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Relieved that “human” in Washington once more defaults to everybody on the planet at least in theory. All evil starts with identifying a “chosen people” as default human. Hypocrisy might drive things down from an aspirational high road, but it beats *starting* with the low road
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For vast numbers of people on the planet, their entire net worth consists of being at least considered theoretically human by powerful institutions. Take that away and they don’t even have the basic protection of power being ashamed of its own naked exercise.
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This is the danger the “make a scene” party fails to see. I’m meh on “civility,” but decorum/seemliness is good true north. It includes displays of shame and contrition, rituals of seeking/granting forgiveness etc. That’s what preserves default theoretical human at max definition
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The real two-party system: the make-a-scene party and the don’t-make-a-scene party.
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Through these 4 years, the media constantly harping on how Trump failed to show contrition, regret etc. was grating because those are stupid things to even expect from a malignant narcissist. But with normal people, these things are critical features of human public life OS.
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If you don’t have leaders sensitive to perceptions of shame, guilt, regret, apologies, forgiveness etc, you basically don’t have the working parts needed for a functional public life. Displays being insincere some of the time shouldn’t make us conclude the capacity is worthless.
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Insincerity really bothers “make a scene” people who are hypersensitive to authenticity, and have overdeveloped cheater-detection mentalities. This is why Trump was able to ride a metastasized cancerous reaction to “PC” to a 4y-regime based on making a virtue out of shamelessness
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Believe it or not, your gut-certain sense of authenticity and sincerity, evolved in 30-ape troops from 10 million years ago, does not actually extrapolate to huge institutional systems. Systems that assume capacity for emotions like shame AND insincerity in expressing them.
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While politics adversely selects for *some* insincere shamelessness, putting an individual who literally lacks an entire emotional range in a key position that assumes it, is to break the system. Like putting a color-blind person in a job with an RGB decision-coding system.
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A broader zeitgeist that happened in the last few years is that “scene-making shameless person lacking a certain emotional chunk of emotional range” got recoded as “genius contrarian” the way “wears black turtleneck” got recoded as “Steve Jobs level visionary.”
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Some dressed it up further with being on autism spectrum becoming an aspirational contrarian-genius claim. Basic logical error. Many geniuses being on the spectrum does not mean all on the spectrum are geniuses. Sadly, most just have compromised judgment with no upside.
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Anyhow, back to shame, insincerity, and hypocrisy becoming part of the OS again, and shamelessness, scene-making and cheater-detection going back to being occasionally useful and tolerable tactics, rather than treated as a lofty contrarian-genius-asshole philosophy of governance.
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In case you’re wondering why I’m focusing on cheater-detection as a pathology...
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Overactive cheater detection is at the root of a lot of societal problems. It’s not that people are dumb when acting under biases but that they’re only smart about problems framed as cheater-detection. You can work on eliminating 100 biases, or just on lowering cheater-response. twitter.com/vgr/status/134…
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Forgot perhaps the biggest piece of the shame/regret/forgiveness layer of the OS, which Biden is reinstalling: a proper place in public life for death and mourning, which occasion perhaps the most sincere displays of shame/regret/guilt/etc. Biden’s brought that back in a big way.
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Some people suspected the constant presence of the late Beau Biden in the narrative was more than a little staged. But there has been a core of sincere emotion there. The sense of this inauguration also being the first public mourning for 400k dead from Covid also feels real.
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Stuff like this Arlington ceremony... they just didn’t seem meaningful when Trump did them. He seemed puzzled like a blind person at a silent movie. At some level he didn’t seem to get why people were doing somber ceremonies. I suspect he thought funerals are just extreme PC.
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There’s a sense of narrative claustrophobia being lifted. There’s a lot more room in the grand narrative for a spectrum of narratives that don’t need to all cohere. This pluralism is ironically what the trumpist narrative monoculture demonized as a monolith. Pure projection.
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It’s not that their story wasn’t being heard. They seemed to think it was the only one that had a right to be heard. When you’re used to a narrative monopoly, pluralism feels like censorship.
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Jeez he’s walking the last block jogging over to barriers to shake hands. The instinct for humanizing optics on display here is the polar opposite of trump’s instinct for imperial grandiosity. I can’t recall how Trump did it, but I would guess limo to the footsteps.
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Which is ironic, since Biden represents continuation of an imperial mode of US government but looks like Amtrak Joe, while Trump ran the show like a petty small town council but acted like an emperor
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Kamala Harris family is very Modern Family. They just need to add a gay couple in there to look like a nightmare to Hallmark channel.
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General thought: trad administrations are highly scaled systems with a necessary and meaningful distinction between backend and frontend. There is a minimum necessary theatricality to the front-end. It’s a UX metaphor. This reads as “fakeness” to libertarian-scale imaginations.
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Trump may have slapped his name on skyscrapers but fundamentally didn’t get scale and backends. He managed like a small wealth-management family office. His base wanted small-scale wysiwyg dynamics. National budgets managed like small family budgets etc. All UX, no backend.
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