Trump became president of the most powerful nation on earth through a series of obsolete systems.
The first obsolete system was an ancient one that no longer made sense, but it was how things were done. See, once upon a time the nation was hours, days, and weeks of travel wide…and back then it didn’t even reach as far west as Ohio. It was not a simple thing for someone to get from where they lived to where everyone agreed to meet to build policies. Yet the idea was that people who didn’t have a voice were habitually abused, so to help maintain fairness and better enable the whole to thrive in a far-flung nation, somehow their voices had to be included.
It made no sense to have everyone pick up and go to the seat of government. So instead, they created a system where groups of people based on defined geographies would choose a proxy, whom they trusted to vote with what the majority of them felt was correct (or would be smart enough to skedaddle if they didn’t, effectively ending their run of power). These proxies would aggregate and choose a smaller set of proxies to negotiate and build policies.
It was all very civilized, reasonably trusting — and very much a stopgap to outright chaos, and a product of time and availability. It was far from perfect, but it hit the major points (include a broader set of people, a viable and replicable system shared by all the organized entities, accountability) even while it had to fudge the nice-to-haves (one person/one vote, no hauling voting slips for months, able to reasonably turn as circumstances evolved). The delegate system was born.
The mass-pop understanding then was that surviving was the key, and policies based on honest understanding would help bootstrap them up to thriving. Time was a resource as much as food, water, sky, land, and shelter.
So, a system was posited and tried, and lo and behold it seemed to actually work. It did, for decades and then generations. It coalesced into being, and then history, and then into unquestioned “the way it is done”.
Technology happened along the way. Better tools were made. Travel became faster, communication across large geographies could happen even faster than travel. Did the system change?
Nope. It worked, and the consensus was you don’t fix what works.
Technology changed more. Tools were built that could tabulate in real time what people’s opinions were, surface rolled-up scores, and allow for thoughtful contemplation. Did the system change?
Nope. It worked, right? You don’t….fix what works??
Voting doesn’t happen regularly enough to be a screaming pain point, and so it feels like less of a pain point. But it shouldn’t be. Other timelines dealt with it as soon as mail became dependable, or phones phased out party lines. They understood that a more elegant, less trusting approach was available, and cut out the middle men before the numbers game was really seen.
Eh, that was the odd timeline. It was a matter of an absence of nascent cupids and an idea being posited at the right time to an unusually attendant listener, and then spread. It’s such a rarity, and outside of possibility for Rowan intervention — we simply don’t have that many or that kind of hooks into the timelines we visit.
Keeping an ancient system that seems to work is always more palatable to the human psyche, especially on a mass-pop level. Keeping it until the first real, undeniable crack was found is the norm.
Letting it continue until it fractured and started dropping pieces is not. Denying cracks for what they are because you’re able and some poor schlub is believing you is not.
The norm is for the idea of delegates to be seen and understood as a gamifiable, unnecessary complexity around the turn of the millenium. This timeline is behind. For all intents and purposes, there’s not much time left to remove the delegate system before most of the timelines enter a receding phase. So, sure, there’s no point in going through the pain of getting enough people on board to change the laws and process.
Unless, of course, this is one of the few timelines where….but no. There are so few where that happens. That would really, really suck for those of you who make it through the next few years.
Thus a president was elected that didn’t get the popular vote. Again. It had happened before, and people got angry about it, but by then a subset realized that if they could just keep the power structure working like it was, they could keep a disproportionate amount of the power. They liked it. They could keep it if they lied. So they lied.
Simple. Easy peasy.
But in their lying, they tipped their hands. “Oh,” other nations/powers internalized. “Their people are idiots. We can use that to our advantage. If we tear them down, we can scramble up.”
More lying happened, aimed at a specific subset of people that loved their cognitive biases and wanted more time to do what they wanted to do. Overworking contributed to the inclination.
Some cognitive biases —like distrust of the other— worked really well in a backwoods context, where you knew everyone in a 10 mile radius and it took too fucking long to get further out. Today, distrust of the other will get you believing in a child porn ring being run out of a pizza shop. Why? Because the person spewing the lie looks like you, and the person running the pizza shop doesn’t. Some cognitive biases don’t work in our denser, faster world.
