What defines us?

The United States was formed as a Constitutional Republic.  This is a form of government known for its stability.  A Republic is a nation where citizens choose the leader and have a voice.  A Constitution is a set of principles that guide the Republic and cannot be changed merely by the will of the majority. 
The concept rests on two principles:
1. People have the right to choose who will represent them in government.
2. People living in different areas have a voice ("the land has a vote").

The majority may want one thing, but if enough areas do not want that thing, it may not become a law of the land.

This was expressed in the makeup of the Congress, where the House of Representatives represented the people, chosen by majority vote, and the Senate represented the State governments, which often had a different agenda than the majority of individuals.

In 1913, the 17th Amendment to the Constitution took away the right of States to appoint Senators and gave it to the majority.  While a logical problem for a Republic, we still had the Constitution to protect minorities.

In recent years, the Constitution has come under attack.  It has become progressively viewed as a dated document that should not impede the will of the people.

If the Constitution is devalued, we will be left with a democracy, where the people's representatives will decide based upon the whims of the majority.  These whims can be manipulated by the press and by thought leaders.  Further, the whims can be manipulated by adjusting self interest.  The most common example is giving stuff to people.  If I give a Senator $10,000 and she takes it and spends it on herself and her family, and I promise her more if she plays my game and less if she doesn't,  it might be considered a bribe.  If the government gives me $10,000 and promises more if I vote for majority representatives and threatens less if I vote for the minority, this is considered political strategy. 

I think we have moved too far towards a democracy and see problems in our future.  Hopefully, I am wrong.

How People Think

A brief post today.

A is like B if anything is similar between A and B and you want A to be like B.
A is different from B if anything is different between A and B and you want A to be different from B.

A person who is 99% good can still be classified as evil by focusing on the 1%.
A person who is 99% evil can still be classified as good by focusing on the 99%.
By ignoring statistics, one could say that these people are both the same as both are capable of good and evil.

Statistics vs the coin toss. Some people see future events as coin tosses; other see these events as statistical. An example. Lung cancer is more common among smokers than nonsmokers, with 91% of all lung cancers in men occurring in smokers. One view of this is that to avoid lung cancer because it is statistically better to be a nonsmoker. Another view is that anything can happen to anyone, so getting lung cancer in the future for an individual is a yes/no event, a coin toss. Luck is the big factor for the individual.

Many intelligent people use these methods to defend their beliefs and actions, to separate their gods and heroes from those of other people. Watch especially for this during the political season.

I'm Right! Right?

Often we get into discussions or arguments with other people who don't see things as we do. While it is always possible that one or both of you are wrong, it is more often true that both of you are right to some extent.


Positions have three elements:
1. Point of view
2. Data
3. Passion or energy

Positions are used to achieve endpoints:
1. Goals
2. Desires and wants
These endpoints can be viewed on a timeline, with short to long term endpoints.

A point of view is from what perspective you view a problem or a situation. You may consider many points of view or just a few or just one. Every issue has many points of view. The data you consider will be adjusted by your mind to support your point of view. This is one of the problems with the way we think: we use logic and data to support points of view rather than using logic and data to develop points of view. This is just how we are built.

Consider the story of the completely logical and data driven goat standing half way between two equal piles of hay. The goat is hungry, desires to eat and has as his goal satiety and not wanting to starve to death. However, being completely logical and data driven, there is no reason to start in one direction over the other, so he stays put and eventually starves to death.

Passion or energy is applied to a position to energize our support for the position. Indeed, we may have in our minds multiple positions concerning a situation, but the ones with the most passion or energy behind them get the bulk of our support. We imbue our positions with passion depending upon multiple factors including how we see ourselves, how it fits with our other beliefs, how we want others to see us, etc.

It would be wonderful if our system of using positions supported by passions satisfied our goals and desires. Sadly, they often don't.

The solution is not to change another person's mind, but to open minds to allow different points of view in, and then look at the goals and desires and let them guide where the energy and passion should go.

