Thoughts On 1/6

Well, we're in deep trouble.

This post is going to be a mess, because I'm having a huge amount of trouble wrapping my head around this.  So maybe I ought to start with a bunch of things that I'm pretty sure are true:

1. Most people are not evil.  They're not saints.  They'll see things they know are wrong and turn a blind eye to them because it's easy.  They'll find themselves in situations where it's easier (or more profitable) to do something a little bit corrupt.  But only about 5% of the population could be diagnosed with anti-social personality disorder.
2. Most people aren't stupid.  Intelligence is normally distributed, and there's no particular geographic variance in the distribution.
3. A lot of people are ignorant.  They've had bad educations.  They lack critical thinking skills.  They don't read.  They don't know how to do research.  The American education system is a scandal, and has deteriorated to the point where it's a national security threat.
4. There's a point at which violent action against the government is justified.  There is not broad agreement on where that point is.
5. You can't have a functioning society when at least 40% of the country thinks that the other 40% of the country is evil, and vice versa.  (Note that, per assertion #1, each side is objectively wrong about at least 88% of the people that they hate.)
6. To be human is to be tribal.  To be tribal is to hate, or at least profoundly mistrust, other tribes.  Societies that don't acknowledge this are doomed.  At the same time, the goal of a good society is to make the notion of the tribe inclusive enough to give people good high-level reasons to think of themselves as one tribe, while in the absence of the society they would hate each other for lower-level reasons.
7. To be human is to be intuitive, and intuition can lead you to believe some really weird stuff.  The antidote to this tendency is training in how to reason.  That's hard.  (See #3.)

That's pretty much all I'm sure of that's relevant.

It seems that we need answers--solutions--to three huge questions:

1. When is violence against the government warranted?
2. What is the antidote for our hyper-acute tendency to believe weird stuff we saw on the internet?
3. How do we rebuild the American tribe?

Let's take 'em one at a time:

Violence Against the Government

Many of you will think that the first of these is a ridiculous thing to be debated, but it should be obvious to you now that many of your fellow citizens not only disagree but think that the threshold justifying violence has been breached. The apparent last straw for most of them seems to be that they sincerely believe that the presidential election was stolen.

Let's leave aside for a moment the fact that it wasn't stolen (that's a topic for huge question #2).  Instead, let's ask a simple question:  Is stealing an election grounds for violence?

We have lots of examples of stolen elections in any number of countries in which I am pleased not to live.  But in most of those countries, stolen elections are merely a symptom, not a cause, of an extremely bad government.

I would agree that governments in Venezuela, Syria, North Korea, etc. are bad enough that a moral case can be made for attempting their violent overthrow.  I'm not sure it's the best tactic, but I'm not on the ground and can't make a judgement.  These places are far gone, but the lack of free and fair elections is the least of their problems.

We have a few recent examples of places that were well on their way to needing violent corrections, and in those places an obviously rigged election seems to have been the last straw.  However, in those places peaceful demonstrations seem to have been much more successful in backing governments away from the edge than violent ones.

The United States is not currently Syria or Venezuela.  If an election were stolen, it's highly likely that peaceful demonstrations would be more effective than violence.  What we saw at the Capitol was violent.  As such it is more likely to make things worse than better.

A quick aside here:  I'm sure that there were many peaceful protesters at the Capitol.  Similarly, I'm sure that there were violent incidents fomented by protesters in Kiev and Tahrir Square.  Even more to the point, we know that there were violent incidents during the BLM protests.  So it's important to recognize that the line between peaceful and violent is fuzzy.  For me, the BLM protests were largely peaceful, but I admit that's a judgement call and it's a debatable topic.  However, there's no question that the overall character of the Capitol "protest" was violent.

Crazy Stuff

Of course, we wouldn't have to make judgement calls about peaceful vs. violent if a whole bunch of people hadn't believed something that was full-blown batshit crazy.  I'm not going to litigate the overwhelming likelihood that the election was honest, because then I'd be writing a 20,000 word post instead of a simple 3000 word one.

