And now. Click on the photo for the story of this woman dining in DC, who was approached by BLM protesters, not satisfied to invade her while in a restaurant but insisting on the alleged need for compelled speech.
The woman dining in the restaurant is bravely exhibiting the correct approach when someone threatens you to make you say something you don't believe. Here is a classic photo showing how to be brave. Click on the photo for the story of the man who refused to salute Hitler.
If we are to take selection more seriously within humans, we may fairly ask what rigorous system would be capable of tying together an altered reality of layered falsehoods in which absolutely nothing can be assumed to be as it appears. Such a system, in continuous development for more than a century, is known to exist and now supports an intricate multi-billion dollar business empire of pure hokum. It is known to wrestling's insiders as "Kayfabe".
Because professional wrestling is a simulated sport, all competitors who face each other in the ring are actually close collaborators who must form a closed system (called "a promotion") sealed against outsiders. With external competitors generally excluded, antagonists are chosen from within the promotion and their ritualized battles are largely negotiated, choreographed, and rehearsed at a significantly decreased risk of injury or death. With outcomes predetermined under Kayfabe, betrayal in wrestling comes not from engaging in unsportsmanlike conduct, but by the surprise appearance of actual sporting behavior.
What makes Kayfabe remarkable is that it gives us potentially the most complete example of the general process by which a wide class of important endeavors transition from failed reality to successful fakery.
Eric Weinstein's Tweet isn't really about the "race" of this perpetrator and the "race" of this victim. Tomorrow there will be another incident in which the "races" will be reversed and then that news coverage (and lack thereof) will also be reversed. THAT is what is tragic. We are now divided so sharply that we refuse to see the humanity in members of outgroups.
To satisfy our selectively-blinded morality and to sell commercials, our respective teams of "news" media now look only for facts that fit predetermined narratives, ignoring everything that doesn't fit. In other words, our "news" stories are pre-written nuance free, with a few blanks left open for tonight's names and tonight's minor details. And since there is so much going on, they will easily find the stories they seek, the kinds of stories that are guaranteed to make us nod, then clench our fists, then vomit our anger at the opposing team on social media.
We and our teams of "news" media have trained each other so very well that these insane battle lines now seem inevitable. So much so that if Jesus, The Dalai Lama, Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King all suddenly appeared and earnestly reminded us to love both our neighbors and our enemies, it would would unite us, if only for a moment. We would tell them all to go fuck off.
I will vote for Biden/Harris even though there is no rational way to justify how Biden should be the Democrat nominee. He is cognitively rickety and burdened with a long history of being on the wrong side of history (albeit with some notable positives). Today, Joe Biden is not among the best and brightest. I will vote for him anyway because Trump is much worse in terms of factual understanding, moral character and temperament. That said, what we're about to witness leading up to November is Kabuki Theater rather than a meaningful election because the corrupt primaries set the stage. But how did we get here, again? How dysfunctional were the primaries? Is there any expectation that the 2024 presidential primary will better reflect the will of the voters? No way, unless we dramatically reform the system from the bottom up.
Eric Weinstein nailed it on Episode 37 of his excellent podcast, "The Portal." I have taken the time to transcribe Eric's introduction to this episode. High school teachers should throw away their Civics coursebooks and start the court by making Eric's statement required reading:
Hello, it's Eric with a few thoughts this week on the coming US election before we introduce this episode's main conversation. Now, I should say upfront that this audio essay is not actually focused on the 2020 election, which is partially concluded, but on the election of 2024 instead. The reason I want to focus on that election is that precisely because it is four years away, we should know almost nothing about it. We shouldn't know almost anything about who is likely to be running or what the main issues will be. And we should be able to say almost nothing about the analysis of the election. Unfortunately, almost none of that is true. Now, obviously, we can't know all of the particulars. However, we still know a great deal more than we should. And that is because the ritual is not what many suppose it to be: a simple nationwide open contest to be held on a single day after several unrestricted long form debates with unbiased rules enforced by trusted referees.
What is most important is that prior to the 2024 election, there will have to be an appearance of a primary election. So what actually is a primary election and what function does it serve? It's hard to say, but if you think about it, this is really the awkward disingenuous and occasionally dangerous ritual by which a large and relatively unrestricted field of candidates needs to be narrowed to the subset that is acceptable to the insiders of the parties, their associated legacy media bosses in the party mega-donors. Now the goal of this process is to--in the famous words of Noam Chomsky--manufacture consent from us, the governed, so that we at least feel like we have selected the final candidates who, in truth, we would likely never have chosen in an open process. I've elsewhere compared this ritual to the related process referred to by professional illusionists as "magicians choice," whereby an audience member is made to feel that they've selected something like a card from a deck out of their own free will, but that the magician has actually chosen from a position of superior knowledge and control long before the trick has even begun.
