“I think that is the ultimate insensitivity, anyone looking at that with any common sense would say, ‘What in the world would we be doing, you know, fostering some type of system that allows this to happen.’ Everybody knows America’s built on the rights of free expression, the rights to practice your faith, but come on.”

Eric Cantor, R-Va, said this recently. This is my favorite bald, asshat quote of the year–so far. It’s palinesque in its appeal to (some version of) commonsense, and it’s not at all over-the-top, given the waves of grotesque rhetoric the Cordoba House project has evoked. Cantor’s opinion here doesn’t amuse me because it is of the tinfoil type. (There’s plenty of that of course, much of it subsisting on the belief President Obama is a Manchurian candidate and, maybe, the world’s most un-Muslim-like Muslim.) No, what I enjoy about this quote is how it encapsulates the falling away of a whole string of conservative pieties: First Amendment, for suckers; Local governance-fuhgetaboutit; God-centeredness-who needs it?While, out of nowhere, Cantor here seems to embrace political correctness–got to have it, and got to have it rotate around being sensitive.

This last play in favor of sensitivity captures, evidently, a new Republican move to embrace sensitivity! Who would have thunk it? But, sure, “being sensitive” should probably trump the Constitution if one is willing to flip flop on what used to be a longstanding, thorough-going principle of personal responsibility. (I chose this one, from among several delicious choices.) Isn’t the ideologically driven advice from Republicans almost always along the lines of: ‘suck it up!’ ‘take care of yourself’ ‘obey the Constitution and our Christian foundations’ etc.? Until now.

Another impressive feature of the Republican embrace of, this time, religious bigotry, is how sanctimonious Cantor, Gingrich, Palin, are about the composition of necessary exceptions to the First Amendment. So: ‘We’re tolerant, we’re pro-Constitution, but, let’s face it.’ I had thought the Constitution was more hallowed than the site of the 9-11 attack.

I’m sure I’ll know it when it happens: when any of these self-identified bright lights attach an argument favorable to the First Amendment to their politically-correct call for sensitivity about the sensitivities of religious bigots and their reactions to a project that has zero to do with Jihadi aspirations.

Meanwhile, Jeff Merkley, D-OR, framed the ‘cognitive’ issue, and other facts, succinctly:

“I appreciate the depth of emotions at play, but respectfully suggest that the presence of a mosque is only inappropriate near ground zero if we unfairly associate Muslim Americans with the atrocities of the foreign al-Qaida terrorists who attacked our nation. Such an association is a profound error. Muslim Americans are our fellow citizens, not our enemies. Muslim Americans were among the victims who died at the World Trade Center in the 9/11 attacks. Muslim American first responders risked their lives to save their fellow citizens that day. Many of our Muslim neighbors, including thousands of Oregon citizens, serve our country in war zones abroad and our communities at home with dedication and distinction.”

These facts of the matter go in one hand and the clear imperative of the 1st Amendment go in the other hand. Yet, this doesn’t settle the matter in a lot of people’s minds. Why this is so is of great interest to me. Opposition to the Cordoba project’s site location is not singular at all. It’s not simply only due to ignorance, or only due to practiced agendas, or only due to some politicized version of common sense.

Opponents’ antipathy surely can be understood in terms of psychology, yet, at the same time, understanding the nature of internalized distrust, false attribution, and, confirmation bias–to pick one constellation of behavioral features–doesn’t completely resolve that which constitutes behavioral explanations for upwelling of fear, anger, and, strong dislike, (ie.antipathy.)

The opposition is wide spread and encompasses a wide variety of people, and this surely includes persons who are highly educated, well-traveled, and, intelligent. The group of opponents also would have to include the opposite of this characterization, and, as well, include persons who believe all religions except for their own are members of a satanic opposition.

No simple explanation covers the entire group. But, Cantor’s prescriptive “come on” is simple. And, from this, it is apparent that a system of laws stands against very intense socially affective constructions. From my perspective, none of this yields to just supposing strong feelings based in counterfactual, socially-reinforced interpretations explains the, for example, commonsensical appeal to sensitivity, and fright about the strict ramifications of the 1st Amendment. Although, antipathy certainly isn’t, nor could it be, linked to opponents working through the salient facts. Those facts are also: simple.

But, the intense upwelling of affect, posed as it is by Cantor to literally trump the 1st Amendment, stands with all sorts of other propositions; propositions held by large groups of people with enthusiasm. Such enthusiasms do earn an account at least for reasons having to do with collective aspirations, which if realized, would subvert, if not overturn, all sorts of protective, often lawful, norms.

What and why and how people come to believe stuff has been one of the handful of my central interests for almost forty years. There is nothing surprising about the range of beliefs found at the extreme end of the continuum of antipathy about Muslims, and, similarly, about gays, Darwin, Democrats, elites, capitalists, banks and bankers, Dick Cheney, on and on.

In noting this, generally, it is optimal for people to internalize and be able to cope with factual, thus realistic, fears, sorrows and anger. Nevertheless, (I suggest,) a lot of energy and instinctual (or primary,) process potential attends to the status of our closely held beliefs–in the context of our each apprehending our various realistic and unrealistic interpretations of that which threatens those same beliefs. Antipathy may generally express primal fears oriented to not only having an Islamic cultural center set two blocks from where 9-11 unfolded, but also oriented to the very ideas that other believers, be they Muslims, metrosexuals, Harvard grads, Mexican laborers, progressive Democrats, (etc.,) have set themselves a bit too close to the home of belief–the self; and too close to: me and my own.

For me this antipathy spirals around the ‘low ordering’ of belief; about which I will riff in an ensuing post.

Click for the large version and please come back…

Rummaging through old computer files, I came upon a series of slides about the Fundamental Attribution Error. Here’s the definition from the The Psychology Wiki.

In attribution theory, the fundamental attribution error (sometimes referred to as the actor-observer bias, correspondence bias or overattribution effect) is the tendency for people to over-emphasize dispositional, or personality-based, explanations for behaviors observed in others while under-emphasizing the role and power of situational influences on the same behavior.

When I created the slides a decade or so ago, my aim was to roll into a presentation of experiential learning theory some takings from cognitive psychology’s conceptions about cognitive bias. Whereas today I’m just going to fry the ‘FAT’ fish a bit.

My opinion is the Fundamental Attribution Error is an error so common as to suggest we’re wired to make it. It may even be advantageous to sometimes make it. Certainly, and much to my quiet amusement, I’ve observed its being made in ‘professional’ contexts over and over again. This is why I term it the acid test, especially as a validation of how much that social psychology 101 class sank in! I’m no longer amazed to observe the error being made, or even intentionally deployed, or otherwise witnessing various attributive terms being decontextualized and misused.

This happens whenever a description about a person, for example about a personality style or type, is assumed to portray an unqualified assessment of their disposition. Many times these kinds of attributions ‘globalize’ situational, or modular, behaviors. All sorts of attributions are errantly globalized and attached to stereotypes. Global attributions attached to, for example, some person identifying as a liberal or conservative, are not usually traits. Closer-to-home, I’ve identified something like qualities of my own situational dispositions using several assessment tools, yet, I’m not always being intuitive; learning via my primary ‘audiostyle;’ trying to influence others using my sociableness; or always being a cheery optimist.

At the same time, as I view human phenomena on a broader scale, (oh, and dig into the literature,) the FAT is itself a heuristic, thus is a short cut means to attribute a feature to another’s personality, and seems to work then as firstly a generalization subject to later refinement. This refinement would narrow the appropriate circumstance for making a correct attribution. In suggesting this, I am also mindful of the complexity of procedures for attribution and construal in the domain of ‘applied’ folk psychology. With respect to attribution–making attributions–those procedures don’t strike me as fitting very comfortably under the rubrics given by either simulation or theory-theory. …for what it’s worth.

My other abiding position on all this has to do with how attribution errors mix in with sensemaking of one’s own life-world. This is a complicated subject, so the matrix serves to prime a way of looking at this problem. To get at this, you can ask your self what assumptions do you make about everybody, what do you attribute to everybody?.

