A William James Moment

One of Josh Marshall's readers nails, perfectly, the import and context of the Foley/Page situation. It has a much larger, Orientation-based, meaning

You will soon post on the "is it all Foley?" question, and I wanted to
submit my 2 cents in advance. Here's the thing about the Foley scandal: it gives people space to change their minds about things. Think about when you've admitted a mistake or accepted someone's knockdown argument on a topic you believe in strongly. Sure, you look at the facts and exercise your capacity for reason. But there is an emotional component too, and it's a lot easier to change your mind when the other person, or in this case the general public mood, makes it OK for you to shift your perspective.

That's what Foley has done--provided an emotional space within which people can reevaluate their views without having to question themselves or their previous beliefs too deeply. I believe there has been a growing sense in the country that things are going badly, very badly, on all sorts of fronts. Foley, frankly, doesn't have much to do with that. But now it's OK to step up and say, "Hell with it, I'm tired of this crap." And change your vote.

"without having to question themselves too deeply."

I mentioned William James above. Here' s the specific from his "How an individual settles on a new opinion."

The most violent revolutions in an individual's beliefs leave most of his old order standing.

Another way of putting that is that we don't move unless the positive feedback far outweighs the negative, allowing us to continue believing we're "on the right course" in personal terms. But that's a sliding scale. In all but the rarest cases, nobody goes from Point A to Point B for the pleasure of the trip. It's most always because the pain of remaining at Point A is too much to bear.

Imagine... Before flumoxxing the presentation of a lifetime, one that can launch you several steps up the career ladder, a hypothetical Point B can come in many forms: A plush corner office, a Carribean beach with cabana boys or native girls fanning you and fetching you drinks. And, after bombing the pitch, a janitor's closet or at home, under the bed, in the fetal position becomes a quite attractive Point B.

The above diagram shows a very simplified view of John Boyd's OODA loop. Developed for quantifying 4th Generation Warfare process and information assimilation, it's also a marvelously fine example of how we all interpret and interact with our world. The tasks circled in red, deciding and acting, are for most of us, habits of process and Newton's First Law of Motion: Every object in a state of uniform motion tends to remain in that state of motion unless an external force is applied to it.

Steve Gilliard explains the kind of "force" necessary, the kind that is like a depleted uranium round through the skull, straight into our amygdala...

There are always voters who will seek to be right at any cost. They will blame the GOP's problems on the Democrats, the flying spaghetti monster and the media. But there are going to be women, and more than a few men who will dredge up their nightmares, dredge up the worst parts of their lives and see the fat lying Hastert taking the place of the principal, the priest, their dad, refusing to see, refusing to act.

And nothing happens without a moonshot or a tsunami to catalyze it.

The idea of an external force affecting something as profound and subliminal as the various ideologies we cart around in our heads is problematic. It all depends on the source of that force and its bona fides. That's why you see underneath the loop above, Ernest Becker's Twin Ontologicals - our perennial personal dilemma of competing desires, to belong and to stand alone. These matter because "truth" is also a sliding scale, often calibrated outside ourself, as is "outrage." In most cases, the other bits of info and cultural input that makes up our "orientation" diminish or amplify our responses. It is complexity itself. And it's quite a see-saw, being your own Man or Woman, self-directed, self-determined, amongst larger groups of men and women all grading your work and attitude, while they are each attempting to navigate the same situation.

The Prime Directive in this situation, the one James describes, is to protect your flank and your rear to avoid losing face at all costs. We're hardwired to do this since our primal origins of stomping about the savannah or woody climes of Nenaderthal Europe. The theory goes that our instincts evolved within the roving Band or Tribe structure. We knew our tribe and our tribe knew us, and our abilities, better than any cohort might today. For this reason, our reputation (our "brand" almost) was paramount and precious. The ingredients of reputation, our consistency and the confidence conferred by our twitchy hunting and gathering tribemates depended on our talents and awareness. These two assets combined to create credibility, which builds into trust, the social glue. It too was a feedback/forward loop. In that primal environment, being wrong, about any number of things, could make you or others seriously dead. Although the risks are exponentially fewer today, this innate angst about being wrong and its imagined consequences are still overpoweringly with us. Until somebody delivers that killshot to our amygdala's stage mangement of its preffrered "reality", until the Tsunami is too much to bear....

From the heart of Kansas, Johnson County, home of Overland Park, Shawnee Mission: 90% white, 50% college-degreed, 150% of Kansas' Median Income, ~20% of Kansas Population, predominantly Republican. Steve Rose, Johnson County Sun Chairman.

