Lipstick on a pig

Political parties as deluded spectacles that don't solve root problems

Pigs are not glamorous, loving to wallow in mud and their own feces. Putting lipstick on them does not address this root nature, and hence does not make them more glamorous, but watching them wallow in mud with lipstick might be amusing as a spectacle, and distracting from the root nature of the pig. The same can be said about our political parties: they do not address root problems of our society, only offer spectacles designed to entertain their followers, shame the opposing party, and distract us all from having any grasp on root problems, or effective action to solve them. The same kind of mechanism contributed to the fall of the Roman Empire, and probably many other empires. It’s a failure of imagination.

It hasn’t always been so in the US. There were real issues to be debated and resolved: monarchy, slavery, levels of governance (federal vs state), how to prevent too much power concentrated in government, how to allow some power to be vested in ordinary citizens without the tyranny of the majority. The measures that were taken resulted in actually solving these root problems, though not in a final way: autocratic monarchy might come back if it were up to some people, slavery has been exported abroad and legitimized by paying slaves wages, states might be too big now for effective government and municipalities too weak to deal with root issues, the supreme court judges can be controlled by the executive branch which appointed them, and congress can be bought by corporate lobbyists, as the solutions must be implemented on an ongoing basis.

But there are new problems that were not anticipated by our founding fathers, and we are not equipped to solve them politically. Problems like Climate Change (and other Tragedies of the Commons), a loneliness crisis, political polarization that incapacitates our government and might lead to civil war, unemployment due to jobs going abroad, being given to machines (and AI) or illegally to desperate immigrants who agree to low wages and bad working conditions, meaningless jobs that do not require creativity and alienate people from their labor, making them tools of machines and corporations, and the general chaos that can’t be controlled with markets or non-totalitarian states (unless proper nesting of levels is implemented), that might be solved by religion, if there were one that enough modern people could believe and agree on.

What is the general populace doing? YouTube videos have a surplus of all-cap click baiting words like HUMILIATED, OWNED, SCHOOLED, DESTROYED, ANNIHILATED. Wokesters are obsessed and evangelical with who is and who is not racist, sexist, privileged, micro-aggressing, and colonialist. Trumpers are obsessed and evangelical with immigrants, guns, Jesus virtue signals, trans people and wokesters. What can any politician do to make this piggish behavior more glamorous? MPGA (Make pigs glamorous again)?

Most young people don’t know how to do much in the non-screen world, and only a few understand either the software or hardware that makes their “smart” phones work, while making them quite stupid. Very few have any understanding of the technological infrastructure that satisfies their basic needs, getting them water, food, shelter, transportation and electricity. Sure, there is specialization, but never in the history of the world have people been so removed from how their basic needs are produced, except with royalty and nobility. With lack of understanding also comes lack of any productive powers, except the ability to produce money either passively (rent and interest) or actively by breaking the law and not getting caught, being part of a corrupt bureaucracy, or having a meaningless job that tries to respond to the ills of a pig-like society with lipstick.

Most older people cannot offer any meaningful visions for a future, rehashing instead ideas that have not worked out to significantly improve life for most people, whether from the right or from the left.

These problems cannot be solved by new laws (or even adherence to old laws, as might be the case with jobs being given to immigrants), because their solutions require reorganization of our economic system. Everyone is vested in the current system, even if they are miserable in it. No politician can change that, even if they are willing to risk re-election by being unpopular. Besides, imagination should not be left to politicians or pigs. It’s up tp scientists, farmers, builders and engineers to solve these problems, if they’re not spending all their time propping up the status quo.

I’ll spell out how the rehashed ideas are coming not from an active imagination that could help us diagnose and solve our root problems, but from fundamental gut-level values that occur at a subconscious level for liberals, conservatives and libertarians, as outlined initially by Jonathan Haidt in his Moral Foundations Theory. All of these values have biological and evolutionary precursors, for example, purity/disgust evolved from the need to have a good immune system (at any level, especially organismal) against both internal (cancer) and external (parasites and germs) threats, ingroup loyalty/outgroup hatred evolved from the benefits of cooperation within a group and competitiveness with other groups. For liberals these are: 1. care for the underdog/compassion, 2. justice/equality.

