Breaking the Matrix, Part One: False Options that Keep Us Divided, Conquered, and Controlled

     Liberal and conservative, Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street, human needs and environmental needs—these are stark choices, seemingly based on diametrically opposed and mutually exclusive viewpoints.

     What if the Tea Partiers and the Occupiers, like the blind men examining the elephant, not realizing that they were all confronting the same thing, are needlessly arguing with each another about what the problem is? What if human needs and environmental needs are one and the same? What if the Matrix—the world that is presented to us—really is “the wool that has been pulled over your eyes to keep you from seeing the truth”?

     This article—a case study of natural allies needlessly squabbling with each other—is part one of a three-part series.

     A month or two ago, I watched a video called The Story of Stuff, hosted by Annie Leonard. When I recently looked for that video, I found a rebuttal called The Story of Stuff, the Critique, by Lee Doran. Doran’s video is a classic example of how liberals and conservatives are talking past each other, when we should be listening to one another’s concerns.

     The original video, The Story of Stuff, is twenty minutes long. The rebuttal, which contains all original, plus the rebuttal, is almost twice as long. It’s worth watching in full, albeit with a critical mind. If you don’t have the time or the patience to watch the whole thing, here’s my summary and a rebuttal to both versions of The Story of Stuff.

     Annie Leonard and Lee Doran seem to have been produced by Stereotypes R Us, which is precisely why my comments on their respective efforts are useful for the rest of us.
      My take on Annie Leonard is that she’s an aging flower child wannabe who was born a few years too late to have participated in the Summer of Love or Woodstock. She bubbles with more enthusiasm than facts, and emphasizes her points with wide, circular sweeps of her arms. 

      Lee Doran is a dweebish character who seems to fit the stereotype of the frat boy with a head full of college knowledge but with too little real-world experience. He’s the perfect straw man conservative that every liberal wishes he had to oppose.

     Annie is filled with natural wisdom concerning the environment and does a masterful job of explaining why simple recycling is not enough for us to preserve our natural resources and avoiding, as she puts it, “trashing the planet.” She lays most of the blame at the doorstep of big business, which she correctly accuses of having too much influence over how government regulations are written and enforced. Her solution is to write more laws—which she fails to realize are written by business-financed lobbyists more often than congressmen—to give government (which she suggests is controlled by business) more control over business. Hmmm.

     At the suggestion that business is capable of wrongdoing, Lee Doran forgets all about Annie’s main point—environmental protection—and treats her video as if it were all about business. In his defense of business, he cites an abundance of facts without a shred of wisdom—and some of his “facts” are wrong—showing that he hasn’t the first clue as to how the world outside the college classroom really works.

     According to Lee, entrepreneurs are in the business of giving the public what they want. Wrong. Entrepreneurs don’t follow the market so much as they create it. If Henry Ford had given the public what they wanted, he’d have given them a faster horse. According to Lee, advertisers are in the business of informing the public of a wider range of goods and services. Wrong. Advertisers are in the business of limiting consumers’ options to marketable products or services. Have you ever seen an advertisement telling people of the benefits of silence or quality time with family instead of buying a radio? Of course you haven’t. Silence and quality time with family are not marketable.

     In Lee’s world, government is to be praised for the results of regulations they’ve already made, such as the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act; but he’s horrified at the thought that other someone may actually favor government regulations. In Lee’s neatly packaged world, nobody dumps nuclear waste or a shipload of old television sets in the waters off the coast of Somalia. Either that, or Africans don’t count.

     Nuclear waste doesn’t just disappear. If it’s dumped into the ocean, it’s because government officials somewhere have turned a blind eye. The fact that it does happen suggests that Annie’s faith in government is flawed, and that Lee’s faith in business is equally flawed.

     I’d like to say one more thing about Annie’s careless use of words and Lee’s careless use of facts. As Lee points out, Annie undermines her argument by confusing toxicity with risk. Aluminum, for example, is toxic, but in most cases the risk is minimal. Lee, on the other hand, is careless with the idea of risk.

     Let’s suppose that, at a fraternity party, one of Lee’s frat brothers urinated in the punch bowl, and Lee found out about it. There’s a greater risk of harm in partaking in the fried chicken, cookies, the beer bong, and other amusements offered at the frat party than there is in drinking the punch. Which do you think Lee would decline, the punch or the riskier fare offered at the frat party? He’d refuse the punch, of course; and he may even join in on the beer bonging (as in the photo above). Unlike fried chicken and kegs of beer, urine isn’t a marketable product offered by big business.

