Cutting to the Chase ...

You want national unity - here is how you get it. But it will not be easy.

I was going to follow up my last post - too long ago - with a series of posts making the detailed case for our various societal dysfunctions having their roots in a “problem behind the problems” that is both subtle and pervasive in our modern society, that most do not even perceive as a problem.

I still intend to make that detailed case, but the events of the last two weeks - the obvious evidence of cognitive impairment from our sitting President in a debate, followed by an assassination attempt directed at his challenger - compels me to focus simply and directly on the “problem behind the problems”, for it is the driving force behind our messed-up politics.

The wife of the challenger, Melania Trump, posted an eloquent call for national unity in this bitterly-divided nation on her X account, the day after the assassination attempt. But such unity will not last unless it is built upon a firm foundation of truth and respect for each other … and the problem-behind-the-problems has eroded that foundation for over a century, to the point that what is left of it is just accepted as simply The Way Things Are, even as it allows our society to collapse under its own weight.

The big crack in the foundation.

The most significant divide in this nation is not demographic - Democrat/Republican, conservative/Progressive, or even white/people-of-color. But this divide is the biggest crack in our foundation, and was best described by another President, who was just an actor when he described it sixty years ago during another election season:

This is the issue of this election.

Whether we believe in our capacity for self-government

…. or …

whether we abandon the American revolution and confess that a little intellectual elite in a far-distant capital can plan our lives for us better than we can plan them ourselves.

It is that confession, that is the underlying precursor to the problem-behind-the-problems. And practically EVERY citizen in the last century - on both sides of those various other divides - has been led to embrace that confession in varying degrees, even if they think they have not.

From our very first school day, we are led to embrace that confession … when we are told to “be nice” and “trust Teacher”. Our society reveres education, accomplishment, compassion, and advancement, to the point that we put those who best personify those attributes on pedestals of respect, authority and trust.

Then forget that they are neither omniscient nor infallible, but all-too-human. Possessing the same capacity for error, greed, deception, and delusion as anyone else, with the same, limited perception capability as you and me.

Then even worse, consider our own common-sense insights - derived from proximity to the problems we face, the exposure to the consequences of each problem AND any attempt to resolve it - as unworthy of use to question or challenge the Pedestaled; that our lot in life is to simply submit and comply to their (all-too-human) guidance.

We misplace our trust in the thoughts of others, to the point that we outsource our decision-making authority to them. Reagan’s famous line of “trust but verify” is thought of as a Cold War anachronism, when prudence dictates it be part of every decision we make - instead, we allow the Pedestaled to make our decisions and allocate our resources FOR us as we just go to work or school each day, thinking that “playing by the rules” is all we need to do because the notables we trust will make sure we attain a better future.

This is a level of trust that I characterize as Flounderian, after the hapless character in Animal House who was arrogantly informed by a frat brother that “you f____d up, you trusted us”.

And the Pedestaled are more than happy to oblige us, in taking over that authority. In fact, many among them build their entire lives around attaining the elite status that leads to being trusted with such authority; it is their greatest investment.

They also believe their own press … that “they are the ones we have been waiting for”; the Smart People^JN and Nice People ^JN who will lead our society to The Best of All Possible Worlds.

This leads to them taking on problems that are beyond their perceptual ability to accurately discern, much less resolve - since most of our societal problems are not “a problem”, but a problem with hundreds of millions of individual variables that are highly variable. Yet they - with support from many among us - attempt to solve such problems with top-down, one-size-fits-all solutions that are inadequate for many, counterproductive for some - but nearly always applied by leveraging the coercive force of law and its attached Silly Strings, not by persuading their fellow citizens to voluntarily adopt the solution and adjust it to their specific needs.

Our misplaced trust in them also leads millions of our neighbors away from the responsible exercise of their initiative to find better solutions … leaving them vulnerable to the errors, greed, deception and delusion of those they trust, along with the bites of reality when they come a’ chompin’ … when they could be taking steps to protect themselves.

THE PROBLEM BEHIND THE PROBLEMS is that we have learned to short-sell ourselves - in particular, our ability to discern the facts-on-the-ground around us, to leverage the insights of our own experience and common sense with knowledge outside ourselves to attain a thorough understanding of the problems we face … and take the initiative to implement solutions, for ourselves and/or our neighbors that do not cause more problems than they solve.

Instead, we look to those that we have come to believe Know Better^JN to set the answers before us, and worse yet, “outsource” our authority to make binding decisions to them … even at the expense of maintaining our ability to protect ourselves and/or efficiently work around decisions that end up in failure.

And do so, when those we are putting such trust in are operating from a position of inadequate knowledge of what we as individuals may or may not need – no matter any good intentions they may (or may not) have.

But there’s more … that Flounderian trust paves the way for the Pedestaled to lead us into even darker places.

