Notes from Underground

Macroeconomic Changes Have Made It Impossible for Me to Want to Pay You

by Leave a Comment

Team,

There’s no easy way to say this: I have made the difficult decision to eliminate many of your positions. In the past year, we have achieved huge wins together. But unfortunately, the macroeconomic environment has shifted in ways none of us could have foreseen, from an economy in which I did feel like paying you, to one in which I’d rather not.

In 2021, things looked different. Interest rates were low, and my enthusiasm for bankrolling your children’s insulin was high. Given every available forecast, it was the perfect time for the university to spin up some original streaming content, start another capital campaign for the Bloomington campus, announce a multimillion-dollar rebranding campaign for the Indianapolis campus, and give me a a $160,000 bonus for preventing a graduate worker strike. Who could have known that in just a few months, despite all our operational velocity, the world would pivot so dramatically? Staff attrition has stalled. Inflation has risen. And suddenly all your salaries and dental work hang like millstones chafing the supple neck of my compensation package.

I wish this weren’t the case. But we cannot avoid the externalities of today’s market, which is influenced by complicated global factors like the collapse of Chinese real estate, the war in Ukraine, and my desire for a marble kitchen island with a waterfall edge. As we all know, our competitors are relentless. Even as we speak, they’re streamlining, optimizing, and booking the best adjuncts in the Midwest for the next academic year. If I could want to pay you, I would. I just simply can’t.

This was not an easy decision to make. It’s weighed heavily on me for the past year, keeping me up at night and nearly causing me to cancel the special class sessions on inequality, even though Nikole Hannah-Jones’s $101,700 appearance fee was only 50 percent refundable. Let’s not mince words, though; the accountability for this decision rests with me. The consequences, on the other hand, rest with you, but so does a pretty generous COBRA package.

Ultimately, this decision was made out of an abundance of confidence in our mission and all the work you’ve put into it. The fact is, our fundamentals are sound. The university’s tuition revenue is growing. Our endowment fund reserves are high. We are not going anywhere (except for a few hundred of you, but you’ll be going there with a free login for LinkedIn Learning). The fact is, if I wanted to pay you, I could. I could even give you raises. But once again, that is not the economic reality we face. And so we must make hard choices.

For those of you we are losing, I’d like to say thank you for all the work you have given us, but there’s a good chance you’ve already been locked out of your computer before this email arrived.

For those of you who are staying, I look forward to touching base at the town hall next week (forgive the early start time as I’m dialing in from Cinque Terre). In the meantime, please take a moment to reflect, refocus, and visualize the bright future ahead: one in which we double down on executional excellence, and I feel interested in paying you again.

Shout with questions,

Pamela Whitten
President, Indiana University


(parody of Macroeconomic Changes Have Made It Impossible for Me to Want to Pay You)

Send in the Clowns

by Leave a Comment

Dedicated to the memory of Joe Lightweight.

He strode in a swarm of fireflies. He wanted above all, like the old joke, to shove a marshmallow on a stick in the furnace, while the flapping pigeon-winged books died on the porch and lawn of the house. While the books went up in sparkling whirls and blew away on a wind turned dark with burning.

…

“Sit down, Montag. Watch. Delicately, like the petals of a flower. Light the first page, light the second page. Each becomes a black butterfly. Beautiful, eh? Light the third page from the second and so on, chain-smoking, chapter by chapter, all the silly things the words mean, all the false promises, all the second-hand notions and time-worn philosophies.” There sat Beatty, perspiring gently, the floor littered with swarms of black moths that had died in a single storm.

…

“Once, books appealed to a few people, here, there, everywhere. They could afford to be different. The world was roomy. But then the world got full of eyes and elbows and mouths. Double, triple, quadruple population. Films and radios, magazines, books levelled down to a sort of paste pudding norm, do you follow me?”

…

“Books cut shorter. Condensations, Digests. Tabloids. Everything boils down to the gag, the snap ending.”

…

“Speed up the film, Montag, quick. Click? Pic? Look, Eye, Now, Flick, Here, There, Swift, Pace, Up, Down, In, Out, Why, How, Who, What, Where, Eh? Uh! Bang! Smack! Wallop, Bing, Bong, Boom! Digest-digests, digest-digest-digests. Politics? One column, two sentences, a headline! Then, in mid-air, all vanishes! Whirl man’s mind around about so fast under the pumping hands of publishers, exploiters, broadcasters, that the centrifuge flings off all unnecessary, time-wasting thought!”

