Category Archives: Social Justice

I Want to Sing a Love Song

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In today’s world, it’s tough to feel positive let alone inspired by anything. It’s all too easy to think that the worst of us represent all of us. It seems like heroes only ever existed in comic books and today even they have been reinterpreted as deeply flawed creatures.

But true heroes do exist in the world. Singer, songwriter, and activist Harry Chapin was one such real life hero. I was reminded of this when I watched the marvelous documentary about Harry called “When in Doubt, Do Something” on Prime Video (see here).

If you are still a huge Harry Chapin fan, you should watch this documentary. If you are wondering if Harry Chapin is the guy that did “Cat’s in the Cradle,” you should watch this documentary.

Harry Chapin was a musical genre all to himself. Although a few other artists might be identified as storyteller musicians, I doubt that even they would feel worthy to be placed along side Harry Chapin in that category. He told emotionally raw stories, set to the backdrop of sweeping cello strings and ethereal falsettos that bore right through the heart to the soul of the listener. Real, basic, everyman stories that anyone can relate to. His story songs ranged from comedic to sappy to dark but he told all his stories fearlessly. He didn’t pontificate. He was never so obvious as to entreat us to “give peace a chance” or “love one another right now.” He didn’t tell, he showed us universal truths by showing us the everyday people he brought to life through his music.

If you are interested in my recommendations, I’d suggest “Mail Order Annie,” “Mr. Tanner,” and “A Better Place To Be” as just three. If these don’t make you emotional you may have trouble passing the “I am not a robot” test.

Besides being a prolific songwriter and tireless performer, Harry was also a pragmatic idealist who devoted his energy and creativity to combating global poverty, hunger, and homelessness. During the Carter years he gave everything one could possibly give in service of his fellow human beings through both his music and through his dauntless legislative lobbying on behalf of humanity.

One thing that the documentary illustrates vividly is that everyone who interacted with Harry Chapin, and Harry reached many, many people, has their Harry Chapin stories that they can never forget. It is not undue hyperbole to say that most anyone who heard his music was deeply touched. Those who saw him in concert or in more informal performances felt forever connected to him. And those who lived and worked alongside him were transformed by him.

I’m no exception to that. Although I’m only one of millions that were profoundly touched by Harry Chapin, my own Harry Chapin stories are still unique. In true Harry Chapin tradition here are two of them.

I was tending bar in my early twenties. It was one of those local corner family-owned dives there I mostly poured beer for regulars. Every Friday night this young couple would come in and sit at the bar. I never actually learned their names but we had a ritual. At some point during the night they would play “Taxi” on the jukebox and the three of us would share six and a half intimate minutes while we sang Taxi along with Harry Chapin. Like honoring some reverent moment of silence, none of the other working-class patrons would so much as shift on their stool until we were done.

To appreciate my second Harry story, you have to understand that I always went to see Harry Chapin in concert whenever he played in the area. One week, the radio stations kept promoting his upcoming concert at the local Performing Arts Center in Milwaukee where I lived. On concert night, the DJ mentioned that the Harry Chapin concert was to start shortly and I realized that for some reason I had never bought a ticket!

Just out of hopeless desperation I drove over to the PAC. There was no one in the lobby as the concert had already seated. I nevertheless walked up to the ticket window and inquired. Of course there were no tickets left. Sad but unsurprised I turned to walk away but hesitated when I noticed another employee come in from the back and whisper to the agent. The agent turned back to me and said that there was a no-show and they were putting the ticket up for sale. Of course I snatched it up!

It turned out that the ticket was row AAA, the very front row, dead center. I had the best seat in the house to enjoy that Harry Chapin concert. Eventually, Harry came out for the encore. He did Sniper. Now you have to understand, Sniper is a 10 minute magnum opus, exhaustively relating the gut-wrenching story of a clock tower sniper. It was probably longer in concert.

And for this song, Harry came and sat on the edge of the stage with his guitar, feet dangling just inches from my knees. At the finish, exhausted and sweat covered, Harry ended the epic climax of the song. While the audience cheered he just sat there, looking directly at me the entire time, spent and flushed, yet with the kind of connection one only imagines experiencing in feeling of true love at first sight.

I found I just couldn’t clap along with the rest of the audience. I couldn’t call for yet another encore. I feared he might think badly of me, so I just pursed my lips and nodded as if to say, “It’s OK. You have given it all. You don’t have to give any more.” Harry nodded back, every so slightly, and I could see he understood and appreciated my holding back as perhaps his loudest applause of all.

