Individuality Is A Big Deal
So far I’ve written four essays on becoming an individual in the US, without explaining why this seemed like a worthwhile question. The answer lies in the last election. The conventional wisdom is that the state of the economy and the character of the candidates are major factors in the decisions of voters. A third major factor is tribal identity.
But no reasonable person can deny that Trump is a revolting bag of guts. He has no integrity, no loyalty to the Nation or anyone besides himself, and no reason to want to be president other that personal gratification and staying out of jail.
It is equally inconceivable that any sane person thinks that the current Republican Party cares about the economic or physical well-being of anyone except themselves and their donors. There is nothing in the history of the last 45 years to suggest that Republicans will enact any legislation, adopt any budget, or make any rule change that will benefit any of us. Most of their plans will hurt millions, including their voters.
So why did so many people flunk this basic test of democracy and vote for this oozing pustule?
Their answers
I’ve run across lots of explanations, without keeping track of sources. He says he’ll protect my abortion rights, said one woman. He’s the imperfect tool the Almighty is using. He’s against killing babies. He’s so masculine. He’ll fix the economy. The economy was better under his first administration. He’ll fix the border crisis. He’s for law and order. The Democrats didn’t help me. The price of eggs. Vaccines are killing us.
That’s all crazy, and I doubt it’s the real reason.
Why it matters
We say we live in a democracy, that our government derives its just powers from the consent of the governed. But we ignore the responsibilities democracy puts on us. We do not form a shared view of reality, and of the problems we face. We do not listen and hear ideas about solutions.
Blue voters think the point of government is to make our joint lives safer and more pleasant, and to give everyone the best chance of flourishing. I have no idea what Trump voters think the purpose of government is. Most of them couldn’t tell you. Only the Christian Dominionists have an answer.
I think Trump voters follow leaders who tell them what their problems are. These leaders insist that the important things are abstract ideas around sexual morality, racial purity, white male superiority, and religious fundamentalism, among others. Trump and his henchmen find or invent instances exemplifying those fake abstractions, and the leaders and the media amplify them. These leaders (preachers, Fox News belchers, Qrazies) tell them Trump will solve the problems created by Trump and amplified by those very leaders.
Normal people know government can’t solve those abstract problems. It can only make life hard for the targets of right-wing obsessions. The leaders know that too. They don’t care. They want votes and obeisance, things that will benefit them.
Two explanations
I think existentialist philosophers like Camus and Sartre are right that many people don’t want freedom. They are willing to do just about anything to avoid exercising it. Perhaps they think it might expose them to ridicule or hostility from the people around them. Perhaps it’s too hard to make a decision. Maybe they’re afraid of the responsibility that goes with exercising freedom. Maybe they think that if everyone exercises freedom, chaos will follow. Freedom is dangerous.
I used to think this existential dread was just an rationalization to explain why so many Germans supported the Nazis, and why so many French people supported the Vichy government. But now I think that they were on to something important. Freedom is terrifying.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau offers a different explanation. This is taken from the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Soon, there become distinct social classes and strict notions of property, creating conflict and ultimately a state of war not unlike the one that Hobbes describes. Those who have the most to lose call on the others to come together under a social contract for the protection of all. But Rousseau claims that the contract is specious, and that it was no more than a way for those in power to keep their power by convincing those with less that it was in their interest to accept the situation. And so, Rousseau says, “All ran to meet their chains thinking they secured their freedom, for although they had enough reason to feel the advantages of political establishment, they did not have enough experience to foresee its dangers.”
Doing what the dominant class tells you to do is a trade-off for relief from fear of chaos. Watching the fearful vote for Trump is just like watching people run to meet their chains.
Both explanations seem to rely on a deeply human desire for security and certainty. Not all people succumb to that desire. Many of us know that there is no permanent security, and that there is no certainty. That knowledge does not frighten but inspires. The question becomes not how to escape freedom, but how best to use our freedom in an indifferent universe.
Conclusion
1. We all look to others for our ideas. I do. So who am I to judge others for choosing Trump or some rando on YouTube as a leader? Well, I think some things are better than others, and I can make these distinctions, guided by the insights of people who don’t want anything from me. In particular, they aren’t asking me to give them powers they can exploit for their own ends.