Although I haven’t beta tested the tool yet, it seems this would be a good question to fund an experiential exercise via which the learner comes to experience–reflect upon–their own process for answering this question. In any really determined effort to address the question, it turns out to be a very probing inquiry.

1 in 4 Americans censoring thoughts under Obama

Man, talk about priming a poll result!

This raises lots of questions aside from those about polling methodology.

Do you suppose some people would report feeling really free and thoroughly liberated irrespective of anything the U.S. government has done, say in the last 37 years since such a person first voted at 18?

How would one account for this, account for a person impervious to the tug of that which denies one their freedoms?

How would the internalized sense of one’s being free to some degree be indexed? I’m reminded there was no cogent psychology Locke could utilize. (Romantic!) notions about property and happiness, be they of Hayek or Nozick, cross over into what reasonable domain of psychology? You couldn’t go there with those fellows if you wanted to!

For example, Libertarian thought leader David Boaz:

Libertarians believe that there is a natural harmony of interests among peaceful, productive people in a just society. One person’s individual plans — which may involve getting a job, starting a business, buying a house, and so on — may conflict with the plans of others, so the market makes many of us change our plans. But we all prosper from the operation of the free market, and there are no necessary conflicts between farmers and merchants, manufacturers and importers. Only when government begins to hand out rewards on the basis of political pressure do we find ourselves involved in group conflict, pushed to organize and contend with other groups for a piece of political power. (Libertarianism: A Primer)

The leap from ‘no necessary’ to ‘only when’ hammers home the naivete. The absence of socio-psychological understanding is, obviously, implicit.

STRATEGIC SERENDIPITY.

My thinking about terminology, having passed through the former term, has come, next, through the keep it simple stupid phase, and arrived at Strategic Serendipity.

Strategic Serendipity: in the context of individual human development, a chance event that comes to completely alter the course of a person’s development. Among the many kinds of change such an event impacts, the common kinds result in changes in: key relationships; career; location; interests.

Beck is a masterful architect, but of what, I’m not sure. He’s not really a polemicist or propagandist in the sense that both those dispositions usually presume coherency. His basic argument is structured as a sort of daft hermeneutics, connecting dots, but doing so incoherently across domains. It all ends up, usually, in the same place: a cabal of Marxist elitists are planning to take over the country and “control every aspect of your life.”

The aspect that evokes cognitive dissonance is Beck’s appeal to freedom from control, while offering at the same time, an analysis that could only be practically powerful were persons to accept it uncritically ‘en mass.’ For Beck, America is free when there is a monotheism of individuality, and if you’re so individuated as to disagree, well then, you’re helping to destroy the country.

Jon Stewart breaks down Beck’s hermeneutics.

What would be the nature and inherent cognitive complexity of someone who would buy Beck’s binary paranoia, who would follow his connected dots to their satisfying conclusion: slaughter or ark? Decades ago I wondered the same thing about who possibly could find Ayn Rand’s insipid version of logical rationality reasonable.*

Jason Richwine, unintentionally unleashing silliness in The American, the Journal of the American Enterprise Institute, Are Liberals Smarter Than Conservatives?, ponders anecdotal counter-factuals, while missing the point of Lazar Stankov’s research, Conservatives and Cognitive Ability. Heck, Richwine misses the point even though it’s pointed to in the paper’s title.

Richwine does mention that conservatism isn’t defined deeply enough in Stankov’s research. I’d love to see a factor analysis of policy-oriented beliefs meshed with a meta-analysis of several orders of cognitive complexity and personality constructs. For example, is there a correlation across the range of the former beliefs with binary attitudes? How does ideological certainty correlate with tendencies having to do with reducing complexity, anxiety, and dissonance? I don’t think Richwine read the paper though, because Stankov’s work is not primarily concerned with ‘smarts’, and is, in fact, focused on a very complex meta-analysis, very close to my intuition about what I’d like to see.

In our work, conservatism is captured by a score — usually a factor score — obtained from several scales that were not developed specifically for the measurement of conservatism. Thus, it incorporates measures of Personality (Big Five from IPIP), Social Attitudes (Saucier, 2000; Stankov & Kneževi?, 2005), Values (Schwartz & Bardi, 2001), and Social Norms (GLOBE; House, Hanges, Javidan, Dorfman, & Gupta, 2004) — a total of 43 different subscale scores.Nevertheless, ouranalyses show the presence of a factor of Conservatism that has loadings from subscales from all these domains and captures many constructs that are included in the nomological net of Jost et al. (2003) and Wilson (1973). This factor is expected to correlate with cognitive ability for reasons outlined above. What are the other factors that emerge from the analysis of 43 subscales? Are they also expected to correlate with cognitive ability? Stankov (2007) found three domain-related factors. They are quite different from the Conservatism factor in that they show very little overlap between the domains.

These are:

• Personality/Social Attitudes. This is usually a bipolar factor contrasting Personality traits on the negative side and Social Attitudes on the positive side. Loadings of Personality traits on this factor are typically lower than loadings from the Social Attitudes measures. In some of our analyses, this factor splits into a separate Personality factor representing “good” evaluative processes (or perhaps social desirability) and a Social Attitudes factor representing anti- or amoral attitudes towards social objects (Stankov & Kneževi?, 2005). • Values. See Method section for the interpretation of this factor.

• Social Norms. Several Social Norms scales from GLOBE study (House et al., 2004) load on this factor. In this paper I report the analyses based on a smaller (22) number of variables that correspond quite closely to the solution obtained with the full set of 43 measures. Smaller number of variables is employed in order to carry out simultaneous (i.e., multilevel) structural equation modelling of individual- and country-level data that has not been reported in the past.

There is no empirical evidence or theoretical arguments in the literature that suggest a relationship between cognitive ability and Values or Social Norms.2 Thus, it is reasonable to assume that these two constructs do not correlate with cognitive measures. The situation is different with the Personality/ Social Attitudes dimension. Jost (2006) reports that Conscientiousness (positively) and Openness to Experience (negatively) correlate with Democrat/Republican voting preferences of the states within the U.S., interpreted as reflections of liberal/conservative tendencies. Openness to Experience is also known to correlate about .30 with measures of intelligence (Stankov, 2005; Stankov and Lee, 2008). The other side of this bipolar factor, Social Attitudes, captured by Toughness, Maliciousness, and Betaism (i.e., non-PC motives for behavior), have qualities reminiscent of Dogmatism and Authoritarian personalities that are often seen as components of conservatism (see Jost et al., 2003). Since in our work they define a factor that is separate from conservatism, it is reasonable to assume that there is a separation between thuggish and rough Social Attitudes trait and Conservative syndrome that captures not only social attitudes but also Values, Social Norms, and Personality traits. These rough social attitudes are also likely to be related to cognitive ability—they often reflect difficulties or disinclination to make fine-grained analysis of a problematic situation (see Wilson, 1973).

Snap! Maybe the article was so complex it caused Richwine anxiety? I wonder what Glenn Beck would think?

*John Galt’s Monologue

Loony, yet, “crazy ass sh*t, but. But, more than a few people do agree with Beck. This is so even if such people couldn’t tell you anything intelligent about what the founding fathers actually thought; what they contested among themselves; and what were their various radically liberal principles.

Here’s a conjecture (of mine) about ideology and history. There is no extant or past example of a form of governance for which it could be demonstrated that it’s procedures of governance wholly and absolutely are realized solely as a matter of adherence to ideological principles. This is falsifiable if it can be shown that there exists or has existed a form of governance for which, in its application of its principles, every instance was/is entirely consistent with principle.

Let’s imagine there are people who are committed to some set of principles in the following, narrow way:

Our endeavor is to instantiate a set of principles. We believe this for two reasons. First, because this set of principles is the best of all possible set of principles. Second, that the principles are best, is verified by the fact that their truth is the most reasonable truth upon which any possible set of principles could be based.

