Why do so many countries — in what yesterday we called the Third World and today we call the Global South — seem open to coups, dictators and the slide into autocracy, and with the sometimes enthusiastic backing of segments of the general population?
Why is 2/3 of Russia, admittedly, its rural populations, its 2nd- and 3rd-tier industrial cities — the same remnants of the mid-20th-Century economy stirring up trouble in affluent North Atlantic nations — backing Putin as he mortgages Russia’s future to a short-lived peak Russia at the tail end of his reign?
Knowledge Is Power, But Only when Paired with Knowing What One Doesn’t Know
Why peasants are so easily misled:
The more ignorant, the more easily lied to.
The more short-term the outlook, the easier prey for those with a long-term outlook and a willingness to deceive their followers “for their own good” — since only those directly wired into the true path by bloodline or prophetic insight, by charismatic leadership or unquestioning submission to dogmacan know the true way, and follow it.(The rest of us should just shut up and do as we’re told.)
The more tied to the daily struggle for survival, with no banked surplus to speak of, the less able to independently confirm what they are told by those with the wealth, power and leisure to educate themselves.
Even when not misled, even when they know they are being exploited, the same reasons that put the peasantry at a disadvantage of education and knowledge, puts them at a disadvantage in power, in all its forms, hard power and soft power, force and fraud, knowing how the game is played or skill and experience in organizing and managing a household or the resources or self-confidence to build for the long-term and prepare for the future.
the working classes and smallholders are not much less at a disadvantage.
This is not news. Locke spoke of the sensible politics of the English yeoman freeholder and Aristotle of the moderate, balanced nature of a middle-class.
One of the great ironies of history is the way Communist Parties infantilize the proletariat they claim to serve, making them more abjectly in thrall to the newly imposed elites than they were to the old displaced elites, because the Party puts on a better show of serving the than did the old order.
This irony was laid bare when the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) transferred its favor from the rural peasantry to the urban middle-class workers of the rising manufacturing and tech industries. Ina word; hukou.
Hukou means the requirement of city registration to get basic services — including medical insurance for the old and education for the young — which was routinely withheld from the influx of inalnd peasnats displaced from work by the progress of their richer coastal cousins, who didn’t want to share their economic benefits.
China built its own internal and domestic wall to keep displaced peasants from sharing in the opportunities for advnacement enjoyed by their coastal cousins.
Cut through the bullshit and this shows that the CCP was simply ditching its old power base for a newer, more promising one. Welcome to the same old same old, dressed up as a movement of utopian idealism! Lipstick on a pig, if there ever was.
When you’re surplus to needs, even the Communist Party doesn’t look after you.
Conclusion #1: The poor are easy marks for opportunistic leaders and parties because they lack both resources (wealth) and education (skills).
Conclusion #2: Affluent country living standards and basic primary and secondary education guarantee nothing.
Conclusion #3: When rumor, however digital the medium, and fellow-feeling (whether of blood and clan, of sect or party, race or ethnicity) determine political perspectives, the population is ripe for exploitation by charismatic demagogues, extremist sects and parties, and general-purpose opportunists (of whom there’s never a shortage, waiting in the wings). Pun intended!
Those skillful in the manipulative arts of persuasion will appeal to biases and grievances, making empty but alluring promises to the gullible. They will promise givebacks and giveaways to whatever power base they find handy.
The taste for flattering or titillating misinformation, coupled with a limited capacity for fact-checking, credibility analysis or critical thinking, can lead normally sensible citizens — generally more engaged with family and daily concerns than with national politics and the big picture — into accepting as authoritative sources and leaders who are merely manipulative.
Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat. (Sun-Tzu)
Locked by Birth into Singular Perspectives
We are all mortal beings, born into a precarious life that must be defended, if it is not to be lost.
We must continually win our survival, pitted against the long arm of natural selection, until death do us part.
We cannot help but view the world as would survival-machines, for survival is the indispensable condition of our existence.
Noteworthy exceptions: the sheltered nestlings of the affluent classes in affluent nations. But this inherited condition comes with its own risks and pitfalls and, anyway, it seldom lasts a lifetime.
So, we lean into surviving. Or we don’t survive.