2. I used to think conservatism was driven by principles, even if I could not quite articulate them to my own satisfaction.
Now I think millions of Americans choose to abdicate their freedom and responsibility to judge based on their own principles.
=======
The caption on the front page image translates as “Turn back? After we’ve come so far?”
In Escape From Freedom, Erich Fromm argues freedom is a burden that many are happy to forego.
Yes. I remember thinking the same thing I thought about Camus and Sartre, that it was a kind of rationalization.
For Camus, his famous remark: Nothing is forbidden does not mean everything is permitted, places all responsibility for your morality on yourself. You cannot escape it. It is a burden and even giving it to others does absolve you of responsibility.
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Thx. I couldn’t recall my name. :)
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Wasn’t that a 1970s hit by Jim Croce?
Earl:
I assume you’re referring to Leroy Brown, after the fight with Doris’ husband: “a jigsaw puzzle with a couple’a pieces gone.”
That’s certainly an apt metaphor describing our society at this point (although the number of missing pieces is a bit shy).
Good article
Why we elected Trump?
I hate to say it but the electorate doesn’t
know what “United” means and second,
they believe Fox News propaganda
Dark days ahead, the Supreme Court is
corrupt and only a revolution will solve matters unfortunately.
The law has been compromised
If you read Ed’s post, it’s not reflected in your comment.
Thanks
I’ll take your comment under advisement, but in the meantime….
With all due respect….
“…only a revolution will solve matters…” Revolution often, but not always, results in the most ruthless and unscrupulous in power. There are no guarantees of improvement. We still have legal means for change.
I have no idea what Trump voters think the purpose of government is.
My WAG: “Government is inherently intrusive, not to be trusted under any circumstances, and exists to be fought against, minimized and customized to cater to my poorly-defined values.”
Q: Are all the factions developing within MAGA inherently white-supremacist across the board? Maybe.
Tim Snyder has labeled the modern GOP philosophy as “notalitarian” in his new book On Freedom. A notalitarian is someone who is “bottomly agnostic about both values and facts” (p. 221)
I think many MAGAs have been programmed by Fox et al. to believe Dems = higher taxes = giving their taxes away to lazy unemployed minorities aka “socialism.” “Cutting wasteful spending” and “close the border” pushes their buttons.
Never mind that they happily accepted Covid money from daddy Trump. It’s not socialism when Repubs do it.
MAGAs aren’t bothered by things like logic and facts; they just dig in their heels out of spite because they think freedom means never admitting to a lib they are wrong.
Thanks Ed.
IMHO, ‘Freedom’ is in the eye of the beholder…One person’s concept of freedom is different than another but in a true democracy there are so, so many freedoms to exercise, the act of exercising becomes habitual and we take them for granted. Breathing is a freedom when short of breath, whether due to low oxygen or lung disease.
Like Joni Mitchell said, “Don’t it always seem to go, that you don’t know what you got ‘til it’s gone…Oh, bop, bop, bop”.
One third of voters wanted trump, one third Kamala, one third didn’t vote. He won ‘cause of red state EC vote counts. And we all know the EC is a relic from our civil war days and has never evolved since.
‘Freedom’ to vote and know that your vote was counted are sacred parts of our democracy but taken for granted. We will just have to see what happens to the 2/3rds of the electorate that didn’t vote “to make our joint lives safer and more pleasant, and to give everyone the best chance of flourishing.” A rude awakening by the un-wokers?
If trump is an oozing pustule, those who want him and his cronies to run this country are a big bad boil on the butt of our freedoms and soon us regular folks are not gonna be able to sit down anymore.
And ‘standing-up’ for your principles will become really tiresome.
Then the “millions of Americans who chose to abrogate their freedom and responsibility to judge” may have to think really deeply about the origins of their principles and their freedoms.
Freedom requires that they accept responsibility for their actions.
Donald Trump is the poster child for NOT accepting responsibility for your actions or anything at all. Is that what drives his base, to be like him – and – get away with it?
Don’t know how this fits, but my sense of typical low information voters is that they genuinely believe they are participating in a meaningful way. Of course, that posture will not withstand even the slightest analysis, nevertheless, they forge ahead on that basis.
Which means, it’s not what’s driving them.