News for social, fiscal & national security conservatives who believe in God, family & country. We seek to uphold the rights of citizens under the U.S. Constitution, traditional family values, Republican principles / ideals, transparent & limited government, free markets, liberty & individual freedom. The ARRA News Service is an outreach of the Arkansas Republican Assembly. However, all content approval rests with the ARRA Editor. While numerous positions are reported, our beliefs & principles remain fixed. mission

Our political climate in the U.S. is very interesting in this year, unfolding now, after the election of Mr. Obama. Several developments have taken me by surprise. Obama surprised me by not partnering his financial system bailout policies with policies aimed to help right the economy of main street from the bottom up. It was also surprising that he didn’t articulate in concrete, instrumental, terms what kind of reform he would endorse, and insist upon, to end the depredations of the speculation-driven shadow economy.

Then, he moved to reform health care and laid it in the laps of his congressional majorities.

In light of these developments, I’m not in any way surprised that people have been stirred to reactionary and (called by me,) restorative activism. Nor was it surprising that they oriented their dissent positively around their patriotism, and, negatively, around their primal fear that the government is posed to strip from him or her so-called freedoms.

I’ll let Missy, writing on her blog at TCUNation, the Social Network for Conservatives, explain:

But the worst part? It allows the federal gov’t to be in charge of every aspect of your life. Every decision you make on a daily basis can be linked to “healthcare.” You drive an SUV? You’re contributing to pollution & that increases asthma…..you need to pay more! Since we have direct access to all of your accounts we know you own a 4-wheeler. That’s dangerous………you need to pay more! We see that you eat at McD’s twice a week. That’s bad for you……you need to pay more! YOU OWN A GUN??? THAT’S DANGEROUS! YOU NEED TO PAY ALOT MORE!!

These liberal fanatics will most DEFINITELY use the federal gov’ts financial stake in your everyday lifestyle choices to CONTROL THEM. Your decisions will no longer be your own, they will be decisions that will be for the “collective good.” And they will be MANDATED & CONTROLLED by the gov’t. And in order to “nudge” you into compliance with their ideology of how you should live your life, they will simply put a financial burden on you if you choose differently.

The paranoia surprised me. How does one square paranoia with a normative conservative ethos that holds its funding principles to be both first, and, last, and to be foundational, and also holds these principles are the only possible enlightened goal granted by reasoning through the problem of governance? Where does paranoia fit in? Is it possible that such foundational principles are, in fact, extremely fragile?

I don’t think so. President Obama has offered a mild liberalism. The bank bailout was extraordinary, yet a Republican would have had to have done the same thing. (Creative destruction is a notion one can practically hold only when the bombs aren’t falling on your own head.) All such bailouts tend to occupy uncertain spots in any ideology. A bailout is above all expedient and unhooked from conventional, ideological morality. They’re grotesque too.

So far Obama’s maneuvering hasn’t been much like anything we associate, historically, with truly radical presidents; especially those with very novel views of the Constitution—such as Jefferson, Lincoln, FDR, Reagan, and Bush II. Nevertheless, the ideological principles survive, and this suggests underlying principles, aren’t at all fragile. This includes freedom given to be a result of, contingent upon, application of, ideological principles.

So why is paranoia evoked?

My tentative view is: affect is consequential in the current ‘social psychological framed’ ecology. Forged in the magical bake shop of projective identification, specific affect-laden estimations are on offer. So: a messianic leader is scapegoated so as to be the cause of knowing (i.e. unconsciously feeling,) that what is possessed, “freedom,” is to be stolen by the conspiratorial Other, (i.e. an alter.) This inflated threat is to be met and defeated by, ironically enough, the collective personal power of freedom-loving individualists. It’s worth noting that in some quarters, this evil goat is assumed to have super powers, or, alternately, is assumed to be the servant of hidden masters.

Putting the participation mystique aside–may Levi-Strauss rest in peace–what are the embedded chain-of-being regimes supposed in a clash between the red-in-blood red-tending-to-blue meme, and, the blue-tending-to-orange meme. These, given by Grave’s Spiral Dynamics, and, given by me in my deployment of a shadow dynamics* supposing the red shadow of blue conservatism’s ‘traditionalistic’ paternal chain of being comes to clash with the neoliberal paternal chain-of-being of Orange. Pre-modern, the red shadow of blue, collides here with the post-modern orientation toward technocratic problem-solving.

(Or, the atavistic self and identity, is felt to be threatened by the spectral, post-modern selves and identities. Perhaps, were one to dig into the narratives, one would find at their core a clash between the production of certainty and productions of uncertainty.)

Among many curious aspects of this clash, is the gravity given to an emotionalized, largely unconscious, sense of freedom. (I’ve written about this before.) What is it about a notional freedom that one can be dispossessed of, versus, other less vulnerable notions about freedom? Isn’t it interesting that the conservative concept of freedom-under-constraint, a necessary consequence of the pessimistic view of human nature, is subsumed in the shuffle through the emotionally-charged libertarian bake shop!

Then there is the conspiratorial tenor of magical narratives. Of course, it’s long-standing that the government is anthropomorphized to be a kind of beast, capable of devouring freedom. In this respect the conspiracy mongering of Ron Paul, or Michelle Bachman, comes to be of a piece with the extreme supernaturalized conspiracy advocates, David Ickes, Alex Jones, and Michael Tsarion. In turn, the current extremes are merely the contemporary waves of olden conspiracy theories. And, heck, why not share some air time with the truly deluded?

“they’ve been positioning…” they, theY, thEY, THEY!

*I have yet to go into this in detail. However, roughly, my proposal is that the vertical scale of Spiral Dynamic is configurable as a dynamic, oppositional scale. This is able to depict how higher and lower memes serve as descriptive categories, and schema, for shadow dynamics. For example, by such a dynamic scale, the shadow dynamics for the Blue Meme are discoverable as aspects of Red (below) and Orange (above). In my novel (or idiosyncratic,) view, the shadow dynamics then tend to fall (or regress,) toward the lower, more archaic order, while this unconscious propensity is galvanized by fear of the upward pull toward the newer, more complex order.

My notion here supposes that a concept of Blue freedom, will come to be defended at the lower, unconscious level of Red. Similarly, this defense is waged against a super-charged (by way of ‘social cognitized’ projection,) ‘controlling’ Orange. Grant this phenomenology, and the result is that fear of bureaucracy regresses to fear of collective control, control formulated to the scale conspiracy; “conspiracy” being the shadow concretization of Orange—in its worst form.

This is consistent—well, at least it is to me—with the mental procedures via which contested, soft conceptions–such as freedom–are reduced, reified and objectified. Then the reified conception’s opposite, in this case anti-freedom, is realized and nailed to the alter. Thus, a collective complex is constellated.

The shadow is not the whole of the unconscious personality. It represents unknown or little-known attributes and qualities of the ego-aspects that mostly belong to the personal sphere and that could just as well be con- scious. In some aspects, the shadow can also consist of collective factors that stem from a source outside the individual’s personal life. When an individual makes an attempt to see his shadow, he becomes aware of (and often ashamed of) those qualities and impulses he denies in himself but can plainly see in other people-such things as egotism, mental laziness, and sloppiness; unreal fantasies, schemes, and plots; carelessness and cowardice; inordinate love of money and possessions-in short, all the little sins about which he might previously have told himself: “That doesn’t matter; nobody will notice it, and in any case other people do it too.”

If you feel an overwhelming rage coming up in you when a friend reproaches you about a fault, you can be fair1y sure that at this point you will find a part of your shadow, of which you are unconscious. It is, of course, natural to become annoyed when others who are “no better” criticize you because of shadow faults.

Joseph Henderson, Jungian Analyst

There may come a point when the lay observer lurches back from being enthralled by the amazing conspiracy freak-a-thon. He asks himself: ‘What is so compelling–to you–about the garden variety magical participation you’re chewing up (your) valuable time voyeuristically looking upon?”

The main thing for me is that a robust socio-psycho-historical snapshot has to have enough depth of field in it to capture the background where the shadow of regressive dynamics comes into resolution. As phenomenologist, this interests me. So, looking into such a picture, an embarrassment of super loopy psycho-dynamic riches is revealed. Ummm, wordplay intended.