People aren't evil.  They're not stupid.  But they are ignorant.  Even worse, they're untrained in how to approach novel situations.  I'm not going to hold myself up as a paragon of Reason in the face of new, scary stuff, but I do know how to do at least informal research.  I know to check sources.  On my better days, I can entertain the idea that some of my beliefs and assumptions are wrong, even though I'll fight to preserve them right up until the moment when they're no longer tenable.

A first-order explanation for why things have gone so wrong is that ordinary people have suddenly had massive loads of information shoved down their throats via social media, and conspiracy theories are a simple way of making sense of the confusion.  A conspiracy theory has a narrative.  The outline of the story is simple and compelling, while the ramifications make it feel complex enough to mimic the complexity of the real world.

I don't know how to make this stop.  Tens of millions of words by deeper thinkers and better writers than I have been devoted to this.  However, I do have a few unorganized thoughts on a few parts of the solution:

1. Censorship won't work.  First, attempts to censor will make a weak conspiracy theory suddenly seem to be absolute Truth.  If somebody doesn't want you to see it, then there must be a Reason, right?  Riiiiiiiight???  I'm overjoyed that Twitter took away Trump's car keys, but that's mostly because we have to survive the next few months.  (And of course there's the little fact that I hate him.  Hate him.  I wish him ill. More than any person I've ever encountered.  The hatred is exhausting and I can't seem to make myself stop, even for my own good.)
2. A necessary condition for rooting out pockets of craziness is that we be able to see that they're forming.  To do that, everybody needs to be able to see the graph of the social network in as much detail as the social media companies can.  This will take money out of their pockets.  It will be hard to draft the legislation in a way that's simple enough for third parties to be able to monitor things and bulletproof enough to be enforceable.  Nonetheless, it needs to be done.
3. It's bad for people to interact with an AI whose sole objective function is to make them interact with it more.  This needs to be illegal.  Again, this is hard, because the reductio ad absurdum version of this argument is that all social media must be boring, and that won't work.  A modest, half-baked suggestion:  If you can make an AI that can recognize the best way to maximize a user's engagement, you can make an AI that can recognize when that user is falling down an unhealthy rabbit hole, and make him stop.  Again, it's tricky codifying things like "unhealthy" and "rabbit hole".  It's even trickier figuring out how to prove that an AI conforms to the definitions and is operating correctly, especially since even its creators don't know exactly what it's doing or how it's doing it.
4. AI-driven social media is an existential threat to American society, and likely an existential threat to humanity in general.  No, this isn't a "killer AIs are going to kill us all" rant; it's a "human behavior augmented by AIs is unstable" rant.  We are like the Krell in Forbidden Planet, and our own Monsters from the Id are already roaming the earth, unchecked.  We should listen to the AI alarmists a lot more, and we should be tackling codifying the rules for what is and isn't acceptable, ASAP.
5. I always roll my eyes when somebody suggests that if we only had a better educational system, everything would be fine.  First, you get the benefits of better education twenty years in the future and at this rate that will produce a generation of highly educated young adults who can contemplate the rubble that their parents left them.  But we do need to work hard to give adults the tools needed to grapple with the firehose of information that's been installed in them.  I'd start with the fifty-year-olds and work my way down, so we can meet the Gen Z+'s (Gen AA?) in the middle.  It seems to me that there are abundant opportunities for tools that can manage information, determine its primary sources, and gently point out when something is full-blown batshit crazy.  I devoutly hope the people who try to produce these tools live in Omaha, rather than Menlo Park, or the target audience won't use them.

I'm... not sanguine that any of the stuff above is going to make a difference in the short term.  It's all vitally necessary but, like education, it's going to take a long time to get right.  That's not a reason to do nothing, but ultimately, I think our survival depends less on adapting technology to the humans and more on adapting the humans to their culture--or possibly vice versa.