So, we support loyally those that helped us survive. We take for granted the goodness of all that helped us survive and thrive — the people, partners, family, friends and allies, and the customs, traditions and institutions as well.
We all want to preserve all that preserved us, even when that came at the expense of others.
Friends and foes is the first political distinction recognized by survival-machines.
And it persists — in disguised forms — even in the thoughtful, even in those who have worked to broaden their horizons (i.e, liberals).
Postmodernists call this perspective a grand narrative, claiming, correctly, that it pervades every culture, every cultural institution and every mind.
How could we not take for granted the conditions under which we flourished, under whose shelter we received, developed or strove to achieve all that makes us what we are: our personalities, our personal histories, our social networks, our careers and achievements?
If conditions were favorable to our flourishing, we owe them a great debt; this is the basis of family feelings and blood obligations.
If conditions were unfavorable, we look for the obstacles that inhibited us and attack them with all our force. (This is the peephole from which many postmodernists take their bearing.)
Those are the extreme cases, but most origins fall into the middle range, the range of mixed blessings.
In sum, individual perspectives are inescapably shaped by our peculiar circumstances, producing perspectives at least as various as the conditions that shaped them.
What, then, can truth be? If, indeed, it is anything at all?
The Origin of Perspective
But no perspective, standing alone, is reality or truth.
Truth must either reject all perspectives by superseding them all, or comprehend them all by incorporating all of them — more precisely, all of them that can accommodate other legitimate perspectives.
This works much in the way that journalists, detectives, and researchers sift and validate eyewitness accounts, by using methodical procedures, governed by rules.
Where possible, we should use explicit methods and procedures that can be reduplicated for confirmation or falsification, as in the scientific method.
But methods and procedures are their own keyholes, for conditions must meet certain requirements before they can be applied.
A crucial example of this is the scientific method, which applies most readily to objects whose movements are accounted for entirely by causes externalized in space and time, rather than objects engineered internally — and thus, locally and individually — to process external inputs of forces or itsensory stimuli in ways whose traits are determined by locally established types: species, psychological profiles, or the massive processing of internalized data (as in human experience and the incorporation and processing of massive data sets in Large Language Models (LLMs), the current vogue in AI.
Such local centers of ordered change — identities, one might call them — can be produced by natural selection, advanced natural cognition or the simulated cognition of the emerging deeper AI.
Blinded by Perspective
Most perspectives assume that the truth supersedes all mere perspectives.
They further assume that their inherent perspective is no mere perspective but the truth entire.
And, if they even bother to consider what their “truth” looks like to every other perspective — namely, just another mere perspective different from their own truth — they find ways to discredit all other claims, exhibiting healthy doses of confirmation bias as they do so.
They do this with little or no justification. And they all, or nearly all, do it.
How can one ever escape the trap of perspective?
The Outsider Perspective
The most readily occurring way is to stumble into the outsider perspective.
This can occur in ways that are idiosyncratic, like the daimon of which Socrates speaks in the Republic ( Book VI, 496a-e) or of the socially withdrawn or aspirational types depicted in James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Thomas Mann’s Tonio Kroger or James Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain.
Or it can arise from the outsider status of ethnic or other minorities, as in the pre-WWII writings of the Jewish-born Kafka or the wartime resistance activities of the White Rose network, whose members’ religious affiliations were overwhelmingly with minorities in predominantly Protestant Germany.
Yet outsider perspectives can become just as insular and blinding as mainstream ones.
Two Paths to Escape
Beyond the outsider perspective, a largely involuntary response to exclusion and discrimination, I know of two other ways to escape the limitations of perspective, orthodoxy and dogma.
First, disillusionment with ideological fervor born of successive conversions. Like the outsider perspective, this too is an accident of history. But, for disillusionment to occur, one must at least have some kind of built-in bullshit-detector that lots of people lack, as exposed by today’s social media and their unforeseen but destabilizing consequences.
Soapbox Interlude
And to think, technophiles initially foresaw a new era of spreading enlightenment enabled by easy access to all of mankind’s knowledge. They forgot to consider that lies spread faster than truths in the rumor mill, and that the viral characteristics of mass communication — partly just the age-old social accelerant called gossip, partly the techno-profit engine of algorithmssensitive to the viral potential of thoughtlessly virulent posts — magnifythe distorting effects of the age-old rumor mill, effectively putting it on steroids.
