Dumb and Dumber - by Richard Sale

I am writing in praise of Pat Lang’s recent post and his keen observations into politics.

We must remember that the majority of the American public elected Trump President.  That is where the real blame lies. Trump says he doesn’t like poor people, but says he loves uneducated people.  Why? Because uneducated people are basically uninstructed mobs. They are suggestible. They are like sponges – their destiny is to soak things up. They can’t think except in a group.  the French poet Baudelaire hated the Belgians because he said “They were born to think in unison.” On CBS Sunday Morning this week, one of my wife’s favorite shows, (not mind,) Ted Koppel did a bit that made clear that not only we do we know same things in common; we get that knowledge the same way at basically the same time. Such a thing is drastically retarding to the mind’s development.

In other words, we are in the grip of hideous uniformity. This means that what we claim to know is a very superficial brand of knowledge. It doesn’t help either that we are also a nation drowning in data.  If you want to hear a weather report, it goes on for five minutes, many of the facts reheated over and over again to the point of stupefaction. What should be an alert or a heads up becomes an instance of tedious self display in order to be favorably noticed. Bah, humbug.

People are more and more like schools of minnows who swim in the same direction, then suddenly swim in other direction. They don’t break ranks, there are no minnows that desert the pack and strike out for themselves.  To me that defines politics.  Most people do not grasp that politics exists only because of the indifference of the majority. I won’t belong to a political party for tat reason. Whoever embraces a political party is giving up their intellectual; sovereignty and independence. A political party is a school of followers, all swimming n one direction for the sake of unity. The people I mostly talk to are usually liberals, liberals by habit, inclination, and conceit. Liberals assumed their ideas are superior to any other ideas.  (I am not a conservative.) They don’t vote on the basic of evidence. They don’t vote for merit. They vote in order to admire their views because those are the most enlightened views, and their views make them extremely self-righteous about what they believe, as if no other beliefs could possibly be as compassionate, foresighted or charitable as their own.

My own views are simple - I try to vote for merit. I try to vote for honesty, for people of heart and vision. I am suspicious of politicians because most are devoured by a lust for power.  That lust comprises them from the beginning. The lust for power has always destroyed the society it lives and rules in, but that is ignored. I have ideals, but I don’t take them for granted; I remain skeptical of them. I try to refine and improve and perfect them all the time.  Recently, I had a discussion with two young women who voted for Hillary, and we still angered over her loss, and when I said I didn’t vote for Trump or Hillary, one was affronted.  She said, Well one of them was going to run the country, so you have to vote for one of them. I told them I didn’t vote for either of them because I did not want that on my conscience. A very bright young man who wrote in Bernie Sanders on the ballot felt the same way. I asked the young women if they had studied the email scandal.  They hadn’t.  I said I had a file of one hundred pages showing what a conniving, heartless skunk Hillary was and would be happy to forward the file to them. I doubt they will read it. They have already been convinced.

But was my view correct? I thought it was or I wouldn’t have aired it. In any case, I dislike collectivities.

To me, the chief evil in today’s political scene is the decline of the critical spirit.  What is that? It means a capacity for analyzing things in order to accurately determine their value.  What does this require? You must be observant. You must be unhurried. You must be studious. The video image dominates our culture to our detriment. These images flash before us in less than a second.  We have no time to examine their meaning, their accuracy or their worth because the rapidity of sequence denies us this.

What I see today is a clouding of mental alertness, a growing insensitivity of personalities because of our cultural decline. We put up with all sorts of nauseous smells, deafening noises, abrupt accidents and crashes and atrocities. Modern man is becoming increasingly insensitive, ever more addicted to constant excitement and novelty, requiring harsh stimulants, disdaining any sort of repose of the mind in order to develop it.