…

“Empty the theatres save for clowns and furnish the rooms with glass walls and pretty colours running up and down the walls like confetti or blood or sherry or sauterne.…”

…

“More sports for everyone, group spirit, fun, and you don’t have to think, eh? Organize and organize and super-organize super-super sports. More cartoons in books. More pictures. The mind drinks less and less. Impatience. Highways full of crowds going somewhere, somewhere, somewhere, nowhere.…”

…

“The bigger your market, Montag, the less you handle controversy, remember that!…”

…

“Ask yourself, What do we want in this country, above all? People want to be happy, isn’t that right? Haven’t you heard it all your life? I want to be happy, people say. Well, aren’t they? Don’t we keep them moving, don’t we give them fun? That’s all we live for, isn’t it? For pleasure, for titillation? And you must admit our culture provides plenty of these.”

(all of the above is from Fahrenheit 451, by Ray Bradbury)

School Is Not Life

by Leave a Comment

I’m pretty cynical about politics because most political discussion is ignorant babbling. In a typical political discussion, everyone involved knows almost no facts about the subject at hand and they actually have zero influence on the broader society. Yet, they act really serious about everything as if the fate of the world depends on them clinging to the eternal truth captured in some ridiculous video or the punchline from a TV comedian. So, there are very few so-called “political” issues that I care about — but education is one of them. I grew up believing that education was important, but schools are not.

Schools seemed irrelevant to me because I attended a different school every one or two years from the age of 5 until I graduated at 18. It is difficult for me to imagine this thing that Americans call a “public school system,” because in my experience, it was not a single system at all. For example, some schools let above-average students just get A grades in everything; some schools let them take honors or advanced courses; some schools made them sit out in the hallway so they didn’t bother the normal kids; and some schools disciplined them (as in “inflicted corporal punishment”) for working ahead. Even schools in the same district that taught the same grade levels had completely different classes, rules, student demographics, and learning environments.

Lacking continuity in my schooling, I wasn’t trapped in the illusion that some people have about public education as a kind of communal effort to implant a common body of knowledge into children and prepare them for the special little slots waiting for them in the community of adults. I saw education more as a personal adventure in accumulating as many different skills as possible so that I could be successful on my own terms. As a result, I developed the outlook of a self-taught person, and totally ignored the social significance of schooling.

The point of public school in the US has always been to “educate” in the broader cultural sense, not in the narrow sense of learning a subject (or range of subjects) or learning how to do a particular job. From its earliest forms in the US up through its institutionalization and desegregation, it was always explicitly promoted as a method of integrating into “productive” society all the religious outsiders, immigrants, lower classes, Indians, Blacks — everyone who was not a middle-class, white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant.

This is still an explicit objective of public school, except that now it also has a normative function for the middle class — in other words, it has become the de facto normal condition of the middle class to have had a public school experience. That is why the defenders of public schools nowadays go further and claim that without having had a public school experience, a child literally has no place in adult middle-class society and is incapable of functioning normally. This is the single most common public objection to homeschooling, even more than fears of child abuse, child neglect, or educational neglect. They are afraid of the possibility of a “parallel society” — suggesting that there should be only one monolithic society fed by one monolithic school system, neither of which can co-exist with diverse forms.

Ironically, as primary and secondary schools became public enterprises in the US and became more open to all students, they lost their original diversity of mission — to prepare students for integration into particular communities — and developed instead a uniform rationale of idealized, large-scale universality that is disconnected from organic communities, and more closely related to prisons and factories.

The traditional European and American models of education were nearly always directed toward the creation of a particular mindset that would fit in within a particular culture. Prior to the 19th century, however, this usually meant a subculture within the broader society, partly because schools were exclusive by design, not just because of geography. Even after US schools became nearly “universal” in the scope of their students, the notion that each needed to impart a specific cultural outlook and set of habits has remained. It isn’t so obvious in primary and secondary schools, unless they are charter schools or magnet schools. However, in post-secondary education, the cultural differences between different universities, campuses, schools, and departments have always been very clearly defined — mostly out of self-defense, as they competed against each other for funding, and even more as they have struggled against online schooling and free self-education opportunities.

Education has two different basic styles, an inner and an outer style. One style sees sociality as an exercise in formation, whereas the other sees sociality as an exercise in expansion. The first is narrow insofar as its purpose is to create a person with a certain worldview; the second is broad insofar as its purpose is to unburden a person of their existing worldview through cosmopolitan interactions that ideally leave them with no particular worldview at all.

Contrary to stereotype, social formation does not necessarily result in narrowness, and social expansion does not necessarily result in openness. A person with a carefully formed worldview could be inquisitive and open to changing unfounded prejudices. A person with no worldview at all could be hollowed-out enough to assimilate any pre-programmed ideology. The challenge for schools, at least for those that are not preparing children to live in a totalitarian prison state or a religious cult, is how to balance convergent and divergent educational objectives in order to help people develop themselves.

