Coronavirus Psychology Perspective
Zappy Friday!
My help today in this time of pandemic is to educate about proper psychology perspective in a time of panic and uncertainty. We all might be questioning our own sanity from being in new isolation. We all might be questioning our governing sanity in times of new governing actions.
How should we think about these things?
Well I'm going to start us from a birds-eye view of say an American football game already in progress as if you are a fan who is a also a quarterback. You are the quarterback of your own life and you are specifically trying to gain perspective of new psychological patterns. At the birds-eye view then you are the quarterback of a team not on the field.
Next we will fly closer to the field and take a look. Finally we land and take over as the quarterback and look at things as they are on the ground.
I'm first going to take a psychological perspective that is my own, personal view. Facts. I am going to focus on lying because truth is the foundation that a world view is built on.
Here are two psychological views perhaps you yourself might not have considered when looking at the current situation from a birds-eye view.
To summarize:
A healthy country with a healthy psychology would have never platformed Trump's lies. We should've never given the liar a mic. But in our capitalist society the love of money Trumps all other morals. In this there is no difference between Trump and the media. They are both amoral. It is all about the Benjamins. The fact that the liberal media puts a "this is a lie" disclaimer on Trump's lies is irrelevant.
Now lets take our birds-eye view for a closer look at the playing field.
Why? Why is publishing lies as lies for money the same as spreading the lie as truth? Or better stated, why doesn't publishing the lie and labelling it a lie work?
This is a question I get asked often. This is why I am writing this helpful essay. People often ask the question of why don't the Trump supporters change their minds when his lies are called out as lies?
Why indeed? Well, in order to understand this we need to get closer in on the ground game.
First if you are asking the question why don't Trump supporters acknowledge lies when confronted with the truth then you are lying to yourself that you do not do the same thing. Truth is not clear cut, especially when it comes to things we ourselves are incapable of processing. I don't understand the coronavirus as a virus. So when I read a technical assessment of the virus then I just have to accept it. I have no way to discriminate. A simple rule of thumb about lying, or rather recognizing the truth, is that the more intelligent one is then the more capacity one has to discriminate fact from fiction. As humanity then those of us who are so blessed so as to be on the upper end of the intelligence spectrum have an implied responsibility to take care of those less fortunate because the least among us have the least ability to discriminate truth. These are those most vulnerable to lying being seen as truth. The average intelligence is also not above average intelligence. This means those of us with well above average are obligated to take care of not only the most vulnerable but also the average vulnerable. In this liberal media has sold out the average intelligence for click-bait dollars. We live in a time of tabloid journalism. In fact so much so that tabloid journalism is no longer distinguishable. Sensationalism is the news. The only differences between mainstream media and the National Enquirer is that mainstream media will add a disclaimer to some things as being untrue.
So if you are asking yourself why Trump supporters cannot change their minds about Trump's lies then the first psychological view to help you is that truth is not clear cut and to recognize the ability to clear cut truth is an ability. What we are seeing is people being lied too who cannot clear cut truth from lies even when exposed as lies.
Another reason that Trump supporters cannot change their minds is that truth about human desire is relative. The irony here is that Trump supporters will the be the most likely to posit that truth is absolute. Make American Great Again and the American First desires are truths that Trump supporters believe are absolute for all Americans. This is why they feel comfortable using any and all lies to impose them. This is where psychologically we are starting to get into tribalism. Tribes are artificial and arbitrary divisions of humans. Tribal desires are viewed by those in the tribe as absolute truths of human of desires for all people. Tribalism posits that only our tribe has the absolute truth of human desire. Every other tribe is judged by the similarity to our truth of human desire and deemed worthy accordingly.
The truth of human desire has a name. That name is culture. Conservative media has the right of it when they call our existing tensions in America a culture war. Our culture war is a war about the truth of human desire. Culture has a synonym called world view. The difference being that world view applies to both individuals and groups where culture is always describing groups.
When I grew up we read a childhood story in school about the country mouse. The country mouse and the city mouse meet for the first time. The moral to the story is that difference is not necessarily better or worse, but truth of human desire can simply a different truth. This country-mouse childhood story is a live-and-let-live lesson.
Why is this relevant? Because when this country was founded then only ten percent of the population lived in cities. The other ninety percent lived in the country. Today the inverse is true. Today ninety percent live in cities and ten percent live in the country. Okay that's not numerically true but the idea is the same. Today fifty Senators in Washington represent only seventeen percent of the US population. The US government predicts that another twenty percent of the population the currently lives in the country will move to the city in the next couple of decades because that's where the jobs are. Given this then the culture war between the city folk and country folk will only get worse and extremes of lying to match the divide of truth of human desire will increase. A constitution written for a rural American cannot sustain metropolitan America. We are trying to fit a square peg in a round hole.
Okay so that is the birds-eye view as we swoop in to land on the field and take a personal view. The US has always been tribes split between country folk and city folk. The demographics of the US are dramatically shifting from countryside to city dweller. These two tribes have never agreed on the truth of human desire. Rather the country folk have always dominated the city folk. One tribe was always stronger than the other. Now things are shifting due to technology. All the jobs are shifting to the cities.
What is the world we desire to live in? City desires are different than country desires. As folks move to the city then they are losing their religion, their countryside culture. So it is only natural that a culture war erupts when the balance of power shifts between competing tribes. In some respects the game is already over. The city folk are easily going to win just based upon the balance shifting in favor the city fol.
So our closer view of the game we see the two teams as city folk versus country folk.
Now we are going to land and take over as the quarterback in a huddle where the only people can see are those in our tribe.
