The Graveyard Spiral of Politics:
I think the title of this section pretty much says it all. So I’ll just expand upon it a little bit.
In a democracy, leaders depend on winning votes from majorities of voters. In competing against your opponents for public support, visionary leadership does not get you elected. Pandering to the lowest common denominators is what gets you elected, because dumb people get to vote too. If more voters care more about what kind of shirts the candidates are wearing than they do about the candidates’ foreign policies or whatever, guess who they’re going to vote for.
Now that so many people have devoted so much time and effort to figuring out how to win democratic elections by triggering favorable emotional responses in statistical majorities of our hunter-gatherer brains, visionary leadership of America is only possible when our country gets into so much trouble that statistical majorities of American voters finally realize that none of the other candidates have the slightest f*cking clue what to do about it anymore. Statistical majorities of Americans only agree to daring new approaches to trying to solve problems after they’ve lost hope of anybody’s conventional solutions working anymore.
Forget about current events for a moment. I’m sure you’re probably as sick of hearing about them as I am. Let’s see how this graveyard spiral of politics worked out in a previous decade.
Vital Lies, Simple Truths was published in 1985. Dr. Goleman spells out the fundamental problem of the Cold War on the very first page of the forward to the book. The nuclear arms race was caused as much by the harnessing of nuclear energy as it was caused by the public’s failure to correctly perceive how big of a threat nuclear weapons were. According to the theories on how to pursue the Cold War that were circulating in the Pentagon in the late ‘70s, and as Dr. Goleman paraphrases:
1: In an age of overkill, with plentiful and redundant weaponry able to deliver ample megatonnage, no new weapons system offers a significant military advantage.
2: However, if naïve groups—the American public, other than world leaders, for example—believe that the weapons matter militarily, then those weapons will be consequential psychologically and politically.
3: Thus those among the inner circles of military strategists should act as though new weapon systems—such as the BMX missile, or SDI—actually matter militarily, so that they will matter psychologically.
…So by 1985, the United States was spending one million dollars every minute on maintaining and developing our nuclear weapons.
Like I said in the last book, the nuclear arms race seemed necessary because it fulfilled the reputation part of the Hobbesian cycle of aggression. Everyone felt the need to maintain a reputation for themselves to help keep themselves safe, and everyone felt that everyone else must feel the same way. If everyone on both sides thought to themselves, “Jesus Christ, this is f*cking stupid,” it still wouldn’t do anyone any good. Until everyone realized that everyone else felt the same way, nobody had any way to realize that any other course of action could’ve kept everyone safe.
There are a whole lot of things that went wrong with everyone’s perceptions, and it will take me most of this book to cover them all—or even to try to cover them all. If politicians started out by assuming they were smarter than their voters, and Americans and Soviets each assumed they were smarter than each other, then everyone involved went into the situation with an information package that said, “I think this is stupid” and, “I’m smarter than you”. Subconsciously, that information package must also have contained the ideas “you probably don’t think this is stupid” and “so in order to keep myself safe from you, I’m going to have to do this stupid thing anyway”.
Well guess what. Everyone in the world knows something important about life. That includes your worst enemies. In fact, your worst enemies probably know a lot of important things about life, which is how they’ve managed to pose such a threat to you and earn the title of your worst enemy.
So if your political strategy depends on you outsmarting everyone else in the world except for the people in your own group, and you assume that you can do this and that you have to do this because you’re smarter than everyone else, you’re f*cked, because there are a lot more people outside your group than there are inside your group, and on the whole, they are as smart as you are. If everyone assumes that they must be smarter than everyone else, and everyone keeps trying to outsmart everyone else, then everyone is going to lose, because their plans are going to keep getting foiled by other people’s actions, but nobody’s going to understand why, because everyone’s going to assume their opponents aren’t supposed to be that smart.
In the last book, I said that I’m conquering the world by uniting it. If this is the best plan anyone else can come up with to try to conquer the world, it shouldn’t be that hard at all…