The election is over. How do we feel now?

I host a monthly discussion group in Austin TX, The Austin Rainbow Forum, that meets at 2 pm on the first Sunday of every month to consider interesting topics and ideas. I pass on here the background reading for our Dec. 1 session, whose topic is: "The election is over. How do we feel now? " The first two links are to articles by David Brooks. 

David Brooks - Voters to Elites: Do You See Me Now?

David Brooks - Why We Got It So Wrong

Also, below is a longer screed by Sam Harris that he made available for a period to non-subscribers of his "Making Sense" podcast:

    
The following is an edited transcript from The Making Sense podcast:

So the reckoning has arrived: Donald Trump has been re-elected President of the United States. And it seems like he's going to have both houses of Congress too.  Of course, he already had the Supreme Court. The question is, what to make of this? Why did he win, and why did the Democrats lose?

Well, first, we should acknowledge that this is the greatest comeback in American political history. It's as if Nixon got re-elected to a second term after Watergate. It's better than that, or worse, depending on what you think about Trump. Luckily, I hedged my bet and I never said anything too critical about the man. I've always been very respectful of him and Elon and the other innovators they have around them. Let's be honest, these guys just want to make America great again. Can't you just give them a chance?

All kidding aside, I will let you know when I receive my first audit from the IRS.

What I think we need now is an honest assessment of why Trump won—because it says a lot about our country that he did. It says a lot about how divided we are.  It says a lot about the state of the media and the effects of social media. Above all, it says something that the Democratic Party and our elite institutions need to hear.

Obviously, Trump's win and Harris loss were determined by many factors, and I think everyone is in danger of believing that their pet issue explains everything that happened on Tuesday. You could certainly make the case that it was immigration and the southern border. Or it was inflation and the cost of groceries. You could even say it was the way Trump responded to that first assassination attempt, which, among other things, prompted Elon Musk to endorse him within minutes. Or it was Harris's weakness as a candidate. And the way the Democratic Party coronated her, rather than allow some competitive process to happen. Or you could say that the blame lies with Biden himself, and his disastrous decision to run for a second term—that was pure hubris. And of course, this blame extends to all the people who covered for him, and lied to themselves, or to the public, about his competence for over a year. Some of this culpability fell on Harris herself: What did she know about Biden, and when did she know it? She never had a good answer for that question. Or, to come to one of my hobby horses, it was her failure to have anything like a “Sister Souljah” moment where she could put some distance between her current self and the Kamala Harris of 2019, who seemed to be in lockstep with the far left of the Democratic Party.

The truth, of course, is that all of these things contributed—and if one or two of them had changed, we would have had a different result. But the Harris campaign and the Democratic Party—in the last hundred days before the election—weren't in control of most of these variables. They could have messaged differently about all of them—I think it would have been possible to talk about inflation and immigration better than they did—but their real failure, in my view, was to not pivot to the political center in a way that most people found credible.

So, to return to my hobby horse, I think there are some lessons that the Democrats really must absorb from what is undeniably a total political defeat. They simply must recognize that several planks of their platform are thoroughly rotten.

Identity politics is over. No one wants it. Latinos and blacks don't even want it, as witnessed by the fact that they moved to Trump in record numbers. Trump got a majority of Latino men nationwide, and in some counties he got a majority of Latino men and women, even with all that he has said about immigrants from Latin America over the years—like that “they're poisoning the blood of our people,” which is straight out of Mein Kampf. A comedian called Puerto Rico “a pile of garbage” at a Trump rally, and the entire democratic machine, and all of liberal media, seized upon it, as though a nuclear bomb had just vaporized an American city, and no one cared.

Identity politics is dead, and we have to bury it.

There's one species of identity politics that had an enormous effect on this election, and most Democrats don't seem to realize it: Around half a percent of American adults identify as transgender or non-binary—that's 1 in 200 people.  And yet the activism around this identity has deranged our politics for as long as Trump has been in politics. One lesson that I would be quick to draw from this election is that Americans aren't really fond of seeing biological men punch women in the face at the Olympics. And if that sounds like transphobia to you—you're the problem. Political equality, which we should want for everyone, does not mean that “trans women are women.”

Trans women are people and should have all the political freedom of people. But to say that they are women—and that making any distinction between them and biological women, for any purpose, is a thought crime and an act of bigotry—that is the precept of a new religion. And it is a religion that most Americans want nothing to do with.

I want to be very clear about this: I have no doubt that there are real cases of gender dysphoria, and we should want to give such people all the help they need to feel comfortable in their own bodies and in society. How we think about this, and how we understand it scientifically, is still in flux. But there are four-year-olds who, apropos of nothing, claim to be in the wrong body—for instance, they were born a boy, but they insist that they're really girls—and they never waver from this. It's pretty obvious in those cases that something is going on neurologically, or hormonally—at the core of their being—and that it is not a matter of them having been influenced by the culture. But, conversely, there now seem to be countless examples where the possibility of social contagion is obvious. Where, due to the influence of trans activists on our institutions, these kids are effectively in a cult, being brainwashed by a new orthodoxy.  These are radically different cases, and we shouldn’t be bullied into considering them to be the same.

I've spoken to many Democrats in recent years, and over the course of this election, and a shocking percentage of them imagine that all the controversy about trans rights and gender identity in kids is just a product of right-wing bigotry—and that it’s a non-issue, politically. Whereas it is obvious that, for millions of Americans, it might as well have been the only issue in this election. Not because they are transphobic assholes, but because they simply do not accept the new metaphysics, and even new biology, mandated by trans activists and the institutions that they have successfully bullied and captured. And it's important to say that not all trans people agree with what these activists say and do.

Having the thought police suddenly proscribe the use of the term “woman,” and demanding that we speak instead of “birthing person,” or “menstruators,” or “people with ovaries,” or some other Orwellian construction designed to test everyone's patience and sanity… the sight of people being deplatformed on social media or fired from universities for merely stating that there are two biological sexes—I actually know a professor who lost her job at Harvard over this… witnessing an epidemic of gender confusion spread through our schools, when people with their own eyes could see that this was a social contagion being encouraged by the schools themselves—the ultimate fruition of which, in many cases, is irreversible medical procedures… We've got an epidemic of teenage girls wanting double mastectomies—snd some are actually getting them, based on ideas being spread on TikTok—and any parent who resists this trend gets demonized and, under certain conditions, could lose custody of their kids?

Congratulations, Democrats. You have found the most annoying thing in the fucking galaxy and hung it around your necks.

I know people who haven't been touched by this issue personally, for whom it was the only issue that decided their vote. In fact, it is the issue that fully radicalized Elon, and he's spoken about this at length. Do you think Elon continuously messaging to 200 million people on X, and going to Trump's rallies, and donating over 100 million dollars to the campaign, and supporting him on podcasts, and doing everything else in his power to get Trump elected, might have accounted for a few votes? Honestly, I think a doctoral dissertation, and perhaps several, could be written on how trans activism completely destroyed Democratic politics—without most Democrats knowing.

Of course, people will be doing an autopsy on this election for quite some time.  But there is some polling already which suggests that cultural issues in general, and this issue in particular, were the greatest drivers of swing voters turning to Trump. For the purpose of this poll, a swing voter is defined as “those who are undecided in the presidential race, or who have changed their voting preference since 2020, voting Democrat in one election and Republican in the other.” Or they were “Independents, who had either indicated that they split their votes between Democrats and Republicans, or who hold either a favorable or unfavorable view of both Trump and Harris.” So these were the people whose votes were in play, and according to a poll titled, “Why America Chose Trump: Inflation, Immigration, and the Democratic Brand,” for these swing voters, the strongest predictor of a vote for Trump was their response to the following statement:  “Kamala Harris is focused more on cultural issues like transgender issues rather than helping the middle class.” So transgender issues were flagged as the example of progressive politics.

Now, you might want to say that neither Harris nor Biden campaigned as a vocal trans activist—and that's true. But, honestly, if you wanted to account for Harris's loss and Trump's win in the briefest possible space, and also indicate the hold that the far left has had over Democratic politics and the Biden administration, I think it would be hard to do better than to juxtapose the following two facts: On his first day in office, President Biden signed an executive order ensuring that trans girls could have access to girls’ restrooms, locker rooms, and sports.  It took him two and a half years to sign an executive order addressing the chaos at the southern border. Why did he wait so long? Because the far left has always said that a concern about the southern border is “racist.”

What more needs to be said about the degree to which the Democratic Party and the Biden administration lost touch with the will of the American people?