Huddling like an American football team goes by many psychological tropes. Birds of a feather flock together. Or perhaps confirmation bias is the latest trope where people willingly seek out confirming news sources that only confirm what they already believe.
In any case a huddle is just tribalism. There is safety in numbers, another trope. It is survival instinct and therefore unthought thought taken for granted. This tribal thinking also gets called intuition. Intuition is an axe of truth of human desire used to clear cut information.
Okay then. What can we do about this tribalism? How can we compensate for our natural bias and gain new truths while in a huddle? How can we overcome lies that confirm our identity? How can we adjust our game play?
Learning is one answer. Learning is the process were we objectively clear cut truth to some absolute frame of reference. American football teams learn by watching video of the other team in order to create new plays. A lack of learning is something both liberals and conservatives lament about the other side. Both sides of conservative and liberal tribes today lament that the other side cannot learn plays from the other side. This is a source of frustration for everyone and especially to the pro-life movement. I believe the pro-life movement is sincere in their wanting to see their truth of human desire adopted as an absolute, universal truth of human desire. What the pro-life movement refuses to see is that human desire is relative and that this true even for slavery. Slavery desire requires the constant education of humans to reject slavery just has with the truth with holocaust education. If our truth of human desire changes back to wanting slavery then slavery will make a comeback. Slavery is not an absolute moral. There is no absolute human desire.
Learning will fail if it attempts to teach absolute human desires. Learning is a constant process to reinforce relative truth of desire.
In addition, learning takes a long time in order to change emotional identity.
People don't change their identity easily. We are not computers that can simply reboot using another operating system such as Linux to replace Windows. The same lesson needs to be taught over and over again. I give the pro-life movement credit for teaching the same lesson ad-nausem. However, I fault them for not knowing when to give up. Technology will soon make abortion moot as technology will enable pregnancy to only ever be planned.
Learning is frustrated because huddling together for identity is culture. It is a feedback loop. It is the feedback loop that is most important to sustain our identity and not the content of the loop itself. Humans evolved to value social group existence over personal existence. Therefore our truth of human desire is culture identity first, content of the identity second.
If we cannot learn within the huddle then can we just teach ourselves to break out of the huddle?
Some of us have always existed outside the huddle. In human nature some of us do not identify strongly with groups. We are often called free thinkers. We are often called atheists. The point is though that we reject our tribe's identity in preference to one of our own creation. I am such a person. Some people might think this makes us objective because we can observe tribes from a distance. That's absurd. We are subjective. We are subjective to the huddle of our culture of one.
This notion that we are all trapped in a huddle of culture of some kind has recently been expressed by Jordan Peterson. Jordan Peterson is a psychologist out of Canada of some fame in pop culture today. He posits that atheists are all murderers and rapists because they have no moral god to rule and discipline them. Peterson goes on to argue that given science has shown that murderers and rapists are mentally unstable then Peterson concludes there are no atheists. To Peterson people in culture who are peaceful and call themselves atheists are just cultural Christians. Everyone is religious in Peterson's world view except the mentally deficient. There only exists the overt religious people and cultural religious people. This is the same way we think of all Jews as either cultural Jews or observing Jews. Atheism is cultural Christianity to Jordan Peterson. If that's true then the word atheism defines some Christian adjacent value system evolution and science replace god and that kind of thing. This is a common argument lobbed at us atheists. We are often accused of substituting a god of religion with evolution and science.
Sam Harris is a public atheist who takes exception to Peterson's kind of thinking. Sam argues that atheism is a lack of belief. Sam argues that lack of belief defines nothing just like the lack of belief in the Easter Bunny does not define any culture world over for those people who do not believe in the Easter Bunny and have never heard of it. Sam Harris and most atheists reject Peterson's view.
So which is it? Can we break out of the tribal huddle and be free? Or are those of us who believe we are not in the huddle just cultural Christians where we substitute things like science and evolution for culture? Can any of us ever expect to be truly disconnected from culture even for a moment and so be free to change our minds about a lie?
Sam Harris would freely admit he is a product of his culture and since he grew up in a Christian culture then he is Christian culture adjacent. The question here is not of kind but of degree. What degree? Free-thinkers are anti-group. I cannot stress this enough. Free-thinkers are anti-group. On the whole we are not joiners. We don't join groups. What this means is we are counter-culture or against culture. That is our psychology. The upshot is that atheists will not congregate with each other or the greater culture at large.
Atheists unite! Free-thinkers unite! These are jokes in the free-thinking community. Sam attributes this lack of huddling to a lack of belief defining no common cause. I see the correct psychological perspective as what Grouch Marx observed:
This is clarion call of free-thinkers who are also anti-joiners.
The answer then is we cannot be free of culture, but we can be anti-culture or counter culture by choice.
The point here is that we all huddle even it is with just by ourself in opposition to others.
Here's a question: what culture are the non-religious today? They represent twenty-percent of American culture. They are not free-thinkers like myself. We cannot see a genetic-shift overnight to a new set of twenty percent free-thinkers who are anti-joiners. The natural percent of free thinkers such as myself who are anti-joiners hasn't changed, we are probably still at around one-to-three percent. It would be a culture catastrophe if that were the case. One might speculate that such anti-joiners do serve a purpose as lubricant necessary in evolution to keep tribes from killing each other by acting as traitors, subversives, and ambassadors between tribes. We are an evolutionary necessity that facilitates maintaining competing tribalism for genetic diversity. Live and let live. However, too many free-thinkers and your cultural cohesion fails apart. So what culture are the non-religious in the US today? I'd argue they are a bench culture. They are on the sideline waiting to decide. They loosely align with traditional culture but will seemingly run counter-culture at the drop of a hat.
