How I Communicate With People Less Right Than Me

On this post about the weird "We Are the 53%" tumblr, Donald Johnson commented:

I think it's a mistake to assume the worst about these people. What they're doing is probably what a lot of us do--make ourselves heroes in our own stories. We lefties are the smart ones who see through the propaganda that surrounds us (or anyway I assume that's a temptation to self-glorification that others besides myself feel--I have to remind myself of how clueless I can be sometimes when I read something especially ridiculous in the MSM which is clearly intended to fool someone somewhere in the readership).

Anyway, these folk see themselves not as the victims of society, but as modern day American pioneers, like their fabled forefathers who moved West and conquered a wilderness through hard work, grit and determination. Stoic John Wayne types. No whiners allowed. (And no Indians, and no Chinese except to build railroads and preferably no blacks or Mexicans, but that's beside the point.) They don't see their heroes as the people who struggled for a five day workweek or equal rights for blacks or Native Americans or anything like that. Now those protestors against Wall Street are telling them that maybe they're not heroes--to some extent they're victims. They hate that.

I have no idea what to do about it.

I do have an idea what to do about it, sort of. I strongly believe that every ideology is right in the sense that it is responding reasonably to some aspect of reality. In the case of the 53% people, they accurately perceive that individual effort, personal responsibility, etc. absolutely do affect your life circumstances. They clearly have lived that, and trying to persuade them that they're wrong will be like trying to persuade them that they have nine arms. That's not going to work.

What might work is acknowledging and respecting their lived reality, while gently trying to widen their view to include other aspects of reality that they've missed. For instance, Saddam Hussein grew up poor, was extremely talented and worked really hard, and reached the very top. That doesn't mean that the Iraqi system was a fantastic idea that we should all celebrate.

Likewise, wanting other people to have better lives is completely consistent with everyone's personal self-interest. It just has to be a slightly more enlightened self-interest than the standard American version. I would really like the people who do the maintenance on the plane I'm flying on next week to be well-rested and not worrying about whether their spouse is about to get laid off. I'd like there to be lots of money spent now researching treatments for the diseases of the old, because I plan to be old someday. And so on.

Obviously this is a lot easier said than done. The 53% tumblr people are probably so rigid in their thinking that they're not reachable. And even reaching less rigid people is much easier when it's part of some kind of shared experience (which is why unions and churches can be such a powerful force for democratization). But if there's a way to do it, it involves respecting the fact that people think things for a reason, even if they're missing a lot of the rest of the picture.

BONUS: It turns out that the 53% thing was created by Joshua Trevino, a bl*gger who once wrote under the name "Tacitus"—ie, the Roman historian. This gratifies me very deeply, and I would like to thank him for making the world a funnier place.

—Jonathan Schwarz

This Is Really Funny. In a Movie.

I've been looking at this tumbler We Are the 53%, which of course is a response to We Are the 99%. If anything, the first tumblr is even more heartbreaking than the second. Here's a good example of the "We Are the 53%" people:

I look at that and it tells me that I've failed, you've failed, we've all failed, and because of that we're all going to die. These people not only won't fight the killer billionaires stomping on their windpipe, they'll brag about getting stomped on and ask for more.

I knew I'd seen this before, but I couldn't remember where. Then I realized it was here:

Yes, it's very funny. In a movie.

—Jonathan Schwarz

Failure

This is a great, great oped by performer Mike Daisey about Steve Jobs:

Mr. Jobs’s magic has its costs. We can admire the design perfection and business acumen while acknowledging the truth: with Apple’s immense resources at his command he could have revolutionized the industry to make devices more humanely and more openly, and chose not to. If we view him unsparingly, without nostalgia, we would see a great man whose genius in design, showmanship and stewardship of the tech world will not be seen again in our lifetime. We would also see a man who in the end failed to “think different,” in the deepest way, about the human needs of both his users and his workers.

