Frank's Musings

The new film, ‘Don’t Look Up,” posits unconscionable ambivalence towards the scientifically substantiated inevitable destruction of planet Earth by an impending disaster.  Instead of Climate Change, it imagines the public’s reaction to an incoming killer comet. 

One of the thought problems that it sparks is what should a thinking person do when faced with that prospect.  Accept it as fate, because we’re all going to die anyway?  Abandon reasonable expectation and still attempt to rescue mankind through desertion of the planet?  Make a stab at promoting or joining a movement to engineer and finance a desperate attempt to develop an effective countermeasure?  

Of course, the real lament is the disappointing helplessness of human nature.  How long will it take for evolution to advance our collective imagination and intelligence to the level needed for self-preservation?

Is it really likely that CDC guidelines for unvaccinated people will be followed? Nearly all of them are ideologically opposed to accepting the bona fides of any outside authority.

The CDC apparently is caving in to political pressure by shortening the recommended isolation time for those infected with COVID who have symptoms. The only sensible solution to the pandemic is mandates.

When Trump surprisingly defeated Clinton in 2017, I first thought it wouldn’t matter much because “the US has a government of institutions.”  However, those institutions turned out to be vulnerable to corruption, owing to the decay of vigilant commitment to democratic values, the same decay that allowed Trump to be elected in the first place.  The ambivalence towards the makeup of the leadership of the national government is a result of the public’s growing abdication of its responsibility for how the country is run.  It’s like a return to the days when everyone accepted monarchic rule as natural.

When citizens of a democracy throw up their hands in frustration with their lack of control over government actions, they commonly believe in conspiracy theories to explain political and economic events.  They don’t give credit to their own collective power that elections and markets exist to mediate.

The rise of conspiracy theorists in the Congressional Republican Caucus is due to the willingness of ordinary Americans to elect them.  Contrary to Trump’s supporters I’d almost be willing to assert that it is extreme right-wing election victories that are fraudulent.  Under the pretense that their policies would reaffirm the people’s control of government policies, they really intend to pursue their personal advancement agendas.

Democratic elections aren’t popularity polls like Nielsen ratings.  They afford the public in the U.S. representative system the only official way to direct government policy.  (This was the only available tool when the Constitution was written.  The Internet offers a possible future way to widen the public’s role in government.) 

Confusing elections with popularity polls leads to the empowerment of demagogues.  Constant vigilance is needed to protect a representative democracy.  Features of its written Constitution can always be distorted by a determined seeker of political power. 

America is now experiencing the result of its creation of a split society that includes a wealthy elite who can afford an education instilling critical thinking and an enviable lifestyle at the top of society and a lower class made up of those who are forced by circumstance to serve only their animal needs (cf. The 9.9 Percent by Matthew Stewart.).  A confirmed portion of those in the bottom layer of society resents what they believe to be the arbitrary division in individual fortunes.

In some ways modern advances and features of communications technology, particularly privately owned cable news channels, the Internet and social media, have made this division more apparent and raised its immediate impact on personal values.  In the U.S. the Republicans have taken advantage of this to build a power base of anti-intellectual voters.  Their leaders seem to have opted to relinquish the burden of making sense to thoughtful conservatives as they seek to maintain a hold on a more reliable constituency driven by the pursuit of material advantages, including passive entertainment, leisure travel, and physical comfort.

One of the possible costs of this trend is the ultimate destruction of liberal democracies established by the Lockian founders of the U.S. republic and other like-minded political philosophers around the world.  A delicate balance exists between individual benefit and community welfare. (The Framers of the U.S. Constitution made a lasting error in allowing racial corruption to deform individual rights.) Recent history shows the vulnerability of democratic government to the seduction of its population by creature comforts.  In fact, one of those comforts is relief from the burden of governing oneself and one’s society.  It is easier to leave that to a supposedly beneficent autocrat. 

Centuries ago, education made it clear that government is not like the weather.  Something can be done about it.  Technology has spread that knowledge widely; on the other hand, it has also strengthened the ability of tyrants and narcissists to exploit the public’s natural preference to be ambivalent.  Moreover, governments can alter society’s priorities, and specifically whether it frames its goals in terms of the common good or individual personal advantage.  Providing incentives for individuals to achieve excellence can only promote democratic societal welfare when it encourages systemic improvement that distributes its fruits to everyone.

Alas, human thinking is not as mechanistic as an economic model.  A theoretical case can be, and has been, made that a capitalist economy eventually spreads wealth to the benefit of all participants in the market.  Unfortunately, human patience is not broad or long enough for all but the top stratus of society to anticipate or wait for that result.  (This was the shortcoming of “Reaganomics.”)   A successful market economy like the United States creates enormous wealth; however, that economy will eventually fall into civil disorder or martial law if its benefits are not equitably shared by the entire populace.  In that case, it will no longer be a true democracy. 

The Biden Administration is faced with an ultimate turning point in America’s history--now that the U.S. has the resources to reward individual excellence while assuring high common living standards.  Setting the nominal price of that program ought to be relegated to a bookkeeping task rather than be regarded as a threat to a budgetary wall.

People are afraid not to humor Donald J. Trump.  Why? Because they are gullibly afraid of his power to retaliate in the press and through legal nuisance actions. 

Or is the reason more fundamental?  It’s mystifying how much political power is attributed by the     -press to Trump.  A pretty solid 40% of the voting U.S. public expresses its uncritical support for the antiestablishmentarian views vaunted by this narcissist national figure.  He basks in a delusion of leadership.  His good luck to have inherited vast wealth from a family real estate fortune has hoodwinked greedy bankers and investors into backing a series of marginal and failed schemes.  He fell into the role of an entrepreneurial wizard that allowed him to finance outlandish hotels, casinos, other real estate projects and an enviable lifestyle.  More ominously, he became a symbol for a disenchanted segment of Western society that resents its depressed living conditions compared to those enjoyed by the top stratus of wealthy people.   

There are many reasons for the emergence of a would-be autocrats like Donald J. Trump.  Some are global in scope, explaining the current rise of authoritarian leaders in many proto democratic countries—Orban, Duterte, Bolsonaro, Modi to name a few.  One unifying cause of the vulnerability of advanced societies to exploitation by determined domineers is the worldwide technological revolution.  Populations have been seduced into dependence on convenient sources of information, including unmonitored social media services, as opposed to regulated and conscientiously edited publications and broadcast networks (if not countered by oppressive government-owned news outlets) for the formation of their opinions.  The owners of these channels of communication are motivated by the search for profit or by the need for political acquiescence, not by a desire for critical thought. 

Ultimately, the public allows itself to be so exploited because it is easier to abdicate responsibility for educating themselves to those who are otherwise motivated to do so than to devote the necessary energy to performing that task themselves.  In the end the culture of democracy in the West will be destroyed unless people judge the value of its preservation higher than the value of leisure and self-gratification.   

There was a time when higher values, like faith or justice, dominated the personal goals of comfort and overcoming peer pressure.  Short-term hubris must have been the evil against which religions were originally created.  The prophets who created them possibly just gave up on arguing for a more rational long-term view of the future of the human race.  We have to learn this lesson again every time we make our world more easily exploitable by polemicists like Trump. 

Parents who abdicate their responsibility to limit the dangerous urges of their children are guilty of grossly neglecting the consequences of their mutual sexual gratification. Parenting means much more than bringing infants into existence. It requires preparing them for proper membership in society. That cannot be left solely to society’s institutions.