It’s white supremacy. As long as the government supports white supremacy, bigots are happy to support it. But if that government starts programs that are perceived as detrimental to white supremacy, bigots will turn on it.
It’s plain as day if you know US history.
BINGO!
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Symptom, not explanation. Why is white supremacy a driving force? It puts people ahead of the people of color they despise, those not like them. It also subjugates them to white male dominance. The planter class is a requirement element.
It’s not that simple. Different factors drive different voters. For some it is the price of eggs. For some the many sided propaganda land they live in. WS is only what drives some, maybe many.
But even if they claim it’s the price of eggs, it should not be believed because people often choose whatever of many factors that motivate them, that is least morally objectionable to others and maybe to themselves, without self awareness.
I think the combination of your Camus/Sartre and Rousseau reasons form a decent first approximation for what drives the behavior and beliefs of a large segment of the population. My exposure to the cultural aspects of the dominant religion when in grad school in Utah in the 1980s led me more to the Camus/Sartre concept: the attraction for the adherents was never having to make a decision with imperfect information, because the Bishop will tell you what to do. But since then I’ve seen a lot more of the Rousseau fear, and certainly the expression of power used to retain power, which I didn’t pay attention to back then.
I see an obvious connection to the election: people opted for the strongman who will fix things while they get along with their own lives, and existing social leaders pushed their followers to support Trump to retain their own positions of mid-level power.
However, I’m missing something (probably important) about how this ties in to individuality and the previous posts in this series. [Apologies and I’ll be patient if that is the topic of your next posts.]
Individuality is not the same as agency and self-determination, or reflection and intentionality. Individuality is not just the opposite of conformity. I don’t see that individuality explains MAGA versus my voting preferences.
Even within the most socially-determined, top-down conformist societies I’ve had to live amidst (Utah, but also small town southern white Baptist), almost everyone expressed their individuality. They didn’t think for themselves, and they certainly didn’t question or rebel against the society or powers that be, or dye their hair or dress outside the norms. [They were taught science as a set of facts to memorize, not as a fundamental way of learning/knowing about an empirical reality.] They channelled their individuality into what was allowed (or possibly into things they could control and affect), which then received much greater emphasis than in other societies I’ve observed. Minor details of their clothing; pride in secret recipes for the best hot dish, pie, barbeque, or jello salad; embroidery or quilts or other crafts; customizations on their car or guns, etc.: all became important personal expressions of individuality. To some extent, individuality was more channelled than suppressed or absent, channelled into things that did not challenge power or the way things were. “Caught up in systems that control” them, but actively expressing uniqueness from their accumulated experiences and desires. To me, even the MAGA-ist Trump supporters are very much individuals.
This is a helpful comment, about half of a future post.
I’m reminded of kids in a school where uniforms are required and strictly enforced. Every child will still find some means to individuate – the color of the shoelaces, two different color socks, a pencil case with a particular patch sewn on, a sweater with unusual buttons. Each is a strike against a system of control.
re “The Bishop will tell you what to do”
I agree some people enjoy the sense of order and virtue from conforming to their church’s rules.
But then there’s MAGA pro life Catholics dismissing the pope’s “The covid vaccination is a moral obligation.” I’m curious how they justified this to themselves in the face of millions of covid deaths.
Who wants to make a major decision–really major? It’s hard, and as my sister (an MSW with wisdom) pointed out, we’re never trained to do it. Buy a house, a car; figure out how to handle sudden large debt; confront the challenge of a dying relative where medical choices must be made…
Our culture feeds us images of happiness based not on the process of figuring out hard things, but of possessing their proceeds. In this country now, “freedom” means having to deal with that for which we are least prepared, that which our culture does its utmost to avoid.
The rich pay folks to do this for them. The rest of us can’t. Freedom is scary indeed.
This is a really good insight. Thanks.
You stated this clearer than I did.
You and your wise sister emphasize the lack of training in decision-making, and the stakes, the magnitude of the decision.
I underestimated the high stakes aspect. What struck me to begin with was seeing college students asking their bishops (more or less rank equivalent to a local parish priest, 5 or 6 levels of delegated authority below God) for even “minor” (to me) decisions like what specific classes to take. The bishop’s edict would be arbitrary because the bishop had no relevant specific knowledge. But looking back, those decisions likely seemed high stakes to those students at the time.
