[FRIAM] [SPAM] Re: [[Narcissism Again]again]

[Eric Smith]

Thank you for forwarding this Owen,

I didn’t receive the original.

> So.  Let me just share one thought.  I have said a hundred times that I think the great achievement of the Right in my life time has been to problematize (Ugh!) the Deweyan consensus of the 1950’s  One of the elements of that consensus was that there is a truth of most matters and if we gather inclusively, talk calmly, reason closely, study carefully, investigate rigorously,  we will, together , come to it.  What was, at the time of my coming of age, the shared foundation of argument, became over last 50 years, a position in the argument.  The alternative to this Deweyan position seems to be something like, “There is no truth of the matter; there is only the exercise of power.  He who wins the argument, by whatever means, wins the truth.  Truth is not something that is arrived at; it is won.”
> 
> So, if we are going to counter Trump, it cannot be by demonstrating that he lies.  It has to be by demonstrating that liars don’t win. 

Nick, with the little clipping (done above) of what felt to me like a digression within this gem, it seems to me perfect.  It is the return to a clear focus on the center of the problem that I have been looking for and not been able to express.

The thing is (acknowledging Marcus’s replies also, and the ensuing discussion of the scoping of the claim):

1. Regarding trump itself, I don’t care about it except as I would care if someone told me a vial of Marburg virus had been spilled on the kitchen floor.  I would feel a sense of urgency to get a strong disinfectant to try somehow to scrub it out.  If I felt I couldn’t get rid of it short of cutting out and replacing a part of the floor, that would be within bounds of the discussion.  etc. at that level. I care a little more about several of the craven rats in the congress, enough to be angry at them, but again they can go into the autoclave with my blessing, and not much more interest than that.   (I believe this is what the NYT editorial called the dehumanizing motive of contempt, and argued is a bad choice; it feels to me like they have more than earned the category on their own.)

2. But I read Nick as saying that The Problem, and the central accomplishment of the Right, has been to install this shift in position as a feature of the population and whatever one calls the “culture” of this (and probably several other) nation(s).  That is what worries me, and drives a sense of urgency to fix a problem I do not know how to fix because I don’t understand how it can exist, much less be ascendent or robust.  It’s not the same as losing piety or losing god (loss of mere cultural luxuries), to lose the sense of factual truth as something larger than one’s own petit ambitions or the scope of the tribe.  In a big and complicated world where people have the impact they do, losing the factual sense of truth is commitment to an undignified form of suicide (emphasis on undignified, otherwise do as you like), alongside a lot of other -cides that are not morally defensible in any terms.  To have arrived at a large number of people who have managed to somehow get on the wrong side of this point requires a kind of blindness that it is hard to see how to break through.  The “demonstration that liars don’t win” is to be a demonstration to them (as I read Nick), to somehow flush out the narcotic that has them in this bizarre non-mental state, and make room for the common sense they routinely use when (for instance) not sticking their hands into the kitchen broiler or diving head-first onto the back patio, to again become the driver of decisions.  

Any animal (that has a brain) has a part of its brain that is subservient to the consistency of nature that we call fact (filtered and processed, of course, but I claim still the point stands).  The heavily social animals start to develop bigger veneers in which power starts to become a major motivator, and partitions tasks with those motivated by an awareness of fact.  But even as socialized as people are, as long as they are not self-mutilators in a clinical sense, that part still seems no bigger than a veneer.  Somehow it seems that cultures can, over decades, perform enough decadance that the scope of control of the veneer balloons and that pattern gets both frozen in to behavior and reified in a lot of constructed cultural supports.  What is the manual for the needed task of jointly tearing out what needs it, and re-building what has been built wrongly?

Eric