My early life was characterized by a divergent education that conditioned me to see schools and their communities as disconnected little way-stations on a wandering path. That point of view didn’t really change after I went to college. But by the time I was older, I started to notice the cultural differences in each higher education experience, the way each group of teachers had a different ideal end that they seemed to be trying to draw me towards.

After a couple of decades of college classes I started to see that an ideal end, the formation of a certain kind of person, was actually the only purpose of every formal educational framework, also known as a “school.” Their purpose was not to convey knowledge as such, obviously, since they were very inefficient at conveying knowledge, and anyway the details changed continually. Apart from those few who truly needed a structured format in order to learn a particular subject, most students acquired knowledge despite their schooling, not because of it.

Most importantly, everyone who is not in school full-time already knows this, and that is why most people don’t want to “go to school” ever again after they become adults. In real life, they are either told what to think or they discover something for themselves; knowledge is just a commodity, not the result of a process, for most people.

The result of an educational process is a set of habits of thought, and the habits acquired through socialization lead to identification with a characteristic ideal — what we like to call character. If those habits can be supported in real life, then we may be able to live according to our ideals outside of school — but only if the ideals modeled in school represent real life.

What Does It Mean to Be Educated?

Homeschooling as a right, and a needed practical alternative

Hacker News comments on “Homeschooling as a right”

Why Nerds Are Unpopular

SSC Gives a Graduation Speech

The true purpose of a university education

The Purge

by Leave a Comment

One important lesson I learned as a child was to regularly evaluate everything I owned and throw away whatever was simply taking up space. I never liked doing it, but I had to do it anyway. If I looked at it and had no attachment to it, I had to throw it away because each thing took up space and it contributed to the weight of household goods that had to be carried from one place to another.

Sometimes things actually had negative feelings associated with them — they were only being kept out of a sense of obligation, not due to attachment or any perceived need — and those things also needed to be discarded.

I can’t say that this kind of decluttering ever became a habit, but it did become something I was used to doing. Probably the personal habit that developed out of this practice was the habit of carefully segregating anything I didn’t want to accidentally lose through the process of purging. Anything that I expected to value over time had to be categorized as part of a collection in order to assign it a collective value, a value through association with other examples of a type.

On the other hand, there were always a few items of unknown value. At the time they were acquired they seemed intuitively to have some value, but I wasn’t sure why. They couldn’t be categorized except as miscellaneous items, usually acquired without intention. Over time, I found when looking at these things, which at some point I might have called “treasures,” that the intuition had vanished and I could not remember what potential value they had.

After I was separated from the circumstances and viewpoint when these items were acquired, it seemed like their potential value had been imputed according to no principle. I could rationalize why they might have value, but I could not rationalize why they must have value; and this is a distinction of temporary preferences. Without the intuition in place, it was obvious that these things had not only no market value and no utilitarian application, but also no lasting attachment.

The only significance of an object representing a temporary preference is historical or archaeological. Historical significance is defined by a narrative, whether contemporaneous or retrospective. Archaeological significance is assigned based on material evidence or location, and then is placed within a historical narrative. Both are social processes of assigning meaning.

For years I would look over such items and imagine constructing a narrative around them that would give them significance. Sometimes I had boxed them up and stored them so that I wouldn’t have to figure out their significance, but then occasionally I would find them again, look at them in bewilderment, then store them again without determining their significance explicitly.

The significance of these relics was, indeed, that they were things I had kept only because, despite having no use and no value, they might have a meaning which I had not figured out yet. My account of my life, my personal mythology, included these things only because it seemed that by contemplation of them I might eventually discern a secret about myself.

But the missing element is the social construction of meaning. Without a shared narrative, there is no secret meaning, no key to understanding, no prophetic symbolism. There is only the evidence of an obsession to collect an artifact of preference — a passing feeling that has no meaning by itself. Having a hoard of disconnected artifacts does not elevate their significance; rather, it highlights a lack of meaning.

Time Narrows

by Leave a Comment

He’s sitting on a deck chair

stiffly staring out over the lake–

squeezing his mouth together–

not saying anything.

 

On the way here

I listened to a book about dying.

I don’t know what is expected because

we don’t talk about death.

 

Across the lake

the sunset light pulls down.

Time narrows and dims.

 

“I just want the pill, Dave.

The one that takes away

all the pain.”

A Tragedy of Manners

by Leave a Comment

On January 21, 2017, I knew that the election season was finally over. I breathed the fresh, clear air of a newly anointed presidential administration, knowing that at last the earth had stabilized on its axis and God was now free to do His will (God’s, that is!) throughout all of creation, unimpeded by malevolent forces in the executive branch of the US federal government.

In the past God was able to use murderous, unbelieving kings to implement His will; but in a modern democracy God has to wait for vote-counters to tell him whether His favorite two-faced paper-pusher will be in charge, or whether He will have to withdraw from the world for four years and hope for the best.

