[FRIAM] What is the response when bad faith is pervasive and coordinated?

[Frank Wimberly]

I'm not sure this is relaxant Dave but...When I was a senior at Berkeley I
took an upper division course for non-majors in political science
(unusual).  Among the many required readings was a short book by Eric
Hoffer called The True Believer.  It presents ideas which may explain
schismogenesis.  They are certainly relevant to Trumpism.

At that time Hoffer was a research professor even though he had no formal
higher education.  He had spent a career as a longshoreman.  The professor
invited him to give a series of lectures.  This was in the context of the
Free Speech Movement, which was occurring in Sproul Plaza a few yards from
the lecture hall.  He told "us students" that we were acting like Latin
American students which he did not intend as a compliment.

Not long after that he decided that he had been on the wrong side which he
blamed on his aging and fossilization.  Shortly after that he resolved to
stop being a social commentator.

If you haven't already done so, which I doubt, read True Believer.

---
Frank C. Wimberly
140 Calle Ojo Feliz,
Santa Fe, NM 87505

505 670-9918
Santa Fe, NM

On Sat, Oct 1, 2022, 4:40 PM Prof David West <profwest at fastmail.fm> wrote:

> I have been thinking a lot about the *"public movement to disintegrate
> society."* It feels like we are in the throes of a country-wide
> schismogenesis - the process of defining ourselves as what our neighbors
> are not. We expect differences in culture in different
> environments/contexts, but dramatic differences within the same environment
> surprise us. An example would be pacific coast native american groups,
> neighbors, where one culture has autocratic kings and slavery while the
> neighbors abhor and 'outlaw' both.
>
> Schismogenesis is the concept used by anthropologists (probably no the
> only users) to explain how adjacent cultures, or similarly characterized
> (e.g. nomadic herders, hunter gatherers, urban agriculturalists) can
> exhibit such diversity of political and social organization.
>
> From this perspective, it is not "society" that is being dis-integrated,
> it is a particular form of hierarchical Federalist society. The roots of
> this dis-integration are deep and mythical.
>
> davew
>
>
> On Wed, Sep 28, 2022, at 6:43 AM, glen wrote:
> > There's an ambiguity in "institutional". Our elections (and suits and
> > rulings) are handled like a tree of locales, allowing both challenges
> > and rulings many articulation points up and down the heterarchy at
> > which to act. Immigration is more unified, more homogenous. As I
> > understand it, federal law preempts state law in all but employment
> > licensing. So "institutional" for elections is distributed and
> > heterogeneous, whereas it's more centralized and homogenous for
> > immigration.
> >
> > One institutional change would be to distribute it. But we'd risk human
> > rights abuses in the same way we currently risk things like states
> > banning abortions or a frivolous election challenging blitzkrieg like
> > we saw in 2020. Another institutional change would be to retool federal
> > immigration law, which probably won't happen with first past the post
> > elections that guarantee 50/50 legislators. I suppose if we could
> > appoint a good faith Machiavellian secretary of homeland security, we
> > could retool the execution in such a way as to obviate many of the
> > judicial challenges. But I have no idea how that might happen.
> >
> > On 9/28/22 06:08, David Eric Smith wrote:
> >>
> https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/28/us/politics/election-activists-voter-challenges.html
> <
> https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/28/us/politics/election-activists-voter-challenges.html
> >
> >>
> >> To moan about this may have some small role early, to try to raise
> awareness (to compensate for the absence of a News industry that functions
> as such).  But after that, it ceases to be a response, and decays into an
> abnegation and a waste of time.
> >>
> >> Responses are institutional.  What is the institutional response to
> what, by now, sort of qualifies as a public movement to disintegrate the
> society?  “When in the Course of human events [a certain group of people
> decide] to dissolve the political bands which have connected them [with
> others]….”   For things that have been around for a long time, like
> frivolous use of lawsuits, we have arrived at some norms for throwing out
> mistakes and actively penalizing abuses, a kind of detente within which we
> can function at some level from day to day.  For more acute recent changes,
> like handling immigration claims, we are not doing so, and we approach
> jamming transitions.  For this electoral contesting, I don’t know if there
> even is an institutional plan.
> >>
> >> I would like to have something in my head about this that qualifies as
> a thought or an idea.
> >>
> >> Eric
> >
> >
> > --
> > ꙮ Mɥǝu ǝlǝdɥɐuʇs ɟᴉƃɥʇ' ʇɥǝ ƃɹɐss snɟɟǝɹs˙ ꙮ
> >
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