The truth of the Internet is this:
Those who use it intelligently, as humanity’s most accessible research tool, will grow and prosper,
while those who use it as an amplifier for biases and prejudices and as a platform for misinformed ignorance and spite, frothing at the mouth and flaming in the cloud — will first, damage society as a whole, and then condemn themselves to ever-increasing irrelevance.
For their refusal to adapt makes them less and less fit for the knowledge economy just now revealing its real potential.
Irrelevant, but dangerous.They are a large and powerful near-majority, able to slow down needed change, and — in their recurring short-sighted isolationism — either run the ship of state aground or make it much more brutal and costly to salvage the geopolitical mess they are on the verge of leaving to us… and to their children.
This is not the time to sit on the fence and count up short-term gains or costs.
If you have a vote, use it now, and use it wisely, with your eyes on the long-term consequences.Run-of-the-mill politicos, old fogeys, even, come and go, but it takes a divisive demagogue to ruin a republic.
And, now, off my soapbox and back to my topic.
Dialogue and Dialectic: Multiple Perspectives in Dramatic Form
The second, more general and more procedural escape from the limitations of perspective is the discovery of the multi-perspectival processes of dialogue or dialectic.
The dialogue form can be a facade, of course.True dialogue must be dialectical in both form and substance.There are no shortcuts, no royal road, to real dialectical examination of the interplay of thesis and antithesis, of hypotheses and alternatives.
It’s hard work, and the pitfalls are legion. There may be no perfectly perspective-free perspective. We are, after all, limited finite and mortal beings, not gods.
Yet dialogue and dialectic both preserve opposed perspectives as they present and examine controversies.
Each begins by acknowledging that persuasion — and any chance of the emergence of consensual truth — must address all perspectives willing to submit to open debate and rational scrutiny.
It is similar to the consensus — the agreement to disagree, but to find common ground for forward movement, nonetheless — that well-constructed republics require in order to act in unison, united behind policies to which all have consented, at least procedurally.
Policies, in a balanced and functional republic, can split the difference between distinct interests, by finding a middle position, by balancing trade-offs between disparate interests, by sharing the spoils or by uniting against the threat of a common enemy.
Dialectical thinking, by contrast, must preserve incompatible perspectives within its discourse, in something like the alternative branches that arrive at different outcomes within a flow-chart.
Dialectical thinking must retain incompatibles and unresolved issues, incorporating them within its all-encompassing flow-chart of possible lines of thought.
This will include both the defensible lines of thought and the dead ends, because knowledge crucially includes knowledge learned from prior mistakes.
It will also include junctions which alternative lines of plausible argument leave undecided.
Aristotle called such junction points aporeia (undecidables), such as the one in the Nicomachean Ethics, where he considers the different senses in which we can be said to have choice and not to have it. His point there is twofold: 1) neither opposed answer by itself fully captures the matter, and 2) whichever way we answer the question changes the ethical dilemmas of a thing not at all, so it doesn’t matter for practical purposes.
Kant’s most noteworthy preservation of incompatible perspectives are the four antinomies (literally, anti-laws, by which he means paired and offsetting proofs using reductio ad absurdum (i.e., assuming the contrary thesis and exposing it as self-contradictory).
The 3rd of Kant’s antinomies is the very same aporeia of Aristotle’s mentioned above. (The other three are: 1st) that time and space are bounded/unbounded, 2nd) that matter is/isn’t reducible to simplest parts, and 4th) that there does/does not exist an absolutely necessary being (i.e., God).
Self-Image & Social Standing
If the survival-machine in man is dangerously limited in its perspective, so is the social ape in him.
We are social animals, our survival dependent upon the success of our troop — competing with other troops and other species for scarce resources — and upon our standing within our troop.
The inner reflection of social standing is self-image.
Self-image is a double challenge, to accurately appraise our world and our standing within that world. We can be wrong on either account.
Social standing and self-image matter to all social animals –they set the pecking order, among other things, and together they determine our ability to access resources,to gain allies and to pass on our culture, history and genes to succeeding generations.
