“I seen so many things I ain’t never seen before/I don’t what it is, I don’t wanna see no more” is the assessment of the narrator in “Mama Told Me Not to Come,” a song written by Randy Newman and made famous mostly by Three Dog Night’s version. * The fictional character is at a party, where he is “chokin’ from the smell of stale perfume” and from marijuana smoke. His girlfriend is “passed out on the floor” at a party in which he has seen things he “ain’t never seen before.” And regretting his decision to attend the party, he remembers, “Mama told me not to come…’That ain’t the way to have fun, son.’” *


I’m guessing that my late father did not listen to Three Dog Night. They were part of a generation and cultural milieu that differed from the Big Band Era of his the 1930s and 1940s. Born in 1916, and having lost his father when he was only eight, my dad survived both the hardships of the Great Depression and then as a Marine, the battle on Okinawa and two typhoons. He had volunteered after the Pearl Harbor attack, called to duty by a sense of loyalty to the country and by an aversion to anyone who would alter the the country he loved even though he was himself only modestly ever able to achieve its promise “of happiness” in Jefferson’s words in the Declaration of Independence. The mix of loyalty to country and promise of country to individual probably influenced his lifelong political philosophy.


My dad was a traditional Democrat who believed that he participated in the American Dream to some extent. He had, after all, survived the poverty of his youth and risen to relative comfort as a homeowner, a foreman of a printing company, and, in retirement, a golfer, and traveler of modest means, the last two activities of golfing and traveling made possible by relative frugality  born in the Great Depression and practiced during his working days. The same sense of loyalty that drove him to join the Marines kept him loyal to the Democratic Party all his life and maintained his belief in unions, even after he had to scramble to establish a 401K when his own union, the International Typographical Union, lost his pension money. For him, the economic enemies were the businessmen and Republicans who ran the nation and profited from the work of their employees. For whatever reason, he imagined their corruption but could not imagine the corruption of union officials or Democrat party bosses who lived as well as many business executives while they espoused “economic equity” for their membership.


Imagery serves many functions according to cognitive psychologists. ** It serves as an avenue to a potential future and as a connection to the past. It helps us solve problems, and it provides us with a metaphorical connection to encode information that is both false and true. It makes “the abstract” into “the concrete,” giving us the ability to turn our chaotic amorphous world into personally and culturally meaningful constructs. It is our ability to imagine that preserves cultural archetypes, such as “the American Dream” and to envision impediments to fulfilling expectations. For my dad, one of those imagined impediments was the Republican Party which he connected to business.


Where did Dad get the image of a political party standing in the way of his personal success? Why did he scapegoat Republicans and businessmen so? Maybe his imagery was the product of his having been an employee and not a business owner. Maybe it derived from promises of FDR after a Great Depression that occurred during a Republican administration. Maybe it derived from the background hum of socialism that grew louder when he was a child as unionism was burgeoning. Or maybe it was the product of overt statements that worked their way into the American psyche, statements like that of Charles Wilson, long-time president of GM, who said during a confirmation hearing whether he saw a potential conflict between his position as Secretary of Defense and the needs of his former company:


    “I cannot conceive of one because for years I thought what was good for our country was good for General Motors, and vice versa. The difference did not exist. Our company is too big. It goes with the welfare of the country. Our contribution to the Nation is quite considerable.” ***


Yep! In the mind of my dad—and in the minds of many others, particularly socialists, communists, and democrats—the image of business and by extension Republicans was fixed in that statement. GM and other Big Business cabals saw themselves as co-equal with the government. It was that “vice versa” in Wilson’s statement that morphed into the popularized “What is good for GM is good for the country,” and again by extension, “What is good for business is good for the country.” Business first, country second. That didn’t sit well in the mind of my dad.


He did seem a bit bitter or envious—I couldn’t tell which, maybe both—because there were those who were born with proverbial silver spoons in their mouths and because business owners experienced a wealthier lifestyle than their employees. For some reason and even though he was quite intelligent, he could not connect the risks taken by entrepreneurs to their successes or to his having a job that existed only because of a risk-taking boss who started and maintained a printing company that provided my dad with lifelong employment.


Were he alive today, I have no doubt that my father would still be upset over wealth disparity and still be a faithful Democrat. He saw relative wealth from his financial position by looking “upward” and not by looking “downward.” Looking up gave him an image of disparity that looking down didn’t plant in his mind. Realizing his perspective, I once asked him if he saw a disparity between his having a home, a car, two stocked refrigerators and a freezer, and disposable money for vacations and golfing and the plight of a homeless person who lacked all of the above. I did not receive a response.


Of course, there are people who are inordinately rich just as there are people who are inordinately poor. The disparity is obvious. But so is the hypocrisy of those who have wealth they do not share with others while they preach socialism as a mechanism for eliminating that general disparity. There was a disparity between my dad and the people of lower economic status that he could not see, a disparity between his modest “wealth” and someone else’s deep poverty. Why, Dad, were you not moved to share your house and food with the destitute if you so truly believed that wealth disparity was a Republican or businessman’s identifiable evil?


Don’t misunderstand here. He was a great dad, but we differed in our economic philosophies, more so as he moved into his late eighties and mid-nineties (He died at age 97). I’ll reiterate. He was a great dad, especially in light of his having grown up without a father. Those summer days of catching ball after supper are among my most cherished memories, and his advice concerning furthering my education after high school is the reason I became a college professor, textbook writer, and researcher. (Thanks, Dad, for the love and support)


But with regard to his economic (and political) thinking, I wonder whether he would belong to the Democratic Party for any reason other than a sense of loyalty and an inherent disdain for those who seem to walk in gilded neighborhoods or live in homes two to three times larger than the one he built for $13,000 in 1958. Of course, I’m simplifying here. As everyone is, he was not “just one thing” bereft of complexity. It’s a fool’s analysis that oversimplifies the nature of anyone. As we come to realize with some pondering, everyone who adheres to a single idea harbors the potential for hypocrisy at the worst and contradiction at the least. Dad wanted the promises of socialism but would have argued against the imposition of a socialist government and excessive taxes and giveaways. However, he, like many among Democrat supporters—just as, by the way, the other party’s supporters—would have been the frog in the gradually heated pot of water, not recognizing the change in temperature until it was too late to escape the inevitable boiling.


The Democrat Party he knew under Roosevelt and Kennedy changed through the decades. But of course, the Republican Party of Teddy Roosevelt has also undergone changes. And runaway capitalism is another pot of frogs on the American stove, as CEOs worth tens to over a hundred billion dollars indicate. Both parties have a history of heating the water and a membership that doesn’t recognize the temperature change. In the twenty-first century, we see, for example, spending under Republican administrations that is as reckless as spending under Democratic administrations, both working separately and sometimes in unison to drive the national debt to its 2021 level of $28 trillion. What would you think, Dad?


A line from Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 116” seems to capture the adherence to party regardless of its changes: “Love is not love/Which alters when it alteration finds.” The Democratic and Republican parties have changed, but the members of both parties do not alter their loyalty. The Bard writes “Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,/But bears it out even to the edge of doom.” Both parties have changed so much that their old versions are, in fact, dead; yet, their members admit no impediments to their loyalty. Nothing came between Dad and the Democratic Party. Nothing “altered” the “love.” 


The Democratic Party has long leaned more toward socialism than the Republican Party, and it has long attempted to alter the capitalist system that made the United States the wealthiest country, the most beneficent charity for domestic and foreign organizations, and the most diverse nation. Capitalism, for all its evils, still draws people to the United States from socialist and totalitarian states like Cuba and the former Soviet Block countries. There’s a freedom associated with capitalism that is not associated with socialism, the system under which at least 162,000,000 people were murdered during the twentieth century.


My father would have been insulted if I called him a socialist. Had he not been assigned to fight in the Pacific Theater against the Japanese, he would have, like my uncles, readily taken up arms against the Nazis and their threat to the American Way. Yet, like that frog in the warming water, he would not have recognized the socialist leanings of his party as one of those slippery slopes down which countries like Germany slid. Think this is an overreach of logic? Consider here a statement Hitler made in May, 1927:


    “We are socialists, we are enemies of today’s capitalistic economic system for  the exploitation of the economically weak, with its unfair salaries, with its unseemly evaluation of a human being according to wealth and property instead of responsibility and performance, and we are determined to destroy this system under all conditions.”


Have you heard something similar to this recently? Wasn’t Occupy Wall Street a brief and unsuccessful attempt to do what Hitler advocated? Certainly, there have been voices among Democrats advocating socialism to some degree (Bernie Sanders and a group of young congresswomen come to mind). And then there are the broad social giveaways promised by a party willing to spend trillions of dollars in the hope that government can somehow make people wealthy or achieve economic parity. It can’t, of course, because government has no product to sell, but, instead, relies on wealth made by those who do have products to sell. One needs only look to the failed Solyndra solar panel factory ($500 million giveaway) and to the trillions spent lavishly on continuations of Johnson’s Great Society programs and the War on Poverty, programs that relied on giving away “fish” instead of “teaching how to fish.” Why after so many dollars spent, are there still people living in poverty? Why after great spending are the inner cities still plagued by poverty and crime? Could it have something to do with government’s putting faith in itself and not in entrepreneurs who make things? Could it be that for the greatest number of people, including my family, capitalism made life better than socialism could have  made it and done so in spite of its endemic economic disparities?


The promises of socialism are always greater than the actualities of its consequences, such as the impoverishment of more people after its institution than before its institution. Think Cuba, Venezuela, and the Soviet Union, none of which uplifted the masses their systems enslaved or controlled. Under Venezuelan communism, at least four million Venezuelans fled the country this century. But why did they flee if socialism is a good idea? Yet, I would guess my dad would have, regardless of socialism’s inevitable attack on personal freedoms and property—freedom to succeed and freedom to fail, freedom to own and freedom to lose—supported the goal of taking everyone toward the mythical “middle” called economic parity or equity.


Remember Teddy Roosevelt? It’s difficult for the twenty-first century American to envision that a late-nineteenth- and early twentieth-century-conservationist/anti-trust Republican might have had insights germane to today’s trend toward socialism in the Democratic Party. His actions show the complexity of balancing between runaway capitalism and runaway socialism. Consider some background information. When anthracite miners went on strike in 1902 and the mine owners refused to negotiate, Roosevelt threatened to seize the mines, giving some impetus to the formation of a union. Yeah. There he was, a Republican giving some support to the worker. And read here from his speech to Congress in December, 1901:


    “The captains of industry…have on the whole done great good to our people. Without them the material development of which we are so justly proud could never have taken place…Yet is is also true that there are real and great evils…There is a widespread conviction in the mid of the American people that the great corporations known as trusts are in certain of their features and tendencies hurtful to the general welfare. This…is based upon sincere conviction that combinations and concentration should be, not prohibited, but supervised and within reasonable limits controlled….” **


Roosevelt spoke in a milieu of rising socialist, communist, and fascist sympathies among world populations and at a time when his contemporaries Carnegie, Vanderbilt, Rockefeller amassed enormous wealth. It was a time when businesses were becoming big, very big. Steel, for example. Coal, too. Shipping, certainly. Oil, definitely. At the same time that impoverished people sought some economic parity, corporations were becoming so large that people like Roosevelt sought to break up monopolies—and, strangely, he was a Republican. Aren’t Republicans all supporters of Big Business? But Roosevelt’s “captains of industry” had gone a bit too far and had created great personal wealth in the midst of struggling masses. Teddy inherited wealth though he was personally uninterested in business; his relative and future Democratic President Franklin Delano Roosevelt died worth almost $70 million. Today, Clinton, Obama, and Biden are all worth millions, all without having run successful businesses before they were elected. Where’s the supposed parity?