As for training about decision making, my throwaway parenthetical about science taught as facts to memorize v taught as a process, only hinted at that. I was one of the fortunate minority taught (in California public schools) science as testing & creating & accumulating provisional knowledge via accumulating results and observations, not memorizing “Kingdom, Phylum, Class, …, Family, Genus, Species”. The science was about causality: x causes y, tested by repeatedly doing x and not x and seeing what the outcome was. Back then I naively though everyone got taught at least a form of that.
But science is only tangential to decision-making. It is a way of seeing the world, gaining specific knowledge, figuring out (some) hard things. I grew up in a family that played hearts & bridge & gin, where using imperfect information on who might have the queen to decide whether to play the king or the jack was how to play the percentages, and win more often. I learned weighing partial evidence and consequences in simple (probabilistic) low stakes cases because that’s how my parents played, and I didn’t like losing to my older sister. What I learned about science extended that thinking about odds and outcomes from simple card games to all of my life. I would guess that far fewer people get that decision training playing cards any more.
Now, working with natural resource managers (and physicians) who have to make decisions with imperfect information, who can’t wait for more data to get a sufficiently low “p value” for certainty, I realize that even well-educated people with power often don’t know basic decision making. That lack of training you and your sister identified is probably more important to why people defer to authority than what I emphasized. [Also, many people are happy to take obviously bogus p values to eliminate the stress of thinking about a decision. It isn’t just that thinking is hard and pointing to < 0.001 is easy. Avoiding the stress is more important than improving the odds of the right choice, because even with the best process some fraction of the time the decisions will be "wrong". Sometimes they do have the queen and the finesse fails.]
That all said, I'm not sure that the rich pay folks to do this for them (they don't pay me!). I don't see rationality or analytics behind most of their decisions. They pay experts for decisions in investment banking and such, but I see most rich folks basing most decisions on ideology or tarot card readers or gut feelings or "life coaches", perhaps depending on the level of rich. In this way they may be just like you and I, only with golden parachutes when the get it wrong.
.
Mr. Walker, thank you again for asking the big, fundamental questions. It is always tenuous to generalize about the population as a whole, but polling tells us most Americans like and want the things that modern government can offer – clean water, quality education, well-maintained, safe and efficient roads, bridges and other infrastructure. Who pays for it and who benefits from these governmental services is where things get contentious.
In my view, the modern Republican Party, attenuated by the extremist and aberrant Donald Trump, want everything for wealthy white people and not have to pay a nickel for it. Of course, this is sophomoric – like wanting to eat cotton candy for every meal, not brush your teeth and never get tooth decay. The modern Democratic party, on the other hand, is like the old wizen grandfather (Joe Biden?) who tells you to eat your peas and carrots, drive a Chevy Bolt and save your money for the future. Which party is going to appeal more to testosterone-fueled young men addicted to vaping, crypto, on-line betting and Instagram? The future looks bleak.
Hannah Arendt speaks of the fears that led to fascism … the rise of a middle class, unanchored because of the loss of the divine right of royalty, needed some complex of beliefs that were similarly safe and encompassing and embraced the bundle of fasces that united all in security (always *against* some threat) and justified the rise of the militarized nation state with, therefore, an external threat. All, of course, accomplished by surrendering freedoms to the leader, who in several cases morphs into the same Divine , hereditary power.
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I did a long series on The Origins Of Totalitarianism; here’s the index: https://www.emptywheel.net/2016/03/08/the-origins-of-totalitarianism-index-to-all-posts/
Arendt’s book and Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation, which I also discussed here, are a big part of the foundation of my thinking for this series, and for my guesses at the underlying causes of the rise of trumpism.
I think these books give us a place to start thinking about today. How are these changes happening now as compared with then.
All of German society became “unanchored” and lost its bearings owing to the deprivations and loss of the First World War, the imposed peace, the upending of its form of government and its personnel, and the devastating post-war depression and sky-high inflation.
We, the United States citizens haven’t had anything like that. We’ve been up on top of the world for 70-80 years if not longer. It’s more about the white folks losing privilege, which is just another way of saying supremacy, white people. No need to make excuses for what has happened because it’s not that difficult to see. It’s not eggs. It’s not vaccines or any other side issue, is the perception of the loss of privilege that most people weren’t even aware that they had.
