TDS is not a monolith but a coalition

 

It’s Eastertide and I am moved to look for whatever bridges there might be to the people who suffer from TDS but are not necessarily evil at heart. The compound fracture in the soul of this nation needs to be healed, at least enough that we can begin to work together in sensible ways to repair years of decline in so many institutions and belief systems. This post is an attempt in that direction, a search for some different ways of describing and understanding the rifts that imperil us all.

I’ll begin with a proposition: Susceptibility to irrational hatred of Donald Trump is not primarily a function of political convictions. It’s deeper than that, which is why it’s so hard to understand. The haters are so fond of labels that it’s easy to miss the forest for the trees. Or forests to be more precise. There’s more than one forest of TDS sufferers. This post is not about establishing more labels. It’s about describing several different mentalities that lead inadvertently to the Occam’s Razor answer that Trump is the one and only real problem which must be fixed to restore normalcy, whatever that is. Politics is on the list but only because it ultimately impinges on the others and unifies them in the public discourse. As a topic here, it will be saved for last. What else is on the list? The overpaid. The under-qualified. The silo people. The narrow social stratum dwellers. The paper people. The world savers. There’s overlap here, which is why they’re not labels but psychological factors that affect individual perceptions of reality. People do not fall cleanly into one or the other description. To use a favorite Lady Ockham tool of Kamala Harris, the Venn diagram is a way for individuals to plot their own influences in unique configurations. But first, what  are the psychological factors I’ve given names to?

The Overpaid

This is not simply a list of rich people. It’s not an implicit argument for preventing anyone and everyone from becoming rich. It is a list that’s merely representative of the fact that there are people whose financial success has somehow separated them from reality as most people experience it. This usually occurs in combination with one or more of the other factors described below. There are, indeed, people in the video I suspect of being truly evil, but not everyone shown here belongs in that company. What they do generally share is the circumstance that their visible success has made them famous in ways that give them undue influence in the cultural and political realms. A complication in the case of the Overpaid is that they appear to be compensating for personal insecurities they cannot shake. So they have a habit of overdoing things.

What follows are observations, not proofs of any sort. We have reached the point where there are people who are famous for being famous. They have their own Wiki pages, which summarize their careers in just these terms. I don’t believe Kim Kardashian (the person whose head is cut off in the video) is a political person. Like her friend and sponsor Paris Hilton, she became a celebrity by association, not innate talent and creative motivation. Her ambition has become a matter of topping her own excesses, which have nevertheless spread into the lives and fashion sense of young women her age.:there is now a whole profession of “influencers,” who make a living telling their peers how to be fashionable and attractive in the present moment. This only becomes a problem when such superficial kinds of celebrity are used as a platform on matters the influencers know nothing more about than an adolescent in charge of some high school clique.

There is a similar but larger institutional version of this in the world of sports. Professional athletes in MLB, the NFL, NBA, NHL, PGA, NASCAR, and international sports like soccer and tennis are not overpaid in market terms. The complicating factor (there’s always one of those these days…) is sponsorships that free athletes from the connection between athletic performance and life-changing riches. The WNBA, in obedience to market reality, pays most of its players less than $100K a year. Nike and other deep pocket advertisers makes some of them multi-millionaires however. How we got the woke Kaepernick. He had the lucky streak some MLB pitchers get, effective till opponents had seen him a few times and found his weaknesses. When Kaepernick began to fail, he got political and Nike paid him handsomely for it. He no longer had to play football to cash a huge check. Famous for being famous.

That’s why this grouping is at the top of our list. They represent all the other syndromes we’ll be seeing below to one degree or another, but what unifies them is that they are more visible. They have an impact on the culture because the media pays them to do that in various ways and they believe they are entitled to say stupid things because why else would they have so much money? 

Why are they TDS? Because it’s easy and the mass media love celebrity TDS. 

And, yes, there are some who belong here who are not quite as famous to millions as they are to many well placed thousands. Warren Buffett and George Soros, for example, have the power acquired by surviving to very old age with pots of money that makes supposedly smart people think they must know something. Including them. They don’t. They belong in at least one of the other subsets of TDS called out below.