It was during that milieu of rising socialist sympathies that my dad grew up. Yet, steeped in poverty, he was by his actions a capitalist, seeking to own home and car and to have some spare money for life’s niceties. No slouch, he began working at age eight in 1924, the year his dad died, to help support his mother and two sisters. That was three years before Hitler made the statement I quoted above.


Now with regard to those large corporations that Roosevelt believed could do both harm and good, I wonder whether my dad would favor the Left-leaning corporations of today, large businesses that preach socialism and economic equity while accumulating vast treasure for their executives. And would he be happy with a Democratic politician claiming to be against capitalism while making millions of dollars? I know he had a disdain for Bush I and Bush II because of their wealth. Somehow the wealth of Democrats didn’t seem to bother him.


Given the opportunity to become wealthy, would Dad have turned it down? And if he had become wealthy, would he have relished the chance to share that wealth through some bureaucracy? Probably not. I’m guessing here, but I believe he would continue to note the disparity between CEO wealth and worker wealth. “Sure, I have a million bucks, but So-n-So has a billion. Life just isn’t fair,” not his words, but my imagined words coming from any of a number of today’s Democratic Socialists, maybe one like three-house Bernie, the house on the Vermont lake costing in excess of $600,000.


No, life isn’t fair, but just as capitalism can engender inequities, so socialism engenders them, for the oligarchs live far more lavish lifestyles than the masses they control. Yet, the promise of socialism continues to attract the young who grow up in the relative affluence provided by capitalism but not the young who grow up under socialism. Strange. My father, who had a strong work ethic, was not one to say “gimme, gimme, gimme”; yet, he was a Democrat in a party that fostered victimhood and a “you-owe-me-society.”


My dad loved his Democrat Commander in Chief. He served under him in World War II. It was FDR who framed much of the American version of socialism inserted into the politics of Johnson, Carter, Obama, and now Biden. In 1941, FDR enumerated “four freedoms” he believed are “essential human freedoms”: 1) freedom of speech and expression, 2) freedom of worship, 3) freedom from fear, and—here’s the key one—4) freedom from want. From want! The problem that my dad could not comprehend is that “want” is both subjective and culturally variable (I want access to illegal drugs; I want three flat screens; I want a Mercedes; all these wants mixed in with I want food, shelter, health care, and free college education; I want you to refer to me as “Your Highness”; I want a tuition free Harvard eduction; I want free energy).


After a difficult recession in 1958 under a former Army general whose leadership in the European Theater had no bearing on his service in the Pacific Theater, my dad supported another Democrat, the inordinately wealthy Kennedy, who, I believe, stayed more on the conservative side of the economic fence as evidenced by his proposed large tax cut and his resistance to the “New-Deal-like” spending proposed by his Council of Economic Advisers; he opposed a large debt (at that time $7 billion).


Kennedy’s predecessor, Eisenhower, was not a puppet of the Right, however. In 1962 Ike said, “I have no patience with extreme Rightists who call everyone who disagrees with them a Communist, nor with the Leftists who shout that the rest of us are heartless moneygrubbers.” To Dad, all Republicans were moneygrubbers as the blinders he wore prohibited him from seeing the proven and suspected graft of Democrats. How, I once asked him, are some politicians millionaires even though their only occupation seems to have been “politician”?


Oh! How different the Party now! Would Dad approve? Let’s enumerate the current proposed $3.5 trillion spending bill: 1) $200 million for universal preschool in spite of studies that showed the ineffectiveness of Upward Bound after third grade; 2) free community college, guaranteeing that community college staffs will have no worries about funding; 3) federally paid-for medical leave providing 12 weeks of guaranteed paid leaves for who knows what variations on reasons over a ten-year period;that, I believe, equates to $1,000 guaranteed per week that has to come out of the employers' pockets in lost labor; 4) universal dental, vision, and hearing Medicare benefits; 5) enhanced ACA subsidies, probably extended to illegal aliens, also; 6) carbon controls and increased power grid dependence on “emissions-free” sources, even though the price of natural gas in Europe started to rocket as an August and September period of low winds deprived those giant windmills of their power—good news for the Russians who supply natural gas to Europe through, of all things, pipelines (Can anyone say the word Keystone Pipeline and proposed limitations on fracking?); plus a climate control agency--wait till the officials turn down your thermostat. Would Dad have approved of those 11,000 lost union jobs because a Democrat shut down a pipeline that had jumped every environmental hurdle?


“Mama told me not to come/Mama told me not to come”: “This is the craziest party that could ever be.” So, now my deceased father’s beloved party is on the threshold of mandating “for the good of the people.” No exceptions, of course, because socialism can’t abide exceptions. His beloved party insists that Americans get vaccines or be ostracized from both work and social settings while at the same time it is allowing more than 1.3 million border-rushers entrance into the country without vaccines (because “it’s voluntary for them” according to Homeland Security officials). The party he loved is pressing for more taxation to cover the proposed trillions of dollars in spending, much of it on social programs and on demonstrably ineffective energy systems. In eight months of Democrat rule, gasoline prices have soared. Terrorists might be knocking at the door—check that, might be breaking down the door—but his party sees an existential threat in global warming that no adherence to a Paris Agreement by his country will alter even at the expense of lower and middle class wealth. And his party just did what no Marine would have been taught to do: Leave Americans behind enemy lines in Afghanistan. “This is the craziest party that could ever be.”


Yet, regardless of the current circumstances, I believe my dad would remain a Democrat in opposition to “those damned Republicans who only care about business and money.” I believe he would still go to that crazy party. But then, I could say the same about the opposite beliefs in Republicans and their stalwart supporters. On both sides people ask irrelevant questions to dodge the reality of changing party philosophies and actions. They ask about whether we want "whiskey in our water," "sugar in our tea," when they should be asking, "If I adhere to this trend, what's going to happen to me?"


Notes:


*You can read the lyrics online or see a performance of “Mama Told Me Not To Come” on YouTube.


**Leahey, Thomas Hardy and Richard Jackson Harris. 1997. Learning and Cognition. New Jersey. Prentice Hall. pp. 133-136.


***Strohl, Daniel. 5 Sept 2019. Fact Check: Did a GM president really tell Congress
”What’s good for GM is good for America”? Online at https://www.hemmings.com/stories/2019/09/05/fact-check-did-a-gm-president-really-tell-congress-whats-good-for-gm-is-good-for-america  Accessed September 29, 2021.

Just some musings here
Upon a harrowing year,
One that makes me wonder,
“Was science cut asunder?”

Science. “Follow the science.” It’s an expression that encapsulates the topic du jour during all the du jours of the pandemic. Along the path of this race to eliminate a foxy predator, the saying has morphed from “isolate” to  “vaccinate,” and now to “mandate.” And all the while the fox continues to run through the planetary henhouses of human habitation, evading entrapment by morphing faster than the science that chases it.


At first, there really wasn’t any science. Sure, the medical professionals knew there was some sort of respiratory SARS-like disease in 2019; after all, we had been through this before. But this new disease appeared to outrace medical science, then caught flat-footed at the outset and throughout 2020 as it ran to catch up. The disease is still running faster, shape-shifting as it goes. COVID-19 is quick and smart like a fox, a modern Huli Jing. Not only has it shifted form, but it has also circled round and nipped us on our unprotected backside. And there’s little doubt that this chimera will shift shape again and again, eluding the huntsmen in one form or another, probably by hiding in the thickets of mammal populations.


There’s no denying that the fox had gotten into the henhouses of care homes and no doubt that it outfoxed the immune systems of the weakest and most elderly adult population. But not all succumbed. Millions, in fact, survived even before there was any “science” to follow. I suppose we can say the same for every plague, every pandemic. There are survivors, and, so far, you and I have been among them. But did you survive because you followed “the science” or because you stayed out of the henhouses?


“Consider,” you say, “that at the time the best science was actually ‘to stay out of the henhouses,’ to stay in one’s own house, to isolate. That was the science at the beginning. It was the tactic used by ancient and medieval people during plagues. For all our supposed technical and medico-technical sophistication, we were at the end of 2019 and the beginning of 2020 no different from the aristocrats who retreated to their countryside villas or stone towers. The science was absence.”


What is both frustrating and intriguing about this pandemic is that it appears to have been the product of the very houndsmen themselves, the researchers who now chase down the disease, this modern Huli Jing that has entered the planetary henhouse. We ask in disbelief: “Were these researchers misguided alchemists that released a monster of their own making?” The answer to that question lies in a recent report released by a group of independent researchers that go by the acronym DRASTIC (for Decentralized Radical Autonomous Search Team Investigating COVID-19). “EcoHealth Alliance (EHA) in concert with the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) attempted to carry out advanced and dangerous human pathogenicity Bat Coronavirus research that would clearly qualify as Gain of Function (GoF), in a grant proposal submitted to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in 2018.” *


As “science” followed the fox around the world, the clever beast ran through thickets of ephemeral human defenses as through they were gaping holes. As of this writing at the beginning of autumn, 2021, 1.6% of those US citizens who contracted the disease died either from it directly or from the disease’s exacerbating “co-morbidities.” That appears to be a frightening percentage, but in absolute numbers a little less so, as 42.5 million Americans have been either symptomatic or asymptomatic after being infected. That more than forty million people have had the disease and survived and that many of them survived even before there was any “science” save absence, seems to belie the advice of the scientists who proclaim that the unvaxxed will die. That so many survived indicates that the fox can’t, even by shape-shifting, catch and devour all the hens. Of course, for anyone who lost a family member or friend and for those who worked to exhaustion trying to save the afflicted, the pursuit of this modern Huli Jing has been a grueling test of both emotional and physical survival across the planet. This has been a hunt in which the fox outsmarted those creators-turned-hunters, and because of its elusiveness, this chimeric fox has made the general population wary of the scientists and their proclamations.


All the while the fox has been loose, scientists continue to track it, discovering in the hunt that this is not an easy animal to trap. It’s shapeshifting has now enabled it to go not only into the henhouse, but into the lion’s den, where those large predators have become the fox’s prey. Lions and tigers at the Smithsonian’s National Zoo have been infected. This is a viral fox that will do what most viruses are theoretically capable of doing, crossing species barriers. COVID the Fox has already moved from bat populations to human, and now it has outwitted the immune systems of other mammals. Residing where it can, the virus might eventually find in some animal a refugium until it randomly re-emerges to feast on human cells.


This clever fox will probably plague us for many years the way the flu plagues us. That is a bit scary, but the survival of those 40 million-plus who were infected in the United States in 2020 and 2021 bodes well for humanity in general if not for those individuals that make up that 1.6%.


However, what does not bode well is the practice by private and public scientists to carry out more experiments on pathogens, many such experiments run without any oversight. A September, 2021, report by Betsy McKay and Amy Deckser Marcus in The Wall Street Journal carries the claim that only five percent of national governments “provide oversight for research on dangerous pathogens.” ** Because so many are involved in such research and because within that population of scientists there potentially lie both incompetent and evil members toying with pathogens, I fear that COVID-19 isn’t the only fox that will threaten the henhouse. The next “fox” might emerge from any country where such research occurs, appearing not just as Huli Jing from China, but as an Armenian Nhang, an Indian nāgá, a Nordic Nisse, a Japanese kitsune, a Somali Qori ismaris, a Bulgarian Vrkolak, a Russian Volkolak, an Iranian rakshasa, or some other shapeshifting pathogen that researchers accidentally or purposefully release.


Follow the science? Maybe the better advice is to follow the scientists to see what they are doing.

Notes:

*https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2021/09/22/report-wuhan-lab-sought-funding-to-create-release-enhanced-coronaviruses-into-bats/  and other sites, such as https://clashdaily.com/2021/09/bombshell-report-wuhan-scientists-planned-to-release-genetically-enhanced-coronaviruses-into-bats-in-2018/


** 24 Sept 2021. Virus Research has Exploded Since Covid-19 Hit. Is it Safe? https://www.wsj.com/articles/since-covid-19-hit-research-on-viruses-has-exploded-is-it-safe-11632496218  Accessed September 24, 2021.