Imagine how much turmoil would have roiled British society had its empire been shorn from them in 1919 , starting with India; its monarch and his family sent into permanent exile; its army and the Royal Navy virtually dismantled; and had the British pound fallen to several thousand to the US dollar.
Heard instinct is to follow.
I herd you, but it seems to beg the question Ed’s trying to explore.
I would submit that individual actions of a group (Trump voters) is guided by evolutionary forces, hence group action is less choice than compulsion.
Ah, “evolutionary forces.” I was wondering when the lemmings were going to get their moment in the sun.
Seems internally contradictory to me.
Thank you for this. And for highlighting this cartoonist I did not know. Here is another one from him that doesn’t require a caption.
That’s a fierce one!
Surgical.
Tears your heart out.
Great post! Reminds me of Devo:
In ancient Rome there was a poem
About a dog who found two bones
He picked at one, he licked the other
He went in circles, he dropped dead
Freedom of choice
Is what you got
Freedom from choice
Is what you want
You beat me to it…
“2. I used to think conservatism was driven by principles, even if I could not quite articulate them to my own satisfaction.
Now I think millions of Americans choose to abdicate their freedom and responsibility to judge based on their own principles.”
This is relevant and apropos of a book i am reading about antisemitism. Mein Kampf is quoted extensively and to Ed’s piece this is relevant. Hitler believed that “Mankind has grown in struggle and only in eternal peace does it perish…… We shall not waste time over minority rights and other such ideological abortions of sterile democracy..” Individuals had no intrinsic value……Social Darwinism
Enter the Jews…with the exact opposing beliefs. Every human has value. The opposite of Social Darwinism. Compassion and human rights, not might. But difficult to carry out.
This parallels though with slightly different subject (Freedom and individuality in Ed’s essay, compassion and mercy (Rachmones, YIddish)) in the book’s. Often, unfortunately people want to be told what to do.
Thanks for the provocative essay.
It’s helpful to me if you mention the name of any book you discuss. This one sounds interesting, not just to me, but to others.
That’s the parallel struggle that’s hard for me to unsee. From the individual case of domestic violence to the masses case of domestic violence.
Certain behaviors that when normalized become a culture literally creates “codependency”. That is, a reliance on external information from others to create reality for the self.
This reliance is problematic when alcoholism or mental illness or narcissism exist. It becomes harmful to the individual to become “dependent” on outside or external perceptions about ourselves.
We will lose touch with the individual within us. We will not rely on our senses, our emotions, our perceptions or even the quality of our thoughts.
We lose touch with our own gear for knowing things and dependent on others to tell us. I apologize for the psychology. This is my filter. I tend to think we can learn from each others filters. But that we cross into a problematic strategy when we lose touch with our own inner world.
My theory is that this is not due to laziness or the desire not to do the work but that the transformation from individual developing trust in their epistemological skills to dependent on knowing from others comes from the invalidation of the individual through the process of power and control. With the end extreme being brainwashing.
On the other end of the continuum the strong individual using skills of knowing first based in our bodies and then added and analyzed info through the filter of our own knowing and experiences.
This leads to a richness of perspectives. This is the general argument for diversity that new perspectives grows our brains and our solutions. That this perspective leads to more knowledge and leads us away from compulsive or obsessive routines in thinking. Those routines of knowing developed under power and control become a closed system.
My thesis is that this apparent “laziness” of thought occurs through the undermining of individual thought. This occurs through power and control that requires children to “behave” and individuals that need to be controlled. The more the rules and sanctions the less the individual trusts their own perception.
Minimize, deny and blame is a mechanism and behavior of power and control that literally invalidates the individuals experience. Your experience is minimized, denied or even worse blamed on you. This mechanism comes with a power incentive to give up your own perceptions to avoid harm.
And to live in this chronic invalidation from a young age or to be living in an environment like this daily, results in a disconnect from the self.
When the individual thought is punished, we must focus on the punisher to keep psychological and or physical safety. We stop relying on our own individual information system.
This is why I keep referencing domestic violence. Power and control parenting, paramilitary groups, gangs, evangelical Christian groups, formal military, all use power and control to create obedience and cohesion. And all of these environments use coercion and punishment when individual thought conflicts with the authority.
