I was listening to Dan Carlin's July 19th Common Sense podcast when he said something I've often thought about. The podcast was entitled The Inflexible Mind, and he talked about how some people are incapable of changing what they believe in. These are people that will not concede any points to someone that does not already agree with them. New facts or contradictory information is not even allowed into their minds. They have staked out an ideology and cannot be budged from it in the face of a reality that changes. I have often thought that this mental rigidity is similar to football fan mentality. Often when people watch their favorite team, every call by the referee is an affront to their team. When their own team members commit some blatant personal foul, they are silent, and seemed to not even notice.
The problem we have now in our political leadership is an insidious form of corruption that stems from the influence inherent in campaign contribution money in politics. Politicians care only about how to win the next election and will do anything to help their corporate interests that contribute to their campaigns. These same corporate interests are usually interested only in the next quarter's profits and are unable to look at their company should be run in the long term. Often, decisions are made that make this quarter or this year look good so corporate executives can get their bonus, but the decisions prove to be limiting or harmful to the company's long term interests. The question is how to get politicians and the people that elect them to look at what is best for the long term.
Often, we in the public that are electing these government officials are not even aware of everything that they are doing. It's easier to govern if you're not being second guessed by the public, and since you can decide what's public and what's classified, you can just classify anything that is potentially embarrassing or controversial. Secrecy is often used as cover for bad decisions. We are just now unclassifying some of the hidden events that got us into the Viet Nam War. The secrets coming out now are instructive, but they are too late to do us any good. We could have avoided the war in the first place, or gotten out of it sooner if we had only know the truth about what was going on. How can we, the voting public, make decisions on who to elect and what to do about our elected officials' actions unless we know what is really happening?
Unfortunately, it's not always as simple as that. In the run up to the Iraq War in 2003 there were clear indications that the war was not necessary, yet a large portion of the public was all for it, nonetheless. We knew there were no weapons in the country since the weapons inspectors had been all over the country for almost 10years. People that supported George W. Bush could not believe anything that contradicted their original premise that this was a good man that they had to support and that anyone that did not support the President hated the country. This colored everything the saw and knew from that point on. I remember going to a customer's office and hearing from him that he heard on Fox News that we had found an entire city full of weapons of mass destruction. I thought at the time, "that can't be right" and by the time I got home to look at the news myself, realized that it wasn't even being reported anymore, much less refuted.
How do you bring self-deluded people back to reality? The sad fact is that you can't change a person's minds when they are firmly entrenched in their beliefs. They are inflexible. That would be fine, I would be willing to leave it be and forget about it if it was some crazy person in the corner mumbling to themselves, but these deluded masses are not inert and non-influential isolated incidences. These masses of willfully ignorant people vote. They vote in political elections and they vote with their pocketbooks and they frequent the institutions that perpetuate their ignorance. It's become a symbiotic relationship. "Delude us!" they almost shout to their favorite media outlets, "confirm what we already think and tell us how good and patriotic we are for believing!" Fox News could not exist if the people that watch it did not demand that it behave exactly as it has.
I listened to another demoralizing podcast featuring a climatologist describing how they go about doing climate studies today. They now have to spend time studying sociology and psychology to understand why people deny the truth about what's going on and what can be done to get through to them. The scientist was demoralized because they were finding that people with extreme beliefs are incapable of changing or learning or understanding. Once an idea is rooted in a person's mind, it is almost impossible to dislodge it with facts.
And yet, it the case of Obama approval ratings within his own base, you do have a group of people who changed their minds and were disillusioned. This might have something to do with campaign promises raising expectations and the difference between campaigning Obama versus ruling Obama. I think the question many who voted for him are asking is why is he not changing things once he got into office? He was supposed to stop the wars, shut down Guantanamo, stop illegal wiretapping and roll back the loss of civil liberties, reverse don't ask don't tell, and make government more transparent. An ardent Obama supporter once pointed out to me that once you got into office, you would have access to more secret and classified information and you would be forced to decide to do many of the things the same way your predecessor had. My response to that is to ask what chance is there for us to ever elect new people and actually get change? If anyone we elect will disappear behind a veil of secrecy and make the same harmful short-termed and wrongful decisions that the last person made, then this is not a democracy and we do not have control of our country.
I believe we should strip the barriers of secrecy away from our government and our corporations and see and understand exactly how things actually work. At least then we would learn to deal with truth and facts and be able to actually think about how to fix the problems we are dealing with and learn to chart a course for the long term. It's our only hope, because the way we are doing it now is not working.
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