Let me tell you a story. At the end my personal "dark ages" (circa 2005-2009) when I wrote about peak oil for The Oil Drum and ASPO-USA, I had a running dispute with the leaders of ASPO-USA. I wanted them to put more of their limited budget toward the organization's website, where my weekly column appeared, in order to widen our reach. (I also wanted them to pay me more )
But that's not what those who led ASPO-USA wanted to do. Instead, each year they put as much as 80-90% of their precious budget into paying for a physical meet-up (the annual conference) in some host city. One year it was in Boston, one year it was in Houston, one year it was in Denver, and so on. The conference served one all-important overriding purpose—the peak oil faithful could all get together in some hotel to meet face to face and talk to each other.
Peak oil folks could, for a few days each year, be literally surrounded by other people who believed what they believed, or had an interest (often financial) in pessimistic scenarios. Faces and bodies could be attached to often faceless and disembodied people one had only heard of, or had known only on the internet.
Back then, before I better understood how humans work, I used to think this conference thing was a total waste of time and money. Now, in my more enlightened older age, I understand that holding the conference was indeed the most important thing the organization could do because sponsoring the conference went the furthest toward meeting the very real social needs of "peakists" taken as a small, marginalized social group.
What would Simon Sinek make of my story? To him, it would make total sense. He might not put it this way, but instinctual human socializing requires those in the group to be physically present with each other. As I have found out over and over again, socializing on the internet is second-rate; it is counterfeit in a profound sense. It is not the real thing, though one can see precisely the same social instincts at work on the internet as we find in face-to-face interactions.
And what about what Sinek calls "the split" in the United States? Having lived throughout almost the entire post-World War II period (1947 to the present), I can vouch for the social reality of "the split." Back in the day, I used to say that America had become one huge game of Survivor (the TV show). Nobody can trust anybody anymore. For example, here is some text I wrote in the post Are Humans Dumber Than They Used To Be? (DOTE, 11/15/2012).
We might ask an alternative question: are contemporary humans crazier than they used to be? In DOTE terms, that's the same as asking are contemporary humans more out of touch with reality than they used to be?
I believe that if we answer this question in the affirmative, we are on much firmer ground. Modern humans are completely out of touch with the Natural World, and have an equally flimsy grasp of what's going on in the large, complex (but structurally predictable) societies they have created.
Technological "improvements" in mass media have created a situation in which the consensual reality is now almost wholly defined by other humans whose conscious or unconscious agendas constantly shape our perceptions (at a distance) of what's going on. In that sense, for contemporary humans, physical and psychological reality can hardly be said to exist.
Thousands of years ago, humans could perceive directly what was happening around them and to them. That's not the case anymore. Now there are layers and layers of obfuscation separating humans from direct apprehension of events. In Crabtree's terms, direct evolutionary selection pressures no longer exist. You are usually not killed off by the person right in front of you (although that still happens). Now you are screwed by a sociopathic banker on Wall Street who you don't know and who doesn't know you.
For example, polling reveals that Americans have no clue about the extent to which this society has been divided into Haves and Have-Nots. And last week, 120 million Americans voted for Democrats or Republicans, pretending all the while that it matters whether one political party or the other holds power, although the relatively low voter turnout was encouraging. Both political parties have sold them down the river over the last 30 years. Generally speaking, social realities have been nearly obliterated.
And when social realities are obliterated in the sense described here, trust is no longer possible.
Now, this is a complicated subject, but let me touch on a couple things. There are all sorts of sociological, anthropological and psychological aspects to what Sinek was talking about (with which he may or may not be familiar, probably not). I touched on some those aspects in the essay Economics As A Moral Science (e.g., in-groups and out-groups, elites and the hoi polloi, Robin Dunbar's number). But let me talk specifically about "the split" in the United States. I'll quote some text from the end of that essay.
We're Not All In This Together
In 1964 when Lyndon Johnson declared a War on Poverty, there was a strong sense that Americans were one people, that we were "all in this thing together". Over the intervening 50 years, this sense of societal cohesion disappeared completely in the United States. Now America is one giant game of Survivor.
A professor of sociology named Shamus Kan—not an economist—actually made an argument based on some of the insights of this essay. (He hadn't read this essay, of course, and I discovered Kan's piece after I had written it.) Kan's article is called We're Not All In This Together and appeared as a New York Times editorial on December 14, 2013.
Kan calls for a morally rejuvenated America, something he knows won't happen easily.
As a worldview, there’s something seductive in imagining that what’s good for me is good for everyone. Realizing my own advantage, then, doesn’t only feel good; it’s the moral thing to do.
But sadly there isn’t much evidence that greed is good.
Absolutely fucking right.
This leaves us with two lessons...
[The first lesson (a rebirth of political harmony) is hopeless — Dave]
The second lesson is harder. We are not in this together. We need to get back to what made America great, when the many and not the few were winning.
