Now we have an opportunity to bring Americans together, to embrace a collective and inclusive “us,” and to repudiate hate and “othering” as a political strategy...
We can't stop the Republican "othering." What we CAN do is terrify them, because fear is how they relate to the world. They need to be terrified of handing Trump the nuclear codes because he has dementia - something the mainstream media knows, but refuses to acknowledge. They need to be terrified that IVF will be taken from them. They need to be terrified of Project 2025's impacts to each and every family. They need to be terrified that birth control will be taken from them. They need to be terrified that the psychopath billionaires are destroying the planet and lying to them about it. They need to be terrified of dying due to preventable illness because of a predatory medical system. Appealing to the conservative sense of fair play or justice is a losing strategy. They see the world as a zero sum game.
Harris's strategy of bringing joy is good - for those who already support the Democrats. Conservatives are, in my experience, not people who see the world as a place for joy, but of suffering. They glorify this suffering as they worship a dead man on a dead tree - destruction of both humanity and the planet - for those who care to think deeply about their religious mythology. That is the reality of it. When I did a search just now on "suffering is what gives our lives meaning," there were 325 million hits.
Your approach may be necessary due to the short time until the election. I prefer the "carrot" approach rather than the "stick." For example, the Republicans are banning abortion and birth control, while Harris proposes $6,000 for every newborn and childcare.
We are evolving, but we need to identify greedy hoarders as mentally ill and learn to deal with them to protect the rest of us. Hartmann's "Hidden History of American Democracy: Rediscovering Humanity's Ancient Way of Living" is another book with an audio version that I listened to recently. Part Four includes suggested solutions to the modern battle for Democracy.
I don't completely disagree, but if you check the right-wing sites, conservatives are against the $6K per child; they interpret it as giving black people or "slutty" single mothers "their money." Some people respond to the carrot and we should court them; others only recognize a stick. The Democrats have failed to see this and it has resulted in many losses. I think Harris is creating a balance; she doesn't hesitate to call out the conservative nightmares facing us, but she also appeals to those looking for joy instead of doom.
For many of the most entrenched Trump supporters, fear is the only thing that will reach them. Instilling fear is how Trump has succeeded so wildly. Unfortunately, the ratio of those driven by fear has reached a critical mass.
Yes, scare the feces out of them with the truth, something the democratic leadership will not do! A dictator can take their guns, rape their families, exterminate the unhealthy, hire immigrants only for less money, give them cancer, torture them, take their social security and lower the minimum wage....... They respond to force and fear, not mommy talk!
Reading your article today made me think about the speeches at the DNC last week and recall the one Hemingway gave in his Nobel Prize for literature acceptance :
“ It is because we have had such great writers in the past that a writer is driven far out past where he can go , out to where no one can help him .”
This symbolic reference to the “ Old Man and the Sea” is our relentless agonizing struggle to keep our Republic - showing courage in the face of adversity and the transformation into triumph after a terrible setback. The old man went fishing but he captured our hearts and soul . We may find ourselves adrift at any given time but I think the metaphor must be that we go fishing for each other and embrace ( as you say ) social harmony. We may feel alone at sea but we are never without humanity.
Normally I wouldn't sass you, because it's great to have you here, but.....
Depression, PTSD, pain from head injuries and plane accidents, and everyone's WWII favorite medication was booze. Just saying as a veteran myself and the daughter of a tail-gunner.
Very possible, especially when someone doesn't know how to handle the fame, money, and adoration. Perhaps doesn't think they deserve it. Maybe couldn't drink away all that he did NOT do in the wars.
I just don't think of suicide as bad, I think of it as sad. Could have realized all that at the end.
There's a short article from last week about what stress can physically do to brain cells: Scientists Have Discovered Strange DNA in Our Brains – and It Could Be Shortening Our Lives - SciTechDaily
Married 4 times, beat up, humiliated all his wives. Beat up his acquaintances starting at a young age. Indiscriminately shot at people. It's true that he was a spy for the US in Cuba during WW II, but left his third wife, and went to England. Supposedly murdered prisoners.....
