[FRIAM] if by 'populism' he meant ...

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Britain’s Last Day in Brussels: A Populist Punch-Up
https://bylinetimes.com/2020/12/08/britains-last-day-in-brussels-a-populist-punch-up/

I've struggled to understand what populism means. The dictionary definition is no help (appeal to ordinary people) because I don't think such people exist. There is no "average person". We're all "elite" (special) in some way or another. Each thing has its own particularity. (Down to Pauli exclusion.) Binning concrete things into classes requires removing particulars. This kindasorta implies that populism means appealing to the most common feature set. Average every possible feature and choose the top, say, 5-7 most common features.

But that's a problem because we people aren't very objective. So, a data-driven populist would stick pretty close to an algorithm like that. But a "populist" politician probably would not. There's some other criteria at work ... some *conception* of the ordinary person that isn't objective ... a kind of shared subjectivity, "intersubjectivity" <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intersubjectivity>?

My *guess* is that the way "populist" is used refers to a shared *delusion* ... like the American Dream, which was always a delusion. It's simply becoming more obvious as our information ecology changes. The intersubjectivity involved seems to be a mass psychogenic illness <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_psychogenic_illness> ... kinda like popular music and the same damned person winning the pop contest year upon year.

I'd be grateful for any criticism of that conclusion.

I have another idea that was triggered by the Byline article: that populism is a kind of forcing structure [⛧], a reduction from high to low dimension, from high to low diversity. Where "elites" take an appropriate amount of time to, say, explain/understand quantum decoherence, a populist over-simplifies it so that the "ordinary person" can believe they see it everywhere. Or, where "elites" accept the cost of sympathizing with each particular wak they meet, the populist stereotypes those [in|out] of their tribe. This 2nd idea could be seen as a derivative of the 1st one, where the shared delusion is the overly simplified model. I'm not as interested in criticism of this 2nd idea. Killing the 1st idea would, I think, kill the 2nd. But if the 1st idea sounds about right, then it might be worth trashing the 2nd.


[⛧] ... whether [endo|exo]genous, which isn't irrelevant, but perhaps tangential.

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