As for the topic of trans rights and gender dysphoria, what Harris needed to do, at a minimum, is express her understanding that this issue is complex—that there's a legitimate concern about social contagion and that, in certain cases, there's a conflict between giving trans women and girls everything they want and protecting the rights of biological women and girls. And the jury is still out on many questions here—and policy in Europe has changed radically in recent years, for understandable reasons. This topic is a total mess, ethically and politically. And yet, the orthodoxy among Democrats, and in the elite institutions that they have influenced, is that the trans activist line is the only ethical line to take.

But the truth is, every shibboleth that came out of the far left in recent years contains within it the same recipe for the destruction of Democratic politics. Each is like an evil hologram. Take the term “Latinx.” Who was that for? Only 3 percent of Latinos are in favor of this silly rebranding of their ethnicity. Again, Trump did better among Latinos than any Republican in memory. Do you think it was because there wasn't enough identity politics rammed down their throats from the left? Do you think they just need to see some more white people admonished for the sin of cultural appropriation? You think another lecture about sensitive Halloween costumes might do the trick?  Much of Democratic politics has become a bad SNL sketch.

Democrats simply have to understand that this is one of the reasons that we're getting four more years of Donald Trump. Four more years of this man holding more power and responsibility than any person on earth.  If it sounds like I'm blaming far left activists for this, along with everyone who bent the knee to them—I am.

Sure, inflation didn't help, but the Harris campaign and the Democratic Party couldn't change the price of groceries. They could control whether the Vice President gave a rational accounting of why she no longer supports taxpayer-funded-gender-reassignment surgeries for undocumented immigrants in detention.  Do you know how many ads the Trump campaign ran on that issue? In some markets, it was a third of their ad spend. “She's for they/them. He's for you.”  Someone find me the video where Harris made any sense at all on this topic.

And the same can be said for all the other cultural issues that have been poisoned by the far left.  Literally everyone I know who voted for Trump—and this includes some extraordinarily influential people like Elon—literally everyone, was focused on cultural issues. It wasn't inflation, for them. It was trans activism, the insanity at the southern border, DEI policies, and homelessness and crime in our cities—and the unwillingness of Democratic DAs and mayors to do anything about it. The fact that when you go into a CVS, and you need to call a locksmith to liberate some razor blades and Tylenol—this is an absolute disgrace. It is a clear degradation of the quality of life in American cities. And these things mattered on Tuesday, when people went to the polls.

Most of our largest cities are run by Democratic mayors—at least two thirds of the top hundred, and I think a higher percentage of the top twenty. What are the Democrats doing about homelessness? The Democratic Party largely owns this problem—and for years Democrats have been acting like the answer to it is for everyone just to become more tolerant. They won't police the streets, but they'll police the language. “These people are not ‘homeless.’ They're ‘unhoused.’”  Okay. Great… Anyone who lives in a city, who has to shepherd their kids past some raving lunatic standing outside the supermarket, or who knows that there are whole sections of town that they shouldn't even set foot in because it looks like the third act of a zombie movie there—many of these people are done with your politics. And so are millions of others who don't live in big cities, but visit them, or just see the images on social media. No one wants to live like this.  This is the sort of issue that was easily and justifiably weaponized against Democrats in this election.

Or take the Hamas supporters on our college campuses: You don't have to be Jewish to see how shameful this is. This is an assault, not just on Jews and Israel, but on Western civilization. Let's just call it what it is: real civilization. If the Democratic Party can't figure out that civilization needs to be defended from barbarism, what do you expect is going to happen in a presidential election?  Yes, Biden and Harris were not terrible on this issue, but they talked out of both sides of their mouths. They bent over backwards to not offend the people in the Democratic Party who are totally confused about what happened on October 7th, and about the problem of Islamism and Jihadism worldwide—people who think in terms of “Islamophobia” rather than about really protecting human rights.

Here's one clue on the path back to sanity on this issue, which you may have missed: The hijab is not a symbol of female empowerment. Most of the women throughout the world who wear the veil are forced to, by men who will beat the shit out of them if they don't. It might be time to figure this out, if you actually care—or want to credibly pretend to care—about the rights of women on planet Earth.

There's simply no question that Democratic moral confusion on many of these issues cost Harris millions of votes.

So that's the reckoning that has to happen now among Democrats—and I hope it does.  But the concern now is that four more years of Trump and Trumpism will prevent it.  Trump is such a provocation to the left, and to liberal institutions, that Democrats could find themselves doubling down on all their delusions. Needless to say, this will be exactly what Trump and the MAGA cult want, because it will be politically suicidal.

If you are a Democrat who voted for Harris, please absorb this: You lost more people of color than you ever have in a presidential election, while running against Archie Bunker. Worse, Trump is actually supported by real racists and white supremacists—and that still wasn't enough of a problem. Who do you think your identity politics is for? You're really going to keep celebrating pornographers of racial grievance, like Ta-Nehisi Coates and Ibram X. Kendi? Should we just give another Pulitzer Prize to the 1619 Project and congratulate ourselves? You really think racism is the problem in America—and that what we saw this week was just a victory for white-male identity politics? That's how you're going to explain Trump's popularity at this point? Trump gained support from every racial group except white people, where he lost one percentage point when compared to 2020. You're going to chalk that up to racism?

We're about five days out from the election, when I'm recording this, and I'm still hearing prominent Democrats say things like, “America was never going to elect a black woman for president in the year 2024.”  That's not the issue. And if you keep this up, you're going to get President Candace fucking Owens someday. Wouldn't that be a perfect rejoinder to this stupidity?

I hope it's obvious from everything I've said and written for years. And from the first half of this podcast, that I understand the frustration, and even revulsion, that people feel for the far left, and for the progressive orthodoxy that has infected our institutions—for the censoriousness, thought policing, gaslighting, and lying. I understand the degree to which our institutions have been bent by this, and anyone who's followed my work from the beginning knows that I've been outraged by this encroaching moral blindness for at least 20 years—long before “wokeness,” or Black Lives Matter, or trans activism, or “defund the police.”

In the years after September 11th, 2001, when I began to focus on the problem of Islamism and jihadism, I was complaining about just this. I could see that anyone who described these problems too honestly would get tarred as a “racist”—as though that made any sense. I saw how someone like Ayaan Hirsi Ali was treated like an untouchable by left-wing think tanks and writers. I saw how even Nicholas Kristof at the New York Times—whose whole shtick was to show his concern for the rights of women in the developing world—even he felt obliged to condemn Ayaan as an “Islamophobe.” This was a woman who was quite literally being hunted by Muslim theocrats in one of the most cosmopolitan societies we have, modern Holland.

For years, I witnessed journalists obfuscate about the threat of Islamic extremism. Someone was found stabbing people in a European city, or mowing them down with his car—shouting, “Allahu Akbar!”—and it would be reported that the motive for the crime was still mysterious, and the perpetrator would be described, at most, as an “immigrant.” Sometimes every detail of this sort would be suppressed, and you'd have no idea what happened—it was just random mass murder. Needless to say, this kind of politically-correct dishonesty has since spread to many other topics, as the left-wing hatred of Western civilization, capitalism, and white people has distorted everything left of center.

I understand how infuriating this is, especially on an issue that touches your life directly. I know what it's like to read an article in the New York Times and to spot obvious lies. But the alternative to the failure of journalism simply isn't the firehose of lies, half-truths, and conspiracy theories that you find on X. Nor is it the calculated and ever-present distortion you find on right-wing news channels, which never had any journalistic standards to violate in the first place.  There's simply no alternative to healthy institutions that maintain their credibility, even when they make mistakes, by reliably correcting their errors. And when they fall short of this standard, they can be pressured to do better, because they have intellectual and moral scruples. It's an imperfect process, but it's the best we've got.

Elon Musk never corrects his errors. Tucker Carlson never corrects his errors.  Donald Trump never makes errors, because he never stops lying. He's playing tennis without the net, and his fans love it. Putting your faith in deranged personalities isn't a viable alternative to having truly liberal institutions that you can trust, and which can be obliged to earn your trust back when they fail.