Mr. Solomon, I am old enough to agree with you. Hemmingway was badly afflicted by toxic male dominance syndrome. He understood only one thing. I read his novels when I was a college student. Even at that young age it was easy to spot his fake tough guy routine. "Courage is grace under pressure." My god what B.S.
I was amazed that he won the Nobel Prize for literature. But then..... they gave Obama the peace prize. After which Obama used drones to kill at great distances more frequently than any President before him while continuing the Afghanistan violence. Sometimes the Nobel committee just gets it wrong.
There was a long term study of baboon behavior that followed a very unhealthy band of baboons that had a lot of violent bullying behavior throughout the band. They had a lot of the inflammatory illnesses we see in humans with PTSD. The aggressive alpha males ultimately encountered a stash of tainted meat from a resort hotel, and of course, ate all of it, killing those few males off. So, the beta males had to take over and within one generation the band was healthy, and had no more of the bullying behavior that was stressing the band out. It was a whole different band! So there's hope! Vote. Them. Out.
I saw this first on a documentary I think on the nature of happiness or mental health or something but have not been able to find the documentary which interviewed the researcher. He told a great story. See links below.
I have been thinking about something along these lines for a while now--that a small minority of hoarding psychopaths ( I characterize them more charitably as control freaks) take over everything just by insisting and complaining and throwing tantrums. The reason we have nation-states is that the borders represent an "othering" of humanity into interminable rivalries that the alphas will forever exploit.
We are all the other. No matter the level of privilege we perceive as having, life is not static. In fact life is intolerant to this - stagnation. We are only as strong as our most vulnerable. To harm is to harm ourselves, for one day, we too will become the less fortunate. Today's wannabe king's - and everyone in between - are tomorrow's ashes. Our resistance to this truth is where the suffering flourishes, not in the truth itself.
A deep insight, Jon. As I age, I find myself looking at the world and realizing the oligarchs will die just like the rest of us, no matter how destructive their behaviors have been. I ask myself about my part in it all, because most of us played the game in one way or another, though on a smaller scale. It's folly that is passed down generation after generation.
Buried here, alas, is the lesson of early human societies—if you cannot neuter the pathological, psychotic, so-called alpha males by peaceful means, only one alternative remains. That is why we MUST have a blue November up and down the ballot. So we are not driven into a devolutionary spiral.
And with every one of Trump's hateful utterances of "China virus!" Asian Americans were otherized and subjected to vile attacks and diminishment. We must end his reign of true terror against us.
The alternative way to defeat MAGA is to identify THEM as the other.
We can do both. We have the alma mater, the pep band, the cheerleaders, the pom poms, etc. FDR had Happy Days. We have Kamala days. At the DNC, the surrogates laid out the reasons to have the other, while Kamala led her own cheers. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rfQ9JGyJFdc
The second easiest way is to identify their leader, i.e. Trump, as a threat to personal interests.
Blue wave - blue tsunami - register more Democrats.
I have commented before about the study done to professions relative to their percentage of individuals; e.g., house-painters registered highest re alcoholism, lawyers second, MD's fifth, etc. When the study was done re sociopaths, an astoundingly large first place was Corporate CEOs. Corporate CEOs rebelled, and actually the malady of "sociopath" was removed from the DSM manuals--book listing all diseases on every MD desk. Dwell on the power of that influence.
This brings me to the influence of sociopathology and CEOs on the current condition of American capitalism. Earlier capitalism was structured to accommodate a relatively comfortable resonance, livably at least ameniable to our levels of society--lower, upper and middle classes. Today, our capitalism is ruthlessly feral and cannalistic. Competition is blood-lusty and has no boundaries. Anything goes, and the morally worse is celebrated.
The sociopathic influence, marshalled by corporate CEO dictation, has rendered the diseased capitalism we are experience today. IMHO.