Did you know Orly Taitz is outside-looking in on the main birther action these days?

This is not to take anything away from her own scary-thon. Follow this story at TPM to her recent filing.

The central action in the Birtherama is cut between TerriK at her blog Missstickly, and, naturalborncitizen, and, investigatingobama. The interpretation of various ‘findings’ shifts over time, yet, at the moment, they’re mostly converging on a delicate (and irrational,) parsing of statements made by Hawaii Health Director Chiyome L. Fukino, MD. Incredibly, this interpretation underpins the birther’s rebuttal of the conspiracy insult. It seems, there is a plain truth, and that it will seep through the perceived ambiguities discoverable in Hawaiian bureaucrat’s slips! The basic, current line is: Hawaii, were it operating under the more sensible law of Nevada, would be compelled to release documents that verify their own existence, and verify the claim that these same records demonstrate that the so-called long form birth certificate either exists, or, some other holding record was at some time created and/or amended.

The point being: that Hawaiian law may provide for this discovery, and, that Dr. Fukino has already goofed and provided birthers with a loophole big enough to drive a truck-of-discovery through. …completely nuts.

Then there is the swine flu virus and/or vaccination conspiracy. Any galloping conspiracy earns its spurs at such point that hyper crackpot Alex Jones takes an interest. With the virus flu paranoia, Jones was an early adapter.

The first comment under the above article (from April 2009,) is paradigmatic:

That is what people can do to get the ball rolling, connect the dots A-Z, making the evidence disturbing and truth, put in the info in peoples faces so they cannot deny what is happening, then there would be a public outcry in the millions or billions to deal with these scum, thats what needs to happen, educate your fellow man, its not safe to wait for there solution any longer, you, your loved ones, your family, and virtually anyone you know (the police, the military, the politicians, the general people) except for the select will all be affected when things go down, its in everyones interest except the selects to expose these things. Help save others and in so doing you might save yourself, our strength is to win the intellectual battle and cause an outcry for them to be tried and if convicted thrown in prison, thats what you do with the criminals in your society, accountability for their actions will lead them to prison if you connect the dots and convince people.

Also from April 2009:

August, under the title Mandatory H1N1 Swine Flu Forced Vaccinations – NWO Depopulation Program COMING SOON

Several main iterations of the plot are in play. First is that the swine flu itself is deliberately being ‘seeded’ in the population so as to feed a pandemic and eventual takeover of the western governments by agents of the NWO. Second, is that the vaccination program in the USA is actually an op aimed to selectively thin the ‘opposition’. Third, is that the vaccination will be mandatory and will require the establishment of conditions enabled so as to enforce said mandate, and end the ‘republic.’

Yet these three scenarios all swirl about the vortex proposed to instantiate the draining of ‘liberty’. I’ll reprise my view on the object relations that inhere to this: the subject possesses the part object of ‘liberty’ and screams that a predatory ‘new world order’ is going to rip away and repossess it. In other words, it’s an infantile psychological position. I suppose also there is a definitive liberty involved in internalizing an anticipated deprivation, but it’s thin, albeit highly charged. It’s certainly not the inalienable freedom (given by Frankl,) or the existential reconciliation with mortality offered by Ernst Becker. It’s not the conditional liberty given by Tom Paine et al.

No, it’s unconditional; thus it’s more interesting as psychological manifestation and as a social construct mediated by a kind of charismatic echo chamber. Collect together enough regression, ordinate it to inchoate fear of loss of genital power and efficacious identity, and, presto!, “America” needs to be taken back from the repo men cum ur-repo man, the Manchurian candidate–President Obama.

Given these shadowy collective psycho-dynamics, President Obama, is felt by fearful proponents of resistance (to the ‘end of America’) to be the blackest of predatory fathers.

(Oddly, his predecessor was a puer and somewhat immunized from this same content (of projective identification. Although, truth be told, the main money-grubbing conspiracy collectives were busy enough during Bush’s administration: after all, the Bush family had already obtained iconic status as tri-lateralists, Nazi sympathizers, and NWO-directed scoundrels.)

Yet, President Obama offers a much more blank screen. It would seem, if one is paranoid enough to feel his hand close to one’s cajones, he’d be the dark messiah come out of nowhere to cut off resistor’s–pardon me–balls of liberty.

Always, in retrospect, top American leaders in every instance—in our era where symbol and sign and mythologem and sticky tenplate for imago are pushed instantly to the screen—turn out to have been ideally configured for the purpose of having split-off, blackened contents ‘projectively’ attached to them. Regressive paranoia is, in this respect, flexible and always able to morph to fit the disdained objects!

Finally, last and in some ways least, is the growth of conspiratorial imagination evoked by the arrival of American Private Police Force in—of all places—Hardin, Montana. TPM is tracking this very amusing side-show. Here’s a search feed for TPM using “Hardin.” The action starts on 9-30-2009.

Before I plug in a spectacular source for the imaginings, I’ll give my own provisional take on what APPF was up to vis-a-vis Hardin, Montana. My tentative opinion is that APPF identified a mark, concocted a plan, and aimed to establish a footjold in the security-industrial complex. I suppose this in turn is aimed at grabbing some quick paydays from other marks in the future. Anyway, to support their merchandising, APPF threw together a web site, and slotted into it both provincial and extravagant claims about the company’s capabilities. They also both made explicit claims, and hinted, about credentials and company history. What they didn’t plan for was the web site, and the contract with Hardin, coming under scrutiny.

My speculation is troubled however. It’s hard to fathom this op coming to be lucrative for APPF.

Meanwhile, on September 29, unknown persons start up the American Police Force web site. It uses the blog format. It’s first posting explains:

About Us
We are FightingTyranny.com also (www.AmericanPoliceFORCE.net) if you are looking for the American Police Force talked about in the media, their official website is: www.AmericanPoliceGroup.com

In addition to fighting Globalism and the Privatization of our police departments and prisons, we are also dedicated to fighting tyranny by exposing Jack booted thugs also known as the many militarized and violent Law enforcement and Paramilitary (both private and public) personnel that are oppressing and abusing innocent citizens. This includes those thugs who subvert our constitutional right to assembly and protest, our right to keep and bear arms, and our right to not submit to illegal search and seizure.

We don’t hate all cops and we don’t hate our military, however, we do hate those who abuse their power and who refuse to turn in their fellow abusive officers.

If you are a Cop and consider yourself one of the “good guys” and are sickened by the videos that we post on this site, and if you’re fed up with writing excessive tickets just to fund your state or local government, then consider joining a group like Oathkeepers and have the courage to turn in and arrest your fellow officers who abuse their power and authority. If you are too cowardly to do that, then quit and turn in your badges. Remember, YOU work for us! There is not enough room in this country for both us growing number of Pissed Off citizens and you Jack booted thugs. Don’t Ever forget, We outnumber you!

Yippee! That didn’t take long. This leads to, today, the following.

American Private Police Force Logo: Possible ties to Illuminati and Freemasonry

We’ve dug up a little more information here, I’ll do more research as I get time, but check this out. It seems that the Coat of Arms in question has ties to the Illuminati and the House of Rothchild as well as similarities to a the Scottish Rite of Freemasonry.

That didn’t take long. . .at all!

This video compilation, courtesy of TPM Media and Blip.tv, takes the cake. It’s fascinating, but not for its argument. Several things jump out. One, is the lawyer’s name, Gary Kreep two, is the golden hair of the moderator; three, is the pitch for $30.

More seriously, there is the crazed wish for an inversion of our country’s legal process. The idea is that the lack of evidence of law breaking nevertheless makes it incumbent on the President to prove his innocence of a crime–for which there is zero evidence of its having been committed.

Obviously, our legal system doesn’t work this way.

Still, the birther accusation is fit to the basic structure of a conspiracy theory. Advocates of the theory are sure they possess the truth. They’re also sure that most of those not in possession of it are complicit by way of apathy, ignorance, or willful participation. And, both the lack of evidence and falsification of (their) purported evidence are negated because those aspects are part of the conspiracy. These are the stock-in-trade elements of any conspiracy theory.

