“You know the very powerful and the very stupid have one thing in common. They don’t alter their views to fit the facts. They alter the facts to fit the views. Which can be uncomfortable if you happen to be one of the facts that needs altering.”
-The Fourth Doctor
In the wake of… all this… it’s really for the best that the Republican Party cancelled its Jacksonville convention over coronavirus, given that the whole purpose of moving it from North Carolina was that the Governor there wouldn’t let Trump have a big crowd for his acceptance speech. For one thing, for somebody who spends a lot of his time in Florida, you would think that Viceroy Trump would know what the weather conditions are like in August. I’m pretty sure a lot of people told him that if the only way to minimize coronavirus was to be stuck outside in Florida, around hurricane season, in deep August, they would just as well not go at all, which may be why most of these shindigs happen in places with indoor air conditioning.
But as we leave the first week of August 2020, we have to acknowledge the real environmental threat to our survival. It’s not climate change. Yet. It’s not the heat, it’s the stupidity.
I have to admit, since Donald Trump ran for office, I’ve gotten a lot more hard and cynical myself. For instance, I used to have more sympathy for stupid people.
By stupid, I mean subnormal intelligence, “slow” or just having average intelligence without having exposed yourself to much knowledge. I grew up watching movies like Forrest Gump where stupid people were assumed to have some kind of special wisdom compensating for their lack of smarts. Even the stupid people with criminal records (like Michael Clark Duncan in The Green Mile or Billy Bob Thornton in Sling Blade) were shown as being ultimately good at heart.
Well, fuck that.
I had done an earlier bit where I described a certain “anti-conceptual mentality” by using direct quotes from Ayn Rand’s philosophical works to describe what is often called willful ignorance. I said: “When Ayn Rand refers to this (very Randian) term, “anti-conceptual mentality”, she is describing a self-created moron. Such a person is not of medically subnormal intelligence (what used to be called ‘retarded’) but a person of at least average intelligence who deliberately does not apply it, for whom everything is an unexamined given because examination would mean taking a risk he is not willing to pursue, and thus he is almost entirely a collection of second-hand, superficial thoughts.”
See, while Ayn Rand as a person has more issues than TIME Magazine, I still call myself an Objectivist (if I have to call myself anything) because I still find the philosophy to be a practical guide to life whatever one’s opinions of Rand. Briefly: Reality exists, independently of human consciousness, perceptions, or political consensus. At the same time, the human mind and perceptions are sufficient to grasp reality as it is, and in fact they have to be, because there is no supernatural force outside consciousness that will give you a perfect understanding of an object without effort. And in practical terms, what this means is that we cannot separate morality from intellect. The only way we will be able to know the right thing to do is if we can learn things in general.
This was something that Rand herself stressed in emphasizing an “objectivist” morality over an “altruist” morality that disdained self-interest and reason over serving others and faith in non-reason, such as an organized religion, “feelings” or a “Higher Power.” And if this seems counterintutive to most people, it’s because most philosophies, even secular ones, place intellect at odds with morality.
There are plenty of takedowns of Rand if you want to look for them, and while I disagree with a lot of her personal conclusions, I don’t think most critiques address this challenge she places to other philosophies. Indeed I would say that this country in particular is very bad at placing reason and facts over opinion and feelings, and it’s largely because of that anti-rational mentality. And it’s largely because of that that we are so screwed by many factors, including a political culture that allowed just enough people in just enough states to elect Donald Trump.
This leads to a point that is implicit in Rand’s work but that I don’t think she ever actually spelled out in these words: If one has at least normal intelligence, ignorance is a choice. Stupidity is a choice. And since stupid decisions often lead to destructive consequences, stupidity is a moral choice. It’s like drunk driving. You might not be “in your right mind” when you’re drunk, but you’re still legally responsible for being DUI and any acts you commit DUI because you made the sober decision to do something reckless in the first place.
To quote again from my other post: “The anti-conceptual mentality avoids going outside his prejudices because his intuition tells him he would no longer be able to do what he wants to do. Therefore he avoids not only abstract reasoning but intuition and introspection. As the phrase goes, “if you don’t know why hitting children with tear gas is wrong, I don’t know how to explain it to you.”