Well, that was my Harry moment was back then. The documentary brings back those memories and shows me how very common my moment was for anyone who interacted with this exceptional human being. But that doesn’t make my moment feel less special. On the contrary, it makes me appreciate him even more.

Harry, you taught me to look at people with all their flaws and quirks and see them as worthy of love, understanding and respect. You taught me to look at all the darkness of the world, to expose it, even to battle against it, and not become jaded or disheartened by it but rather embrace it with compassion and even humor.

I wish there were more like you in the world, Harry, and it is our loss that you died so young. But the fact of your life makes me confident that we all can be better as well.

Harry still reminds us that we are all not just represented by the worst of us, but that we are all also represented by the best of us.

Pro-Choice Activists Can’t Play Chess

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When I was in grade school, my best friend’s grandfather was a former chess grandmaster. He attempted to teach me the game. And he failed.

Every time I would start to make a move, he would swat my hand, reset the piece, and tell me no. Never move just to move or merely to react. He would demand that I think farther ahead and come up with a better move.

Although I was hopeless at chess, that one lesson did sink in. Never make a move without first anticipating the subsequent moves that may follow. No move should ever be merely a reaction and none should ever be made in isolation. Rather, every move must coordinate with every other move to advance a larger strategy.

It’s that strategic ability to anticipate, to corral your opponent, to control the board, and ultimately to trap them that constitutes the difference between the grandmaster and the novice, the winner and the loser. It is true in chess and it is no less true in the legal and political battle for abortion rights, a game where refusal to play is not an option.

As energetic, creative, and diligent as pro-choice activists may be, we have been outmatched by opponents who think many more steps ahead. Not only do they have more skill at this game, they have a level of ruthlessness and focus that we struggle to overcome, regardless of how passionate we are about preserving a woman’s right to choose.

Abortion activists do work very hard to counter each of the moves that anti-choice grandmasters make toward ending abortion. But while the moves of our opponents are well-coordinated and planned, our moves are mostly reactive. The following list of examples is long, but its very length serves to underscore the magnitude of the problem.

  • When they prohibited Medicaid and/or insurance from covering abortion, we set up funds that provided financial assistance.
  • When they required that patients must be given inaccurate or biased counseling, we developed websites and other sources of accurate info that patients could access.
  • When they required that counseling be provided by a physician days before the actual service, we started using videoconferencing or phone to enable patients to avoid an extra trip.
  • When they required parental approval for minors to have abortion, we set up services that helped minors to seek approval from a judge.
  • When they established unnecessary but onerous requirements about abortion clinic structure or provider credentials that were impossible for many clinics to meet, some clinics closed down. We started mailing pills to patients who were left with no nearby access.
  • When they required patients to have tests before the abortion, we found ways for patients to get the tests in their communities, without having to travel to the clinic itself.
  • When they banned abortion in certain states, we set up clinics in adjacent states, right across the border.
  • When they protested outside clinics, we engaged escorts to help patients get through the picket lines.
  • When they started killing abortion providers, we installed bulletproof barriers and hired guards.
  • When they started to harass or threaten people who had had abortions, we advised patients to say that they were miscarrying.
  • When they required that the provider show the patient any ultrasound pictures, we stopped doing ultrasounds unless they were absolutely necessary.
  • When they required that providers describe the fetus in detail to the patient, we gave patients headphones that they could use to block out the sound.

Again, these are all necessary and hard-fought actions taken to mitigate the damage caused by the anti-abortion movement. But they are isolated and reactive or predictably proactive at best. They do not demonstrate coordinated progress in advancing a strategic plan to win the larger battle. As just one example to illustrate, one prong of a strategic plan might be a generational effort to erect a legal foundation to ultimately establish that a fetus is not a person. None of these reactive efforts contribute to any such wider and longer term effort.

Our activists often lament that we cannot take any initiative because we are continually put on the defensive. But isn’t that the whole point of chess? To advance a strategic plan even as you deploy and defend your pieces?

If my friend’s grandfather were observing the abortion rights game we are engaged in, he would swat the hands of our pro-choice activists and insist that we think strategically, that even as we respond to counter immediate threats we simultaneously maneuver to take ultimate control of the gameboard; hopefully in subtle ways that our opponents never see coming.

Here is what seems clear. If we keep on as we have, if we continue to simply react without advancing a larger strategy to win, abortion is headed to a checkmate. And that checkmate will mean personhood for fetuses and a total nationwide ban on abortion under penalty of murder.