I've never owned any other computers in my life but Apples, and I have an iphone. And they always make me feel like this whenever I look at them: it's wonderful that people are able to invent and build something so beautiful, and it's horrible that people somehow aren't able to bring the same intelligence and effectiveness to invent and build better societies.

Along the same lines, Frank Oppenheimer (brother of Robert and creator of the Exploratorium in San Francisco) once said: "Just as present technology had to await the explanations of physics, so one might expect that social invention will follow growing sociological understanding. We are desperately in the need of such invention, for man is still very much at the mercy of man."

That's true, but it leaves out the unfortunate reality that anyone who tries to invent a better way of organizing politics and society will be punished severely. If people who tried to invent better cell phones were regularly shot in the head, we wouldn't have good cell phones.

P.S. If you're in New York, please go see Mike Daisey in The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs at the Public Theater.

—Jonathan Schwarz

NY Times Reporter Explains Crazy Foreigners Believe Crazy Conspiracy Theories Published in the New York Times

Mark Mazzetti, a national security reporter for the New York Times, was just on Fresh Air to explain the mysterious ways of the orient:

GROSS: So anti-American sentiment seems if anything to be growing a bit in Pakistan. Why is that?

MAZZETTI: The number one conspiracy theory in Pakistan is that ultimately the Americans' goal is to take the nukes, that we have designs to ultimately take the nuclear weapons out of the hands of Pakistan's government because of concerns about, that they might fall into the hands of militants. So—so many of the conspiracies on the street in Pakistan sort of go back to that...

And so that is what's fueled so much of this anti-American sentiment in Pakistan...So as long as the U.S. is maintaining a presence in Pakistan, an intelligence presence and also with the drone strikes, I think you'll continue to see these conspiracy theories...

And here's a 2007 op-ed by two of the most prominent national security think tankers in the U.S., Frederick Kagan and Michael O'Hanlon, published in the New York Times:

...the United States simply could not stand by as a nuclear-armed Pakistan descended into the abyss...we would have to act before a complete government collapse, and we would need the cooperation of moderate Pakistani forces.

Somehow, American forces would have to team with Pakistanis to secure critical sites and possibly to move the material to a safer place...For the United States, the safest bet would be shipping the material to someplace like New Mexico.

Why are the filthy wogs so given to mass delusion? Is there something wrong with them genetically, or is it their culture? I suppose it could be both, of course.

(To be fair, Kagan and O'Hanlon do say it would be probably be impossible to get even "moderate" Pakistanis to let us literally steal their nuclear weapons, so we would "have to settle for establishing a remote redoubt within Pakistan, with the nuclear technology guarded by elite Pakistani forces backed up (and watched over) by crack international troops.")

—Jonathan Schwarz

EPISODE II: ATTACK OF AMERICAN FREE ENTERPRISE SYSTEM

There's an op-ed in the Washington Post today by Sally Kohn called "President Obama shouldn’t be afraid of a little class warfare." Here's some of what it says:

The class war began in 1971. That year, soon-to-be Supreme Court justice Lewis F. Powell Jr. wrote a confidential memorandum to a friend at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce about the "Attack of the American Free Enterprise System."

Oh man that makes me so happy. Of course, the title of the memo was actually "Attack on American Free Enterprise System," as you can see in this, which I believe is the original:

However, at some point it got reprinted somewhere—with both the correct title at the top, AND the greatest typo in world history in the subhead: "Attack OF American Free Enterprise System":

This must be the version that has circulated the most widely, because both PBS and Reclaim Democracy have the incorrect title in their transcribed versions. So that's fantastic already. But now with the wrong title in a Washington Post article, it may really go down in history (ie, Google) that way.

Also, this is interesting: just last month, the version of the Powell memo with the typo was hosted here on grassroots.com—the astroturf arm of Edelman, the largest private PR company on earth. Their clients include the Chamber of Commerce. So they're carrying out exactly the kind of Attack of American Free Enterprise that Lewis Powell wanted. I guess they still used it as a playbook.

However, as you can see by going to that link, it's now vanished from the Grassroots website. I wonder why?

—Jonathan Schwarz