If you look at Capital as a disembodied entity in its own right, you can see how, in a world that values capital above all else, that its drive to consume is monumental. I call it The Money because Capital gets people all riled up about "Marxism, etc." Looking at it as a being, unto itself, The Money is a parasite, aggregating itself into fewer and fewer hands until it becomes impossible to control, even by those who think they have their hands on the steering wheel. The Money cannot be controlled unless we rein it in, and even then, it will likely eventually defeat us. It is Yahweh. It is Mammon. I'm not a religious person, but I recognize mythology as symbolic truth. Capital appears to be the Beast mentioned in Revelation, represented by a leopard, a lion and a bear - all apex predators and all within the human psyche. It is in you and it is in me. The only ones who escape are the transcendent - the sages.
There is a way of undercutting the psychopaths, but it is difficult. That is to get their followers to see "The Other" as people like themselves. I accidentally ran into this many years ago when, though a misunderstanding in an Arab country the cops arrested. At the police station their questioning was getting rough until they went through my things and saw pictures of my family. Then they became much friendlier. You see the same thing in "All Quiet on the Western Front" when a German soldier kills a French one. Going through the dead man's pockets he discovers a working man with a wife and child and suddenly is overcome by grief and shame.
Translating this to a bigger scale is hard and people often go back to being what they were (the German kept on fighting anonymous French soldiers). But if the ground is well prepared a single spark of an identifiable person who represents many others may be enough to force a paradigm change. There are many examples of this in history, with Emmett Till and George Floyd recent ones. Travel helps too, though people have to get outside their comfort zones to really understand a place and those who live there, and that doesn't occur so often.
But on the positive side younger people are communicating and working together across ethnic, racial and national lines far more than did their parents. And I think educated folks are better than they used to be at separating foreign citizens as folks like them from what their governments are doing. And in some places, such as Northern Ireland, people just got tired of fighting ancient conflicts. None of this means the hate and those who like to use it aren't going to continue, they certainly are both in the U.S. and abroad. But it does give a little hope.
Othering is a human instinct, biologically evolved for protection of self, tribe and clan.
But we are at the stage in our evolution or development (your choice of words) where we have evolved such things, you would think so, but recent and rather recent events prove the contrary.
So long as their is tribalism, based on nation, state, race, religion or even a sports team preference, there will always be othering.
Russia vs Ukraine
Islam vs Jew
China vs Uyghers (Muslims)
Orthodox (Serbs) vs Kosovians (Muslim)
Hell Serbs vs Croats (Roman Catholics)
Serbs and Croats vs Bosnians (Muslims)
Hets vs Homo's.
Whites vs Blacks
Anglos vs Hispanics
Hutus vs Tursi's
Hindu vs Muslims
the list is endless. humanity is hopeless.
Watch meerkat tribes battle it out on National Geographics.
I think using 2008 as a benchmark for Trump's "othering" may be a bit generous. There is evidence that he has been doing it all of his life.
This is great info as always. Much of what we see with the MAGA cult has to do with the fact that they are using their gut, not reason to make decisions. That's how they are wired.
The Democrats and movement folks I've known all my life want to include others and to listen. That convention was a rainbow, and it showed how every bit of this country can get together and yet do its own "thing". The invitation went out for EVERYONE to join us, in fact, some Republicans invited them too.
Also, what the hell?! I've heard Jane Goodall speak, read some of her stuff---not a word about the beatings and mating issue. I remember she spoke about violence, but not in this context.
For "comic relief" I offer these phrases which one *could* describe "The Others".
1. So-CEO-Path, and So-CEO-Pathic - For the Elon Musks, Mitt Romneys, etc., of our society.
2. Yippee Ki-Yay, MAGA Sucker! - You know who I'm thinking of.
Thanks Thom for citing the Bruce Willis movies!
(My variation of Bruce's signature phrase in "Diehard".)
While amusing - and sometimes very truthful, I don't advocate ad hominems, but here they are, because I'm programmed to go there if it seems so few are paying attention to substance on issues. And they are in our discourse because "The Attack Campaign" and Republican "Attack Policies and Governance" are so prevalent and successful. They seem to work well if the listener is not thinking things through.
