The Pox In Both Houses

Every day I receive more than a dozen “personalized” political solicitation messages. I get them from political candidates, party leaders, PACs, and crusading organizations. Some are overt desperate pleas for money. Some are covert surveys pretending to want my opinion. I’ve received many thousands of them over the years. They all pretend to be personal, but none of them are.

Every one of them is a disingenuous commercial – a prod, a probe, and an attempt at milking that treats me like just any other member of a herd. They are not designed to learn what I think, nor in any way to engage me in a meaningful conversation. These messages are tactical digital drones designed to acquire information, pump opinions, and suck money.  They are the lures of a predatory machine’s digital fishing hooks.

Though the parties’ goals are very different in so many important ways, there is little difference in their unethical predatory messaging machinery. Both parties’ “marketing” systems are designed to “manipulate constituent behaviors”, not “steward constituent learning and dialogue”.

This is what I send to politicians who attempt to engage me:

You can’t lead the country out of Trumpism by using the same disingenuous and manipulative messaging ethics that Trump uses and that you are otherwise so rightfully at war with on so many fronts. The history of America’s leadership has always been based on the politics of “manipulating citizen behavior” not “stewarding the learning of our citizenry”. That’s how we got Trump.

Bigotry, racism, Trumpism, like predatory capitalism, all have a common ancestral root. They are manifestations of the same underlying ethics that gave license to slavery.  We fought a war to make it unconstitutional for people to own people. Yet today we all accept as “normal” and the “American way” that “people are manipulable assets” – “buyer beware” – “nothing personal, it’s just business”. The ethics underlying slavery have simply morphed into a more insidious license to manipulate people’s economic and political behaviors.  Our survival and viability as a country depend on challenging this out into the open, as we did with slavery, and eradicating it. Today, civil war 2.0, in all its various forms, is a struggle to end this all too commonplace form of predation.

History is repeating itself. We are not the 1st democracy to be in the grips of the predatory machinations of self-aggrandizing politicians.

The architects of the United States created a constitutional framework that liberated and made possible a vastly more learning-oriented way of being a nation than had ever existed before.

Not perfect, but more perfect. More perfectly conducive to a new kind of collective learning that ultimately led the United States to become the world’s most intelligent and successful nation.

Today, stupidified by the predatory machinations of profit and power, our population’s collective intelligence is in a dangerous downward spiral. Our political parties behave as if they are trying to persuade a herd of low-EQ teenagers. Spin the channels, whichever silo you land in, it’s pretty much about convincing and persuading. Our political leadership hasn’t yet learned the importance of stewarding our collective intelligence because it’s too busy manipulating the voting behavior of our collective ignorance.

We live in a profoundly learning disabled country and we will continue to do so until we collectively learn otherwise.

You can’t be a good steward of the learning of the population and use predatorily behavior manipulating messaging machinery (it’s necessarily learning short-circuiting and disabling).

What we must learn from Trump:
Trump’s Law = nothing trumps learning

Whipping up and propagandizing believers to profit, financially-politically, from their behavior is how we got into this mess.  The deep transformation the US must go through to improve the future of “we the people” can only happen through the learning in and of the people. In terms of the future well-being and health of the country, there simply is no substitute for having a more learning-oriented and learning-able population.  

The central dynamic of collaborative collective improvement is collaborative collective learning. The future of the U.S. depends on how well its leaders learn to steward such learning – how well they learn to steward the learning of we the people.

To those of you involved in the political and technological construction of this messaging… We can easily create more mutually learning-oriented political messaging machinery. We just have to see the need for it. Do you?

David

PS – If I ever get a non-robotic-spam message from you, I promise I will respond personally.

See also:

 


OUR NATIONAL LEARNING CRISIS

OUR CLIMATE LEARNING CRISIS

The Predatory States
of America

The Vast Predatory Use of
Behavioral Manipulation Devices

Predatory Politics

The Vast Predatory Use of
Behavioral Manipulation Devices

FUTURE DEPENDS ON LEARNING TOGETHER

OUR GOVERNMENT IS LEARNED

“Our problems are man-made” but “we” didn’t create them and “we” can’t solve them…

What if the Slavers had Nukes?
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