Which we’ll get to now.

The Under-Qualified

Okay. An extreme example. But instructional.

There are many millions of people who aren’t very talented, smart, or competent at the careers they have chosen or fallen into. We’re not concerned with all of these people. They’re baked into the cake. Why we leave assessments of human value to the economy mostly to the market. Talent is in greater demand than incompetence. The supply of the incompetent is quite large, the supply of talent somewhat smaller. What we’re interested in here is the unqualified who are also ambitious and desperately seeking approval to assuage their own insecurities. 

We can see a lot of these in the ranks of the Overpaid above. There are millionaires and billionaires who have earned what they have. There are also many lesser talents who just got lucky. Actors who had a flashy early success and maybe a good run repeating their one role for a time but who fell on harder times as their looks faded and their limitations as actors sidelined their careers. They’re still rich but disappointed and resentful. TV newsreaders who are also actors, let’s face it, nominated for stardom by their looks and their knack for translating what is whispered into their earpieces in appropriately stentorian or authoritative tones of voice. They know they’re mostly faking it. They’re not Murrow or Brinkley or even Mike Wallace. What they are is a practiced TV persona who’s a frightened chameleon underneath the makeup. They are drawn to TDS like so many others. Not because they necessarily believe it, but because their intellects never function much above the Occam’s Razor shortcut thst goes hand in glove with broadcast news, and they are always quick to take the easiest paths to attention, approval, and comforting self-delusions about their own worth. Archetypal example? The entire cast through time of The View. The hosts have all, always, been under-qualified to pontificate about the topics they pontificate about. It doesn’t matter what they really think beneath the facade. They’re just doing what they do and hoping nobody finds them out.

This same phenomenon exists throughout the nation (and every other nation — America is not an exception this at least). There are ambitious Under-Qualifieds in every profession, every Fortune 500 corporation, every law firm, every elected legislature, every appointed government bureaucracy, every journalistic publication,  every social cause, every educational institution at every level, every branch and officer rank of the military, and every religious institution. Some of them rise to great apparent success, even critically important leadership roles. They’re there and in charge. They just don’t really belong there. And deep down, they know it. Why we have a truism called the Peter Principle.

It’s a “concept in management” that has no numbers or proofs to back it up but doesn’t need them because we all know it’s true of the organizations we’ve experienced personally. The people it describes know it’s true generally and probably suspect at a minimum that people might believe this of them too. How do they cope? Lots of ways. Sometimes they’re loud and overly assertive. Sometimes they’re experts at being “company men,” dutifully repeating the current orthodoxy of their superiors in the hierarchy so that they will never be seen as out of step or subversive in any way. Sometimes they are unobtrusive desk managers, unbelievably swift at delegating critical tasks to subordinates who can be blamed later if things go wrong. Sometimes, conversely, they are hyper-aggressive in seeking attention by attempting risky offensives that cover their inevitable missteps with distracting controversies between participants who honestly (more or less) disagree on substance.

What drives them to develop the narrow skill sets they use so repetitiously to maintain their position? Fear. Fear of being found out. This is a constant, because the Under-Qualified always have dirty laundry. Lawyers who cheated their way through law school, elected officials who bought the votes needed to win, corporate managers who systematically stole credit from competent subordinates in ways that could be proven, military officers who lied on action reports, journalists who made up their anonymous sources, professors who secured tenure with plagiarized dissertations and peer-reviewed publications, office politicians of every stripe who engaged in malicious gossip to do in rivals, women in every kind of hierarchy who really did sleep their way to the top. The common thread in all of these, of course, is lies. Why the biggest fear of all for all the Under-Qualifieds is a Competent Man in Charge. 