So that is our quarterback-in-a-huddle psychological world view. We all belong to a tribe that shares truth of human desire, even free thinkers. Many of us are side-lined or benched because we are waiting on some new culture to emerge. This is causing cultural stress. The US is in some ways like a conquered nation where the existing culture was destroyed and changes have made reinstating previous culture is nigh impossible.
One final note on this. I am overgeneralizing. All of us have degrees of character traits. For example, we are all on a gender spectrum of male-to-female for all our personality traits. We all have some degree of free-thinking. Those of us with dominant free-thinking personalities such as myself still culturally identify with the greater culture on some points. So Peterson does have point in that regard. What Peterson gets wrong is that free-thinkers will identify with the wider culture in seemingly random ways. This aligns more with Sam Harris who believes lack of belief defines nothing. Free-thinkers align with different parts of the greater culture capriciously and arbitrarily. This is also going to be true of the twenty-percent of non-religious on the side-lines trying to figure out who they culturally want to be. They are occasionally counter-cultural but are seeking a new one. Free thinkers are always anti-culture.
The best we can do to update lies while in a huddle is to learn the same lesson repeatedly and plan for social change over a long period time while we are in huddle.
What about when we engage each other in opposition? Can we accept new truth then? And now we are going to get out of the huddle and execute a play. Once that happens then our tribes mix with each other. Defense and offense members trade places between the tribes. Then things get messy. Some of your team members are trying to stop the opposing team and some are trying to further the ball downfield.
Conservative media engages the opposition while stuck in psychological quicksand of their own making today. They are stuck sinking in confirmation-bias quicksand in perpetual huddle. They can't run plays. If you only huddle in confirmation bias media then your team cannot break and move the ball downfield. At some level I believe some in the MAGA movement are sincere in wanting to run plays to convert independents in America to their truth of human desire defined as a conservative American. These conservatives realize that unless they convince more people to their side that their nationalism will fail. There also exists in conservative tribe the factions that have no interest in the converting others and instead are in favor of the tyranny and oppression. This play-book has plays of white supremacy and religious supremacy and they are on the rise.
Liberal media plays are likewise stuck is in psychological quicksand, that of meta-culture. Liberal culture has a cultural value that conservatives do not have that is known as live-and-let-live, or tolerance. I believe some of the frustration of non-Trump supporters with Trump supporters is meta-culture awareness. Trump exemplifies primitive all-or-nothing tribal instincts where one lacks meta-culture awareness. His black-and-white language of winners and losers excludes live-and-let-live. Trump supporters have no world view of side-by-side culture. MAGA is an all or nothing proposition where everyone must be a Christian or they are the enemy to be destroyed. Atheists and free-thinkers such as myself are not welcome in the conservative movement because we criticize everyone. Therefore we align with the liberal movement because tolerance of a culture-of-one is no different than tolerance any other different culture. Liberals are still stuck though and unable to run a play to defeat to primitive tribalism when expecting meta-cultural opponents and not primitive oppenents. They are stuck.
Another example of liberal meta-culture quicksand is the so called social justice warriors who are accelerating the fracturing of larger cultures into a much larger subset of cultures. SJWs are challenging the rate at which a larger culture can sub-divide. This is not a statement about what is justice, but what is practical. We often hear the trope of someone's grandparent being racist and yet we just leave them be because they are too old to change. Cultures are slow to change. The quicksand of the SJWs is the slow rate of culture change is resisting their desired pace of fracturing larger culture into smaller pieces that they are demanding. This quicksand also includes liberal culture at large.
Another meta-culture quicksand for liberals is the bench of sidelined new cultural seekers who at times identify with conservative culture. They are very unsure of their truth of human desire. Liberal culture has far less cohesion of culture than conservative culture. Advantage goes to conservative culture here. Liberal culture is in a state of flux where traditions and norms are being rewritten daily and conservative culture is a frequently used as a safe haven.
That's our huddle perspective as a quarterback. We cannot expect lies to be learned as lies while people are huddled and we cannot run plays while trapped in quicksand.
How did we get here?
Humanity started modern physics by believing an absolute frame of reference in space existed. This reference was called the Ether. One could measure an inch of space and it was fixed. This turned out not to be true. Space is expanding. In the same vein religion started modern culture believing that the truth of human desire was an absolute culture frame of reference in culture existed. Thus religions all have a stated objective of mono-culture. Religions have all taught that moral objectivity exists and that the best culture is a single culture of that one religion. This turned out not to be true. Culture is expanding but we have to date no expanding theory of culture.
This ends our psychological journey. We started out at a birds-eye view looking down at an entire field of play and then zoomed in until we landed in a huddle where we our view is limited to just our tribe.
Our identity is not subject to change with notice when something we hold true is exposed as a lie. We cannot change our identity. Any liar then can tap into a tribe's identity can be accepted as a truth teller when lying if the lie maps to culture. The truth they are telling is speaking to the truth of human desire. This is the old lemming trope where lemmings willing go over the cliff to their deaths simply by following the tribe.
The answer as to why Trump supporters believe lies are true even when lies are exposed as such is culture.
This truth applies to liberal culture such as it is today, even as it is in flux. Twenty-years from now the liberal culture is going to be hand-ringing mocking Trump. Trump is mentally impaired. We shouldn't make fun of the mentally impaired. Trump has no empathy. Trump could murder millions, eat a cheeseburger, and sleep easy. That is not his fault. It was not his choice. He was born that way and further conditioned by a dysfunctional childhood. The cultural issue has always been Trump's voters. Why are we putting the mentally ill in charge of the country? That's a cultural moral failure and it is not just of those who voted for Trump because we all share responsibility. The country is undergoing a massive cultural shift in identity from countryside to city dweller and countryside folk are threatened. This American identity change is frightening to people who feel their culture is disappearing out of their control. The difference between liberals and conservatives today in this regard is that liberals do not have an established culture where conservatives do. Conservatives want to retain their culture. Liberals don't have an established culture to recommend because liberals are trying to define one.