Our thought has its basis in perceptions. We see or hear something that strikes our mind, and it makes us curious. What was it about the sight or sound that made us want to know more about it? So we begin to investigate. We view similar perceptions.  After a while we develop a sense of hierarchy, putting the most worthwhile at the top of the list.  It takes critical capacity to do this.  We have to observe, compare, compare again, gather more examples, and finally begin to hammer out an order of value. The brain is key to this, (I almost said, "to this process," a phrase widely overused.) The brain is always busy. It takes nothing for granted.  It questions, it cross-examines. We come to our own conclusions by thinking things out.  Thinking is a precarious activity. Thinking doesn't deliver certainties or ready made conclusions.  Thinking simply requires we take more thought before we can rest on our opinions. We are never sure we are right in what we think until we have gathered more incidents, experiences and examples, and even then, the mind is left in suspense.  What if a new experience upsets your carefully constructed hierarchy?

But the chief virtue of thought is that acts to deepen us, to widen us, make us more open to the unexpected, the unfamiliar and the novel, less able to reject things that are odd or strange. Thought keeps open the door to learning. Conceit and ignorance seal it shut.

But who today thinks of such things?

Comments

[Imagine]

An answer to monolithic news is to have distributed local news--at least one channel for each country. Harder to subvert that way, and countries can battle it out on the airwaves, instead of in the streets.

[Degringolade]

Mr. Sale: An excellent piece.

As always, fiction sometimes states the issue better than many.

“We have no idea, now, of who or what the inhabitants of our future might be. In that sense, we have no future. Not in the sense that our grandparents had a future, or thought they did. Fully imagined cultural futures were the luxury of another day, one in which 'now' was of some greater duration. For us, of course, things can change so abruptly, so violently, so profoundly, that futures like our grandparents' have insufficient 'now' to stand on. We have no future because our present is too volatile. ... We have only risk management. The spinning of the given moment's scenarios. Pattern recognition”
― William Gibson, Pattern Recognition

[Donald]

This was good. And at last, a topic I can comment on--for the most part I recognize that I don't have that much to add to the conversations here, dealing as they do with issues where you need to know something about military affairs or intelligence agencies and how they work. But knee-jerk political allegiances--these days anyone who pays attention can see this firsthand

I'm on the left and what I have noticed ever since the 2000 Nader campaign is that the Democrats and their vehement online supporters take it as a matter of faith that all decent people have an absolute moral obligation to vote for the Democrat--this is the view your female acquaintance was pushing. No longer are politicians obligated to earn our votes. The duty here is almost entirely on the ordinary person. The Democrat who wants your vote is only obligated to be the lesser evil. I don't think I am exaggerating.

And it's worse than that. In the 2000 campaign some people on the left (I am only speaking about the Left here--people on the Right can describe their own problems) said that what Nader should have done was to run in the primaries and make his criticisms of lobbyists and corruption and our foreign policy within the Democratic Party and pull it to the left from the inside and then support whoever the nominee was. So along comes Sanders in 2016 who follows that advice to the letter. And he is still denounced. The truth is, they don't just want the votes. They want people to line up and all say the same things in praise of the candidate.

People who are obsessive about supporting mainstream Democrats and become very angry if the Clintons are criticized accuse others of having a cult of personality. And they are much more upset by someone not voting for the Democrats than they are by, for example, the support the US has given to the Saudis as they bomb Yemen. Now that Trump is in charge there is a shift towards that becoming a partisan issue. You need to have a Republican in the White House these days in order for most liberals to support an antiwar movement. Obama supported the Saudi bombing for nearly two years and very few liberals cared. What upset them much more was Susan Sarandon saying she wouldn't vote for Clinton.

Personally, I do find the logic of lesser evil voting convincing, so I voted for Clinton, but if someone disagrees I can respect that and in fact acknowledge that there is an argument against it. But with most online Democrats, that is the worst heresy imaginable. You will be labeled a moral purist and held responsible for every bad thing that the Republican does, even the things that the Democrat would have done if he or she had won. Right now I see some Democrats criticizing Trump for inching towards war with Syria, as though this wasn't what Clinton would have done.

