America’s Ideals are Permeated with Corrupted Code, a Hotbed of Viruses.
Whether war, January 6, George Floyd’s murder, sexism, sexual harassment, or violence against women, our algorithm requires a huge upgrade, now.
Why do we, the American public, only find out the truth years after the fact? Consider how we would have dealt with the Vietnam War if we had a (nearly) real-time perspective of why we were actually there, and what we were actually doing there? We could call that real-time data deliverance, The (Perpetual) Pentagon Papers. A newer version could be called, The (Always-On) Afghanistan Papers. Such data deliverance would have made sure the bad histories do not repeat themselves axiom avoided becoming tired and stale, which made us abandon the axiom before downloading the full version. Not downloaded because it required a large upfront payment — to plan for the future problems today — on a long-term — reflecting on and correcting our past mistakes — forever subscription.
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If government officials, elected, and appointed, will dispense misinformation and tell outright falsehoods merely to avoid shame and embarrassment due to ineptitude and arrogance, what else are they doing that we should be worried about, and watching more closely?
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So why are government officials allowed to mislead us, whether it be into a war, or a pandemic? They are led to believe by our culture that they are a level above us in many ways. Their shit cannot be allowed to stink. Even though we voted them in, they are free to ignore and demean our input, as they do in calling us the ignorant masses.
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Doing multiple things in parallel is very difficult. One thing may need to be done in a way that seems in cross purposes to the other two, with the second being a counterintuitive solution, and the third a straightforward program. Then again, that could be the overall incorrect strategy. As you are coming up with the proper strategy, do you have a wide-enough lens to make the correct decisions? What experts do you choose, and who will implement their strategy, a true believer in the strategy and the experts, or someone with appropriate skepticism to see, and react, properly to the flaws in the strategy as it unfolds?
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America has an endemic problem with criticizing itself, or apologizing for past actions. Criticism is considered a self loathing act, and apologies are only coughed up by unpatriotic nonpersons. Exceptionalism buffs and toughs never apologize because of the sacred vow they take to always cover up hubris and arrogance. But you can criticize our big government, just not its big defense buildup or the industry that benefits from it. If the military is sent into a war zone, under the cover of obfuscations and lies, and fails miserably at doing what most of us figured was their goal — because time and time again that is what our leaders told us — you must hold your tongue, and never utter a word of criticism like a good Soviet citizen. That is unless Republicans decide it is time to criticize wars, the military, D.E.A., ICE, border patrol, or local police, and their hangers-on. Then bad-mouthing whoever wears a uniform is fine. Respect for those in uniform only goes as far as super-patriot conservatives can cover for them. Unfortunately, I was taught that those unable to be honest about what the problems are, and where they are, never truly solve any problems. Delaying the honesty to a later, and more convenient, time makes a problem worse.
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More Americans must be speaking up at inopportune times; otherwise our geese are soon overlooked. Conundrums like the Afghan war become conundrums because we lack the ability to consistently call them like we see them. Two major problems we have in our governmental leadership structure include how and why politicians make decisions, and our two and four year election cycles. War making is the worst situation for decisions to be sussed out through such a political filter. We must also add in the patriotic bullshit noted above that confuses the filter even more. Kennedy and Johnson passed their war onto Nixon, and W. Bush passed his war onto Obama. Why would either Nixon or Obama allow a war to continue, or worse, ramp up a war that was not going very well, and a great many Americans strongly and effectively criticized in some way? It has something to do with a version of the myth and cliché that America can never lose a war. Presidents must fill those patriotic tough guy shoes rather than the smart person’s thinking cap.
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The tough guy cliché may not be the only thing holding presidents back from making good and honest statements and decisions. But after reading The Afghanistan Papers, and about The Pentagon Papers, it is very difficult to understand why else the military and other actions were implemented as they were. When you compare the statements and actions of the Nixon and Obama administrations, it is hard not to see an automatic inclination to follow the same downward path, or go around and around in the same circles of tough guy peer-pressure, and repetitive stupidity. Obama and Nixon did not have the same personalities, propensities, or positions on most other policies, yet they could not get out of the same general patterns their predecessors took in war tactics. Much of the blame can be placed on military officials for groupthink, or autonomic muscle memory. That said, finger in the wind military strategy making added to we win — because we have bigger muscles — American vanity, easily becomes a tangled web being weaved out of control.