Like any novice in chess, we may be far closer to a loss than we can appreciate. If our opponents succeed and achieve an all-too-sudden checkmate, what should we expect?

Together with my wife, who is a leading abortion researcher, we put together a short video to depict the future that anti-abortion zealots may very well force upon us. It adapts a scene from the popular television show The Wire to illustrate how abortion medications may be administered in the not-too-distant future.

It may be that our best hope for relatively safe and effective abortions will lie with street corner drug dealers who can outthink and outmaneuver the forces arrayed against them to offer abortion medications to people who desperately need that help.

Not to in any way minimize the urgency of avoiding that dystopian future, but streetcorner sales might actually not be as disastrous as many might imagine.

Mifepristone and misoprostol are highly safe and effective abortion medications. Patients can almost always determine on their own whether they are pregnant, whether they want an abortion, and whether they are eligible for the treatment. And, in the rare instances in which the patient misjudges eligibility, the risk of severe complications is minimal. There are very few medical contraindications, and the risk of severe issues is low in even those cases. Studies have shown that the quality of the medications, even when produced by questionable foreign sources is, so far at least, perfectly fine. Supervised follow-up, while desirable, is not essential.

Be that as it may, no one wants to end up relying upon illegal drug sales as the mechanism for health care delivery in America. But to avoid that, we need to stop reacting and start taking control of this deplorable game of abortion chess that anti-choice zealots are forcing us to play.

A South Africa Story

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I usually write articles to make a clear and specific point or argument. This time I’m going to do something different and simply relate a very short story. Although anecdotal, this story illustrates a wide range of individual and societal dynamics that are universal. But I’ll say little more and hope that it stimulates broader thought and discussion.

This story takes place in rural South Africa. It happened while I was serving in the Peace Corps there. Every day I walked past a heavy construction site. This was interesting as it was the only active job site in the village. They were putting up some sort of commercial multistory building. But what jumped out at me one day was that I never saw any men on the job. All the construction workers were women. This seemed curious.

In fact, it felt so odd that I became increasingly irritated about this. Where were all the men? Why were women forced to do all this heavy labor-intensive construction work?

I got curious enough to ask a local about this. “Where are all the men?” The local pointed down to the next streetcorner and said, “They are all in the bar.”

I was incensed. Every subsequent day as I walked past the site I became even more incensed. What kind of miserable, lazy, good-for-nothing men were these that they drank in a tavern while the women were outside doing heavy labor?

My disgust for the men of the village persisted until one day I could not contain my contempt any longer. I expressed my outrage to another local. That person patiently explained that the government gave very attractive incentives to construction companies to hire women. In fact, these incentives were so attractive and successful, that they let all the men go. Those men in the tavern were displaced and simply could no longer hold jobs in construction. And there were no other jobs.

Needless to say, my sense of outrage toward the men of the village immediately disappeared. My judgmental attitude was replaced with embarrassment over my uninformed indignation.

Amazing how just one new fact can flip the entire narrative of judgments that we passionately believe to be so very obvious.

Pandemic of Delusion

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You may have heard that March Madness is upon us. But never fear, March Sanity is on the way!

My new book, Pandemic of Delusion, will be released on March 23rd, 2023 and it’s not arriving a moment too early. The challenges we face both individually and as a society in distinguishing fact from fiction, rationality from delusion, are more powerful and pervasive than ever and the need for deeper insight and understanding to navigate those challenges has never been more dire and profound.

Ensuring sane and rational decision making, both as individuals and as a society, requires that we fully understand our cognitive limitations and vulnerabilities. Pandemic of Delusion helps us to appreciate how we perceive and process information so that we can better recognize and correct our thinking when it starts to drift away from a firm foundation of verified facts and sound logic.

Pandemic of Delusion covers a lot of ground. It delves deeply into a wide range of topics related to facts and belief, but it’s as easy to read as falling off a log. It is frank, informal, and sometimes irreverent. Most importantly, while it starts by helping us understand the challenges we face, it goes on to offer practical insights and methods to keep our brains healthy. Finally, it ends on an inspirational note that will leave you with an almost spiritual appreciation of a worldview based upon science, facts, and reason.

If only to prove that you can still consume more than 200 characters at a time, preorder Pandemic of Delusion from the publisher, Interlink Publishing, or from your favorite bookseller like Amazon. And after you read it two or three times, you can promote fact-based thinking by placing it ever so casually on the bookshelf behind your video desk. It has a really stand-out binding. And don’t just order one. Do your part to make the world a more rational place by sending copies to all your friends, family, and associates.

