DILBERT KNOWS BEST: He says we voters are "basically irrational!"

THURSDAY, JUNE 2, 2016

Part 3—Just check our own love of cartoons:
Yesterday, at a very chic luncheon, we were reliably told that Dilbert creator Scott Adams had appeared with our old pal Bill Maher on last Friday's Real Time.

It must be great to have HBO! You can watch the bulk of that interview here.

Adams was painfully persuasive when he discussed the skills of Candidate Trump. Adams predicted, months ago, that Trump will win this November's election. The Dilbert creator regards Trump as "a master persuader."

When the Washington Post's Michael Cavna summarized Adams' view of this matter, he listed six of the Dilbert creator's beliefs. The first two points were these:
CAVNA (3/21/16): 1. Trump knows people are basically irrational.

“If you see voters as rational you’ll be a terrible politician,” Adams writes on his blog. “People are not wired to be rational. Our brains simply evolved to keep us alive. Brains did not evolve to give us truth. Brains merely give us movies in our minds that keeps us sane and motivated. But none of it is rational or true, except maybe sometimes by coincidence.”

2. Knowing that people are irrational, Trump aims to appeal on an emotional level.

“The evidence is that Trump completely ignores reality and rational thinking in favor of emotional appeal,” Adams writes. “Sure, much of what Trump says makes sense to his supporters, but I assure you that is coincidence. Trump says whatever gets him the result he wants. He understands humans as 90-percent irrational and acts accordingly.”

Adams adds: “People vote based on emotion. Period.”
According to Cavna, Adams says we humans "are basically irrational." His other points about Trump's skill as a persuader follow along from there.

Adams says that we humans "are basically irrational!" Do you remember when we first raised this unfortunate point? It was January 2000, in an award-winning, three-part series. Watching Adams talk about Trump, we'd have to say we thought we saw chickens coming to roost.

Is it true? Are we the humans, and we the voters, "basically irrational?" If so, Trump would be the perfect preacher for our secular church.

As we noted yesterday, Trump's silly name-calling—"Crooked Hillary!"—is straight outta the world of Superman comic books. It's also straight outta the world of professional wrestling, a world within which Donald J. Trump has functioned quite well for years.

(Trump's a made man in gonzo-world. He's a member of the WWE Hall of Fame.)

In Cavna's report and in that tape from Real Time, you meet convincing claims about the power of Trump's persuasion. We say that for these reasons:

When Trump rails about "Crooked Hillary," he's working at the lowest level of our human intelligence. But as Adams explained to Maher, this is the level at which persuasion may be most effective.

Post-Enlightenment culture has always tried to eliminate such dumb-assed conduct from the public square. Slowly, though, in the past fifty years, commercialization of media has rolled back the prohibitions which kept our discourse less stupid.

Uh-oh! First they let Imus have a national show, then they opened the door to Howard Stern. Before very long, they accepted Rush. Olbermann came after that.

In the broader realm, the dumbing down of our society's intellectual content has been widely observed. The History Channel no longer does history. Bravo no longer does culture.

PBS makes its money from doo-wop revivals. Rachel Maddow mugs and clowns, treating us like the irrational players—the potential marks—we all potentially are.

Manifestly, most of our "reality TV" comes from the realm of the dumb. Unfortunately, though, we people seem to enjoy dumb shows—and this past year, along came Trump, who has also done quite well in this low-mental energy realm.

Traditionally, the two major parties would never have let a person like Trump to play as a candidate on the national stage. But as we've seen this year, "democratization" of the political process has now taken that power away.

Along has come Trump, the first major candidate to base his persuasion on the use of two-word schoolyard taunts. It's the dumbest level of persuasion—and as Adams predicts, in the hands of a skillful player, it could actually work this fall.

As a general matter, it's considered insulting to say that we the people are "basically irrational."

Long ago, Aristotle is said to have said that "man [sic] is the rational animal." Because we (irrationally) love to heap praise on ourselves, our broad self-portraits have long been built around that flattering appraisal.

Unfortunately, that flattering appraisal is highly misleading. If we want to rescue our failing culture, we need to move past our reflexive avoidance of this obvious fact.