I can only dream of having so much faith in the importance of a US president to believe that he plays a significant role on a celestial level and that I participated in the vast cosmic drama by bravely pushing a button in a voting booth. Even if I believed in the great march of history, I could not believe that it relies on me personally propelling it forward.

I grew up believing that Republicans were wealthy religious bigots and Democrats were communist radicals who started all the wars in the 20th century. Sure, I had also heard the positive case for each, but basically I thought that both sounded ridiculous; and lacking a desire to identify with any particular group, I ended up gravitating to individualists. The earliest inspirational essay I can remember reading was Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “Self-Reliance,” probably in the ninth grade.

If you maintain a dead church, contribute to a dead Bible-society, vote with a great party either for the government or against it, spread your table like base housekeepers, — under all these screens I have difficulty to detect the precise man you are. And, of course, so much force is withdrawn from your proper life. But do your work, and I shall know you. Do your work, and you shall reinforce yourself. A man must consider what a blindman’s-bluff is this game of conformity. If I know your sect, I anticipate your argument. I hear a preacher announce for his text and topic the expediency of one of the institutions of his church. Do I not know beforehand that not possibly can he say a new and spontaneous word? Do I not know that, with all this ostentation of examining the grounds of the institution, he will do no such thing? Do I not know that he is pledged to himself not to look but at one side, — the permitted side, not as a man, but as a parish minister? He is a retained attorney, and these airs of the bench are the emptiest affectation. Well, most men have bound their eyes with one or another handkerchief, and attached themselves to some one of these communities of opinion. This conformity makes them not false in a few particulars, authors of a few lies, but false in all particulars. Their every truth is not quite true. Their two is not the real two, their four not the real four; so that every word they say chagrins us, and we know not where to begin to set them right. Meantime nature is not slow to equip us in the prison-uniform of the party to which we adhere. We come to wear one cut of face and figure, and acquire by degrees the gentlest asinine expression.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Self-Reliance”

That pretty well sums up how I see everyone who subscribes to a particular party that they always vote for. Every time the wind blows, their opinions shift to accommodate their party affiliation. They don’t actually own any of the words they say or write — everything is either dictated to them by the appropriate thought-leader, or else it is just the dumb parroting of whatever their favorite crowd is murmuring right now.

Every time I find myself agreeing with the people I like, it makes me nervous, because it means that my mind has hitched itself to my instincts and is ready to run off on its own, without the restraint of reason. Even worse, though, is the anxiety I feel when everyone I speak with agrees with me — that is a sure sign that I am likely to be deceived into believing everything I say. It is disappointing to let opinion fall victim to sentiment; but if a whole chorus is echoing my thoughts, it signifies that I am about to suffer a tragic end.

It doesn’t matter how many times I say I don’t care about political parties, because no one ever believes me. I seem so reasonable and articulate that they have to project their idolatry onto me:  They are absolutely certain that if only I read this one article or watch this one video, I will immediately start chirping away and validate all their prejudices for them. Sometimes it’s easy enough to just reassure them that I support their good intentions, and not bother them with my own opinion.

Nevertheless, I have learned over the years how to identify my own perspective — not to submerge it under some bureaucratic policy statement or some empty slogan, but to anchor it to principles. For example, my parents taught me to place supreme importance on education and reading books, but that did not cause me to make public education into a political fetish — it caused me to make learning into a personal fetish. Because I wanted to learn so much, I adored my teachers and I despised all the rowdy, ungrateful, dimwitted children I was imprisoned with in public school buildings. When I read that the brilliant John Stuart Mill had been tutored personally by his own father, I was deeply envious, and I imagined my father teaching me from his science textbooks.

This led me to be sympathetic toward homeschooling, even though my father was at heart a public school teacher. My principles did not include wanting to use legislation, courts, and police to force everyone else to behave exactly the way I wanted them to — that would be an unprincipled political objective, as far as I’m concerned. It is unprincipled not because there may be  justification for it only in an authoritarian fantasy world; it is unprincipled because politics translates personal prejudices into  policy, and I don’t have a principle of trying to force everyone to be puppets.

However, that kind of principled libertarianism assumes that somehow most of the people in a representative democracy have similar principles, so that such principles will win out in the political realm. I floated along with that illusion for most of my life, and most people would probably say it took me way too long to learn that it was an illusion. It’s obvious that politics has more to do with an intrinsic sense of personal identity and tribalism rather than any ideology or policy, but in the past I would have said that was something trivial, something to be overcome.