Such as into the wildernesses of class warfare and identity politics; life in a mirage of lifelong oppression that can be escaped just by taking the initiative to reach beyond the dark image to reality … if one is not impeded in doing so by others trapped in the mirage.

And even worse, to the belief that the approach of the Pedestaled to any problem is the One True Way; that any questioning, dissent or refusal to comply can only be based in ignorance or evil … and such people should be viewed as lesser beings.

This is how, in a modern society, you get denied access to class, cancel culture, doxxing, SWATting … then assassination attempts (YOU ARE HERE) … and if it is allowed to go on long enough, Inquisitions, witch trials, and Holocausts.

What must the foundation support, to get us to unity?

The foundation must support individuals in the pursuit of the following, because the way to unity starts with managing our individual lives:

• Taking (back) decision-making authority over our own lives.

• Maintaining our confidence in our own common sense, our proximity-and-consequence informed insight, and in recognizing the limitations of the book-learned, credentialed “expertise” and “leadership” we have put on pedestals of total trust over us.

• The rejection, as much as possible, of the outsourcing of that decision-making authority to others … from our kids’ teachers, to our doctors, our union leaders, our bankers, journalism, all the way up to our government “servants”. We treat them as advisers at best - but never subordinate our individual decisions to them.

• Maintaining our flexibility to act on our decisions … managing debt and assets, growing our skill sets, taking the initiative to maximize our own productivity even if our employer doesn’t immediately reward us for it, staying ready to fire our management and hire on with better … and not getting mired in the Silly Strings of expedient “help” from government or others.

Will this take more effort and risk on our part? Yes. But it diminishes the ability of our myopic Pedestaled Elite to run your life and grind you into submission … which diminishes the conflicts we endure from the choice to comply or be cancelled - leaving us freer to “live and let live” with our neighbors; requiring unity only over the most fundamental principles of the only sustainable social contract for modern society - the contract that was broken when we embraced the confession Reagan warned us about.

This contract does not grant our government just any powers it sees fit to wield, but JUST powers … powers that do not work against the reason government is instituted: TO SECURE THESE RIGHTS.

Unalienable rights, which supersede even a majority vote - to be restricted only when one's free exercise of them poses a clear, present, and significant interference with the free exercise of those rights by others.

Why is this contract sustainable?

• When strictly respected, this sets limits upon our government operatives in their ability to reach into our lives – to “first, do no harm” as Hippocrates put it. They no longer have the carte blanche they do today to impose any law/regulation/tax they see as furthering their ever-changing definition of the “common good”, simply because they are elected and are assumed to embody the whole “consent of the governed” … the fundamental fallacy of what is called Our Democracy^JN

• It also limits the task set that we must expect our government operatives to perform, to those relative few, one-size-fits-all tasks that directly pertain to securing our rights - and with our oversight, keeps them focused upon that objective instead of thinking they have that carte blanche. That task set is within the limitations of government’s human operatives to effectively and efficiently manage, as opposed to their attempts to solve all things for all people.

• It neutralizes identity politics, reducing all of it to a simple question: is an individual being denied their unalienable rights - or not?

• It is respectful of all spiritual worldviews that are compatible with it, instead of giving one faith (that happens to see its gods in their mirrors) exclusive access to our institutions for its spread.

• And strict allegiance to it maximizes the amount of distributed intellect applied to our problem-solving processes – engaging millions of people with common sense and proximity-informed insight that a “little intellectual elite in a far-off capital” CAN’T possess – by incentivizing the responsible exercise of individual initiative instead of expecting government to solve one’s problems FOR them and therefore submitting to its operatives.

That responsible exercise of individual initiative, in my opinion, is the secret sauce of all human advancement, short of Divine intervention … from the ordinary person seeking to make their ends meet better, to the innovator that conceives and produces new technical advances that benefit us all, to the caregiver and philanthropist who combine their efforts to help those who can’t help themselves while still respecting their responsibility and dignity as adults.

Understand that the flip side of what I describe, is that we ordinary people must realize that WE have to do more than the minimum to manage our own lives, and some of us will perceive this to embody more risk for us. But our Flouderian trust in today’s status quo to absolve us of that is simply fooling ourselves and continuing to attach Silly Strings that slow us down and/or hold us back.

And this will not lead to your, or my, definition of a perfect world, where our neighbors will always do things in accordance with our respective One True Ways.

But the responsible exercise of our initiative, under this sustainable social contract, diminishes our conflicts between each other - while in most cases, denying all parties the hammers of coercive force to beat each other into submission - and instead establishes an environment for unity and its derivative blessings.

This is the way out of the mess we are in … nothing more/nothing less. Let us not allow our own laziness, lack of confidence, or loyalty to others interfere with it.

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^JN (Jester Naybor, or Just Nuts!) is my sarcastic substitute for ™.  In the context of these pages, it indicates a fallacy that is so universally accepted as true that it is worthy of a trademark.