Liberal responsibility for managing truth of human desire comes in two forms today while our liberal culture is in chaos. First we must admit we have intelligence on our side and therefore the lion's share of the responsibility falls on us. Finger pointing at Trump supporters is fruitless. They will not have answers. Further we must admit that even we liberals are unsettled ourselves by not having a well defined culture to offer up to conservatives as an alternative. As a free thinker I'm at ease with a culture of one, but most are not. We cannot offer conservatives a straight up culture replacement today.
So what is the answer here to our culture wars?
Let's take stock. We have the conservative movement with a well-defined cultural identity. We have a liberal movement with a cultural identity in turmoil. Conservatives are incorrect in positing that the culture war is one of conservative versus liberal. The culture war is one of conservatives against liberal culture in turmoil. The liberals in this sense are an easy target because they are in disarray. However the conservatives are still at an even bigger disadvantage because they are losing population in their tribe. The city dwellers are gaining countryside population and converting conservatives to liberalism simply by this fact alone.
Where does that leave us? Well, nowhere. We are nowhere.
Except with Irreni World Scale.
Irreni World Scale has the correct psychological assessment of tribalism. Irreni divides the existing worlds from its existing two-hundred some countries today into two-hundred million tribes tomorrow. These tribes have thirty people and are called MGOs for micro-modular governing organizations. Further Irreni is a balanced tribal system that enforces that the most intelligent of our species are obligated to take care of those with less intelligence. The intelligent minority is not allowed to huddle in primary government. Instead each MGO is balanced with an overall intelligence quotient per MGO. This is not be fair but instead is an acknowledgement of a moral. That moral is humans need to take care of each other as a universal truth of human desire. Everyone is in. This means people of exceptional talents must spread out and not be allowed to congregate as birds of a feather and then dominate everyone else. This is our fate and will happen if we do not deliberately design culture accordingly today.
Irreni World Scale is not a full blown culture, it has only a few universal truths of human desire. This is because Irreni is not a culture, it is a meta-culture. Irreni is not a government but a meta-government. Once we agree upon the few universal truths of human desire included in Irreni then we afford the optimal environment for freedom of choice of culture. Each MGO can have a highly specific culture as they want as long as tyranny and oppression are not included.
Truth of reality cannot trump truth of human desire that is culture and identity. That is human nature. Trump is simply playing into our nature and liberal media is enabling Trump by massively spreading Trump's lies and thus promoting culture war. Trump's lies feed into an identity that has increasing felt threatened by the changing demographics of the US becoming more urban. Trump's supporters accept his lies as truth to retain culture. As a consequence our current culture is devolving into unthought thought of pure tribalism. If we continue on this path and do not change by adopting Irreni World Scale then we can expect new levels of violence to ensue. Violence is unthought thought. People today do not understand that the pen is mightier than the gun and the computer is mightier than the pen. Such people are hoarding guns. Think of all the money they are wasting on guns and think of how powerless they will be to computer tyranny.
People often ask the question why don't the Trump supporters change their minds when his lies are called out? The short answer is truth of cultural and personal identity trumps truth of objective reality. The solution is to adopt new governing called Irreni World Scale that manages our tribal nature before we tear each other apart either due to lack of culture on the left or the right fighting a left that is in cultural disarray.
Join an MGO today!
You can learn more about Irreni World Scale by visiting:
Cheers!
Benefit of cooperation replaces rule of law!
Freethinkers unite!
Freedom!
Party On!
Let's get cracking!
Voluntarily Reject Demagoguery!
Politics as Science!
Demand Irreni World Scale!
Anti-theism is feminism!
Think disruption!
Empathy for all!
Moral relativity: think it, breath it!
Prove it or lose it!
Conversations equal consensus!
Welcome to the 21st century!
Scale your empathy, scale the world!
Find your tribe!
Be sexy people!
The future is coming!
Innovate at a rapid pace!
Slow speed ahead!
Well come! and well met!
Coronavirus Psychology Perspective
My help today in this time of pandemic is to educate about proper psychology perspective in a time of panic and uncertainty. We all might be questioning our own sanity from being in new isolation. We all might be questioning our governing sanity in times of new governing actions.
How should we think about these things?
Well I'm going to start us from a birds-eye view of say an American football game already in progress as if you are a fan who is a also a quarterback. You are the quarterback of your own life and you are specifically trying to gain perspective of new psychological patterns. At the birds-eye view then you are the quarterback of a team not on the field.
Next we will fly closer to the field and take a look. Finally we land and take over as the quarterback and look at things as they are on the ground.
I'm first going to take a psychological perspective that is my own, personal view. Facts. I am going to focus on lying because truth is the foundation that a world view is built on.
- Trump is a proven liar. The Washington Post has an ongoing scorecard of all the lies Trump has told. Further Trump is unprecedented liar as a President. Indeed all Presidents lie but Trump is in a class all of his own with total count. As a result then I expect Trump to always be lying. He lies about the coronavirus pandemic daily. Why would I expect anything else?
- The Chinese government is a proven liar. Show me anywhere in any communist manifesto written prior to the first communist country established where censorship and lying are considered the moral way to run a country. You won't find it. China does this every day. They are not communist. China is authoritarian despotism. It always has been. Mao was a tyrant. I bring this up because this is the Chinese government's psychology. This is old news. China's ongoing censorship and lying to its own people every day is well established. If China lies to its own people then why would there ever be any expectation they would tell the truth to the rest of the world? So again as with Trump then why would there exist any expectation that either is ever telling the truth?