Seriously, I hope you enjoy reading Pandemic of Delusion half as much as I enjoyed writing it.

The Motorcar-Rights Amendment

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1885 Benz Patent Motorcar

Back in the year 1900, there were only 4,192 passenger cars manufactured in the United States. Those 4,192 turn-of-the-century car enthusiasts could freely putter along their dirt roads with little concern about speed limits, driver training or tests, licensing, stop lights, traffic cops, seat belts, or fatal accidents. I’m sure some still managed to get into bouts of road-rage fueled fisticuffs, or run over the occasional slow-reacting pedestrian, but these incidents, while vexing, were not unmanageable.

Fast-forward to 2022 and there are now over 284 million motor vehicles operating on the roads of the United States. Today we absolutely do have to worry about things like speed limits, driver training and tests, licensing, stop lights, traffic cops, seat belts, and fatal accidents. Not only are there far more cars today, they are far more densely packed into confined spaces, they are dramatically heavier, and are far faster. To fail to regulate car ownership and to strictly circumscribe their use in today’s world would not be merely vexing, it would be insanely dystopian.

In this, I think any even the most passionate car enthusiast would agree.

But what if one of the drafters of our Constitution was also the proud owner of a 1886 Benz Patent Motorcar? He might have honestly believed that motorcar ownership is a right that should never be curtailed by the government in any way. And further, he might have argued that the personal mobility offered by the motorcar was essential to civil resistance against an oppressive government. Therefore, what harm could come from including a Motorcar-Rights Amendment to ensure that some future tyrannical government can not seek to oppress us by curtailing our ability to move about and associate freely?

What would likely have happened if we did have such a “Motorcar-Rights Amendment” in our Constitution?

Likely we would be in much the same situation we are in with guns.

Like gun owners, car enthusiasts would have tenaciously invoked their Constitutional Right to block any regulation that in any way restricted their use of cars. No seat belts, no speed limits, no competence tests, no police enforcement–no slippery-slope regulations of any kind. Certainly the American Automobile Association, funded by the car industry, would unfailingly argue in front of the Supreme Court that even the most modest car control regulation or liability exposure is unconstitutional. Regardless of the number of horrific high speed accidents, heedless of death and injury counts, the Supreme Court would steadfastly insist that we adhere to the original intent of the Constitution. “Responsible” car owners would buy ever bigger and more dangerous vehicles in order to defend their rights, to defend our liberty, and to defend themselves from all those “other” reckless car drivers.

Over the decades, as cars got bigger, faster, and more numerous, our dogged protection of that right would have gradually transformed our county into a vast and deadly demolition derby with 284 million rhinoceros-sized death-machines all trying to outdo each other by buying even more deadly elephant-sized death machines.

And our only response would be to continue to send our thoughts and prayers to all the victims of that insane car-nage even as we were quick to reaffirm our commitment to protecting “responsible car ownership” and advocating for inconsequentially modest reforms.

And guns have incomparably less value to society than do cars.

What a more sane and rational Supreme Court would and should do about guns is to drastically reevaluate or even better abandon this primeval Constitutional right in recognition of the real world we live in today. But regardless of that, any ethical and responsible individual would and should voluntarily elect not to own guns of any kind for any reason and refuse to defend or support any private gun ownership whatsoever for any reason.

Game Theory and the End of Democracy

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Asian cultures tend to create games and systems that are inherently cooperative, in which everyone wins or loses together as a team. America, by contrast, is an explicitly and proudly antagonistic culture that pits one side against the other in most every aspect of life. Win-lose competitions drive our society starting with our board games, through our sports competitions, our educational system, our legal system, our capitalist financial system, and right up through our highly prized political system of checks and balances.

But in a system where one must lose so the other can win, it’s tough to be a gracious loser and sometimes just as hard to be a gracious winner. Win-lose competitions often do not end well. Yes, once or twice a gracious loser will walk across the field and congratulate a similarly gracious winner. But if the game is imbalanced, that good sportsmanship cannot be maintained. If one side keeps losing and sees no hope of winning, the game quickly goes sour for both sides. That thrilling boxing match suddenly turns into a repulsive beatdown that forces every feeling person turn away in disgust, and neither the winner nor the loser walk away feeling good.