I understand how satisfying it is to find a new bully to beat up the other bullies who've been making you miserable. But the problem is, this new bully is worse. This new bully has no principles. This new bully has no journalistic, academic, or scientific conscience to appeal to. Whatever might be wrong with a person like Anthony Fauci, or Francis Collins, or any of the other doctors who have been demonized right-of-center for their approach to setting COVID policy—at least they are real doctors and scientists who have some professional scruples and reputations to protect among those who actually know something about medical science. RFK Jr. has none of that. He's just a cowboy taking shots at the establishment. The Joe Rogan podcast is not a substitute for the Wall Street Journal or the Kennedy School at Harvard. It is not progress to have a comedian like Dave Smith, who's apparently done his own research, interviewed about the history of the Middle East or the war in Ukraine like he's the next Henry Kissinger. All of this free access to information is making us dumber.

Of course, I blame Trump and social media for how divisive our politics have become.  Trump is what you get when 51 percent of a society declares bankruptcy on core moral values, political principles, journalistic ethics, and necessary institutions. There is no real defense of Trump and Trumpism. All his defenders act like his critics just don't like the man's style—he's just too crass or bombastic. Or they think we're worried about hypothetical things that might never happen—we're worried that he might become a fascist in the future. And, needless to say, these concerns are tell-tale signs of “Trump derangement syndrome.”

But none of that is true. The problem with Trump isn't his style, and it's not merely what might happen in the future. The problem is what has already happened. It's the damage that Trump has already caused to our democracy. And it's the fact that he has turned the Republican Party into a personality cult that celebrates all this damage as a sign of progress.

For instance, while many of us really wanted Kamala Harris to win on Tuesday, we are also breathing a sigh of relief that she didn't win by a very narrow margin. Why are we relieved about this? Because Trump and Elon—along with several other high-profile freaks—spread so many lies and conspiracy theories about election fraud, that they effectively rigged our society to explode. On the day of the vote, Trump and Elon were both spreading lies about a terrible fraud being perpetrated in Pennsylvania. Now that Trump won, where's the concern about fraud? It just evaporated. I guess Elon looked into it, and our voting machines are fine now?

Pay attention to what happened here: These guys imposed a serious risk of injury on our whole society, for purely selfish reasons. And the fact that we're now relieved to have avoided a civil war is itself an injury to our democracy and to our social order. Is this too ethereal a point to understand?

If someone rigs your house to explode, and the bomb just happens to not go off— for reasons that they didn't actually control—it seems to me that they don't get to say, “Well, no harm no foul. Let's just move on. Let's agree to disagree about what happened here.” No. You put our whole democracy at risk with your lies. You knowingly raised the temperature and the pressure on your side of the electorate—again, with lies—and ran the risk of producing serious violence if things had gone the other way.

There was a moment on Tuesday night, when the tide had fully turned against Harris—when the needle over at the New York Times website was giving Trump an 89 percent probability of winning—but the blue wall states had not been decided. It was still possible, at that point for Harris to win (1-in-10-chance events happen all the time). But I remember thinking, “I hope she doesn't win now.” Because, at that point, given the optics—given that Republicans really thought they had it in the bag, and even Democrats seemed to think that, and said it publicly, on television and social media—if Harris's luck had turned at that point, and she had won, we could have had a civil war, given the degree to which conspiracy thinking had been weaponized by Trump and his enablers. Again, even on election day itself, these lies had been spread consciously and deliberately—Elon did this personally to hundreds of millions of people on the social media platform that he owns. Given all that, I think it simply wasn't safe for Harris to win a free and fair election at that point. And that is a totally crazy thought to have had on election night in America in the year 2024.

Where do we send the bill for the damage that has been done to our country?

Half of our society just elected a man to the presidency who they know would not have accepted the results of the election, had he lost. Vice President Harris conceded the next day, as everyone knew she would. There is probably no one who supported Trump, who thinks that he would have done what they fully expected Harris to do—which is to protect the most important norm of our democracy, the very thing that makes it possible, the peaceful transfer of power. And the astonishing thing is that Trump supporters are totally okay with this asymmetry. They expected Harris to concede and would have demanded that she do it. And they know Trump wouldn't have conceded if he lost—understanding all the risk this would have posed to our social fabric—and they are fine with that.

This is already the ruination of our politics.  This is what the path to fascism looks like. We are already on it. There is nothing hypothetical about this. Bad things have already happened. And this is true, whatever happens over the next four years.

It's like in the film, The Exorcist: If your kid has stigmata, and is vomiting green goo in all directions, and is moving furniture with her mind, you should admit that you have a problem. It shouldn't require Satan himself to make an appearance.

What is so frustrating about Trump supporters is that they refuse to acknowledge any of this. They simply refuse to acknowledge how pathological our situation is—and how pathological Trump himself has made it.

Whatever story you have in your head, about all the good Trump might do in a second term—"he's a disruptor”; “he's got all the tech bros in there with him”; “he's just crazy enough to scare our enemies”; or “he's just a bullshitter and won't do half of what he claims he'll do, so don't worry about it!”—whatever story you're telling yourself, here is what is true now:

We are returning a man to the Oval Office who, as a sitting president, would not commit to a peaceful transfer of power, and who tried to steal the 2020 election, all the while claiming it was being stolen from him. And he has lied about this ever since, knowing that these lies stand as a continuous provocation to violence. And there are court cases pending, seeking to hold him accountable for all of this—cases which, now that he'll be in control of the Justice Department, will be dismissed. We're putting Trump back in power when we know that he can't honestly discharge his oath of office, because he has no respect for the Constitution. And half of our society is not only willing to run this risk, they're positively jubilant about it.  At a minimum, you should acknowledge that these events have seriously injured our politics—again, whatever happens over the next four years.

And I have something that I really must say to Joe Rogan and the other podcasters who interviewed Trump: You can't have it both ways. You don't get to say that this was “the podcast election” and that these long-form conversations are incredibly important for people to hear, so that they can make up their minds about who to vote for, and then take no journalistic responsibility whatsoever to get your facts straight, or to expose obvious lies when you're talking to the most prolific liar on Earth. You don't get to spout endless conspiracy theories about how our election system is dangerously broken and vulnerable to fraud—and then when your candidate wins, say, “Oh, well, Trump's victory was just too big for them to rig the election.” No—how about realizing that there was nothing significantly wrong with our election system in the first place, and that all these concerns about fraud were lies, coming from your candidate and his surrogates?They were telling these lies in preparation for not accepting the results of the election, if he lost. And you let your platform be used for that purpose, by people who were willing to shatter our politics—and even risk provoking a civil war—out of personal self-interest.

Every podcaster who interviewed Trump managed to make it seem like all the bad things that have ever been said about him were the result of some left-wing, elite-media conspiracy. To interview Trump, or his surrogates, responsibly, would have required that you put them on the spot for any number of odious things he has said and done—and for things he said he intends to do in his second term—all of which are well documented, and many of which should be totally disqualifying in a presidential candidate.

It's not enough to just turn on the microphones and have a conversation—and it doesn't matter that it's three hours long if all you're going to do is launder the man's lies by ignoring them in the interest of maintaining good vibes. There is a complacency and an amorality to the way you approached this that was actively harmful.

And all you people with Twitter-Files-Derangement Syndrome: just how fair and balanced are things over there at X now? Is it the bastion of free speech you were hoping for? You think that having a platform run by a manic billionaire who doesn't trust any of his own moderators to vet information—so he fires them—but who trusts random conspiracists and lunatics—so he personally amplifies their lies to 200 million followers—you think this is progress?  Do you think you'd feel the same way if a left-wing billionaire was boosting activist garbage to his 200 million followers every hour on the hour?

And perhaps a note to journalists, scientists, writers, and other people with actual reputations to protect, and lives to live: None of this gets any better until you all decide to leave X. You know it's a cesspool. You know it's harming our society. Most of you know it's harming your lives, personally. By merely being there—and making it seem like everyone has to be there, because everyone is there—you are helping to build the tool that is making fact-based conversation impossible.

Our society is being riven by lies. And social media—and X in particular—is largely responsible for this. Of course, I get that some breaking news happens there first—and some news might only happen there. But if that's a feature of social media that we must conserve, then we have to instantiate it elsewhere—not on a platform that is owned, run, and entirely dominated by a meme junkie who lost all his principles years ago.

Once again, everything I've been talking about and complaining about has already happened. But, looking forward, there are reasons to be worried about a second Trump term. Is RFK Jr. really going to be setting medical policy for the country?  That should make your head explode. Is Trump going to weaken our international alliances? Will he pull us out of NATO? If we have fewer biological men in women's sports, are we also going to have fewer democracies?  Is that a fair trade? Is Trump going to call the MyPillowGuy and the Pizzagate dummies for advice on how to run the world? Or will he suddenly pivot and surround himself with competent, ethical advisors? We'll have to wait and see.

