Societal Learning

It would be hard to miss the fact that these times seem a little strange. Nearly one-half of the population of the US appears to have politically lost their tether and are now openly indulging themselves in hysterical, fever-dreamed fits of rage.

This is societal learning. Learning is like the five stages of grief. It is a reaction and reconciliation with an external reality that throws one off of their balance. When society is composed of essentially two poles with fundamental learning differences, reality will hit both poles differently. The exterior player will adapt to the external influence while the interior player will fight the change before more slowly adapting. This is the model presented in the Transnational Liberalism post. The interior player are the DNC/Socialist party and the exterior player is the RNC/Conservative party. They are differentiated by the fundamental modes of feeling/thinking of their members.

The change is due to technology which has produced an integrated economy fused with politics as never before possible. The red-blue shift over the years has been accelerated by technology and has produced an economic and political dipole. Now, politics and economics are correspondent, ubiquitous, and omnipotent factors in determining nearly every other aspect of US life. As predicted in the TNL post, in such a situation, the interior player must eventually find themselves dependent and inferior to the exterior player since the exterior is where the ever expanding percentage of economic activity is sustained in a growing system. The recent adjustment of American conservative politics to populism and the concordant alignment of DNC/Socialist politics in opposition to populism is one aspect of the Trump phenomenon. This alignment is a mega-trend and not due to one individual.

Confronted with its decline as seen by a recent irrelevance in wish-fulfilling fantasies, the American left has gone from denial (the Russian hoax) to anger, and will soon enter the bargaining stage. Every election is a bargain or sorts, but this is a bargain to sustain an unrealistic internal state--the fantasy that the policies of the left are praiseworthy and not simply primitive selfish rationalizations.

What is clear at this point is that the next election will be one between pragmatism and open delusion. Learning will only take place if pragmatism wins out.