[FRIAM] Motives - Was Abduction

[Steven A Smith]

Dave -
> First, why /Win Bigly/ recommend. Adams' book is his attempt to 
> understand, to deconstruct and analyze, why he "knew" with complete 
> certainty that Trump would win simply by observing one of his first 
> political rallies. From where did that conviction arise? Why was it so 
> absolute? Adams eventually comes to the conclusion that he was so 
> certain because he non-consciously, at first, recognized a master 
> communicator. Most of the book is a series of anecdotal 'experiments' 
> that fleshed out and confirmed his instinctual reaction at the first 
> rally. Ultimately it is a cautionary tale: if you can't (my own 
> editorial position, if you won't) recognize why — despite all the 
> negatives — he won, you will not be able to defeat him next time.
I think I got this point in a post several weeks ago and maybe even 
during the election runup/aftermath.  It opens as many questions as it 
closes however.   I didn't engage (much) then, and am perhaps still (2 
years later?) still trying to form the question.
>
> As to the ethics dimension; you quoted one of Adam's reviewers: 
> /"//But, when I was in school, we always discussed ethical 
> responsibility of the persuader and Adams does not. As long as Trump 
> was persuasive he was going to win and that’s what matters."/ This 
> misconstrues what Adams, who is definitely NOT a Trump fan or even 
> apologist, is saying.
I appreciate your own explanation of "Win Bigly".  It isn't that 
surprising that many of his reviewers would miss his point in favor of 
some slightly askew but fundamentally different.
> A different metaphor: I am standing on a hill watching as a Tanker 
> truck filled with, but leaking, 5,000 gallons of gasoline rushing 
> headlong towards a family minivan and state the obvious, "that truck 
> gonna crush that minivan and immolate every person nearby," and "the 
> truck outweighs the minivan by 5 tons, it has no breaks and the truck 
> driver is slumped over behind the wheel," and "there is nothing the 
> minivan can do about it unless it is a Transformer in mufti." I am not 
> saying that the truck crushing the minivan is "what matters." I am in 
> fact saying that avoiding the disaster is _what matters_ and we might 
> have prevented the disaster if we had recognized and addressed the 
> factors that made it inevitable instead of wailing and gnashing teeth 
> about the driver being a drunk sex offender working for a company that 
> skipped safety inspections ...

Yes to this, I think.  Both the point that avoiding the disaster is at 
least what is most important in the moment, and some kind of 
understanding of how we might have avoided it in the first place has a 
less urgent but  similar if not equal level of importance. If we 
*imagine* that the driver of the 5 ton truck with failed brakes was 
slumped over his wheel in a drunken stupor while reviewing child 
pornography on his electronic tablet, then I suppose being incensed 
about those factors is relevant to the imminent disaster and possible 
future replays by trucks from the same or similar companies with drivers 
with the same or similar questionable habits.

I do believe you might be referring to the common tendency to take the 
facts of a (dire) situation and apply them immediately through the lens 
of your own agenda-structured worldview, letting the current imminent 
incident be fodder for promoting some subset of one's agendas... say 
like what the White House has been doing around the southern border 
"crisis".

>
> Trump's communication skills ensured that he would win as long as the 
> opposition focused on the cretin instead of the policy.

I'm surprised you (and Scott Adams?) would call this "communication 
skills"... he IS effective at what I would more aptly call 
*mis*communication.   It is not that he has a complicated or subtle or 
exotic idea to share which he then serializes into a series of 
communications (talking points in a speech, or a series of tweets), but 
rather that he spews something which may or may not be well crafted, but 
has a quality which misdirects the listener in a way that supports is 
*goals* which are very likely far from the ones he is stating overtly.

My father used to say, when watching a rodeo clown, "you have to be 
really good to be that bad!" referring to the apparent clumsy buffoonery 
being played out to distract the recently goaded bull from the 
bullriding goader trying to get up off the dirt and back to the safety 
of the arena fence.

