The last post outlined a clear pattern in the presidential election of 2024: people who lived in areas that received large transfers of money from the Federal government preferred Mr. Trump, while those who lived in areas that received less from the Federal government preferred Vice-President Harris. Given that Mr. Trump favored policies that would reduce employment (deportation), increase inflation (tariffs), and reduce revenues for the Federal government (tax cuts), that pattern seems inconsistent with the interests of those who rely on transfer incomes.
While curious, this pattern is not unique. For example, some Marxists use the concept of “false consciousness” to explain this self-defeating behavior. Britannica defines that concept this way:
“…false consciousness, in philosophy, particularly within critical theory and other Marxist schools and movements, the notion that members of the proletariat unwittingly misperceive their real position in society and systematically misunderstand their genuine interests within the social relations of production under capitalism. False consciousness denotes people’s inability to recognize inequality, oppression, and exploitation in a capitalist society because of the prevalence within it of views that naturalize and legitimize the existence of social classes.”
The concept does not seem relevant to the election of 2024. My own view was that there was a great deal of resentment against “elites” in campaign rhetoric, although support for a person who regularly bragged about how rich he was is inconsistent with that assessment. Moreover, false consciousness begs the question: it does not explain why people fail or refuse to act on evidence and logic to protect their interests.
I also have not fully answered that question, and the purpose of this post is to afford me an opportunity to clarify my thinking as well as to elicit other ideas from the readers of this post. What now follows is a wild tangent that I hope is ultimately relevant to an explanation.
My suspicion is that the failure to protect one’s own interests stems from the growing inexplicability of the world to most people. There is a growing discrepancy between what we can and cannot readily explain, and when the number of inexplicable events or processes occur, humans will often resort to myth or magic to explain what they cannot account for. It really did not matter whether one believed that the Norse god Thor was responsible for thunder and lightning or whether one believed that thunder and lightning was caused by friction of particles which create an electrostatic charge–thunder and lightning were going to occur no matter which explanation was proffered. But the question of why we believed what we believed is crucially important.
The mythological explanation for thunder and lightning required someone or some institution to legitimize the myth of the god, Thor; the scientific explanation required a process (something we call the scientific method) that neccessitated a broad agreement among those who come to conclusions based upon evidence and reasoning. Both the shaman and the scientist are authorities, but the shaman relies upon faith and the scientist relies on evidence. There is a profound difference in determining what constitutes a true statement between the two approaches.
Over time, the scientific method gained greater legitimacy as scientists such as Galileo and Newton carefully explicated the observations and subjected those observations and conclusions to review by those who accepted the method. Indeed, the increased rigor of the scientific method utlimately led to the pivotal role of “right reason”, or rationality, in the movement that we call the Enlightenment. Science emerged as the most effective way to resolve such problems as transportation and health, and I have no hesitation whatsoever in asserting that the scientific method became the most readily accepted basis for resolving questions about the efficacy of competing approaches to public policy. More importantly, the scientific method is responsible for the dramastic increase in public welfare thast has occurred since the early 19th century.
The price for this progress, however, was to deepen the ignorance of private citizens about how the increase in welfare actually occurred. It was fairly easy to correlate a horse with better transportation than walking–one fed and cared for the horse so that it could perform that essential role; it was less easy to make that same correlation to the automobile–what is a carburetor? How does one refine petroleum into gasoline? Do I really have to answer those quesitons to use a car? The same is true of virtually every aspect of modern life: every day we use things, like a computer, that we really do not fully understand, take medicines to which we have no personal connection such as the bark from a witch hazel tree, eat food that we could not produce for ourselves, wear clothes that we could not make for ourselves, and receive bills with charges that make no sense, only to find ourselves in a phone tree that is impossible to navigate, talking to a person (perhaps) who really does not care if our problem is resolved. Paradoxically, science has produced an environment whose existence might as well been created through sorcery.
Many generations have faced this conundrum, and usually there is a difficult period of transition between our understanding of the universe and our means of assessing that understanding of the universe–think of the Luddites. During this transitional period, shamans will exploit the gap between knowing and believing. In the present, that gap is huge. And since no one really knows how the whole system works, any explanation for its working becomes plausible. And it appears as if even preposterous explanations (“we will build a wall to prevent illegal immigration, and Mexico will pay for it”) can be readily accepted.
The next step in this process is to create a mythological reality which diverts attention from scientific reality. Since the 1980s, the mythological reality of the movement that ultimately led to the election of Mr. Trump in 2024 has been clear and best articulated by one of the gods of that movement, Ronald Reagan: “In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.” How this myth distracted us from the fact that the real source of the economic dislocations of the globalization at the turn of this century was private corporate behavior will be the topic of the next post. End of tangent.
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