Needless to say, I will respond to whatever happens on this podcast. But I'm not going to spend the next four years obsessing about Donald Trump. As I've said before, I consider him one of the greatest opportunity costs for humanity to appear in my lifetime. The fact that we've had to think about this man continuously, for a decade, is just an incredible piece of bad luck.  So, I'm going to do my best to pick my moments.  I'm sure there will be many over the next four years, but I am just not willing to give more of my time to politics than is absolutely necessary.

And I will be sure to tell you when I receive that first IRS audit.

Thanks for listening.

 

Our looming civil unrest is predicted by Turchin's historical model.

I recommend you have a look at Graeme Wood's article on the writing and thoughts of Peter Turchin, who has developed a model based on the past 10,000 years of human history that in 2010 predicted that an "age of discord" worse than most Americans have experienced would get serious around 2020. Here are some clips:

The fundamental problems, he says, are a dark triad of social maladies: a bloated elite class, with too few elite jobs to go around; declining living standards among the general population; and a government that can’t cover its financial positions. His models, which track these factors in other societies across history, are too complicated to explain in a nontechnical publication. But they’ve succeeded in impressing writers for nontechnical publications, and have won him comparisons to other authors of “megahistories,” such as Jared Diamond and Yuval Noah Harari.

“You have a situation now where there are many more elites fighting for the same position, and some portion of them will convert to counter-elites,” Turchin said....Donald Trump, for example, may appear elite (rich father, Wharton degree, gilded commodes), but Trumpism is a counter-elite movement. His government is packed with credentialed nobodies who were shut out of previous administrations, sometimes for good reasons and sometimes because the Groton-­Yale establishment simply didn’t have any vacancies.

Elite overproduction creates counter-elites, and counter-elites look for allies among the commoners. If commoners’ living standards slip—not relative to the elites, but relative to what they had before—they accept the overtures of the counter-elites and start oiling the axles of their tumbrels. Commoners’ lives grow worse, and the few who try to pull themselves onto the elite lifeboat are pushed back into the water by those already aboard. The final trigger of impending collapse, Turchin says, tends to be state insolvency. At some point rising in­security becomes expensive. The elites have to pacify unhappy citizens with handouts and freebies—and when these run out, they have to police dissent and oppress people. Eventually the state exhausts all short-term solutions, and what was heretofore a coherent civilization disintegrates.

So, if these clips whet your appetite, you should read the whole article, (This is a re-post of my 11/12/2020 post.)

Selections from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS.org)

Below are URLs of journal articles  I find interesting and think might be of interest to some MindBlog readers.  Most are open source. Email me if you hit a paywall and would like me to send you a PDF of the complete article.  

The health risk of social disadvantage is transplantable into a new host. https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2404108121   (relevant to transferring immune-reconstituting cells  from a healthy donor to a cancer patient recipient.)

Can names shape facial appearances?  https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2405334121   (individuals acquire face–name congruency as they mature, suggesting
that characteristics associated with stereotypes are not necessarily  innate but may develop through a self-fulfilling prophecy.)

Dissonant music engages early visual processing https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2320378121

It matters what you see: Graphic media images of war and terror may amplify distress https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2318465121

Early-emerging combinatorial thought: Human infants flexibly combine kind and quantity concepts https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2315149121

Callousness, exploitativeness, and tracking of cooperation incentives in the human default network https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2307221121 

The Art of Pretending to Govern

Venkatesh Rao's most recent installment of his RibbonFarm Breaking Smart series has comments on the seminal ideas of James Scott, a writer who recently died.  I want to pass on clips from his piece that exactly mirrors my sentiments, expressed much more clearly that I could:

James Scott is the reason I’m 40% anarchist. I’m also 40% statist, thanks to Francis Fukuyama, 40% mutualist thanks to Hannah Arendt, and 40% individualist thanks to Douglas Adams. I am large. I contain multitudes.  

The great contribution of James Scott to our times was to characterize actually existing anarchism as not just a real thing, but as the most effective and morally defensible political stance in existence. And the functional core of how civilization actually works. Anarchy is neither the macho state of chaotic Hobbesian violence its naive critics assume it must be, nor the anodyne Le Guin pacifism that its apologists pretend it could be if practiced soulfully enough with enough women at the helm. Actually existing anarchism is, as Scott put it in the title of his third major book, simply the art of not being governed.  

It means rendering the powers-that-be as inconsequential as possible in one’s personal life, defined and scoped modestly, and defended cunningly, but never quite perfectly.  

As an homage to Scott, and for your consideration, I’d like to pose a deeply consequential question that he obliquely gets at in his works, but did not truly get around to exploring: What is the function of the state? ...by state here, I mean both the public sector and the private sector it organizes and enables through its economic institutions and military/police protections...I'd like to propose an answer:  

The function of a state is to pretend to govern more than it actually does.  

Contra Scott, and in sympathy with Francis Fukuyama, I do believe in states. I do believe they should exist, and attempt to govern. And that they do in fact manage to govern successfully up to a point. But contra Fukuyama, and in line with Scott, I stop believing in state capacity at precisely the point Scott recommends — where they get tempted into authoritarian high-modernist “schemes to improve the human condition.”... My idea of a good-enough society — 40% anarchic, 40% statist, 40% mutualist, and 40% individualist, with a strong immune system against utopianisms — rests on a balance of power resulting in what we might call the Scott Social Compact:  

The state must pretend to govern more than it does, and individuals must pretend to be governed more than they are.  

This pretense is necessary and good because a significant proportion of the population cannot tolerate the thought that the world is in fact far more ungoverned and ungovernable than they would like for their sanity; that there is no benevolent force — not the State, not the Market, not God, not Straussian Great Men, not Enlightened Bureaucracies — that renders existence necessarily blessed, meaningful, and purposeful.  

These are the people — I’d estimate they constitute about 30-40% of the population, divided about evenly between the two ends of the political horseshoe — for whom muddling through, slouching towards utopia, with some half-assed mixed of inadequate state capacity and somewhat dysfunctional markets and institutions, is not enough... They require a clear plan to get to a clearly defined vision of utopia, and the fullest possible expression of state capacity compatible with that vision. They require a glorious vision to surrender to, which a whole host of ideologues are more than willing to cater to, with every configuration of mechanisms imaginable. This essentially religious tendency cannot be eliminated (and it would be immoral to try) but can be managed.  

It is important to the collective psyche to let these people...believe that the world is more governed than it is, and that they have a decisive say in how it is being governed... But it is equally important to not let them actually try too hard or too successfully. ..his is a dynamic that I have grown to appreciate in the last decade. I no longer delight in ripping off various theatrical veils that obscure the workings of modern societies and enjoying the aghast responses from the clueless such ripping can provoke. It increasingly strikes me as not just an unkind thing to do, but a misguided thing. Even when practiced at the very minor scale at which I have in the past.  

There are enough people around with a genuine religious instincts (whether those instincts lead them to AGIs, Efficient Markets, or older divinities) that denying that instinct adequate expression is a surefire way to destroy the world. It is what they call the “meaning crisis.” A too-naked Scottian anarchy in the external world equals nihilism in the inner world for too many. Sufficiently plausible fictions of governance must be allowed to persist while everybody works their way to becoming as enlightened as you and I...Delusions of agency and the mythic consequentiality of one’s own life must be indulged enough that life for the median religious type feels meaningful enough to live. But not so much that they become threats to others.  

One part of achieving this condition is that the other 70% — the Great Middle of the distribution that does not require mythic significance and meaning piped into their lives by authoritarian high modernist schemes — must learn and practice the art of not being governed. Including the art of pretending to be governed. Scott’s work highlights the extent to which this natural aptitude has been lost in modernity...  

But the other part of achieving this condition is that art of governance must be practiced with sufficient theatricality that more governance appears to be happening than is actually possible under conditions of technological modernity. The theater requires no Machiavellian Straussian Noble Lying to produce. Simply not challenging the narratives people make up to live by, and project onto visible governance processes, does the trick.  

There is no esoteric enlightened force of governance wrought by Great Men at work behind the curtain, and there can be none. There is no Deep State either, being steered by shadowy bureaucrats staffing Adjustment Bureaus. There are certainly those who believe they are part of such entities. Their delusions of grandeur too must be humored by the ungoverned — up to a point.  

