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There is no left or right, not really, not in political terms. There are many shades of thought and philosophies existing and interacting around the place at any one time in history. Grouping everything into a binary is just another lazy thinking way of operating. It is similar to focusing on one individual at the expense of acknowledging teams and organisations being responsible for actions, achievements and perceived failures. This all comes down to how we like to tell stories and the kind of stories we most like consuming. We, as human beings, shift the emphasis within episodic events to make them more coherent and linked to a central theme or character. We strip out the stuff we judge as tangential and beef up what we want to shine through.
Keeping Our Worlds Small
Our lazy thinking loves to label stuff left or right, good or bad, or whatever broad based category fits our bill. Polarisation feeds off these categorisations and judgements like a gatekeeper. We want to keep our worlds small and prevent expansionary ideas getting in. America is the perfect example of this right now, where you have some 333 million people identifying as American. This is way too many folk to be sharing an overarching national identity. The internal pressures to break this up into smaller groupings are overwhelming. Modern human beings cannot exist in such a large pool in terms of their identity. Especially sons and daughters of the Western enlightenment. Red or blue, conservative or progressive, southerner or northerner, rural or urban, white or coloured, WASP or Latino, Christian or something else, and the list of binaries could go on. Human beings want to keep their worlds small and keep out those they deem unworthy of fitting in.
Fictions Over Facts For More Lazy Thinking
It seems like folk are choosing fictions over facts, as stuff they believe in and acting accordingly so. Truth, as an adherence to factor, has gone missing of late in the lives of many Americans. Making stuff up and signing up to stuff you hear without bothering to fact check it are increasingly prevalent. Fingers have been pointed at social media as the defining culprit of this popular trend but I am not sure if this is singularly to blame. Sure, as a source of gossip and outlandish stories social media has expanded the field but human nature must be equally complicit, in my view. Social media is a digital bulletin board, a public square where stuff is writ large, and a shared conversation. The fact that you cannot be assured of the actual identity of who you are communicating with and whether they are, indeed, human at all makes it fraught with fraudulent dangers. Ordinary folk are liable to be manipulated by bad actors, bots, and scammers. Algorithms designed to feed us a diet enriched with outrage engage tens of millions of us across the various platforms 24/7. Bill Clinton, during his Presidency failed to properly regulate the online space and nothing much has been done ever since. Talk about Frankenstein creating monsters, which have grown into multi-billion dollar giants too big to control. The influence of Silicon Valley on successive federal governments and the world is almost without precedence in history. A few historians mention the facts that the printing press, pamphlets and books cost around a third of Europe’s population in lives lost thanks to wars they inspired and provoked, as examples of earlier information technologies and the very real dangers they posed. Some like Yuval Harari and Timothy Snyder tell us that our governments are asleep at the wheel in the face of the online perils now consuming us. Harari makes the suggestion that counterfeiting human identities should immediately be made a crime, a serious one akin to counterfeiting money.
The Elon Musk’s of this world present an Orwellian like danger to our lives through the mind control reach upon his 200 million followers on X, according to Snyder. https://www.boomsocial.com/EN/X/Account/elonmusk-44196397
Demagogues & Dictators
Facebook, Instagram, X, Tik Tok and the myriad of smaller platforms provide global messaging for despots and demagogues like Donald Trump. Strongmen in the fascist mould are rising up in authoritarian states around the globe, Putin, Xi Jinping, Netanyahu, Orban, Madura, and a growing cohort of these populist dictators are presenting a real threat to democracies around the world. Donald Trump wishes to take the US into this cabal of crooks who have amassed fortunes at the expense of their own citizens. Trump sees the presidency as an opportunity to feather his own personal nest to the level he has always wished to ascend to. There have been crooks in the American presidency before but none so blatant and shameless as Trump. The possibility that the American people could be so duped for a second time by this conman makes their own credibility and integrity loom large as highly questionable. Believing in fictions over facts to the extent that Donald Trump is a serial bankrupt, convicted felon, and compulsive liar and still electing him to the highest office in the land makes these Americans seem unbalanced and in layman’s terms batshit crazy. Science is not perfect but when you stop acknowledging its expertise as a matter of course you are in big trouble as a nation. Empires fall and civilisations crumble. Historians, often, struggle to identify what could possibly bring down something so powerful as the Roman Empire in its day. I think that despite the wealth and military superpower the US is heading for destruction if it becomes a corrupt dictatorship under someone like Trump. Donald Trump admires Vladimir Putin. Perhaps, what he admires most is Putin’s ability to syphon off billions of dollars of wealth into his own stashed boltholes. Once a nation loses touch with its people and becomes a closed shop for kleptocrats the light goes out of that place. Eventually, someone with a bigger stick comes along and deals that regime a killer blow. If equal opportunity for the majority of citizens is removed by graft and greed of the few the future looks increasingly dark. Keeping a once great country together is impossible if its leaders are screwing the people out of their birthright.