But for beings able to think abstractly, to ponder what is not currently present to the senses and to imagine altered futures, making plans to bring them about, self-image assumes an even more commanding role than social standing. Outsiders, though generally at a disadvantage, sometimes upset the apple cart, becoming the new masters of new states or industries or cultural fashions.
New allegiances and alliances build upon blood ties and trials of brute strength to realign, in great part, around shared beliefs about the nature of the world we live in, and to attempts to capture that nature in systematic observation and analysis of the world, and of how best to conduct ourselves in it.
Put differently, culture is a shared communal self-image built upon learned competencies and knowledge.
Between them, society-wide culture and personal self-image add new levels of organization — anthropological, historical, sociological and psychological — variable structures atop the invariable structures of physics and chemistry, where universal laws control identical units, both simple and complex, as well as the halfway house of biology, where local environments and distinctive species lineages matter.
“Different strokes for different folks” is my half-jesting summary of human cultures and the social sciences that probe them, where perspective is ineradicable.
Biology, the middle way, is deterministic in the mechanisms of genetics, while natural selection can never be reduced further than the opposed perspectives of predator and prey — or, more generally, of competition for scarce resources.
And resources are perpetually scarce among all organisms in need of the same resources, because biological organisms reproduce and colonize to their limits, a continuation of the self-replication that sets in motion the chain-reaction of biology.
Conclusion
I conclude then that perspective is endemic to the big picture biological aspect of natural selection, and far more so to the big and kaleidoscopic picture of competing cultures, and of individuals within cultures competing for that culture’s resources and social standing.
That being the case, my position is this: truth must incorporate all perspectives defensible in open dialogue and able to withstand critical scrutiny.
Bar this, and thought can never be more than discord (the world as seen by postmodernists and by those who disparage the core desiderata of the Enlightenment).
Bar this, and communication and conciliation can never be more than a temporary armistice in the rhetorical war of words, each successive provisional consensus simply setting the terms for the next outbreak of war.
Bar this, and action can never be more than war (or the maneuverings of future belligerents in preparation for war during unstable armistices).
Bar this, and the future of humanity holds nothing but more of the same, as reflected in history and captured in realism.
There must be common ground, however multi-faceted and multi-perspectival, if the survival-machine and social ape homo sapiens is to avoid self-extinction, one prong of the fork in mankind’s destiny foreseen by Kant in Perpetual Peace.
But he foresaw another prong as well.
Our future is a choice that we will, collectively, make or — by failing to make a deliberate choice — make by default as we slide by degrees to our doom.
We will then be like the fabled frog who, never noticing the gradual rise in temperature of the stewpot in which it sits, does nothing until it is boiled alive.
Through a glass darkly, and through a keyhole narrowly.
Natural selection produces survival-machines, continually refining and adapting them amid changing circumstances.
Social animals, as part of their survival behavior, form a social environment, a group whose members recognize one another, cooperating for their joint survival, while competing as individuals, to degrees varying from negligible in social insects to considerable in hierarchical pack mammals.
This social environment makes for new environmental pressures shaping behavior and physiology, a new level of social organization riding atop the natural environment.
This is the beginning of culture.
Culture evolves atop and alongside of the environmental pressures of nature, a more heavily behavioral element supplementing the physiological and any hard-wired behavioral elements.
And, just as natural selection works both within and between species, so cultural selection works both within and between cultures.
Cultural selection produces evolved traits far faster than natural selection can precisely because such traits are more fluid and less anchored to physiological structures.
To the extent that cultural changes are engineered, by a founder, they must entrench within a single lifetime (Machiavelli’s key point about the new prince). Physiological changes face no such stricture.
The equivalent in culture to physiological changes in the body are underlying economic and demographic changes, that is, undirected changes forces by the environment. Like physiological changes, they build up incrementally, over time and without oversight (i.e., without intelligent design on the part of the new prince).
If the evolutionary units of physiological design and replication are genes, the evolutionary units of behavioral design can be thought of as memes.
Likewise, if the evolutionary units of physiological architecture (i.e., building blocks) are cells, the evolutionary units of behavioral architecture can be thought of as customs.
For social animals, the pressures of natural selection shift, in part, to the social composite, the pack or society.