It’s interesting to ponder whether or not there has ever come about in history a conspiracy uncovered by a vocal minority in possession of truth, and truths about all those who deny the material facts of the conspiracy. Waging a good fight, this conspiratorial truth is eventually demonstrated by verification of the offered evidence, falsification of the counter evidence, falsification of the falsification. The dim evidence evolves to be dispositive and evolves to certify the original claim beyond any reasonable doubt, based in a preponderance of evidence.

Finally, there came to be the uncovering of the willfully complicit. Concerning the last feature, this means discovery of the organization and mechanics behind the willful complicity. This massive industrial complicity is implied in the birther theory, is paramount to the truthers, comes to a magical and esoteric turn in the long-standing ‘illuminatiarian’ global banking conspiracy theories.

Hmmm. No. There is no such historical example. Perhaps, the greatest conspiracies throughout world history nobody knows about, and they have not aroused any suspicion whatsoever.

Continuing from the earlier post What the Wind Blows, presenting a schema of Four Orders given as a phenomenological device. (This device captures the diversification of awareness about one’s own behavior–it ranges from the unconscious yet singularly aware First Order, to the conscious and singularly aware Second Order, to the conscious and aware-with-choice Third Order, to the conscious and aware-with-reasons-for-choosing Fourth Order.)

This general scheme may be extended to also frame a view of belief about any person’s relationships to the world. And this is extended to, specifically, belief as awareness about the objects (and objectification,) given by social aspects of the world.

Second Order – Singular; “This is what I believe!”

Third Order – Multiple; “This is what I believe, but, from other perspectives, what I believe looks different.”

Fourth Order – Multiple; This is what I believe, but I understand why I believe this–rather than some other thing. And, so, I can also see how I might come to believe this some other thing.

Note: the more diverse, the more ambivalent; the more diverse, the more available are possible choices of what to believe. Ambivalence, divergences, searching for other possible perspectives, (etc.) may work together to, in a sense, “de-certify” the absolute, non-ambivalent, convergent, certainties.

Strong Second Order features are found in the current political discourse. It tends toward singular testaments of certainty. Roughly, First and Second Order positions do not obtain the cognitive complexity inherent in Third and Fourth Orders. Second Order beliefs (or positions,) seem, in effect, programmed, and seem to converge on the program.

Someone protests,

“They are trying to steal my liberties, and, my country from me!”

In this statement of protest there are three objects: they, liberties and country. The latter two are possessed as such by the subject. Nevertheless this possession is subject to being nullified by “they.”

Consider, if you can, what it would feel like inside to possess liberty and country, and, in feeling this, also feel the deprivation were one dispossessed of same. Consider also what it would feel like to have a much looser, less associated, relationship with objects such as these.

Contemplate what are the implications of the objects discoverable as features of the belief of the sign carrier above. Do this just from considering what are the possible implications given by the photograph.

What I find gripping is to consider the object relations found in Second Order belief. This is to suggest how the combination of certainty and splitting work to support single-minded beliefs.

Conspiracy. Almost all conspiracy-mindedness reflects reduction to a singular perspective, certainty, and, require casting split-off parts, in effect, ‘away’ from the highly charged core certainties. 

Second Order belief may be very bad at evaluating evidence. Birthers, young earth and intelligent design creationists, 9-11 conspiratoids, each showcase how bad they are at this, but, at the same time, each are–in different ways–obsessed with evidence too. In this, the splitting dynamic is obvious.

Face-to-face with Second Order belief provides an opportunity to drill down and learn if there exists any fragile level of depressive ambivalence. At such a level, anchoring of the ‘First Order” belief may be tenuous because the belief is no longer rooted in the unequivocal solid ground of certainty. However, often this level is not accessible.

I find people’s fears to be poignant. It’s ironic when people’s fears are characterized as being irrational, when such a characterization itself is Second Order–comes from a singular evaluation rather than any possible alternative. A person’s belief that the governmental ‘object’ will dispossess he or she of their ‘liberty’ object is rational at the level of what is true for the particular object relations. It’s as if liberty can be stripped away. Thus, this prospect of dispossession feels frightening.

In this respect, the move to a more cognitive complex order is poignant, as is the First and Second Order fearfulness also poignant.

First Order awareness is automatic, and not directed. If you ever have driven a car and noted at some point that you ‘were on automatic,’ and then been amazed at this lack of consciousness about being a driver, you’re recalling what it feels like to be on automatic, in, as-it-were, First Order awareness. “I barely remember consciously driving to work today! I was thinking about something else, pre-occupied.”

Second Order awareness adds to this awareness of what you are doing. A good example is learning how to ride a bike, where–at the beginning–the new rider has to consciously turn against the tilt out of balance. This is conscious attention paid to what you are doing. This awareness has a very narrow focus. It’s not optional.

Third Order awareness adds to this additional modes for awareness. In the example of driving, this means what else you might do, be aware of, while driving. I term this choice heuristic to reflect how multiple modes are balanced by knowing their prior dynamic via experience. Acquired rules of thumb facilitate this balancing act. For example, some drivers figure out how to have cell phone conversations while driving, and balance attention to this with attention to driving.

Fourth Order awareness adds to this an ability to choose modes of awareness by virtue of having made a prior coherent differentiation of available modes and their effective differential application. The difference between Third/Fourth Order phases is a matter of degree, yet the hallmark of Fourth Order is this critical differentiation. This would acknowledge, for example, that driving while phoning incurs a probalistic downside.

Fourth Order awareness basically means: being able to match awareness with optimal requirements for effective deployment of awareness. And, do this from a coherent ensemble of choices for being aware. And, be able to explain what one does to both differentiate and select.

Finally, to complete this model, (or schema,) there are mediating and liminal phases between the orders. There is a good example of this. Emotional intelligence, itself a repertoire for meeting the goal requirements of an interpersonal interaction, exists at the beginning of conscious development of one’s own intelligent responsiveness. At the beginning it exists as a choice-heuristic. Later this develops into choice-differentiated; thus moves choice from being the result of a rule of thumb to being the result of very particular, and in some ways formal, differentiation of optimal choice. Such a choice is made from a coherent ensemble, i.e. repertoire.

Yet, this move is sometimes articulated in a fuzzy move between Third and Fourth Order. One feature is common to Fourth order awareness. It instantiates motivation to search out more effective and possibly optimal modes of awareness. In other words, there is a gain to be realized in expanding one’s ensemble of choices. So, one is not satisfied with only the repertoire of “rules of thumb.”

This can be further understood, when stretched between the entire First-to-Fourth range, as making the move from automatic, knee-jerk responses to responses forged from being able to make a conscious selection from a repertoire of possible responses. Given this sense, the move from Third Order to Fourth Order selection procedures reflects a substantial enhancement and individuation of critical consciousness.

Again, differentiation and individuation imply here the ability to explain why one choice is superior to some other choice.

We’ll move next, in a follow-up post, to examples and applications in both negative and positive terms, and we’ll use the current environment of political discourse to do so.

“However saying that, I don’t know if the “group” consciousness actually manages to effect a real conscious change in both individuals and in groups. Are these things of the moment?”

Let’s just speak of a simple hypothesis: that a group is possibly a medium for an individual to increase their awareness. There are, in this, several things we’ll need to test the hypothesis.

One, we’ll need a developmental framework that can support both the proof of the hypothesis and its falsification.

Two, given this framework, we’ll need to employ explicit criteria to make a determination about both how to test and next evaluate the results of the test. And, finally we’ll need to grapple and grip with how to interpret the evaluation.

There’s a crucial distinction I’d like to introduce. A hypothesis of this sort is concerned with the development of consciousness of an individual within a group due to the unique opportunities for this development a group may instantiate. Yet this potential for development is not proposed as a positive result of group consciousness, but, rather, is the result of people bringing their personal consciousness to the medium of a group. In noting this, all I suggesting is that consciousness is only a property of individuals; that it would be very hard to characterize what is meant by group consciousness in any normative sense.