Some of the tools were usurped, too. Some of them wanted to be, so badly. It was their reason for being, the beginning and end and measure of their success. Facebook/Yearbook/FaceTime/mySpace — whatever it’s called here. Social media aimed primarily at getting people to tip their cognitive biases. It’s there in the data, in their interactions with others. It’s easy enough to tabulate something you’re looking for when all the data is prettily stored.
At least the international agency didn’t buy social media outright here. Yet? Believe me, they’ve thought about it.
Other data networks took a little more work—like the voting hardware— but eventually fell. A precinct here and there, then a county, then a whole state. Actually, you probably don’t have to worry about the state-level in this timeline. Part of the outcomes of a world-ending recalibration is that, one way or another, voting is managed. You either get your shit together, or you don’t.
It’s your choice.
Here’s the most complicating factor: certain factions of the people in power didn’t want it easier to vote. If it’s easy, people who don’t agree with them will vote, and they’ll no longer have power. In other words, greed ruled, and greed is a mental illness.
Oh, yeah, not for years yet, and only in those timelines that make it through. But seriously, if I manage to clue this timeline in to anything a little early: greed is a mental illness. It’s like hoarding, but specified. Built on the same factors of fear and ill-placed logic, saving an abstraction for a time when it will be useful again.
Here’s a clue: money is a construct. In 40% of timelines, it falls and is replaced by a more complex data set.
But back to the subject of foreign powers lying to mass quantities of individuals susceptible to manipulation of their cognitive biases.
Never forget, first we were lied to by ourselves. A portion of us wanted to believe the lies, because they were so easily reconciled with our cognitive biases. And the people who lied? There was something it in for them: power & wealth, if not today than eventually, with a little more lying and a little less integrity. The external powers had to hold over the internal liars that they were just saying the same things they said; maybe following up with pointing out some connecting dots to the power and wealth the internal powers had already accumulated for themselves.
So, to put it in the context of this timeline, the Republicans couldn’t use integrity because they’d already stolen it from themselves. To rip the mask off the Russians would be tantamount to shooting themselves in the clavicle—very painful and probably debilitating for life. They could either keep what they had and keep their mouths shut, or be pilloried.
They chose the expedient route. They lied, and kept what they had. Change, after all, is terrifying.
Simple. Easy peasy.
Except…Trump really was an idiot.
Quickly, to sum up: Trump was voted into office through a serious of obsolete systems. One was historical but no longer relevant: the delegate system. One was a set of cognitive biases that a significant portion of mass-pop wouldn’t and couldn’t let go of. And the last was based on a mental illness: the willfulness of powerful people to remain in power regardless of cost.
Another key to killing the information revolution is the rise of the despotic idiot. In a word: Trump.
Ok, ok, there’s almost always one. Trump by any other name is still a despotic idiot. Allow me to take some time detailing the qualities of the general despotic idiot.
First, it’s always a man, not a woman—even in the timelines where women win the vote relatively early (like this one), or where women keep their initial foothold in the workplace (this one failed there — or is failing? Which timeline is this again?), or where men and women earned the same amount of money for the same work (a rank failure in this timeline). It takes a long time for people in general to see through the bluster of testosterone-induced male ego. It’s special, in a 50% of the population way. This fall, this time, is lead by testosterone. Don’t worry, estrogen has the potential for it’s moment, too — just not here and now, and its moment is not the same kind of moment.
Which leads me to Second: the man has an ego. We’re talking the kind of ego that shines so bright that it’s hard to see anything more than a big ball of eye-burning light. There are ways to see past the light—mental versions of polarized lenses— but with an ego that big, it works past weaker polarization. It’s painful to look too close. Even those who see past it can’t stand to watch long.
Third, he’s got all the cognitive biases. In a world with a significant population that depends on their cognitive biases, let alone a world where cognitive biases are fiercely defended like this one, a man in charge who emphasizes his own cognitive biases and still floats to the ‘top’ of the society is awesome. They herd eats him up, makes him their own. But for circumstances, that could have been me. The recognition is intense, beyond logic, and an ersatz self-fulfillment.
