The theory also answers the question "Why did the United States Elect Donald Trump President?"
One does not have to spend a lot of time analyzing Donald Trump's twitter tweets or unscripted meanderings to realize that one is dealing with a person who is distinctly below average in many respects, even for a politician. People in other countries are understandably appalled at how we managed to elect him. Consider the reaction of Englishman Nate White from last summer:
But the problem started long before that, when, in each case, the party essentially chose its "field" of candidates, based primarily on only two criteria -- the ability to raise money and the willingness to come reasonably close to toeing the party line.
In other words, you don't get to be a candidate unless you are willing to compromise whatever principles you have to be enough to be like other members of your party so that there's a reasonable assurance that if elected, you will help further the "goals" of the party.
(Larry Lessig gives a good talk on "Tweedism" [“I don’t care who does the electing as long as I get to do the nominating.”] here, which I mostly agree with, but he veers off track when he tries to explain that the process is controlled by the 1%, because (true enough) the initial selection of a slate of candidates depends on donations from less than 1% of the people. The problem is he concludes that the result is candidates who are responsive to the funders only, but that's not really right, because he keeps coming back to the 1%, which is a group of people that is not organized into a superorganism. In the end, the candidates are just tools of their political parties and the corporations who fund BOTH political parties; i.e. they are not truly responsive or accountable to any people at all).
To be clear, the "goals of the party" that I just referred to are not the same thing as the "goal" of the artificially intelligent organism that is the party. The "goal" of the organism is simple -- survive and expand. The "goals" of the party, by contrast, are the set of positions -- the party platform -- that the organism has determined will put candidates of the party in an optimal position to be elected, which will, in turn, cause "viable" candidates to join the party, which will, in turn, allow the party itself to survive and expand.
As mentioned, the other half of "viability" is money. This makes sense, because political campaigns cost a lot of money. The party thus makes sure that you only get to be a candidate if you have been able to raise millions and millions of dollars for your campaign. That in turn works toward the party's survival -- it will not put candidates into the field who cannot finance their campaigns, since those candidates are (odds are) doomed to lose.
So at the outset, your field of candidates is extremely limited by these criteria. What happens next is a months' long slugfest between mediocrities, where everyone tries to eliminate everyone else by shining spotlights on the others' flaws and past transgressions -- and with a field of mediocrities, that's easy enough to do -- with the result that in the end only one or two candidates are left standing, at which point it gets really ugly. On the Republican side, this process yielded Trump, who was such a pathetically poor candidate that -- ironically -- all of the mud just slid right off of him, perhaps because he was all mud and slime to begin with. But various bits of the mud he (and the others) were slinging at each other stuck on some of the others -- because most of it was true -- and one by one, they all folded.
At that point, the organism, for its own survival, needed to get the party to line up behind Trump. And that's what it did. People who had been called the worst possible names by Trump -- and who had been never-Trumpers -- realized that their political survival depended on switching sides and backing Trump after all.
Ted Cruz is just one of several examples. After doing the "principled" thing and snubbing Trump at the Republican convention, Ted Cruz came to realize that Trump might actually win the election and turned around and endorsed Trump in September 2016. During the campaign, had these things and more to say about Trump:
After a Trump attack on Cruz's wife Heidi, he called Trump a sniveling coward, a "big, loud New York bully, and a “a small and petty man who is intimidated by strong women.”
After Trump endorsed the theory that Cruz's father had helped assassinate JFK, he characterized the theory as "nuts" and "just kooky."
And then: “I am not in the habit of supporting people who attack my wife and attack my father.”
And yet, even before the election, Cruz was supporting a pathological liar and amoral bully who had attacked both his wife and his father.
You can find more details here.
Marco Rubio said:
You might wonder "who" is pulling the strings on puppets like Cruz, Rubio, and the rest. But it's not a "who" -- it's a super-intelligent organism -- the Republican National Party. It doesn't matter who occupied the various positions of power within that party (they were simply doing the bidding of the superorganism in any event), the result would have been the same: Trump would have had widespread Republican support both before and after the election.
On the Democratic side, money and name recognition made Hilary Clinton the only viable candidate, and as a result, she got the nomination, despite lukewarm support from her supporters, and the outright dislike of "feel the Bern" progressives and independents.
The result was an election between two people who large swaths of the electorate actively disliked, and for most voters -- even more so than in most election years -- the choice was about figuring out who was the "lesser of two evils."
One does not have to spend a lot of time analyzing Donald Trump's twitter tweets or unscripted meanderings to realize that one is dealing with a person who is distinctly below average in many respects, even for a politician. People in other countries are understandably appalled at how we managed to elect him. Consider the reaction of Englishman Nate White from last summer:
"Trump lacks certain qualities which the British traditionally esteem. . . . For instance, he has no class, no charm, no coolness, no credibility, no compassion, no wit, no warmth, no wisdom, no subtlety, no sensitivity, no self-awareness, no humility, no honour and no grace . . . . while Trump may be laughable, he has never once said anything wry, witty or even faintly amusing – not once, ever . . . . And worse, he is that most unforgivable of all things to the British: a bully . . . . That is, except when he is among bullies; then he suddenly transforms into a sniveling sidekick instead."The answer to the lead-off question, as the alert reader will readily have suspected, lies in the fact a political party is an artificially intelligent superorganism; i.e. an aggregation of people that has a consciousness that transcends that of its individual constituents, and yet uses those constituents to further its amoral aims. In 2016, this came to a head the nomination processes of both parties yielded a field of two nominees who were both extremely unlikeable and borderline corrupt.