Win-lose competitions are great fun as long as both sides believe they can win. But when one player starts to fall behind, they might try to distract the other player so that they can shift a chess piece, or they might grab some monopoly money from the bank when no one is paying attention. As the game becomes more lopsided, cheating becomes ever more irresistible. Sometimes the cheating becomes so intense that the entire game is corrupted and sometimes, by tacit agreement, both parties just abandon the rules altogether.

If one player finally becomes convinced that they can never win, why should they continue to play at all? When a chess player finally accepts that they cannot compete against world-class masters, or a runner accepts that their knee injuries make them unable to compete and win, why continue to participate? Of course, they lose interest in the game, they decide it’s stupid anyway, they might even angrily claim the other side cheats, upturn the game board, and insist we play some other game.

That is analogous to what has been happening in our real-life competitive game of politics. The Right has long seen that they are losing at this game of democratic elections. They tried cheating, they engaged in the political equivalent of unsportsmanlike misconduct, they exploited and abused the rules of the game, but it is still clear that they will not win another fair electoral match in the foreseeable future. Obviously, their natural inclination is to overturn the board, to declare that Democracy is stupid anyway, to turn it into a WWF version of political performance art, and even to embrace dictatorship.

From the perspective of the side that has no hope of winning in a fair democratic election, a totalitarian dictatorship that is hopefully more aligned to your perspectives is a rationally desirable alternative. Even if that dictatorship does not serve your own self interest, overturning the chess board at least denies your opponent a win.

So the message here is that the Progressives have finally succeeded in their generational effort to convince Conservatives that they can no longer win the game election game in America. It should be perfectly understandable that, once internalizing that stark reality, the Conservatives tried to cheat, tried to change the rules, and are now engaged in overturning the entire game.

This impulse to abandon the game rather than keep losing is aggravated and reinforced by a simultaneously lopsided win-lose economic system in which it is clear that the ultra-wealthy have claimed the winning cup so completely that none of the rest of us, but particularly rank and file Conservatives, can ever hope to do more than pitch in the minor-leagues.

What, did we think that Conservatives would just walk across the Continental divide, shake our hands, congratulate us on a well-earned victory, and accede to the increasingly progressive will of the majority?

Of course not. Of course they prefer to overturn the game, and end Democracy altogether, rather than lose at the competitive win-lose game that we have made it.

Let’s Stop Glorifying Soldiers

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Today is Memorial Day. This holiday does make me reflect upon the many soldiers who lost their lives while serving in the military. Without doubt it brings great comfort to many. But for me, those thoughts unavoidably drift far beyond merely acknowledging and appreciating their sacrifice. I’m forced to ask, is this level of glorification justified? Is it a good thing? Does it go too far? And does it cause unanticipated and undesired harm?

How justified really is the extremely high level of recognition we ascribe to soldiers on Memorial Day, Veterans Day, at more routine events, and in the many popular references and acknowledgments that are so pervasive throughout our culture? Many may say it’s far too little and too perfunctory. But many others feel our reverence for and romanticization of the military is borderline pathological.

Yes, some soldiers die during their service. But we have many professions that suffer from similarly high death rates, in fact much higher if you only count combat deaths (see here). And if we look at harm to health and well-being more generally, the terrible cost suffered by other professions is even far more pronounced.

But even while acknowledging the actual numbers, we still like to think that military service is special; that soldiers didn’t merely make the ultimate sacrifice in the course of earning a paycheck. We imagine their sacrifice to be more noble because they were selflessly serving their country to protect our freedom and liberty and our democratic way of life.

In reality, that may at times be the big picture result of military service, but many professions likewise serve those same greater goals. But for individual soldiers, claims of noble motivation are highly exaggerated rationalizations. Many studies have shown that the primary motivation for joining the military is simply money. One such study by RAND (see here) identifies five primary reasons that people join the military:

  • Adventure and Travel
  • Benefits
  • Job Stability and Pay
  • Escaping a Negative Environment
  • Job Training

None of these driving motivations have anything to do with defending freedom and democracy. They are all simply based upon personal gain. Now, that’s not to say that serving a noble cause is not important to many in the military. But for most it’s secondary at best and a rationalization at worst.

That is not as true of many other service professions. Teachers, Peace Corps Volunteers, and many in legal, medical, or other service professions do often cite helping others as primary motivations for working in difficult, low-paying, and sometimes dangerous careers. Not so with most of the soldiers who are so honored by our culture.

So then we ask, what’s the harm? Certainly we should not fail to honor one group simply because we cannot similarly honor all deserving groups. Recognition is often not fair. It never can be. And maybe the goal of inducing soldiers to join the military is indeed so important to democracy that honoring them is a necessary pragmatic white-lie we maintain for the greater good.