Fourth, he doesn’t have enough intelligence to do diddly squat. He’s lacking in memory, so he can always be right and have known it from the very beginning (it’s another cognitive bias, FYI—in this instance supported by the lack of memory to force him to question even something that happened two hours ago). He’s lacking in critical thinking skills, so ‘belief’ and ‘knowledge’ has no basis in fact. He’s lacking in interstitial connective skills, so he can’t understand that the pull of A is warping the weft of B. He literally makes decisions based on his gut — e.g., his cognitive biases — and can’t even wrap his head around the idea that he could do something wrong.
Fifth, and this is key: he’s got a mental illness. Sometimes it’s outright psychosis that has been kept in check for so many years that no one realizes he’s got a psychosis. Sometimes its cognitive decline — he’s just not as smart as he used to be and willfully won’t recalibrate his self image. Sometimes it’s a dissociative disorder, that allows him to understand that he’s different from all his constituents, so when they are in pain…well, that’s like a plant being in pain, right? Do plants feel pain? I can’t feel sympathetic pain when a plant is hurt, so they must not. So it’s ok that Joe is in pain, because he’s a plant because I can’t feel his pain. It all makes complete sense to the very, very smart (cough, logically unsound, cough), and people with this particular disorder believe that they are the smartest. Most often, the mental illness is greed—although it’s an unacknowledged mental illness in the here and now.
Actually, let’s call that Sixth, because in every timeline that reaches critical failure people in authority have cornered the market on greed. They are, for all intents and purposes, cupids by a nicer name. Let me clue you in. Greed—the accumulation of money and power beyond ability to use it all, in itself the foundation for despotic authoritarianism—is hoarding. Do you think it’s sane for someone to live in a house with newspapers, empty cans, and ‘clean’ refuse piled so deep they don’t understand how many infestations the have? It’s no more sane to accumulate vast wealth. It’s based on fear, trying to control the uncontrollable, and massive decontextualized insecurity.
Let’s play this out a little bit, it’s that important. Say there is a tomato garden that 5 people have agreed to share. Through manipulation, bluster, outright aggression, and coming in to steal when others aren’t around, one of those people have managed to take 90% of the tomatoes. When the other 4 come to check, they are bewildered and panicky that they aren’t actually getting more tomatoes — they were depending on them to make it through the winter.
Now, a ‘smart business man’ will think that his accumulation of tomatoes means that he’ll weather the winter handily. He’ll be able to hold tomatoes over the head of the other gardeners so they’ll do shit for him. Hell, let’s give him some credit: let’s say it actually works for a while. The other gardeners don’t clue in, keep doing the same thing for years on end (the choice-supportive cognitive bias), and he lives the life of a king.
Stolen content warning: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.
But he never feels he has enough if someone else has any. He keeps finding ways to keep more and more tomatoes. Eventually, he can get the other gardeners to do things they don’t like or are even personally harmful because they need some of the tomatoes they grew for him.
But it’s not enough. What’s enough? His urge is to take more of the tomatoes to try to fill the void, and it does not come from a place of sanity. Its impossible to thwart the urge.
There are several paths this could take. The other gardeners could clue in to his shenanigans and literally just stop playing his game: forage away from the garden and let it go to weed, move away from tomatoes to something not covered by their agreement, or shun him completely and move the garden and not let him anywhere near it.
The tomatoes that he stored could be improperly managed, and he could lose them all to rot. He can’t force the others to do shit because he doesn’t have tomatoes to hold over them, and they have no fellow-feeling for him because he’s been treating them badly for years.
The most likely path? He could get so intent on recapturing that feeling of security from having more than the other gardeners that he will push it too far. The other gardeners, too unhealthy and exhausted from all the work he’s been pushing because they need a few tomatoes for dinner tonight (every night, they work so hard to grow the tomatoes and are always so hungry), and they keep plodding forward until they collapse. Once they collapse, well, they’ve been too busy working to raise children— there’s no one to take their place. He’s left alone, storage filled with tomatoes that are meaningless. He can’t do it all himself. The garden dies, and him with it. Maybe he’s last because he’s worked the others to collapse, but he still dies.
All these paths assumes that the other gardeners never clue in to the idea that he’s mentally ill. That with some cognizance, help, and personal interior work, he’ll gladly live on his share of the garden — like they agreed to when it all started. They’ll thrive, together.