PS, I bet I'm not the only person who's become tired of hearing that Mitt is "Normal". This is becoming another media meme aimed to prop up and aid the recovery of his party. No Thanks!
Adam Smith wrote two books. One was on how countries got rich, The Wealth of Nations, which has been taken as a text book in economics. The other was on the morality of the industrial revolution and economic wealth, The Theory of Moral Sentiments. He saw that Empire or "outsourcing" removed the control that the local community had on its merchants and how they did business.
History poses a question: Can a society be unified without its members having a common enemy?
As far as I know, the only societies that have accomplished that end are very small ones isolated from the rest of humanity. Those were mostly united against the common enemy of starvation.
If that rather discouraging observation is universally true, the question becomes: How can we personalize the intertwined existential threats to humanity -- authoritarianism, nuclear war, and global warming -- enough to galvanize the mass of humanity against them?
Thank you, Thom. Another brilliant essay!
We can't stop the Republican "othering." What we CAN do is terrify them, because fear is how they relate to the world. They need to be terrified of handing Trump the nuclear codes because he has dementia - something the mainstream media knows, but refuses to acknowledge. They need to be terrified that IVF will be taken from them. They need to be terrified of Project 2025's impacts to each and every family. They need to be terrified that birth control will be taken from them. They need to be terrified that the psychopath billionaires are destroying the planet and lying to them about it. They need to be terrified of dying due to preventable illness because of a predatory medical system. Appealing to the conservative sense of fair play or justice is a losing strategy. They see the world as a zero sum game.
Harris's strategy of bringing joy is good - for those who already support the Democrats. Conservatives are, in my experience, not people who see the world as a place for joy, but of suffering. They glorify this suffering as they worship a dead man on a dead tree - destruction of both humanity and the planet - for those who care to think deeply about their religious mythology. That is the reality of it. When I did a search just now on "suffering is what gives our lives meaning," there were 325 million hits.
Your approach may be necessary due to the short time until the election. I prefer the "carrot" approach rather than the "stick." For example, the Republicans are banning abortion and birth control, while Harris proposes $6,000 for every newborn and childcare.
We are evolving, but we need to identify greedy hoarders as mentally ill and learn to deal with them to protect the rest of us. Hartmann's "Hidden History of American Democracy: Rediscovering Humanity's Ancient Way of Living" is another book with an audio version that I listened to recently. Part Four includes suggested solutions to the modern battle for Democracy.
I don't completely disagree, but if you check the right-wing sites, conservatives are against the $6K per child; they interpret it as giving black people or "slutty" single mothers "their money." Some people respond to the carrot and we should court them; others only recognize a stick. The Democrats have failed to see this and it has resulted in many losses. I think Harris is creating a balance; she doesn't hesitate to call out the conservative nightmares facing us, but she also appeals to those looking for joy instead of doom.
Give them joy or else a dictator will give them a hell on earth (doom)! Both can be done!
For many of the most entrenched Trump supporters, fear is the only thing that will reach them. Instilling fear is how Trump has succeeded so wildly. Unfortunately, the ratio of those driven by fear has reached a critical mass.
Yes, scare the feces out of them with the truth, something the democratic leadership will not do! A dictator can take their guns, rape their families, exterminate the unhealthy, hire immigrants only for less money, give them cancer, torture them, take their social security and lower the minimum wage....... They respond to force and fear, not mommy talk!
Thom -
Reading your article today made me think about the speeches at the DNC last week and recall the one Hemingway gave in his Nobel Prize for literature acceptance :
“ It is because we have had such great writers in the past that a writer is driven far out past where he can go , out to where no one can help him .”
This symbolic reference to the “ Old Man and the Sea” is our relentless agonizing struggle to keep our Republic - showing courage in the face of adversity and the transformation into triumph after a terrible setback. The old man went fishing but he captured our hearts and soul . We may find ourselves adrift at any given time but I think the metaphor must be that we go fishing for each other and embrace ( as you say ) social harmony. We may feel alone at sea but we are never without humanity.