Well, my concern about this kind of pragmatic logic is two-fold. First, it is not at all clear that the good accomplished by our huge military overcomes the bad. But secondly, I am pretty confident that our glorification of the military does real, profound harm to our social fabric by propagating guns, military dress and equipment, and paramilitary behaviors that are incredibly damaging to our country. Beyond mass shootings, our fetishizing over everything military has become inextricably intertwined with the greatest dangers to our democracy emerging from within.

I have to think that our exaggerated romanticizing over soldiers is a significant enabling factor in the marketing of the real dangers and threats we face as a people. Glorifying soldiers, their equipment, and military solutions only models and ennobles this kind of behavior in civil society. We see this distorted and dangerous military mimicry escalating almost daily.

Maybe military behavior, however noble in theory, has become so corrupted in popular society that it is time to reevaluate our long-standing military traditions and their increasingly theoretical and irrelevant positive values.

So what should we do differently?

My suggestion is that we treat Memorial Day more like a remembrance of people who died in natural disasters or mass shootings. We remember these people as victims, not heroes. Rather than creating romanticized narratives of altruism and self-sacrifice, we should mourn the tragic, often needless, loss of friends and family. We should show icons of hope and renewal rather than parading our flags and shooting off rifles in militaristic displays. We should mourn the foreign policies that have put so many in harm’s way, dismantle a military-industrial complex that drives so many into the military, and stop feeding the delusions of so many disturbed, gun-crazy individuals in our society who are driven by the distorted ideas of military honor that they take away from Memorial Day and other military exhibitions.

Spider-Man Gets It

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After being snowed in for a week, I finally got out to see Spider-Man: No Way Home (see here). It was a super fun action movie. But as with all good writing, it also made me think interesting thoughts, such as what makes people bad, redemption, and the effect of superpowers our real world.

The following contains movie spoilers. If you have not seen it yet, and think you might like to, close this article and come back after you’ve checked it out!

With sympathy to those of you who have little patience for superhero stuff, I’ll set up the story really simply. A group of supervillains are brought into our universe by accident. They immediately do what supervillains do; they unleash their terrible powers to create widespread havoc and death.

Spiderman does find a way to send them back to their own universes. Despite intense pressure to do so, and despite the horrible threat that these supervillains pose, he cannot bring himself to effectively deport them to wreak havoc in their old universes. So instead, he tries desperately to help each of them to become better people who can live peacefully in any universe.

Each of these supervillains has a different background and unique challenges that contribute to their evil behavior. Since I don’t have the room in this article to talk about all of them, I’ll focus on just one. That supervillain is called Electro and he is played in the movie by Jamie Foxx.

Electro has the ability to literally siphon electricity from electrical grids and to fire it in lightning-like bolts and bursts. His destructive power is fantastic. But when Spider-Man manages to destroy his electrical emitter, Electro immediately becomes your uncle. Suddenly he is no longer a crazed and maniacal supervillain, but a pretty ordinary next door neighbor. He is no more crazed and maniacal than your typical muffler-repairman and just about as dangerous. In fact, once his power is taken away, it’s hard to imagine that he was ever any kind of threat.

This sudden and dramatic transformation isn’t as unlikely as it may seem at first. Superpowers do actually exist in our real world, and they do induce the same kind of deadly behavior in many otherwise harmless people. Take those superpowers away, and those real-world supervillains are just your uncle, your neighbor, or your muffler-repairman.

These real-world superpowers most typically take the form of public or private office, wealth, or guns.

High offices are in limited supply. And great wealth is still relatively hard to come by. So while dangerous, people with those superpowers are somewhat rare. While they do exist and can do great damage, there can never be too many Donald Trump or Lex Luthor type supervillains in the world. And also, these supervillains are somewhat constrained by the precariousness of their positions of power.

But anyone today can buy a semi-automatic weapon and become a real-world supervillain that rivals Electro in destructive power. And relative to the rich and the office-holders, many of these people have few constraints that restrain their unleashing of that power – at least one time.

As Spider-Man often repeats, “with great power comes great responsibility.” There are certainly some, like Spider-Man, who take that to heart and strive to use their power, their office, their wealth, or their gun, to make the world a better place.

But it is also true to observe that “absolute power corrupts absolutely.” And as Spider-Man: No Way Home shows us, there are many who are intoxicated by great power and who, like Electro, would be perfectly decent citizens if not for that power.

