You’re Not That Smart (and neither am I)

 A friend sent me a link to an interview with Tom Nichols where he discussed the ideas that he describes in his book, The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why It Matters.  A lot of this is stuff I’ve been thinking about as this next election cycle spins itself into another swirling bowl full of turds and vomit. Trump, of course, is the most disgusting turd in the bowl, but there is a lot of local and national fecal matter trailing him that is in no way an improvement in smell or content. Nichols puts a lot of emphasis on the decay in public trust of experts and the years of study and experience that goes into creating experts and he’s right that is a big thing. When your average barely-literate goober thinks he can make better decisions about everything from Gaza/Ukraine to technology/science/AI to climate change that’s a problem. When there are 77 million of them in the US alone, it’s more than a problem. It could very likely be the end of the United States of America as we’ve known it for the past 240+ years. You don’t have to fool all of the people all of the time, you just have to fool enough of them at the right time (aka Adolph Hitler).

Personally, I think a bigger problem is that the US has been literally misled for at least 45 years, at every level of leadership from education to business to government.  And by “misled” I mean the public has too often been corrupt, lazy, incompetent, and destructive, resulting in similar “public servants.”  Looking first at the corrupt part, in Michael Lewis’ book about the Great Recession around the world, Boomerang, Greece was a standout because of generations of distrust and almost universal cheating in every aspect of that culture.  The current US problem is, as Mr. Nichols says,  that our distrust of experts and our neighbors is “breaking down the bonds of trust that democracies rest on.” As a national population, our sense of obligation and duty to each other and our national ideals has decayed into “me first, then maybe you if you’re enough like me.”  Sadly, if you’re Black or Asian and you are reading this I suspect you are thinking, “So what else is ‘new’?”  And that is certainly one of the roots of the problem.  Our history of national racism has always made our words about freedom and liberty a cynical partial-truth at best.

From my own corporate experience, I’ve argued for at least 40 years that “everything is top-down.”  Meaning, if the people at the top of the economic and status ladder are liars and cheats, everyone else in the system will follow suit.  We’ve gone through a long period where average citizens have been cynical about government and corporate leaders.  From Nixon to Reagan to Clinton to the Bush 1 and II to Trump, the people at the top of our country have too often been self-serving, treasonous, cowardly, lazy, and even outright criminal.  Filtering down that leadership ladder, we have a Republican congress obligated to Russian oligarchs to corporate Republicans and Democrats who are just as obligated to other oligarchs.  When congresscritters aren’t behaving like stupid and spoiled children, they are obviously representing the richest and most powerful people in the country to the detriment of 99.9…% of the country.  If that is how the people leading the country behave, why would those following act differently?

And they don’t.  For brief moments in our country’s history, the people most benefiting from our economy and political system felt an obligation to pay some of that privilege forward to the rest of the country. 

In the 80s, the Reagan mobsters doubled-down on “greed is good” and the amoral “values” of “I’ve got mine, screw you.”  A substantial number of average citizens decided that if those rules were good enough for those guys it was good enough for them.  If a B-grade actor pretending to be President can stand in front of the country and whine that he was too dumb to know what his employees were doing in El Salvador and Iran, why should the rest of us have to behave decently?  Clinton’s fake “executive compensation reform” led to even more insane executive salaries disguised as incentives.  If corporate executives can pay themselves 4,000-10,000 times the average salary in their company, while making stupid and destructive decisions that bankrupt the business, why should their employees do more? Again, when the leaders, those who benefit the most do the least, that dribbles-down the chain of command to the feet on the ground where work happens. Or doesn’t happen because no one cares anymore.

I’m the poster child for exactly that response.  For the first 20 years of middle management in everything from a 3-man department in a small division of a midsized manufacturing and service company to managing more than 100 employees in a $50M/year manufacturing company, I’d acted as if the companies I worked for had some kind of purpose, a mission.  I’d convinced myself that my employers had a purpose beyond making the most useless people in the company (the executives) a lot of money for no measurable effort.

Once I realized how wrong I was, my motivational mantra became “I’m not working any harder for this company than the people who benefit the most.”  Working as “hard” as a typical CEO/CFO/COO/C-anything doesn’t take much effort.  Taking that little responsibility for the company’s performance doesn’t take any kind of commitment at all.  Thanks to that observation, I learned to pace myself, based on the commitment I saw at the top; and I was always close enough to those folks to know how little they were doing.  I took the energy and time that I once put into my job and applied it to my own skills and education.  After 1991, I refused every offered promotion into management (and I turned down several).  I maintained that imperative until I retired.  Hell, I still apply those rules to the volunteer work I do, when I do it.

Sadly, most people don’t do anything once they’ve calibrated their behavior to that of the ruling class.  I have always been astounded at how few employees take advantage of education benefits from work.  That makes education the cheapest benefit any company can offer.  So, not only do most US workers distrust management and government, they distrust themselves!  Instead of putting energy into improving themselves and creating some kind of security out of the flexibility that education provides, they numb themselves with sports and YouTube and other “entertainments.”

