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As we approach Herd Mentality, as Trump called it, we seem to be lowering our standards for political candidates.
Our relentless drive for Herd Stupidity — the state in which so many of us are so stupid that there’s nothing more we can manage to do together than run off a cliff — is being assisted and accelerated by the homogenization of politics. Every election contest in America right now seems to be about only one thing — are you with Trump, or not.
If they held an election today for City Cat Herder in Omaha, Nebraska, there would be a Trumpist candidate and a progressive socialist Democrat candidate and they would spend the whole campaign arguing over who is really president.
This is a big, unbelievably complicated country, whose governments at every level face daunting, unbelievably complicated problems. Ideology does not fix potholes. Cults do not build sewer systems. Conspiracy theories do not help keep the lights on, or help anyone after the lights have gone out. Loyalty to Trump does not deflect hurricanes.
Governments are in desperate need of talent, creativity, problem-solving and hard work. Small cities in Florida need a way to deal with the rising seas that are inundating their streets, not soon, but right now. Towns in Alaska need to decide right now what they are going to do when the ice roads that are their only hope of survival are no longer ice, but bottomless mud. Farm communities watching their soil turn to dust and blow away have to do something else, but what? Coastal communities that get blown to hell by hurricanes can only Build Back Better a few more times — then what?
Any possible solution, to any one of these problems, will involve inflicting substantial pain on all parties. Everybody will have to pay more for everything. Property rights will have to be trampled for the greater good. Everyone’s quality of life will have to be scaled back, voluntarily. If we have political leaders capable of devising such a solution, can you imagine any of them actually giving voice to it in a political campaign? Me neither.
Instead, prospective candidates are asked, are you rich? If you answer no, you are disqualified. Next, are you a Trumpist, or not? According to your answer, you are given a label that will sum up all the political thinking you’ve done in your life in a word or two. Don’t worry, no one is going to ask you if you are decent, or corrupt, or a racist or misogynist, because, really, who cares about that stuff?
So the herd stumbles on, its cumulative IQ lowering by the minute, telling itself it is the smartest and richest herd on the planet, lumbering through the lightning and thunder toward the nearest cliff.
When climate criminals assemble to address AGW, warmongers to pursue peace, spendthrifts to wrestle with the economy and poisoners to talk health, it becomes clear that any useful response to these problems will happen despite the political class, not by them.
I expect that the most functional responses will come from the poorest as they already know how to live on less.
“Any possible solution, to any one of these problems, will involve inflicting substantial pain on all parties. Everybody will have to pay more for everything. Property rights will have to be trampled for the greater good. Everyone’s quality of life will have to be scaled back, voluntarily.”
Completely agree with the first part, but the “voluntarily” gets me. We’ve got a well established record for *not* voluntarily reducing energy consumption. That leaves only involuntary, imposed solutions by those with the means, if they wish to survive. Gee, I wonder what they might have in mind? Have there been any globally coordinated programs put in place over the last couple years?
When, for example, people install renewable energy sources, they almost always design a generator that will power their lifestyle. What they need to be doing, especially if they intend to survive the crash and persist thereafter, is design their life to fit their power source. This involves making daily micro-choices that I don’t see government as capable of doing for us, especially in a country with our traditions of freedom and liberty for all.
To have anything resembling survival take place for humanity, it would take people being educated on real-life sustainability, real-life economics and how to actually live with and not just nearby a community of other human beings. also neighbourhoods need to work together having community gardens ,raising livestock as you are able to do together,the lone cowboy myth needs to be rewritten. I know this sounds like 60’s Hippi commune talk but it would be a way to perhaps carry on, of course, if climate change takes us to 3C sooner than later it’s everyone for themselves.
I would submit that the “lumbering herd” and the “nearest cliff” have already met, and the early lead elements are now tumbling it over to fates unknown.
That a vast majority of the heard is unaware that a tragedy is unfolding to the front is unsurprising.
Think of the average Roman legionary at that Battle of Cannae, on a hot summer’s day not so long ago. Perhaps all but few of the 60,000 Roman warriors on that field that day thought in the first hour or two of battle they were winning. After all, their early and steady movement was inexorably forward, which in battle is normally a good thing, toward what must have seemed like certain victory, until they weren’t. Until in a flash all 60,000 had ceased meaningful movement of any kind, and become instead a penned and helpless rabble, awaiting slaughter.
That a few legionaries survived that day to become the vanguard of a force that would eventually lay waste to their land of their foe, is due perhaps to battlefield nooks and crannies, in this case, the nooks and crannies – and cracks and crevices – provided in and among the endless stacked bodies and accoutrements of their fallen comrades.
The brilliant Carthaginian commander Hannibal, who won what seemed such a decisive victory that day, would live to see his people annihilated before he himself was hunted down at the far edges of a burgeoning Empire and ignominiously dispatched by those he thought he had vanquished.
Looking back, it is hard to reach any conclusion other than Hannibal, undoubtedly the greatest battle-captain of them all, was in the end an abject failure. His cavalry commander Maharbal thought so, derisively stating, “Hannibal knows how to win a victory, not a war.”
Hannibal let the Romans off the hook, so to speak, that much is clear, and I wonder if an Impartial Universe will do the same with the herd, as it lumbers toward that nearest cliff.
Hannibal was a mistake-prone human after all, and an Impartial Universe is not. An Impartial Universe might allow for mistakes, this it could be argued is theoretically possible, but it doesn’t make them. It just does what it does.
“Hannibal knows how to win a victory, not a war.”
The same might be said of Lee. Ironically, both were dogged by supply-chain issues as they boldly advanced into enemy territories. The moral: good tacticians don’t always make competent strategists.
I like Eisenhower’s maxim: There are generals that are good at taking the town, and generals that are good at holding the town. Don’t confuse the two.
One lesson we can draw from historical accounts, from the Battle of Cannae to January 6, is that there is an awful lot of randomness in survival, from the individual, to community, to empire.
Maybe the only calculus that matters is that of species-to-environment. The human species has succeeded wildly from a biological perspective, with nearly 8 billion members of us alive. No matter that there’s abject misery, and irreversible planetary damage: our numbers are many, arguably a “success.” Yet on a geological scale, we’ll probably be a blip, a thin layer of toxic sediment in the deep history of our planet.
It’s fun and amazing to have a modern’s understanding of where we are and how we got here, but those of us with this awareness are surely also tortured by it. No one ever lives to see the whole story; we merely fulfill our position as biological survivor on an epochal scale.
For those who survive the kill shot, there will lots of free stuff, including housing.
Cheers.