No doubt, though, the desire to overcome or avoid group identification is a sign of a psychological disorder. It could be a sort of narcissism, if everyone else’s welfare depended on my good will — but I have never wanted to believe that vanity supersedes duty. It could also be a sort of sociopathy, if I considered everyone else to be a means for me to achieve my ends — but I have tried being a salesman and found that I am so concerned with helping people solve problems that I cannot profit by manipulating them. Another popular sociopathy is business management — but I have seen the sociopathy of executives up close, and it made me physically ill.

It’s more likely that either I have a congenital brain disorder or that I was conditioned by the anarchic lifestyle imposed on families by a military bureaucracy. I don’t quite fit the pattern for either one, but I have found that I identify with people who do fit those patterns far better than I identify with neurotypicals or civilians.

The Truth of Democracy

by Leave a Comment

I used to be very anti-democratic. I preferred a fake objectivity that looked at politics from above, as if careful reasoning could somehow plow through the great mass of words in public policy discussions. I thought the best approach to political news was to be like a dedicated investigator untangling the threads of motivation and purpose in a bizarre murder case, with only newspaper stories as evidence.

This approach came from learning about American politics by reading newspapers in the late twentieth century, when the ideology of journalistic objectivity was promoted as an essential control on the excesses of all the other parts of society. The purpose of journalism was not only to watch out for government corruption or corporate malfeasance, but also to temper the vulgar radicalism of the “common people.” In this way, the journalist presented not merely a private point of view, but a carefully curated narrative about how a democratic society balances different interests and works everything out for the common good, without allowing a mob mentality to take over the public agenda.

However, that perspective required me to believe that whatever was written in the newspaper had a special window into objective truth. Between the reporter, the fact-checker, the copy editor, the section editor, and the editor-in-chief — all of them working together to verify details, eliminate bias, and hold each other accountable — the end result was supposed to be as true as possible. The problem is that this purely inductive method of collecting evidence, refining it to make it credible, and presenting it artfully never actually arrives at truth.

All it does is make a good story. And collecting a lot of these stories together can give a pluralistic, multifaceted story, but it is still not necessarily objective or true. It is simply the story that is agreed-upon by the majority of the journalists, newspaper owners, and trusted sources. Other people are left out of the story: the ones who can’t talk to journalists because they know too much; the ones who won’t talk to journalists because they don’t trust them; the ones who contradict the journalist’s boss; the scary people; the boring people; the crazy people; the criminal people; the ugly people; the drunk people; the inarticulate people; the dirty people; and anyone who just doesn’t fit within the little circle of what a journalist considers to be someone whose opinion matters.

When politicians allow a free press, it is because they think it works out for everyone concerned: they can massage journalistic messages to direct public opinion, but they don’t have to take responsibility for anything because it is simply being reported by a third party. Meanwhile, the public is entertained by the spectacle of democracy being played out in front of them, the feeling of identification and fake involvement in civic affairs. The self-satisfied middle-class person can sit back and ponder how wonderfully the public conversation in the press reflects both kinds of middle-class people that they know.

This system functioned reasonably well in the twentieth century as long as there were media monopolies for the most credible journalists. It worked in tandem with the venerable two-party US election system, which creates fake coalitions in order to justify peaceful transfer of power.

The US electoral system was designed by Democrats and Republicans so that a third party will always fail on a nationwide basis. In fact, it isn’t even possible for it to work at all if there are more than two large factions, since the US has no tradition of sorting out coalition leadership, as with some parliamentary systems. If a third party were to reach a level of committed support nationwide among eligible voters equal to the other two parties, that would actually disable US representative democracy, because then whoever won an election could not claim to have even the implicit support of half the electorate. The pragmatic reason for continuing US-style representative democracy is precisely because it enables an enduring narrative about how everyone comes together after an election to support the resulting government in the national interest, on the principle that it has at least a bare majority of public support.

So, it was always obvious to me that the two-party system was just a pragmatic arrangement to ensure the complacency of the populace. It worked well enough to keep politicians on their toes, insofar as they always had a “loyal opposition” in the form of the other party, which nevertheless completely agreed with them on all the important matters of governance. By maintaining the appearance of providing a choice every four years, it enabled a release of tension that might otherwise build up into some kind of revolutionary or insurrectionist movement.

All the potential leaders of any anti-government movement were sequestered in their little DC lobbyist offices or their little think-tank seminars, planning for the day when public opinion would shift again and they would get their chance to ride the wave. Those who didn’t want to play the game were marginalized as radicals or extremists and ignored. Anyone ignored on a large scale is not a credible threat to order, they are just isolated nuts. They may be very principled nuts who are happy with their self-contained rationalizations, but they are not actually part of the broader society.

This is where the so-called third parties exist. Their function is to work tirelessly to play with ideas that are unacceptable to the two major parties, but which nevertheless might get the attention of a portion of the public. In that way, if a fringe policy proposal ever does get popular opinion behind it, one or both of the major parties can just pick it up and use it after it has broad support, without sacrificing their credibility, and their voting public, beforehand. They are the bush league for ideas that seem wacky but may someday get to play in the big league. The third parties themselves will never win broadly, because as parties they are undemocratic: they can never represent, even by passive consent, a majority position.

