[FRIAM] Your personal truth

Fri May 9 22:18:22 EDT 2025

EricS -
> You may need to care about the degree of institutionalization of 
> corruption and terror, and the timescale relative to people’s 
> developmental timescales (generations or parts thereof). 

both Russia/USSR and China have a few (or many) generations of 
totalitarianism supported by cruelty/terror.  The US, for all it's 
faults has had a much milder version of that up to McCarthyism for 
example?  Even then it was narrow-focused and somewhat limited (compared 
to Stalin/Mao?) in it's extremity.  Trump, et-al are trying to raise 
those stakes up to that level (over many months?) and across a similar 
scope (though starting with extant marginalized groups like immigrants, 
LGBTQ, accused criminals, women, minorities in some sort of descending 
order of severity).

> The problems that graspers of power need to solve are somewhat 
> different in earlier and later contexts, and so the solutions that get 
> kept probably are different as well.
>
> When a movement is really a social phenomenon, like fascism or 
> bolshevism in their rising phases, it is not heavily 
> institutionalized.  There are communities pushing to see who will take 
> over the larger society.  By which I mean: people are not atomized. 
>  There, what the demagogue needs to do to survive and succeed is 
> convert the masses into a mob.  He doesn’t yet have an intricate 
> interlocking structure that makes him hard to get at, and he needs to 
> utilize the social and non-atomized nature of mobs to suppress the 
> still-large part of the society that wants to stop him.
>
> If the disease can get installed and hang on through some transition 
> phase, it needs to then eat away at both character and community. 
>  Example is West Point at the moment.  Most of the cadets trained 
> there in the past probably wouldn’t immediately shoot U.S. civilians 
> if told to, and they probably believe that the people who carried out 
> their educations had some notions of courage and moral agency.  That 
> is the thing that is being reworked now.  Demonstrate that those 
> running the place are in fact not brave, and not sure enough of 
> themselves to exercise moral agency, and thus can be bought out and 
> made collaborators.  The cadets for whom that was the lesson of their 
> education will not be the same kind of developed people as those who 
> believed (even if it had not been tested and shown, for them) that the 
> rules were otherwise.  These cadets are more likely to have the 
> calculus that Jonathan Shay describes in Achilles in Vietnam: better 
> to shoot the civilians in front of me than to get shot by my own 
> commanders from behind, since I know they would do that.
>
As a latent draft-dodger (SS registration was lifted months before I 
turned 18) I have always suspected the military hierarchy of having 
values that are not aligned either with that of their troops nor that 
which they publicly espouse.   I wasn't a potential draft dodger because 
I was sure the war was unjust or because I was afraid of losing my 
life.  I was such because I felt I couldn't (easily) know before I was 
so committed (say, on the front lines in 'nam, forced to risk killing 
civilians, or having to kill my commanding officer and his sycophants, 
or face my own death/court-martial? or all of the above).  A lot to ask 
an 18 year old boy who thinks he is a man and is manipulated to prove it 
under extreme conditions?

good analytic essay (above and below) as usual!