So yea, guns.

Guns grant anyone a superpower. By making guns so easily available, we have created a nascent army of actual and potential supervillains.

Many rationalize that guns are not the problem. But that is simply wrong. As Spider-Man: No Way Home shows us, the means to destroy is exactly the problem. When people who can be drawn toward violence are allowed to have guns, it’s like giving Electro his superpower back. Without that power, he is not particularly dangerous. But with that power in his hands, he cannot help but become a supervillain.

For too many people, the lure to use their superpower can be overwhelming. If you could shoot lightning bolts, how could you not? You possess a voice. Are you never frustrated enough to shout out in anger with it? The mere possession of a superpower fundamentally inverts every calculation. With guns, your muffler-repair guy becomes a mass shooter. Without guns, well he’s just your muffler-repair guy.

Electro could not both possess a device of mass destruction and not use it. Modern guns grant less flashy but similarly destructive superpowers. We should not be so foolish as to give everyone access to them. Giving everyone access to Twitter is dangerous enough.

Spider-Man realized this. The weapons are the problem, not the people who possess them.

Spider-Man gets it. Why can’t we?

Trump Exposed Our Stupidity

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I have long expressed the speculation that we are probably no smarter than the population of ancient Babylon. Yes, we may have more technology and more knowledge, but brains evolve very slowly and have probably long ago reached intrinsic intellectual limits like the maximum size of an insect with an exoskeleton. Similarly, we are probably no smarter overall than people were way back when.

Given the number of people in our population who believe in any sort of crazy, nonsensical, disproven claim, it’s hard to deny that we have a lot of really stupid people in our population. Despite that, we have long preferred to respect the intelligence of our fellow humans and at worst characterize them as misled, uninformed, uneducated, and so on. Not stupid though. Oh no, we’re not saying that.

When Trump came to power I said that was further proof of how stupid we are. Clearly we are not stupid in all ways, but I was talking about the particular set of “social intelligence” smarts that might allow us to form a just and sustainable social system. As social stupidity exerted itself throughout the Trump era, more and more people found they had no choice but to refer to his supporters as simply stupid.

Still, most continued to resist that harsh point-blank criticism. They hung on to hope that Trump voters were simply misinformed by Fox News.

Then Covid came along. As it became clear that many Trump supporters and some others were continuing to resist vaccines and thereby placing themselves and others at mortal risk, the rest of us have pretty much been forced to admit that, yes, they are just plain stupid. We can no longer continue to pretend that any less critical adjective is sufficient to describe them.

Trump has not made people stupid. Stupid people created Trump. Trump didn’t tell them what to think, he threw out trial balloons at his rallies and he echoed whatever they cheered to most strongly. He led stupid people wherever they told him they wanted to go.

The stupid people don’t worship Trump. They don’t even follow Trump. The moment he tries to take them where they don’t want to go, they rebel. They boo him as they did when he tried to urge them to get vaccinated. As horrible as Trump may be, the real problem is not Trump, the real problem are the stupid people who created and continue to empower Trumpism.

Look, it’s clear we have different kinds of smart and stupid. Some people may be brilliant in lots of ways, but still be quite hopelessly stupid at math. You don’t want them teaching math to your kids. In the same way, we should accept that some people, as smart as they may be in lots of ways, are simply hopelessly stupid when it comes to social policy and they should not be allowed anywhere near making it.

In their excellent book, Hating America, authors Barry Rubin and Judith Colp Rubin document the dire misgivings that many 18th century European intellectuals expressed regarding the formation of a Democracy in America (see here). They warned that a system that empowered uninformed and stupid masses to make critical decisions was doomed to be dysfunctional and destructive. Their concern was elevated by their certainty that America, with all its vast resources, would become very powerful. Putting that much power in the hands of the stupid masses would be disastrous, they warned.

It has taken longer than those European intellectuals feared, but their predictions and warnings are finally coming true. A powerful America, dysfunctional and destructive in its behavior, careening down the road to a calamitous global future with stupid people behind the wheel.

Why now? I mean, the stupid people who support Trumpism – if not Trump himself – have always been here. They spewed nonsense in ancient Babylon, they owned slaves in America, and lynched free Blacks more recently. They have always hated government, believed in nonsense, proudly flew their Confederate flags, denied climate change, and rejected vaccinations. But we have managed pretty well so far. We have made progress despite them. So why worry about them now? What makes them more dangerous today?