So, anyone who has carefully thought-out and consistent policy positions, yet is unwilling to compromise for the sake of an imaginary, nationwide political coalition, will always be a loser politically. The leaders of the major parties know this, and the party hacks know it too; that’s why they spend a lot of time posturing, pretending to be virtuous in their blind, animalistic party loyalty. In every election they try to pull the third-party voters over to a major party with imaginary bargaining or emotional appeals. Eventually they lose patience and start to virtually spit on third-party voters, mocking them for their airy principles and calling them stupid and useless.

Some third-party sympathizers react by simply not voting. Not voting works to send a message, but it takes awhile. Also, the message is ambiguous, so the parties can lie to themselves about what it means: Does nonvoting mean that some people are too lazy, too happy, or too hopeless to vote?

Voting is not actually effective as a means of individual expression, because it is depersonalized and anonymous. As expression, it only matters when expressed to other people in words or images, rather than in the form of an actual “vote”; and then it just functions to let everyone know whether someone is “in” or “out” of their little ideological group.

No single vote actually affects the outcome of a national election, either, unless it happens to agree with other similar votes — which means that with the proper manipulation of groups, it would be possible to make a difference. Setting aside the concept of manipulation, what actual political function does voting have?

Voting functions to help the populace accept a peaceful transfer of power, because they believe that the results of an election represent “majority rule”, meaning that one side won the game and so everyone should accept the result and move on. Voting also functions for the governing authorities as a census:  Every election is a referendum about what kind of ruling figurehead, and what kind of ideology, will be accepted by a majority of the electorate (that portion of the population who are allowed to vote, able to vote, and care enough to vote). So, as a census, it allows the authorities to take a reading on the most effective rhetoric to justify governance and avoid insurrection or revolution.

This is how I was finally able to rationalize voting for one of two fake coalition parties with fake ideals, fake policy positions, and fake talking-head representatives: by seeing my vote as one of millions of census datapoints representing which of two possible options are the most acceptable. As with any measurement of millions of datapoints, each individual sensor can only show local conditions, and they all together reflect a general trend.

This the the truth of democracy:  It doesn’t seek truth and it doesn’t discover truth. In that sense, it is completely unprincipled. The only options it presents are the options that further the interests of the people in power. Its only purpose is to enable people with power to rule the majority through subtle manipulation instead of deadly force. Sometimes the majority fixes on a particular injustice it wants to correct, or a particular injustice it wants to perpetrate, and if the people in power want to stay in power, then they go along with it. Sometimes the people in power take a risk and move against majority opinion, but more often they don’t; the inherent imprecision and inaccuracy of measuring public opinion, and the cyclical nature of elections, make it worthwhile to take such risks. Truth is not under consideration in these scenarios.

Several years ago, I decided that if voting is simply a way of participating in a census, then there is nothing wrong with voting according to my gut feelings from the choices I was given. This was a huge insight for me: I could move with the herd in support of democracy rather than protest its mindlessness by voting third party. Even though I could not identify with a group, I could move with it instead of standing detached from it, like some kind of omniscient narrator.

Cycle of Insanity

by Leave a Comment

I’m thinking about how to vote in 2016 in a way that will annoy the greatest number of people.

Usually, the most effective way to annoy the greatest number of people is by voting third party; most people have a deeply superstitious faith in the two-party system, such that voting for a third party seems to them like some kind of blasphemous perversion of democracy.

In the state of Indiana, the only third party that consistently makes it onto the ballot is the Libertarian Party. Helpfully enough, most people despise libertarianism above all, because libertarian principles imply that excessive government control over society is stupid and ineffective, if not evil; and most people want to maximize the power of government to oppress and silence the people they hate.

However, the rhetoric of libertarianism has been pretty much taken over by Ayn Rand worshippers in the last few years. I had some sympathies with the people who made up Tea Party gatherings, but in general they were farcical. They tended to indulge in collectivist fantasies about the oppression of the middle class, which supposedly needed to organize street rallies in order to demand special consideration from the federal government. Then, when people laughed at them, they threatened to hold their collective breath until they turned blue, which they romantically called “going John Galt.” Their most significant actual achievement was inspiring Republican politicians to organize them as a voting bloc in order to dislodge some ossified incumbents.