But the problem started long before that, when, in each case, the party essentially chose its "field" of candidates, based primarily on only two criteria -- the ability to raise money and the willingness to come reasonably close to toeing the party line.
In other words, you don't get to be a candidate unless you are willing to compromise whatever principles you have to be enough to be like other members of your party so that there's a reasonable assurance that if elected, you will help further the "goals" of the party.
(Larry Lessig gives a good talk on "Tweedism" [“I don’t care who does the electing as long as I get to do the nominating.”] here, which I mostly agree with, but he veers off track when he tries to explain that the process is controlled by the 1%, because (true enough) the initial selection of a slate of candidates depends on donations from less than 1% of the people. The problem is he concludes that the result is candidates who are responsive to the funders only, but that's not really right, because he keeps coming back to the 1%, which is a group of people that is not organized into a superorganism. In the end, the candidates are just tools of their political parties and the corporations who fund BOTH political parties; i.e. they are not truly responsive or accountable to any people at all).
To be clear, the "goals of the party" that I just referred to are not the same thing as the "goal" of the artificially intelligent organism that is the party. The "goal" of the organism is simple -- survive and expand. The "goals" of the party, by contrast, are the set of positions -- the party platform -- that the organism has determined will put candidates of the party in an optimal position to be elected, which will, in turn, cause "viable" candidates to join the party, which will, in turn, allow the party itself to survive and expand.
As mentioned, the other half of "viability" is money. This makes sense, because political campaigns cost a lot of money. The party thus makes sure that you only get to be a candidate if you have been able to raise millions and millions of dollars for your campaign. That in turn works toward the party's survival -- it will not put candidates into the field who cannot finance their campaigns, since those candidates are (odds are) doomed to lose.
So at the outset, your field of candidates is extremely limited by these criteria. What happens next is a months' long slugfest between mediocrities, where everyone tries to eliminate everyone else by shining spotlights on the others' flaws and past transgressions -- and with a field of mediocrities, that's easy enough to do -- with the result that in the end only one or two candidates are left standing, at which point it gets really ugly. On the Republican side, this process yielded Trump, who was such a pathetically poor candidate that -- ironically -- all of the mud just slid right off of him, perhaps because he was all mud and slime to begin with. But various bits of the mud he (and the others) were slinging at each other stuck on some of the others -- because most of it was true -- and one by one, they all folded.
At that point, the organism, for its own survival, needed to get the party to line up behind Trump. And that's what it did. People who had been called the worst possible names by Trump -- and who had been never-Trumpers -- realized that their political survival depended on switching sides and backing Trump after all.
Ted Cruz is just one of several examples. After doing the "principled" thing and snubbing Trump at the Republican convention, Ted Cruz came to realize that Trump might actually win the election and turned around and endorsed Trump in September 2016. During the campaign, had these things and more to say about Trump:
"This man is a pathological liar. He doesn’t know the difference between truth and lies. He lies practically every word that comes out of his mouth, and in a pattern that I think is straight out of a psychology textbook, his response is to accuse everybody else of lying.”
“I say pathological because I actually think Donald, if you hooked him up to a lie detector test, he could say one thing in the morning, one thing at noon and one thing in the evening, all contradictory and he’d pass the lie detector test each time. Whatever lie he’s telling, at that minute he believes it, but the man is utterly amoral.”
"He combines [dishonesty] with being a narcissist, a narcissist at a level I don’t think this country’s ever seen. Donald Trump is such a narcissist that Barack Obama looks at him and says, ‘Dude, what’s your problem?’’’
“Donald Trump is a serial philanderer, and he boasts about it. This is not a secret. He’s proud of being a serial philanderer.”
After a Trump attack on Cruz's wife Heidi, he called Trump a sniveling coward, a "big, loud New York bully, and a “a small and petty man who is intimidated by strong women.”
After Trump endorsed the theory that Cruz's father had helped assassinate JFK, he characterized the theory as "nuts" and "just kooky."
And then: “I am not in the habit of supporting people who attack my wife and attack my father.”
And yet, even before the election, Cruz was supporting a pathological liar and amoral bully who had attacked both his wife and his father.
You can find more details here.
Marco Rubio said:
"We are going to send a message that the party of Lincoln and Reagan and the presidency of the United States will never be held by a con artist."And yet now he is one of Trump's closest confidantes.
You might wonder "who" is pulling the strings on puppets like Cruz, Rubio, and the rest. But it's not a "who" -- it's a super-intelligent organism -- the Republican National Party. It doesn't matter who occupied the various positions of power within that party (they were simply doing the bidding of the superorganism in any event), the result would have been the same: Trump would have had widespread Republican support both before and after the election.
On the Democratic side, money and name recognition made Hilary Clinton the only viable candidate, and as a result, she got the nomination, despite lukewarm support from her supporters, and the outright dislike of "feel the Bern" progressives and independents.
The result was an election between two people who large swaths of the electorate actively disliked, and for most voters -- even more so than in most election years -- the choice was about figuring out who was the "lesser of two evils."