A simple example: Many people passionately believe that the rich should be taxed to help the poor. Indeed this seems to be a way of easing suffering. Just look at a starving child who is no longer starving after receiving a government supplied meal. We have had a war on poverty since 1965 in the USA and yet the percent of those living in poverty has not changed. One would expect that there would be some improvement, but there has been none. Yet, the passion for taxation of the rich to solve this problem remains in spite of the failure of both short and long term (45 year) results. This should tell us that we need to consider other points of view, other options to reduce poverty, that taxation of the rich, while emotionally satisfying, did not lead to the desired goal of reducing or eliminating abject poverty. And yet, given this information, those who have great emotional energy behind taxation of the rich will not be able to open their minds or de-energize that position in spite of the failure of results. A reply might be "we just haven't done enough of it yet".

When we have great emotional energy behind a position and are not moving towards our short, intermediate and long term goals, we owe it to ourselves to reconsider where we are investing our emotional energy and need to consider other points of view and our data in other patterns. Indeed, this is one of the highest levels of intelligence: to be able to step back from one's passions to consider other points of view in light of goals and desires.

Change

How do we justify change? We apply two basic concepts, and then judge our success by our own standards.

The Superior Morality

Our moral standard is superior to yours. We are fairer, more just, kinder, more open minded, etc.

Irrelevance and Interpretation

1. The old view is antiquated, is not in step with modernity. [Example: the Bible/Constitution are historical documents, not really relevant today]

2. The words used have new and/or broader meaning than the older, narrow meaning. [Example: the federal jurisdiction to regulate interstate trade was to keep it regular, to keep it flowing smoothly. Now, regulate means to control, and that control can mean demanding that each citizen of each state buy health insurance, even if that citizen never leaves her home state).]

Objective Success and Progress

How do we know if we are going in the right direction? How do we know if our policies are obtaining the desired results? It boils down to definition of terms, what end points to measure, and perceived good.

1. What are the desired outcomes? Do you want your doctor to cure you of a disease, or do you want your doctor to be kind to you? Which is the measure of success?

2. What if you want to eliminate poverty? What if the poorest person in your country wants for nothing but has few personal assets? What if the richest person in your country lives in a hovel? Its all about the definition.

3. What if you feel good about what you have done, feel that it is the right thing to do but no improvement has occurred towards your stated external goal? What if you change the way you teach math to 6th graders, judge it favorably based on how the teachers and students feel about the program, but find that the student performance in higher grades and in the real world is the same or perhaps even inferior to the prior method? What if you raise taxes on the rich with the purpose of redistributing it to the poor only to find that the rich are still getting richer and the poor poorer? We define lack of progress as progress because had we done nothing the situation would have gotten even worse, or that we have done the right thing but not enough of it yet to matter. [This normalcy fallacy or bias is discussed in a prior posting.]

Argument Rope-A-Dope

Several posts ago, I blogged about how to win an argument. However, I excluded some of the more modern approaches to deflect an argument.