As it has come about–in modern psychology–short of defining a framework, there are concrete terms for characterizing the development of consciousness in the medium of a group. For example, these are some of the developments afforded by groups: better teamwork, closer coordination, acceptance of and mitigation of narcissistic and infantile needs, enhanced problem analysis and problem solving, better skills for discernment and differentiation, support for withdrawal of projections, etc.. and on and on.

Also, groups make possible at times the submission of self-oriented egoic impulses to higher orders of awareness, including facilitating recognition and ownership of the shadow. So it is, to use one broad developmental mode, that an individual in a group may leverage the means for increasing their emotional intelligence.

***

I believe all sorts of artistic teams in music and dance and theatre brings lots of unique developmental potential into being. These provide excellent examples, but so do all sorts of other common groups. One such group would be–at their best–the formal or informal classroom.

Of course, my sense here presumes that consciousness itself is not a mountain to be climbed, but instead operationalizes real world capabilities. In short, to become more able at anything poses a developmental increase.

The only move toward spiritualization, would be to suppose that all such developmental increases are qualities of higher consciousness given a timeworn notion of spiritual development–when those better capabilities do no harm.

A sign-system such as a natural language is not an input-output system of encodings and decodings for the transmission of contents from one mind to another. Instead, it is a normative and conventional resource consisting of semiotically salient differentiation-types for producing, acting on and transforming situation conventions and the cognitive representations that people have of the situations in which these conventions operate. Paul J. Thibault

Hat tip to eldon, my Netdynam colleague, for hipping me to the book Brain, Mind and the Signifying Body, by the semiotician Paul J. Thibault. It fits into a funny reflexive picture, because I’m reading my friend Heward Wilkinson’s The Muse As Therapist, and, trying to pare away time to keep two different music-making projects percolating. Then Thibault pops into the frame. Really, Heward and Paul should get to know each other someway other than in my tiny mind!

Which is to say, it’s probably been years since I set up two wondrously knotty books by my night stand. (I don’t recommend trading off between Heidegger and Husserl as I once tried to do.) Oh, and to make this picture complete, Bra Ken, generously sent me the back issues of his literary chap House Organ. This does make dr.p’s head spin when I can’t decide what looking glass I’m going to pick up.

Group Entry Norming Matrix (Posted to the Netdynamics 2.0 group blog, Group Entry Schema.

My colleague, Eldon, and me enter into a dialog in the comments. This dialog points toward this:

Cognitive Construal Vectors

Anybody conversant with social psychology will note the conventions captured in this schema. The schema does not represent formalized theory-making. It simply depicts a way of looking at the conjunction of the egocentric/stereotypic conventions. (Hmmm, I shall coin a term, egotypic, less confusing to me than egocentric given the latter’s numerous meanings.)

I’ll be referring to and saying more about Netdynam 2.0. It is an offshoot of the Netdynamics email discussion list, of which I have been a spiky participant for 13+ years. If you’re interested in interdisciplinary, transdisciplinary, or, oh yeah, post-disciplinary, wandering through the mashed fields of depth/social/group/personality psychology, and linguistics, and applied semiotics, and ecosemiosis, and, disruptive poetics, and the internet and Web 2.0, you can peruse the offerings, and, maybe give our tiny crew a pinch or two.

Gordon Knox, director of the global initiatives project at Stanford University’s Humanities Lab could be considered an instigator of the “post-professional” meme as it applies to the commons and articulations of knowledge and experience on the internet.

article: If Corporations Could Paint (Forbes)

Over on our, (being the Netdynam email discussion group,) new group project blog, Netdynam 2.0, I’ve posted Knox’s video, Darwin, web 2.0 and the Role of the Amateur.

One of Gladwell’s main points is concerned with behaviors on the flight deck which undermine real time judgment, communication between flight crew members, and, objectivity and interpretation of circumstances.

When I turned on the TV and happened upon the unfolding story of US Airways flight 1549, it became clear right away that the flight crew on the Airbus 320 were also outliers, having ditched a heavy airliner in the Hudson River without serious injuries.

At the same time I noted the gathering heroic interpretation of what was presumed to have happened in under four minutes between take-off and watery landing. The details of what actually happened will soon be known, but I’d like to highlight the role of flight engineer and co-pilot Jeff Skiles. I would be shocked to learn, especially after Gladwell’s account, that he didn’t play an equally saving role to that of the instantly legendary, pilot and air crew captain, Chesley Sully Sullenberger.

The work of Karl Weick, one of my main guys, comes to mind too. Sullenberger has a sideline company, Safety Reliability Methods, Inc. On the about page is this:

Safety Reliability Methods, Inc. (SRM) was created to apply the latest advances in safety and high performance and high reliability processes to organizations in a variety of fields.

Many of these advances have their genesis in the ultra-safe world of commercial aviation. Others have been developed as a result of studies of high-risk, high performance environments such as aircraft carrier flight deck operations and the energy industry.

When these techniques are applied on an organizational and individual basis, they create a robust, error-trapping system that significantly benefits the bottom line.

Weick invented the discipline of sensemaking in social psychology. One of his books is titled, Managing the Unexpected. I’ll look forward to Dr. Weick’s weighing in on the elegant case of flight 1549. A lot had to go right and the management of all the vectors of event, sense, decision, and response, no doubt, was a two person affair in the cockpit, and a collaboration elsewhere on the jet as it came to a rest south of East 40th street.

Questioning the efficacy of experience begs the questions: “what is meant by experience; what are the relations of experience to capability; what–for you–are the optimal benefits of experience?”

My informal surveys reveal that most people have never thought in any sophisticated way about the nature and benefits of experience. In fact, most people adhere to quaint (and false) hydraulic notions about experience. A hydraulic notion posits that experience literally inputs capability, thus more experience provides for more capability.

It is worth noting that the question, ‘what are the optimal benefits of experience’ will tend to evoke responses about performative quality. In other words, if experience is considered to be primary to development, then the goals of experience are performance, capability and future capable performance.

If you read this and sense that ‘optimal experience’ must play a part, rather than ‘any old experience,’ then you are on the way to putting experience in its proper relation to capability.

From the perspective of my own folk psychological prejudices, were someone to ask me what the nature of experience is with respect to anticipating the capability of a candidate, I would begin my answer with this:

A person’s robust, or not, navigation through life events will allow for the development of capabilities. Those capabilities will combine abilities of perception and construal, knowledge, rehearsed adaptive responses, affectual factors, features of cognitive complexity, heuristical routines, novel routines. Also impressed upon performative behavior will be tacit, subconcious, and implicit factors.

There is nothing about experience alone that provides for specific developmental impacts. If it’s not experience alone, how might we describe the certain kind of experiences which impact the development of capability and the performance effectiveness? I’m implying here that capabilities are developed by complex processes that are not generated by experience by itself.

I’ll mention two broad categories of experience. First is intentional pedagogic or andragogic learning. Their fruits would construct and support knowledge and other capable features. I’m deferring from a richer conception. I’ll set this aside but acknowledge that one point of experience is to learn by using experience to learn.

The second, among many forms of experience, is doing a task under a high cognitive load. Alternately, this is described as performing a task for which a requisite demand is a cognitively complex demand. The task is hard because its cognitive demands are challenging. Here’s a technical description: a cognitive system’s intention within a problem space must construct productive responses so as to obtain a solution and meet the implicit goal of the problem space. To understand how to generate a solution is, broadly speaking, the developmental goal of this type of experience.

Here’s a description from Raab and Gigerenzer, (2003: Intelligence As Smart Heuristics)

Intelligence is thought of as an assembly of “factors,” either one (g), a few, or many. This tool-driven metaphor (factor analysis) has its limits because it does not describe how cognition translates into behavior. We propose a new view of intelligence that provides the missing link in terms of heuristics. Human intelligence, in our view, is modeled by an adaptive toolbox that contains building blocks for heuristics to direct search for information, to stop search, and to make a decision. Smart search rules describe how people find the few relevant pieces of information, in memory or in the outside world. Stopping rules describe a primary function of cognition, to ignore or discard irrelevant information. Decision rules translate the information searched in memory or in the outside world into behavior, such as what profession to choose or what products to buy. The adaptive toolbox embodies an ecological, not logical, view of rational behavior. The building blocks can be recombined to form new heuristics, which are rational to the degree that they are adapted to the structure of environments in which they are employed.