Here are two psychological views perhaps you yourself might not have considered when looking at the current situation from a birds-eye view.
- Liberal media is spreading lies even when labelling lies. The left is complicit in spreading Trumps' lies for click-bait dollars. In recent days we have seen a bit of a conscience and some remorse for this where some liberal media outlets have said they are going to stop broadcasting Trump's daily briefings on coronavirus response. Uhhhh, this is not a case of better late than never. This is a case of the horse has already left the barn. Spreading lies for money even when calling them lies is a special kind of lying, lying for money. We label cigarettes as dangerous to your health and what effect did that have on smoking by itself? Very little. It wasn't until we banned smoking outright that we got to where we are today. Labelling Trump's lies as dangerous to your health has the same minimal effect as labelling cigarettes dangerous to your health. Trump's lies need to be banned outright.
- Trump has engaged in special lying as well. Trump has been promoting the Chinese government has been lying and thus blaming the Chinese government for the severity of the outbreak in the US. This is a special kinda lie. Everyone knows the Chinese government lies. So why the fake outrage over the Chinese government lying? Well, obviously Trump is trying to shift the blame for his lack of response in January and February onto the Chinese government. Lying by blaming known liars for not telling the truth deserves its own name. I'm just going to make up a name. Blaming known liars for not telling the truth is now called a red lie. Trump is telling a red lie. There has never been any expectation that China is ever telling the whole truth. There has always been some truth in what China reports but thinking the report is the whole truth is like expecting the tip of the iceberg to be the whole iceberg. The American government has a spy system specifically to deal with the whole truth. Where are the CIA reports about what's actually going on in China? Hmmmm? It is interesting to me that the Trump government has shown satellite images of the Iranian graveyards of dead from the coronavirus but not the Chinese graveyards. Trump is just red lying to shift blame off himself.
To summarize:
- Liberal media has been spreading Trump propaganda and lies with wild abandon for money. Pointing these lies out to be lies is simply political cover or pretend conscience in order to assuage their guilt with some rationalization.
- Conservative media and Trump are red lying by pretending a liar has an expectation to tell the truth. They do so in order to shift blame from a lack of response in January and February.
A healthy country with a healthy psychology would have never platformed Trump's lies. We should've never given the liar a mic. But in our capitalist society the love of money Trumps all other morals. In this there is no difference between Trump and the media. They are both amoral. It is all about the Benjamins. The fact that the liberal media puts a "this is a lie" disclaimer on Trump's lies is irrelevant.
Now lets take our birds-eye view for a closer look at the playing field.
Why? Why is publishing lies as lies for money the same as spreading the lie as truth? Or better stated, why doesn't publishing the lie and labelling it a lie work?
This is a question I get asked often. This is why I am writing this helpful essay. People often ask the question of why don't the Trump supporters change their minds when his lies are called out as lies?
Why indeed? Well, in order to understand this we need to get closer in on the ground game.
First if you are asking the question why don't Trump supporters acknowledge lies when confronted with the truth then you are lying to yourself that you do not do the same thing. Truth is not clear cut, especially when it comes to things we ourselves are incapable of processing. I don't understand the coronavirus as a virus. So when I read a technical assessment of the virus then I just have to accept it. I have no way to discriminate. A simple rule of thumb about lying, or rather recognizing the truth, is that the more intelligent one is then the more capacity one has to discriminate fact from fiction. As humanity then those of us who are so blessed so as to be on the upper end of the intelligence spectrum have an implied responsibility to take care of those less fortunate because the least among us have the least ability to discriminate truth. These are those most vulnerable to lying being seen as truth. The average intelligence is also not above average intelligence. This means those of us with well above average are obligated to take care of not only the most vulnerable but also the average vulnerable. In this liberal media has sold out the average intelligence for click-bait dollars. We live in a time of tabloid journalism. In fact so much so that tabloid journalism is no longer distinguishable. Sensationalism is the news. The only differences between mainstream media and the National Enquirer is that mainstream media will add a disclaimer to some things as being untrue.
So if you are asking yourself why Trump supporters cannot change their minds about Trump's lies then the first psychological view to help you is that truth is not clear cut and to recognize the ability to clear cut truth is an ability. What we are seeing is people being lied too who cannot clear cut truth from lies even when exposed as lies.
Another reason that Trump supporters cannot change their minds is that truth about human desire is relative. The irony here is that Trump supporters will the be the most likely to posit that truth is absolute. Make American Great Again and the American First desires are truths that Trump supporters believe are absolute for all Americans. This is why they feel comfortable using any and all lies to impose them. This is where psychologically we are starting to get into tribalism. Tribes are artificial and arbitrary divisions of humans. Tribal desires are viewed by those in the tribe as absolute truths of human of desires for all people. Tribalism posits that only our tribe has the absolute truth of human desire. Every other tribe is judged by the similarity to our truth of human desire and deemed worthy accordingly.
The truth of human desire has a name. That name is culture. Conservative media has the right of it when they call our existing tensions in America a culture war. Our culture war is a war about the truth of human desire. Culture has a synonym called world view. The difference being that world view applies to both individuals and groups where culture is always describing groups.
When I grew up we read a childhood story in school about the country mouse. The country mouse and the city mouse meet for the first time. The moral to the story is that difference is not necessarily better or worse, but truth of human desire can simply a different truth. This country-mouse childhood story is a live-and-let-live lesson.