- Steve

> Put on low heat and cook for a generation.  While people are growing 
> into that different worldview, build up your mafia hierarchies, where 
> everybody is pitted against everybody and the notion of whether or 
> where you are safe gets re-evaluated with each new day, based on what 
> you can learn about what changed overnight.  You can start with the 
> ones who were already cynical and amoral or immoral, since there will 
> always be some of them in the society and you just need to put out a 
> red lantern and let them find you.  And as more of the rest get tipped 
> over into cynicism and amorality, you can expand the collaborator pool 
> as they come online.
>
> In that world, the mafia organization, much like a modern economy with 
> respect to consumer and labor choices, people are atomized, do not act 
> socially (w.r.t. these questions), and act instead with institutions 
> as their counterparties.  When everyone faces only an institution as 
> the certain or predictable part of life, and when the institutions are 
> mafia institutions, building up the social mentality of the mob is not 
> “needed”, and perhaps building up the shared identity of the mob is 
> not even desirable (since who might come to control it if it becomes 
> cohesive; maybe somebody other than you).  There can be a pretense of 
> demagoguery, as in Castro’s hours-long speeches, or Maduro “teasing” a 
> listener that the listener must be on “the Maduro diet” (meaning 
> starving, while Maduro got fatter and fatter), and there will probably 
> be some rump of the eternally-aggrieved for whom that does something. 
>  But they are not the same mob that put the current capo in power 
> before the institutions were built.  I don’t think probably nearly 
> anybody feels warmth and affection toward Kim Jong-un, even though 
> there probably were many who felt that way toward Kim Il-sung.  The 
> situation of Bekele in El Salvador right now may be interesting in 
> that regard.  He got re-elected with a huge majority, but I’m not sure 
> it was because people responded to the demagoguery so much as, like 
> the support for Duterte in the Philippines, they were more afraid of 
> immediate daily presence of violence, and would back somebody who 
> seemed to be big enough to suppress part of it.
>
> Eric
>
>> On May 10, 2025, at 7:27, Jochen Fromm <jofr at cas-group.net> wrote:
>>
>> Hmmm I am not sure, but I think the emotional connection between the 
>> demagogue and his followers is important, at least in some systems, 
>> but not in all. President Xi in China and president Putin do not show 
>> much emotion or create an emotional connection to their people, 
>> right?  I am reading Peter Hessler's last book "Other Rivers" and he 
>> says in China they call it "chen mo" if people turn silent because 
>> they are frightened of a negative government reaction.
>>
>> I scribbled this graphical description. Not sure if it makes sense? 
>> In authoritarian systems you are not allowed to criticize the ruler, 
>> in totalitarian systems neither the ruler nor the ruling party.
>>
>> <.EmailTempImageHEV_1746829057729.jpg>
>>
>> -J.
>>
>>
>> -------- Original message --------
>> From: steve smith <sasmyth at swcp.com>
>> Date: 5/9/25 10:43 PM (GMT+01:00)
>> To: friam at redfish.com
>> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Your personal truth
>>
>>
>> Jochen wrote:
>>> Knowing *their* emotions could be the key. Maybe one major reason 
>>> why Donald Trump's followers find him so persuasive is that they 
>>> have the impression he knows what they feel, because what he says 
>>> fits exactly to how they feel. The most selfish and narcissistic 
>>> person who is incapable of empathy gives people the feeling that he 
>>> knows what they feel. It is a little bit paradox, isn't it?
>>
>> Unless of course, he is appealing to every(wo)man's inner 
>> selfish-narcissist?  First you tweak up fear (and maybe greed in the 
>> background) and then appeal to the (very natural?) narcissistic and 
>> selfish sensibilities that come with that?
>>
>> Also Trump has a penchant for a type of vagueness which makes it easy 
>> for a motivated listener to map their own worst hopes/fears onto 
>> everything he says (very polarizing).  He blathers so much nonsense 
>> about so many things it is easy to pick and choose what you want to 
>> get excited (or incensed) about.
>>
>> As for me, the (rare?) times something the Donald does or says 
>> appeals to me I can usually find a limbic system level greed or fear 
>> trigger of my own that he's touched on?   Gilded embellishments in 
>> the background of the White House, Supermodels and Pornstars and 
>> Inappropriately Young Women hanging off his arm (or waiting just out 
>> of sight) and  Personal Jumbo Jets and Golf Resorts (with fake 
>> fake-gold trophies) and outrageous rhetoric about immigrant crime and 
>> the "unfairness" of global trade/relations really do just the 
>> opposite for me.  Total turnoffs.   But for many I think those things 
>> give them a little tweak...  gives them hope for their darkest 
>> desires and confirmation on their darkest fears.
>>
>> When I hear that maybe Social Security income won't be taxed, I get a 
>> little bump to my limbic system thinking of the 2 or 3 figure savings 
>> I might get on my tax bill (unless of course I go full tax-revolt as 
>> I preach to others).   When I saw the big fentanyl roundup in 
>> NM/AZ/NV/OR  I was heartened to imagine that the "worst of the worst" 
>> had been at least mildly subdued, even though I'm pretty sure a 
>> careful look will see a lot of collateral damage to people, at worst, 
>> on the periphery or victims of the "worst of the worst" themselves.
>>
>> Musk used to appeal to my latent (or mostly recovered) inner 
>> libertarian, convincing me that just good old fashioned elbow grease 
>> and innovative thinking (and acting) could save me from the 
>> existential risks of our own thoughtless self-destructive ambitions 
>> and the selfishness of others.   I was raised on a similar Good Old 
>> Fashioned Future SciFi canon he apparently was (maybe the SoAfrica 
>> SciFi literary centroid was a decade or so behind the US/Europe?).  I 
>> can't tell he read anything with a "cautionary tale" built into it 
>> though...
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
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