[EEngineer]

The brain is indeed always busy, but an overloaded brain cannot THINK. When someone becomes over stimulated they loose the ability to reflect on any of it.

Adam Curtis did a 4 hour mini-series called Century of the Self that goes into how we've collectively allowed our subconscious desires to overwhelm us. It's out there on YouTube and torrents for those interested.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Century_of_the_Self

[dilbert dogbert]

"We must remember that the majority of the American public elected Trump President."

Didn't the Electoral College elect Trump?
I have read that about 90,000 votes elected Trump vs the almost 4 million for Clinton.

[David O White]

Correct. He lost the popular vote. Also,the total number of votes accorded to all Democratic members of congress also greatly exceeds that of the Republicans. I know that's how the "system" works but there is something rotten in the state of denmark.

[TonyL]

Richard,

Thank you. Beautilully written essay. I wish more people would think like this:

"I try to vote for merit. I try to vote for honesty, for people of heart and vision. I am suspicious of politicians because most are devoured by a lust for power."

Tony

[David E. Solomon]

Richard,

This is an excellent article (as was Colonel Lang's). I see the real problem as the result of the total degradation of our educational system - (from the ground up).

Of course, we are all about the same age. That is to say, "old".

Possibly the old always see the current environment as awful. Nevertheless, I am glad I will not be around in the long run.

That said, I hope not to have to live through another war with anyone.

Thanks for you effort.

Regards,

David

[turcopolier]

richardstevenshack

And you learned that up in Canada. pl

[Cee]

Mr.Sale,

Another fine piece.

Donald,

I was a Perot campaign chair, a Nader voter who went on to vote for Trump Because I'm sick to death of both parties. Pat Buchanan is right to say they are two wings on the same bird of prey.

EE,

What you said brought to mind a quote from They Thought They Were Free by Milton Mayer.

And all the crises and reforms (real reforms, too) so occupied the people that they did not see the slow motion underneath, of the whole process of government growing remoter and remoter.

[Timothy Hagios]

There's the morality of ethical conduct, and there's the morality of belonging to the proper identity. The former is difficult because it requires you to do something notable, while the latter is much easier, since all you have to do is be something (meaningful action is voluntary). I believe that the growing political tribalization and groupthink is skewing the public's perception of what is acceptable from its political leadership. When two ostensibly different teams each think that anything is permissible so long as their side does it, we wind up the situation where power is shared between the kind of people who get elected when merit and ethics have become minor concerns in comparison to identity.

Notably, I received at least 20 flyers in the mail prior to election day from the Clinton campaign, which showed a picture of Jill Stein with a line drawn through her and something to the effect of, "A vote for Jill Stein is a vote for Donald Trump." It was a big flyer and had plenty of room to list reasons why I should vote for Hillary, yet it did not devote even a single line to why I should vote for her. The message was clear: if you have have a liberal identity, you don't need to think about anything else.

[Huckleberry]

You say you want critical spirit, but I don't think you do. Not really.

If you did, you'd heck out the Alt Right.

You might think you know what it's about - but you don't.

For better or worse, whites have begun to wage identity politics. No amount of constitution-worship is going to put that genie back in the bottle.

Get on board or get out of the way.

[Cortes]

Thanks for the stimulating essay.

My old dad used to tell us that there's a big difference between having no money and being poor. On reflection and in the light of experience I'd rather acknowledge that he was right.

[Jack]

A very nice post Richard.

I've got a question for you. In the long arc of history do you think we've seen other epochs similar to our contemporary behavior patterns?

There's no doubt that the current frequency, even frenzy of information update leaves a frantic response. Everything is Breaking News. Twitter updates throughout the day. There isn't much time for deliberation and consideration, let alone reflection and contemplation. Is it possible, that all that we've changed is our environment, however we're the same human in our behavior. Has human behavior changed significantly in five millenia?