To the extent that member survival depends upon pack survival, social selection replaces natural selection as the determinant of behavior,
Social animals, viewed as individual organisms within an encompassing society upon which their survival depends, shift some of their behavior from survival-seeking behavior oriented to the self to advantage-seeking behavior oriented to the society.
In pursuit of social advantages — status in the pack, access to pack-held resources (food, territory, surpluses), and access to reproductive resources (mates) — social animals develop behaviors that appear self-denying or even self-sacrificing.
Together in search of riches untold…
Social Advantage, Knowledge & Truth
The seven warring states… of ancient China… and of post-Napoleonic Europe
Human beings, being social animals, have a limited appetite for truth.
“Truth” Nietzsche said, “has no survival-value”.
Nor does truth always confer social advantage.
More often than not, it marks one out for ostracism, harassment, imprisonment or death.
Autocratic regimes, an especially defective kind of regime, propagate lies as a survival-mechanism, as do blowhards, grifters and demagogues, three especially defective kinds of individuals.
Social advantage is conferred by the despot and their crony networks in autocratic regimes, and by the ruling class in regimes where a nationality, race, sect or party dominates, even when democratic features are present alongside oppression of some disfavored groups. Oppression can be complete, as in slavery or subjection, or partial. Oppression can be formally revoked and renounced, and yet have lingering traces.
To eliminate all traces of former oppression and accumulated advantage and entitlement would require the entire removal of the social ape from our nature, leaving only the rational being.
Our approach to that is a long and winding road and, as Kant suggests, likely an aspirational goal only asymptotically approximated.
Occasional reversions to oppressive practices are guaranteed whenever political advantage is to be gained by indulging in them, and that occurs whenever dominant groups with a sense of entitlement feel threatened in their customary ways of life by a comparative upsurge in the power and prospects of formerly downtrodden groups.
This is the Thucydides trap (Google it!) operating among social groups.
The Importance of Being Earnest Dog-Whistlers
The best I can say of our current bout of culture wars — not simply American, they are widespread among affluent nations of long standing — is that they are more about assimilation of dogma than about traditional divides of genealogy or gender. (Progress, of a sort.)
In other words, if you share their beliefs you are welcome, no matter what you look like. Except at the knuckle-dragging fringes.
But no one refuses votes, no matter where they come from. Votes are votes like money is money. Provenance overlooked.
Hence the value of dog-whistling: courting dirty votes with plausible deniability.
Don’t say what you mean clearly. Don’t say anything you can be tied to. Let each market segment hear what they want to hear.
We’re all minutemen at heart but we’re also slackers and love to slip in those little distractions that don’t put us behind schedule or bump the last few items off of our daily to-do list.
(Is that, you ask, minute, as in a period of time, or minute, as in teeny-tiny? Or, to the phonetically-minded, are those vowels short or long?)
You Can Always Smell the Majority You Crave
The commonest mistake in political perception is to project the mindset of one’s own circle onto the population at large.
That’s why every near-majority thinks it’s the majority. The left-wing Counterculture thought so in the ’60’s and ’70’s, the right-wing Tea-Party-turned-Trump-Party thinks so now. Many conservative Republicans are receptive to claims that Trump won in 2020 because everyone they know voted for him.
Of course, movement strategists (not so much the icons and spokespeople) know that’s not the case, as they busily try to shift the contest onto a favorably tilted playing field. For the Counterculture that was Academia, Hollywood and major media; for the Tea Party, it’s the electoral college, the Senate and less populous states.
Liberals often gripe that it’s also big Republican donors. That may be true, but it’s more complicated than that makes it sound. The majority of entrenched big money flowed from the extraction economy and smokestack industries. Insurgent big money is coming from the knowledge economy, most obviously Silicon Valley.
Three things have kept this balance in favor of the Republicans: 1) legacy wealth accumulated from fading industrial sectors, 2) the greater desperation felt by those whose sources of wealth are drying up, and 3) growth industry profits are overwhelmingly plowed back into those very industries (that’s where there’s the best return on investment and it’s also necessary to achieve the winner-take-all dominance that typifies today’s tech titans). But the non-growth steady-state corporation, if not now being disrupted, is a cash cow, generating cash that’s not sucked back into the business, thus available for donation to causes.