IMHO Hemmingway was a paranoid suicidal hack.
Normally I wouldn't sass you, because it's great to have you here, but.....
Depression, PTSD, pain from head injuries and plane accidents, and everyone's WWII favorite medication was booze. Just saying as a veteran myself and the daughter of a tail-gunner.
Inside information. https://havanatimes.org/features/breaking-up-with-cuba-book-review/ I have enough info for another book. Mean. Vicious. Bully. Maybe a murderer.
Very possible, especially when someone doesn't know how to handle the fame, money, and adoration. Perhaps doesn't think they deserve it. Maybe couldn't drink away all that he did NOT do in the wars.
I just don't think of suicide as bad, I think of it as sad. Could have realized all that at the end.
There's a short article from last week about what stress can physically do to brain cells: Scientists Have Discovered Strange DNA in Our Brains – and It Could Be Shortening Our Lives - SciTechDaily
I lived around alcoholics as a child and they can all go to hell! Normally I would agree with you Alis!
Married 4 times, beat up, humiliated all his wives. Beat up his acquaintances starting at a young age. Indiscriminately shot at people. It's true that he was a spy for the US in Cuba during WW II, but left his third wife, and went to England. Supposedly murdered prisoners.....
Harsh, but accurate.
Having been forced to read "The Old Man and the Sea" in middle school, I agree. The book, to me, was dreck. But the he-men crowd loved it.
The irony for Cubans is the old man was not Cuban. Came from the Azores. Language not authentic.
I don't begrudge some of his writing, but his schtick was to limit adjectives! Reader has to fill it in the details.
But as a person, he was a miserable drunk. For years, he had families living simultaneously in Key West and Finca Viligia. He destroyed his younger kids. https://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/TS/GregoryHemingway.html#:~:text=MIAMI%20%2D%20Novelist%20Ernest%20Hemingway's%20troubled,for%20the%20county%20corrections%20department.
Mr. Solomon, I am old enough to agree with you. Hemmingway was badly afflicted by toxic male dominance syndrome. He understood only one thing. I read his novels when I was a college student. Even at that young age it was easy to spot his fake tough guy routine. "Courage is grace under pressure." My god what B.S.
I was amazed that he won the Nobel Prize for literature. But then..... they gave Obama the peace prize. After which Obama used drones to kill at great distances more frequently than any President before him while continuing the Afghanistan violence. Sometimes the Nobel committee just gets it wrong.
I intend to order your book.
There was a long term study of baboon behavior that followed a very unhealthy band of baboons that had a lot of violent bullying behavior throughout the band. They had a lot of the inflammatory illnesses we see in humans with PTSD. The aggressive alpha males ultimately encountered a stash of tainted meat from a resort hotel, and of course, ate all of it, killing those few males off. So, the beta males had to take over and within one generation the band was healthy, and had no more of the bullying behavior that was stressing the band out. It was a whole different band! So there's hope! Vote. Them. Out.
If you ever find a good link to that story, I’d love to see it!
I saw this first on a documentary I think on the nature of happiness or mental health or something but have not been able to find the documentary which interviewed the researcher. He told a great story. See links below.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC387823/
https://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/13/science/no-time-for-bullies-baboons-retool-their-culture.html?smid=url-share here's one
For my favorite science geek. Could be a connection to this and it includes stress. A three minute read from last week:
Scientists Have Discovered Strange DNA in Our Brains – and It Could Be Shortening Our Lives - SciTechDaily
I have been thinking about something along these lines for a while now--that a small minority of hoarding psychopaths ( I characterize them more charitably as control freaks) take over everything just by insisting and complaining and throwing tantrums. The reason we have nation-states is that the borders represent an "othering" of humanity into interminable rivalries that the alphas will forever exploit.
Interesting idea Mr. Hobbs. "The reason we have nation-states....."
We are all the other. No matter the level of privilege we perceive as having, life is not static. In fact life is intolerant to this - stagnation. We are only as strong as our most vulnerable. To harm is to harm ourselves, for one day, we too will become the less fortunate. Today's wannabe king's - and everyone in between - are tomorrow's ashes. Our resistance to this truth is where the suffering flourishes, not in the truth itself.
