Remembering What Comes Next
Thirty years ago, when Bill Clinton was caught chasing interns around the Oval Office, many assumed it was the end of him. Instead, he not only wriggled free of the scandal, and many other scandals, but he seemed to be stronger for it. The reason is Clinton was an extraordinarily clever man. He was not a smart man, in the sense that he could anticipate and avoid problems. Smart men do not have sex with interns. He was clever like a fox in that he could always find a way to slip out of a trap.
The Clintons, of course, set the tone for post-Cold War politics. They brought to Washington the style of politics that is now normal. They formalized both narrative politics, which relies on abductive reasoning to win debates. They also introduced things like media spin and media jamming where they sought to control the narratives at any given moment by overwhelming the system with their messaging. The Clintons made politics into a guerilla media war.
This sort of politics selects for clever over smart. When everything is done in the moment, there is no patience for deliberative politics. In the current Middle East crisis, for example, the information space is controlled by actors chanting rehearsed lines to the other actors in the media. The mainstream media is a Greek chorus and whoever can get the chorus chanting their chants wins. In such an environment there is no room for well thought our arguments and serious debate.
This is a world that favors the clever over the smart. In fact, it strongly selects for the clever and selects against the smart. The guy who tries to make a well-constructed argument from facts and reason does not get invited onto cable chat shows, podcasts or gain a following in social media. On the other hand, the person who is glib and quick on his feet will be in great demand. If he is also entertaining, then he can become a media star and help set the tone of political discourse.
What the Clintons did was merge entertainment and politics so that public policy is often sold to the public as political entertainment. Genuine debates, if they happen at all, are done behind the scenes. Usually, policy is crafted by the powerful interests that have come to dominate a specific domain. Foreign policy, for example, is run by the Israel lobby and the neocons. The political show of the last week around Iran, is about selling it to Trump voters, not genuinely debating the issue.
Another factor here is the explosion of media. Fifty years ago, this sort of politics was impossible as Americans were not living in a 24×7 theater. They consumed news slowly and deliberately through newspapers. Television news was limited to a half hour in the evening and maybe an hour on Sunday. The media menticide of this age was not possible as everyone lived outside the great public theater. Today, most everyone is plugged into the mass media hivemind.
This produces a childishness in the people, because the focus is always on the moment rather than what comes after the moment. Like children, they want their desires satisfied right now, not at some future date. This in turn favors the performers who can deliver that satisfaction right now. As a result, our public discourse is like a comedian rattling off jokes in rapid succession. He may pause and enjoy with the audience the jokes that land, but he quickly moves on from the ones that fail.
You see this with the crisis in the Middle East. The people who caused the crisis quickly moved to the next bit when their first scheme failed. There has been no discussion of what they did or even why they did it, beyond the emotive gibberish, which is intended to set up the next bit. The people who were wrong about the decapitation strike and wrong about the response, are now dancing around on stage promising more good vibes with their next performance.
This is the cause of the collective Gell-Mann amnesia. This is the cognitive bias where people notice the errors in the media about topics they know but trust the same media on the topics about which they know little. Collectively this results in a public fully aware that the media is fake news but still believing what is in the media. Similarly, people who are perpetually wrong, perhaps degenerately so, can continue to control the media narratives on their particular subject.
This sort of public environment rewards those who can quickly slip out of a self-created mess and focus the crowd on the next performance. The clever man, taken to the extreme, is devoid of both a conscience and second order thinking. He lives only in the moment, responding only to the crowd. Like any other actor, he exists only while he is on the stage, performing his role. It is why our politicians look and act like the kids from the high school theater club.
Even the producers of our political theater are not immune to it. They also lack second order thinking. They never ask themselves, “then what?”, after they have settled on some scheme. They just get busy training up the performers. We see this with the Middle East crisis. No one thought about what happens if the scheme fails or what happens if it succeeds. No one thought about what might happen after this caper because they are biologically incapable of second order thinking.
In the fullness of time, the Clinton era will be seen as an inflection point, but it would be unfair to treat them as a cause. Bill Clinton was more of a proof of concept for the emerging mass media politics of the internet age. People forget that Reagan was a trained actor who relied on Hollywood for his public performances. Bill Clinton was the logical extension of what started with Reagan. Bill Clinton was the new performative politics for the mass media age.
The result is we are now dominated by clever men. The genuinely intelligent who possess second order thinking are forced to work within a system that rewards the clever at the expense of the smart. The smart people must find a way to arrange the clever so that they manage to arrive at the right answer while they are searching for a clever way to win the internet or win the news cycle. The smart seek to control the fire that causes the shadows on the cave wall.
This must inevitably fail because the cultural environment favors the clever man who maximizes the moment over the man who thinks long term. The clever guy who can quickly craft a compelling, plausible argument that appeals to the immediate desires of the crowd will always win out over those who seek the right answer. The result is a politics that is more like a variety show than politics. We live from moment to moment, never remembering and never thinking about what comes next.