{"id":774,"date":"2010-10-09T19:46:21","date_gmt":"2010-10-10T01:46:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/coloradoconfluence.com\/?p=774"},"modified":"2013-09-06T22:45:18","modified_gmt":"2013-09-07T04:45:18","slug":"systems-analysis-politics-and-the-cooptation-of-ignorance-by-privilege","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/coloradoconfluence.com\/?p=774","title":{"rendered":"Systems Analysis, Politics, and the Uneasy Alliance of Ignorance and Privilege"},"content":{"rendered":"

Buy my e-book A Conspiracy of Wizards<\/em><\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

For those who haven’t figured it out yet, I believe that we live in a fundamentally systemic reality, that increasing both our understanding of the nature of those systems and our application of\u00a0that understanding to the challenges and opportunities\u00a0we face, in service to reason and\u00a0goodwill,\u00a0is what defines, or should define,\u00a0the collective human endeavor. If all human beings, or all Americans, or all\u00a0Coloradans,\u00a0agreed with this simple proposition\u00a0today, the enormity of the challenge would still loom before us like a mountain to be scaled, but one we would be able to scale, to our immense benefit.\u00a0But in a world in which so many people are so irrationally, or self-interestedly,\u00a0resistent even to getting to this starting point, that\u00a0mountain\u00a0recedes beyond\u00a0moats and\u00a0fortified\u00a0walls, hordes of armed and angry sentries attacking those who\u00a0even gesture toward, much less\u00a0try to approach, those heights\u00a0or our potential.<\/p>\n

We not only need to analyze the interactions of\u00a0our social institutions, technologies,\u00a0and natural systems in the pursuit of an ever-more robust, sustainable, and equitable production and distribution of human welfare, but we also have to analyze the nature of the human obstinance and ignorance that stands between those of us committed to addressing these inherent challenges, and our collective ability to do so. And we need to discern the strategies for circumventing that obstruction.<\/p>\n

Politics, which should be the execution of the process we’ve created for acting collectively to our collective benefit, has devolved instead into a shouting match over whether there is any collective benefit to be pursued, and whether the process is one which is meant to bind us together at all.\u00a0It has been hijacked completely, not by competing views of which analytical tools to employ, or which balance of interests to favor, but rather by those loud and angry mobs that insist we should not engage in the challenge at all, that there is no need, that since (in their view)\u00a0it was not the will\u00a0of those who designed our system of self-governance that we govern ourselves, any attempt to do so is an affront to\u00a0the immutable authority of the ideologues’\u00a0misinterpretation of the will of people who died two centuries ago.\u00a0<\/p>\n

On one level, this is nothing new or exceptional. Politics has long, if not always, been held hostage\u00a0by the need to trade in raw power, to manipulate masses by mobilizing resources. There have always been those, perhaps always a majority of those actively involved, who have not asked “what best serves the public interest?” but rather only “what best serves my interests?” Those who ask the former\u00a0have always been\u00a0trapped in the battle against those who ask the latter, while the latter\u00a0have been trapped in battle against one another. The form of systems analysis that evolves in this context is the one that addresses itself to political victory rather than to social problem solving. It has thus far been an inherent dilemma.<\/p>\n

But there are times and places when this perennial dysfunctionality is eclipsed by a deeper incarnation of its underlying logic, both a response to it and a culmination of that logic. In such circumstances, the political morass is no longer defined by a\u00a0battle of competing self-interests and commitments to the public welfare. Instead, it is defined by a combination of competing self-interests and a battle between those who fight for the public interest, on the one hand,\u00a0and an uneasy alliance of self-interested power and misguided ignorance, on the other.<\/p>\n

We are in such a condition now, in this country. Despite the erosion in recent decades of social institutions which have served the interests of the many and diminished the distance between their welfare and the welfare of the most privileged few, a robust populist movement exists in America which mistakenly believes that that erosion was to their benefit, that it’s continuation and acceleration\u00a0serves the greatest good, that it facilitates some mystical function or value that is absolutely inviolable.<\/p>\n

The alliance of self-interested power and misguided ignorance is an uneasy one because the populist\u00a0movement in question (The Tea Party) is not a reliable partner. In its fanatical commitment to a clear, simplistic\u00a0ideal divorced from analysis, from any cause-and-effect considerations, it threatens not only to undermine the ability of the many to continue to refine our social institutional framework to increase equality and social justice, but also undermines the basic functionality of our political economy altogether, promising to\u00a0decrease the wealth and welfare of\u00a0rich and poor alike. The politically self-interested wealthy (those who seek policies which protect their wealth) try to co-opt this movement, but also try to recover their party from its clutches, unable to do either effectively<\/p>\n

The most pressing systemic challenge we face in this country today is the one imposed by this mass delusion, one which not only undermines the interests of those who fall prey to it, but also the interests of those who don’t. The great, overwhelming frustration of human existence is the recognition that we are capable of doing so much better, if only we all agreed to, if not join in the effort to do so, at least refrain from obstructing those who do.<\/p>\n

Buy my e-book A Conspiracy of Wizards<\/em><\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Buy my e-book A Conspiracy of Wizards For those who haven’t figured it out yet, I believe that we live in a fundamentally systemic reality, that increasing both our understanding of the nature of those systems and our application of\u00a0that understanding to the challenges and opportunities\u00a0we face, in service to reason and\u00a0goodwill,\u00a0is what defines, or […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_mi_skip_tracking":false},"categories":[4,22],"tags":[548,486,360,546,547,254],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/coloradoconfluence.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/774"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/coloradoconfluence.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/coloradoconfluence.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/coloradoconfluence.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/coloradoconfluence.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=774"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/coloradoconfluence.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/774\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":404180,"href":"https:\/\/coloradoconfluence.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/774\/revisions\/404180"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/coloradoconfluence.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=774"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/coloradoconfluence.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=774"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/coloradoconfluence.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=774"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}