A wasteland of warlords in an endless civil war may well be the ultimate outcome for America. Indeed, Hollywood has already made a movie about it in homage to its possible prescience.
Predicting The Outcome With AI
Human beings have a preference for narratives over data, we are not machines after all. We invent machines like AI to fill this gap in our processing protocols. The stories we tell ourselves don’t always correlate with the statistical data, especially regarding things like the state of our health. Now, we have fitness monitoring smart devices to enhance our understanding of the actual state of affairs. However, we lack such things in our processing of information regarding the political sphere. We rely on pundits, polls, news sources, and social media to glean the gist of goings on in this circus like arena. All of these things run on narrative based themes, as this is what piques audience interest over just the dry facts. Even the polls are defined by the questions presented to those polled. Surely, AI must have the answer to who is going to wing the 2024 presidential election. A recent ad by the Lincoln Foundation tells us that AI has chosen Trump as the answer to that pertinent question. If a machine can be plugged into all the data points relevant to the question, as massive as that must be, one would suppose that this ground breaking technology can deliver the likely outcome.
AI & Global Warming
Is AI another lazy thinking way of operating? Is it merely more outsourcing of human brain functioning destined to render us more dependent and dumber down the track? Technology is a two edged sword, which can cut both ways. AI can be used to take our human predilection for stories out of the equation to produce more factual answers to our queries. It will be interesting to hear what AI has to say on the global issue of climate change. Big Oil and the fossil fuel sector have effectively muddied the waters on the world’s perception of the science on this matter. Human beings are not great on dealing with stuff involving deep time, as it spans far beyond our own lifetimes. The global climate is way out of our league on this score. Would the world listen to AI on this existential question? Is anybody asking AI right now?
More Lazy Thinking?
It seems, as if the world is faced with a choice between the descendants of colonisers and those who see a fairer society for all. This reduction may just be more lazy thinking but bear with me awhile. On one side we have folk who view the world as same as it ever was, where the dominant cohort, white males rule the roost. Individually, they want their slice of the pie and don’t want to risk sharing it with those currently getting less pie or no pie at all. Scattered amongst this large group are a few who don’t seem to fit in, superficially anyway. They might be Black, Latino or Asian but they want a position with an inside run like them white men. Plenty of women have long known that they need to act like men to get what they want at work and in the halls of power. Hell’s bells some are playing rough and tumble sports because this is where the glory still resides in our societies. Why should they miss out on the action and the rewards success in sport brings. Victim or perpetrator, who would you rather be? Identities are no longer fixed in biological realities if they ever really were, they are stories we tell each other and ourselves. Even gender, is no longer a binary imperative anymore. Black women can be Trump voters and members of the Trump cult. Latinos can be likewise supporters, despite the vile stuff Trump and Vance put out about immigrants. Plenty of immigrants, once they have established themselves in their new country, take on the political identity of those who campaign to end immigration and keep foreigners out. They are happy to see the door slammed shut after them.
Belief In A Zero Sum Game Is Lazy Thinking
Belief in a zero-sum game, where there are always only winners and losers, especially in economic situations is their take on life. Get in and take what you want and to hell with anybody else – this is the mantra of these folk. Private wealth over the public good. The neoliberal economic agenda has thus ruled Western governments for the last 40 plus years. The financialization of every part of life has been led by the United States and other advanced economies are following suit. Housing is all about the market and what profits can be generated there. Thus, we have housing crises all over the world, where shelter has become largely unaffordable for great swathes of our populations. Rents have gone through the roof, as social housing has not been built during the decades of neoliberalism. Market forces want to create expensive luxury style housing, so as to maximise profitability. Now, there is nowhere for the poor to live and people are homeless and living in tent cities in the 21C. A section of the population has done very well from the rampant inflation in the residential property market, which in Australia is at the order of some 330% over the last 30 years. We do not talk about this as inflation, however, because massively increasing property values are a good thing apparently. The banks have made countless billions out of this rampant inflation of land values. The central banks are at heart bankers of course and therefore support this grand con; this approved scam upon the people. Wealth creation for the few over the many has rapidly expanded during the last 30 years. Billionaires strut the world stage making their celebrity felt like medieval kings once did amid their dirt poor subjects. Oligarchy has returned to rule over governments and the people. Democratic government is a thin veneer, a sham, bought and paid for by the great wealth of corporations and their oligarchs. Political leaders are mouthpieces making speeches on TV for the benefit of their donors. The Trump circus has brought reality TV to the halls of political power. Donald Trump is the resurrection of the super salesman, forget about Willy Loman, this compulsive liar reinvents reality for the American public every minute of the day via social media. There is no truth, only fake news, and this whining, braggart paints a bleak picture of America to exploit the grumblings of grievance politics among his cult followers. Trump promises to make it better, MAGA style, by blaming all the bad stuff on those identified as ‘other’. Immigrants are to blame all over America, apparently. The poor and dispossessed are easy targets for overweight, unhappy Americans who feel they are not rich enough in their lives. Populist politicians tell this mob that everyone else it to blame for their hurt feelings.