Which Is the More Authoritarian, Conservatism or Liberalism? Let’s argue; sorry, let’s converse. But first, a word from our sponsors:


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No, there is no product called Amalgamite in case you’re wondering. But if there were, you might benefit from taking it. In fact, all of us might benefit. It would give us the ability to see commonalities embedded in our ostensible differences. Amalgamite would enhance our natural abilities to control mood and stress that stereotypical political leanings negatively affect.


You know the common belief: Conservatives are authoritarian; Liberals aren’t. I think the branding creates a chronic irritation that prevents the two sides from understanding their commonalities. Is it possible that in spite of stereotypes, conservatives and their libertarian and far-Right versions are, in fact, anti-Establishmentarian? Is it possible that liberals and their far-Left versions are Establishmentarian? To answer those two questions positively requires definitions that do not incorporate long-held assumptions that offer false dichotomies. Such definitions must also include the full amalgam of philosophical and psychological variations. The usual associations that label conservatives as authoritarian and liberals as anti-authoritarian fail the mutual exclusivity test.


There’s another problem in labeling conservatives or liberals on the basis of their authoritarian or anti-authoritarian leanings. What is meant by authority? Is it applicable to individual or group? Is it direct or subtle? And in the current mix of political apples and oranges, is the notion that liberals are free-thinkers as erroneous as the notion that conservatives are automatons? Does such a notion stem from thousands of years of the arts (painting, sculpting, writing of all kinds, and physical performances like dance) as havens for outcasts and avant-garde thinkers operating outside the boundaries of decorum?


Those who put their hopes in the power of an individual as an authority usually find that the god they chose to emulate often has tin feet and a hollow inside. Those who put their hopes in decorum discover a splintering of ideology emerging shortly after they commit their loyalty. And as for directness or subtly, consider that in some instances authority is as overt as the spoken word and as the tweeted emotion. In other instances, authority is a subtle cancel culture that derives from the tyranny of conforming masses, originating, by the way, from either Right or Left.


I realize that those last two statements are as empty as ellipsis marks, that they are incomplete thoughts in your mind. Let me elaborate: We recognize authority consciously by decision and unconsciously by years of inculcation. Unconsciously, we accept a banker in a suit sitting at a desk in a bank office with a door that reads “Vice-President of…” as an authority in finance. The homeless person on the street outside the bank appears to be incompetent in finance. Such stereotypes come from years of inculcation. Our preconceived notions incline us to accept them. We ignore, however, that “men (and women) in suits” have brought about the collapse of economies and that many who once carried the appearance of authority have been relegated after such collapses to living as sidewalk dwellers in the world of finance. We often, it seems, project authority onto some person or group on superficial bases, often on the bases of appearances and often, too, on the bases of likemindedness: Our leanings Left or Right, for example.


One need look no farther than YOU to discover the complexity and error of labeling people as conservative or liberal authoritarians. You embody the argument against the dichotomous view by your own ambivalence.


“Hey, I’m not ambivalent,” you say. “I know what I am.”


No ambivalence? Let’s run some tests, and the pandemic provides a context in 2021. Are you vaccinated? Yes. No. Do you believe in the efficacy of vaccine mandates? Yes. No. What about mask mandates? Accept and practice them, yes? Accept and practice them, no? Vaccines for the pediatric population? Yes. No. Mandates similar for inside and for outside activities and for vaccinated and unvaccinated populations? Yes. No. Should there be exemptions for people who have already had and survived COVID-19 and its Greek-letter variants? Yes. No. How do you feel about those self-proclaimed VIPs and political figures who violate their own mandates and proclamations by partying without masks and social distancing? How do you feel about making children wear masks for a full day in school?


Now, did you answer those questions in favor of mandates and compliance or in favor of individual choice? Is it puzzling to you that Liberals tend to favor mandates issued by “authorities” more than conservatives?


“Well,” you say, “it’s because conservatives are mostly ‘uneducated rednecks’ incapable of understanding that their selfishness makes them fools at best and murderers at worst. They can’t see that they spread the disease. That’s why the disease is spreading and not ending. And now, children are getting sick because the fools will not listen to the authorities like Dr. Fauci and the scientists at the CDC and FDA.”


Or, you say,


“Well,” liberals are puppets that follow what the elite and ruling classes that control the media tell them to do. They’re afraid of their own shadows. They talk about ‘science’; yet, they hypocritically violate their own recommendations, which, by the way, are often contradictory, like the no-mask, one-mask, two-masks, one-mask, no-mask advice from their ‘lead scientist’ Dr. Fauci. Conservatives want to know that science isn’t an arbitrary guessing game. Have you seen those galas and award shows with celebrities without masks walking past servers with masks?”


Or, with regard to all this, you say,


“You’re making a mountain out of a mole hill. Of course, liberals are free thinkers and conservatives are not. And of course, liberals are more rational. They understand that there are reasonable measures one can take to quash the disease, measures like getting vaccinated and wearing masks while social distancing. All conservatives want is for some authority to control the world as they have known it, preserve the status quo, so to speak. This disease thing has given both sides a chance to show their true nature: Rational liberals vs. irrational conservatives.”


But don’t both sides yield to some authority while disregarding another? Isn’t it a matter of choosing one’s preferable authority? In that regard, aren’t both sides simultaneously “authoritarian” and “anti-authoritarian”? Don’t both sides exhibit Establishmentarianism and anti-Establishmentarianism? And don’t both sides decide on the bases of both reason and emotion?


How much of your answers to the questions on vaccines and masks was based on reason? How much on emotion? Certainly, vaccines appear to protect many people from death and extended hospitalizations. There seems to be evidence for that even though the Delta variant of COVID-19 appears to infect vaccinated people. And certainly, masks, though not foolproof, block some aerosols though viruses are small enough to enter both through the masks themselves and along the gaping sides of and at the open areas exposed by improperly worn masks. And certainly, since viruses are too small to see, all such organic particles can float suspended in a room atmosphere or even on the gentle breezes at a stadium or theater venue—even on the red carpet where celebrities walk and pose for pictures. And concerning that “six-foot social distancing,” note that FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb (2017-2019) said during an interview on Face the Nation that “The six feet rule was arbitrary in and of itself…Nobody knows where it came from…Most people assume that the six feet of distances, the recommendation for keeping six feet apart, comes out of some old studies related to flu, where droplets don’t travel more than six feet.” * Do liberals follow the “six-feet rule”? Do conservatives? Do YOU?


And as a matter of feeling over reason, how much of your answers to those questions center on fear for yourself and for your loved ones? It’s a truth that children have gotten very sick from the disease and some number of them, though small, have died. But most who have gotten the disease have not died. We can say the same for the flu. As I noted in a blog entitled “282 = 282” (8/2/2021), as many children died from the flu in 2009 as died from COVID in 2020; yet, no one proposed masks and social distancing, and no one proposed vaccine mandates or school closings. And the disease is so prevalent now that it has already found its way into animal reservoirs, as all viruses appear to do. Lions and tigers at the Smithsonian’s National Zoo in Washington contracted the disease in September, 2021. ** No one knows what species are destined to harbor the virus during periods of quiescence until it re-emerges in the human population. Should we put masks on all the animals that could potentially carry the disease? Should we vaccinate thousands to millions to billions of potential carriers in the general mammal and other animal populations? Maybe all the bats in the world? Certainly, the lions and tigers in Africa and India. Would you as a Liberal or Conservative be inclined to follow such advice if a noted “authority” gave it?


Have you considered these points in answering?


There is, in my opinion, an assumption among academicians that they can discern a Liberal mindset from a Conservative mindset, and I believe that assumption underlies attempts to define people by groups. Although I have done no “meta-study” of social and political psychologists and their leanings toward either liberalism or conservatism, toward either establishment or anti-establishment philosophy, I believe that research by Leor Zmigrod et al. demonstrates that such rudimentary assumptions about Left and Right underlie the general perspective.


Zmigrod, Ebert, Götz, and Rentfrow asked what the consequences of infections diseases had in socio-political settings, particularly in regard to voting patterns. *** The authors found “The link between pathogen prevalence and authoritarian psychological dispositions predicted conservative voting behavior in the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election and more authoritarian governance and state laws, in which one group of people imposes asymmetrical laws on others in a hierarchical structure” (from Abstract). Can you find the assumption in that statement? What I see is that although there might be a correlation between “elevated regional levels of infectious pathogens and authoritarian attitudes,” such a correlation ignores that other influences were operating, such as a poorly run campaign by Hillary Clinton, a disdain for a left-leaning media that predicted her victory, a rejection of the political decisions of the previous administration, a sense that Clinton was “more of the same,” a desire to try a different approach to economic revival and international policy, a hope that an “outsider” with business experience might effect a positive change, a promise of toughness on the international stage, and a few other influences. Was a desire for authoritarianism part of the process? It might have been, but the election in 2016 of a conservative candidate attracted many previously left-leaning voters. Were they seeking rule by an authority? The authors suggest that the Parasite Stress Theory of Sociality predicts a correlation between high levels of infections and a tendency for humans to avoid “dissimilar others” and to show “preferences for obedience and conformity.” Nothing new here: Read 


But what if many of the voters were, in fact, rejecting the previous “authority” and did not, as the political and social psychologists presume, suffer from some xenophobia? What if the rejection of a policy of “open borders” had nothing or little to do with xenophobia and more to do with a reasonable or well-reasoned approach to immigration that disallowed entrance into the country by citizens from known terror states like Iran and N. Korea? Was that xenophobia?


Branding anyone as only Left or only Right or only Establishmentarian or Anti-Establishmentarian carries the same errors that all generalizations carry. That liberal state governors appear to be imposing more restrictions on their citizens than conservative governors are imposing doesn’t seem to support the distinctions between Left and Right and the tendency toward authoritarianism.


And YOU, as I mentioned above, probably embody the complexity of favoring and disfavoring authority simultaneously and sequentially. Sometimes, I’m guessing, you hold both positions, and at other times you vary your stance.

Notes: 

*Shaw, Gabbi. 20 Sept. 2021. Former FDA commissioner said the 6-feet social distancing rule is ‘arbitrary’ and ‘nobody knowns where it came from’ Business insider, India. Online at https://www.businessinsider.in/international/news/former-fda-commissioner-said-the-6-feet-social-distancing-rule-is-arbitrary-and-nobody-knows-where-it-came-from/articleshow/86354716.cms  Accessed September 21, 2021.


**Chavez, Julio-Cesar. 17 Sept 2021. Lions, tigers recovering after COVID infection at Washington’s National Zoo. Reuters. Online at https://news.yahoo.com/lions-tigers-recovering-covid-infection-213126750.html. Accessed September 21, 2021.


***Zmigrod, Leor, Tobias Ebert, Friedrich M. Götz, and Peter Jason Rentfrow. 9 Sept 2021. The Psychological and Socio-Political Consequences of Infectious Diseases: Authoritarianism, Governance, and Nonzoonotic (Human-to-Human) Infection Transmission. Journal of Social and Political Psychology. Volume 9 (2). Abstract online at https://jspp.psychopen.eu/index.php/jspp/article/view/7297  PDF online at  https://jspp.psychopen.eu/index.php/jspp/article/view/7297/7297.pdf   Accessed September 20, 2021.

A reporter and a reader discuss the news.


Reporter: “Long night. I had a deadline on a story, and I just finished on time. Kept the usual cursing by my editor at bay.”


Reader: “I’ve never had to meet a newspaper’s deadline, but I’ve had to finish school papers on time, so I have some sense of your urgency and pressure. What was the story?”


Reporter: “About how climate is ruining our mental health.”