To do so we must stop conflating moral arguments with economic ones. Instead of operating under the fiction that we will all benefit from a proposed change in economic direction, let’s be honest. If a few of us are better off, then many are not. If many are better off, then the few will be constrained. Which world would you rather live in?
To me the answer is obvious.
As I arrive at the end of this essay, I feel I've said a lot of obvious things too, but I've tried to frame them in a way which is new to me and probably new to you. I can only hope you've gotten some insight into the moral catastrophe called the United States of America...
That's "the split" — we're not all in this together here in the Greatest Country on Earth.
And then there are the historical aspects of "the split" which Sinek talks about (and doesn't get quite right). In the essay Moral Failure In The United States, where I talked about social elites, I also described my own theory about the exceptional nature of the post-World War II decades.
America In The Decades After World War II
It is unfortunate in the United States that political liberals and progressives always take the post-World War II decades as illustrative and exemplary with respect to what they believe is possible in achieving their desired utopia. I have given considerable thought to that historical period, a time when a large, prosperous Middle Class arose in America, for it is in many respects exceptional in human history. I grew up during those decades but have learned since that yearning for their return is a form of progressive nostalgia. We are very unlikely to see the return of the more inclusive moral preferences of the 1950's and 1960's.
I have a theory about how such an egregious socio-economic exception to the historical rule arose. After the victory of the Allies in World War II, the United States became without question the most powerful nation the world has ever seen. Most of the victors (in western Europe) and the vanquished (Germany, Italy, Japan) became in effect client states of the United States, outside of isolated China and the Russian sphere of influence. All of these states to one extent or another also participated in the economic boom of the post-war decades, helped and encouraged by the United States to liberalize their societies in accordance with the American model
In the United States, it became clear during the war that America's citizens were largely indistinguishable from its active military. Every American, whether they were in uniform or not, joined in the war effort. It was ordinary Americans who won the war, and it would be ordinary Americans who would share in the prosperity which followed the victory. By contrast, World War I was the creation of and a conflict among the elites of various old European powers, for whom conscripts and patriotic volunteers of the various nations fought and died. World War II was among the Allies (and the Axis powers) the first "people's war", an all-hands-on-deck affair which remains unique to this day [1943 poster left].
Thus the heightened inclusiveness of the war effort carried over into the decades following the victory. And so for a relatively short time in U.S. (and human) history, during the war and thereafter, America's elite and America's people had a shared sense of purpose and shared moral preferences. Moreover, their shared experiences during the war meant that America's elite and its ordinary citizens were to some significant extent one and the same people. America's generous, more inclusive values were also encouraged in the client states (the Allies and the vanquished in Europe and Japan).
World War II created a close-knit social in-group made up of veterans of that war. This group ran the United States for a long time. It wasn't until Bill Clinton in the 1990's that an American president had not served in some capacity during World War II!
One might write a book to flesh out this theory—for example, unity of purpose and inherent superiority (the "American Way of Life") was constantly reinforced by the Cold War with the communist world—but suffice it to say that the unprecedented social unity brought about by World War II, which was reinforced by countless political pronouncements, corporate messages, intellectual books, TV shows and Hollywood movies over the decades which followed, eventually and inevitably faded away.
We now live in the more historically typical United States of the early 21st century, a society which still has great socio-economic wealth and military power, but whose many wars are fought by a voluntary military made up of disenfranchised citizens without prospects, and whose elite has confiscated almost all of the income gains and most of the nation's financial wealth, thus shafting the large majority of America's citizens.
The usual story about the post-World War II decades is thus like a fairy tale in which, once upon a time, we Americans were all in it together fighting the good fight, making Progress happen, and spreading Goodness everywhere we went. (Never mind about CIA-sponsored coups in Latin America, Iran, etc.)
But that's all over now. That fairy tale died 35 years ago, if not many years before that during the Nixon presidency and the Vietnam Era.
But many Americans are loathe to give that story up, or, if it obviously isn't true now, they say "why couldn't that story be true once again?" After all, the American story in the decades just after World War II is such a Good Story, it's such a Hopeful Story—who wouldn't want to believe it could happen again?
This was all this stuff that came to mind for me when I watched Sinek's TED talk. I could go on and on about human sociality and what happened historically in the United States, but I've covered the gist of it here.
I used this "educational" video in Economics As A Moral Science.
Another way in which the internet is a pale comparison to immediate social situations is in feedback. No responses here yet, but I'd bet others like me read it and nodded their heads this morning. You don't see it, Dave, but it's there.
A point about WWII efforts that's often made is how we "need a WWII style push for renewables". I hear and see that phrase often. Beyond the questionability of renewables themselves, the term implies we'd actually do that - when all we really have on the table are market solutions (selfish motivation vs. community effort), and the enemy isn't Hitler, but ourselves.
Posted by: Jim | 05/26/2015 at 03:28 PM