That’s what happens in the most generous timelines: greed is acknowledged and helped. In the less generous timelines, greed is acknowledged and cauterized. It’s more expedient, and living under the thrall of greed for too long makes a populace very in tune with expedience.
It’s a longer way back to trust, though. Helping the mentally ill is the faster way to mass-pop sanity. It gives everyone hope that their own failings will be helped instead of cauterized.
Just in case it isn’t clear, “cauterized” is a euphemism. The greedy die at the hands of mass-pop, usually with as much pain as they can think of. Burning is common; hanging, too; eaten by masses of deliberately starved rats in some of more pushed timelines. Yeah, that one comes up a little too frequently for my stomach. Mass-pop doesn’t want the death to be painless or quick; they want to foist some of their pain and exhaustion back to the originators.
It’s not pretty when a despotic idiot falls unwillingly. Let’s hope elections work, and our personal Trump concedes. We’re living non-collapsed time state here, it can still be the way it works.
To have a despotic idiot at the top, the government system needs to be corrupted.
Trump isn’t wrong with his rhetoric of a swamp. He’s actually proving the swamp exists and has expanded on it. Not having many speed bumps in his expansion shows how corrupted the system is.
The thing about government is that it’s less about the system being corrupted and more about the people making up the system having been corrupted.
Checks and balances exist. They’ve been tried and thwarted because there are so many corrupted people in positions of power, but the rule of law can still be refounded. All it takes is reprioritizing integrity over cronyism and creed, intelligence over cognitive bias, fairness over profit.
In short, the greed needs to be removed from the system. Its that simple. And its the hardest fucking thing you’ll ever do.
There are many paths to get there. Some of the simpler are currently being blocked by a system bulwarked by people who want to stay in power. The rule of law — thoughtful policy put in place before it was needed, before logic could be thwarted by pretty words and spinsmanship — has been broken, partly by Trump, mostly by having in place too large a set of people already hemmed in by their lies and intent on cronyism and creed.
If Trump can keep dismissing and firing oversight, well, it’s not going to be pretty or short-term to fix the problem. That a mass is allowing it to continue — I’m looking at you, Republicans, with your finger in the pie of power, cronyism more important than integrity, lies more useful than facts — means that it will take something barely short of revolution.
Truly corrupt people are generally disliked. They have to buy their way into power, and the rebalancing effort to do that means taking away from a lot of mass-pop. Mass-pop feels the pain, and vote for the opposite of the proven corrupt, even if they don’t understand that’s what they are doing. So, make the voting easy and by popular vote instead of proxy, and you weed out the corrupt.
That’s the biggest reason voting is becoming hard. It’s not that the voting system has been hacked (yet — that might be the upcoming elections, but only enough precincts to swing the delegate count), but that the cognitive biases have. It’s hard, they are told. You can’t leave work, and work controls 90% of your waking hours, they are pointed out. The voting lines are long, the only way to vote is to ignore eating, drinking, shitting, sleeping — and if you can do it to vote, well you can do it for your job, they are threatened. You should be ashamed to make these lines longer by forcing us to look for you in the voting rolls, the raised eyebrows state. You’ll go to jail if your skin is wrong, it’s implied.
It’s an escalation. If hints won’t work, make it hard. If hardship won’t work, bring in shame. If shame won’t work, bring in the possibility of jail. It all has one goal: keep mass-pop from voting unless they meet your criteria.
Now, our system has been corrupt for a while, and gerrymandering is a major issue. When voting mass-pop are hand picked for being trusting to a certain creed (all in the effort of the greater good, wink wink), the corrupt can stay in power longer and start weeding out those voting populations. So, voting districts need to be realigned. We have tools now that could do it with minimal politics involved, if we have the right people building it.
Cognitive biases are always an issue, especially with people writing policy. Gerrymandering goes beyond an accidental use of cognitive biases to a willful leverage of cognitive biases on a mass scale. In short, gerrymandering is a willful subsumption of integrity.
Reality is that in this timeline, it’s probably too late for a fix through voting and removing gerrymandering. The corrupt are in place, and in high enough numbers that they’ll sit there like toads until the entire system rots around them.