My theory is that the more we were exposed to and embedded in the power and control paradigm, the more we are vulnerable to detaching from our individual self and relying on the authority to tell us who we are. All the way to completely brain washed.
And it’s far more challenging to heal this at the extreme end of brainwashing because it comes from a psychic wound. Mental illness at the extreme. The point of Milgram’s study and electric shock could have been the awareness that almost all of us are vulnerable to power and control because of the paradigm we are immersed.
We cannot seperate psychology if the individual from discussions about society. Sometimes we need the micro level to understand the macro level.
I worked domestic violence for 12 years. It was the same head slapping. Your husband tore all your hair out of your head. Your kids were traumatized. But her perception of her treatment did not matter as much as his. She had learned to be dependent on his perceptions instead of her own. And it took years to heal.
For me it is the awareness and fear that insight alone will not heal this in humanity. That our behaviors are perpetuating this disconnect and dependence on authority.
Apologize for the length, and it’s been expressed by me and others before, but it directly speaks to some of the questions posed by Ed. Thanks for tolerating.
I see how this fits. Thanks.
PeaceRme, I find your perspective relevant and valuable. Having studied the intrinsic misogyny of authoritarian leaders–how domination of anything perceived weak, including women–I have seen over and over how this model of power/control operates, from family level to political affiliation.
It is reinforced, too, subtly but insistently by much of our popular media; this is my focus in the work I’m doing on true crime TV, which both caters to and reinforces pernicious tendencies in our personal and political behavior.
If Freedom/Individuality/Tribal Identity truly is a driver of political preference, the huge correlation with religion is interesting. Some, such as Black Protestants and Jewish, lean heavily in one direction, while others, such as Evangelicals and Latter Day Saints, lean in the opposite direction. Looking at the data, it would be difficult to argue that something other than religious affiliation is the overwhelmingly dominant factor in current elections.
I’ll suggest that many on both sides of the divide both desire shelter from fear/chaos and non-accountability for their decisions and actions. One group simply believes that government is most able to protect them, and the other simply believes that their church is able to do so. That is one reason why teaching of analytical skills and factual history is so contentious.
You see it in all walks of life and all professions; people who are afraid to make a decision on ANYTHING, because if you make a decision, you become responsible for that decision. Instead, people afraid of it wait for someone else to make the decision for them, because in their thinking, that means that whoever made the decision is now responsible for it instead of them.
I always remember something my mother said about the responsibility of voting. My father spent a lot of time bitching about the government and so on, but back in the day he didn’t bother to vote. So when he started bitching about the state of things, my mother told him, “Well, you didn’t vote. So you don’t really get to bitch about it.”
People who lack an effective critical thinking process can be led into believing just about anything, no matter how far-fetched, as long as it’s delivered by a trusted messenger. This includes ignoring everything that doesn’t agree with their worldview, including facts arrived at via the scientific method.
To me, organized religion is an even better example of this effect than MAGA.
This is a great discussion. One thing notable is that participation in churches/organized religion is on the downswing in the US. That does not mean that quitting religion wipes out the history we have in the practices/beliefs of the religions we left behind. I think there would be tendencies to overcome or at least give critical thought to in moving on. Most likely there are some values we carry along, and probably beliefs that support one or another political or voting tendency.
Individualism as displayed in self-expression is not the same as the pull yourself up by your bootstraps individualism we understand from the self-righteous “I did it so you can too” form that is used in the denial of racism, class, and misogyny, and white Christian supremacy.
In response to the critical times we face, I continue to hear across the board from my friends and comrades, “We must build community.” “Solidarity is good medicine.” I have never been much for the idea that Love will solve our problems. But it is one thing we can do in community. I believe we need to create many strong and intersecting webs of support while we work on strategies to fight fascism.
As for living with DV and narcissism etc, one only need watch the tortured face of someone who is trying to survive and is wholly miserable, seated at the end of the Presidents’ pew at the Carter funeral.
It’s physically impossible to pull yourself up by our own bootstraps. That was the point of that saying.
Just a quick note:
FYI The wonderful image referred to in the endnote doesn’t appear on this page. It does appear when I share the page on Twitter or Bsky.
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The image appears on the front page of Emptywheel.net, but not on the post.