Ultimately, there is only the emergent force of billions of sufficiently ungoverned people — including hundreds of millions who are part of “states” that are supposedly doing the governing — muddling through, making it all hang together just well enough to work.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Ooze is Growing

In case you haven't seen enough pessimistic predictions about the next ~10-20 years, I pass on the following clips from a recent installment of my email subscription to Venkatesh Rao's "breaking Smart" news letter: 

...world affairs are effectively on autopilot now, running on what in the control engineering world are called bang-bang laws. Bang-bang laws drive a control mechanism from one extreme to another discontinuously, like steering a car with only hard right/hard left limit steers, and regulating speed only with hard braking and floored accelerators. Or electing two opposed sets of wingnuts to govern in loose alternation...Bang-bang laws can often have nice properties like time-optimality, and making good use of limited control authority that “saturates.” And they’re simple and robust, like your thermostat, a bang-bang controller that’s in Chapter 1 of most control engineering textbooks.

...I don’t think the state of the world today is one that can be governed by the bang-bang control laws being applied to it by opposed tribes of wingnuts everywhere. It’s not the right sort of problem for the strategy. Nevertheless, it’s the strategy we’ve adopted, because it happens to be the only option available right now. Instead of an Overton window within which politics as an art and science of the possible operates, we have two narrow slits representing the bang-bang limit positions, separated by a stretch of impossible positions. This situation has been contrived by people who don’t like to think very much or at all. So we have control laws that don’t actually work in the current planetary condition...weird out-of-control behaviors unfold if you apply an ill-conceived bang-bang strategy to a system unsuited to it...you brace for weird fallouts. Just as if you’re a passenger in a car being driven in a bang-bang way, you brace for a crash...You prepare for a world that will go out of control when the bang-bang strategy fails. It’s a question of when, not if.

The world is becoming ungovernable even as visions and attempts to govern it are getting ever more outlandishly delusional and ineffective.

The only conclusion we can reach is that we’re in for a period of increasingly ungoverned anarchy. Sure, some sort of theater of governance will continue everywhere. There will be bang-Left and bang-Right theaters piously strutting about on their respective stages pretending to govern, to captive audiences desperate to believe they are being governed, confined within ever-shrinking and increasingly exclusionary islands of stable prosperity, secured with growing amounts of low-grade localized boundary-integrity-maintaining violence. Lots of individual lives will get destroyed in the process. There will also be marquee showcase things built just so there are things to point at as examples of governance doing something, even if not well. The facade will last longer than we expect, even if you’re expecting it.

But all around, the ooze will grow. The ungovernability will grow.

But the ooze is not inevitably good or bad. What will make it good or bad is the quality of the attention and care we bring to thinking and feeling our way into it. It only feels shitty-shitty right now because we are attending to it in bang-bang ways, blinded by too-simple ideas and a fear of words.

How do you ignore and sidestep the bang-bang governance theaters, and feel and think your way into the ooze, to begin co-evolving with it? That’s the question. Fortunately, it’s mostly not a question for you or me, but for the next generation.

The blanding and flattening of our culture

Since I returned to live in my family home in Austin Texas in 2017 I have been  sad to see the continuing disappearance of kinky "Keep Austin Weird" coffee shops, book stores, bars, and restaurants that have catered to the remnants of the slacker and hippie cultures of the 60s and 79s, as well as online Tech Bros.  Instead we now have the monoculture of countless Starbucks and other chains pointed to by internet platforms that "curate" our options by pointing us to a bland uniformity of vendors whose shops and products are identical through the world. 

 Patrick Tanguay points to a piece by Matt Klein relevant to this process, "Beware the Curators," and passes on the following clip from his text:

Over the last decade, tech platforms have come to effectively dictate taste at scale, flattening culture by algorithmic means. Call it “The Age of Average,” “Filterworld,” “Algo Supremacy,” “Cultural Homogenization,” “Blanding,” “Refinement Culture” or “Cultural Moneyballism.” It’s all the same. […]

There’s an irony here: Algorithms were once believed to untether us from the masses and offer paths for personalization. But “For You” is not about pushing the limits of our artistic palates, but a device to serve us what the platform wants us to be satisfied with, herding us into perfectly predictable siloes that can be targeted with more “precise” recommendations. Anything other than this is a liability to the business model. […]

What we ultimately require – more than curators replacing algorithms – is the energy to explore, discover and share new works, and the self-confidence to develop independent taste... even if that means enjoying what no one else does, or enjoying exactly what everyone else does.

 

An essay on Geopolitics and Globalization

I want to pass on one complete section, indicating titles of the others, of  a larger essay addressing tribalism versus global consciousness.

Untimely Meditations

Philosophy goes against the grain of political immediacy to insist on inconvenient truths.

 

Nathan Gardels, Noema  Magazine Editor-in-Chief

The Condition of Planetarity

The Politics of Planetary Realism

Conceptual demolition of the outmoded paradigm of nation-state realism, however, does not erase its still firmly rooted expression in present practice. Building the centripetal momentum toward binding planetary association against the weighty centrifugal pull of tribal identity is an endeavor as fraught as it is necessary.

While technology and advancing science may foster a universal understanding of the planetary condition, politics and culture have a different logic rooted in emotion and ways of life cultivated among one’s own kind. Far from moving ahead in lock step, when they meet, they clash.

Indeed, the great paradox today is that the planetary imperative of mitigating climate change has become the province of renewed nationalism. Industrial policies designed to make the green energy transition are competing to protect and promote national self-interest instead of joining together at the level of all humanity. What we see instead is the battle of subsidies between the U.S. Inflation Reduction Act and the European Green New Deal, with both raising stiff tariff barriers to blunt China’s concerted conquest of core green technologies from storage batteries to electric vehicles, solar cells and their supply chains.

In short, rather than uniting as a threatened species to meet a challenge that knows no boundaries, competition has sidelined collaboration within the West while global warming has been weaponized in the new Cold War with China.

The new element of a greenlash, registered in the recent European elections, portends social resistance that is more about resentment of self-righteous Tesla-driving elites and the unequally borne costs of the energy transition than climate denial. The Diet-Coke imaginary of environmentalists — who sold climate policies as achievable without undue burdens on economies built around fossil fuels for more than a century — has been put to rest. As the heavy lift of the transition bites ever more deeply into the daily bread, we are learning the hard lesson that the future has a scarce constituency in consumer democracies as well as growth-oriented autocracies.

In this sense, “planetary realism” takes on a double meaning. It entails both a recognition of the interdependence of the planetary condition as well as a realistic grasp of what it will take to navigate through what remains a world of nations.

Immigration And Belonging

Becoming Universal

What about some positive news for a change?

Doomsaying can become a self-fulfilling prophesy, as David Brooks points out. I want to point to Fix The News, a website curated by Angus Hervey and Amy Davoren-Rose, that points out positive stories, and offers to send occasional emails (Which I enjoy receiving) that list some of its content.  

Another positive (and totally woke) effort at making a more positive future is described in the document "New voices for a better society".

I would also point to previous MindBlog posts on the positive views of Steven Pinker. Nicholas Christakis, and Hans Rosling.

The emerging world order as a global version of the pre-Westphalian Middle Ages.

I would like to pass on this link to an essay by Parag Khanna in Noema Magazine which is one of the best description of the increasing entropy in global geopolitical systems as America's former hegemony contines its rapid decline. A previous MindBlog post has pointed to Zeihan's version of this story. Here are a few clips from the start of the piece that indicate its direction:

In global politics, entropy is captured by the term devolution, the transfer or surrender of power toward ever more local levels of authority. The deconcentration of power we witness today has been unfolding since the end of World War II, at which point the U.S. represented roughly half of the global GDP, was the only proven nuclear power and occupied strategic geography in both Europe and Asia.

Fast forward to today and China is the world’s largest economy in Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) terms, which accounts for the price of goods in local currency rather than U.S. dollars. Meanwhile, the EU’s share of the world economy in PPP is roughly equal to America’s, there are nearly 20 economies with a GDP of one trillion dollars or more, nine official nuclear weapons powers, and America’s influence is being actively challenged in the Middle East, Central Asia, Far East and even South America.

It is no coincidence that this rapid diffusion of systemic power coincides with the spectacular expansion of globalization, which connected Western capital to Asian labor, Arab oil supply to Asian demand, ultimately leveling the global economic playing field.

Ascending powers such as China and India have used globalization not to serve the Western-led order but to assert themselves within an interconnected global system. Globalization then has not been a tool of Americanization but far more fundamentally an avatar of entropy: distributing capacity and connecting an ever-wider array of agents.

There are no more human elites of any sort...