I say Man, not the usual mealymouthed Man or Woman, because to some extent all women suspect they are Under-Qualified even if they aren’t. As a group in the market economy, they are Under-Qualified. Their nearly equal and often superior numbers in professional schools are suspect because achieved too rapidly and politically, and too lacking in quantifiable rates of success to be anything other than a kind of cheat on a national scale. Why the sad irony of the current controversy about men in women’s sports, which serves to highlight the size and scale of the physical differential between the sexes, shining unwanted light elsewhere in the employment universe. Why women don’t belong on firetrucks or logging crews, in police cruisers, military combat operations, and dozens of well-paid skilled trades in which physical size and strength can be a matter of life and death. Why they also fear the Competent Man-in-Charge. He may be more likely to think a woman unqualified based on personal experience with the distaff side of the Peter Principle.

What do we know about the Competent Man in Charge? He hates being lied to. He despises cheaters of all kinds. He has no use for the lazy, the stupid, the phony, the braggart who can’t back up his boasts, the sneaky, the gossips, the backstabbers, the hypocrites, and the sycophants. He is not perfect and will tell you that. If pressed, he will tell you what his own flaws are. He can be obnoxious and also forgiving of those who take offense. He is more human than packaged and protocoled. But what is his most distinguishing characteristic? He has a proven record of accomplishment, of winning when winning isn’t easy, of looking for the best in the people he encounters, and publicly praising those who have contributed to his and the enterprise’s success.

Why he is so hated. He is not a phony. He is, above all, a fighter for what he believes in. Why he must not be just defeated but destroyed. He must be accused of every sin committed by the Under-Qualifieds who fear him most. 

If one stands back and looks at all this from a big picture perspective, a perspective that encompasses some human understanding, a high percentage of what Under-Qualifieds do to preserve their positions and self esteem is not evil. It’s reflexive. It’s self-defense against a threat they perceive more personally than the majority who don’t cheat as a way of life.

There are approaches that can be made to the Under-Qualifieds after, and even before, they are exposed. Their fear can be reduced. Joe Scarborough and Jake Tapper are not going to be sentenced to hard labor in a MAGA re-education camp. Neither will Robert De Niro, Whoopi Goldberg, or Kathy Griffin. Mark Zuckerberg’s still undergraduate-level software suites may face punishment in the market but not from political retaliation. The most likely fate of this group is yet another mean tweet, or silence if they speak more honestly and less angrily in future.

The same is true of the millions of Under-Qualiifieds across the country who have had no real personal contact with the nation’s Competent Man in Charge. He’s never going to find out, let alone hunt down, everyone who cut corners, stole credit, or lied his or her way to a title above his or her level of competence. As the prizes awarded for hating him dwindle down, as they will, the Under-Qualifieds are largely safe from Trump. Those of us who support his efforts can ease the transition by expressing our own willingness to forgive much of what has been said out of fear and accompanying delusions. That might account for about 10 percent of the electorate.

The Silo People

Perfect metaphor but still challenging to recognize in reality.

The ones who live in silos are a paradox. They can be as smart, sometimes are, as the brainiest ones in the population. They can be dumb too, but smarts are not the operative factor here. This is a function of interests and connections. Silos are vertical structures that can rise to great heights. They have no, or few, windows from which to see outside. In human terms, these are specialists who are sharply focused on one perspective from which they view everything. Silos can be professional, political, economic, technological, social, and personal. What they have in common is that the person who lives in a silo has built his or her entire persona around one sharply defined priority that drives nearly all decision making. The danger they pose is that they can be brilliant, even genius level, in their chosen point of focus and dumb as a rock when they venture into areas outside their expertise. 

To demonstrate that the factors on this list cut across the political spectrum, including the two already discussed (yes, there are MAGA Overpaids and Under-Qualifieds too, just not as laser-focused on one enemy) the most dramatic single example I can find of silo people is Elon Musk. He is a genius, no doubt of it, the richest man in the world they say, and he is motivated by a great vision of achievable space travel and colony building beyond the bounds of earth. He understands the physics of high technology at a unique level, and he knows how to assemble organizations capable of executing extraordinary feats. But his kind of incredibly sharp focus comes at a price. Mentally, he is also on the autism spectrum, a milder manifestation of it called Asperger’s Syndrome, which adds to his creativity and intensity but can be limiting in other aspects of life. Other suspected Asperger’s geniuses include Albert Einstein and Isaac Newton, who were famous eccentrics, to put it kindly. (You can read more about Musk and autism here.) The syndrome comes with some extreme behaviors, offputting social interactions (15 children?), and a kind of yes/no range of interests. What they’re interested in, they’re very interested in. What they’re not interested in, they learn very little about. Musk is no polymath. He’s not your go-to guy on every big question in public and private life. But he is more than willing to offer opinions, if asked, about things he knows almost nothing about. Because people do ask him about all kinds of things. This is his relevance to the silo phenomenon as a psychological archetype.