     Isn’t it about time we started learning from each other instead of acting like the blind men who’d encountered an elephant? Don’t we have more in common with each other than we have with the banksters and other people who profit from creating disasters?

     In part two of this three-part series, I’ll show that the supposed trade-off between jobs and the environment is a false paradigm. Business, environment, and society all need each other. The most successful strategies for these three areas are a strategic fit among these needs. I’ll show examples of how businesses, societies, and social action groups have worked together to achieve that fit.

Towards a New Paradigm, Part 1

Probably all of you have seen the outmoded political spectrum that puts all voters at some point along a straight line. Reading it from left to right, we see communists, socialists, liberals, moderates, conservatives, fascists, and Nazis. One of the major problems is that the spectrum presumes that all political behavior is based on political philosophy; but most people aren’t political philosophers. It also presumes that all people are motivated by the stated rationale for political positions rather than attitudes about freedom.
In recent years, the sort of grid you see below has come into vogue. For simplicity, I've left out the numbers and lines that are supposed to show—based on how you answer a set of questions—where you fall on the grid.

This grid is an enormous improvement on the straight line because it more realistically addresses the attitudes that citizens have concerning the government’s place in their lives. It’s still lacking in one area in that it labels the people in the center of the grid as populists. This label presumes political motivation for a group that is noted for its lack of political interest.
The classic explanation of the word populist is, “Us against them.” Owing to a lack of political interest, most people who are considered political centrists can't be called populists or moderates.
Most of them are politically oblivious until a couple of months before an election. Then they listen to the rhetoric and vote for the candidates who offer the best rhetoric. Never mind that everything a candidate says may be a lie; they don’t know it because they haven’t bothered to look for the facts. Never mind that candidates may completely contradict themselves by, for example, describing themselves as fiscal conservatives and social moderates (government actions cost real money regardless of how they’re packaged.) They’re like thin reeds that sway with every gusty speech and are often most influenced by who most recently spoke to them.
The illustration below more accurately identifies the voter in the middle of the illustration.

According to the paradigm we’ve heard all out lives, pandering to swing voters is the key to winning elections. In my opinion, pandering to swing voters is the main reason that freedom has lost out in the overwhelming majority of elections.
Think about it in terms of Game Theory. Everyone has some understanding of Game Theory even though very few people call it that. Most voters view each election as a one-time, zero-sum game. Understandably, liberals, conservatives, and libertarians would rather give up some of what they’d wanted in order to avoid losing all of what they’d wanted. As a result, voters occupying each position choose the centrist candidates just to keep the other two groups from winning.
That's why authoritarians gain ground with each election. For one thing, there will be other elections. For another, the position defined as the “moderate” position—“centrist” is more accurate—is a lobster trap that moves the electorate closer and closer to the authoritarian position.
The authoritarian strategy is a combination of “The Prisoners' Dilemma” and good cop/bad cop. Two suspects are kept apart and each is given reasons to suspect the other of ratting on him. Although each prisoner knows that it’s to the benefit of both prisoners to remain silent, each incriminates the other in order to get what he's told is a better deal.
The good cop/bad cop scenario is played out like this: “Conservatives” get elected and deprive the people of some of their personal freedoms. “Liberals” loudly oppose the move. Swing voters and everyone else are offered false alternatives. Instead of voting for a principled liberal, the liberals settle for someone who is considered "less conservative." Why? The “less conservative” candidate is presented as most agreeable to swing voters;thus, he's said to be most likely to win. If the “conservatives” lose power, the “liberals” come into office and do nothing to change the injustices wrought by “conservatives.” Instead, they deprive the people of some of their financial freedoms, which the “conservative” officeholders ratify when they get into office.
The old paradigm of the swing position being used to play liberals, conservatives, and libertarians against each other—to the benefit of the authoritarians—has caused all three groups to lose their liberties. What we need is a new paradigm in which liberals, conservatives, and libertarians unite against the authoritarians.
There are three major challenges to that idea. The three groups aren't communicating with each other, and I see no reason to hope that they'll learn to do so in time for the 2010 congressional elections. The three groups don't trust each other, and I don't expect that situation to change any time soon. Lastly, each group realizes that, in cooperating with each other, the gains and losses will not be equally distributed among the three groups.
How do you coordinate three groups that aren't communicating, don't trust one another, and see an uneven distribution of rewards and costs coming from cooperation with one another? I'll answer that question in my next article.