 I want to pass on the conclusion of a great essay by Venkatesh Rao, giving the meanings of several acronyms in parentheses. You should read the entire piece.
 

"Let me cut to the conclusion: There are no more human elites of any sort. In the sense of natural rulers that is. There are certainly all sorts of privileged and entitled types who want the benefits of being elites, but no humans up to the task of actually being elite.

It is only our anthropocentric conceits that lead us to conclude that a complex system like “civilization” must necessarily have a legible “head,” and legible and governable internal processes for staffing that head. Preferably with the Right Sorts of People, People Like Us.

We’re all under the API (Application Programming Interface) in one way or another. What’s more, we have been for a while, since before the rise of modern AI (which just makes it embarrassingly obvious by paving the cowpaths of our subservience to technological modernity).

To know just how little you know about anything, be it car lightbulbs or national constitutions, whatever your degrees say, just ask ChatGPT to explain some deep knowledge areas to you. I don’t care if you’re a qualified automative technician or Elon Musk or clerking for the Supreme Court. Whether you’re failson C-average George W. Bush or a DEI (Diversity-Equity-Inclusion) activist trying to swap out some Greek classics for modern lesbian classics in the canon.

What you don’t know about the world humanity has built up over millennia utterly dwarfs what you think you know. Whatever the source of your elite pretensions, they’re just that — pretensions. Whatever claims you have to being the most natural member of the governing class, it is somewhere between weak to non-existent. Your claim is really about suitability for casting in a governance LARP (Live Action Role-Playing), not aptitude for governing as a natural member of an elite.

Humans do not like this idea. We ultimately like the idea of a designated elite, and legible, just processes for choosing, installing, and removing them that legitimize our own fantasies of worth and agency. We want to believe that yes, we too can be President, and would deserve to be, and do a good job.

The alternative hypothesis is that modern civilization, with its millennia of evolved technological complexity crammed onto the cramped surface of the planet, does not admit any simple, just, and enduring notion of elite that we can use to govern ourselves. The knowledge, aptitudes, and talents required to govern the world are distributed all over, in unpredictable, unfair, constantly shifting, and messy ways. When a lightbulb fails, there is no default answer to the question of how to replace it, and what to do when mistakes are made.

The rise of modern AI is presenting us with seemingly new forms of these questions. Those who yearn for a reliable class of elites, even if they must both revere and fear that class, are predictably trying to cast AIs themselves as the new elites. Those attached to their anthropocentric conceits are trying to figure out cunning schemes to keep some group of humans reliably in charge.

But there is nobody in charge. No elites, natural or not, deserving or undeserving. And it’s been this way for longer than we care to admit.

And this is a good thing. Stop looking for elites, and look askance at anyone claiming to be part of any elite or muttering conspiratorially about any elites. The world runs itself in more complex and powerful ways than they are capable of imagining. To buy into their self-mythologizing and delusions of grandeur is to be blind to the power and complexity of the world as it actually is.

And if you ever need to remind yourself of this, try changing a car headlamp lightbulb."

Off the rails - inequity and unfairness built into capitalism

I have largely withdrawn from posting items relevant to the details of our current political and social malaise, but I want to pass on a few clips from a piece by Brett Stevens, that passes on points made by Ruchir Sharma, the chairman of Rockefeller International and a Financial Times columnist, in his new book “What Went Wrong With Capitalism.” Sharma makes a convincing case that hits the nail on the head about what has gotten us where we are: easy money, or ultralow interest. When the price of borrowing money is zero, everything goes bonkers.

In 2010, as the era of ultralow and even negative interest rates was getting started, the median sale price for a house in the United States hovered around $220,000. By the start of this year, it was more than $420,000.

Inflation is seen in global financial markets:

..In 1980 they were worth a total of $12 trillion — equal to the size of the global economy at the time. After the pandemic...those markets were worth $390 trillion, or around four times the world’s total gross domestic product.

In theory, easy money should have broad benefits for regular people, from employees with 401(k)s to consumers taking out cheap mortgages. In practice, it has destroyed much of what used to make capitalism an engine of middle-class prosperity in favor of the old and very rich.

First, there was inflation in real and financial assets, followed by inflation in consumer prices, followed by higher financing costs as interest rates have risen to fight inflation...for Americans who rely heavily on credit, it’s been devastating...

...he system is broken and rigged, particularly against the poor and the young. “A generation ago, it took the typical young family three years to save up to the down payment on a home,” Sharma observes in the book. “By 2019, thanks to no return on savings, it was taking 19 years.”

The social consequence of this is rage; the political consequence is populism.

For all their policy differences, both leading U.S. candidates are committed and fearless statists, not friends of competitive capitalism.”

What happens when both major parties are wedded to two versions of the same failing ideas? And what happens when leading figures of both the progressive left and the populist right seek to compound the problem with even easier credit and more runaway spending?

The answer: We are wandering in fog. And the precipice is closer than we think.

The other shoe is about to drop in 2024 - important closure moments in the state of the world.

I want to pass on a clip (to which I have added some definitions in parentheses) from Venkatest Rao’s most recent Ribbonfarm Studio installment in which he argues that the other shoe is about to drop for many narratives in 2024, a year that feels much more exciting than 1984, 1994, 2004, or 2014.

With the Trump/Biden election, the other shoe is about to drop on the arc that began with the Great Weirding (radical global transformations that unfolded between 2016 and 2020). This arc has fuzzy beginnings and endings globally, but is clearly heading towards closure everywhere. For instance, the recent election in India, with its chastening message for the BJP, has a 10-year span (2014-24). In the EU and UK, various arcs that began with events in Greece/Italy and Brexit are headed towards some sort of natural closure.

Crypto and AI, two strands in my mediocre computing series (the other two being robotics and the metaverse), also seem to be at an other-shoe-drops phase. Crypto, after experiencing 4-5 boom-bust cycles since 2009, is finally facing a triple test of geopolitical significance, economic significance, and “product” potential (as in international agreement that “stable coins” as well as fiat currencies are valid vehicles for managing debt and commerce). It feels like in the next year or two we’ll learn if it’s a technology that’s going to make history or remain a sideshow. AI is shifting gears from a rapid and accelerating installation phase of increasing foundational capabilities to a deployment phase of productization, marked by Apple’s entry into the fray and a sense of impending saturation in the foundational capabilities.

Various wars (Gaza, Ukraine) and tensions (Taiwan) are starting to stress the Westphalian model of the nation state for real now. That’s the other shoe dropping on a 400-year-long story (also a 75 year long story about the rules-based international order, but that’s relatively less interesting).

Economically, we’re clearly decisively past the ZIRPy (Zero Interest Rate Policy) end of the neoliberal globalization era that began in the mid-80s. That shoe has already dropped. What new arc is starting is unclear — the first shoe of the new story hasn’t dropped yet. Something about nonzero interest rates in an uncertain world marked by a mercantilist resource-grabbing geopolitical race unfolding in parallel to slowly reconfiguring global trade patterns.

Managing the human herd

 This post is a dyspeptic random walk through thoughts triggered by the front page photograph of the Wall Street journal of June 17, 2024, showing Masses of pilgrims embarked on a symbolic stoning of the devil in Saudi Arabia under the soaring summer heat. Such enormous mobs of people are those most easily roused to strong emotions by charismatic speakers.

How are the emotions and behaviors of such enormous clans of humans be regulated in a sane and humane way? Can this be accomplished outside of authoritarian or oligarchical governance? Might such governance establish its control of the will and moods of millions through the unnoticed infiltration of AI into all aspects of their daily life (cf. Apple's recent AI announcements). Will the world come to be ruled by a "Book of Elon"? 

Or might we be moving into a world of decentralized everything? a bottom up emergence of consensus governance the from the mosh pit of web 3, cryptocurrencies and stablecoins? The noble sentiments of the Etherium Foundation/ notwithstanding, the examples we have to date of 'rules of the commons' are the chaos of Discord, Reddit, and other social media where the sentiments of idiots and experts jumble together in an impenetrable cacophony.  

Who or what is going to emerge to control this mess? How long will the "permaweird" persist?  

 

The future of life.

I want to pass on this science magazine review of Jamie Metzl's new book "Superconvergence: How the Genetics, Biotech, and AI Revolutions Will Transform Our Lives, Work, and World". Metzel is founder of the One Shared World organization. Check out its website here.