Reader: “What!!!???”


Reporter: “Yeah. Really. People are increasingly more upset emotionally and mentally because of global warming. You know, the hurricanes, fires, heatwaves, tornadoes, tropical disease migration, droughts, floods, sea level changes, and even polar vortexes. Well, all that weighs heavily on people. It’s giving them a ‘climate identity.’ * People are becoming increasingly more distraught because of climate change. And I’m not the only one reporting on this. There’s an article by Daniela Sirtori-Cortina out just yesterday about mental health being in jeopardy because of global warming.”


Reader: “Come on, are you serious?…Oh! I can see you are. Hmnnn…Have the DSM people…Have the people who write the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders labeled this yet? I’ve skimmed through the fifth rewrite, and I don’t remember seeing ‘Climate Identity Disorder,’ but maybe I wasn’t looking for it at the time. Is it just a subset of anxiety disorders?”


Reporter: “Trust me; there are people out there who are pretty upset about global warming. Look at all the articles we have had to write over the past twenty-five years. Look at all the reports coming out of the UN. Look at poor little Greta Thunberg who said we robbed her of her childhood. I’ve been thinking about my next article on the subject already. I’m going to call it ‘Climate-Denier Dysfunction’ and approach the subject from a different angle, going to list some ‘deniers’ and their conspiracy theories.”


Reader: “Aren’t conspiracy theories actually hypotheses? Never mind…just my wandering mind. Theories, as I understand them, are the product of demonstration. But I’m off the topic. Sorry. Okay, so you were writing about mental health and climate change. Is that like something similar to like… like… PTSD, maybe PCCSD, Post Climate Change Stress Disorder? Wait! Let me go back and combine the thoughts. We can name it Climate Hypothesis Anxiety Disorder, or CHAD. And as for Greta, who prevented her from playing hopscotch, or jacks, or some other games? Who kept her from her childhood? Greta, sorry to say sarcastically, might want to spend a day in the life of a child sold into slavery if she wants to experience a stolen childhood.”


Reporter: “You joke, and joke cruelly. You can see in Greta’s angry face that she’s distraught over climate change. There are people who are genuinely stressed out about global warming, about all the stuff that’s going on, all the natural disasters caused by climate change.”


Reader: “Droughts?”


Reporter: “Yes, and fires.”


Reader: “Floods and sea level changes?”


Reporter: “Those, too. All of them. There’s a whole population out there who can’t shake their personal fear over climate change; it’s making them anxious.”


Reader: “So, you wrote another story for them to read about how they are stressed out.”


Reporter: “It’s my job to keep them informed.”


Reader: “Informed about how they feel, about how anxious they are? But isn’t that some version of self-fulfilling prophesy? Is it also your job to keep people on edge because of what ‘might happen’ if the world warms up? Does an article that says how many feel the same do anything but confirm beliefs? If they know they are stressed out, doesn’t another article that tells them they are stressed out just magnify the stress, just convince them that they are doomed?”


Reporter: “You’re simplifying.”


Reader: “Not as much as you. What can your article do beyond confirming their ‘neuroses’ about natural phenomena, about climate? Do you direct them to cures?”


Reporter: “Cures?”


Reader: “Sure, cures of Nature and cures of people. Ways to ‘save the planet’ stuff, ways to deal with the coming doom and the extinction of the species, verbal anti-depressants and verbal anti-anxiety drugs. You’re  basically just reporting on perceptions of helplessness.”


Reporter: “Well, I haven’t written about cures. I just report the news as is. Things are bad and looking worse. I simply tell the readers. There are many people out there who feel this way about climate. It’s an upward trend of a downward neurosis. In fact, I’ve felt similarly. There’s a real problem. We’re going to have big shifts in demographics, in the geography of diseases, in famines, wars, resources. All because of climate. People…Well, not people like you…are concerned about their future.”


Reader: “Okay. I’ll grant there are people who are, in my mind, inordinately disturbed by talk of climate change. And I’ll grant that natural phenomena change. But don’t all the articles you and yours write exacerbate mental dysfunction? Show me this article by what’s her name, Sirtor…”


Reporter: “Sirtori-Cortina, Daniela. Here it is.”


Reader: “Give me a sec…Hmnnnn (reading)…”


Reporter: “Sure, blame me, the messenger. Remember, I just report. Sirtori-Cortina is just reporting; she’s a messenger, too.”


Reader: “But you report and report and report the same mantra. This is the result of climate change. That is the result of climate change. This is the result of…Every article ties some natural phenomenon to climate change. Remember that news lady on CNN, Deborah Feyerick, I think. She asked Bill Nye, the Science Guy, if a passing asteroid was the result of global warming. ** Okay, here in Sirtori-Cortina’s article I see the story of a Mariana Menezes.
    “Sirtori-Cortina reports that Mariana was happy when the US signed the Paris Agreement and ‘crestfallen’ when Trump pulled out of the agreement. She quotes Mariana as saying, ‘I started getting really worried, thinking, “oh no, we’re not going to make it”…I became very anxious. I couldn’t sleep…I was thinking about my children.’
    “I see that the sentence that provides the context for her statements is the one written by Sirtori-Cortina just before the quotation. The reporter writes, ‘The more she learned, the worse it got.’ You know the old saying, ‘If you say something often enough?’ Well, the corollary of that is ‘If you read something often enough….’ Think of what Mariana believes and feels when she says, ’We’re not going to make it.’ Really.
    “You think Mariana has actually ‘learned’ as Sirtori-Cortina writes? Or has something else been going on, such as indoctrination of one sort or another? You think Mariana has studied climatology and paleoclimatology? You think she is aware that over the course of 200,000 years or more of human evolution and of our species dealing with natural phenomena, that during swings in climate our ancient ancestors talked about how they ‘felt’ about a prolonged drought or a rise in sea level? Or did they simply act to survive by moving around to find water and by moving farther inland? You think Mariana knows anything about centuries-long droughts and eustasy?”


Reporter: “But we know that the world is warming. I wouldn’t be a good reporter if I didn’t mention it and its effect on people.”


Reader: “I can envision that If you had lived during the Medieval Warm Period or the Little Ice Age, you would have written the articles on impending physical aspects of climate change BUT without the Chicken Little anxiety slant. And as climates cooled or warmed, you would have noted physical changes, but not projections into the then future that might have caused psychological distress. You would have noted efforts to find food on the hoof, shelter, or a place to grow stuff, or different stuff, just as in the Little Ice Age northern Europe shifted from drinking wine to drinking beer (Thank you, climate change). If you had lived when the Pueblo or Maya underwent severe droughts, do you think you would have reported on their mental health or emotional state or about how they either methodically or randomly sought a better place to live under their altered circumstances?
    “Mariana needs to take a deep breath and read about flooding in ancient Mesopotamia, about how five millennia ago the ancient city of Ur was inundated by a rising sea. *** Mariana might be a little less anxious if she learned about the history of eustasy.”


Reporter: “What’s that supposed to mean?”


Reader: “What if you are giving your readers a false dichotomy? What if you are telling your readers or implying an Either/Or? Are you telling your readers that their only future lies in either a complete reversal of climate trends or a destruction of life as we know it? That there are no alternatives in a complex world? Remember the Dust Bowl years? How many Californians are descendants of people who moved off farms in the Midwest to escape the drought and then took up residence as farmers in California? How many Californians suffering from wildfires and drought today might pick up and move to their ancestral homeland in the Midwest?
    “Think of poor Mariana. She believes that doom is inevitable and that humans can’t cope with climate changes because of her sense of limited alternatives. But the truth about the natural environment is that it DOES change and people have coped with it. I keep thinking of sea level, for example, and how it started to rise about 20,000 years ago, having been as much as a football field’s length lower than it is today, maybe rising by 120 meters, with some of that rise being reached during Sumerian times to alter the lives in the ancient city of Ur. That rise occurring in steps, increasing transgressions of the sea onto the land, as they are called.
    “Can anyone say Miami? Is Miami the modern Ur? Will it be inundated? Sure, if the trend of the last 20,000 years continues. I think a better article would be focused on the folly of shortsighted humans to see that coastal communities are ephemeral at best. So, will an Ur-like inundation of Miami mean the end of the world as Mariana probably thinks it will be?


Reporter: “I hadn’t thought of…”


Reader: “Without compunction that you might be indoctrinating and frightening, you reporters keep writing that climate will inevitably destroy us unless we act fast. And now you are writing about how there’s an anxiety over climate. False dichotomy, I say. You remind me of the current Leader of the Free World saying when asked why the US left Afghanistan the way it did, ‘Well, what choice did we have? What alternative in the way we pulled out of Afghanistan?’ Just as the sequence of withdrawal could have been altered from military-out-then-civilians-out to civilians-out-then-military-out or from close-Bagram to keep-Bagram open, or from leave-weapons-behind to destroy-weapons-left-behind, or any other set of choices, but definitely not limited to Either this/Or that. To say there were only two choices like withdrawing chaotically or throwing whole new armies into the fray is to offer a false dichotomy. And that’s exactly what’s going on with all your doom-and-gloom articles, such as the one on the ‘climate identities’ of anxious people.
    “The question about climate change doesn’t have be centered on ‘we’re doomed unless we destroy the world economy or an individual country’s economy.’ It doesn’t have to be ‘accept the Paris Agreement’ or be condemned to natural disasters.’ Climate change could be as highly variable as climates are today. Changes will appear, if I can speak teleologically, to ‘favor’ some areas over others, enhancing living conditions at Site A while degrading them at Site B. Some will see lush growth; others will see desertification.              
    “Let me belabor the point, though I know you are in a hurry to meet that next deadline. Say sea level does continue to rise. I’ll take it as a given because I know that sea level has fluctuated, as I said, by tens to hundreds of meters during the past two and a half million years, rising, by the way, pretty fast through the first six millennia of the current interglacial period, the Holocene that people now want to call the Anthropocene because of human influences on the natural world. Anyway, not everything is an Either/Or thinker, but you reporters seem to think that people like Mariana need a black-and-white version of reality. If people keep moving to coastal locations, aren’t they inviting inevitable trouble? I live a thousand feet above sea level. I can’t be inundated. Is it nice to live in Miami? Sure. I lived there once, but I can’t see making a permanent residence in a modern Ur, though it’s silly to think of sea level rise as being so rapid that people can’t adapt. I think of Obama, a guy who proclaimed the seas were rising but who has built homes in Hawaii and Massachusetts right on the coast. Is he really worried about sea level? Yet, he proclaimed the worrisome mantra of ‘the seas are rising; the seas are rising.’
    “Poor Mariana. She was under the false assumption that the Paris Agreement offered a climate panacea and that the government could stop the seas from rising. It was either adopt the Agreement, or suffer the—in her mind—immediate end of things. But I can’t put the blame solely on Mariana for her despair. You people in the news just keep saying over and over that the sky is falling—or heating up. And you never seem to center any stories on the hypocrisy of the alarmists that is the corollary of the anxiety you say is widespread.”


Reporter: “Your mind is wandering…People are worried. What if you lived in Miami? What if you lived on the Mississippi Delta?”


Reader: “Right, sorry. Sea level. I was making a point…Oh! Yes. Sea level has been rising for 12,000 years, at different rates, of course, and variably at different places.  The Mississippi Delta? You know it’s only about 7,000 years old, right? That it’s there because of sediments laid down by the rivers and that for anyone living in Colonial Time, there would have been no land on which to build State Road 23 that runs down the delta through communities like Venice. And as for sea level rising? When the ice melted, its weight was removed from the land, so crustal rebound occurred the way carpet fibers spring back after being stepped on—and much of the land that was depressed in northern states under ice sheets is still rebounding upward. Crustal rebound offsets some of the increases in sea level caused by glacial meltwater flowing back to the sea. It isn’t a matter of a universal and uniform rise around the planet. Some coasts will see a greater increase than others. And in the case of tectonically rising landmasses, some will see a fall in sea level.”