Strangely, I remember JFK saying something like – ask not what your country can do for you but what you can do for your country. Wow, I wonder how that would go down these days?
Some experts define America as split down an urban vs rural divide. Possibly another lazy thinking way of operating, but worth exploring, perhaps? Why do folk live in rural areas when most of the services are in and around the cities? Obviously, it must provide a way of life they enjoy and value. More space and less other human beings in their face, these things are part of the appeal I bet. However, this tends to make many of them less tolerant of other ways of living. Less tolerant of people born elsewhere and who have moved with their customs to their new home. Less tolerant of those who worship differently to themselves. Less tolerant of LGBTQI folk in many instances, but not all. If you only think about your likes and dislikes, your wants, and don’t think about other realities on the national level, then, this is going to be a problem. If partisan politics exploits this and encourages it, we end up with a divided nation – as is the case. The adherence to the zero sum game turns everything into a battle for a shrinking pie. What a smart person would do is ask themself who is getting most of that pie right now? Cui bono? Is it Black folk? No, most of these folk are poorer than white folk. Is it immigrants as a group? Definitely not, these folk are at the very bottom of the wealth measurement ranking. Actually, it is these billionaires and these corporations. How can it be alright for Elon Musk to be worth $269 billion? For Jeff Bezos to be worth $205 billion? Bill Gates $138 billion? What kind of economic system allows such obscene amounts of wealth to be accrued whilst most folk are struggling to afford healthcare, education and a roof over their heads? The answer is a manipulated system, where the rich buy the politicians and they do their bidding in terms of tax relief and lack of regulation. Many of us know this stuff but have no idea about how to go about changing the status quo. It is too hard for all those used to lazy thinking. So, they attack easy targets to vent their frustrations upon – like immigrants. This is called downward envy or as I like to say punching down on weaker folk. Trump can go around laying blame on immigrants and other traditional targets for demonization. White men like to blame women, especially powerful women who have risen above their station in the view of these men. Blacks are pilloried as pimps, gangsters, drug dealers and responsible for their own poverty, more generally, in the minds of many white voters. LGBTQI folk are beneath contempt in the opinion of many white voters on moral grounds, according to their traditional religious beliefs and upbringings.
Political violence is an American thing as well, which has been with them since the beginning. Not just assassinations of presidents but far more wide reaching across the nation. Massacres and the lynching of Blacks at every level ever since slavery morphed into peonage, Jim Crow, and apartheid. Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Medgar Evers and a host of civil rights leaders were murdered. Militias beat up, shot up, and murdered unionists and those that opposed the wealthy and powerful across the land. One gets a sense that Trump and his Project 2025 associates want to turn the clock back to these fertile times for fascists and oligarchs. America rarely talks about its real history of political violence. Hollywood has shied away from telling these non-feel good tales.
Partisan politics has stymied the ability of Congress to impeach Presidents, whether they be deserving or not. If politicians and elected representatives are playing for their side over and above every other consideration – they are not representing their constituents. The Founders knew the danger of partisan politics and did not want what has eventuated in America at every level of government. Even, the US Supreme Court is heavily partisan and incapable of providing impartiality as final arbiter. Congress has been rendered impotent in the face of this rampant partisanship. Oligarchic money has polluted all 3 levels of federal government in America, including the courts. Abraham Lincoln is once again required, now more than ever, to return economic opportunity to ordinary Americans under siege from the billionaires and their vested interests. Will the nation be able to find such an individual in the 21C? Could the modern version of Abe be a woman of colour in 2024? Or are we destined for disaster and this is just another lazy thinking way of operating?
Robert Sudha Hamilton is the author of America Matters: Pre-apocalyptic Posts & Essays in the Shadow of Trump.
©MidasWord