Almost surely, it's too late to save this year's campaign from the sub-rational depths of the two-word taunt and insult. If we want to start rebuilding our culture, we need to start recognizing the ways we are inclined to be "basically irrational."

For us liberals, this means we have to understand the way our own tribe is "basically irrational." Consider 1) a recent interview with a Trump voter and 2) a range of irate liberal reactions to a recent post by Kevin Drum.

We liberals! For decades, we've built our tribal discourse around the same sorts of two-word denigrations now mainstreamed by Candidate Trump.

Candidate Trump is running against "Crooked Hillary." For decades, we liberals have built our internal discourse around the concept of the "Dumb / Racist Conservative."

There actually are a lot of conservatives who may tilt toward the dumb, especially when they're exposed to skillful, relentless persuasion. But good lord! What about our pitiful tribe, with our own two-word perceptions?

How "irrational" is our tribe? Let's start with that interview with that lone Trump voter.

The interview was conducted by the Atlantic's Conor Friedersdorf. He spoke with a 22-year-old Trump voter from the Bay Area. The voter offered a nuanced set of explanations for his support of Trump.

The voter expressed a range of views, many of which are "progressive." He seemed to say that he favors Trump because of so-called "political correctness."

We liberals know this can't be true, except as a mask for this voter's racism. But that's how denigration-based we modern liberals are.

How simple-minded are our own liberal frameworks? Consider those comments to Drum concerning his recent post.

Drum offered a thousand pre-apologies for the possible appearance of sexism in the post in question. His post appeared beneath this headline:

"Hillary Clinton Has a Shouting Problem"

Is it true? Does Candidate Clinton possibly "have a shouting problem?"

We'd say she possibly does. And by the way, just for the record, during the clownish coverage of Campaign 2000, Candidate Gore was widely savaged for his alleged shouting problem. We say this to note that this complaint can also be aimed at men.

(Click here, scroll down to "A tale of two speeches." We liberals don't recall that this occurred because we're too scripted and too unobservant to get outside the two-word frameworks within which we live our own mental lives.)

Let's return to that question. Does Candidate Clinton possibly have some type of "shouting problem?" In his post, Drum pre-apologized a hundred ways for the possible appearance that this question might possibly seem to perhaps be sexist.

This had little affect on Drum's readers. In comments, you'll see one liberal after another complaining about his obvious sexism, full stop. Again and again, this seems to be the only play we liberals know how to run.

As we read those comments to Drum's post, we thought about the complaints by that 22-year-old Trump voter. Today, we also think of Adams' analysis, in which we humans live our actual mental lives in the realm of the two-word insult.

We liberals are inclined that way too. Being human, we find it quite hard to see that.

We recommend that tape from Real Time. We think Adams' observations help explain the downward spiral of our political/journalistic culture.

Until now, a candidate like Candidate Trump wouldn't have been allowed to proceed by major party leaders. Voters wouldn't have been exposed to such acts of cartoonized persuasion.

Increasingly, though, the gatekeepers are gone. Increasingly, we're being exposed to the comic book, pro wrestling world of the cartoonized two-word putdown.

We liberals live by those cartoonized putdowns too. More and more, voters may be rejecting us for this "basically irrational" conduct.

If they are, they have a point. What will we do about it?

Tomorrow: Dilbert does Manchuria

20 comments:

  1. Enter the troll and its pointless banalities:

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    Replies
    1. Another long rant about "commercializtion in the media" over the last fifty years is certainly going to get the troll hopping.

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  2. This not "the red meat" they like to waste time over email servers. But trying to predict HOW THEY respond to anything is ridiculous, so I will admit I am barking up the wrong tree. I also admit I have a shouting problem myself... BAYLOR!

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  3. Since the only people who have actually voted for Trump are GOP right wing voters, how can Adams project this onto the general election voter? Based on what?

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  4. One more thing Adams, if voters are so damn irrational, how was Obama elected twice? Stick to Dilbert, which is very funny.

