[FRIAM] Curmudgeons Unite!

[Jon Zingale]

Glen,

I suppose it isn't really fapping <https://www.reddit.com/r/NoFap/> if one
shows good brinkmanship :) The troubles our political institutions met
during the 2016 election, via weaponized social media technologies, no
doubt point to a serious vulnerability in our democratic process, and no
doubt one that is being studied by more resourceful and intelligent people
than I. IMO, the field was prepared long before the seeds of chaos and
distrust were sown.

Over the entirety of my life, and with the complicit consent of our (mostly
boomer) citizens, a devious narrative took hold that the American people
were not intelligent enough or capable enough to reason about the events of
their world, much less govern themselves. This perspective is too often
parroted as an axiom in political conversations, where one might say,
"Yeah, but do you really think that Joe Smoe on the street can...". This
cultural self-shaming strikes me as having a three-fold purpose:

1. to lull the participants of a democratic republic into sitting back, taking
a load off, and letting someone else drive for a while. The responsibility
of governing oneself is hard work and *you deserve a break **today*.

2. to invoke nation-wide Stockholm syndrome where individuals come to believe
that since some abstract daddy or expert is better equipped to think about
politics, it's better to leave the thinking to those abstractions (Chomsky's
commissar argument <https://chomsky.info/dissent02/>).

3. to cultivate better consumers.

Unfortunately, a democracy cannot function this way but it seemed to be Ok
for a short time. The *career guys *functionally operated as *daddy *and we
could cheer them on from the comfort of our television sets. In effect,
politics became a spectator sport.

As far as I can tell, this wave of disenfranchisement found purchase in a
crucial transition period from Carter's administration into Regan's.
Hippie-cum-yuppies,
in the face of the enduring hardships of the era: cold war, peak-oil,
failure in Vietnam, the rise of international terrorism, crisis of
confidence <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1IlRVy7oZ58>, etc... did what
any raised on superhero and GI Joe comic-book loving American would do,
they took the blue pill
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_pill_and_blue_pill>. Regan offered
America a return to the *good times*, cultures of protest withered away,
and soma was had by all.

Abroad, neoliberalism (à la Regan, Thatcher, and Ayn Rand-loving Alan
Greenspan)
became the dominating strategy for the west over developing nations.
Leadership wrt democratic ideals and stewardship of our own republic was
ceded to objectivists <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Objectivism> believing
in the cake of their own success bias. Meanwhile, at home, the public was
weened from nutrient-rich information sources[!] and transitioned toward
propaganda-driven rhetorical forms, emulating the successes of advertising
culture, and through this shift, our sound-byte culture was quickened.

What makes the actions to delegitimize our trusted institutions so insidious
is that the critique isn't wrong. For a brief period in the '90s and
leading up to the WTO/IMF protests in Seattle, political unrest was
beginning to wake from its nearly two-decade-long slumber. Discontents
(realizing the vanishing prospects for their own creation of wealth,
imminent environmental collapse, and the wholesale exploitation of
developing nations) formed grassroots movements to confront the
irresponsibility
of Regan-era *good time* thinking. Well, at least until the unfortunate
events of 9-11 epiphenomenologically nipped all movement in the bud, and
ushered in an *era of terror*, and like a good family, the public banned
together to support the suspension of even the most basic of civil
liberties.

When you say, "As I understand it, the attack was a successful use of *active
measures*. The objective was to find *extant* rifts in US society and
exploit them. This resulted in a sophisticated data science-driven attack
on platforms via technology like Facebook", I sympathize and can only feel
grave disappointment that this is the legacy we inherited. Fixing things,
as far as I can tell, will require investment in the capability of the
American people and the disruption of a program to produce good consumers.
Short of that, I don't know what the next steps will need to be, but I
suspect those steps will involve a good therapist.

Jon

[!] Paralleled almost symbolically by world-wide and aggressive campaigns to
market substitute breastmilk
<https://www.projectcensored.org/5-the-bottle-baby-scandal-milking-the-3rd-world-for-all-its-worth/>
.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://redfish.com/pipermail/friam_redfish.com/attachments/20200830/9260f5df/attachment.html>