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Towards a New Paradigm, Part 2

In the previous article, I promised to offer a possible solution to a seemingly impossible situation. How do you get liberals, conservatives, libertarians, and others to cooperate on an election strategy when they don't communicate or trust one another?
First, let's look at the problem I mentioned first. How do you get people to coordinate their strategies when they're not communicating?
Actually, people do it with surprising regularity. For example, let's say that two people have agreed to meet at the Takashimaya Department Store, but they somehow neglected to say just where in the building they'd meet. Counting the parking garages on the eleventh and twelfth floors, and the basement, we're talking about thirteen floors. What would they do if they didn't have cell phones?
In this event, each is influenced by what he thinks that the other would do. The store has three entrances, two of which can be seen from one spot. If they came by foot or by bus, they'd most likely look for one another in the spot that offers a view of the two entrances.
According to a study conducted a few years ago, about a hundred subjects were divided into fifty pairs. Each member of each pair, without being allowed to communicate with his “partner,” was presented with the same hypothetical challenge: Meet your partner on a certain day somewhere in New York City.
Strictly by the law of chance, none of them should meet his partner. In actuality, many of them did. A surprising number of them chose the information desk at Grand Central Station at 12:00 noon. That choice of spot and time was reasonable, accessible, and prominent. (The Statue of Liberty wouldn't have been as accessible.)
Let's get back to the two men at the department store. If one came by car, he'd get off at one of the top floors. If the other came by bus, he'd get off at the ground floor. They may still choose to meet at the front entrance unless some other place is more reasonable, accessible, and prominent. If they'd agreed to meet for lunch, they'd either head for the basement area or one of the higher-class restaurant area on the tenth floor—probably the latter.
Why might they choose the tenth floor and not the front entrance? The key word is signal. Knowing that they were going to meet for lunch was a signal as to how they might find one another. It doesn't have to be a strong signal; it doesn't always have to be reasonable. If it's the only signal of which they're aware, that’s the signal they'll probably follow.
Suppose, on an earlier occasion, the wives of the two men had met in the lingerie department and they'd spoken of how quickly they'd made contact. As unreasonable as it may seem for two men to meet in a lingerie department, that may be where they'll look for one another.
Remember that word signal. I'll get back to it later.
You may remember the Kobayashi Maru scenario described in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. It was designed to be a hopeless dilemma, especially since the computer was allowed to cheat in order to guarantee that the cadet would lose. Erstwhile Starfleet Cadet James T. Kirk managed to overcome the no-win scenario by secretly changing the program. “I don't believe in no-win scenarios,” Kirk smirks. Rather than expel Cadet Kirk, Starfleet Academy praised him for his “original thinking.”
Liberals, conservatives, and libertarians likewise face a Kobayashi Maru, and the computer's programmers are allowed to cheat in order to assure our defeat. Like Cadet Kirk, we need to change the game's program.
Elections are designed to be zero-sum games for the voters but incremental wins for the Establishment. This allows the other side to present liberals, conservatives, and libertarians with a no-win scenario: Vote only on ideology and be willing to settle for a half a loaf rather than none. We end up accepting a candidate whom the organized crime syndicate on the Potomac finds more pliable.
Voters are conned into thinking that they're “voting for the lesser of two evils.” More often, however, voters are choosing between an evil candidate (the presumed lesser of two evils) and one who simply disagrees with us on matters of policy but not necessarily on objectives. The sooner we grasp these facts, the more easily we can change the game from a zero-sum conflict (which, by design, we must lose by increments) to a mixed-sum game of mutual dependency.
Mixed sum means that the different sides (conservative, liberal, and libertarian) stand to gain from the outcome, although not in the same degree. By getting honest people into Congress, many voters will at least get a representative who tries to represent the people and will listen to them, even if his ideology isn't what we'd prefer. Some voters will get both the honesty and the ideology they'd prefer. In many cases, the alternative is to elect liars who say at least half of what we'd like to hear during the campaign, and then betray their constituents once they're elected.
Mutual dependence means that the behavior (in this case, voting behavior) of each side must depend on what they believe that the other sides will do. At this point, none of the three sides (conservatives, liberals, and libertarians) have much reason to trust that the other sides will do what is best for all. A confidence-building measure is needed.
I told you to remember the word signal in the sense that I'd used the word earlier. What could each side do simultaneously that would manifest that confidence-building measure? We have little reason to believe that the three sides will be freely communicating with each other by November 2. Then what signal could be sent that would encourage all sides to manifest this confidence-building measure no later than November 1?
I'll present my ideas on that on the next page.

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