I go over all this because it’s not enough to bag on the various people of mediocre or subnormal intelligence (like the various Facebook Trumpniks who commit at least three typos per paragraph) but to address the numerous people who do have brains and who might even have some conceptual ability but still choose not to consider the real consequences of serving Trump. They can do this because again, we as a culture place reason at odds with morality, and are expected to sacrifice the former to the latter. If one does not practice critical thinking even with one’s own premises, one is not practicing rationality but rationalization. Yes, that includes a lot of “Randroids” who attach to Rand’s pro-capitalist and anti-socialist teachings and use them to advocate for Republicans simply because they can mouth the right words. Even in Reagan’s day, Rand herself was not a fan: “A few months before her death, Rand told an audience of her fans, no doubt to the surprise of many, that she didn’t vote for Ronald Reagan against Jimmy Carter, whom she regarded as a small-town power luster. “There is a limit,” she told them, “to the notion of voting for the lesser of two evils.”
“Rand did welcome Reagan’s strong language toward Soviet Russia and his promises to cut spending and taxes. But she warned that his invitation of the so-called Moral Majority to the halls of power would be a long-range disaster. By tying the (supposed) advocacy of freedom and capitalism to, in Rand’s words, the anti-intellectuality of “militant mystics,” who proclaim that aborting an embryo is murder and creationism is science, Reagan’s presidency would discredit the intellectual case for freedom and capitalism and embolden the anti-intellectual, authoritarian mentalities in the country.”
The chain should become clear upon reflection: Reason is the source of morality, because to determine “right” from “wrong” we must be able to distinguish from other categories besides right and wrong. Morality cannot be the source of reason because that begs the question of what is Right in the first place, and if one cannot answer that question for oneself, it creates a situation where authority figures define your terms, and thus your thinking, for you.
A naive simpleton in power is far more dangerous than an evil pragmatist because you could expect the pragmatist to examine his own practical limits and work within them. The simpleton only operates on a moral code which was handed down to him by someone else and which he has not tested by circumstances. If unethical people work with him and they know how to push his buttons, they can get him to perform atrocities. This is what happened with George W. Bush in Iraq.
In the last couple decades, comicbook writers have gone into scenarios where Lex Luthor or Norman Osborn would run for president and win, and while they’d inevitably over-reach and get taken down, even they acknowledged some limits. When Lex became president in the DC Universe, he actually severed his ties to Lexcorp. So if you want to consider where our political culture is, consider that Donald Trump and his various people literally have less ethics than a comicbook supervillain.
Needless to say, when you have a real person who is both less intellectual than Forrest Gump and more evil than Lex Luthor, the damage he can do is that much greater than a person can accomplish with stupidity or evil alone.
This is the issue with being an intellectual who places morality at odds with intellect. If you’re a Rod Dreher, and you’re a traditional conservative, and you have a brain, and you read history, and you know, for instance, that the decades-long oppression of Francisco Franco in Spain (in the name of ‘traditional Christianity’) led to a backlash after Franco’s death that made Catholicism less popular and socialism and secularism that much more popular, you can look at the situation here. You have led yourself to the conclusion that your culture is under siege. Your morality tells you to hate the people who hate Christianity. Your intellect tells you that Trump is a grifter and a deceiver. But Trump tells you, “These people, they’re not really after me. They’re after YOU. I’m just in the way.” And it doesn’t matter that you know how many times Trump has lied, it doesn’t matter how many times he’s been proven false, how many times Trump has failed, he’s telling you what you want to hear. He’s reaffirming what you already believe. He knows what your priorities are, and he knows how to push the right button to completely bypass your intellect. And so you march in line and follow The Leader no matter what, cause you’re convinced that once They take him out, you’re next.
The punchline, of course, is that while secular liberal culture may not have any affinity with traditional religious culture, it was not nearly so hostile to the latter as the other way around, and the secular majority didn’t have good reason to oppose the religious culture until it actively supported a politics that undermined our national security for the sake of Russia and China, undermined our economy and ended up killing 150,000 Americans and counting, cause apparently wearing a Goddamn five dollar mask is gonna get you kicked out of the Real American Patriot He-Man Woman Haters’ Club.
