Please don’t kill Trump: the death of American mythology
It won’t solve anything. It will only delay the inevitable.
Trump is an opportunist, not a revolutionary. He is capitalizing on the breakdown of American mythology that is happening with or without him. He is a mirror, reflecting back these myths as comfort to those for whom these myths are woven so tightly and inextricably into their personal stories that to unravel them would leave very little identity remaining. Many of us are like that because weaving societal myths into our identities is both a feature and a bug of humanity.
Stories: evolutionary software
One might say that stories are the most important evolutionary development of humanity. Stories allow us to hijack and accelerate evolution by passing information across generations much more quickly than genetic evolution can manage. We evolve by changing the software rather than the hardware, and this has allowed us to change rapidly, dominate the world around us and decimate it in a very short time. Because we can share stories, we can cooperate, manage resources and live in societies. The most common societal glue stories we have are politics, religion and the economy — the stories that cause the most inflamed emotions when we disagree, and the ones we hold onto the most tightly. They are woven into our individual stories of identity with such complexity that to unravel them would require great use of resources (biological energy and action) to mend. Some find enjoyment in this process, and some avoid it at all costs.
Stories are part and parcel to our unique consciousness. Massive amounts of data enter through our perceptive organs, it is filtered, refined, processed by biological intelligence that we are not conscious of, and a very scaled down version of it is presented to consciousness so that it can craft a story for the biological organism to deal with similar situations efficiently (requiring fewer resources) and with the highest chance of survival in the future. The intensity of emotion we feel when presented with the data determines how strongly this story gets coded into memory and woven into other stories which become a self. An identity. We combine the stories we create first hand with the stories passed to us to create a view of the world which maximizes our ability to survive and spread: the two pillar objectives of all forms of life.
But, when there is a divergence between the stories passed and stories created through perception, we have a real psychological problem on our hands. If enough people have the psychological problem, then we have a societal problem. The story I’m telling now is of the incongruence of stories causing our current state of affairs.
Truth
Truth is not necessary for stories to be effective for survival and spreading. In fact, trying to make a story that is completely true is (probably) impossible, and would prevent that story from ever being useful. Stories can approach truth, but not attain it (thanks, Plato). Real truths are unavoidable, like, without tools, there isn’t a human alive today who can fly. We ignore real truths in our stories because we don’t need stories to agree upon them. They just are. By contrast, humans won’t live peacefully together at scale, even if it is the most advantageous for survival, so we need to agree on stories above and beyond truth to make that happen.
The scientific method itself disproves things until we are left with a smaller field of possibilities from which to choose. Categorization then compresses and reduces those possibilities into chunks of information we can act upon. That compression is very lossy, creating a fuzzy image of the world. Our stories are this fuzzy view, and often, in reducing the possibilities and categorizing, we are plain wrong or those in control of the storytelling may insert, remove or miscategorize on purpose for power (control of people and resources). In short, there is absolutely no chance that the stories you think are true actually are true. They can be good enough, for survival, but if they don’t evolve when key information is added, they won’t be.
These are among the great American myths that are becoming increasingly incongruent with the experiences of everyday Americans:
- American exceptionalism
- The political legacy of slavery
- The founding fathers thought of everything
- Democracy is uncorruptable
- Mobility in economic status
American exceptionalism
The country is geographically and geologically advantageous. We have natural resources and we’re hard to reach from other landmasses. Once breaking free from the control of colonial Europe and dominating less technologically advanced indigenous peoples, those two characteristics kept us freer to advance than most of the rest of the world. Interestingly, those indigenous peoples were less technologically advanced because they enjoyed the protection of the geography and resources before European peoples developed the technology necessary to threaten them. They had no stories that would cause them to create the technology to defend themselves. Europe was decimated by WWII and we were not, thanks to the technological limitations of the time (but that is changing as it did for indigenous peoples). That’s the start and end of American exceptionalism. We enjoyed roughly one generation of economic boom because of this, we very rapidly adapted our earlier revolutionary and isolationist stories into a story about how we were superior humans just for being born here. The leaders of the free world (by default). We’re very lucky to have been born here, for sure, but we are still just regular humans and the truth of that is becoming abundantly clear as the same fallibility that has plagued all human societies is happening here.
If being American is what you hang your hat on for superiority, you’re starting to see it’s not true and desperately looking for a way to make it true or at least for someone to comfort you by telling you that it is. Otherwise, your identity would be hollowed out and you would have to accept equal footing with the rest of humanity or glom onto some other superiority falsehood.
The political legacy of slavery
Whether you accept or reject the 1619 Project, it is quite clear that it has been a psychological tool for less advantaged whites to put blacks beneath them. It’s not comfortable to be on the lowest rung of a society because the stories of that society that attach value will not include you. It’s not far-fetched that a small group of people with great control of resources gave additional story value to a buffer layer of the lowest, most expendable resources under their control (and also put a series of buffer layers above them). For the controllers of resources, it was an effective, relatively cheap way to ensure their survival. A good business decision, as it were. Over the years since, as more people immigrated, and with a pattern in place for staying off the bottom rung, the approach was applied to each new group, to build a false floor for those who would be on the bottom rung, to at least feel they were not. But feeling you are not on the bottom and actually not being on the bottom are not the same. The story was changing as controllers of resources found more advantage in people artificially placed at the bottom than they did in people trying to keep them there. Resources flowed to those who could provide value, not those who wished to sit atop them by virtue of skin color or country of origin. So, the incongruence between the societal story and true circumstances has grown as the actual resource value of being racist has diminished. The myth says you have value for being white, but the people with resources won’t give it to you.
