A Fly in the Ointment

[grantcart]

18. I have been giving this modern mass cognitive dissonance experience considerable thought recently

My current vocation brings me to visit mostly seniors in mostly rural areas.

As you can imagine I meet a large percentage of people who supported Trump. Many of them are not too bright. I am thinking of a Mexican American 74 year old who had a huge Trump - Make America Great Again - flag in the front yard. As I was leaving I realized that this fellow's English only included a few dozen words and 4 that he knew was "Make, America, Great, Again". That was why he supported Trump. He wanted America to be Great. That was all he knew about the election.

Most of the Trump (or suspected Trump supporters) were perfectly reasonable, faith based folks, plus a smaller group of radical nitwits.

If you asked this larger group of folks if they would ever support a candidate that had repeatedly cheated on his wife and was repeatedly divorced, engaged in running gambling enterprises, had consistently failed with multiple million dollar bankruptcies had been found to run a fraudulent university scam and was forced to return tens of millions of dollars, advocated trade war and massive federal debt as standard policy, none of them would support that.

It reminds me of a conversation I was having with a farmer in Central Washington State who was complaining about the federal government. This part of the country probably has the greatest federal support on a per capita basis because of Grand Coulee Damn than any other part of the country sans small communities with large military bases. I was pointing out that the GCD was in fact a federal project and not a tribal one and that he benefited from cheap electricity and water for irrigation.

When he informed me that all of his water was well water and that he was down to 100,000 year old water. The fact that he was using water that fell to the earth 100,000 years ago stunned me and we wandered down different paths in our conversation. I was aware of which Church he attended and was aware that their theology was off the scale nuttery.

I asked him how old the earth was? He said 4,000 years old.

It was such a stunning example of cognitive dissonance that I didn't try to integrate the obvious contradiction but simply switched the conversation back and forth in a sympathetic matter so I could see someone who was highly functional operating his brain in dual mode without the two parts of the brain talking to each other. It was like a science experiment.

And now days I will meet some highly functioning perfectly pleasant people who demonstrate a similar dissonance with their faith and Donald Trump. They are not stupid people but their brains have stopped working in an integrated way. Even more interesting this isn't a purely American experience. Other countries are going through similar experiences ranging from Brazil on the one hand with a nut job for President and UK on the other with its Brexit and even a large anti vax demonstration last weekend.

Like you I concluded that this is a result of a large shared experience of fear.

What is the cause of this fear?

I believe that this fear is consistent with the very prophetic work 50 years ago of Alvin Toffler in his book "Future Shock".

The basic premise is that change will continue to accelerate beyond our ability to absorb the nature of change.

When I look at a Trump supporter in Pennsylvania I see a blue collar guy who worked all his life in coal or steel and doesn't understand a world that is going to use more solar and synthetic materials. He doesn't see how he will work after 50 and how his kids will survive at all. "We have been here for generations, what are we supposed to do, move?".

To which the answer is yes, move and adapt. Moving and adapting is the one constant that all Americans share in their heritage. From the first natives that kept moving past San Diego looking for even better land further south to the their progeny who are now jumping fences to get back to San Diego. The one constant is that everyone here moved (or was forcibly moved) and adapted. For those of us with family history's in the west, we just kept moving, and continue to move around at a much higher rate than many in the east and the south.

To conclude, as I frequently do, that the US is not particularly well educated or smart is a cheap formulation that doesn't penetrate the epidermis of the problem. I find myself wondering about that when I listen to someone with low education, skills and sophistication talk at length about a subject that they have a deep interest in. like football or the Pacific campaigns of WWII and I realize that this person isn't "stupid" but in a cage. Its amazing how much detail and knowledge a "red neck" can have on a subject that interests him.

That cage, I believe, is our ability to manage change, which you could argue is a basic part of intelligence or at least self awareness. It is a cage we are all forced to confront until we can find a way to absorb an ever increasing rate of change in every aspect of life. Like contemplating economic systems in the future I usually end up with "well how did they do it on Star Trek"? How do we create a populace that is open to and embraces change?

I am more sympathetic to the hard working guy who never did anything wrong, got up and worked a hard days work, went to Church on Sundays and followed the Commandments pretty much to a tee. For decades he was told that same sex love was an abomination and then in a split second on the sociological scale he was told that it was OK, that a good loving same sex couple was morally superior to the guy who came home and beat his wife every Friday night.

He can even accept the argument. His problem is that he no longer trusts his own ability to know what is permanent and what is built on sand. So he clings to his guns and religion and the idiot leader who says that is OK.

It is natural that we react with outrage to the Republican fascists who exploit this fear. It is more important in the long run that we attempt to understand the roots of this fear as you do in this invaluable post.

Good to hear from you again.