[turcopolier]

Huckleberry

You don't get it. If "white people" as you call people of the majority culture take up identity politics, the only thing that will protect ohers is the constitution. Without that they would be kicked back to the curb where they were before the present constitutional protections developed. pl

[Lars]

Actually, things are just fine in the state of Denmark. According to surveys, the happiest people on the planet live there. Of course, the most astonishing thing about the country is that they are providing players to the NHL.

What is rotten is the US election system that was created to support slavery and has now been thoroughly corrupted by large amounts of money.

[turcopolier]

lars

You have never grasped or accepted the concept of state sovereignty. The electoral college was created to protect states like Rhode Island and New Hampshire. The states created the Union. Remember? You and Fareed Zakariyah like the US but wish it were another country. pl

[Bill H]

Thank you, Colonel. Another voice heard from who understands the relationship between Congressional legislation, and the presidential election. A consensus of the decisions by the sovereign states.

[kxd]

Huckleberry,

whites have begun to wage identity politics? that's a nice hallucination you got going on there.

What whites have begun to do is get sick and tired of being told about their so called privilege and being made to feel guilty for "the sins of their father" because of course white people were the only group of humans in the history of our species to be oppressors right?(irony alert)

Nah, the ones who started this identity politics BS were the college marxists back in the 60s who realised they couldn't justify their support for the massacres happening in the Soviet gulags and the Chinese countryside and so switched the narrative from 'bourgeoisie and prols' to 'oppressors and oppressed'.

The so called 'Alt Right' is a direct response to that identity political BS.

I got an idea, how about minority groups stop victimizing themselves, and stop blaming 'whitey' for everything. Maybe then your boogeyman of the 'Alt Right' will go away.

[wisedupearly]

An excellent and very timely article. Research suggests that we are killing our intellects by becoming dependent on dramatic visual content and well crafted apps. We are training ourselves to become good consumers of images/videos even as we walk and if the app makers have their way, our personal world will be fully delineated by their interfaces. I would love to halt all smart phones in NYC for one and check how many people would become completely flummoxed. Unable to distinguish East from West. Unable to judge for themselves the best way from A to B. Unwilling to try some place new unless some app gives it 4 stars.

[LeaNder]

thanks, Donald. were I American and had voted for Nader in 2000 I might have voted for Clinton too. But more basically the two basic offers felt like a 'no-way-out' scenario for this foreign observer.

Concerning intelligence. There was a rather good document available on the web by Pat Lang in the larger Jeffrey Sterling context. Strictly I think "intelligence" in the context of the military is as old as the world or wars, and at no point something like the invention of the wheel happened in this context.

https://exposefacts.org/jeffrey-sterling-the-governments-circumstantial-case/

https://exposefacts.org/blog/special-coverage/

[LeaNder]

The brain is indeed always busy, but an overloaded brain cannot THINK.

EE, and that's why you meditate occasionally?

Maybe I should watch it. Been mentioned before. Much of what he seems to look at would fit into the larger box of what a German art historian defined as UN-aesthetic versus aesthetic. On first sight, or superficially. The constant bombardment with a flood of information via, colors, logos, slogans, AND news(?) ads we have to live with.

Maybe a US President slightly reminiscent of our earlier POP stars who said it like-it-is, although in his case in slightly higher frequency, is some type of natural civilization development after all?

And our "collective subconsciousness" has what exact desires? Freud's Eros or his Death Drive? Or are they mysteriously joined at the hips as some assumed over the ages?

[Fred]

dibert,

I take it you think the other 136,000,000+ votes didn't matter.

[Fred]

Lars,

It may be news to you but slavery was ended a century ago. It is the legacy guilt that lives on.

[Fred]

Huck,

"...wage identity politics" .

On that note we should end the legal race based discrimination policies known as "affirmative action" in all its forms.