We are in a race to the bottom. But how far is it to the bottom? That question keeps getting avoided but needs to be asked.
America and its Empire have struggled to keep the world simple. Greed is our only virtue; bigger is the only definition of better, even if it kills you. And no one really gives a shit and hasn’t for a long time, so it doesn’t matter.
Now that we have that out of the way, reality requires us to continue functioning nationally until combined climate disasters make it impossible to continue.
Sadly, we are in a year of elections in a very tattered tradition of representative government that requires choices to be made. The overall race to the bottom means that those choices if they exist at all, are between dumb and dumber.
While everyone, I think, knows this, our system is still in the realm of dyadic thinking. For most people, there are only two options: good and evil. Since our political system is set to ensure only variations of bad and no good choices are available, we are hung. Some people, with no idea of what to do, lurch toward fascist authoritarians who provide easy answers as if they will take responsibility when things go to hell. Authoritarians, of course, historically refuse all responsibility and blame everyone else.
How else can you explain the Trumpists following Drowsy Don, as he spends much of this year dozing in the defendant’s seat in various courts of law? A congenital liar who is no longer able to cover his reality with bullshit.
The fact that the media has had to perform heroic acts to keep him in the race despite his inability to do much of anything but whine or slide into the alliterative incoherence of senile dementia suggests the need for some new standards.
The people who are locked into the traditional media and its panicky fringes are stunningly ignorant or have given up. We are no longer presented with anything that can be construed as a good alternative to what we have, which is failing rapidly.
The choice we have in America and its empire is fascist collapse or semi-competent management of a failing system. In the end, that is an easy choice, as fascists are ugly people who turn on their own supporters for sport.
We need to give up on looking for good and get serious about defining bad.
While all evil is bad, not all bad is evil.
We need to distinguish between stupid, ignorant, incompetent, and wrong. The first three are bad but not necessarily evil, while wrong is bad and maybe evil. As always, things are not simple in the world we have created for ourselves in the 21st century.
The primary distinction is between individuals and systems. We all deal with stupid, incompetent, and ignorant people who cause problems and, sometimes, significant disasters.
Stupidity is a personal condition; we know stupid people when we talk to them. We can all be stupid sometimes, as it is a human trait, but it is beyond some people’s ability to be anything but stupid. We need to mark those as unsuitable for public positions. A look at what passes for the GOP in Congress shows what happens when stupid people are allowed in positions of authority.
Ignorance is curable with education, which can be formal or informal. We are primarily ignorant but learn from experience if nothing else. Ignorance may result in evil, but that is usually unintentional. Wilful ignorance is evil, but that is situational.
We all know the wilfully ignorant. Depending on their religion, many religious people are wilfully ignorant but not a public threat. In the wrong situation, they are incompetent, which can become evil. Never allow an ideologue, religious or otherwise, to be in a position of authority. We have no idea what they will do as they have abandoned logic and replaced it with myth.
Racists, ideologists, and nationalists are all willfully ignorant. All of these conditions are normal in our species. The transition from bad to evil is situational, but I suggest we should not put a willfully ignorant person in a position of authority. In the same sense, you don’t put a known thief in charge of your possessions.
In America, many of us have religionists and racists in our families. They may be good people until they are in the wrong situation and become obnoxious or dangerous. This is not dyadic; it is not black or white. It requires us to openly manage ourselves and our cultures.
In our age of growing complexity and disaster, simple black-and-white thinking is not only stupid but deadly. We need to suppress this for any hope of survival.
Before we get to the problem of the dyadic mindset, we need to look at evil. As noted above, evil is often situational on an individual level. We all face this growing up with combinations of ignorance, stupidity, and incompetence in the people we live with and care for.
One of the great shocks in life is suddenly finding yourself in a situation where someone you grew up respecting reveals ignorance or stupidity, and these things usually occur together. In America, it is often discovered that members of your family are racists.
We have a strong tradition of the most archaic forms of traditional religion that are relatively harmless in agrarian, rural societies as there are few people to be hurt by it. But they become deadly in our crowded and disaster-prone world.
Often, this is a result of religion, a primary source of wilful ignorance. This shows up at holiday time when families get together, and your uncle, who played with you as a kid, proves that he is a racist and fascist idiot.
What do you do? That depends on several factors, but normally, we make adjustments and don’t talk about things that trigger bad or evil thinking. As noted above, we don’t put people with identified weaknesses in positions that could cause evil consequences. It takes work, and sometimes evil results occur anyway, but we try.
We need to deal with our national situation at this level of diligence. Our problem is allowing dyadic value judgments. If our condition prevents us from having good alternatives, we need to rank what is acceptable within our reality.
That does not mean we abandon what is right and correct, but we need to be pragmatic based on our situation. This means using compromise, which is the foundation of democratic government that we appear to have already lost.
This is not accepting evil but being able to reject evil by identifying it while recognizing bad that is not yet evil. At the same time, we work to correct the conditions that have destroyed our options.
Selfishness, greed, willful ignorance (in all its forms), and denial of rights to any life forms on this planet are evil. Diversity is good because it allows survival and opportunity. We have been on the way to this for several hundred years for obvious reasons of positive returns and must not stop despite the rising howls of greed and selfishness.
Obviously, this gets very sticky because some people insist that they have the right to be evil. That is evil at a fundamental level.
Now this is the pragmatic decision that must be made for us to survive the climate disaster we have created that is going to cripple and almost certainly destroy our existing civilization. We must define evil, and it must be redefined regularly as our biosphere shrinks and changes as we are forced into sustainability.
The only option is a very ugly decline and fall to some primitive forms of society, which will come quickly. We see it now in our planet's equatorial regions and densely populated areas such as Palestine, where evil has been allowed to rule.
We need to remove from and prevent authority being given to people who are evil. This is not easy because we cannot hand off this identification of evil to evil people. They will use it only to make themselves endlessly powerful, and we all will suffer and die because of that.
The formula is simple; it is about the only thing that is now. Evil plus evil equals evil. We are in this mess partially because it became popular in the leadership of the Western World in the 17th and 18th centuries that private vices could be public virtues. Capitalism was a product of that thinking. It has destroyed our planet’s climate and completely unbalanced the allocation of planetary assets in our lifetimes.
The critical challenge is that all of us must do this in a true democratic process. We need to identify evil and evil people who are not qualified to lead. Granting that to a person is evil. Remember, evil + evil = evil.
My hope is to use AI to conduct the research needed to determine a preliminary evaluation of anyone seeking public office. This will require several levels of verification and human overrides to determine someone who may be allowed to volunteer for community service or run for public office but will never be acceptable in a position of authority.
This could be a new citizenship process to certify all who wish to participate in public positions or run for office. All candidates for public positions would need to be certified as minimally educated, not stupid, willfully ignorant, or identifiably incompetent.
Yes, that would clearly eliminate most of our current public officeholders, and the Republican party would disappear. It may also eliminate all political parties, as the founders of America sought. What are now party primaries become voluntary tests for citizens.
Reality is everywhere to be guarded. I've spent the last 30 yrs pursuing and exploring what is real and what is not. This piece is Real. I appreciate your consistent and firm grasp on Reality Mike.