Why is this relevant? Because when this country was founded then only ten percent of the population lived in cities. The other ninety percent lived in the country. Today the inverse is true. Today ninety percent live in cities and ten percent live in the country. Okay that's not numerically true but the idea is the same. Today fifty Senators in Washington represent only seventeen percent of the US population. The US government predicts that another twenty percent of the population the currently lives in the country will move to the city in the next couple of decades because that's where the jobs are. Given this then the culture war between the city folk and country folk will only get worse and extremes of lying to match the divide of truth of human desire will increase. A constitution written for a rural American cannot sustain metropolitan America. We are trying to fit a square peg in a round hole.
Okay so that is the birds-eye view as we swoop in to land on the field and take a personal view. The US has always been tribes split between country folk and city folk. The demographics of the US are dramatically shifting from countryside to city dweller. These two tribes have never agreed on the truth of human desire. Rather the country folk have always dominated the city folk. One tribe was always stronger than the other. Now things are shifting due to technology. All the jobs are shifting to the cities.
What is the world we desire to live in? City desires are different than country desires. As folks move to the city then they are losing their religion, their countryside culture. So it is only natural that a culture war erupts when the balance of power shifts between competing tribes. In some respects the game is already over. The city folk are easily going to win just based upon the balance shifting in favor the city fol.
So our closer view of the game we see the two teams as city folk versus country folk.
Now we are going to land and take over as the quarterback in a huddle where the only people can see are those in our tribe.
Huddling like an American football team goes by many psychological tropes. Birds of a feather flock together. Or perhaps confirmation bias is the latest trope where people willingly seek out confirming news sources that only confirm what they already believe.
In any case a huddle is just tribalism. There is safety in numbers, another trope. It is survival instinct and therefore unthought thought taken for granted. This tribal thinking also gets called intuition. Intuition is an axe of truth of human desire used to clear cut information.
Okay then. What can we do about this tribalism? How can we compensate for our natural bias and gain new truths while in a huddle? How can we overcome lies that confirm our identity? How can we adjust our game play?
Learning is one answer. Learning is the process were we objectively clear cut truth to some absolute frame of reference. American football teams learn by watching video of the other team in order to create new plays. A lack of learning is something both liberals and conservatives lament about the other side. Both sides of conservative and liberal tribes today lament that the other side cannot learn plays from the other side. This is a source of frustration for everyone and especially to the pro-life movement. I believe the pro-life movement is sincere in their wanting to see their truth of human desire adopted as an absolute, universal truth of human desire. What the pro-life movement refuses to see is that human desire is relative and that this true even for slavery. Slavery desire requires the constant education of humans to reject slavery just has with the truth with holocaust education. If our truth of human desire changes back to wanting slavery then slavery will make a comeback. Slavery is not an absolute moral. There is no absolute human desire.
Learning will fail if it attempts to teach absolute human desires. Learning is a constant process to reinforce relative truth of desire.
In addition, learning takes a long time in order to change emotional identity.
People don't change their identity easily. We are not computers that can simply reboot using another operating system such as Linux to replace Windows. The same lesson needs to be taught over and over again. I give the pro-life movement credit for teaching the same lesson ad-nausem. However, I fault them for not knowing when to give up. Technology will soon make abortion moot as technology will enable pregnancy to only ever be planned.
Learning is frustrated because huddling together for identity is culture. It is a feedback loop. It is the feedback loop that is most important to sustain our identity and not the content of the loop itself. Humans evolved to value social group existence over personal existence. Therefore our truth of human desire is culture identity first, content of the identity second.
If we cannot learn within the huddle then can we just teach ourselves to break out of the huddle?
Some of us have always existed outside the huddle. In human nature some of us do not identify strongly with groups. We are often called free thinkers. We are often called atheists. The point is though that we reject our tribe's identity in preference to one of our own creation. I am such a person. Some people might think this makes us objective because we can observe tribes from a distance. That's absurd. We are subjective. We are subjective to the huddle of our culture of one.
This notion that we are all trapped in a huddle of culture of some kind has recently been expressed by Jordan Peterson. Jordan Peterson is a psychologist out of Canada of some fame in pop culture today. He posits that atheists are all murderers and rapists because they have no moral god to rule and discipline them. Peterson goes on to argue that given science has shown that murderers and rapists are mentally unstable then Peterson concludes there are no atheists. To Peterson people in culture who are peaceful and call themselves atheists are just cultural Christians. Everyone is religious in Peterson's world view except the mentally deficient. There only exists the overt religious people and cultural religious people. This is the same way we think of all Jews as either cultural Jews or observing Jews. Atheism is cultural Christianity to Jordan Peterson. If that's true then the word atheism defines some Christian adjacent value system evolution and science replace god and that kind of thing. This is a common argument lobbed at us atheists. We are often accused of substituting a god of religion with evolution and science.
Sam Harris is a public atheist who takes exception to Peterson's kind of thinking. Sam argues that atheism is a lack of belief. Sam argues that lack of belief defines nothing just like the lack of belief in the Easter Bunny does not define any culture world over for those people who do not believe in the Easter Bunny and have never heard of it. Sam Harris and most atheists reject Peterson's view.
So which is it? Can we break out of the tribal huddle and be free? Or are those of us who believe we are not in the huddle just cultural Christians where we substitute things like science and evolution for culture? Can any of us ever expect to be truly disconnected from culture even for a moment and so be free to change our minds about a lie?
Sam Harris would freely admit he is a product of his culture and since he grew up in a Christian culture then he is Christian culture adjacent. The question here is not of kind but of degree. What degree? Free-thinkers are anti-group. I cannot stress this enough. Free-thinkers are anti-group. On the whole we are not joiners. We don't join groups. What this means is we are counter-culture or against culture. That is our psychology. The upshot is that atheists will not congregate with each other or the greater culture at large.