A deep insight, Jon. As I age, I find myself looking at the world and realizing the oligarchs will die just like the rest of us, no matter how destructive their behaviors have been. I ask myself about my part in it all, because most of us played the game in one way or another, though on a smaller scale. It's folly that is passed down generation after generation.
Resistance is the root of all suffering if you follow Ekhart Tolle. He's got a point.
Buried here, alas, is the lesson of early human societies—if you cannot neuter the pathological, psychotic, so-called alpha males by peaceful means, only one alternative remains. That is why we MUST have a blue November up and down the ballot. So we are not driven into a devolutionary spiral.
And with every one of Trump's hateful utterances of "China virus!" Asian Americans were otherized and subjected to vile attacks and diminishment. We must end his reign of true terror against us.
There is no "I" in "team". https://teambuilding.com/blog/team-building-psychology
The alternative way to defeat MAGA is to identify THEM as the other.
We can do both. We have the alma mater, the pep band, the cheerleaders, the pom poms, etc. FDR had Happy Days. We have Kamala days. At the DNC, the surrogates laid out the reasons to have the other, while Kamala led her own cheers. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rfQ9JGyJFdc
The second easiest way is to identify their leader, i.e. Trump, as a threat to personal interests.
Blue wave - blue tsunami - register more Democrats.
https://www.fieldteam6.org/
I have commented before about the study done to professions relative to their percentage of individuals; e.g., house-painters registered highest re alcoholism, lawyers second, MD's fifth, etc. When the study was done re sociopaths, an astoundingly large first place was Corporate CEOs. Corporate CEOs rebelled, and actually the malady of "sociopath" was removed from the DSM manuals--book listing all diseases on every MD desk. Dwell on the power of that influence.
This brings me to the influence of sociopathology and CEOs on the current condition of American capitalism. Earlier capitalism was structured to accommodate a relatively comfortable resonance, livably at least ameniable to our levels of society--lower, upper and middle classes. Today, our capitalism is ruthlessly feral and cannalistic. Competition is blood-lusty and has no boundaries. Anything goes, and the morally worse is celebrated.
The sociopathic influence, marshalled by corporate CEO dictation, has rendered the diseased capitalism we are experience today. IMHO.
If you look at Capital as a disembodied entity in its own right, you can see how, in a world that values capital above all else, that its drive to consume is monumental. I call it The Money because Capital gets people all riled up about "Marxism, etc." Looking at it as a being, unto itself, The Money is a parasite, aggregating itself into fewer and fewer hands until it becomes impossible to control, even by those who think they have their hands on the steering wheel. The Money cannot be controlled unless we rein it in, and even then, it will likely eventually defeat us. It is Yahweh. It is Mammon. I'm not a religious person, but I recognize mythology as symbolic truth. Capital appears to be the Beast mentioned in Revelation, represented by a leopard, a lion and a bear - all apex predators and all within the human psyche. It is in you and it is in me. The only ones who escape are the transcendent - the sages.
There is a way of undercutting the psychopaths, but it is difficult. That is to get their followers to see "The Other" as people like themselves. I accidentally ran into this many years ago when, though a misunderstanding in an Arab country the cops arrested. At the police station their questioning was getting rough until they went through my things and saw pictures of my family. Then they became much friendlier. You see the same thing in "All Quiet on the Western Front" when a German soldier kills a French one. Going through the dead man's pockets he discovers a working man with a wife and child and suddenly is overcome by grief and shame.
Translating this to a bigger scale is hard and people often go back to being what they were (the German kept on fighting anonymous French soldiers). But if the ground is well prepared a single spark of an identifiable person who represents many others may be enough to force a paradigm change. There are many examples of this in history, with Emmett Till and George Floyd recent ones. Travel helps too, though people have to get outside their comfort zones to really understand a place and those who live there, and that doesn't occur so often.