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For example, what if the saving lives ideal always overruled killing others, or people dying from our collective actions as a nation, unless there was no other way to approach the solving of a problem, whether in war, or other situations? Maybe do no harm would be our highest ideal. All other reasonable tactics or strategies would be employed before resorting to state-sanctioned murder like criminal executions, drone killings, and bombing of supposed enemy activities. Every American would provide a solution, and the algorithm would sort them out, and present the highest value idea first, and the finalist idea would be undertaken, if approved by a large majority of Americans.
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Elite groupthink and dumbbell muscle memory during a war effort usually narrows the focus of those involved. Rather than going all G.I. Jo, or Joe, and all elite garble-dee-duped, maybe they could have been more unique, and comprehensively successful. For example, rather than spending 8 billion dollars as we did on being colossally unsuccessful in ending the poppy farming, and heroin trade in Afghanistan, we should have spent twice that on opioid addiction prevention and treatment here in the United States. Counterintuitively, such a local strategy could have significantly undermined the Taliban’s ability to fight. Additionally, we could have saved Americans by the hundreds of thousands here, thousands of Americans in Afghanistan, and Afghans by the tens of thousands. Sadly, extreme state murder seems to be our persistent fallback position in many areas here, and abroad.
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In Talking To Strangers, Malcolm Gladwell, explains how today’s judges who determine criminal bail have the same problem as Neville Chamberlain did deciding who the good person was. People are evolutionarily predisposed to trust. This trusting trait in general has worked out for us as a species, but in specific fraught instances we are deceived by this general level of trust. Another example Gladwell gives is how the CIA was duped in an exceptionally American place, i.e. Langley, by the Cuban intelligence machine for over a decade from the 1970s into the mid 1980s. The Cubans went so far as to video record all their double agents’ interactions with their CIA counterparts. Making even our best agents look like amateurs. The Cuban double agents were never discovered by our intelligence agencies, until exposed by a defector, and the recording noted above, which was provided by Fidel Castro!
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While we can dismiss these and others who cannot tell a bad person from a good, it would be dangerous to flippantly fault others, when it is a human trait to trust others including many strangers. Yes, there may be some small percentage who see the reality about others on a regular basis; yet those totally unbiased and very observant individuals obviously have had little power to make many of the calls, or determinations, required by a large and varied society. Otherwise, Hitlers, lying politicians, scamming CEOs, and double agents, would not be as successful, and influential as they are. Regrettably, the impact of truth finding whistleblowers is haphazard and perhaps only minimal. However, increasing distrust in any significant way is also not a positive good for society. That is evident from our growing distrust in the last two decades of immigrants, the other political party, and our government, which has caused disruption, and inchoate disunion.
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Gladwell also eludes that the Jerry Sandusky, Penn State child sexual abuse scandal was possibly a rush to judgement conviction, with much of the evidence collected being the alleged repressed memories of victims. Repressed or false memories have been debunked in similar cases including a 1983 case in Jordan, Minnesota. Whether or not Sandusky is what his conviction and sentencing make him out to be, we know that rush to judgements have happened, and the horribly opposite of a rush to judgement. Like the Dr. Larry Nassar case, he sexually abused 300 female gymnasts during his 18 year career with USA Gymnastics. Nassar’s case was open and shut, but only after finding massive amounts of child pornography on his computer, which was a terrible 15 years after the first accusation! What these three examples show us — the confirmed rush-to-judgement cases, the disputed by some Sandusky conviction, and the clear cut Nassar case — in addition to how presidents conduct wars, and how judges and others make decisions — is that we need to manage decision-making data much better.
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We have a problem with sorting out the facts. In Gladwell’s book, Talking To Strangers, that fact sorting problem is quite evident. There were items I found in the Sandusky story that Gladwell did not mention including what a janitor saw in 2000, and at least another item before 2000. Having not done an exhaustive study, I am not sure what has been fully discounted or not. Either way, it shows how confusion can linger, especially for the extreme crimes of which Sandusky was convicted. As to the concept of ideals, we have so few parameters for consistently deciding such problematic cases.
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When big names do bad things, or are accused of doing bad things, there can be a rush to judgement by those knowing only half-truths. There is also often stalling that occurs by powerful others to protect in an innocent, or corrupted way, their family member, friend, colleague, employee, or client. But then that secret, or misinformation, explodes in the media years later anyway. The stalling alone can corrupt the process so much that as the years pass, the truth is harder to get at. Of course, in other cases it can be the most oppressed persons whose cases are corrupted, and slowed, or sped up, by the system including authorities manufacturing and hiding evidence, lying, etc.
