A Public Building in Need of Replacement

Imagine we have an old public building that has become hazardous and costs far more to maintain than any public benefit it provides. It needs to be demolished (and replaced).

We'll need to hire a demolition contractor.  As we consider the tenders, we see that we have one from an under-qualified over-confident dishonest angry demolition contractor with a fixation on “disaster” who asserts, “It will be a cinch to tear this baby down!” He says he’ll do it “fast and cheap” by swinging a wrecking ball during rush hour in the crowded streets. While his own estimates are very low and competitive, his costs do not include collateral damage. He seems to have a curiously cavalier disregard for the complexity of the job, safety, and broader consequences. In fact, it is a virtual certainty that most of the demolition debris will fall directly on our heads and is likely to result in injury, death and irreparable harm.  Shall we give him the contract?

Putting Terrorism into Perspective

The following excerpt from Steven Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, 2011 may be useful in putting the current hyperbolic concern about terrorism into perspective.

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“Compare the American death toll, with or without 9/11, to other preventable causes of death. Every year more than 40,000 Americans are killed in traffic accidents, 20,000 in falls, 18,000 in homicides, 3,000 by drowning (including 300 in bathtubs), 3,000 in fires, 24,000 from accidental poisoning, 2,500 from complications of surgery, 300 from suffocation in bed, 300 from inhalation of gastric contents, and 17,000 by “other and unspecified nontransport accidents and their sequelae.”184  In fact, in every year but 1995 and 2001, more Americans were killed by lightning, deer, peanut allergies, bee stings, and “ignition or melting of nightwear” than by terrorist attacks.185  The number of deaths from terrorist attacks is so small that even minor measures to avoid them can increase the risk of dying. The cognitive psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer has estimated that in the year after the 9/11 attacks, 1,500 Americans died in car accidents because they chose to drive rather than fly to their destinations out of fear of dying in a hijacked or sabotaged plane, unaware that the risk of death in a plane flight from Boston to Los Angeles is the same as the risk of death in a car trip of twelve miles. In other words the number of people who died by avoiding air travel was six times the number of people who died in the airplanes on September 11.186  And of course the 9/11 attacks sent the United States into two wars that have taken far more American and British lives than the hijackers did, to say nothing of the lives of Afghans and Iraqis.

The discrepancy between the panic generated by terrorism and the deaths generated by terrorism is no accident. Panic is the whole point of terrorism, as the word itself makes clear. Though definitions vary (as in the cliché “One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter”), terrorism is generally understood as premeditated violence perpetrated by a nonstate actor against noncombatants (civilians or off-duty soldiers) in pursuit of a political, religious, or social goal, designed to coerce a government or to intimidate or convey a message to a larger audience. The terrorists may want to extort a government into capitulating to a demand, to sap people’s confidence in their government’s ability to protect them, or to provoke massive repression that will turn people against their government or bring about violent chaos in which the terrorist faction hopes to prevail. Terrorists are altruistic in the sense of being motivated by a cause rather than by personal profit. They act by surprise and in secrecy; hence the ubiquitous appellation “cowardly.” And they are communicators, seeking publicity and attention, which they manufacture through fear.”

Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, 2011, pp. 380-1

Impending Impeachment?

A friend of mine recently expressed his anguish about the future with the "President Elect" in office. He is (as we all should be) very stressed about the very real possibility that the combination of Trump's petulant inarticulacy and proclivity for disrespectful vulgarity toward anyone with a difference of opinion might lead to a global nuclear conflagration.  He told me that he felt Donald would be impeached perhaps even before inauguration next week.  

He cited (among other things) an article from the Independent which cites evidence that Trump actually worked with the Kremlin during the campaign.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/donald-trump-russia-dossier-file-investigation-hacking-christopher-steele-mi6-a7526901.html

Here is my response:

I agree that it would be great if DJT could be dispensed with asap.

The problem lies in the "political nature" of impeachment.

Quoting from the the article linked to the one you provided
(http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/donald-trump-impeachment-impeached-highly-likely-us-president-elect-inauguration-us-congress-illegal-a7525761.html)

Political science Professor Terrence Casey at Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology said impeachment was undoubtedly a “political act”, necessitating a shift in public confidence.
“Impeachment means criminal offences, so in that sense it’s not about public support,” he told The Independent.
“It is also a political act. Bill Clinton’s impeachment proceedings could only occur because you had an opposition party in control of congress. In the case of Trump, you would have to convince a Republican congress to impeach a Republican president, which would fail if he still had public support - like it did with Clinton, and it would succeed if he didn’t - like in the case of Nixon’s resignation.”
Professor Wilson said support would be likely to waver if claims that Moscow had compromising material on the President-elect were proven to be true.