Reporter: “Still, there’s a reality to more anxiety over climate.”


Reader: “Yep, and isn’t the modern world characterized by anxiety in general? You think I’m just hammering this, don’t you?”


Reporter: “Yada, yada, yada…”


Reader: “So, you simplify with your false dichotomies. It’s the way of the world, I guess. I’m thinking of a book called The Anxious Years, an anthology of essays about the 1930s. This emphasis on anxiety over a myriad of phenomena has been around ever since Robert Burton wrote The Anatomy of Melancholy in 1621. I think the Western World entered into a ‘woe-is-me-funk’ that became the zeitgeist of the modern world. Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Sartre added to it, with philosophy framing the growing number of types of psychological analyses. Climate is just the latest ‘woe-is-me’ focus.”


Reporter: “Whoa. Hold on. You’re trying to snow me with books I haven’t read. And, as usual, you’re trying to make something from…”


Reader: “Here’s the problem with the Sesame Street Generation. Or should I say Sesame Tweet Generation? If something is longer than an aphorism, it’s too long for the current generation to contemplate. People want short snippets, like those letters Sesame Street flashes on the screen. People don’t want a dialogue. They don’t want developed arguments, and they don’t have time for anything more than a quick article that proclaims something is a reality, like climate identity and its associated anxiety.”


Reporter: “I have deadlines.”


Reader: “And I have a desire to explore to the point of exhaustion. So, people like you and Sirtori-Cortina write about something you assume is true on the basis of anecdotes. Couldn’t I just as easily write an article about people who are unconcerned about matters like sea level? What about an article about Obama, an article that proclaims that rising sea level is not a problem. If it were, why did he build two homes on shorelines? Wouldn’t that allay fears of people like Mariana? She probably has no idea that those homes exist—expensive homes, by the way. And couldn’t some of those people who are unconcerned be, as you call them, ‘climate deniers’? Obama was or is a climate alarmist, but he appears to be unconcerned. Those two homes are proof of that.
    “And isn’t it possible that the ramifications of a warmer world might be beneficial in some areas, but detrimental in others? Isn’t it possible that the anxious people are people who would find another focus for their anxiety if they did not have climate to worry them? I’m sorry, but the current term ‘snowflake’ applies to many concerned about global warming. The very idea threatens to melt them. And since they believe themselves to be helpless against the onslaught of bad news, they have little choice but to feel melancholic or anxious.


Reporter: “You sound like one of those conservatives. Definitely, you’re one of those right-wing nuts.”


Reader: “Really? I’m sorry if I come off that way. I think I’m more Hegelian in that I want to read thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. And I’m willing to tear apart the new synthesis. I don’t want to hear emotional pleas from the anxiety-ridden for somebody to do something. I don’t want to hear that someone is worried because of some possible or probable future. I think global warming is quite likely, but give me a lifetime longer than a couple of centuries for me to actually see whether it is harmful or helpful.”


Reporter: “So, you want to put the blame for mental illness on a milieu?”


Reader: “I want to read you a passage from H. L. Mencken’s The New Deal Mentality. I think it applies here. Hold on. Here it is. Mencken writes about political and social matters that have become for some theological matters and for others the prevalent psychology of the times. Global warming has become a religion, and the IPCC is the head of the ‘church.’ Mencken was writing about progressivism and the promise of communism or socialism, but I’ll quote him in the context of global warming alarmists.


    ‘What has it [Think: the threat of global warming alarmism] to offer the poor fish who fall for it? What it has to offer, I greatly fear, is only a long series of splitting headaches. It may sooth[e] them transiently, but it leaves all their chronic agonies unrelieved, all their pathetic questions unanswered. When they throw it off in the end they will be precisely where they were when they embraced it—helpless, disconsolate, forlorn. Yet, they go on cherishing it with innocent and unflagging devotion, as little children cherish the concept of Santa Claus. They believe in it as firmly as they believe that they have immortal souls and will be transformed….’****


    “Isn’t that Mariana? You report increasing numbers of people ailing over some possible, probable, or unknown future. They walk around thinking their only choice is the false dichotomy of doom or glory, of a world of innumerable climate-caused disasters or a world of flowers and bunnies in which humans act positively to control that which they have never been able to control. So, even if humans have set the stage for a warmer world, they have also set the stage for more conferences, more dire warnings, more articles like yours and Sirtori-Cortina’s, more anxiety in the general population, and more despair that nothing can be done because not enough people care to act to save the planet from humanity. Not enough people take the Paris Agreement seriously. Not enough people are willing to sacrifice their personal economies for the good of all mankind. So, people like Mariana will, in the words of Mencken, feel ‘helpless, disconsolate, forlorn.’”


Reporter: “I have a deadline.”


Reader: “Go. Meet your deadline. And write more stories about how people feel.”


Notes:

*Sirtori-Cortina, Daniela.  17 Sept. 2021. Mental health could be the next casualty of global warming. Phys.org. Online at https://phys.org/news/2021-09-mental-health-casualty-global.html   Accessed September 18, 2021.


**https://www.upi.com/blog/2013/02/12/CNN-anchor-asks-if-global-warming-caused-asteroid-fly-by-VIDEO/6711360683868/  and other easily found links.   Accessed September 18, 2021.


***Mörner, Nils-Axel. 25 Dec 2014. The Flooding of Ur in Mesopotamia in New Perspectives. Archaeological Discovery. Vol 03 No. 01 (2015), Article ID:52979. 10.4236/ad.2015.31003 The author reports that a fossil shore was 0.3 meters higher than current sea level. The Holocene Maximum (of sea level) occurred sometime between 4550 and 5100 years ago. Online at https://www.scirp.org/html/3-1140038_52979.htm  Accessed September 20, 2021.


****Mencken, H. L. 1936. The New Deal Mentality. In Louis Filler. Ed. 1963. The Anxious Years. New York. Capricorn Books. pp. 126-140. The essays in this anthology indicate that much of the current anxiety-ridden milieu has roots in the 1930s. At the time, for example, proponents of socialism and communism were waging verbal wars against those in favor of capitalism. In Filler’s introduction to the collection, he writes, “It is not possible to understand 1930’s radicalism without also understanding 1930’s fascism… (115).” Think now of your present circumstances: Do you favor controls imposed upon you by government in the name of the “greater good” or favor a libertarianism that prefers a “natural selection and freedom to both fail and succeed”?

Apparently and regardless of governmental restrictions, people will migrate from one country to another if they believe there’s something to be gained in the move: Safety, for instance, or wealth, maybe infiltration for terroristic purposes, whatever. The causes of migration are, therefore, multiple, the results are the same, an endemic or indigenous population undergoes diversification. That’s the principle of equifinality in action, and we see it today in more than a million immigrants to the southern border of the United States, the people from other countries who have applied for entry through the legal system, and, recently, in the tens of thousands of Afghan refugees seeking safety. The end of the causes is the same, many people arriving in the United States in a very short time, a mass migration that increases the population by an unknown number that maybe some future census will determine.


The equifinality of being in the United States does not, however, alter the multifinality of outcomes among individual migrants. Some will succeed in their new homeland; others will not. And no amount of averaging will explain the success or plight of migrating individuals. But averaging will imply that a wide range of outcomes will occur. Unfortunately, those who claim to see the “big picture” will not take into account the pixels of failures and even tragedies that will become the fate of many individuals both among the migrating and indigenous populations.


As “meltiing pot” America has discovered through migrations (both voluntary and forced), the “finality” for the country is always a mix of “equi” and “multi.” There’s no getting round that historical fact. Decades from now, people will have the perspective that the present does not afford: It’s only in looking back that we can see, for example, the advantages of having an Einstein, a Fermi, or a Bethe living in the United States, or of having many others who added to our knowledge of the world, such as Audubon in ornithology and Claude in cellular biology. Maybe somewhere in the mix of current migrants there are some who will become known for accomplishments that will enhance the lives of others just as many involuntary migrants, the African slaves, produced enhancements in industry, technology, agriculture, and the arts and sciences. But if we average to say that generally the influx of migrants will enhance the country in some way, we must also say that generally the influx will also provide us with new versions of Charles “Lucky” Luciano.


The CATO Institute ran some numbers on “criminal immigrants” in the United States. Not counting the “illegals” held in jails or prisons for illegal border crossings, the institute found that among legal immigrants incarceration amounted to 364 per 100,000, whereas among illegal immigrants, incarceration was 756 per 100,000—keep in mind that these incarcerations were for “crimes” not associated with an illegal border crossing. * Now, that sounds like bad news because any crime has a victim and many crimes have multiple victims. And, in fact, it is bad news. However, and there’s often a “however” in such matters, the researchers found that “Legal and illegal immigrants were less likely to be incarcerated than native-born Americans in 2017, just as they were in 2014 and 2016” (5). Imported crime does not surpass home-grown crime.


Where does that leave us? There are those who favor “borderless” countries. I suppose at their core, they believe in some “world unity.” They are, as I have previously called them, the “Imagine Idealists” after John Lennon’s lyrics, people for whom reality is an average and for whom some endpoint unity is possible, maybe inevitable. They are versions themselves of a Pierre Teilhard de Chardin who believe that human evolution works to make humans better, whatever “better” means, physical, intellectual, spiritual. They believe the masses will unconsciously work toward a better world. To hold such an evolution principle, they must ignore the realities, the details, of actual evolution, specifically that its mutations are random. They must also ignore that many such mutations result in “tragedies” for the individuals in the grand experimental scheme of things. Biology, used as a model, has produced far more losers than winners if estimates on the number of species that have gone extinct are reasonable. David M. Raup, a statistical paleontologist, estimates that the planet has housed up to fifty billion species over the last 3.5 billion years. ** And although there are conceivably between 5 and 50 million species alive today (no one knows), those alive are outnumbered by those extinct. Thus, evolutionary experiments don’t always lead to success stories, averages are still just averages with outliers of all kinds, and some of those outliers are victims of crimes committed by border crossers, in fact, by migrants both legal and illegal. Still, there are those who believe the world will work its way toward some Overman as Nietzsche postulated and Bernard Shaw promulgated, or toward some Omega Point imagined by de Chardin, that the trend will be toward “betterment” and “unity.” “Imagine…and the world will live as one” (Lennon).


And it might. Yes, it might. But then, again, there have been in just one year in the United States those incarcerated 756 per 100,000 who have entered the country to do no “good.” And the same applies to other countries. Sure, the average might be toward some neutral or enhanced state of the State, but the individuals who suffer some harm, loss, or even personal extinction at the hands of migrants won’t be around to see the future Fermis, Audubons, and Claudes enhance our knowledge of the world. Does migration offer benefits? Did you use Google to find this author? Thank—or curse, depending on whether or not you like these musings of mine—Sergery Brin, immigrant who with Larry Page founded the search engine. Had Brin not emigrated from the Soviet Union…


That difference between equifinality and multifinality, terms used by psychologists trying to trace the origins of pathological individuals, does seem to apply here. Two people can have very similar experiences but end up different (multifinality); two can have very different experiences but end up the same (equifinality). We’re unpredictable as individuals, however. Do we apply averages when we are not personally affected? Those who favor unlimited border crossings have no objections to them. Many poor immigrants will arrive to become productive individuals. But what if those “Imagine Idealists” were personally victimized by an illegal alien criminal? What, for example, if they were in the baby shoes of the three-year old child of 35-year-old Karen Ruiz of California? Karen was killed by Herbert Nixon Flores, a 46-year-old Salvadoran who had been deported ten times for offenses ranging from burglary to driving under the influence, to resisting arrest, to criminal threats to, well, a bunch of other illegal activities. Average that, I might ask of an “Imagine Idealist,” into your Omega Point, your Imagined World, your Nietzschean Overman. Certainly, Karen won’t be able to see the endpoint because she prematurely reached it thanks to Flores and the sanctuary system that allowed him to stay in the United States on his eleventh illegal entry.