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No one should be falsely accused of, or falsely charged with, a crime. However, it seems most Americans never expect it to happen to anyone they know. In that oblivious way, we allow many false cases to become a rush to judgement. A criminal is bad, and we know the bad ones as soon as we see them. Or in the case of date rape, we may downplay the problem of alcohol and its affect on the young. Good people can do bad things, and we can stop more of the bad things if we changed our perspectives, responses, and actions in crucial ways. As Gladwell noted about suicides, and how they couple with mundane elements of society, we ignore things right in front of us. For example, in the UK it was coal gas which was infused with carbon monoxide, and in America it is the Golden Gate Bridge, and handguns.
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Yes, simply augmenting a bridge and altering an energy source can prevent suicides. Adding nets to the GGB has worked, the bridge had barriers to prevent falling accidents during its construction in 1936, saving about 19 lives; and using natural gas instead of coal gas removed its killing ingredient, i.e. carbon monoxide. The UK gas fix, completed in 1976, reduced suicides by a very large percentage. The GGB was rescheduled to be finished in 2023, with about 30 suicide deaths a year, the two-year delay from 2021 is appalling. People have argued for decades that a suicidal person would just find another way, but this is not always true, it can depend on how easy or seductive the manner of suicide is. We have let people kill themselves, as well as get falsely accused, then convicted of a crime, merely because we refuse to look at the facts, and deal with the situation fully in the moment, or even many moments afterwards. Our ideals are too flimsy and vulnerable in multiple areas, which engenders many more screw ups and tragedies than need occur. Counterintuitive solutions that actually work must become real to enough of us much faster.
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That conundrum leads us to many conundrum questions. What do we do when someone we know may have done something wrong, but saying so could make it uncontrollably so in many minds including that of law enforcement, and the media? What do we do when the public is not fully up to speed on the science or the cumulative facts of a problem like why suicides occur, or why the climate crisis is a real thing? Finally, what if we could do something more effective than involving ourselves in wars, executing people for their crimes, sentencing so many people forever, or placing humans in solitary confinement? There are clearly many more questions of various severity gradations, but these are some of the hardest, and enough to understand the complexity of our dilemma. While part of the reason we do not tackle these questions is due to ideology, party affiliation, religion, and personality, much of the reason is the cumulative effect of general and history education too often being at a low ebb, or activated only in a short term manner. We can design our problem solving approaches more cohesively and prevention oriented.
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An Incorruptible, and Effective “Code Switch”.
We can hope to find all the fixes, and agree on them by just getting better at it. Regrettably, that strategy will put off your biggest concern for a century, while we get to the others. Fighting over one or two issues might delay the remedy for all the others for decades. We must be able to get fervently excited and organized about all of them simultaneously, or all the preventable disappointments, acts of discrimination, diseases, disasters, and individual deaths will continue beyond many of our lifetimes. I am not talking about utopia, but things we know how to prevent today, yet we are not preventing due to corrupted political, ideological, and theological reasons that would mostly disappear if we had an advanced civic, worker, and societally responsible communication system rather than only profit making versions.
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There is a problem with elites having the final say in our affairs. However, they could probably have much better results if what they were deciding on was not filtered through the convoluted processes and precedents developed over two centuries. Imagine getting drug over a gauntlet of rusty, infectious nails while at your job, or when involved with the legal system, or trying to get health care, housing, a good education, etc. Those rusty nails are White supremacy, autocracy, aristocracy, plutocracy, classism, bureaucratism, chauvinism, misogyny, sexism, genderism, racism, xenophobia, antisemitism, poverty, and other discriminatory and problematic viruses infecting our system.
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That said, it would be better to workaround both the elites and the current decision makers. When elites decide our fate, they are almost always going to work from science, rules, theories that were developed two or three generations ago. They will be trapped in many of their predecessors’ paradigms, which means their decisions would continue the screw ups, and problematic policies of many predecessors past. Basically, they cannot make decisions on a dime, and give us any changewhen it is actually needed.
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That is something only We The People can do. The potential for this system to work was incomprehensible, let alone doable, much before 2020, but the latest technology provides us the ability to develop a more streamlined, and effective local to national decision-making structure. Of course, it still may be hard to believe, and counterintuitive, for many Americans to see the reality in nearly 300 million of us making decisions more cohesively, quickly, and competently, than a governor and a state legislature, or a president and 535 congresspersons. First, understand that the We The PeopleSystem would not override the functions of local, state, or federal governments. Consider the system a powerful workaround and countervailing force instead. The system puts all politicians and plutocrats on notice in a serious, comprehensive, coordinated, detailed, massively supported, and unmistakeable manner. No rock is ever left unturned, and rock hiding under is never again allowed.