I would rather have people vote according to either their material interests or their ideal principles, than according to some pragmatic calculation about “who can win” or “who will win.” A pragmatic calculation assigns a magical power of manipulation or divination to the individual voter, obscuring the fact that a vote in a mass election is nothing more than an expression of personal commitments. Each individual vote literally makes no difference to the final result; they only matter en masse. So, unless someone has awesome voodoo allowing them to manipulate millions of other people’s votes by pushing a little button in the voting booth, the average voter has to choose whether to believe that they are a skillful political operator who can multiply their influence by enough acquaintances to swing the election, or they have to figure out how to go along with the rest of the herd.

It is difficult to manipulate large numbers of voters in a geographically and culturally diverse nation, which is why parties and politicians have to use special strategies. Parties have to divide up the voters like cattle and drive them into little pens based on fake, irrelevant abstractions and wedge issues. Then they can massage smaller, more manageable groups into cohesive voting blocs by persuading them that the party is “in their pocket” and will always vote their interests, despite the absurdity of making the same cynical pitch to competing interest groups. Then, once each social group is in its little pen and focusing on the candidate, the voters have to be lulled into feeling warm, safe, and happy. One way is to use a lot of irrational symbols and slogans to make people feel complacent whenever listening to or watching the candidate; another way is to use the candidate’s clothing, height, voice, gestures, or hairstyle to communicate authority and decisiveness.

In the current election campaign, I think that Bernie Sanders is interesting only because he is articulating the suppressed desires of progressive liberals. For seven years Democrats have been whining about how Republicans have unfairly characterized Obama as a socialist; so, apparently, some Democrats are now trying to prove their point by nominating a self-identified democratic socialist.

Sanders has as much chance of being nominated as Ron Paul did: that is, no chance at all. Why would a party nominate a candidate who explicitly demonstrates the hollowness of its official rhetoric, not to mention the cupidity and hypocrisy of most of its members? In the same way Ron Paul was despised by “the party of small government,” Sanders will be pushed aside by “the party of the common people,” and his devoted followers will move on to more radical politicians in the next election cycle.

Donald Trump is interesting because he has taken advantage of some disaffected former conservatives and some gullible mass media figures in order to generate the perception that he is The Great and Powerful Oz. Like Hillary Clinton, he is absolutely unreliable and will say whatever he thinks people need to hear at the moment in order to make him appear larger than he is. Trump doesn’t challenge Republican ideology because he doesn’t care about ideology at all. I think most of his supporters are wowed by his huge public image; or they are fixated on one of his clever remarks that they mistake for a policy statement; or they are just gleefully watching him troll everyone from the mass media to progressive activists to duplicitous “establishment” Republicans.

Trump is image-oriented, not principled: He presents an updated Archie Bunker, a postmodern characterization of pre-1960s secular American culture, when loyalty to God and Country were taken for granted without having to “explain” anything by using big words or by making excuses for personal prejudices. In this way, he appeals to people whose real-life interests don’t fit neatly into the artificial little compartments created by political elites.

Hillary Clinton is a politician’s politician, someone who must win because it isn’t possible for her to exist without political validation, so she tacks whichever way she needs to in order to get it. Because of her tenacity, she is the obvious choice for anyone who is afraid of betting against the house, anyone who is otherwise powerless yet always calculating how to pick the next winner.

Ted Cruz is like the anti-Hillary, because he is equal and opposite to her. Rather than deftly managing his social networks, he is a technical politician, as evidenced by his superb political tactics and rhetoric. If he were on Survivor, he would be allowed to go to the end because the other people figured they would look better next to him, since no one actually liked him; but if he won anyway, it would be because the jury grudgingly acknowledged the effectiveness of his manipulations.

So, in the Indiana primary I am voting for Ted Cruz out of respect for his well-crafted ideology and his skillful gamesmanship, even though he cannot possibly win Indiana, the party nomination, or the general election. He is not flexible enough to scoop up a majority of Republicans, much less a broad base of voters nationwide. Based on the current polls, saying that I am voting this way in the primary will guarantee disturbing the peace of the maximum number of other voters.

The Gift of the Holy Sport

by Leave a Comment

I live in Indiana, where basketball, football, and racing are widely popular. Yet, I am agnostic with regard to spectator sports. I don’t deny that great teams and great athletes exist, or that sports are generally harmless to watch, but I have never personally experienced salvation by watching sports.

Spectator sports are often beneficial for their followers and the society that allows and encourages them, and people who criticize sports for being a waste of time need to realize that much of what anyone does is a waste of time. Not only that, much of what any society supports is practically useless, since its primary function is to promote cohesion and complacency, not well-being.

Nevertheless, I simply have no use for spectator sports. I am alternately amused and annoyed by all the painted and dressed-up folks who come out on game day: They hoard all their little relics; they make their big pilgrimages; they rehearse their chants and rituals; they venerate their idols; they start stupid arguments with followers of rival teams.