There are millions of people whose experience and decisionmaking are describable in extremely vertical terms. They do what they do in every walk of life. In politics, they tend to be one-issue candidates or advocates. If you disagree with them on that one issue, you are the enemy. This what distinguishes all the most vocal champions of identity politics. To them, you are all wrong if you are not right on their vertical hot buttons, which predispose their perspective on everything else. They do not, can not, recognize that they are being unreasonable to those outside of their particular fixations. Mass media have elevated a number of issues that become litmus tests for silo people. Abortion, climate change, race/sex/gender grievances, inequality of economic outcomes, healthcare, and child rearing are topics that promote extreme positions and decisions by those for whom they are central to their own personal identities. 

This is where fame has a complicating role in the nation’s state of mind. Actors, for example, tend to be silo people. Show business is the overwhelmingly dominant focus of their lives. Nothing wrong with that. You read their biographies, and there is a dominant pattern that emerges. Very early fascination with the acting profession, early abandonment of general higher education to specialize on career building in show business. Proliferation of high school and college dropouts. Work experience consisting of menial jobs to make time for acting classes, auditions, uncompensated stage gigs, and other unpaid career steps. Then with talent and luck they, some of the many succeed, and they achieve wealth, celebrity, and legions of fans. Media in search of headlines interview rhem for their opinions about everything under the sun, including politics and hot button issues of the day. When the red light on the camera starts burning, they start acting like they have an answer and their fans are impressed (or not).

I wouldn’t ask Alan Dershowitz about the intricacies of film editing, Bill Gates about post-modern art, or Itzhak Perlman about NASCAR racing. Why would I ask Taylor Swift about American foreign policy? 

It’s not just a celebrity issue. We have all kinds of verticals that create relative idiot-savants in large numbers. Accountants who can’t see past their ledgers into the actual businesses they document, computer scientists who can write thousands of lines of code but not a coherent English sentence, professors of business who have never met a payroll, surgeons who don’t know the names of the patients on their operating tables, feminists who have never had a positive romantic experience with the opposite sex, theoretical physicists who have never rewired a lamp, child psychology luminaries whose own children are drug addicts, in prison, or dead. These are people who are not really plugged into the culture at large, however much they feel comfortably on top of things. If asked, they will answer with confidence in their own acumen, and they are all well versed in the use of Occam’s Razor to obscure ignorance and reduce subtleties to snap decisions.

The actors are doing what they do best. Acting all this self-imposed isolation out on stage for the rest of us, to show us us as so many of us are. Whether they know they’re doing that or not. They’re just improvising as they’ve been carefully trained to do. When in doubt, play to the crowd, go for the applause. If it’s cool to hate Trump, do it, Don’t dream it, be it…  Who will know the difference?

The Narrow Social Stratum People

Not all of rhem live cheek-by-jowl, but the symbolism is apt.

When I was a kid, I lived in the country. Who were my immediate neighbors? Well, within one square mile of the house I grew up in, the other inhabitants were — What’s the au courant word? Diverse? — a struggling farm family, a semi-retired female osteopath who ran a tiny antique shop, a painter of lovely watercolors who was a Communist living with his very kind wife in a two room house, a red cottage that housed every summer’s migrant workers, the richest man in the township if not the county, a black handyman with a mentally challenged son who did repairs of various kinds, a retired accountant who wrote mystery novels on the side and whose wife was a French Canadian sage with the coolest voice I’d ever heard. We knew them all except for the migrants, whom we ran into at two nearby country stores and I waved at on the farm road behind our house as they went to work in the tomato fields. My sister and I visited most of the others on our bicycles. We felt sorry for the farmer’s little daughter because it was so hard to make her smile. Most of the older ones were honorary aunts and uncles after the fashion of the day. Aunt Isabel, Aunt Gordy, Uncle Biff, Aunt Sis, and Uncle Hiney. It worked. No Mr. and Mrs., but not a purely first-name basis either, because we were kids and they were grownups. And in those days, all grownups were in loco parentis if anything unexpected came up.