The result that “good Christians” fear so much has become that much more likely, probably inevitable, because of the actions they told themselves would prevent it.
The execution of stupidity as philosophy was made clear again by the now-famous interview that HBO aired for Axios between reporter Jonathan Swan and Donald Trump. Other people have described the event at least as well as I could, and it’s not like Swan’s interview told us anything we didn’t know, but there are a couple of details that matter in terms of this topic.
The first question Swan asked was where he brought up Trump’s adherence to the power of positive thinking, “the mantra that if you believe something, if you can visualize it, then it will happen.” Now Trump did say this is only true to a certain extent, and that he also has to consider the downside (which he does, in a way that causes therapists to ponder). But Swan asks if that mindset is suitable to handling the worst pandemic we’ve seen in a century. And of course, Trump just accentuates the positive, with a bunch of generalities. Swan presses that communication needs to be based in reality, and wishful thinking is insufficient.
And then there was the point where Trump defends his record on coronavirus by throwing Swan a sheaf of bar graphs and Swan looks confused, and then says, “Oh! You’re doing death as a proportion of cases, I’m talking about death as a proportion of population, and that’s where the US is really bad.” And Trump just gives him this blank, pleading stare, and goes, “You can’t DO that.” Which means, “You’re not following my terms of argument when even I don’t know what they are.”
Which goes to another point of Onkar Ghate’s article: “Closely connected to this disdain for the truth is a complete amoralism. “The normal pattern of self-appraisal,” Rand observes, “requires reference to some abstract value or virtue,” such as “I am good because I am rational” or “I am good because I am honest.” But the entire realm of abstract principles and standards is unknown to an anti-intellectual mentality. The phenomenon of judging himself by such standards, therefore, is alien. Instead, Rand argues, the “implicit pattern of all his estimates is: ‘It’s good because I like it’ — ‘It’s right because I did it’ — ‘It’s true because I want it to be true.’”
When you have no standard of judgment other than “it’s good because I like it” and no means of verifying results other than “it will be true because I wish it to be true” you get the coronavirus “policy” that is on track to kill a quarter-million people in this country by the end of the year.
Which is why Swan’s interview got so much attention from the rest of the Mainstream Media, and why it is both ultimately revelatory and ultimately meaningless. It is ultimately revelatory in that it makes clear that this country’s coronavirus policy is screwed because of the evil simpleton in charge, and it is ultimately meaningless because the reason things are screwed is because the evil simpleton in charge of coronavirus policy is not the only one who follows the philosophy of wishful thinking and anti-reason, and if he didn’t have that support base, he would have been removed by impeachment if not one of his numerous other scandals.
The problem there being that even if Trump is effectively an unaccountable King now, he still has to have a formal election before he can really rewrite the system to cement his power, but he not only needs to be re-elected to do that, he needs at least a Senate to do that, and if he doesn’t get a handle on coronavirus, both the White House and Senate are in danger due to the simple fact that the virus is ravaging the voter base in Trump states later than it did in “blue” states that the Trump Organization wrote off. Trump may be telling voters to believe him over their lying eyes, but if you’re dead, it doesn’t matter if you believe Trump or not, you can’t vote. (Remember, Illinois is a blue state.)
The real irony is that people like Ayn Rand (and me) are thought of as “Social Darwinists” because we don’t agree with liberal altruism, but that in itself is a misnomer embraced by the kind of “scientific” racists who don’t agree with species evolution. In actual Darwinism, “survival of the fittest” doesn’t mean “survival of the most fascist”, it means “survival of the species best adapted to its environment.” And since human development and civilization are more mental and social as opposed to matters of physical evolution, “social Darwinism” would really mean a process in which individuals and culture become better adapted to a changing environment. “Social Darwinists” like the current Republicans don’t believe in that Darwinism any more than the Theory of Evolution, and the end result will be that the liberal-socialist triumph they fear so much will become that much more likely. Yes, hundreds of thousands will have to die to achieve that result, but if Republicans don’t care about those people, you’d think they would care about “traditional values” and their own political careers. And if they did, you’d think that they could adapt.