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Competency and Consistency Of Purpose.
The system is based on a two-tiered process: fact-based universal ideals, and simple universal voting. Rather than our fate always being decided by a gerrymandered state legislature, a supreme court majority of partisan elites, a senate of 51 or 60, or a president elected by a minority of voters, the We The People System, gives much more power to us, which we deserve. The fact-based universal ideals are determined by us, and insure we do not subvert our own ideals in situations fraught with anger, vengeance, biases, misconceptions, etc. Some universal ideals to consider:
- Are we really against extrajudicial actions, torture, and state sanctioned murder, or is that conditional on how angry and vengeful we are in the moment, which becomes a revolving door of death that lasts for generations as honor killings do? .
- Do we really accept the expertise of scientists, and over one hundred years of scientific consensus, as we do gravity, a spherical earth, and CO2 warming, or are we able to inject multiple versions of politicized science as fact? .
- Are germ and virus caused diseases real, dangerous, and preventable, or do we succumb to them, as if we were in the Middle Ages, and did not know better? .
- How can we confirm and protect the individual rights of Americans if they are still controlled within an outmoded cultural, mythical, superstitious, or religious realm, rather than a Constitution that protects everyone similarly and inalienably without regard to previous mores and social constructs, which are also disrupted and disconfirmed by our current knowledge and understanding derived from science, and other?
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I am not suggesting we wipe away the past, but there must be a point where updating is allowed, and required in some areas. While our core ideals should hardly ever change, how an ideal was, or is, constructed must be consistent, and not require awkward, hairsplitting qualifications. Plessy v. Ferguson and Dred Scott v. Sanford were flagrant and disjointed qualifying rulings that rejected our supposed inalienable core ideals of freedom and liberty. A person’s skin color, or gender and sexual preference should not be differentiated in the law. Whatever adult heterosexual, and cisgender White men and women are allowed to be, do, or say, cannot be taken away from any American who is not similarly situated.
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Religion plays an important role in our society, but allowing a specific religious sect’s faith to have greater influence — than another sect — on the ideal of individual rights, goes beyond any religion’s stated influence in the Constitution. There should be no religious test for individual rights anymore than there should be one for voting or attaining political office. Bigotry may be in the eye of the beholder, but our core ideals should be cleanly defensible, and not confused with weasel word qualifications, and selective, out of Constitutional context, sectarian pleadings.
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Some future generation may be threatened, and see a need to ditch our ideals in various ways, not only because the future may be worse than generations before, but due to collectively forgetting why we determined our ideals were originally necessary and preeminent. To avoid that confusion in the future, determining our foundational ideals in this moment requires that we decide how we will confront all threats, and inculcate our ideals and those remedies into society through active training. For example, think about how we trained soldiers to kill more efficiently. In WWII only about 25 percent of infantry soldiers fired their rifles. In the Korean War, it was over 50 percent, and for Vietnam War, it was 90 to 100 percent. While some of these statistics are disputed, others see these rising percentages as a confirmation of the training methods improving over time. Why are we so well trained in killing, and yet very unfamiliar with protecting, reaffirming, and supporting our core ideals during times of societal stress or existential threat?
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To that end, we all know that performing a very dangerous, or scary, job like being an army medic, is going to cause problems for us, and those around us, unless we are well trained. Firefighters are trained to do work most of us would never do, or never could do effectively even if flames were not present. Only one in a thousand of us would run into a burning building, except maybe for a very close family member needing rescue. When a one in a thousand thing happens, and our ideals are acutely challenged, and we are not trained beforehand in responding correctly, bad things happen, like forever wars, and shooting unarmed Black men. We should be doing much more training that involves more humane traits than we do now, or ever have before. We must boost our higher ideals training.
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Conclusion.
Having strong ideals is a must; that is due to the fact we will never agree on everything. Refining our ideals as much as possible to their true core is vital; otherwise we are lying to ourselves and hurting others. There is no way to avoid gradations in every case, such as the killing of another. A case of manslaughter, in anger, with malice, with explicit hate of a certain group, and premeditated murder, are a few of the gradations in one area of the human experience that reverberates dangerously throughout a society. Yet without ideals strengthened by consistent training, deciding how we treat the vulnerable, or those who have broken through the guardrails of society, will continue to blatantly expose us as unexceptional.