As we prepare ourselves to make political endorsements in subsequent issues, I can tell you unequivocally that this newspaper has never endorsed so many Democrats. Not even close....

The point is, I can name on two hands over a half century the number of Democrats we have endorsed for public office.

This year, we will do something different. You will read why we are endorsing Kathleen Sebelius for governor and Mark Parkinson for lieutenant governor; Dennis Moore to be re-elected to the U.S. Congress; Paul Morrison for Kansas attorney general; and a slew of local Democratic state legislative candidates. These are not liberal Democrats. They are what fairly can be described as conservative Democrats, and we can prove that in our forthcoming endorsements.... Link

He goes on to make his case in some very strong terms. A man in pain, if you will.

Warren Buffet's hometown paper, the Omaha World-Herald, is a carbon copy editorially and temperamentally of the Kansas paper above. Translated, that means usually quite partisan conservative. Not this time. (free reg req'd.)

Two young men are vying to succeed U.S. Rep. Tom Osborne in Nebraska's 3rd Congressional District. Given the unseasoned nature of both candidates, there is a degree of uncertainty about how either would do in Congress.

One candidate, Scott Kleeb, stands out as the better choice. The reason: his fundamental strength - a strength of intellect, a strength of eloquence, a strength of stability.

When pressed aggressively, Kleeb's opponent, State Sen. Adrian Smith, falls back on sound bites and slogans. When pressed under the same conditions, Kleeb draws on different resources - mental focus, breadth of analytical ability and an unshakeable internal steadiness.

Such strength could serve Kleeb well in Congress. Such strength provides him the potential to be a lawmaker respected for making a constructive difference.

As many 3rd District voters know, Kleeb has an unusual background as a cowboy/scholar - a real-life ranch hand who also earned stellar academic credentials, above all for his study of how the American West and cattle country in particular are connected to the world economy.

A most unusual individual, certainly. But even though he is a Democrat (and no Democrat has represented western Nebraska in Congress since 1961, despite several close general elections), Kleeb has shown himself to be thoroughly familiar and comfortable with the cultures and communities of the district....

Is the election about Foley? Nah. It's about a towering, teetering collection of observations that have been way past hazardous for some time. Foley is the primary as they say in the nuke pusiness. He's the small but focused charge that makes the previously somewhat benign glob of fissile material go critical. It was unstable but reasonably managable before. Today, it makes Point A a very toxic place to loiter in.

Pure William James, 101.



The master speaks: From "Pluralism, pragmatism, and instrumental truth."

How an individual settles into a new opinion

The process is always the same.

The individual has a stock of old opinions already.

The individual meets a new experience that puts some of these old opinions to a strain.

• Somebody contradicts them.
• In a reflective moment, the individual discovers that they contradict each other.
• The individual hears of facts with which they are incompatible.
• Desires arise in the individual which the old opinions fail to satisfy.

The result is inward trouble, to which the individual's mind till then had been a stranger.

The individual seeks to escape from this inward trouble by modifying the old opinions.

• The individual saves as many of the old opinions as is possible (for in this matter we are all extreme conservatives).
• Old opinions resist change very variously.
• The individual tries to change this and then that.

Finally, some new opinion comes up which the individual can graft upon the ancient stock of old opinions with a minimum of disturbance to the others.

• The new opinion mediates between the stock and the new experience.
• The new opinion runs the stock and the new experience into one another most felicitously and expediently.

The new opinion is then adapted as the true one.

• The new opinion preserves the older stock of truths with a minimum of modification, stretching them just enough to make them admit the novelty, but conceiving that in ways as familiar as the case leaves possible.
• An outreé explanation, violating all our preconceptions, would never pass for a true account of a novelty.

The most violent revolutions in an individual's beliefs leave most of his old order standing.

My hero.

I just remembered, last month the sage and prolific Dan Abott pointed folks to a similar parsing of the mind, the group, belonging and OODA loops. He cited the very interesting to "The Origin of Politics: An Evolutionary Theory of Political Behavior," by John Alford or RiceU, and John Hibbing of UNebraska - Lincoln.

Here's a particularly useful list of the herding tendency for anyone hoping to encourage innovation or fresh thought.

To sustain group membership, individuals must
1. cooperate with others in their in-group;
2. dislike those in out-groups;
3. punish or banish uncooperative in-group members;
4. encourage others through norms, institutions, or moral
codes to (1), (2), and (3);
5. be ever sensitive to status, payoffs, and reputation relative
to other in-group members;
6. cease cooperating if the noncooperation of other members
goes unpunished. (Alford and Hibbing 710)