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    1. I don't find Dilbert that funny -- and I am an engineer -- but Adams made some very interesting points on that show. It's not necessarily a new observation that humans are irrational. Dan Ariely, a behavioral economist from MIT, has been running experiments on that for a while. Has some good books on the subject. http://danariely.com/
      As far as electing Obama, I hardly view that as an irrevocable proof of human rationality.

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    2. that humans are irrational has long been known, e.g., Gustav Lebon's, "The Crowd" or check out Machiavelli (and countless others).

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  5. Scott Adams is an MRA, evo-bio loon. As far as he's concerned, feminist are the key to the downfall of Western culture. How, "Bob" to use him as an example of clever analysis.

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    1. It is even more "Bob" to claim you don't have a premium channel of cable. Then you drop Bill Maher's name as your buddy after a commenter noted earlier you were claiming to start a series based on a two and a half month old on line column.

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  6. When Trump rails about "Crooked Hillary," he's working at the lowest level of our human intelligence.

    Perhaps most voters are not at the lowest level of human intelligence, but most undecided voters are. E.g., people who comment here are knowledgable and interested about political issues. Somehow we've reached a POV or rationalized a POV. Either way, nothing Trump says is going to change our minds.

    However, people uninterested in politics are apt to be at a lower level of knowledge, and perhaps intelligence. They're not interested in subtle policy. They'll be swayed by something blunt and simple, like "Crooked Hillary" or "Trump is a fascist".

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  7. the 22-year-old expressed a range of views, many of them progressive. Um, most of them were NOT progressive; many of them were typical libertarian-republican. and he clearly doesn't understand "political correctness." the kid's a privileged asshole.

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    Replies
    1. No. He is a person of nuanced views. If he were a reporter, however, he would be youngish.

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  8. try as I might I'm not as gifted with the rhetorical skills, so here's Jon Schwarz and Noam Chomsky on the American voters:

    "They think that we're Fascinated by them, despite the fact that, by steadily reducing our voting rate for The past fifty years, we keep giving them a resolute and obvious Hint."
    (Jon Schwarz and Mike Gerber: The unanimous Declaration of the world's Normal People (we know who we are)

    Chomsky, in Salon:
    Nonvoting is very high, roughly 50 percent, even in presidential elections—much higher in others. The attitudes of people who don’t vote are studied. First of all, they mostly identify themselves as Democrats. And if you look at their attitudes, they are mostly Social Democratic. They want jobs, they want benefits, they want the government to be involved in social services and so on, but they don’t vote, partly, I suppose, because of the impediments to voting. It’s not a big secret. Republicans try really hard to prevent people from voting, because the more that people vote, the more trouble they are in.

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  9. My life became devastated when my husband sent me packing, after 8 years that we have been together. I was lost and helpless after trying so many ways to make my husband take me back. One day at work, i was absent minded not knowing that my boss was calling me, so he sat and asked me what its was all about i told him and he smiled and said that it was not a problem. I never understand what he meant by it wasn't a problem getting my husband back, he said he used a spell to get his wife back when she left him for another man and now they are together till date and at first i was shocked hearing such thing from my boss. He gave me an email address of the great spell caster who helped him get his wife back, i never believed this would work but i had no choice that to get in contact with the spell caster which i did, and he requested for my information and that of my husband to enable him cast the spell and i sent him the details, but after two days, my mom called me that my husband came pleading that he wants me back, i never believed it because it was just like a dream and i had to rush down to my mothers place and to my greatest surprise, my husband was kneeling before me pleading for forgiveness that he wants me and the kid back home, then i gave Happy a call regarding sudden change of my husband and he made it clear to me that my husband will love me till the end of the world, that he will never leave my sight. Now me and my husband is back together again and has started doing pleasant things he hasn't done before, he makes me happy and do what he is suppose to do as a man without nagging. Please if you need help of any kind, kindly contact Happy for help and you can reach him via email: happylovespell2@gmail.com

    ReplyDelete
  10. Polls approval rating of Congress as a whole down to 11% from 15%. Polls approval rating of one's own Representative, hovers in low to mid 40%. Now that's insane

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