Healing the American Tribe

It's important to understand where the bad craziness is coming from and how to make it stop--eventually.  But we're going to have to rely on older, more time-tested methods if we're to survive the next year, or five years, or even ten years.

We need a culture war armistice.

Now:  As a moderate conservative, six years ago I was comfortable describing myself as economically conservative and socially liberal, under the clearly incorrect assumption that a live-and-let-live culture would work itself out, and the best way to assist it in doing so was to ensure that it wasn't burdened with economic turmoil.

I was wrong, both on the culture and on the economics.

I'm going to leave the economics for another day, other than to say that the Trumpism doesn't care about any of the things that economic conservatives care about, and that seems to have freed large chunks of the Democratic Party to think up ways that they can spend us into a debt spiral even faster than the Republicans can.  A lot of those ways are responsible for the "Socialism!!!!!!" panic attack that's instilled in the current GOP.  The lack of self-awareness on both sides is... sobering.

The much more serious problem is that both sides have become cultural nihilists.

On the left, with have this weird, identity politics crossed with intersectionality death cult.  On the right, we have this hollow edifice of buzzwords to which the GOP still pays lip service, but the parts that cared about real families and real civics has been eaten by demagogic termites.  The religious stuff is still lurking in there, but it seems more like Democrat-style identity politics than real faith these days.

Both sides are nuts. 

I don't know how to restore any of this.  I'm a kinda-old white guy, so my observations on how to fix American culture are going to seem... quaint?  Still, I'm 2000 words into this, so let's let'r rip:

1. I've said this before in this blog, but I'll say it again:  Just because identity politics is more effective than ideological or interest-based politics doesn't mean that it's a good idea.  It is tailor-made for polarization, because its foundations rest on the idea that one group is denying the other group (or groups) the stuff that they're entitled to, and the only way to fix it is to drag down the bad group.  Then the remaining groups can apply this process recursively until things look more like Bosnia than the United States.
2. I like living in a tolerant society.  There's a lot of stuff that I'll tolerate that I'd rather not have to deal with very much, though.  There's a fine line here, because sometimes my not dealing with it is intolerant, or at least denies others rights that are easy for me to wield but hard for them to acquire, much less wield.  That said, we're bumping up against those pesky limits to human nature:  push people too hard, too fast, and they react negatively.  You make more progress with a gradual improvement than a storm-the-barricades revolution, followed by 20 years of reactionaries working to undo what really hadn't been done in the first place.  Patience.
3. Respect is a huge deal.  I'm a mostly urban person, and I don't get the cultural things that the rural people are upset about.  I wouldn't want to live with them.  But I don't look down on them, and I respect that they probably find the stuff that's important to me to be pretty silly.  I want to make this very clear, though:  If Tribe Blue insists that Tribe Red is living the wrong way, Tribe Red is going to become increasingly angry.  Angry people are more susceptible to craziness, and craziness makes them think that things like ransacking the Capitol is an act of patriotism rather than the single biggest blow to the foundations of the American Experiment in the last 150 years.

All three of these things are more conservative than they are liberal.  But they're a much more classical conservatism than Trumpism is.  The prescription for the Red Tribe is therefore that they need to take a breath and figure out what it means to practice what they preach, because the cartoon version really isn't cutting it.

The prescription for the Blue Tribe is more complicated, because there's no reason why they should be forced to backtrack on stuff like police reforms and working to reframe the conversation about racism in America.  But all of those gains will be lost if they're framed in an us-vs-them rhetoric.  As I said, I'm an old white guy, and I won't even pretend to understand the rage and despair that's been bubbling under the surface without me seeing it.  But at the same time, if this is a zero-sum game where my position in society has to be sacrificed so that others can take its place, I'll be on the other side of that one.  There's a positive-sum solution to this stuff, but it requires more nuance and patience than have been shown recently.

And for god's sake, show some respect.  This is asking a lot, especially this week, when the worst that the Red Tribe has to offer has been on horrifying display.  But there's no solution to this horrible situation we've gotten our selves into without an act of faith or two.