I don’t think any of this is “new,” either.  The combination of generations of “I’ve got street smarts” and the barely-latent racism that sprouted its ugly head during the Obama years has just allowed the worst and the dumbest to proudly spout their nonsense. Republicans and evangelicals who have always preyed on that crowd are leading them, and the rest of us, down the failed empire path to the expected historical bad ending.

"Without courage we cannot practice any other virtue with consistency.  We can't be kind, true, merciful, generous, or honest."

 

- Maya Angelou

 

Scary Philosophy

When I was 20, in 1968, the United States was at the beginning of the rapid decent into fascism we are now suffering in its full bloom.  On a false pretext, a CIA-fabricated and inflated “attack” on US battleships by ground-based North Vietnamese forces, my country had escalated the illegal war and invasion of a third world country for a laundry list of amoral and awful reasons.  We were moving from a country that was largely admired by the world for our participation in defeating Germany, Italy, and Japan’s fascism and representing democracy to the world, to becoming an outlaw nation that abused it’s military power for the profit of a few.  We are, now, solidly that country.  And I suspect there is no turning back.

Thanks to asthma, the Navy, Air Farce, Marines, and, finally, the US Army classified me as 1-Y, then 4-F, after I failed my Navy physical when I was 18, two years earlier.  Before that, I didn’t know what asthma was, I just thought I was a wimp who coughed up blood after running a couple of 100 yard sprints in football practice.  Supposedly, my father and step-mother knew, but I suppose they’d hoped I’d “grow out of it” and didn’t bother to explain any of my handicap to me.  I did grow out of it, too, after leaving Kansas and the agricultural air pollution of the Midwest and moving to the cleaner, less polluted Los Angeles environment in the 1980s. 

 

So, without the draft hanging over my head and a new wife to care for as a twenty-year-old without direction, other than protesting the Vietnam War, I was looking for a philosophy.  One of the few over-40-adults with the courage to speak out against the Vietnam War was Bertrand Russell, who had the good sense and decency to be a British citizen. In his book, The Problems of Philosophy, Russell presented me with the background for a lifetime of skepticism.  One of his many challenges was the thought that, to be an atheist (as opposed to the lazier agnostic I’d been up till then), I needed to explore all of the religions of the world and find them without meaning or utility.  So, while my new wife was back in school finishing her senior year in high school, and after I’d finished my meter-reading route for the day, I spent my afternoons in the downtown Dallas, Texas library.  That library is still one of the most amazing buildings I’ve ever experienced.  Since there are at least 10,000 religions in the world, I didn’t come close to carefully examining all of them, but most (like Christianity) are so burdened with superstition, magic, violence, prejudice, and ridiculous bullshit that they didn’t warrant much more than a brief glance to expose their lack of value. 

The two “religions” that I found the most fascinating and complex were Buddhism and Confucianism, both of which are only sort-of-religions and are more accurately described as philosophy.  Like religions, both have been thoroughly distorted, perverted, and made into something they weren’t and shouldn’t by defective, vicious, corrupt, greedy humans.  And that is when and where I first ran into the quote, “Choose your enemies wisely, for you will become them.”  Everyone from Confucius to Friedrich Nietzsche to Mary Dora Russell gets credit for that warning, but regardless of the origin, it appears to be true. 

What we take away from that fact is the place where philosophy becomes downright terrifying.  Taken as an absolute fact, it appears that the worst people are the most likely to benefit, long term, from choosing enemies, since evil will become good, eventually, and good will become evil.  The United States, today, seems to be a perfect example of exactly that.  Most recently, US Vice-President J.D. Vance (or whatever his name is at the moment) lectured what used to be our European allies on his perverted view of democracy, "You can believe it's wrong for Russia to buy social media advertisements to influence your elections. We certainly do,  But if your democracy can be destroyed with a few hundred thousand dollars of digital advertising from a foreign country, then it wasn't very strong to begin with."  Ironic words from a man apparently incapable of irony or any form of humor, since Russia bought his entire political party for a few million dollars.  Of course, Vance was defending Germany’s far right political parties, supported and sustained by Putin’s barely-disguised attempts to capture the EU in the same manner the US Republican Party was co-opted.

German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius bit back with, “If I understood him [Vance] correctly, he is comparing conditions in parts of Europe with those in authoritarian regimes.  That is unacceptable, and it is not the Europe and not the democracy in which I live and am currently campaigning.

“In our democracy, every opinion has a voice and it makes it possible for parties that are partly extremists such as the AfD, and they can campaign just as any other party, This is democracy.”

Germany, in 1941, chose democracy, peaceful and free nations as its enemy.  At least the majority of Americans (including Canada and Mexico) chose fascism as its enemy.  Today, Germany is defending democracy, peaceful and free nations, and its own national and regional security while the United States is opposing all those things, internally and world-wide.  We, apparently, did not choose our enemies wisely.