The least violent way forward is a massive, redefiningly large voter turnout that starts swinging the pendulum the other way. Prove them wrong. Work against the narratives they are screaming, look at your life, look at the lives and choices of the people you are voting into power, and try to oust as many liars as possible. Believe actions over words.
Other than that, you’re probably looking at a revolution, with all the requisite animosity and aggression. Except the guns are mostly owned by those who have been suckered into cognitive biases, sooooo….yeah, that’s not going to change diddly squat, except feeling like you’ve tried.
But those area potentialities. It's possible to move into them for a period of time —the cascading potential leaves a window open for a while. Your timeline, though, is on a path to limp along as-is for the course of the pandemic and the aftershocks. Really, it’s years. It’s not going to be pretty, and it’s not going to be fun. So many people will die who didn’t have to. The tools and technology you will lose out of those deaths is enormous—but the good thing is that ideas have their time and the very best of them have multiple scatterings of ah-ha moments by a disparate population. The ideas will still arrive, but out of France, Germany, Ghana, India, and Sri Lanka.
When the worst is mitigated, the most corrupt who have survived the virus will be more intransigent than ever, although a few key players will die.
When McConnell dies, there will be a demographic shift to the courts that —in the world where the gauntlet is survived—will be the key to digging out corruption. But he’s just one head to the rot. His removal alone isn’t enough.
The path out of corruption is very simple, and yet the hardest thing possible. The government has to end money in it’s current form, acknowledge greed as a true rot, cap wealth, and shift to a data economy. The tomatoes need to be moved away from. Data needs to take it’s place, built from an ethos of fairness and regular questioning of cognitive biases.
The nascent seed—if it is found at all— is in the food supply. When produce starts rotting in the field, someone has to step in and figure out the logistics of getting it to people. All people, regardless of race, gender identity, income, job, or how far they live from the field belt. It will take figuring out the logistics, making them work with the resources (like industrial refrigerators and trucks), and focusing on the data instead of the economics. With that, there will be an ah-ha moment that money really, truly is a construct, and things can be moved around without it.
That is the real start of the data economy. It will have some major glitches: cognitive biases of the coders that ‘forget’ vast swathes of the population; a backdoor that Russian hackers find to start the fields rotting again until the hole is plugged; distributing peanuts — and only peanuts — to people with peanut allergies. But it’s the start.
If you can survive until then, be happy. It’s only a year or five before the gauntlet is passed, and you have a 69.82% probability of surviving.
Unless you have a peanut allergy and no back-up garden. I’m really, really sorry. Hopefully we can get Albert to remember you this time around by stressing your loss.
I started talking about the corrupted system, and got derailed by a paen to the nascent data economy. Let’s get re-railed, but on to the core problem.
The system is corrupted. People are the source of corruption. Data can overcome it, as can an understanding of the key contributor to corruption.
The true illness in the system, the true illness in the despotic idiot, and the true illness that supersedes creed and enforces cronyism, is greed. Today, greed is most represented by wealth. Money.
Greed can have many, many forms. Wealth is the simplest to see and the most pervasive in the system that exists today.
It can be used to shore up so many other greeds.
To be greedy — the urge to have more than you need, and urge so deep and pervasive that it feels like need — is a mental illness.
I can’t say that enough. Whether the outcome is the need to control other behavior, control environment, be the center of adulation, or swim in a silo full of gold, greed is the urge to have.
It does not understand when ‘enough’ has been hit. More is better. If it is perishable and could rot, there is still not enough. If its past the age of usefulness, well, who’s to say what is useful?
Greed is just a specified hoarding mentality. It’s foundation is fear and insecurity. It most often is only understood by the person in the midst of it as a need to control. But that need to control is based in the core belief that what you have (whether intelligence, physical stamina, personality, water, etc.) isn’t enough, and that you need to shore up other resources to make up for the lack.
Some of the greedy believe that they know better how the system should work, and are using their resources to push it in a certain direction. They haven’t dug deep enough. They want the system to go in a certain direction because that’s the direction they understand, and what they understand can be manipulated so they’ll never be left to their own devices.
Their own lack.
Wealth is an indicator of potential greed. It’s not the only indicator, and just because someone has wealth doesn’t mean they have the illness.