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Rote learning and training is not the goal. The future cannot be protected without heightened critical thinking skills. Our ideals must be able to withstand scrutiny and skeptical criticism. Hiding in the depths of convoluted ideological inconsistency, succumbing to convenient status-quo fears, or retreating to indiscriminate abuses of logic can no longer suffice. Basically, we must develop the ideals algorithm of the We The People System as if it was our Constitution, but with every American having similar individual rights.
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What would our perspective be if our nation had been established with similar rights? Imagine if all the rusty nail, social construct viruses never spread throughout every system of government. Envision none of the following occurring: White supremacy, slavery, Manifest Destiny, murder or forceful uprooting of American Indians, women or people of color made second class citizens or worse, one hundred years of lynchings, the KKK, Jim Crow, colonizing beyond the 48 contiguous, racism in housing, education, and the legal system. While more could be noted, expanded, reviled, and excised, my thought experiment is not meant to rewrite history, but to focus the mind on how our ideals code was, and is, corrupted. This corruption is embedded in the current expression of our ideals. It will be nearly impossible to fully clean up our Constitutional ideals when the cleaning utensils we employ leak with contaminants from past precedents and predatory actions.
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We can laud our Constitution with all the accolades it deserves, and still not have a document that truly speaks for every American in a similar manner. What if the term law-abiding was added into that sentence, as in truly speaks for every law-abiding American in a similar manner? There has never been a logically-consistent way to determine who and whatthat means in America. For example, was Woodrow Wilson, J. Edgar Hoover, MLK, or Malcolm X, law abiding? Was Roger B. Taney, Abraham Lincoln, John Brown, or Jefferson Davis, law abiding? Was Frederick Douglass, John C. Calhoun, Nathan Bedford Forrest, or Homer Plessy, law abiding? Was Eric Garner, Daniel Pantaleo, Jonathan Pollard, or Caspar Weinberger, law abiding? Was George Zimmerman, Marrisa Alexander, Alice Paul, or the White man, law abiding?
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While combining many of these names may seem contradictory, and my last entry may seem exaggerated, the reality of their circumstances is, or was, drastic, yet involved illegalities. Even Lincoln is still considered by many to have avoided some constitutional obligations during the Civil War. Caspar Weinberger may be the single most important person in the length of the spy Pollard’s prison sentence. Yet Cap was pardoned by H.W. Bush, in connection with his alleged involvement in the Iran-Contra Scandal, and his related-felony charge. We call some of the most desperately poor and abused people in the world who cross our borders without proper documentation illegals, but the one percent remove from our government’s coffers over 175 billion dollars per year via supposed legal tax evasion strategies — none of us can utilize — great, industrious Americans. Note: cost of all immigration control is about 60 billion dollars. The wealthy elite, and those in charge of the government always have better access to escape from pertinent laws, and the power to make the laws less pertinent to themselves.
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The corruption of our societal code is still evident in the predominance of White wealthy males having most of the power and money. Though this debasement of our We The People value as rightful heirs to prosperity has lessened somewhat in many areas, the great bulk of corruption will likely continue, at minimum, for multiple generations before there is legitimate parity. We can keep lumbering on, allowing one group to get the most from our work and civic participation, or we can develop a workaround that elevates our current ideals algorithm above the corrupted, outmoded, discriminatory rusty nails we are being abused by.
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Determining who and what is law-abiding, and other such rights limiting concepts can no longer be left to a few, working from a corrupted code of ideals, never much widening in modern perspective, and historically framed on keeping the masses under control.
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The American hard drive is full, and our code is corrupted enough that eliminating a gigabyte or two every few weeks will never provide us with the unadulterated space to make our overdue, required changes. That is because more corrupt code always builds up so we continue hitting a wall, causing noticed and unnoticed damage. Without fully cleaning up the code, or transferring to another device, a crash will occur, such as the January 6 attempted coup d’état. Let us avoid another such scenario by developing a countervailing and counter-narrative system to directly compete with the forces allied against us. That is a We The People System built on top of an ideals algorithm, which includes a Jobs Development Platform, a democratic economy, an advanced civic participation structure, and more.
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Two recent related We The People System essays:
And the personal responsibility scapegoat, and social responsibility escapers.richard-the-chwalek.medium.com
Making the case for person-to-person, community-to-community, democracy w/ advanced guard rails (an ideals algorithm)…richard-the-chwalek.medium.com
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