Atheists unite! Free-thinkers unite! These are jokes in the free-thinking community. Sam attributes this lack of huddling to a lack of belief defining no common cause. I see the correct psychological perspective as what Grouch Marx observed:
I will join no group that would have me as its member.
This is clarion call of free-thinkers who are also anti-joiners.
The answer then is we cannot be free of culture, but we can be anti-culture or counter culture by choice.
The point here is that we all huddle even it is with just by ourself in opposition to others.
Here's a question: what culture are the non-religious today? They represent twenty-percent of American culture. They are not free-thinkers like myself. We cannot see a genetic-shift overnight to a new set of twenty percent free-thinkers who are anti-joiners. The natural percent of free thinkers such as myself who are anti-joiners hasn't changed, we are probably still at around one-to-three percent. It would be a culture catastrophe if that were the case. One might speculate that such anti-joiners do serve a purpose as lubricant necessary in evolution to keep tribes from killing each other by acting as traitors, subversives, and ambassadors between tribes. We are an evolutionary necessity that facilitates maintaining competing tribalism for genetic diversity. Live and let live. However, too many free-thinkers and your cultural cohesion fails apart. So what culture are the non-religious in the US today? I'd argue they are a bench culture. They are on the sideline waiting to decide. They loosely align with traditional culture but will seemingly run counter-culture at the drop of a hat.
So that is our quarterback-in-a-huddle psychological world view. We all belong to a tribe that shares truth of human desire, even free thinkers. Many of us are side-lined or benched because we are waiting on some new culture to emerge. This is causing cultural stress. The US is in some ways like a conquered nation where the existing culture was destroyed and changes have made reinstating previous culture is nigh impossible.
One final note on this. I am overgeneralizing. All of us have degrees of character traits. For example, we are all on a gender spectrum of male-to-female for all our personality traits. We all have some degree of free-thinking. Those of us with dominant free-thinking personalities such as myself still culturally identify with the greater culture on some points. So Peterson does have point in that regard. What Peterson gets wrong is that free-thinkers will identify with the wider culture in seemingly random ways. This aligns more with Sam Harris who believes lack of belief defines nothing. Free-thinkers align with different parts of the greater culture capriciously and arbitrarily. This is also going to be true of the twenty-percent of non-religious on the side-lines trying to figure out who they culturally want to be. They are occasionally counter-cultural but are seeking a new one. Free thinkers are always anti-culture.
The best we can do to update lies while in a huddle is to learn the same lesson repeatedly and plan for social change over a long period time while we are in huddle.
What about when we engage each other in opposition? Can we accept new truth then? And now we are going to get out of the huddle and execute a play. Once that happens then our tribes mix with each other. Defense and offense members trade places between the tribes. Then things get messy. Some of your team members are trying to stop the opposing team and some are trying to further the ball downfield.
Conservative media engages the opposition while stuck in psychological quicksand of their own making today. They are stuck sinking in confirmation-bias quicksand in perpetual huddle. They can't run plays. If you only huddle in confirmation bias media then your team cannot break and move the ball downfield. At some level I believe some in the MAGA movement are sincere in wanting to run plays to convert independents in America to their truth of human desire defined as a conservative American. These conservatives realize that unless they convince more people to their side that their nationalism will fail. There also exists in conservative tribe the factions that have no interest in the converting others and instead are in favor of the tyranny and oppression. This play-book has plays of white supremacy and religious supremacy and they are on the rise.
Liberal media plays are likewise stuck is in psychological quicksand, that of meta-culture. Liberal culture has a cultural value that conservatives do not have that is known as live-and-let-live, or tolerance. I believe some of the frustration of non-Trump supporters with Trump supporters is meta-culture awareness. Trump exemplifies primitive all-or-nothing tribal instincts where one lacks meta-culture awareness. His black-and-white language of winners and losers excludes live-and-let-live. Trump supporters have no world view of side-by-side culture. MAGA is an all or nothing proposition where everyone must be a Christian or they are the enemy to be destroyed. Atheists and free-thinkers such as myself are not welcome in the conservative movement because we criticize everyone. Therefore we align with the liberal movement because tolerance of a culture-of-one is no different than tolerance any other different culture. Liberals are still stuck though and unable to run a play to defeat to primitive tribalism when expecting meta-cultural opponents and not primitive oppenents. They are stuck.
Another example of liberal meta-culture quicksand is the so called social justice warriors who are accelerating the fracturing of larger cultures into a much larger subset of cultures. SJWs are challenging the rate at which a larger culture can sub-divide. This is not a statement about what is justice, but what is practical. We often hear the trope of someone's grandparent being racist and yet we just leave them be because they are too old to change. Cultures are slow to change. The quicksand of the SJWs is the slow rate of culture change is resisting their desired pace of fracturing larger culture into smaller pieces that they are demanding. This quicksand also includes liberal culture at large.
Another meta-culture quicksand for liberals is the bench of sidelined new cultural seekers who at times identify with conservative culture. They are very unsure of their truth of human desire. Liberal culture has far less cohesion of culture than conservative culture. Advantage goes to conservative culture here. Liberal culture is in a state of flux where traditions and norms are being rewritten daily and conservative culture is a frequently used as a safe haven.
That's our huddle perspective as a quarterback. We cannot expect lies to be learned as lies while people are huddled and we cannot run plays while trapped in quicksand.
How did we get here?
Humanity started modern physics by believing an absolute frame of reference in space existed. This reference was called the Ether. One could measure an inch of space and it was fixed. This turned out not to be true. Space is expanding. In the same vein religion started modern culture believing that the truth of human desire was an absolute culture frame of reference in culture existed. Thus religions all have a stated objective of mono-culture. Religions have all taught that moral objectivity exists and that the best culture is a single culture of that one religion. This turned out not to be true. Culture is expanding but we have to date no expanding theory of culture.