On the night of 4 July 1776, the Irish immigrant and official printer to the Continental Congress John Dunlap entered his Philadelphia print-shop and began to typeset the first printed version of a document that was to become the enduring North Star of the “American experiment.” It comprised an ideological handbook for its utopian aspirations and a codification of purported essential self-evident ground truths that included the equality of all men and the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. By the morning, Dunlap had produced an estimated 200 copies of the American Declaration of Independence, which Abraham Lincoln would later refer to as a “rebuke and a stumblingblock… to tyranny and oppression.”

In his erudite, optimistic, and timely book Superconvergence, the futurist Jamie Metzl laments the lack of any such authoritative reference to inform our exploration of an equally expansive, intriguing, and uncharted territory: humankind’s future. Replete with unprecedented opportunities and existential risks hitherto unimaginable in life’s history, the new world we are entering transcends geographical boundaries, and—as a result of humankind’s global interdependencies—it must, by necessity, exist in a no-man’s-land beyond the mandates of ideologies and nation-states. Its topography is defined not by geological events and evolution by natural selection so much as by the intersection of several exponential human-made technologies. Most notably, these include the generation of machine learning intelligence that can interrogate big data to define generative “rules” of biology and the post- Darwinian engineering of living systems through the systematic rewriting of their genetic code.

Acknowledging the intrinsic mutability of natural life and its ever-changing biochemistry and morphology, Metzl is unable to align himself with UNESCO’s 1997 Universal Declaration on the Human Genome and Human Rights. To argue that the current version of the human genome is sacred is to negate its prior iterations, including the multiple species of human that preceded us but disappeared along the way. The sequences of all Earth’s species are in a simultaneous state of being and becoming, Metzl argues. Life is intrinsically fluid.

Although we are still learning to write complex genomes rapidly, accurately, without sequence limitation, and at low cost, and our ability to author novel genomes remains stymied by our inability to unpick the generative laws of biology, it is just a matter of time before we transform biology into a predictable engineering material, at which point we will be able to recast life into desired forms. But while human-engineered living materials and biologically inspired devices offer potential solutions to the world’s most challenging problems, our rudimentary understanding of complex ecosystems and the darker sides of human nature cast long shadows, signaling the need for caution.

Metzl provides some wonderful examples of how artificial species and bioengineering, often perceived as adversaries of natural life, could help address several of the most important issues of the moment. These challenges include climate change, desertification, deforestation, pollution (including the 79,000-metric-ton patch of garbage the size of Alaska in the Pacific Ocean), the collapse of oceanic ecosystems, habitat loss, global population increase, and the diminution of species biodiversity. By rewriting the genomes of crops and increasing the efficiency of agriculture, we can reduce the need to convert additional wild habitats into farmland, he writes. Additionally, the use of bioengineering to make sustainable biofuels, biocomputing, bio foodstuffs, biodegradable plastics, and DNA information–storing materials will help reduce global warming.

Meanwhile, artificial intelligence (AI) can free up human time. By 2022, DeepMind’s AlphaFold program had predicted the structures of 214 million proteins—a feat that would have taken as long as 642 million years to achieve using conventional methods. As Metzl comments, this places “millions of years back into the pot of human innovation time.” The ability to hack human biology using AI will also have a tremendous impact on the human health span and life span, not least through AI-designed drugs, he predicts.

Metzl is right when he concludes that we have reached a “critical moment in human history” and that “reengineered biology will play a central role in the future of our species.” We will need to define a new North Star—a manifesto for life—to assist with its navigation. Metzl argues for the establishment of a new international body with depoliticized autonomy to focus on establishing common responses to shared global existential challenges. He suggests that this process could be kick-started by convening a summit aimed at establishing aligned governance guidelines for the revolutionary new technologies we are creating.

The pathologies of the educated elites

Another really nice opinion piece from David Brooks, who notes the consequences, as we have moved from the industrial age to the information age, of progressive energy moving from the working class to the universities, especially the elite universities.

I’ve looked on with a kind of dismay as elite university dynamics have spread across national life and politics, making America worse in all sorts of ways. Let me try to be more specific about these dynamics.

The first is false consciousness. To be progressive is to be against privilege. But today progressives dominate elite institutions like the exclusive universities, the big foundations and the top cultural institutions...This is the contradiction of the educated class. Virtue is defined by being anti-elite. But today’s educated class constitutes the elite, or at least a big part of it...This sort of cognitive dissonance often has a radicalizing effect. When your identity is based on siding with the marginalized, but you work at Horace Mann or Princeton, you have to work really hard to make yourself and others believe you are really progressive. You’re bound to drift further and further to the left to prove you are standing up to the man...elite students...are often the ones talking most loudly about burning the system down.

The second socially harmful dynamic is what you might call the cultural consequences of elite overproduction...the marketplace isn’t producing enough of the kinds of jobs these graduates think they deserve...Peter Turchin argued that periods of elite overproduction lead to a rising tide of social decay as alienated educated-class types wage ever more ferocious power struggles with other elites...The spread of cancel culture and support for decriminalizing illegal immigration and “defunding the police” were among the quintessential luxury beliefs that seemed out of touch to people in less privileged parts of society. Those people often responded by making a sharp countershift in the populist direction, contributing to the election of Donald Trump and to his continued political viability today...elite overproduction induces people on the left and the right to form their political views around their own sense of personal grievance and alienation. It launches unhappy progressives and their populist enemies into culture war battles that help them feel engaged, purposeful and good about themselves, but ...these battles are often more about performative self-validation than they are about practical policies that might serve the common good.

The third dynamic is the inflammation of the discourse. The information age has produced a vast cohort of people (including me) who live by trafficking in ideas — academics, journalists, activists, foundation employees, consultants and the various other shapers of public opinion...Nothing is more unstable than a fashionable opinion. If your status is defined by your opinions, you’re living in a world of perpetual insecurity, perpetual mental and moral war...French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu...argued that just as economic capitalists use their resource — wealth — to amass prestige and power, people who form the educated class and the cultural elite, symbolic capitalists, use our resources — beliefs, fancy degrees, linguistic abilities — to amass prestige, power and, if we can get it, money...symbolic capitalists turned political postures into power tools that enable them to achieve social, cultural and economic might...battles for symbolic consecration are now the water in which many of us highly educated Americans swim. In the absence of religious beliefs, these moral wars give people a genuine sense of meaning and purpose.

Brooks notes a number of potential ways of countering these dynamics, all of which require the educated class. progressive or not, to address the social, political and economic divides it has unwittingly created. But he also cites another, perhaps more likely, path:

Perhaps today’s educated elite is just like any other historical elite. We gained our status by exploiting or not even seeing others down below, and we are sure as hell not going to give up any of our status without a fight.

 Brooks then points to a forthcoming book, al-Gharbi’s “We Have Never Been Woke.” al-Gharbi notes:

...today’s educated-class activists are conveniently content to restrict their political action to the realm of symbols. In his telling, land acknowledgments — when people open public events by naming the Indigenous peoples who had their land stolen from them — are the quintessential progressive gesture...It’s often non-Indigenous people signaling their virtue to other non-Indigenous people while doing little or nothing for the descendants of those who were actually displaced...while members of the educated class do a lot of moral preening, their lifestyles contribute to the immiserations of the people who have nearly been rendered invisible — the Amazon warehouse worker, the DoorDash driver making $1.75 an hour after taxes and expenses.

 Brooks concludes:

That rumbling sound you hear is the possibility of a multiracial, multiprong, right/left alliance against the educated class. Donald Trump has already created the nub of this kind of movement but is himself too polarizing to create a genuinely broad-based populist movement. After Trump is off the stage, it’s very possible to imagine such an uprising....The lesson for those of us in the educated class is to seriously reform the system we have created or be prepared to be run over.

 

 

 

Is it a fact? The epistemic force of language in news headlines.

From Chuey et al. in PNAS (open source):  

Significance

Headlines are an influential source of information, especially because people often do not read beyond them. We investigated how subtle differences in epistemic language in headlines (e.g., “believe” vs. “know“) affect readers’ inferences about whether claims are perceived as matters of fact or mere opinion. We found, for example, saying “Scientists believe methane emissions soared to a record in 2021” led readers to view methane levels as more a matter of opinion compared to saying “Scientists know…” Our results provide insight into how epistemic verbs journalists use affect whether claims are perceived as matters of fact and suggest a mechanism contributing to the rise of alternative facts and “post-truth” politics.