In the modern era, of course, consent has become a much more interesting word, especially of late. And perhaps that fact is important in this context too. The constellation of issues carry over surprisingly well. To bring in more terminology from the national conversation on consent, the party rank and file are groomed, if you will, by the party-affiliated media as to who is viable and who should be ignored and laughed at through a process of what might be termed political negging. The candidates are also conditioned by being told that they can only appear in party-approved debates, which must be hosted exclusively by affiliated legacy media outlets, which emphasize soundbites and theatrical gotcha moments over substance, despite the internet's general move towards in-depth discussion made possible in large part by the advent of independent long-form podcasts like this one. Thus, both voters and candidates are prevented from giving informed and uncoerced consent by the very institutional structures most associated with democracy itself.
I've followed Social Psychologist Jonathan Haidt closely for many years (as you can see by searching for his name at DI). He is the author of several excellent books, including The Happiness Hypothesis, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion and The Coddling of the American Mind. Haidt's thought process crosscuts the prevailing two wings of political thought in the United States. In this extended interview with Joe Rogan, Haidt dissects many topics, including identity politics. He urges that this phrase encompasses two separate approaches, "Common Enemy Politics" and "Common Humanity."
Haidt also distinguishes between two prevalent types of conversations, two types of "games" being played that often make conversations frustrating. Many of us insist upon playing the "truth seeking game," while others play a game that assumes a Manichean battle where A) no one gains except at the expense of someone else, B) where people are not seen as individuals but a members of groups, and C) you can tell who someone is merely by their appearance. Much of the fruitless dialogue on social media and elsewhere makes a lot more sense once we realize that these two approaches have virtually nothing in common--they serve entirely different purposes. Just because we exchange words does not mean we are, in any meaningful way, communicating.
In addition to embedding the video of the interview, I invested some time to create a transcript of several sections of this interview, from about Min. 33 - 55. I have cleaned up the wording to omit throat-clearings and false starts, but I have worked hard to be true to the substance of the conversation.
33:18
JH: You have to look at different games being played. Yale was a place that taught me to think in lots of different ways and it was constantly blowing my mind when I took my first economics course. It was like wow, here's a new pair of spectacles that I can put on and suddenly I see all these prices and supply. I never learned to think that way, where I learned about Freud in psychology or sociology. A good education is one that lets you look at our complicated world through multiple perspectives. That makes you smart. That's what a liberal arts education should do. But what I see increasingly happening, especially at elite schools, is the dominance of a single story, and that single story is life is a battle between good people and evil people, or rather good groups and evil groups, and it's a zero-sum game. So if the bad groups have more, it's because they took it from the good groups, so the point of everything is to fight the bad groups. Bring them down create equality and this is a terrible way to think in a free society. That might have worked you know in biblical days when you got the Moabites killing the Jebusites or whatever, but you know we live in an era in which we've discovered that that the pie can be grown a million-fold. So to teach students to see society as a zero-sum competition between groups is primitive and destructive.
34:22
JR: In your book, you actually identify the moment where these micro aggressions made their appearance and they were initially a racist thing.
JH: Yeah. The idea of a micro aggression really becomes popular in a 2007 article by Derald Wing Sue at Teachers College. He talks about this concept of microaggressions. There are two things that are good about the concept, that are useful. One is that explicit racism has clearly gone down--by any measure explicit racism is plummeted in American across the West—but there could still be subtle or veiled a racism.
37:27
JR It's ultimately for everyone's sake, I mean, even for the sake of the people that are embroiled in all this controversy and chaos. It would be fantastic across the board if there was no more sexism, there was no more racism, there was no more any of these things. It would be wonderful. Then we could just start treating humans as just humans. Like this is just who you are you're just a person. No one cares. What a wonderful world we would live in if this was no longer an issue at all.
JH: Beautifully put.
JR: How does that get through?
38:01
JH: We were getting there, okay? That's what the twentieth century was. We were shaped by the late 20th century. The late 20th century was a time in America in which, you know, earlier on there was all kinds of prejudice. I mean, when I was born, just right before you were born, it was legal to say you can't eat here because you're Black and so that changed in 1964-65. But it used to be that we had legal differentiations by race and then those were knocked down. But we still had social [discrimination] and it used to be that if you were gay that was something humiliating. It had to be hidden. If you look at where we were in 1960 or ’63, when I was born and then you look at where we got by 2000, the progress is fantastic on every front, so that's all I mean when I say we were moving in that direction.
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