>
> Second, Individualism. The list recently struggled with the idea of 
> labeling (categorizing) people and my response to your question and 
> observations about individualism will echo some of the labeling 
> conversation.
>
> I will resist being labeled an "individualist" because every 
> characterization I have seen on this list is grounded, in one way or 
> another, on "individual rights." I do not believe that indivdiual's 
> have "rights," even the inalienable ones, that are not derived 
> entirely from "individual responsibility."
I think I share some analog to your rights/responsibility duality. But I 
also think they are part of a social construct/contract. "Rights" and 
"Responsibilities" only make sense to me in the context of some group. I 
think in most cultures *many* of the rights and responsibilities of the 
"individual" are so implicit in the culture that we don't think much 
about them until we get around to conjuring up a constitutional 
governance document or facing a judge in a courtroom.
>
> I am ultimately and absolutely responsible for, not only myself, but, 
> labeling again, all sentient life. While this seems absurd on its 
> face, it is directly analogous to the Bodhisattva. (A goal, not an 
> achievement!)
Why draw the boundary around sentient life?  Why not include *all 
consciousness* or *all life* and then extend  that to *all patterns of 
matter and energy*?   I'm not asking this challengingly...  I'm 
suggesting that in the same way expanding past "me" to "my family" to 
"my tribe" to "my nation" to "my race" to "my species" to "my genus" or 
"family" or "order" or even "kingdom" makes some real sense.
> Corollaries follow: 1) absolute responsibility also means absolute 
> accountability, including if a mistake is made ("do the crime, do the 
> time");
I think the question of "accountability" vs vaguely related concepts 
like "retribution", "revenge", "rehabilitation", "recovery", even 
"return to grace" is important but probably worth deferring here.
> 2) a critical dimension of responsibility is acquiring the kind of 
> 'omniscience' that assures non-attachment;
These are somewhat the opposite of "Willful Ignorance", methinks?
> 3) every act (behavior) I exhibit is both informed and intentional;

In some limit, yes.  But along a spectrum it would seem.   Until one has 
achieved said "Omniscient Non-attached Enlightenment" there is room for 
weakly informed and therefore mis-applied intentions.   The truck-driver 
hurtling toward the minivan loaded with a model family (including a 
couple of cute dogs) may well have been swerving to avoid a deer when 
his poor information lead him to believe that he could do so without 
crossing lanes, jumping a barrier, and flying headlong into said family 
(in this version, the truck-driver is neither a sex offender nor 
substance abuser and the brakes may or may not work but in either case 
aren't being effective enough to avoid the inevitable fiery collision).

And then we have the concept of "willful ignorance".   Are you perhaps 
suggesting that every act/behaviour has a component of willful ignorance?


> and 4) the necessary assumption that everyone else is an 
> "individualist" of this same stripe.
We can assume that every one else is the same animal, whether they know 
it or not.   Harping on my willful ignorance, we could accuse those who 
don't know it of extreme ignorance with or without extreme willfulness.
> In the above I am an admitted fundamentalist fanatic. However, the 
> culture I grew up in, both secular and religious, strongly echoes 
> these ideas. Growing up, I was exposed, pretty much constantly, to the 
> "Paradise Built in Hell" kind of individual, group, and social 
> behavior. (Obviously, that was not the only thing to which I was exposed.)

I think I was as well, though some reflection exposes various pockets of 
hypocrisy that I was unprepared to recognize at the time.   I think 
something actually *changed* during my generation, where *willful 
ignorance* (still harping) replaced engaged responsibility.

This is a lot of what I am curious about... what that equation is, how 
it is balanced and how we got from there to here (or even whether here 
and there are anything but the same thing?).

> A Geography professor at Macalester College sparked a lifelong 
> interest in Utopian communities. In addition to the physical 
> environment,I was interested in the 'mental' environment of values, 
> principles of social organization, etc.. I have found a lot of other 
> 'echoes' of my concept of individualism in those that managed to 
> survive multiple generations (a rarity).

Intentional Communities (almost by definition Utopian?) have been around 
for a very long time and often fail within a generation, sometimes under 
the weight of their own extremism, sometimes under the weight of 
"backlash" from trying to overconstrain human instinctual drives (e.g. 
all the things that the 10 Commandments feels compelled to be explicit 
about).

Complexicists might prefer Utopian societies exhibit Utopian qualities 
through emergent properties.   Jenny Quillien's writeup on her trip to 
Bhutan exposed a partial example of this (perhaps).

>
> Hope this was on point to what you asked about.

I think more to the point is to stimulate some off-axis discussion which 
perhaps provides a little parallax relief from the familiar left/right 
debates (rants) that we (not just this group, but society at large) seem 
to lock into.   I sense that your own experiences and unique path 
through life leads you to a similarly unique perspective.   The topic of 
categorization recently seems mostly to be an issue I think Glen calls 
"over-quantization" or perhaps it is "premature-quantization"? This is 
also why I harp on breaking the RNC/DNC stranglehold on election 
(including debate) processes... I want to be making my own choices in a 
much higher-dimensional space... even if I might be resigned to the 
hazards of representative gov't (as opposed to the hazards of a direct 
democracy).

- Steve

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