It wasn’t until my secondary school years and later that I learned most people didn’t grow up this way. I had occasion to visit suburbs where the houses looked a lot alike, and the families on any given street tended to have approximately equivalent incomes to live on, cars to drive, and front and back yards to mow. Their kids went to school with and hung out with each routinely after school. The kitchens and living rooms looked a lot alike. I seemed different and awkward to them. They seemed different and clannish to me. They lived in a fairly narrow horizontal slice of the world they thought was the world.

As my travels and social interactions increased over the years, I saw other horizontal slices from different ‘socio-economic brackets,’ from the Great Middle and Lower Middle classes, to the wealthier suburbs with bigger houses, cars, and yards, as well as urban row houses in Northeast and Old Town Philadelphia, Beacon Hill in Boston, and eventually even the emerging phenomenon of gated communities where it seemed everyone was living in a social club or being comfortably detained there behind fencing and strict homeowner regulations. In college I began to realize that there were horizontal slices you couldn’t see except in your mind’s eye. I divined these from the people I met, who came from different states but somehow the same slice — Chestnut Hill in both Boston and Philadelphia, Lake Forest IL, Grosse Pointe MI, Bethesda MD, Darien CT, etc. Somehow they often knew each other, vacationed together, went to the same boarding schools and colleges, and attended each other’s debutante balls and weddings. I haven’t been to all these places, but I imagined that their houses and cars and yard looked almost as much alike as the company towns in Millville NJ and Huber Heights OH. 

Are there other virtual horizontals? Yes indeed. There’s an American phenomenon called the “Strip.” There’s a famous strip in Las Vegas and another one in Hollywood. There’s a slightly less famous but much longer one in Atlanta called Peachtree Street, which goes on practically forever, with mile after mile of franchise hotels, blocky office buildings, gas stations, fast food restaurants, chain store facades, and townhouse developments. These are the notable ones, but there are innumerable nameless ones all across the country, collectively what might be called the same street duplicated and virtually connected to all the others. Strip Mall Country. Every state has some or many incarnations of this street, so similar in appearance that it’s almost impossible to tell which state you’re in unless you can read the license plates on the cars or spot the oddball local food specialty buried between McDonalds, KFC, and a Pizza Huts.

When I started to see this street proliferating in my home state north of the part I grew up in, I started wondering what the kids think when they take their new drivers licenses out on one of those those exploratory excursions. Do they know that before there was a Taco Bell, an Outback, and a TJ max outlet amongst all the baking parking lots, there used to be orchards, big red barns, stands of old trees, and horses in pastures next to modest frame houses? Or do they imagine this Xeroxed strip of commerce was always here, just as it is everywhere they go now?

It’s not just the young and uneducated who are marooned in the virtual horizontals. Having once been a member of what I jokingly called the ‘corporate ronin’ who spend a big chunk of their working lives on planes bound to and from business meetings, I realized that I had been living in just such a virtual slice of America. I could say that I had visited a lot of cities, but what I had done in reality was pass through a lot of similar-looking airports and stayed briefly at the same handful of chain hotels. Yes, I frequently had good corporate hosts who showed me their city’s night life and principal attractions, but all too often, those destinations are still located on the ubiquitous city strip you visit everywhere. When I lived in Ohio, it would have been easy to drive along all the main drags and see what you always saw all over the place. Highway entrances, exits and interconnections are so highly developed that it takes actual effort to find what Ohio still has lurking outside the paved-over part. Country roads, winding ribbons bordered by green grass, shade trees, farms and houses built over two centuries by families who sometimes lived in them for generations. My suspicion is that every state still has its unique version of this hidden life, what made the state home for so many families in the past. But how much do the children know and how hard do we try to take them on vacations that don’t involve franchised amusement parks and sporting events? Do they know that nasty capitalism has not hammered the earth itself into a single vast urban heat sink? That life doesn’t have to be bleak unless we choose never to venture away from the mass-produced segments of strip life? I don’t know how all this can be Trump’s fault, but I’m sure the true-believer haters can explain it to them.