Framed by social psychology and concerned with interpersonal knowledge, here’s Burleson and Caplan (1998: Cognitive Complexity)

Research comparing experts and novices on a variety of information processing tasks has found that experts are better able to: (a) develop detailed, discriminating representations of phenomena (e.g., Lurigio & Carroll, 1985), (b) recall information from memory quickly (e.g., Smith, Adams, & Schorr, 1978), (c) organize schema-consistent information quickly (e.g,. Pryor & Merluzzi, 1985), (d) notice, recall, and use schema-inconsistent information (e.g., Bargh & Thein, 1985; Borgida & DeBono, 1989), and (e) resolve apparent discrepancies between schema-consistent and schema-inconsistent information (e.g., Fiske, Kinder, & Larter, 1983). These expert-novice differences correspond closely to contrasts distinguishing those who are more and less cognitively complex. For example, compared to those having less complex systems, persons with complex systems of interpersonal constructs: (a) form more detailed and organized impressions of others (e.g., Delia et al., 1974), (b) are better able to remember impressions of others (e.g., B. O’Keefe, Delia, & O’Keefe, 1977), (c) are better able to resolve inconsistencies in information about others (e.g., Press, Crockett, & Delia, 1975), (d) learn complex social information quickly (e.g., Delia & Crockett, 1973), and (e) use multiple dimensions of judgment in making social evaluations (e.g., Shepherd & Trank, 1992). These results suggest that interpersonal cognitive complexity is properly viewed as indexing individual differences in social information processing capacity.

Finally, distinctions between second order ‘I shall do what I do’ and third order ‘how shall I determine what I shall do?’ speak to the increase in complexity between automatic or habitual performance-in-response-to-a-task, and, fitting a rehearsed range of responses drawn from a repertoire or a novel, (ie. experimental,) response to a task; this developed through active experimentation.

It’s this very last element that is unlikely to be revealed in an elicitation, (framed by folk psychology and evoked as phenomenological answer,) of what are crucial performative, solution-oriented capabilities.

Politics. Experimental capability may not be a component of policy given by ‘experience.’. For example, even though the results of the supply side experiment are in, and its distinctive risk management features are well known, we might then do well to discount a claim to economic experience based in the wish to do such an experiment once again. (After all, the overt hypotheses have been falsified.) So, it is perhaps time to do other kinds of cognitively complex (so-to-speak) economic experiments.

This points in the direction of capability, not mere experience; capable policy trumps ‘experienced’ policy. I don’t want to know who is superior in experience, I want to know who is superior in capability, and, who won’t do failed experiments again.

This is analogous to a shopper’s behavior. How much time does a shopper spend in deciding what tomato in a pile of tomatoes will provide the biggest payoff in return for their investment of “selection” time? Why is it that a given shopper will select several candidate tomatoes And then from this selection decide on a single tomato?

We enter, here, into the realm of behavioral economics. Although it must be true that in a given display of tomatoes one tomato (presumably) is objectively and certainly the best tomato, in fact, given a maximum amount of time to make the choice, a shopper will instead opt to deploy a practiced heuristic so as to dramatically cut their time investment. The shopper does this while, at the same time, they expect this lesser time is the appropriate time to invest toward realizing the ‘great tomato’ payoff. Spending more time is not worth it.

Take this thought problem: you pull fifty people off the street and line them up in front of a display of tomatoes and a display of apples. You then give each an opportunity to select one tomato or apple. Most people will invest very little time in deciding whether they go for a tomato or an apple. Their pick between the two will turn out to simply be a matter of their foregone preference. Given the choice between the two, each person will go for what they already prefer and then employ their favored rule of thumb.

However, for some it will be a hard choice between the two. They will be ambivalent to some degree. The considerable differences between tomato and apple in such cases are not instrumentally decisive differences. In this group, some might ask to check out both before they commit to one or the other.

Returning to voter behavior, what would you guess is the situation given voters who cannot decide between the tomato of Obama and the apple of McCain?

I’d like to offer several hypotheses about this group.

1. Having no strong foregone preference, most members of this group are likely not to spend a lot of time making their decision.

2. Some members of this group approach their decision not as if it is between a tomato and an apple, but rather is between two examples more similar than different.

Is it likely that persons who are willing to spend a lot of time investigating differences between options, nevertheless also more disposed toward a foregone preference?

If 15% of a national electorate are undecided, and this group is given as the portion of the electorate upon which the election will turn, is it then the case that elections turn upon persons who will invest the least amount of time in deciding between two candidates?

Consider what might be involved in a voter’s having to decide between Obama and McCain. Since the policy positions between the two are mostly stark, what other features of the candidates would blur those difference and reinforce a voter’s ambivalence?

There are cases for which substantial policy differences are not instrumentally decisive. If someone can’t decide between Obama and McCain, it is very likely that their ambivalence vectors around something other than policy differentials.

(I spend a lot of time researching various data in the political realm. However, as far as my voting behavior goes, where I feel my time is worth investing in deciding who among the democratic apples is the apple of my eye, it is for me a foregone conclusion that I will vote for a democrat. I rush to the apple display! I will also spend a lot of time researching, as a matter of opposition intelligence, the opposing republican. And, I would suppose that my total time invested puts me in a marginal group, investment-wise; say in the group of people who spend 5+ hours a week investigating political information. One mitigating behavioral factor suggested by this is that the extra time invested after I’ve made my decision does not increase the possibility of a greater return. From this it could be suggested that a much greater ratio of return is gained by the person who invests almost no time in making their decision. However, keep in mind this low time cost is also attachable to a low expectation of return, and so there is the extreme represented by most non-voters, no time cost-expectation of zero return.)

[See: Libertarian Paternalism Is Not An Oxymoron Cass R. Sunstein; Richard H. Thaler

Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness
by Richard H. Thaler, Cass R. Sunstein

review of above: Economics: Which Way for Obama? By John Cassidy; NY Review of Books; June 8, 2008]

Darnit! On the other hand, voting behavior may be largely driven by effects due to implicit (unconscious) processes. In which case, the time sunk by undecided voters may be commensurate with what is necessary to efficiently confirm their bias. If so, such voter’s ambivalence could be termed pseudo-ambivalence.

“Undecided” Voters’ Minds Already Made Up, Study Says

Of more interest to me is the reactions Expelled promotes in the neighborhoods of the blogosphere where the defense of evolutionary biology has long been a central commitment. This is interesting to me because after making the unexceptional and strong arguments against evolution’s non-scientific competitors and the rotting pseudo-philosophy underpinning those competitors, pro-evolution forces’ approach to persuasion unravel when the subjects are either ones of social psychology or scientific literacy.

Partly this is simply because the logical focus of scientific persuasion is different than the logical focus of generic rhetoric and persuasion. But the reasons so many people adapt so many unscientific stances are researchable. And those reasons defeat the commonsense arguments of the defenders of science, and atheism, not because they are more correct reasons but because they are more believable.

In the province of the mind, what one believes to be true is true or becomes true, within certain limits to be found experientially and experimentally. These limits are further beliefs to be transcended. In the mind, there are no limits. (John Lilly, Programming and Meta-programing in the Human Biocomputer; 1972).

Thus people do tend to be ‘experientialists,’ limited to the best belief a person is capable of. The questions which can fruitfully be addressed by the public intellectual cum scientist leverage the problem posed by Lilly. This is a problem of learning rather than it being a problem of persuasive propaganda.

Pragmatically this problem is about whether or not the given current limit, as it were, can be transcended. The least likely population to learn differently is the population most fixated on the believed truth they happen to be, in effect, fused to. This goes for the scientifically-minded too!

The most likely population to learn is the population for whom the believed truth is most fragile and most likely to be changed.