This ends our psychological journey. We started out at a birds-eye view looking down at an entire field of play and then zoomed in until we landed in a huddle where we our view is limited to just our tribe.
Our identity is not subject to change with notice when something we hold true is exposed as a lie. We cannot change our identity. Any liar then can tap into a tribe's identity can be accepted as a truth teller when lying if the lie maps to culture. The truth they are telling is speaking to the truth of human desire. This is the old lemming trope where lemmings willing go over the cliff to their deaths simply by following the tribe.
The answer as to why Trump supporters believe lies are true even when lies are exposed as such is culture.
This truth applies to liberal culture such as it is today, even as it is in flux. Twenty-years from now the liberal culture is going to be hand-ringing mocking Trump. Trump is mentally impaired. We shouldn't make fun of the mentally impaired. Trump has no empathy. Trump could murder millions, eat a cheeseburger, and sleep easy. That is not his fault. It was not his choice. He was born that way and further conditioned by a dysfunctional childhood. The cultural issue has always been Trump's voters. Why are we putting the mentally ill in charge of the country? That's a cultural moral failure and it is not just of those who voted for Trump because we all share responsibility. The country is undergoing a massive cultural shift in identity from countryside to city dweller and countryside folk are threatened. This American identity change is frightening to people who feel their culture is disappearing out of their control. The difference between liberals and conservatives today in this regard is that liberals do not have an established culture where conservatives do. Conservatives want to retain their culture. Liberals don't have an established culture to recommend because liberals are trying to define one.
Liberal responsibility for managing truth of human desire comes in two forms today while our liberal culture is in chaos. First we must admit we have intelligence on our side and therefore the lion's share of the responsibility falls on us. Finger pointing at Trump supporters is fruitless. They will not have answers. Further we must admit that even we liberals are unsettled ourselves by not having a well defined culture to offer up to conservatives as an alternative. As a free thinker I'm at ease with a culture of one, but most are not. We cannot offer conservatives a straight up culture replacement today.
So what is the answer here to our culture wars?
Let's take stock. We have the conservative movement with a well-defined cultural identity. We have a liberal movement with a cultural identity in turmoil. Conservatives are incorrect in positing that the culture war is one of conservative versus liberal. The culture war is one of conservatives against liberal culture in turmoil. The liberals in this sense are an easy target because they are in disarray. However the conservatives are still at an even bigger disadvantage because they are losing population in their tribe. The city dwellers are gaining countryside population and converting conservatives to liberalism simply by this fact alone.
Where does that leave us? Well, nowhere. We are nowhere.
Except with Irreni World Scale.
Irreni World Scale has the correct psychological assessment of tribalism. Irreni divides the existing worlds from its existing two-hundred some countries today into two-hundred million tribes tomorrow. These tribes have thirty people and are called MGOs for micro-modular governing organizations. Further Irreni is a balanced tribal system that enforces that the most intelligent of our species are obligated to take care of those with less intelligence. The intelligent minority is not allowed to huddle in primary government. Instead each MGO is balanced with an overall intelligence quotient per MGO. This is not be fair but instead is an acknowledgement of a moral. That moral is humans need to take care of each other as a universal truth of human desire. Everyone is in. This means people of exceptional talents must spread out and not be allowed to congregate as birds of a feather and then dominate everyone else. This is our fate and will happen if we do not deliberately design culture accordingly today.
Irreni World Scale is not a full blown culture, it has only a few universal truths of human desire. This is because Irreni is not a culture, it is a meta-culture. Irreni is not a government but a meta-government. Once we agree upon the few universal truths of human desire included in Irreni then we afford the optimal environment for freedom of choice of culture. Each MGO can have a highly specific culture as they want as long as tyranny and oppression are not included.
Truth of reality cannot trump truth of human desire that is culture and identity. That is human nature. Trump is simply playing into our nature and liberal media is enabling Trump by massively spreading Trump's lies and thus promoting culture war. Trump's lies feed into an identity that has increasing felt threatened by the changing demographics of the US becoming more urban. Trump's supporters accept his lies as truth to retain culture. As a consequence our current culture is devolving into unthought thought of pure tribalism. If we continue on this path and do not change by adopting Irreni World Scale then we can expect new levels of violence to ensue. Violence is unthought thought. People today do not understand that the pen is mightier than the gun and the computer is mightier than the pen. Such people are hoarding guns. Think of all the money they are wasting on guns and think of how powerless they will be to computer tyranny.
People often ask the question why don't the Trump supporters change their minds when his lies are called out? The short answer is truth of cultural and personal identity trumps truth of objective reality. The solution is to adopt new governing called Irreni World Scale that manages our tribal nature before we tear each other apart either due to lack of culture on the left or the right fighting a left that is in cultural disarray.
Join an MGO today!
You can learn more about Irreni World Scale by visiting:
https://irreni.blogspot.com/p/join.html
Cheers!
Benefit of cooperation replaces rule of law!
Freethinkers unite!
Freedom!
Party On!
Let's get cracking!
Voluntarily Reject Demagoguery!
Politics as Science!
Demand Irreni World Scale!
Anti-theism is feminism!
Think disruption!
Empathy for all!
Moral relativity: think it, breath it!
Prove it or lose it!
Conversations equal consensus!
Welcome to the 21st century!
Scale your empathy, scale the world!
Find your tribe!
Be sexy people!
The future is coming!
Innovate at a rapid pace!
Slow speed ahead!
Well come! and well met!
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