I have no idea what caused the pathology of Flores. Maybe he was reared without love. But, then again, maybe he was reared with love. At 46 and shortly after killing Karen Ruiz, he committed suicide, so we’ll never know. Does it matter whether or not his life path was filled with love or hate, with respect for life or disdain for it, with compunction or indifference?


And so, migrations will continue as they have since humans spread first throughout Africa and then throughout the world. They will be both voluntary and involuntary marches of the innocent and evil, the bright and dull, and the moral and amoral. In every group of every ethnic stripe, there have been the good the inventive. Those unaffected personally by any evil will say that all is well and good. Greater diversity has given USA African-American, Asian, and European inventors and engineers. It has given the United States thinkers and artists, industrialists and technologists, and moral and spiritual leaders. Those negatively affected will say there are prices to pay that no individual should have to pay, prices paid by Karen Ruiz and her daughter. Those who favor open borders will think in terms of averages and of the supposed evolution toward some wonderful finality. They will continue to believe that given the right start in life, all individuals will end in an equifinality of good. In opposition, those who have experienced varying degrees of harm will note that multifinality is more rule than exception.


How do you view yourself? Is it in terms of averages or in terms of specifics? I would guess it’s in terms of the latter rather than the former.

​Notes:
*Langrave, Michelangelo and Alex Nowrasteh. 4 Mar 2019. Criminal Immigrants in 2017: Their Numbers, Demographics, and Countries of Origin. CATO Institute, Immigration Research and Policy Brief No. 11. PDF available.


**Raup, David M. Extinction: Bad Genes or Bad Luck? New York. W.W. Norton & Company, 1991. I’ve quoted Raup in other blogs. The book is worth the read.

Elsie, Bessie, and Buttercup have a mooooving conversation.


Elsie: “Did you see the news. Someone potty-trained the kids.”


Bessie: “No.”


Buttercup: “Doesn’t surprise me. My new grand-calf is smart as a pig, maybe even smarter.”


Bessie: “All grandmas think that. You tellin’ us, Elsie, we don’t have to look before we step in the pasture? Dung-it, that would be great. I always have to wait for a rainstorm to get clean.”


Elsie: “Yeah, I know what you mean. Oh! Sh…. I just stepped in another one. But it’s true, some humans trained cows to use a designated area to relieve themselves. *


Bessie: “Well, send my milk to the churn if that an’t sompthin.”


Buttercup: “And humans called us ‘dumb’! See, I told you gals that Baby Belle was smart.”


Elsie: “Humans! They think they’re so smart. They chain us in a barn and keep us from roaming over the pasture. I don’t know about you, but I could use some sunshine and fresh grass. Heck, I’d even help train the kids, make them ‘civilized,’ so to speak.”


Bessie: “So, how’d these humans potty-train the kids? Did they get ‘em to graze on hashish and tell ‘em that there’s more like that at the potty-yard? That worked for the hashishin.”


Elsie: “Kinda. They gave them treats if they used the ‘facility,’ classic conditioning, I’d say. And for those who didn’t make it to the ‘bathroom’ in time, they used a water spray as a ‘punishment.’ Not all the kids learned, but a surprising number did.”


Buttercup: “They better not dope up my grand-calf with some cannabinoid.”


Elsie: “Relax, Buttercup. No one’s giving Baby Belle THC. That’s something humans save for themselves.”


Bessie: “She’s right, you know. Funny how so many humans think they’re sompthin’ special because they graze on a drug they call ‘grass.’ Anyway, isn’t it kind of ironic that humans can be taken up with training us, but that they can’t train themselves to be civilized? Even when they offer one another green ‘treats’ they call money, they get only some temporary or partial conditioning. Heck, I heard there’s a whole country where humans prefer their past over the conditions of the present, a place where no one in charge pushes for education of the females. Bulls, every one of them! Buttin’ heads, gorin’ one another.  Barnyard bullies, that’s humans, for you. And they’re everywhere, but especially in that one countryside, where patties cover the grazin’ land. Can’t imagine there’s any place to walk there without steppin' in it.”


Buttercup: “I’m going to see Baby Belle.”


Elsie: “Come on, Bessie, let’s go see this cow potty I read about. I heard there's a bunch of humans who think they can train everyone to act civilized.”


Bessie: “Okay, but even there, we better watch where we step. As you said, ‘Not all the kids learned.’ But I guess it’s better than walkin’ over that grazin’ land in Afghanistan.”


Note:

*https://www.science.org/content/article/barnyard-breakthrough-researchers-successfully-potty-train-cows

If there is one date that begs in the minds of an American an essay on extremism more than September 11, I can’t think of it. It was a date that engendered a twenty-year war that ended with the potential for more extremism at a time of extreme measures bordering on complete authoritarianism by many governments, authoritarianism perceived as the imposed will of either oligarchs or dictators on the populace. But why connect authoritarianism to extremism? The genealogy of the two reveals the hereditary relationship: Authoritarianism begets extremism begets authoritarianism begets extremism, and so on. And now, a bit of research seems to confirm that genealogy.


The first two decades of the twenty-first century do not differ much from the perceptions of authoritarianism as inimical to the freedom of any group, save the group in charge. At any time of variously motivated civil protests and counterprotests, there has been the potential for violent encounters as those who would unseat an Establishment confront those who would defend it. And apparently, such encounters emerge as anarchists and defenders switch over time and circumstance between Left and Right. Today’s anarchists become tomorrow’s defenders and vice versa. History provides numerous examples, even recent history.


Here are six headlines I found on the Web:


    1.    Brexit as much due to resistance to supranationalism as immigration
    2.    Far-right violence in Portugal draws strength from skinhead roots—study
    3.    Researchers call on science fiction to understand extremist psychology
    4.    Conservatives and liberals motivated by different psychological factors, new study shows
    5.    Social psychology sheds light on Trump’s appeal
    6.    Study: Left-wing authoritarians share key psychological traits with far right


Just a cursory reading of those headlines with no knowledge of the content they introduce reveals that perspectives on who is an “authoritarian” and who is an “anarchist” appear to differ in the minds of social psychologists. And those differing perspectives put the “science” behind social psychology in doubt from my perspective.


In general, the headlines lean toward identifying the Right with extremism more than the Left, the Right with authoritarianism and Establishmentarianism more than the Left, and the Right with dictators and oligarchs more than the Left. And yet both sides have demonstrably shown themselves to take alternating positions of anarchy and oligarchy as the group in power finds itself defending that power against a rebellious group not in power. The rise of both the Nazis and the Soviets, both socialism and Leftism incarnate, reveals the switch anarchists make to become dictatorial Establishmentarians. Certainly, neither the Nazis nor the Soviets had any desire to give up the power and the establishment they acquired through revolution. The pattern repeats throughout history, as just in the last twenty years the Taliban have gone from Afghan Establishment to anarchists to Establishment again. Crazy world, isn’t it? It’s a world in which just about every social, political, and religious movement terminates in its antithesis.


Where’s Empedocles when you need him? Oh! Right. He threw himself into a volcano to prove he was a god. Talk about extremism! Talk about running your immortality into its mortal grave. In that version of his death rumor has it that the locals found his sandal. More on the old philosopher later…


So, let’s begin with the last headline first. Here’s a comment by lead researcher Thomas Costello, as reported at Phys.org: “We found that in terms of their psychological characteristics and their actual behaviors, left-wing authoritarians are extremely similar to authoritarians on the right.” * Costello says that authoritarianism begs power, but ironically, people on the right and on the left will both submit to “people they perceive as authority figures.” I suppose there are many historical and contemporary examples, such as crowds gathered at political conventions, working themselves into a frenzy over their nominees for office.


More importantly, Costello says that being an “authoritarian” is primary; ideology is secondary. Authoritarians adopt an ideology, and that ideology can be extreme on either side of the social, political, and religious spectra. Thus, the difference is the focus that initiates anger and violence: Those on the left are anti-Establishment; those on the right, in contrast, are pro-Establishment—at least, that’s the supposition behind the study. And the focus of violent behavior? One strikes blows to destroy; the other strikes blows to protect. There are, of course exceptions and shades of grey in both Leftist and Rightist movements; extremism comes in degrees or color intensities. And as I just noted by citing the histories of Nazis, Soviets, and Taliban, all such movements bear in them the potential for becoming the opposite of their initial identity. Maybe a more germane example on this twentieth anniversary of 9-11 lies in the shift from the Left’s fearing a dictatorship of the Right to the Right’s fearing a dictatorship of the Left. Who, for example, instituted more “lockdowns,” “mandates,” and restrictions on personal freedom across the world during the pandemic, the Right or the Left? And who is perceived to be anarchist?


Costello states that submissiveness is inextricably tied to both Left and Right authoritarianism. Those people who strap on bomb vests and those who fly planes into buildings to disrupt the Establishment demonstrate their subservience to their favored Establishment and its untouchable leaders—who never choose to strap on bombs or fly planes into buildings because, well, someone has to be left behind to run the show that sacrifices individuals for some “greater cause.”


The back-and-forth political battles over Brexit also fits into an examination of extremist views. According to a study done by the University of Kent, those labeled right-wing authoritarians prefer “cultural traditions and loyalty to national authority…and a desire for group-based dominance and hierarchy in society.” ** Those in favor of Brexit wanted the return of the England they once knew and were imbued with “Euroskepticism” and a desire for the UK to “take back control.” In an interesting mix of anarchy and Establishmentarianism, those in favor opposed the supranational EU Establishment and sought to break its hold on their lives in favor of a return to the historical national Establishment. This switch between objecting to the “transnational authority” and desiring a return of the former national authority is like watching a volley from the sideline stands at Wimbledon. But lest you think all this Brexit stuff had the propriety of a genteel English afternoon tea break, consider, also, this additional headline from NPR: “Violent Protests Over Brexit Continue in Belfast.” *** Yes, people took to the streets over Brexit to break things and hurt others. Brexit, the attempt to de-establish the transnational Establishment and to re-establish the national Establishment engendered anarchy.


Portugal provides an example of people shifting from one establishment to another through anarchy. The breakup of its colonial empire displaced millions and cost maybe as many lives. At one time favoring its multiculturalism, the country took a turn against incoming refugees of late, with “skinheads” from the Far Right trying to “preserve” the country against the influx of immigrants. The authoritarians shifted ideologies from 1974 through the 1980s to the present. They remained authoritarian as Costello explains, but adopted different ideologies. This is the opening line of the article (#2 above) by the University of Birmingham: “Influenced by the international ‘skinhead’ movement from the mid-1980s, current extremists drawn largely from the working classes have turned to violence to ‘protect’ white Portugal and Europe against the ‘threat’ posed by multi-racial and multicultural society.” **** Here’s the irony. The predecessors of the twenty-first century Portuguese “skinheads” were “politically violent organizations aimed at stopping the advance of Communism in Portugal and safeguarding the Portuguese multi-racial and pluri-continental empire” (italics mine]. Yep. The Rightists turned Leftists; the Leftists turned Rightists. And in their recent incarnations, there’s been a strange merger of the ultra-nationalists and the anarchic skinhead cultures.


With regard to authoritarian leanings behind the tendency toward violence, the third headline above leads a story about an experiment. The researchers Matteo Vergani of Deakin University and Ana-Maria Bliuc of Western Sydney University framed the language of articles in ISIS’s “Dabiq” and al-Qaeda’s “Inspire” as a science fiction tale. Vergani says, “ISIS-related mobilisation [sic] requires high levels of authoritarianism and religiousness to counterbalance the high psychological costs on its followers—psychological costs due to the members being aware and supportive of the group’s adoption of extreme violence, especially against other Muslims (which al-Qaeda has criticized).” ***** Participants in the study appear to have favored the more extreme ISIS language if they were more in tune with authoritarianism. Seems that this study backs the conclusion of study #5 by Costello: Authoritarianism underlies the tendency toward submissiveness and anarchic violence.


