Billionaires don't just try to buy elections. They also promote the conspiracy theories and malaise that steer people toward fascist politicians, who in turn allow billionaires to loot the country.
It may be possible that the economic numbers are inaccurate -- in the sense that analysts have not probed deep enough to see the actual rationality of consumer behavior. To take just one area of consumer economy: housing.
1.) Increased housing costs have been cumulative, and single numbers in a single year may not tell the whole story. Home ownership keeps on getting completely out of reach and more so each "cumulative" year. Every loss of possibility increases the anxiety about something very traditionally fundamental.
2.) More than ever, housing is increasingly a rental situation. Because of "congestion-pricing" rental formulas, consumers feel (justifiably) vulnerable. It's the "pattern" that is missed by the single-focused numbers.
3. Suburban housing is related to auto and energy costs so there's some additional "cumulative" effect which may not be reflected in the numbers.
Despite the drunken social media at the door, rationality may not be dead.
(although a political party that can't connect war-related gasoline increases to voting behavior may be in trouble).
This is definitely a possibility. Although consumer sentiment and economic data part ways in a very sharp fashion in 2021. Undoubtedly the pandemic was hard on housing budgets, but it’s not like housing suddenly became unaffordable in one year. Still thinking about this.
What is clear to me and I started noticing it during the mid-1980s is people have isolated themselves and are choosing not to communicate interpersonally with other individuals. When social media arrived on the scene, along with IT technolgoy in general it was appealing to Americans who have always been more focused on quick fixes and convenience. It has been part of our culture.
Now people sit next to each other at a dinner table with friends in a restaurant and text-message each other. They willingly elliminate a major portion of how we as human species assimilate information from sources external to ourselves: Social media basically eliminates nonverbal communication. The communication that is most natural to us in determining and deciphering meaning from external sources, especially other humans.
So, as you look at all these systems that impact democracy or any other part of societal cultural norms that people create for whatever purposes, good or bad, the fact is interpersonal communication is deteriorating in our society. Consequently we loose that important factor of synergy that derives from interaction with others. This lack of interpersonal communication, which is most felt at local levels, is what allows someone like Donald Trump to create a cult following. Couple this control of interpersonal communicatsion and you find that people are not exposed to a wider range of perspectives and consequeently are relyiing more on social media versus person to person local community interaction. On one hand with social media you have the benefit of reaching many more people, but on the other hand that communication is not personal and easily corrupted.
It isn’t larger organizations: nation-wide groups we need. It is more local interpersonal communication where if you say something and someone disagrees with you, and you are confronted in a personal space environment that challenges you in real time, you must continue the dialogue until you come to agreed upon terms, or agree to disagree and change the subject. That doesn’t happen in a social media post.
From my point of view, how you create these groups and how they operate will. make a large difference. If you helicopter above all of Congress's bullshit, what you see are humans not able to interpersonally connect, retreating to their offices and trying to figure out how to get around having to enter into dialogue that might take data and information from both points of view and arrive at a decision that neither party thought of and is better than any party has presented separately. That is synergy, not compromise. Synergy is win/win, Compromise is lose/lose and hoping for something's better down the road that never seems to develop.
Wonderfully observed and expressed. For the last decade, my own concise version of a lot of this has been trying to explain to people that our ever-increasing inability to say hello to strangers passing by, waiting in line at the market, or riding in the elevator, etc. correlates exactly with the rise of MAGA/trump. In a world where meaningful conversations happen between strangers, there is no room for the uber-binary MAGA partisan version of human interaction. Unfortunately, social media technologies have contributed mightily to 'rewiring' our brains. Cooperation and synergy are the systemic dynamics that made human progress up until now possible - positing human societies since we mastered agriculture only predicated upon competition & survival of the fittest would have never gotten us to such a lofty experiment as American democracy.
Social media, plus some of the silo-ization that resulted from Covid, have definitely had an effect on the way people learn about and interact with politics. I think we're going to be trying to sort that out for some time to come.