Are we done with the horizontal slice factor? Not quite. There are also professional horizontals, which are subsets of the airport and city models described above AND with ties to the Silo factor for a double whammy effect. 

If you’re a mover and shaker in your trade school profession (lawyer, doctor, business, government, environment, academia, military, et al…), you have your own virtual network of cities, airports, hotels, and annual conferences of professional orthodoxy. When I spent my years in the computer industry, I went to trade shows in Las Vegas, Silicon Valley, and Greater New England and NCR facilities in the U.S. and Colombia. When I moved on to the automotive manufacturing world, I became a customer of the GM Air Force, which flies you early in the morning to the GM facility where you will spend the day in meetings before returning that night. These are real passenger planes, not puddle jumpers, and there are few amenities but it’s all for free. When I moved on to Whirlpool, I became a frequent flyer on a different, trans-Atlantic network that included Benton-Harbor MI, Evansville IN, Fort Smith AR, New York NY, Italy, Germany, France, Switzerland, and the U.K. All of these transportation networks make you feel important, in the know as others aren’t, and you absorb a sense of the hierarchy in which you are only a cog no matter how visible your role in various business processes. Final decisions are never really yours; at best you have a say and a front row seat.

It feels like a physical world to travel widely within a large organization. It’s empowering in that it may be entitling (pun intended), but it's also intimidating. Physical worlds that have geography and widely distributed facilities and personnel can also have an intimidating impact. When you’re closed inside the fist of the left hand, you can’t know what is happening inside the fist of the right hand, and nobody’s obligated to tell you. Trust the organization that owns you. What the organization opposes, you support at your own peril. 

One more thing. When the silo people are also confined to one or more horizontals, boxes are created. Boxes which are hard to get out of, think out of, see out of.

The horizontal factor in particular argues that no one person’s consciousness contains or encompasses the whole,from top to bottom or vice versa.. No matter how sure we feel or think we are. How communities, organizations, and cultures keep their people in line. The people involved may not be haters so much as hostages, amenable at some level to rescue or release.

The Paper People

This is here because it was early stab of mine at the whole subject being discussed in this post. I’ll give you the text without further elaboration. Factor it into the whole as you will:

“A friend of mine died today. It's no big deal. He wasn't interested in living any longer, and I, who had spoken with him via cell on his deathbed, realized there was no there there when we talked. An on-again off-again friendship of close to 40 years was unequal to the shell of charm that was the calcified residue of what had made us friends in the first place. Not even the imminence of death in a hospice could precipitate a breakout from that shell. It was cool to the touch, even over the phone, and it poisoned my memory of what I used to think of as good times. I mourn his passing. He was brilliantly talented. I'm prepared to believe he inspired other people with that talent. But in his death he reminded me of my own father, a desiccated ruin who welcomed the end of his disappointments.

I have had an extraordinarily fortunate life. I was raised to be part of the prep school, Ivy League elite who rule the world with their minds. By an accident of geography I was also raised in a pair of predominatly rural counties that take hold of your soul with an anti-rational mix of vistas, smells, sounds, people, and pursuits which become part of your blood. The salt smell of the marshes and the burning rubber smell of drag and motorcycle tires cutting swaths through the moonlit silence. Serpent roads and internal combustion engines that slice through the mist of back roads, back woods, the river, the ocean, the bay, and the back streets of villages, towns, and even Philadelphia.