For conservatives these are both of the previous, but also (and usually with much more emphasis on) 3. disgust with violating/purity of categories/group boundaries, whether conceptual, biological, familial, religious, or national, 4. Submission to or imposition of authority, 5. ingroup loyalty/outgroup hatred. Liberals also care about these, but more about the first 2, and sometimes they are positively repulsed by 4. and their disgust is usually about different category mixings than conservatives.

For libertarians all of the above, but with much more emphasis on 6. individual freedom (we have already discussed how a healthy individual is also an integrated collective of both psychological and biological parts, but most people, including libertarians, don’t know this).

Kamala Harris talks about federally re-legalizing abortion (care for the underdog—poor women), tax cuts for the middle class (care for the underdog and equality), somehow subsidizing or incentivizing cheap housing (care for the underdog-poor people), and protecting social security and medicare (care for the underdog—poor and middle class people). And of course she is pro LGBT, which is more of a conservative-annoying issue, since they see it as a category/purity violation (outgroup hatred of republicans).

Trump is a narcissist who is not motivated as much by any of the previous (with the exception of his germophobia, which is about his body’s purity) as by his own self aggrandizement. But in order to feel grand, he needs to appeal to the base moral motivations of the electorate who ARE motivated by the above values. So he wants to fire lots of federal employees, especially from the FBI, CIA, NSA and DOJ, that he sees as corrupt, or part of a corrupt but secret sub-organization which he (not original to him) calls the “deep state” (threats to purity from internal threats, he will be re-purifying the “swamp”). He wants to put more federal resources into reducing border permeability and deporting many foreigners (threats to purity from external threats), both legal (if they have jihadist sympathies) and illegal, as well as take measures against homeless people being visible, and enabling police to be tougher on criminals (threats to purity from internal threats). He wants to phase out Chinese imports of “essential goods” through tariffs and other measures (threats to purity from external threats and ingroup loyalty). He wants to stop funding Ukraine with US resources (ingroup loyalty with his fellow strongman and dictator pal Putin, and imposition of his authority), but continue to fund Israel and the war there (ingroup loyalty with his strongman pal Netanyahu, and imposition of his authority). He wants to stop funding trans-gender affirming care and make it illegal (purity from internal threats). He wants to fund oil companies and defund renewable energy companies, while sticking the finger to anyone concerned with Climate Change (outgroup hatred of democrats). He wants to terminate the federal department of education, and take measures to allow more local control of education, while promoting school prayer (presumably to a Christian God). The latter is more about making deals with fundamentalist Christians so he can get the power he craves as an alpha authoritarian.

RFK, the only politician (with a large following) with any shred of imagination, wants to punish the democrats for being too censorious (individual rights), pro-war (he has the liberal concern with care and compassion, and thinks that the Hamas-Israel war can only be stopped by annihilating the current version of Hamas, while the Russia-Ukraine war can be stopped by making deals with Putin) and not tough enough on chronic disease (internal threats to ingroup purity, plus care and compassion for the underdog—our children). Being a libertarian with some liberal traits, he is very concerned with individual rights, sometimes more, sometimes less than purity and care/compassion. But he must know that Trump doesn’t give a hoot about unprocessed organic food (he eats junk food) or our ecological woes. And he is wrong in his diagnosis that bad diet is at the root of the mental health and obesity crisis. There is no data that people who only eat unprocessed organic food are mentally healthier (perhaps they could be physically healthier), in today’s society. There IS data that people within peaceful agrarian or hunter-gatherer cultures, who ALSO eat unprocessed organic food are mentally healthier, but that could be due to other cultural factors besides the food. And the mental health problems started already before processed foods were the norm, observed by writers like Henry Thoreau and sociologists like Emile Durkheim and Max Weber.

We must turn away from this circus and form groups that can create an economic alternative, based on a sound understanding of how evolution, nature and emergence of groups work. Let’s stop trying to make the pig glamorous by putting lipstick on it. Let a minority of us who want to get out of the muck stop being motivated by glamor altogether, and instead be motivated by love and reason. I’m not saying my ideas of proper nesting are the only ones to try, but please, let’s actually try something new that has a chance of working.