But on the positive side younger people are communicating and working together across ethnic, racial and national lines far more than did their parents. And I think educated folks are better than they used to be at separating foreign citizens as folks like them from what their governments are doing. And in some places, such as Northern Ireland, people just got tired of fighting ancient conflicts. None of this means the hate and those who like to use it aren't going to continue, they certainly are both in the U.S. and abroad. But it does give a little hope.
As a single man or woman, I would have gone to prison. Great? Don't blame us! Sounds like JD Vance!
Othering is a human instinct, biologically evolved for protection of self, tribe and clan.
But we are at the stage in our evolution or development (your choice of words) where we have evolved such things, you would think so, but recent and rather recent events prove the contrary.
So long as their is tribalism, based on nation, state, race, religion or even a sports team preference, there will always be othering.
Russia vs Ukraine
Islam vs Jew
China vs Uyghers (Muslims)
Orthodox (Serbs) vs Kosovians (Muslim)
Hell Serbs vs Croats (Roman Catholics)
Serbs and Croats vs Bosnians (Muslims)
Hets vs Homo's.
Whites vs Blacks
Anglos vs Hispanics
Hutus vs Tursi's
Hindu vs Muslims
the list is endless. humanity is hopeless.
Watch meerkat tribes battle it out on National Geographics.
Jesus, Mary, and Joseph (all could be fictional) William!
You had me until hopeless. We are trying to figure ourselves out and that is a start.
Well there is always hope, alis.
What do people crawl into a 55 gallon drum when they know it is going to be sealed? Hope.
Why do people dig their own graves? Hope
Why do people climb the scaffold: Hope
Why do people cooperate in their own execution by marching to their death? Hope.
There is always hope. Myself I prefer to go down fighting, or least struggling and make my executioner work for it.
I think using 2008 as a benchmark for Trump's "othering" may be a bit generous. There is evidence that he has been doing it all of his life.
This is great info as always. Much of what we see with the MAGA cult has to do with the fact that they are using their gut, not reason to make decisions. That's how they are wired.
The Democrats and movement folks I've known all my life want to include others and to listen. That convention was a rainbow, and it showed how every bit of this country can get together and yet do its own "thing". The invitation went out for EVERYONE to join us, in fact, some Republicans invited them too.
Also, what the hell?! I've heard Jane Goodall speak, read some of her stuff---not a word about the beatings and mating issue. I remember she spoke about violence, but not in this context.
For "comic relief" I offer these phrases which one *could* describe "The Others".
1. So-CEO-Path, and So-CEO-Pathic - For the Elon Musks, Mitt Romneys, etc., of our society.
2. Yippee Ki-Yay, MAGA Sucker! - You know who I'm thinking of.
Thanks Thom for citing the Bruce Willis movies!
(My variation of Bruce's signature phrase in "Diehard".)
While amusing - and sometimes very truthful, I don't advocate ad hominems, but here they are, because I'm programmed to go there if it seems so few are paying attention to substance on issues. And they are in our discourse because "The Attack Campaign" and Republican "Attack Policies and Governance" are so prevalent and successful. They seem to work well if the listener is not thinking things through.
PS, I bet I'm not the only person who's become tired of hearing that Mitt is "Normal". This is becoming another media meme aimed to prop up and aid the recovery of his party. No Thanks!
Adam Smith wrote two books. One was on how countries got rich, The Wealth of Nations, which has been taken as a text book in economics. The other was on the morality of the industrial revolution and economic wealth, The Theory of Moral Sentiments. He saw that Empire or "outsourcing" removed the control that the local community had on its merchants and how they did business.
Thank you, Thom. This newsletter opens up a whole other perspective for me. I'll be reading it again, for sure.
History poses a question: Can a society be unified without its members having a common enemy?
As far as I know, the only societies that have accomplished that end are very small ones isolated from the rest of humanity. Those were mostly united against the common enemy of starvation.
If that rather discouraging observation is universally true, the question becomes: How can we personalize the intertwined existential threats to humanity -- authoritarianism, nuclear war, and global warming -- enough to galvanize the mass of humanity against them?