The comments of the science progress blog are much more interesting than Chris Mooney’s review of Expelled. I contributed the following:

“Smart tactics might be optimally supported by an understanding about the cognitive and social psychological features that tend to reinforce the truth claims of belief against other kinds of truth claims.

This requires much better listening, analysis and targeting. This seems to me to be much more about teaching and teachability than it is about mastery of the ‘science’ of propaganda.“

Mr. Obama got himself in a lot of hot water recently when he waxed ‘anthropologically’ in just such an informal, subjective mode.

He answered a questioner with these now infamous remarks:

But the truth is, is that, our challenge is to get people persuaded that we can make progress when there’s not evidence of that in their daily lives. You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. So it’s not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.

The offered stereotype probably does fit some people, but the error in anthropology, (Aside from the tactical error,) was described neatly by Obama, his choice of words was “inartful.”

My experience is folk anthropology is almost always at least inartful, artless. The reason is that there really isn’t any presumptive method other than what kinds of descriptions can be made to hang together out of both experience and other received data. And, it gets kicked along uncritically and often prejudices and biases and logical faults of attribution bang one’s findings into new and oft ridiculous shape.

A higher order folk anthropology would remain subjective but would be leavened by a critical sensibility. My sense is this is a skills set that can be taught and I’ve done so, yet lacking even an ability to focus on rich data rather than surface data, it is no surprise poor data gets reduced to stereotypes.

Although Obama has been advised by hundreds that, next time, his social analysis should be expressed as a matter of empathy, I’d go farther and suggest that any anthropological insights be rendered in as rich and nuanced a description as possible given the context.

His faulted remarks don’t exist at the vaunted level–in a negative sense–of the truly cynical and condescending anthropological musings of the pundits. They, to a man and a woman, are always standing up for, “Joe Six Pack.”  I’m confident the descriptions underneath this term would be appallingly incorrect. I see no evidence that the punditry has even the slightest clue about what’s going on with most people outside the pundit’s obvious bubble. Bubbles. Elitist bubbles.

As soon as Obama was taken to task for calling people bitter, the punditry weighed in with what these same people were going to feel in response to being called bitter. At least Obama has some data to go on! But the punditry traffics in all sorts of “ur-stereotypes” and so it was both not surprising and shocking to hear almost every cable commentator, and Mrs. Clinton, repeat Obama’s mistake by suggesting they knew how the subject in fact ticks. B.S.

The crucial practice of informal anthropology is careful inquiry unhooked from any of the biases which can be identified and ‘put away’ prior to the inquiry. The point is to reduce the influence of the filtering grid one normally interposes in an informal inquiry, i.e. how one comes to know by coming to ask. Any worthwhile inquiry done over 10 to 30 minutes will reveal the human subject to almost always be complicated in affect, cognition, and overall configuration. The point of a focused inquiry is to discern and differentiate particularity and then piece together the human operations and higher levels of order and at larger scales.

This is too much to ask of politicians of course. Still, most tossed-away ‘ethnography’ in the commons and in public discourse is worse than Obama’s attempt to highlight an actual socioeconomic predicament and its affectual and routine consequences.

As for elitism, it’s not so simple; J.K. Galbraith wrote in 1971:

Among all the world’s races, some obscure Bedouin tribes possibly apart, Americans are the most prone to misinformation. This is not the consequence of any special preference for mendacity, although at the higher levels of their public administration that tendency is impressive. It is rather that so much of what they themselves believe is wrong.

Over at Colonel Pat Lang’s blog, Sic Semper Tyrannis 2008, one of the handful of blogs I read as a matter of routine, a fascinating post, Kristol On Obama (2/25), and comments popped up over the question of who might be the most qualified nominee for the Democratic Party. I posted a comment that survived about six hours. I have nothing but respect for Colonel Lang’s moderating abilities, but don’t really know why my thought got kibboshed. In any case, my point was simple enough: if one really wants to drill down into voter preferences, you’re going to be soon framing the inquiry in terms of the constituent features of how it is people define and devise their preferences, and, eventually should this inquiry become detailed, you’re going to be speaking of social cognition and cognitive complexity.

An inquiry such as this stands in contrast to the much dimmer position of trying to understand why people opt for a preference (unlike one’s own) by using one’s own process of, as it were, preference-making as the means for analysis. Of course this happens all the time: ‘My decision is correct and all those who are incorrect don’t know how to correctly decide.’

Because Barack Obama’s popularity has evoked descriptive language ranging from his supporters being a movement to their being a cult, William Kristol decided to do some psychologizing. Colonel Lang picked up on this. My own sense is that Kristol is a terrible psychologizer and Colonel Lang, alas, latched onto a straw man. (As it might be said: Kristol didn’t go to primary sources materials.) Still, it is worthwhile to consider how this so-called movement is made up of various social psychological moving parts. But what are its parts?

Luckily, I’m unable to do this because I have neither the expertise or the data. However, I do know several things about how the movement could be broken down so it could be analyzed and better understood as social psychological phenomena.

You have to ask people why they support Obama. Do this first as a means of directing the inquiry toward the actual richness underneath the so-called summing movement. Assuming that the generalization is supported by the thick part of a Bell Curve is unreasonable if you can’t back up the offered generalization at its magnitude.

(Kristol’s psychologizing was risible and bogus even as an assertion about sub-group affectual motives.)

On a busy day at the grocery store, it looks like a movement to get through the check out line. At the same time, each shopper’s basket tells a different story. The admixture of different agendas, intents, preferences, taken as a single thing looks as a movement would look, and at the same time, is also a loose amalgam of many moving parts. It is varied and so earns being understood as a matter of these parts being differentiated.

It is unlikely that similar dynamics aren’t also in play in the campaign of Hillary Clinton. This hypothesis is researchable. Short of doing the research, my informed guess is based on how gigantic is the sample given by the magnitude of the group of each candidate’s supporters. Because the group-at-large is enormous in size, it could be expected that within each group there are sub-groups moved either by largely feeling-toned reasons or largely thinking-toned reasons.

This suggestion simply points in the direction of each group having as sub-groups groups which represent aspects of the spectrum of possible modes of attraction (to the candidate.) Hidden in this suggestion is a more concrete suggestion: it can also be expected that the disposition of an individual voter would promote their being attracted to the other candidate, were they to shift allegiance, via the dispositive modality they happen to favor.

I ‘m for Obama. I’m unmoved by affectual appeal. I’m for Obama because my paramount issue is protecting the Constitution (against its being sundered.) Obama, as a liberal Constitutional scholar and ex-law professor, seems to me to have the high level ability to protect the Constitution and fight its being sundered. Were my support to shift, it would shift along dispositive lines having to do with my understanding how Hillary Clinton represents–in an appealing way–my thinking-toned interests.

It is possible, even likely, that Barack Obama offers more grip to the sub-group(s) which tend to offer allegiance based more in their own affectual dispositions. Yet, it would be a mistake to over-generalize this mode of appeal based only in the ability to make up (literally,) a case for this based in Obama’s language and the self-reports of only affect-based supporters.

In fact, it would possibly be a mistake to lump Obama’s cognitively elite supporters into the feeling-toned camp without gathering data in support of this move.

The narrative about Obama’s idealistic campaign does refer to its transformative rhetoric. As Colonel Lang wrote in his blog’s comment section,

I think it is a great mistake to ignore politicians’ rhetoric

Yes. But how one chooses to contextualize the language, grant significance, and posit ramifications, does not lend itself to a tidy analysis. Ironically, informal analysis might be prone to having its significance elevated magically; this against doing the legwork of thinking through the concrete variations in actual psychological appeal and voter preference-making; especially to analyze these at the individual cum sub-group levels of analysis. (Hmmm, thinking of Saussure here…)

However, it is doubly ironic that this false generalizing nevertheless offers up a ripe target-worthy generalization. There’s a kind of scapegoat effect: heart-felt support needs to be punished a bit. Even if all one can say about the mistaken generalization used for this purpose is: ‘it’s heartfelt!’