Power is an indicator, too; but today, you can’t really get power without wealth.
Power and wealth will bow before the rule of virus. They have zero extra ability against it.
They will fall to virus despite their power, despite their wealth, and despite their greed.
But by allowing their greed to run rampant for so many years, they will cause many more to fall to virus, too. They’ve already stolen the tomatoes for years; the other gardeners are malnourished and exhausted, giving the virus a larger, easier foothold.
Here’s the kicker, though: greed is the start, the urge and the seed to do all kinds of things that you might not actually think was reasonable except that you have this urge pushing you, convincing you that you are desperate.
Desperation makes a mockery of the reasonable, of logic, of fairness. Greed’s truest strength is that it locks in to desperation as it’s handmaiden. Everything is reasonable in the face of desperation, from the point of view of the person doing shit.
Let’s be clear. Forcing others to do your bidding against their will and to their detriment? Not good. Killing others through action or neglect? Not good. Making others lack resources to force your will? Not good. Thinking that a fair share for you is most of what’s there, and others can get by on less? Not good.
Every person has to come to terms with their internal reality, how it impinges on external reality, and how those external realities compound to create the world. In your timeline, in its current linearity, you have actually taken steps backwards.
There are ways to train people to come to mass-pop beneficial conclusions. Critical thinking is, well, critical. An understanding of cognitive biases, how they drive everyone, where they are beneficial and where and how to thwart them in yourself, is essential.
In your timeline, at your currently point in linearity, there has been a tripling-down on rote education. You know what you know because it is what’s known. It is the root of how such a large percentage of your population has become herd.
They do not know how to question. They’ve been taught, over and over again, that questioning is bad and detrimental to their success. So when they hear an idiot spouting what they already know—and do not question— they reward the idiot for being just like them. They are rewarding themselves, patting themselves on the back for sticking with the system they’ve been taught and proving that it works. Look! One of them is in the highest seat of power, and it’s great. He keeps saying it, so it’s great. Just the bigliest bestliest greatest of greats.
Cough. Hack. Should we go to the doctor? No, the virus is a hoax. This is just allergies. I can inject some disinfectant, and everything will be great. We’re all great!
The death toll in the small Trump towns will be staggering. Gird your hearts, or hope to die before you have to see them.
There will be mass graves. I’m sorry. You can blame Trump, but in the end the real foundation is greed.
Greed uses every tool at hand to shore up it’s desperate need to control, to have all the haves worth having. That starts with manipulation. The easiest thing to manipulate is a population rife with cognitive biases that have no training to see itself and change its process, to learn. Greed wants cognitive biases, the more the better. A cognitive bias is easy to manipulate, and that’s the easiest path of all. It takes no tools, no weapons, no stealthy midnight tiredness.
A well-placed cognitive bias in others, and they’ll give you what you want with a few words.
So a mass-pop with cognitive biases to spare? And no time or training to see through them?
That’s greed’s heyday. Fuck 90% of the tomato garden, that’s nothing. You can have the whole garden. And if they try to grow potatoes instead of tomatoes? Well, convince them that it was never that specific — it was always the garden, in general. All the gardens, in general. All the people’s productivity and ideas, in general. There’s really no end to what they gave you when they agreed to grow a garden with you. Here, you can have this tomato you grew, but you owe me. How and why? It’s the way things work, per our agreement. Do the work first, and I’ll mete out what I think you deserve. You might not deserve to survive—so prove you do by working harder now.
With cognitive biases in place, it’s an easy manipulation. If there’s one or two that are thinking hoi-polloi, well, the herd will keep them working until you can exhaust them. Then, in their exhaustion and ill health, they’ll be almost as easy as the herd.
I truly am sorry you have to live through this variation. I thought it was all out with the ideas of flower power and the ERA. But there was a previously uncoalesced rise of a judge who had ideas about the educational system. He developed a near-perfect system for creating herd instead of hoi-polloi, and got it embedded in the public education system.
Even when greed is acknowledged as a disease, even when we can consider our cognitive biases, the smartest of the cupids will find ways to game the system.
Sometimes, the cupids can even become a Rowan. Those are scary fucking timelines.