I’ll give two reasons why our stupid population is more dangerous today – social media and guns. Social media gives them the critical ability to mutually-reinforce their stupidity, to coordinate, to rise up in online or real-world mobs, and to take over our government through coordinated action or even under threats of violence. Social media promised to empower the masses, and unfortunately it has succeeded.

And guns give these people the real power not only to mobilize, coerce, and threaten, but to exert their will through with profoundly horrifying violence and destruction.

It is long past time that we all accept and acknowledge that we have, and always will have, a socially stupid and dangerous fraction of people in our population. We must further accept that no amount of education, media campaigns, or empathetic outreach – or even fear of death – will dissuade these people from their stupid behavior. We cannot “bring them around.” We rather must find ways to moderate them, disempower them, and achieve a fair and sustainable society despite them.

We need, as George Will has said, sane and rational people in our representative form of government who can moderate our worst, stupidest, passions. But social media, and increasingly guns and threats of violence, are installing stupid people in our government who then gerrymander and create other pathways to bring in even more stupid people.

Eliminating, or strongly controlling, the two major enablers of stupidity, social media and guns, is essential if we are going to survive our socially stupid population and prove those European intellectuals wrong about the unavoidable fate of a Democratic system of government.

I Say Give Them Time

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As my readers know I occasionally take exception to comments made by highly respected intellectuals. I hope that when I do so it is not to engage in a gratuitous attack, but to offer an important counterpoint. In that spirit I must take exception to recent comments made by the highly respected thinker and author Malcolm Gladwell (see here).

The comments I refer to were offered by Mr. Gladwell when he appeared on The Beat with Ari Melber last week. The full text can be heard on the Ari Melber podcast dated July 3rd, 2021.

Mr. Melber introduced the segment by pointing out that we live in a period in which Republicans are attempting to revise history and promote lies. He asked Mr. Gladwell for his thoughts about all of that and whether there were any solutions. It should be noted that this question was asked in the context of promoting Mr. Gladwell as an expert on human thinking and behavior.

Here is a slightly polished transcription of the response by Mr. Gladwell:

I think about the role of time. I wonder whether we’re in too much of a hurry to pass judgment on the people who continue to lie about what happened on Jan 6th, there are many forms that denial takes. One of it is that I honestly don’t believe that anything went wrong there. Another form is that I do believe but I’m not ready to admit it yet. A lot of what looks like a kind of malignant denial in the republican party right now is probably just people who aren’t ready to come clean and renounce a lot of what they were saying for the previous four years. I say give them time.

While this admonition for patience may sound superficially learned and wise, I find it naïve, wrong both theoretically and factually, and damagingly counterproductive. While I certainly don’t expect Mr. Gladwell to cite all his supporting evidence in a short interview segment like this, I don’t believe he has any. I suspect this is simply well-meaning but unrealistic platitude, analogous to “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” That’s OK, except that he is putting forth an unsupported platitude as the conclusion of a purported expert in human thinking.

But such an expert on human thinking should understand that neural networks simply do not function in a way that would make “give them time” a reasonable strategy. As long as Republicans continue to hear the same old lies repeated over and over, they are not going to eventually recognize and reject them. Repeated exposure does not reveal lies but rather transforms our brains to accept them more deeply.

Our neural networks are influenced mainly by the quantity and repetition of the training “facts” they are exposed to. They have little capacity to judge the quality of those facts. Any training fact, in this case any idea the neural network is exposed to, is judged as valid by our neural network machinery in proportion to how often it is reinforced. And by the way, I know most of us want to believe that we collectively are not so susceptible to this because we want to believe that we personally are not. But we are.

So, my objection to Gladwell is that he does not truly understand how our neural networks function because if he did he would understand that “I say give them time” is counterproductive advice at this time. Now, yes, it would be good advice if we were confident that Trump voters are being exposed regularly and primarily to truthful information. If that were the case I would agree, yes, give their neural networks more exposure time. However, I don’t believe that there is any reasonable basis to think that giving them more time will serve any purpose except to further reinforce the lies they are continually exposed to from Trump, the Republican Party, and Fox News. We are simply not ready to just be patient and let the truth seep in and percolate.

The more nuanced advice, in my opinion, to the question posed by Ari Melber is that we must discredit and stem the flow of misinformation from these sources and expose Republicans regularly to truly factual information. Once we do that, then, yes, I say just give them time for their neural networks to become comfortable with it. With enough exposure their neural networks will transform whether they want them to or not. But to accept the status quo right now and “give them time” as Mr. Gladwell suggests would be horribly premature and ill-advised.