot of what I am curious about... what that equation is, how
it is balanced and how we got from there to here (or even whether here
and there are anything but the same thing?).
A Geography professor at Macalester College sparked a lifelong
interest in Utopian communities. In addition to the physical
environment,I was interested in the 'mental' environment of values,
principles of social organization, etc.. I have found a lot of other
'echoes' of my concept of individualism in those that managed to
survive multiple generations (a rarity).
Intentional Communities (almost by definition Utopian?) have been around
for a very long time and often fail within a generation, sometimes under
the weight of their own extremism, sometimes under the weight of
"backlash" from trying to overconstrain human instinctual drives (e.g.
all the things that the 10 Commandments feels compelled to be explicit
about).
Complexicists might prefer Utopian societies exhibit Utopian qualities
through emergent properties. Jenny Quillien's writeup on her trip to
Bhutan exposed a partial example of this (perhaps).
Hope this was on point to what you asked about.
I think more to the point is to stimulate some off-axis discussion which
perhaps provides a little parallax relief from the familiar left/right
debates (rants) that we (not just this group, but society at large) seem
to lock into. I sense that your own experiences and unique path
through life leads you to a similarly unique perspective. The topic of
categorization recently seems mostly to be an issue I think Glen calls
"over-quantization" or perhaps it is "premature-quantization"? This is
also why I harp on breaking the RNC/DNC stranglehold on election
(including debate) processes... I want to be making my own choices in a
much higher-dimensional space... even if I might be resigned to the
hazards of representative gov't (as opposed to the hazards of a direct
democracy).
- Steve
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