Abstract

How we reason about objectivity—whether an assertion has a ground truth—has implications for belief formation on wide-ranging topics. For example, if someone perceives climate change to be a matter of subjective opinion similar to the best movie genre, they may consider empirical claims about climate change as mere opinion and irrelevant to their beliefs. Here, we investigate whether the language employed by journalists might influence the perceived objectivity of news claims. Specifically, we ask whether factive verb framing (e.g., "Scientists know climate change is happening") increases perceived objectivity compared to nonfactive framing (e.g., "Scientists believe [...]"). Across eight studies (N = 2,785), participants read news headlines about unique, noncontroversial topics (studies 1a–b, 2a–b) or a familiar, controversial topic (climate change; studies 3a–b, 4a–b) and rated the truth and objectivity of the headlines’ claims. Across all eight studies, when claims were presented as beliefs (e.g., “Tortoise breeders believe tortoises are becoming more popular pets”), people consistently judged those claims as more subjective than claims presented as knowledge (e.g., “Tortoise breeders know…”), as well as claims presented as unattributed generics (e.g., “Tortoises are becoming more popular pets”). Surprisingly, verb framing had relatively little, inconsistent influence over participants’ judgments of the truth of claims. These results demonstrate how, apart from shaping whether we believe a claim is true or false, epistemic language in media can influence whether we believe a claim has an objective answer at all.

The Happiness Gap Between Left and Right

 I want to pass on a few clips from a recent Thomas Edsall essay, followed by a condensed version of the longer piece provided by Chat GPT 4:

Why is it that a substantial body of social science research finds that conservatives are happier than liberals?...psychologists and other social scientists have begun to dig deeper into the underpinnings of liberal discontent — not only unhappiness but also depression and other measures of dissatisfaction.

One of the findings emerging from this research is that the decline in happiness and in a sense of agency is concentrated among those on the left who stress matters of identity, social justice and the oppression of marginalized groups.

There is, in addition, a parallel phenomenon taking place on the right as Donald Trump and his MAGA loyalists angrily complain of oppression by liberals who engage in a relentless vendetta to keep Trump out of the White House.

There is a difference in the way the left and right react to frustration and grievance. Instead of despair, the contemporary right has responded with mounting anger, rejecting democratic institutions and norms.

Here is my edited version of a Chat GPT4 4-fold condensation of Edsall's essay: 

…surveys have consistently shown that those on the right of the political spectrum enjoy a higher self-reported sense of happiness compared to their counterparts on the left. The reasons are as complex as they are intriguing.

Conservatives tend to view the social and economic systems as just and fair, where hard work is rewarded and natural hierarchies are maintained. This perspective shields them from much of the anger or dissatisfaction that might arise from witnessing social or economic inequalities. They see market outcomes and social stratifications as generally fair and based on merit, which fosters a sense of contentment or acceptance of their circumstances.

On the other hand, liberals are more likely to perceive social and economic systems as flawed or unfair, nurturing a sense of injustice and dissatisfaction. This ideological stance makes them more sensitive to the inequities and imperfections of society, which can manifest as frustration, sadness, or a pervasive sense of being wronged. The liberal focus on social justice, equity, and the protection of marginalized groups, while morally compelling, can also be a source of continuous discontent and agitation as these goals are often far from being realized.

Recent psychological research has started to probe deeper into these disparities, shifting the focus from documenting differences to understanding their underlying causes. This body of work suggests that the liberal emphasis on identity and the systemic oppression of marginalized groups can sometimes lead to a feeling of disempowerment. By defining themselves in terms of victimhood and systemic barriers, liberals might inadvertently undermine their sense of personal agency, which is closely linked to psychological well-being.

The current political climate, especially with the rise of Donald Trump and his brand of populism, has also highlighted a stark difference in how frustration and grievance are expressed across the political spectrum. While liberals might internalize their discontent, leading to despair and dejection, many conservatives have channeled their frustrations into anger and defiance. This is exemplified by the significant number of Republicans who view Democrats not just as political opponents, but as outright enemies, and who believe in the necessity of strong, even authoritarian leadership to preserve their way of life.

This divergence in emotional response is not without consequences. As observed in various studies and polls, more than twice as many Republicans as Democrats believe that extreme measures, including violence, might be necessary to protect the nation from its leaders. This growing acceptance of force and the bending of democratic norms and institutions reflect a profound shift in conservative sentiment, fueled by perceived threats to their traditional values and way of life.

The implications of these ideological and psychological divides extend beyond mere political debates to affect the very fabric of individual well-being. Scholars like Jamin Halberstadt and Timothy A. Judge argue that a focus on systemic injustices and an external locus of control can significantly dampen happiness and self-esteem. Liberals, with their emphasis on the collective and the structural, might find themselves feeling powerless and disillusioned, while conservatives, with their focus on individualism and personal accountability, maintain a more optimistic and empowered outlook.

Moreover, the phenomenon of concept creep, as discussed by Nick Haslam, illustrates another layer of complexity. This expansion of definitions around harm and abuse, often driven by liberal ideologies, has increased sensitivity to various issues, which while raising awareness, also intensifies feelings of vulnerability and injustice. This heightened sensitivity can lead to an atmosphere where free speech and expression are more heavily scrutinized, further complicating the landscape of political and social discourse.

In conclusion, the happiness gap between conservatives and liberals is a multifaceted issue that reflects deeper ideological beliefs and psychological orientations. While conservatives may find comfort in a worldview that sees the social order as just and self-determined, liberals' commitment to challenging this order and addressing systemic injustices, though noble, may paradoxically contribute to their own discontent. This dynamic interplay between ideology and well-being underscores the profound impact of our political beliefs on our personal lives, shaping not only how we view the world but also how we experience it.

 

 

How the US is destroying young people's future.

When I wake up in the morning, I frequently remind myself to be grateful for the luck of having been born in 1942, and being able to ride the crest of a number of fortunate external circumstances that made my generation vastly better off than those who followed. I was in high school in the late 50s when Sputnik happened, fueling a huge increase in federal research funding that, powered my laboratory research career how our vision works. Both my parents and myself were clients of state governments or universities that offered generous retirement plans and pensions, and and the ability to set aside tax deferred money to invest for later years.

This has lead to the situation succinctly described in the following TED video done by Scott Galloway, who teaches at NYU, transcript of talk is here.  (It was sent to me by my 49 year old son, an senior E-commerce digital solutions architect, whose expectations about the future are vastly more modest than mine were when I was his age.) One of the most striking graphics in the video shows how the increase in household wealth of those 70 and older has increased by 11% since 1989, while it has decreased by 5% for those under 40. 

 

Blueprint - Nicholas Christakis on the evolutionary origins of a good society

This opinion piece by Frank Bruni in the NYTimes motivated me to download and read Nicholas Christakis' Magnum Opus “Blueprint” (very much in the 'everything you need to know about humans' spirit of Sapolsky's "Behave" and Harari's "Sapiens," and "Homo Deus," and "21 Lessons," all books that I have made the subject of previous posts.). It echoes Pinker's emphasis on the more positive aspects of human nature and progress. It is a very engaging read, and not amenable to a simple summary, but here is a bit from his introduction:

How can people be so different from—even go to war with—one another and yet also be so similar? The fundamental reason is that we each carry within us an evolutionary blueprint for making a good society.

Genes do amazing things inside our bodies, but even more amazing to me is what they do outside of them. Genes affect not only the structure and function of our bodies; not only the structure and function of our minds and, hence, our behaviors; but also the structure and function of our societies. This is what we recognize when we look at people around the world. This is the source of our common humanity.

Natural selection has shaped our lives as social animals, guiding the evolution of what I call a “social suite” of features priming our capacity for love, friendship, cooperation, learning, and even our ability to recognize the uniqueness of other individuals. Despite all the trappings and artifacts of modern invention—our tools, agriculture, cities, nations—we carry within us innate proclivities that reflect our natural social state, a state that is, as it turns out, primarily good, practically and even morally. Humans can no more make a society that is inconsistent with these positive urges than ants can suddenly make beehives.

I believe that we come to this sort of goodness just as naturally as we come to our bloodier inclinations. We cannot help it. We feel great when we help others. Our good deeds are not just the products of Enlightenment values. They have a deeper and prehistoric origin. The ancient tendencies that form the social suite work together to bind communities, specify their boundaries, identify their members, and allow people to achieve individual and collective objectives while at the same time minimizing hatred and violence. For too long, in my opinion, the scientific community has been overly focused on the dark side of our biological heritage: our capacity for tribalism, violence, selfishness, and cruelty. The bright side has been denied the attention it deserves.

(The above is a repost of MindBlog's 6/3/19 post)