The founders of the U.S. created a framework that liberated, enabled, and ignited a more learning-oriented way of being united. Not perfect, but more perfect. More perfectly conducive to a new kind of collaborative learning that ultimately lead the U.S. to become the most intelligent nation on the planet.
Today, predatorily and parasitically stupidified by the machinations of profit and power, our population’s collective intelligence is in a dangerous downward spiral. Our political parties behave as if they are trying to herd a herd of low EQ teenagers. Spin the channels, which ever silo you land in it’s about convincing and persuading. Our political leadership has always been so busy manipulating the voting behavior of our collective ignorance that it has never realized the importance of stewarding our collective intelligence.
High and mighty founding documents not withstanding, our politics have never been a contest for who could best guide and resource the learning of the population. Throughout our history, the partisan war for the voting behavior of the mass electorate has been always been a competition for who could best manipulate the opinions and behaviors of voters. It’s always been a competition between who could best herd the voting behavior of the population. Both houses gave us this pox – this disease.
A reporter asked Pat Buchanan (A Richard Nixon insider in the 1960 election): why didn’t Nixon demand recounts when he had credible evidence of wholesale voter fraud in Illinois and Texas. “Because,” Buchanan laughed, “we stole Kentucky.”
LEFT TURN ONLY
The left (and center) need to learn that they are incapable of winning future population manipulation competitions. In previous eras of newspapers, radio, and TV, the press-media-tech was a comparatively level playing field, but those days are gone. The predatory-parasitic-wealth behind the right doesn’t have the same degree of ethical scruples as the left. And, they control most of the wealth, they own the infotech and media, and they are far out learning the left in using AI to further perfect the science of manipulating the behavior of the population.
“No man ever went broke overestimating the ignorance of the American public.”
— P.T. Barnum
The left can no longer win the kinds of opinion-behavior manipulation contests that have been the center of American politics since our founding. Continuing to conduct politics as if it can will corrupt its integrity, further weaken the people’s trust, and provide the right even more incentive to perfect their weapons of mass manipulation.
The left will never again win by out-manipulating the right.
The longer the left tries to compete with the right based on its legacy model of voter behavior manipulation, the more powerful the right will become in trumping the left’s manipulations and the more our population will become even more manipulable. But the most important reason that the left must evolve beyond manipulation is that the manipulation is completely antithetical to its core principles. It’s been a lesser of evils compromise that gave license to the predatory-parasitic stupidification of America that, consequently, just elected Trump. For example, the Climate Change issue:
Most of the U.S. population doesn’t understand the profound effects of Climate Change. It’s in the best interests of predatory-parasitic wealth for our population to continue to NOT understand those effects because a climate conscious population could cost them trillions per year. The Harris campaign realized that it couldn’t compensate for the population’s lack of understanding of climate change (or any other critical issue) by engaging in a behavioral-opinion manipulation competition with Trump, Musk, Zuckerberg and Bezos et al. They calculated that focusing on Climate Change would provoke a response that would have a net-negative effect on their overall campaign. In other words they calculated that the population could not learn to understand and appreciate what’s at stake in time to benefit the campaign. It was an issue lost due to insufficient population learning.
Climate change, along with all the other big challenges, should be proof (to those paying attention) that there just isn’t ANY substitute for a more learning oriented population.
Facts: Neither political polarity will ever accept subordination to the other. The country voted for Trumpists. They have no scruples. They have the money. They have the tech. They have the most pervasive media and applied AI (as Trump’s election just proved). The left can’t out manipulate them. Whether it wins next time or not, the only viable long arc strategy for saving the nation from the predatory-parasitism currently trumping democracy is turning up the learning of the population. It’s the most universally relevant and healthy and smart thing we can do. Only after we realize the need to do so can we begin learning to champion the health of our population’s learning.
The election of Trump is proof that there is no substitute for a more learning oriented population.
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