March 2.

2016-03-02T14:20:15Z

March 2. Last week I mentioned global emotional illness related to economic decline, and that link goes to a subreddit post with a careful explanation of an idea that sounds right to me: a slow economic decline is more painful than a fast one. This fits a general rule of happiness, that chronic pain is worse than acute pain. (That's why I'm against insurance, because the ongoing loss of insurance payments makes me more unhappy than a sudden big loss.) And if you doubt that anyone would really enjoy a hard crash, read A Paradise Built in Hell by Rebecca Solnit, or at least the first hundred pages.

Anyway, the idea is that Trump is drawing support from people who, consciously or subconsciously, want the system to collapse already instead of slowly grinding us down. I confess that Trump's wins yesterday felt good to me, even though the emotional vibe of him and his supporters will keep me from voting for him. But here's what I was going to say about emotional illness and economic decline:

There are two kinds of human systems, one with top-down or hierarchical power and one with bottom-up or shared power. Shared power is really hard to do, even in small systems, so our big systems are mostly top-down. The problem is that positions of power become entrenched, and the people who hold them become sort of evil. What I mean is, almost nobody thinks "I give thanks every day for my power over others and remember to use it responsibly, and if I lose it, well, it was a nice ride." Instead people come to think of their power over others as normal and fair, and losing it feels like an injustice.

In an economic decline, almost everyone loses power. The highest class holds onto it and the lowest class never had it in the first place, but the middle class is like, "I used to hire peasants to mow my lawn, and now they're living off the government when their labor is rightfully mine!" It's usually more subtle, with higher prices for products and services that require unseen human labor. My long-term answer is a utopia where tedious labor is automated, everyone is guaranteed basic survival, and money is decoupled from work. But in the near future we're going to see a lot of people beating down on anyone weaker to try to hold on to their feeling of power-over, and hopefully we'll see some new bottom-up systems where people can feel powerful in a healthy way.

While I'm writing about politics, I have one side comment: the Republican congress will bitterly regret their decision to not let Obama appoint a bland moderate Supreme Court justice, when they see the crazy destabilizing justices appointed by Trump, or the more liberal justices Hillary appoints with four years to keep trying.

Ran Prieur

March 2.