There is a lot of literature and research surfacing to day linking social media to mental illness, especially in children, and linking it to isolationism. The key component which is critical to communication is the elimination of nonverbal communication. My research into interpersonal communication, neuroscience and social psychology clearly points to why people place much more weight on how something is communicated versus the actually worlds used. A lot of evidence shows that 90% of people assign the behavior of the person to the meaning of the message as opposed to the words they choose.
You eyes are the only outward organs of the body that are directly attached to the brain. What you see is passed through the optic nerve to parts of your brain so fast it is processing the observations before you realize you saw them, and with lighting speed pass that through various parts of the brain. The first stop is that part of your brain that focuses on your survival and instincts the goes to the other parts of the brain to determine things like rationale. It makes sense this kind of prioritization is good reasoning for why we consider nonverbal behavior more important than language when trying to determine congruity.
So, eliminating nonverbal communication, which is what someone does at the dinner table when they are texting someone else, often eliminates large parts of the meaning of a message. Now put this in context of a company laying off a large group of people and notifying them by text message or through a What’s App.post.
Geez and the next generation are being raised on this communication dilemma. We don’t teach interpersonal communication anywhere in public or private educational systems, and most college students get far less interpersonal communication than they need to enter the business world.
This became apparent to me when law enforcement learned far more about lone shooter motivation from the shooters social media accounts than they did from the parents, siblings, teachers and friends. Something to think about and change in the future. Thanks for responding. If you found this interesting please share it and subscribe. I don’t use a paywall and I am about to launch a series of video newsletters explaining the interpersonal communication closed system on this Substack.
“I suspect that if Democrats don’t retool their political machinery to confront this excessively powerful class, and counter propaganda, and viral lies, they will succumb to governing failures and factional warfare and (possibly, eventually) total collapse.”
Stating up front here I haven’t (can’t) listen to just this yet but…
Much like the way the Democrats ignored the decades long right wing takeover of the courts, and specifically the Supreme Court, until it was too late it kind of feels like this issue has been ignored, or deemed not important to voters so 🤷♀️ for too long, and the train has left the station.
It may be possible that the economic numbers are inaccurate -- in the sense that analysts have not probed deep enough to see the actual rationality of consumer behavior. To take just one area of consumer economy: housing.
1.) Increased housing costs have been cumulative, and single numbers in a single year may not tell the whole story. Home ownership keeps on getting completely out of reach and more so each "cumulative" year. Every loss of possibility increases the anxiety about something very traditionally fundamental.
2.) More than ever, housing is increasingly a rental situation. Because of "congestion-pricing" rental formulas, consumers feel (justifiably) vulnerable. It's the "pattern" that is missed by the single-focused numbers.
3. Suburban housing is related to auto and energy costs so there's some additional "cumulative" effect which may not be reflected in the numbers.
Despite the drunken social media at the door, rationality may not be dead.
(although a political party that can't connect war-related gasoline increases to voting behavior may be in trouble).
This is definitely a possibility. Although consumer sentiment and economic data part ways in a very sharp fashion in 2021. Undoubtedly the pandemic was hard on housing budgets, but it’s not like housing suddenly became unaffordable in one year. Still thinking about this.
What is clear to me and I started noticing it during the mid-1980s is people have isolated themselves and are choosing not to communicate interpersonally with other individuals. When social media arrived on the scene, along with IT technolgoy in general it was appealing to Americans who have always been more focused on quick fixes and convenience. It has been part of our culture.
Now people sit next to each other at a dinner table with friends in a restaurant and text-message each other. They willingly elliminate a major portion of how we as human species assimilate information from sources external to ourselves: Social media basically eliminates nonverbal communication. The communication that is most natural to us in determining and deciphering meaning from external sources, especially other humans.