• The Two Pronged Attack: Question the other person's facts AND question their motives. Example: you are caught cheating on a test. You say to the teacher, "Everyone was cheating on this test. In fact, compared to everyone else, I cheated the least. You just singled me out just because I am (insert some race, sex, age, income or other demographic). " No matter what the teacher says, you have placed the teacher on the defensive.
• The Preliminary Defense: Question the timing or completeness of the other person's facts. "Yes, the sun did rise in the East yesterday and the day before, but to say that it will always rise in the East, well that is certainly a preliminary statement."
• The U-2 are Wrong Defense: This searches to find a technicality that makes the other person as wrong as you are. "While it is true that I did copy my answer from wikipedia, your exam question is nothing more than a paraphrase of the third question at the end of chapter 2 of the textbook. The college handbook states that our teachers will ask us new and innovative questions, so you are as guilty as I am."
• The You are Biased Defense: This finds bias in whatever the other person observes that is critical of your biases. "Obama's birth certificate? You never asked to see George W Bush's certificate. You must be a racist!"
• The Bigger Picture Defense: "You say I have so much potential. Don't you think it would be wrong to flunk me because I cheated on your exam? If you flunk me, you will not only deprive me of getting into a good college, but will also deprive hundreds or thousands of people from the great things I could do with a college degree. And don't you think that the good of our society is much more important than my minor transgression?" This defense has been most effectively used in defending President Clinton during the Monica Lewinsky affair and John Edwards in his affair. This approach was used to great comedic effect in the movie "Animal House" during the Fraternity Trial scene.
• The Trust Defense: You deny all information and beliefs, relying only on the ones you trust. "Yes, I hear you that the Congressional Budget Office says that President Obama's new program will cost us 1 trillion dollars, and I agree that we cannot afford to go into deeper debt, but I trust President Obama, so I know he will make things work out in the end."
• The You are a Hypocrite Defense: "You tell me that the biggest problem with America today is that we are all too self centered. Did you not notice how giving Americans are? We helped in Haiti and now are helping in Japan. Not too shabby for a self centered culture! By the way, I didn't see your name on the list of donors to the crisis in Japan.

None of these approaches actually deals with the issue. They all deflect or confound the argument. At no point is the true issue actually addressed.

It might be fun to make a list of these tactics and see how often they are used during political speeches and talk show interviews. Also, I would be curious if members of one political party tend to use one tactic more than another.

I am so beautiful, to me!

We are in the age of narcissism. We are entitled to things, just because. We not only reward ourselves, but also expect to be rewarded by others. We deserve a break today; we are worth it; we deserve only the best. If we choose to reward ourselves after we have actually earned it, that is one thing. It is something completely different to borrow to satisfy wants or to expect it from others, such as from the government. We also trick ourselves by re-defining wants as needs. For a while we have been able to survive this without total financial collapse, but we are coming to the end of that. When we consume conspicuously, we bankrupt ourselves and our society. Regrettably, our government has the same disease, so we are in a use it or lose it scenario. If you don't spend it, the government will just tax it away.

We need fiscal responsibility at all levels and to not fall for the defining of wants as needs.

Who Are You?

Each of us has multiple allegiances. As social animals, this is to be expected. We are members of our family, our community, our nation, our religion, our heritage, our work family, our trade partners. We are supporters of sports teams, followers of people, interests and hobbies.

When it gets down to our core, we have our most important allegiances, our core identities. Our prime self definitions.

If you were forced to choose between identities, which would be the most important? Which ones would trump all the rest?

In a world that has become unkind to the concept of nation, where do you place your loyalty? Many people consider the concept of nation passe. Indeed, in the US we have the federal government more concerned about cultural injustice than closing a porous border. We have dropped trade barriers between nations, and have a president to declares all nations to be equal, none superior to another. In Europe, the European Union has begun to blur the national identities, and in the Middle East the concept of religious identity as the essential social glue is on the rise.

What would a post-national world look like? The idealistic see it as one less barrier to world unification, but I wonder if it would just open us to more divisiveness. If nations are not worth defending, what is?

The most important allegiances are those that dignify our lives, add a degree of divinity to our otherwise worldly existence. This is usually summarized as "God and country". With country out of the picture, we are left with God.

Will it be possible for all to agree that God is a personal choice, that religion should not be the cause of conflict? Fundamentalists of each religion have tried to impose their will on others within and without their religion.

The horror of the Holocaust has, at least for now, put a damper on active anti-Jewish actions by Christians. Many religions are by their nature peaceful. This leaves Islam as the wild card. Fundamental Islamic teaching is no different than other fundamentalism, with strict control of the adherents and a convert or die approach to the heathens or infidels. Other religions seem for now to have moved past that hatred.

The uprisings in the Middle East will tell us quite a bit about the next 100 years. Hopefully, freedom is not another word for jihad. How wonderful it will be if the newly liberated masses in the Middle East embrace national pride that allows all citizens to public office and equality, no matter what their religious leanings.