Twaspawarednot @ 2:48PM
The revolution does not have to be bloody.
All break-ups are hard, or you wouldn’t break up. All revolutions are bloody. The debate is over whose blood.
You can take it up
with AI
“Yes, there have been several “non-bloody” or “bloodless” revolutions throughout history, most notably the “Carnation Revolution” in Portugal (1974), the “People Power Revolution” in the Philippines (1986), and the “Peaceful Revolution” in East Germany (1989), where significant regime changes occurred without widespread violence through large-scale nonviolent resistance.”
Your definition of “non-bloody’ leaves out a lot of bodies left in ditches leading up to those “peaceful” results.
good piece, thank you, Ed —
“Doing what the dominant class tells you to do is a trade-off for relief from fear of chaos. Watching the fearful vote for Trump is just like watching people run to meet their chains.”
some segments feel so insecure that they accept the chains. anarchy represents existential threats too. revolution leads to bloodshed leads to death for the old, the children, the women — all those who have no stake in valor have no protection.
By coincidence, I just finished a book titled Embassytown by China Mieville. It’s a science fiction book and at its heart it presents and addresses extremely well the concepts of individuality and society as Ed is posing in this series. It is a remarkable book. I would recommend it to anyone but especially to Ed Walker. Given Ed’s eyesight issues, he might want to consider it on audio (although I don’t know how audio would express some of the essential, underlying elements of the written words/symbols as presented in this book).
As a caveat, I read books but have never listened to one on audio so I don’t have any sense of comparison for how much is gained or missed by listening to or reading the same information. Another question for another day as to how reading or listening to the same thing affects the development or evolution of individuality, I imagine.
The book sounds interesting. Thanks.
Starts slowly and ends with a bang! An individuality bang and its meaning for a society!
It’s been a long time since I’ve read any fiction. But you’ve managed to pique my interest, Epicurus. I might have to check this out.
I have a particular interest in the symbolic representation of language and it’s visual and emotional impact. As I mentioned quite a while back, I once made a very short film that is a poem with words and letters that move in a kind of dance that tells a hidden story.
I tried to make it a component of a novel that I never finished. But I got so distracted and distressed by politics that I lost interest in it. Maybe China Mieville’s Embassytown will inspire me to find new ways to express my own points of view.
Ed, yea now just one week before the comet hits. I try not to think about it.
The Georgian kids are defending Salome out in the streets, but out of the news. However there are big protests against Fico in Slovakia! So we’re not the only ones in deep kimchi. All we all know is we don’t wanna end up like the Hong Kong kids in what Timothy Snyder would call unfreedom.
But just pack up your troubles in your old kit bag, take a break driver 8 and go see A Complete Unknown. It’s about a contrary disagreeable fella in difficult times.
It’s symmetric, starting with Woody singing Dusty Old Dust and ending with Woody in the sanatarium slowly dying in North Jersey. What a place to die in. Anyway, in between is Dylan vs. the Anti-Establishment Establishment. Starts in 61 with The Girl From the North Country and ends in 65 with this one. Rather strangely it’s optimistic about the future which ends up always being reinvented
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=syNLBJ_Lq9E
Nice piece Ed!
My 2cents: It’s fascism (which necessarily includes white supremacist anti-woke backlash). People have done a lot of writing about what it is but very few have written about why it’s seductive. You get a leader who absolves you of your worst; or who at minimum pardons your sins. You need not take responsibility while still free to hurt those you hate and you get a scapegoat on which to beat and on whom to blame all of your woes. And you get to join a big tribe and feel like you’re part of something larger than yourself. It gives you respite and it also gives your life meaning.
It’s not freedom. It’s VERY freeing. It’s easy. It’s not Freedom. It’s recess. The bully who runs the playground is in charge. The teachers are overmatched and homework is cancelled. Yay!
I did a college final paper back in the day arguing the merits of fascism and I watched every piece of Nazi propaganda I could in a little dark room in the college library on old reel to reel; every piece of cr@p put out by Leni Reifenshtahl and a lot of reading. It horrified me. I see it on Fox every day. The instant Trump called Mexicans rapists and criminals I knew exactly where we going. I’ll never forget it.
A hellish mash-up between Lord of the Flies, Animal Farm, and Idiocracy.