Imagine for a moment, the view from two perspectives, a millionaire of 1865 and a billionaire of today. Both are looking down, from a resource and control perspective on a great many people below them. The 1865 millionaire sees a great many white faces and a chunk of black faces who, until yesterday, he whipped. There is a real value difference, to him between the two groups because one group might want to kill him, and they are relatively easy to separate. The billionaire of today sees a patchwork of all sorts of different faces, none of which wish him any more harm than others. So he employs his resources efficiently, providing more resources to those who provide him more value. Some came from countries with better specialized education or came with more motivation to work and a willingness to work for less. Those start to become the more valuable faces, when looking down. Of the faces looking up, the white ones still think they have more value even if they don’t have specialized education or a willingness to work for less, but to the one in control of resources, they don’t. There is incongruence between the myth and first-hand perception, and identities are in jeopardy. (And yes, I used he/him because that fuzzy view hasn’t broken down yet. It’s accurate enough for the telling of this story)
The founding fathers thought of everything
They most certainly did not. In fact, they left a rather large gap called the Supreme Court with the ability to posthumously decide what they thought, the ability to strike down any law that might regulate them, without democratic process in their appointment and with no way to be held accountable for wrong doing or removed from office other than death. That’s a pretty big gap.
They also did not put in place stipulations to avoid the danger in having only two choices of political party or the legalized corruption that would stem from Political Action Committees. The brand of democracy they put in place was arguably less effective than what was instituted elsewhere, in Europe. They lived in a different time, with different problems, and looking at our current problems through the lens of what they would have done or what they intended is patently impossible and insufficient to deal with the problems of the very different nation of today. These men have become mythological saints or gods whose intentions we try to divine and apply to a nation with very different realities.
Democracy is uncorruptable
This one also has its roots in WWII. Because there were two prevailing political ideologies then, espoused by two nations that both wanted control after the war, we have been fighting viciously over which one is right ever since. We’ve propped these two up as a false dichotomy of options, and forced ourselves to take sides without considering or developing other options. On this side of the fence, it was made clear that commies were corrupt. That with the government doling out resources, and power centralized into one political party, bribery and favoritism would ensue. And that appears to have been a correct assessment, at least in some implementations.
And yet, the result we see today is something much more like oligarchy in both nations, regardless of which system they started with. A powerful minority has managed to all but control both of them, though by different mechanisms. It’s almost as if, regardless of the system in place, a minority will learn to use it to amass resources and control while the masses are misdirected by the details of the story.
The aforementioned supreme court, coalescence of power into only two political parties, deregulation of the media, the rise of institutionalized bribery in the form of PACs have all been mechanisms by which a capitalist democracy has been transformed into a near-oligarchy with completely ineffective legislative bodies. Every voter sees the divergence between the myth and reality at the polls, and that despair contributes to the mythological breakdown.
Mobility in economic status
This myth is supported by anecdotes. One can find stories of people who’ve struck it rich, but those stories are often carefully crafted to leave out the most important details through effectively fuzzying how the reduction of possibilities and categorization was carried out. In truth, most people now are struggling not to slip out of the economic rung they were born into, and that is becoming increasingly more difficult as the controllers of resources learn to use the political and economic system in place to funnel more and more resources to upper tiers. There simply aren’t resources at lower tiers to use to make such a jump. The jumpers are often moving from the fringe of one tier into the fringe of another or from the fringe of a tier more squarely into the tier, but crafting stories that make the jumps seem more significant than they are. As resource control becomes more consolidated in upper tiers, it is less and less likely that true jumps can happen because the sheer amount of resources that must be transferred down to move up works against the funnels being continually hardened to move resources in the opposite direction. The stories still exist, but the possibilities diminish daily, and there is once again, an incongruence between myth and reality.
We cannot help but to create myths like these. The specifics above are examples to illustrate concepts. You could pull examples from any society on the planet, past or present as illustrations. Myths rise out of chaos to stabilize a group of humans living together, then their ability to give adequate reasons for each person to work for the benefit of a larger good, possibly at the expense of their own, breaks down. Chaos bubbles again until the myths are replaced with ones that fit better. And so on. It’s quite literally how we create societies and how we justify living within them.
Shooting the messenger won’t stop the process. You would have to shoot all of us to do that. Perceptual evidence is showing us that these myths, in their current form, no longer provide the insight needed to optimize life’s goals: survival and spreading. New myths are bubbling in every corner of the internet right now, fighting to replace them, and the ones that do won’t be any more true than these were. The hope is they will be an evolution of the story that is more applicable to current times.
I wish I had a better conclusion to put on this story, but if I did, it would be every bit as fuzzy and misleading as any other myth. The story I’m telling here is an effort to build a model of understanding that saves my own identity, my own self, from the chaotic unravelling of the myths of the society I live in.