Is the jury in? Do we have Leftists and Rightists pinned like moths on display? Do we know which side is more violent, which more capable of extreme behavior? If there is a problem in almost every social science study, that problem is rooted in its authors’
assumptions. What might you infer from this statement in article #4?


    "The motivational basis of conservative preferences for “binding” intuitions has for years been assumed to be independent of needs to reduce uncertainty and threat and to represent a broad, prosocial sense of morality. However, the new findings in PLOS ONE indicate that the endorsement of 'binding foundations' is linked to the very same motives associated with many other conservative preferences, including authoritarianism, social dominance, system justification, and underlying psychological needs to reduce uncertainty and threat." ******


Whoa! Just a minute there, Mr. Social Psychologist and Mr. Social Scientist. What does one do with the conservative and Jeffersonian mantra that “that government is best that governs least”—is that the mantra of system justification and a desire for reduced uncertainty? Does the statement in the PLOS ONE article rely on the assumption that a conservative stress on individualism is a cry for social dominance? Or is it the manifestation of a psychological projection by social scientists who themselves lean Left? Could one not just as easily argue that those in favor of smaller government are advocates of smaller, less intrusive Establishments and greater freedom for individuals?


Haven’t, if I might use a sign of the times, Left-leaning social media outlets been censoring conservative talk shows, videos, and public tweets? Who by the evidence of the present is really seeking social dominance and authoritarian rule by suppression of dissent? And which group seeks to dominate first by neighborhood riot and then by legislation and mandate? Were summer-long riots in Washington and Oregon that saw firebombs thrown at office buildings housing government officials the acts of Rightists or Leftists?


Any group can have an innate desire to protect its status quo. Those shades of grey or color intensities of extremism do not negate the reality that on the Right and on the Left there are rugged, unyielding individuals that sometimes adopt extremism and violence, and at other times an indifferent neutrality. Put this to a personal test. Do you lean Right or Left? Now, given your leaning, would you participate in acts of random anarchic violence? And if you do lean either way, are you submissive to the will of your side’s oligarchs or dictators? You might upon introspection find that you are a model of a dichotomous world: Sometimes you favor peaceful obedience; at other times, violent defiance. Sometimes you adamantly take a stand for your personal individualism; sometimes you take a stand for some overriding Establishment.


What about article #4? The one about the election of Donald Trump. According to the author, Trump, the “reality-star candidate” won because of “authoritarianism, social dominance orientation, prejudice, relative deprivation, and intergroup contact.” *******
Now the question becomes one of perspective. Prejudice, for example, against whom? Oh! Right. Anyone not “Right.” And, of course, anyone not “White.” And the reason for the assessment? The early move to ban entrance into the country by those from terror-exporting states and to ban entrance to those bypassing legal entrance through the immigration system, plus the statement widely spread but rarely qualified by the media that on the issue of statues remaining up or taken down, there were “good people” on both sides. The argument was made about decade prior with the Confederate Flag flying on the South Carolina Capitol, a flag erected by southern Democrats and whose continued display was blamed on supposedly prejudiced Republicans. The stereotyping changes with the group in power and, as in Portugal, with the passage of time. The ideology favored by African-Americans at one time slowly shifted. The sins of the KKK were forgotten by the generations that benefitted from Civil Rights supported mostly by the party of Lincoln. So, in an era of a Left-leaning media the executive actions of Trump and his statement about the statues were taken as endorsements of bias and as an affinity for a white-only nation. Professor Thomas Pettigrew of the U. Of California, Santa Cruz, says that these five “social-psychological phenomena” added up to “the unprecedented outcome.” That simplification that the “five social-psychological phenomena” motivated Trump voters says nothing about the alternative candidate and her appeal or lack thereof. What matters to many social psychologists seems to be the stereotype. If you are conservative, you are a right-wing extremist. But then doesn’t the other side of the coin bear the stamp of anarchy, similarly stereotypical, similarly generalized to lump everyone together? Wow! Looks as though we have to choose between two very different groups even though Costello’s study indicates that they are much the same.


The article on Trump’s election declares that “Trump supporters are also characterized by prejudice.” That statement is followed by the mainstream media’s explanations centered on racial bias and xenophobia. Yet, many of those Trump voters were black, Hispanic, and, who knows, people with genetic origins spread throughout the planet. What does Pettigrew have to say about the 28% of Hispanics that voted for Trump or the 6% black males who also voted for him? Were they also “prejudiced”? And were the 48% of “political fence-sitters,” the 13% of “mostly liberal,” and the 2% of “consistently liberal” voters who voted for Trump also prejudiced? Were there no economic concerns during the election cycle, no foreign policy concerns, no intrusive government concerns? Did the American populace choose between an Either and an Or or nuanced concerns?


Are there Right-wing extremists? Sure, just as there are Left-wing extremists. Does either group resort at times to violence? Sure. But what can we learn from these studies about Right, Left, Extremism, and Authoritarianism?


First, the nature of social science research lends itself to errors born of definition. Remember that those Portuguese skinheads evolved from earlier skinheads with an opposite point of view and purpose—yet both groups were lumped together as “skinheads.” Think of Antifa during the recent riots. The stated purpose of the group is anti-Fascism, but all that the group has done could just as easily be designated as the perfect model of Fascism. How did the group’s actions differ from those of Hitler’s brownshirts?  And that group that invaded the US Capitol on January 6 is little different. Ostensibly in the name of supporting the Establishment, the group became anarchists seeking to de-establish. And among the mob were people who on an ordinary day would go about business as usual, no thought of anarchy or considering themselves to be anarchists. No encompassing social science explanation hits the complex target of human motivations when it starts with dubious assumptions and questionable definitions. The 162,000,000 people killed under socialist regimes in the twentieth century indicates that authoritarianism and Establishmentarianism make the violence on the Left as brutal as—if not more brutal than—the violence on the Right.


Back and forth we go, Leftist bad, Rightist bad. Leftist extreme; Rightist extreme. I’m reminded of the lyrics by Stealers Wheel, “Clowns to the left of me! Jokers to the right!
Here I am stuck in the middle with you.” That is, I hope, if you, like me, would prefer less extremism and more moderation, more rationality and less emotion and assumption.


Oh! Almost forgot. I mentioned Empedocles. What could the philosopher have to do with  all this? Empedocles modeled the Cosmos on the Four Elements (Earth, Air, Fire, Water) and on two opposing forces: Love and Strife. Pure love breeds a perfect harmony; pure strife breeds chaos. In the cycle of the universe, Love and Strife contend for dominance. But that’s a simplification of his simplification. When strife dominates, chaos abounds. Think of those riots in Portland and Seattle. Think of any mob violence. When love dominates, the world order is at peace—but without all those interesting individuals that come with mixing. Mixing? The philosopher’s four elements don’t change the way we know that uranium, for example and through radioactive decay, can become lead. They do, however, mix in the eyes of Empedocles to become all the diverse entities in the Cosmos, much the way we think of compounds like salt (NaCL) forming. The mixing of the elements that makes all those separate entities occurs under the dominance of Strife.


So, the world is a bit more interesting place when Strife prevails and a bit more boring when Love prevails; it is also a bit more dangerous. And that’s the nature of the Right-Left extremism that breeds violence first in the name of de-Establishment and then in the name of Establishment. Unity (Love) has, to use a term from radioactive decay, a short half-life. It splinters into disunity. And as in Empedocles’ Cosmic Circle, it fights for new unity.


Along the way—if I may use another philosopher’s ideas—Nietzschean prophets, people like Hitler, rise to proclaim that an historical destiny “to unify” and “to establish” speaks through them. And always the prophecy is that a new world order is just around the bend—if only individuals seeking a unifying authority would yield their individualism in the name of the unreachable Overman, the group’s destiny being more important than the individual’s. The greater cause demands a self-sacrificing suicide bomber. And thus it is in every coup and every election cycle: The crowds of submissive individuals gather on the Left and on the Right, with many determined to sacrifice themselves if not in violence then in loss of personal destiny for some “greater cause.”   


Notes:
*Emory University. 10 Sept 2021. Pys.org. Online at https://phys.org/news/2021-09-left-wing-authoritarians-key-psychological-traits.html . See also Thomas H. Costello et al, Clarifying the structure and nature of left-wing authoritarianism. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (2021). DOI: 10.1037/pspp0000341  Accessed September 11, 2021


**Press Office, U. of Kent. 12 Feb 2019. Online at https://www.kent.ac.uk/news/society/21131/brexit-as-much-due-to-resistance-to-supranationalism-as-immigration   Accessed September 11, 2021.


***Langfitt, Frank. Morning Edition. 9 April 2021. Interview transcript online at https://www.google.com/search?q=Violent+Protests+Over+Brexit+Continue+In+Belfast+-+NPR+https%3A%2F%2Fwww.npr.org+%E2%80%BA+2021%2F04%2F09+%E2%80%BA+violent-protests-over-...&rlz=1C5CHFA_enUS965US965&oq=Violent+Protests+Over+Brexit+Continue+In+Belfast+-+NPR+https%3A%2F%2Fwww.npr.org+%E2%80%BA+2021%2F04%2F09+%E2%80%BA+violent-protests-over-...&aqs=chrome..69i57.2728j0j9&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8.       Accessed September 11, 2021.


****U. Of Birmingham. 16 Jan 2020. Online at https://www.google.com/search?q=Far-right+violence+in+Portugal+draws+strength+from+skinhead+roots%E2%80%94study&rlz=1C5CHFA_enUS965US965&oq=Far-right+violence+in+Portugal+draws+strength+from+skinhead+roots%E2%80%94study&aqs=chrome.0.69i59.1409j0j15&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8     Accessed September 11, 2021.


*****Deakin University. 1 Feb 2018. Online at https://www.deakin.edu.au/research/research-news-and-publications/articles/researchers-call-on-science-fiction-to-understand-extremist-psychology   Accessed September 11, 2021.


******NYU. 11 Nov 2020. Online at https://www.nyu.edu/about/news-publications/news/2020/november/conservatives-and-liberals-motivated-by-different-psychological-.html.   Accessed September 11, 2021.


*******McNulty, Jennifer. 10 Aug 2017. UC Santa Cruz Newscenter. Online at https://news.ucsc.edu/2017/08/pettigrew-trump.html   Accessed September 11, 2021.

As I have written elsewhere, bureaucracies have a ponderous inertia that slows the commencement of any project and slows its cessation once the project proves to be ineffective or counterproductive. Take the drive by many politicians and their bureaucratic agents to change the energy structure of the United States, for example. The goal of agencies since the Clinton Administration (under Al Gore) has been to become carbon neutral in an effort to “save the planet” from a presumed ineluctable global warming. Set aside the assumption that “global warming” will be universally “bad” for a moment, and look instead at the assumptions regarding alternative energy as the path to a cooler Earth.


Think balloons. Think blimps. Think hydrogen. Clean fuel for a cooler planet. But is it? As with all bureaucratic endeavors, I ask, “What could go wrong?”


Take “blue” hydrogen as a model “alternative fuel.” Start with a molecule of methane (CH4) and an oxygen molecule (O2, the stuff you breathe). Get them to react, and walla! Two molecules of hydrogen (H2) and one molecule of carbon dioxide (CO2). Burn the hydrogen for energy and get only two byproducts, water and heat (I know, but where does the heat go?). And then there’s that nasty carbon dioxide stuff, that other byproduct that plants love. You can’t release it into the atmosphere, can you? After all, isn’t that what global warming is all about? Isn’t that the villain, the cause?