So, here I am in the middle of this religion, the Church of the Holy Sport, that I don’t like and that I think is only for losers who have too much leisure time, too much money, and not enough brains. And these nutcases are constantly evangelizing to me and preaching to me and praising their idols for all these imaginary superlative qualities.

I’ll tell you what:  I feel imposed upon. I feel like I am somehow immoral because I don’t care about their idols. Every time I see some ordinary sports fan wearing “the uniform,” I think that if someone wanted to do any crime or terrorism at all, they should dress like that, because no one would ever suspect them of doing anything antisocial. I guess this is what it’s like to be on the outside of a religious majority.

The funny thing is that church-religion doesn’t seem nearly as popular as sports-religion. I know there are lots of churchy religious performances and rallies and TV shows, but none of them are as commonplace, as well attended, or as heavily supported by local business and government as sporting events are. Maybe it’s different in certain areas of the US or in other countries, but where I live, publicly supporting any sport is way more important than publicly supporting any church.

I think I’ve only been “witnessed to” by a Christian stranger twice in my life. Both times they were very polite about it, and when I told them I agreed with them, they said goodbye. Maybe they just wanted an atheist to argue with, but on the other hand, only an argumentative atheist would have responded with a hostile attitude. So, I’ve always been baffled by people who complain about having Christianity forced on them.

After considering the comparison to sports worship, I guess I’m willing to admit that some people may make themselves a big target with regard to non-sports religion. And if they already have some problems with society not affirming them enough or with society not looking enough like they do, they might get kind of resentful and start whining about persecution against atheists. But until their favorite atheist TV show is pre-empted by a televangelism crusade, I just don’t think I’m going to feel sorry for them.

Why Ask Why?

by Leave a Comment

Here is an in-depth report on the problem of functional illiteracy:

Published July 04, 2009 09:00 pm –

Literacy: 1 in 7 adults has problems

By Dave Stafford, Herald Bulletin Staff Writer

ANDERSON — Nearly 14 percent of Madison County residents lack basic literacy skills. It’s a disadvantage that dramatically raises their likelihood of incarceration and lowers their chances of earning a living.

It’s also a problem that affects people of all ages and in all stations in life.

“There’s just no rhyme or reason as to why people don’t learn to read,” said Ginger Mills, executive director of the Madison County Literacy Coalition. “So many of our learners have high school diplomas. … We have a lot of learners who have retired from General Motors.”

On the other end of the age spectrum, new emphasis is being placed on babies, pre-kindergartners and the building blocks of learning.

This is how a tough, insightful, professional journalist usually works: Present the hook (a social problem); quote an expert who gives an authoritative opinion, but don’t cross-examine them; then change the subject to how the government will make everything better by starting a new program that ignores the problem.

In this case, the problem is adult illiteracy. That is, the entire population is required by state law to attend school, or obtain an equivalent education (not really the same thing), through age 16. Most of them graduate from public high school. A majority of the population has the capacity to read at an eighth grade level, but some don’t read at the eighth grade level, even though they attended public school for at least ten years and may even have graduated.

What are we to make of this? “There’s no rhyme or reason” why the system could possibly fail. It’s a mystery, and it’s best not to look too closely, or you might see something you don’t like. So, instead let’s talk about how to make sure that toddlers are better prepared before they get to public school; maybe that way they will accidentally learn something later on in the “black box” of public school. It’s a black box because we can’t actually know what happens inside it, so we must control what happens outside of it, in the home. The parents are the cause of the public schools’ failure to teach children how to read, but nobody is blaming them; the government is going to help them prepare their children for the black box, since they are understandably incompetent and irresponsible.

The reporter goes on to point out how parents can help their children learn to read while they are in public school. Sometimes journalists even quote schoolteachers saying how necessary it is for parents to help, because without the parents’ help they can’t educate children at all. So, apparently parents’ help is necessary for the licensed teachers to perform the function of education, which only the licensed teachers are authorized to do, since it is so hard that parents cannot possibly do it. Right, I got it now.

What is the single greatest thing that public school teachers can do to help children learn how to read? Should they take more graduate classes in the discourse of early learners in proactive settings enabled by interactive technologies that affirm positive multicultural role models? Er . . . no. Here is the surprising new idea:

A key to Robinson’s success was individual attention and monitoring student progress. “It’s indescribable, really,” Cassaundra Day said of the importance of individual tutoring. Day was a reading buddy at Robinson and is also director of literacy services at the Madison County Literacy Coalition. “It makes an incredible difference.”

Day said that even schools’ reading recovery programs can sometimes fall short because students might receive individual attention for only a limited amount of time during the school day.

Although this strategy seems to work in some public schools, it is not recommended for an unlicensed, unqualified parent to try this at home. It might be dangerous for the child’s self-concept as a worker drone dependent on the beneficent government bureaucracy to compensate for the ideological shortcomings of his parents.