Debugging Democracy

Doc Searls — Thu, 05 Jan 2017 16:24:44 +0000

You had to be a crank to insist on being right. Being right was largely a matter of explanations. Intellectual man had become an explaining creature. Fathers to children, wives to husbands, lecturers to listeners, experts to laymen, colleagues to colleagues, doctors to patients, man to his own soul, explained. The roots of this, the causes of the other, the source of events, the history, the structure, the reasons why. For the most part, in one ear out the other. The soul wanted what it wanted. It had its own natural knowledge. It sat unhappily on superstructures of explanation, poor bird, not knowing which way to fly.—Saul Bellow, Mr. Sammler's Planet, 1969.

I began writing this column on November 9, 2016, on the balcony of a hotel in Istanbul, while a call to prayer echoed through the streets below. I took that as good advice, because a few hours earlier my country elected an Internet troll, Donald Trump, as its president Perhaps by now we're calling this day 11/9, in the mold of 9/11. I'm an optimistic guy, but color me pessimistic about where my country is now heading, led by a world-class narcissist.

And forgive me for obsessing not only about where this is going, but how we got here. Our country has been hacked, and that matters.

Disclosure: I'm a political independent, and not a fan of Hillary Clinton, though I thought she was the only sensible choice, given Trump's shortcomings, many of which should have disqualified him, flat out. But he won. Why?

I don't know, though I did see it coming. Mostly I felt it. Polls said one thing, my senses another. "We know more than we can tell", says Michael Polanyi. Evidence: most of the time we don't know how we'll end the sentences we start, or how we started the sentences we end. Yet we know what we're talking about. And if we succeed, another human being gathers our meaning, even though they can't repeat it verbatim.

To say something is to express some care about it. We also tend to hear what we like to hear more than what we don't, even if we welcome what might disagree with us. Those of us who work with logic (such as Linux Journal readers) have a high regard for the rational. But while logic and reason sit on the mental board of directors, emotions cast the deciding votes. As Bellow says, the soul wants what it wants.

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