(Commentary by Roger Erickson.)
Madison, Washington et al warned us against factionalism ... the measles of mankind.
"One way to keep [a voting block of] 50 million [poor people] fractured is through disinformation."
Once retired professional athletes are waking up to that fact, maybe there's hope.
It's also a hopeful sign that other citizens are starting to notice that many politicians don't know how fiat currency operations work.
Yet why is it taking so long for all these signs to be noticed, by more people? Is it partly because voters, in their turn, don't understand politics or politicians?
In general, most people in nearly all of our rapidly growing variety of disciplines don't understand much about the other disciplines. The downside is that our electorate understands LESS about its nation's context every year.
To generalize from an old academic joke,
"citizens receiving increasingly specialized education and training know more and more about fewer and fewer of themselves, until they end up knowing everything about nobody (and about no aggregate context)."
Here's another old joke. Our nation and it's context have become hidden from our own view, buried beneath a churning mass of blind specialists, like a cloud of mosquitoes obscuring a victim. No wonder we're stumbling around like a drunken policy apparatus. We can't even tell if that's a pink elephant encapsulated by all the blind men!
More fundamentally, not enough citizens formally recognize that over-adaptation to transient context - excess efficiency - is a death knell. Why? Too much specialization, thereby shedding the capacity for resiliency, while also instituting runaway feed-forward loops cementing institutional momentum!
That constitutes growing dissociation rather than growing coordination.
What we have is a blind cultural growth spurt, where growing aggregates have to GET clumsier before they can discriminate the signs of their growing clumsiness (aka, less agile democracy). Recognition is required before an electorate can start taking steps to regain agility, on yet another scale.
Until then, we're all stuck with understanding less about ourselves, about our context and about our options.
We have a name for classes of humans stuck in that limbo, devoid of the talent of discernment.
Homo lemmings - defined as a sub-class of homo sapiens who regularly say that
"no one could have expected" reality.
No pain, no urge to adapt. What if there's less capability to recognize looming cultural pain soon enough to take early evasive action? Then there's less willingness to adapt and survive, even if options are clearly presented.
Tell that to our legions of citizens with 30 second attention spans, who have come to accept countless exhortations to not read, not explore and, worst of all, not think - and certainly not outside the boxes - or cubicles - they've been handed.
Give these people an opportunity to think, and they are prone to call you a "lazy writer."
Is there a vaccine for lazy writing? Yes, and we call it extinction, ironically, since provocative writing, which asks readers to actually think, IS a cultural vaccine. A vaccine against a vaccine is therefore an example of self-assisted suicide. Those who don't get enough remedial practice at agile thinking are sometimes termed "literalists" - people who can only see what is, not what can be.
Literalists are people who, when faced with contexts describable ONLY through a seemingly near-infinite polynomial set of interdependent variables, have difficulty imagining more than one variable changing at one time. Agile thinkers, on the other hand, practice the cultural equivalent of combinatorial chemistry - throw everything together, change many variables simultaneously in many, interleaved, experiments, and practice the ability to discriminate novel signals, on the fly, from the expanding mass of noisy data.
Literalists, ironically, often call agile-thinkers lazy. Usually because the literalists won't stoop to asking enough questions to keep up. So who are the lazy ones?
In the end, there is a simple solution to that particular friction - between the literalist and agile ends of the thinking spectrum. How much could it hurt to add many more agile-thinking "games" to all levels of K-12 education, so that a threshold proportion of citizens get adequate practice at our constantly escalating task of coordinating on a larger scale - aka, get them practice at emulating evolution? That's one elegant way to prepare a growing electorate for a better balance between long-term cultural resiliency and instantaneous cultural efficiency.