But as the economic transformation continues and accelerates, that’s all going to change!
What is human life but a constant and futile yet ennobling attempt to escape the limits of being human? That is the core of every real religion, every spiritual movement, every vocation, every lifelong quest.
The human being is the animal that looks at itself through words, words that both magnify and veil. It is the animal that reworks its animal nature, as far as it can or wants to, to match an image of itself propagated as culture.
Anyone who thinks that America First is a new thing knows nothing of politics or history. No hegemonic power has ever not put itself first.
But there’s a difference between the geopolitical equivalents of local worthies and mafia capos. The local worthy provides some kind of quid pro quo, while taking the chieftain’s cut; the mafia capo gets what he thinks his due or people die — quickly, without questions or due process. And no one saw anything. (“Yeah, Vlad, I’m talkin’ ’bout you.”)
Tough guy by dayTough guy by night
The new mob is literate but uncritical. They roam the Net, a high-tech expressway for con-men and demagogues, whose numbers are increasing across the globe.
In the Age of Twitter, 281 characters is a long-term commitment, a one-night stand is an enduring relationship, and a liar’s promise decides elections.
Twitter Feed is all too often Twit Fodder. Who’s fattening you up for the kill?
Brilliant, but got it wrong!
Karl Marx badly oversimplified class analysis.
In accordance with the Utopian assumptions of his youth (see his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844), he defined classes solely in terms of abstract economic classes (feudal, bourgeois, proletarian, lumpen-proletarian), rather than as the product of cross-cutting economic and cultural categories.
The sign that these more kaleidoscopic demographics are the true political manifestations of class interests is that all contemporary political analysis — both by political consultants and by academics — uses more fine-grained designations, drawing on categories like:
sectarian: Evangelical, Mainstream Protestant, Catholic, various minority religions and the unchurched.
residential: rural, urban, suburban, exurban
racial: white, black, Hispanic, Asian, etc.
national origin: as when distinguishing the Hispanic vote into Mexican, Cuban, Venezuelan, Colombian, etc.
gender & sexual orientation: male. female, LGBTQ
levels of income and education, age, and other relevant variables.
And analysis is focused increasingly on composite demographic groupings, like white Evangelical Protestants, women in the labor force, etc.
It figures that campaign consultants/pollsters, the modern for-hire version of feudal courtiers, would gravitate toward the real sources of political power in a democracy — and a campaign consultant’s main job is to design and deliver demographically-packaged pitches (Lepore, Jill, These Truths, pp. 448-50, 454-59, 532-34, 542-48, 565-66, 633-36). Campaign consultants have been doing for decades in politics what social media have just been learning to do in advertising.
If you want to find a fugitive, follow a bloodhound. If you want to find truffles, follow a pig. If you want to find power, follow campaign consultants.
The servants of power smell power instinctively; it’s their primary means of surviving and prospering.
“How much spin does it take to win?
Primary Colors, starring John Travolta and Emma Thompson, is an incisive and thoroughly well-done movie ( a comedy-drama) depicting the reality of campaign politics. Cutting too close to the bone, it never got the recognition it deserved.
Released in 1998, it is based on Joe Klein’s thinly disguised tell-all of his time as a journalist traveling with the 1992 Bill Clinton primary campaign. Directed by Mike Nichols and scripted by Elaine May, a famous improv comedy duo, it also features Billy Bob Thornton, Kathy Bates, Adrian Lester, Maura Tierney and Larry Hagman, with cameos by Larry King, Charlie Rose, Geraldo Rivera and Bill Maher.
I aired this movie every year for 16 years’ worth of American Government classes, so it’s my know-the-lines-by-heart equivalent of The Rocky Horror Picture Show. I still rattle off lines from the movie in everyday life, like “Come back, Shane… run for president” or “His balls are big, but they’re made of glass.”
You can view it for $3.99 from a variety of sources, including YouTube, iTunes, Apple TV, Google Play Movies and Amazon Prime.
The Russians sent a monkey into space, their first time out. Elon Musk sent a Tesla sports car. I’m sending a 7 word summary in a nutshell of the paradigm of evolutionary thinking :
When All Is Said and Dunn 