[ExI] Meta level was tone down

Keith Henson hkeithhenson at gmail.com
Sat Jun 4 19:39:10 UTC 2016


On Sat, Jun 4, 2016 at 8:48 AM,   BillK <pharos at gmail.com> wrote:

> And the reason Trump has such a large following is......???

Completely understandable in terms of US post WW II history and
evolved human psychological mechanisms.

> Much of the US population is suffering greatly under the old system

In absolute terms or relative to poor countries the low end of the US
population hardly suffers at all.  But as
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Cialdini said (quoting someone
else) it's relative to what you are used to.  Animals generally
respond relatively to changes and humans are not an exception.

> and have no hope that anything will improve

That's the biggest part of the problem.  Humans evolved to be
sensitive to future conditions.  Improving situations, such as we have
seen in the last few decades in China lead to a relatively happy and
easy to govern population.

> under the old system in Washington.

The source of the problems are only partly located in Washington.  But
rational responses can't be expected of a population under stress.

>On the contrary, they expect the system to make life worse
> for themselves and continue to enrich the financiers. They had 'Hope
> and Change' with Obama and got screwed even more. So now they are
> setting out to destroy the old system.

I doubt there is that much reasoning behind the discontent.  In any
case, it's not obvious that the government *can* do anything
substantial about the underlying problems.  It's far from obvious that
people in the government even understand the problems.  Heck, most of
the readers of this list don't either.

> And if voting still doesn't
> work,

There might be things a government could do to help deal with the
underlying problems, particularly power satellites to deal with energy
cost and helping women with fertility control.

In spite of my efforts and those of many others, the power satellite
project is not widely known yet.  Lt. Col Garretson and Dr. Paul Jaffe
made a start with a presentation at the White House April 20 which
included a 3 minute video I partly financed.

> I fear the US is headed for severe civil disruption.

It's possible.  Consider Syria, or for that matter Venezuela.

Keith



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