The race to acquire a “blue” hydrogen energy supply has already begun. The goal is a carbon-free alternative energy. But there’s a problem in running to that goal. Along the way every promising Achilles has to stop to account for the energy required to produce the alternative energy. There’s a cost to all human endeavors, and in forming “blue” hydrogen, the cost lies storing both the blue hydrogen and the carbon dioxide produced by that reaction between methane and oxygen. And there’s an addition cost in building a new or repurposing an old delivery system for the hydrogen. Use natural gas pipelines? Okay, but would leakage be a problem?


There’s also the cost of storing the hydrogen, which, in your experience poses two problems: The Hindenburg flammability and the  party balloon leakage (hydrogen is, if you recall, a very light atom, the lightest, in fact, one capable of escaping the decorative mylar skin of the party balloon}. So, there are two storage problems: First, there’s that nasty carbon dioxide derived from the reaction that must be sequestered forever so it won’t enter the atmosphere, and second, there’s that escape-artist hydrogen that is tough to store, even in deep salt mines. And then, of course, there’s the question of transport: In pipes? In trucks or trains? Third, there’s that matter of converting vehicles into little Hindenbergs that in many of the six million car accidents per year in the US will result in “Oh! The humanity!”


What’s a politician to do? What’s a bureaucrat to do? They keep running after the tortoise of planetary change only to find that as they close the gap, a gap still remains. Zeno’s paradox: To beat a tortoise in a race when the tortoise has a head start, Achilles must run half the distance to the tortoise, and then as the tortoise moves, half again that distance, and so on, ad infinitum. And during the race Achilles must overcome not the ever-decreasing yer ever-present gaps, but he must also overcome the excess baggage of his tactics, using, for example, as much energy to produce the clean energy as the clean energy yields or constructing and maintaining a reservoir for an ever-increasing amount of byproduct carbon.


Let’s throw money, tax money, into making blue hydrogen. Lot’s of money. What could go wrong? Of course, when the count of true costs emerges somewhere along the race track, that is, when Achilles sees he can’t catch the tortoise regardless of his greater energy output, it will be too late to withdraw. Pride will be at stake. Achilles can’t give up. That would be an admission of failure. He’ll run a losing race just for the sake of pride. The slow, pondering tortoise of planetary change will continue, moving variably faster or slower, but always staying ahead by half, and then half of that, and then half of that…


So, the politicians and their bureaucratic agents keep running, and those of us on the side of the race track keep providing them with the food they need for the race. Along the course are those who cheer them on, oblivious to the futility of their favorite champion’s efforts and to the costs to themselves. 


We’ve tried much, haven’t we? We have turned our food into fuel, for example, by making ethanol from corn to add to our gasoline. Note that we subsidize ethanol production. Note that it takes more than two and a half tons of corn to produce 320 gallons of ethanol. Note that it takes 131,000 Btus to make one gallon of ethanol that yields only 77,000 Btus (Encyclopedia of Physical Sciences and Technology, 2009). Note that subsidies continue to run because the inertia of bureaucracy under the direction of politicians can’t be stopped.


Achilles keeps gathering mass as he runs, also, much like a subatomic particle accelerated toward the speed of light. The faster he tries to run to overtake the tortoise, the more mass he accumulates, and the more the gap changes. Want to produce blue hydrogen with solar power? Sounds like a good idea. Ought to make catching the tortoise easier, but there are still those weighty byproducts. In about 20 years there will be over 700,000 tons of windmill blades in landfills. Right now only 5% of car electric batteries are recycled. Solar panels have only about a 30-year life. ** Then what? More landfill debris? Certainly, we couldn’t put it where we grow our corn though who cares whether or not corn for ethanol is polluted? (What about the purity of water supplies? No doubt there will be funds allotted for a cleanup)


Apparently, planetary changes are tortoises that win races against the best of our political and bureaucratic heroes. Apparently, too, inertia keeps them in the race. But they all had ample warning on the odds of winning the race. Zeno wrote his paradox about Achilles and the tortoise 2,500 years ago. Still, they keep on running…




*Cornel University. 12 Aug 2021. Touted as clean, ‘blue’ hydrogen may be worse than gas, goal. TechXplore. Online at  https://techxplore.com/news/2021-08-touted-blue-hydrogen-worse-gas.html. Accessed September 10, 2021.


**Atasu, Atalay, Serasu Duran, and Luk N. Van Wassenhove. 18 Jun 2021. The Dark Side of Solar Power. Harvard Business Review. Online at https://hbr.org/2021/06/the-dark-side-of-solar-power  Accessed September 10, 2021.

Why is it so difficult for any of us to take advice? Is it because we can’t see the immediate effect of listening?

Unfortunately, most advice isn’t demonstrable as immediately effective or helpful. There does seem to be one place, however, where people are willing to take advice, and that is in a sound studio. Whoever works the soundboard seems to have the ear of the performer. Maybe the reason is that the advice comes in the form of immediate playback, revealing the benefit of yielding to the control of someone who can change the volume, the treble, and the bass to produce the best version of a performance. The sound of words doesn’t seem to hit home as much as the sound of sounds.


Now most of us have ears, but to paraphrase Mark, 8:18, we don’t listen. Of course, in a sound studio the advice is the sound itself, and the producer can vary the “advice” with knobs, dials, and slides on the soundboard.


Maybe knobs, dials, and slides are what we need to give advice that is not only heard but accepted. And maybe if we pictured any person giving us advice as a producer sitting behind a soundboard adjusting the sounds, we might be more inclined to listen.


Most advice doesn’t lend itself to immediate playback. That’s unfortunate, but it is the reality of time outside a studio where most life occurs. But if we want our music to be accepted by a wider audience in the theater of daily life, we need to think of our advisors as producers with soundboards.

Far be it from me to criticize a Nobel laureate—Well, maybe not so far. We can all use a bit of healthful rethinking about what we consider to be sane, rational thought. Take taxes, for example, and those who would impose them. Are taxes in the hands of bureaucrats and politicians spent on the common good? Are they spent with or without personal accountability? 


Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz favors a world tax on corporations. * Just what we need, a universal tax on corporations that will provide money to be used for…


That’s just it. For what? Under whose wise direction? And with no waste? As a well known politician who currently wants to spend trillions of dollars is wont to say, “Come on, man.” Who buys into the idea that waste derived from incompetence, greed, and redundancy wouldn’t affect a world treasury filled with this proposed corporate tax? Think of the the USA’s GSA scandal. Think of any anonymous bureaucrats handed inordinate sums of money.


Name a large government bureaucracy that doesn’t overspend or spend just because the money is there.


I’m thinking of an incident years ago and a college librarian where I worked. As I was leaving the library after doing some research one night, I passed the desk of one of the librarians. Her head was down, her hands quickly turning pages of publishers’ catalogs. “Katie, what’s going on? Why are you feverishly working so late? I’m the last person here. Close up. Go home.”


“I have $20,000 more dollars to spend by tomorrow. If I don’t spend the money, the state auditors will reclaim it, and the library will lose those funds.”


“But on what are you spending it?”


“I’m ordering as many books as I can.”


“Any books? Any principle behind what you order? Faculty requests? Some ‘every library should have a copy of’ list?”


“I don’t have time, and I already filled the requests. I have to order before tomorrow,” she said as she lowered her head to peruse the catalogs.


“Okay, good luck. Order copies of Proust’s novels for me. I’m teaching him next semester and the library doesn’t seem to have copies.” **


World tax? I’m thinking now of The Stamp Act, of a tax imposed by an agency far removed from those required to pay the tax. Americans who paid some attention to their history might remember that in 1765 the British Parliament decided to levy a tax to recoup funds spent in the French and Indian War, aka the Seven Years War. The colonists didn’t like it. It was, in fact, one of those nails in the coffin of British rule in the Colonies. A group far removed from the taxed colonists wanted their money. Now imagine a world tax that Stiglitz favors. Imagine any tax imposed by an entity that might misuse not $20,000 simply because it has it to spend, but maybe $20,000,000,000! Or $20,000,000,000,000! No temptation there.


Remember the General Services Administration scandal, the $800,000 party thrown in Las Vegas, Nevada? Yes, $800,000 that included a reception that served a $19 pp charcuterie and $7,000 in sushi at the reception, a $3,200 session with a mind reader, $$5,600 for in-room parties, over $6,000 for T-shirts, water bottles, bartender fee, rented tuxedos, and vests. And, of course, $100,000 in travel costs for multiple trips pre-conference by the conference planning committee; I don’t know how much for the travel and rooms of the participants in Las Vegas, but I should mention in my incomplete account the $6,325 the GSA spent on commemorative coins in velvet boxes and the $146,000 for food. “Drop in the bucket,” right?


Between 2017 and 2019, US bureaucracies distributed grants worth $135,826,847,780 (Dept. of Education), $22,135,246,534 (Dept. of Labor), and $35,201,732,943 (Agency for International Development—USAID) plus a couple of trillion dollars more. And God bless the Ivy League Schools with their paltry collective $140 billion in endowments; they needed tax money: The US agencies gave them $9.8 billion in grant money.


Am I being naive? Isn’t the bulk of that money spent rationally? Isn’t it spent without waste on projects necessary to the common good? Or is the following list of government grants compiled by Adam Andrzejewski of Forbes something everyone should consider before following the advice of a Nobel laureate?
    
     hookers for Jesus ($530,190)--Prayers with moaning? A new meaning for "Amen"?    
     tai chi classes in senior centers ($671,251)--Don't people in Asia gather on their own to do this in a park?
     creating outdoor gardens at schools ($1.6  million);
     space alien detection ($7 million)--Are we different from the medieval cartographers who wrote "Here there be dragons" on    maps?                 
     taxpayers-funded story time at laundromats ($248,200)--No doubt a quiet place for a dramatic reading!
     sex education for prostitutes in Ethiopia ($2.1 million);
     a social media war on tanning beds ($3.3 million);
     webcast-livestreamed eclipses ($3.7 million);
     subsidized airport on Martha’s Vineyard ($12 million)--What's wrong with the public ferry? ***


World tax. Sure. That’s what the seven billion of us need. And who will be in charge of the spending? Aren’t you glad that the G20 has discussed it? Aren’t you glad that a prestigious Nobel laureate backs it?


I’ll bet you can’t wait for the corporations to get their world tax bill. You know they won’t pass any of those costs to you, and you know that ALL that money will go to bettering the circumstances of people around the world, to maybe saving the polar bears, the coral reefs, and the massive ice sheets on Antarctica and Greenland, or maybe to…. Give me a moment….To bailing out countries that went deep-end socialist and spent all the locally collected taxes on giveaways, Greece, for example. Remember the unrest in Greece’s streets and the EU’s bail-out euros? Or maybe to maintaining the WHO that did such a wonderful job on COVID-19.


In 1766, the British Parliament repealed the unpopular Stamp Act. If the global corporate tax is imposed, who will repeal it? Once a bureaucracy forms, it grows. Imagine an unfettered one with the resources of the world’s corporations. I can envision the parties—excuse me, conferences—in Geneva, Monte Carlo, Macau, and Las Vegas.


And what will be the argument behind instituting such tax? If a Nobel laureate favors it, such a tax has to be reasonable. What could go wrong?


*https://techxplore.com/news/2021-09-nobel-laureate-stiglitz-global-tax.html


**I was a professor in the Department of English before moving into the Department of Earth Sciences.


***30 Sept 2020. Where’s the pork? U.S. taxpayers funded a lot of wasteful spending (2017-2019). Online at Forbes https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamandrzejewski/2020/09/30/wheres-the-pork-us-taxpayers-funded-a-lot-of-wasteful-spending-2017-2019/?sh=11d30c703dc0  Accessed September 8, 2021.