So I was always divided. Thomas Wolf said "You can't go home again," but he was an asshole. Going home again was the only thing that ever had the chance to save my soul. I had been brought up to be one of the Paper People, those whose province in life was supposed to be ideas but is instead the pillorying of all ideas, in the name of bookish superiority, a continuous demonstration of the power of wit and learning over the native creativity that is supposed to animate our best efforts. The only thing I learned from the Paper People was a certain superciliousness, the kind of preemptive dismissal of all things philosophical which is responsible for the exceptionally high percentage of our so-called 'best and brightest' who go to law school and business school and occupy the empty wastelands of stock trading, investment banking and corporate law.

I went so far as to go to business school myself. I actually did better at statistics and business case analysis than I had done at Dickens and Shakespeare in college, but there came a day when I realized that I was in danger of becoming a certified public accountant or a banker.

That's when I returned home -- to the grave disappointment of my father, who had lived most of his life in a town whose people he had never met, unless they were the right sort.

Now I know how wrong he was AND how right he was. In a curious way John Edwards is right. There are two Americas. But the difference between them is not what government can do to reconcile them. There's only what they both need to learn from each other. The Paper People think they have figured out everything important. They have their books and their goddamned smarts, and they have certain gifts at administration, organization, discipline, and rectitude. But they almost always make an unholy mess of their own lives. They're always the person tapping the outside of the aquarium thinking they can make the fish conform to their irrelevant will. 

Then there are the real people. The ones who live in their senses and the moment. The ones who never have any money but always know where the best party is being held tonight. They don't have any books. They're the ones who know how to cut off dangerous tree limbs, pump your septic tank, put the power back on after an ice storm, catch the snake in your crawlspace, and reshingle your roof. They're also the ones who shoot bullet holes in road signs, think stripping is an okay profession, and will kill you in a barfight because they didn't really imagine what life in prison is like.

My PRIVILEGE in life is that I'm both these people. The blood of the Real People makes sense of the Paper People. I've lived in both their worlds. Real People are more fun but they repeat the same mistakes so endlessly you reach a point of wanting to be done with them permanently. (No, you really don't need to slash her tires and bust all her fenders just because...) Paper People are genuinely enthralling -- they know so much and can be so charismatically captivating -- but they live their whole lives without the slightest idea of what life is about, and they're actually proud of that fact. Their wit and intellect can kill you stone dead over a decade, and if you don't believe me, look at what happens to their children.

My ARTICLE OF FAITH is that most Americans are more like me than unlike me. We believe in the virutes of both Real People and Paper People. We subscribe to a sublime if naive notion that the ultimate of our breed is someone who knows how to live AND how to think.

To be honest, I go back and forth. Sometimes I can't stand Real People. Other times, like now, I positively hate the Paper People. What's the point of all that intelligence and talent if your only response to the sound file on this post is that it's "boring"? What I DO know is that Europe has become a wholly owned subsidiary of the Paper People. Their entirely rational refusal to reproduce is the purest possble refutation of the rightness of their philosophy. They won't exist in another fifty years. America will. Because even though bipolar examples like me may seem like victims, in reality we are simply evidence of the roiling process that continuously rejuvenates our nation. When you get sick enough of the Paper People, you will stop buying their newspapers and magazines, and you will demand some combination in your leaders. Maybe that's Obama's real role: the reductio ad absurdem of the Paper People. Learn fast, my friends. Four years of superior platitudes is a lesson. Eight is a cataclysm.

You can see that nothing is going to be resolved in this post. Perhaps that's why I'm obsessed with the promise of Christianity, which does not conflate intellect with virtue. Intriguingly, the story appeals to all facets of human experience. It befuddled George Bernard Shaw as much as it does your local bartender. That's why I love it so.

Sleep well, my friend. You don't like this music, but I do. We'll argue the point later.”

The World Savers

The ones who cause the real trouble.

This is where politics enters the picture and inveigles support from the people most negatively affected by the factors above. The World Savers seek out the hurt ones, the isolated, the resentful, the left-behinds who can be convinced that there is a correct ideology capable of bringing about a utopian society. Almost universally, World Savers are atheists, because the proof that there is no God is that things are so fucked up. The most important discovery in the history of history, to them, was the invention of rationalism, which finally made it possible to see that the God of our traditions and our Constitution is a fairy tale. In fact, belief in any god is a big part of the problem, which can be addressed by adopting the right system and organization for making things better.