So, as you look at all these systems that impact democracy or any other part of societal cultural norms that people create for whatever purposes, good or bad, the fact is interpersonal communication is deteriorating in our society. Consequently we loose that important factor of synergy that derives from interaction with others. This lack of interpersonal communication, which is most felt at local levels, is what allows someone like Donald Trump to create a cult following. Couple this control of interpersonal communicatsion and you find that people are not exposed to a wider range of perspectives and consequeently are relyiing more on social media versus person to person local community interaction. On one hand with social media you have the benefit of reaching many more people, but on the other hand that communication is not personal and easily corrupted.
It isn’t larger organizations: nation-wide groups we need. It is more local interpersonal communication where if you say something and someone disagrees with you, and you are confronted in a personal space environment that challenges you in real time, you must continue the dialogue until you come to agreed upon terms, or agree to disagree and change the subject. That doesn’t happen in a social media post.
From my point of view, how you create these groups and how they operate will. make a large difference. If you helicopter above all of Congress's bullshit, what you see are humans not able to interpersonally connect, retreating to their offices and trying to figure out how to get around having to enter into dialogue that might take data and information from both points of view and arrive at a decision that neither party thought of and is better than any party has presented separately. That is synergy, not compromise. Synergy is win/win, Compromise is lose/lose and hoping for something's better down the road that never seems to develop.
Wonderfully observed and expressed. For the last decade, my own concise version of a lot of this has been trying to explain to people that our ever-increasing inability to say hello to strangers passing by, waiting in line at the market, or riding in the elevator, etc. correlates exactly with the rise of MAGA/trump. In a world where meaningful conversations happen between strangers, there is no room for the uber-binary MAGA partisan version of human interaction. Unfortunately, social media technologies have contributed mightily to 'rewiring' our brains. Cooperation and synergy are the systemic dynamics that made human progress up until now possible - positing human societies since we mastered agriculture only predicated upon competition & survival of the fittest would have never gotten us to such a lofty experiment as American democracy.
Social media, plus some of the silo-ization that resulted from Covid, have definitely had an effect on the way people learn about and interact with politics. I think we're going to be trying to sort that out for some time to come.
There is a lot of literature and research surfacing to day linking social media to mental illness, especially in children, and linking it to isolationism. The key component which is critical to communication is the elimination of nonverbal communication. My research into interpersonal communication, neuroscience and social psychology clearly points to why people place much more weight on how something is communicated versus the actually worlds used. A lot of evidence shows that 90% of people assign the behavior of the person to the meaning of the message as opposed to the words they choose.
You eyes are the only outward organs of the body that are directly attached to the brain. What you see is passed through the optic nerve to parts of your brain so fast it is processing the observations before you realize you saw them, and with lighting speed pass that through various parts of the brain. The first stop is that part of your brain that focuses on your survival and instincts the goes to the other parts of the brain to determine things like rationale. It makes sense this kind of prioritization is good reasoning for why we consider nonverbal behavior more important than language when trying to determine congruity.
So, eliminating nonverbal communication, which is what someone does at the dinner table when they are texting someone else, often eliminates large parts of the meaning of a message. Now put this in context of a company laying off a large group of people and notifying them by text message or through a What’s App.post.
Geez and the next generation are being raised on this communication dilemma. We don’t teach interpersonal communication anywhere in public or private educational systems, and most college students get far less interpersonal communication than they need to enter the business world.
This became apparent to me when law enforcement learned far more about lone shooter motivation from the shooters social media accounts than they did from the parents, siblings, teachers and friends. Something to think about and change in the future. Thanks for responding. If you found this interesting please share it and subscribe. I don’t use a paywall and I am about to launch a series of video newsletters explaining the interpersonal communication closed system on this Substack.
“I suspect that if Democrats don’t retool their political machinery to confront this excessively powerful class, and counter propaganda, and viral lies, they will succumb to governing failures and factional warfare and (possibly, eventually) total collapse.”
Stating up front here I haven’t (can’t) listen to just this yet but…
Much like the way the Democrats ignored the decades long right wing takeover of the courts, and specifically the Supreme Court, until it was too late it kind of feels like this issue has been ignored, or deemed not important to voters so 🤷♀️ for too long, and the train has left the station.
It’s not great.