Progressives have the right system, says their secular scripture, which is based on equality. All people and all the outcomes of people’s efforts must be made equal. All the ones who stole from the people who don’t have enough must be punished and made to pay reparations, which will be administered by government. Complicated decisions that cannot be solved by applications of Occam’s Razor must be made by experts who arrive at a consensus of what must be done and see to it that it is done. The commitment to equality is the reason why people must trust the government instead of God, because God’s historically racist and sexist promoters prefer arbitrary moral precepts over equality as a means of keeping the “Chosen” in charge. For Progressives, everyone is Chosen except for the ones who must be punished.

It will take time to transition to Utopia. But we have time, plenty of time, as long as we don’t let climate change bury us and we don’t tear apart all the systems we already have in place to keep making progress toward equality. 

Why Trump must be hated and destroyed. He is for all the wrong things. He believes in God and arbitrary moral standards and capitalism and taking a crowbar to systems that have been working fine for many many years. We’re not there yet, true, but Trump will only make it impossible fer us to get where we’re headed, which is will be great, trust us. If you know what’s good for you.

If you don’t believe that we’re right about all this, then why are all the smartest people on our side? Why have so many people been working so tirelessly to destroy Trump if he isn’t the worst, most unequal outcome we could ever imagine. All those Progressives in Congress, all those judges and lawyers, all those consensus scientists and doctors, all those eminent journalists, all those universities full of brilliant experts have been fighting in concert to soothe your hurts, end your isolation and loneliness, free your individual desires, end your slavery to compulsory parenthood and endless family responsibilities, and guarantee your equal share in the economic bounty. Why would so many of  them have gotten so heated, so borderline violent in their attempts to put Trump in a prison or a coffin? They wouldn’t. They know.

We are the easiest and most rationally perfect path to Utopia. Trust us.

And many do trust them. Because it is the easy thing to do.

Summary

Not a monolith but a coalition. A coalition of psychological factors that can affect anyone. There is overlap among them, and every individual you might want to think about could have a Venn diagram unique to him or her. Make your own. Get some elliptical shapes, identify each factor by name, and see how and if they touch and overlap. Discard the ones that aren’t applicable. Pick one that seems central. Then arrange and rearrange them until it’s possible to see the biggest problem areas. Ways of communicating past the obstructions might then suggest themselves. Or not.

Sample of how they work. Good brainstorming tool. Don’t blame Kamala for liking 

them, just for not understanding how they work and don’t in political speeches.

It’s important to understand it’s okay to want to save the world and bring it to perfection. But it’s equally important to understand that perfection is impossible in matters involving human nature. There will always be crime and betrayals and failures and disappointments. The path through it all is not the artificial reality — the utter fiction — called Utopia. The path that has worked the best through the millennia of history is common sense. Which I am glad to see is the root mission expressly described by Trump 2.0. All the factors we have been looking at are problematic because they diminish the individual capacity for a common sense view of reality. But these are also factors which can be mitigated by a renewed determination to employ common sense instead of wishful thinking. 

All successful civilizations have worshipped gods more powerful than human beings. That bespeaks a humility which is one of mankind’s most signal virtues. The age-old postulate that no man can be a God is the perfect refutation of the 19th and 20th century fakers who shoved God aside in favor of economically based secular substitutes for morality. All their ideologies have failed. The economic system that has succeeded is capitalism, precisely because it is only a system, not a religion or a moral statement but a systematized acceptance of human nature. Capitalism succeeds only when its practitioners also accept the authority of a morality that supersedes individual desires. 

Time we relearned these basic truths and accelerated our outreach to all the segments of our society who have forgotten or never learned how the world works when it’s working well. That is, with heavy doses of common sense, optimism, and empathy.

I often conclude discussions like this with a wry song by The Rolling Stones. This one will do for today.