As we know, criminal offenses are not offences until proven.  Bringing charges is also very political, which Trump supporters know too well.  Whether criminal or impeachment proceedings or other, it all hinges on "proven to be true."  Trump supporters think that truth is hard to find because the media, journalism and the "establishment" all have the prefix "liberal" or "swamp" in front of them.

Thus, it is impossible to "prove" anything to them that they do not agree with.  Whatever they do not want to hear is a concoction of the "establishment" meant to maintain vested political interests.

So, the only way Trump will go down is if there is a ground swell of popular political support for his removal.  The election indicated less than a majority for DJT but, the ground swell "majority" would have to be much more than marginal to have this take place.

Lets say it rose to 70% of the population (that politicians were capable of discerning), this would still leave a VERY ANGRY 30% who would maintain the belief that everything is false except what they are willing to believe.  This would in turn create an even more divisive political landscape into which the next potential candidate would have to forge.  Bernie Sanders might be the only one who could weather such a hostile world but at that point he would be up against HUGE economic interests (the 1% that owns 90% of US wealth) that would want to derail him.

Given the enormous complexity of the situation and the fact that DJT supporters (and, indeed, a substantial portion of the US population) is impervious to effects evidence might have on their understanding of the world (as Winston Churchill said "A fanatic is one who can't change his mind and won't change the subject"), I don't see a resolution to this any time soon.

A positive angle on all this is that "the will of the people" seems to remain at least somewhat influential at least in the possible success of impeachment proceedings.  But then, the "will of the people" may not have been terribly influential in the college electoral system, since Trump had 2.86 million fewer votes than his opponent.

Political or Pathological?

This from Steven Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence has Declined (2013): In discussing the psychology of leaders and the association with potential violence he writes, "

The socially constructed nature of dominance can help explain which individuals are most likely to take risks to defend it. Perhaps the most extraordinary popular delusion about violence of the past quarter-century is that it is caused by low self-esteem. That theory has been endorsed by dozens of prominent experts, has inspired school programs designed to get kids to feel better about themselves, and in the late 1980s led the California legislature to form a Task Force to Promote Self-Esteem. Yet Baumeister has shown that the theory could not be more spectacularly, hilariously, achingly wrong. Violence is a problem not of too little self-esteem but of too much, particularly when it is unearned.(fn 123) Self-esteem can be measured, and surveys show that it is the psychopaths, street toughs, bullies, abusive husbands, serial rapists, and hatecrime perpetrators who are off the scale. Diana Scully interviewed many rapists in their prison cells who bragged to her that they were “multitalented superachievers.”124 Psychopaths
and other violent people are narcissistic: they think well of themselves not in proportion to their accomplishments but out of a congenital sense of entitlement. When reality intrudes, as it inevitably will, they treat the bad news as a personal affront, and its bearer, who is endangering their fragile reputation, as a malicious slanderer.

Violence-prone personality traits are even more consequential when they infect political rulers, because their hang-ups can affect hundreds of millions of people rather than just the unlucky few who live with them or cross their paths. Unimaginable amounts of suffering have been caused by tyrants who callously presided over the immiseration of their peoples or launched destructive wars of conquest. In chapters 5 and 6 we saw that the tail-thickening wars and dekamegamurders of the 20th century can be attributed in part to the personalities of just three men. Tin-pot tyrants like Saddam Hussein, Mobutu Sese Seko, Moammar Khaddafi, Robert Mugabe, Idi Amin, Jean-Bédel Bokassa, and Kim Jong-il have immiserated their people on a scale that is smaller but still tragic.

The study of the psychology of political leaders, to be sure, has a deservedly poor reputation. It’s impossible to test the object of investigation directly, and all too tempting to pathologize people who are morally contemptible. Psychohistory also has a legacy of fanciful psychoanalytic conjectures about what made Hitler Hitler: he had a Jewish grandfather, he had only one testicle, he was a repressed homosexual, he was asexual, he was a sexual fetishist. As the journalist Ron Rosenbaum wrote in Explaining Hitler, “The search for Hitler has apprehended not one coherent, consensus image of Hitler but rather many different Hitlers, competing Hitlers, conflicting embodiments of competing visions. Hitlers who might not recognize each other well enough to say ‘Heil’ if they came face to face in Hell.”(125)

For all that, the more modest field of personality classification, which pigeonholes rather than explains people, has something to say about the psychology of modern tyrants. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) of the American Psychiatric Association defines narcissistic personality disorder as “a pervasive pattern of grandiosity, need for admiration, and a lack of empathy.”(126) Like all psychiatric diagnoses, narcissism is a fuzzy category, and overlaps with psychopathy (“a pervasive pattern of disregard for, and violation of, the rights of others”) and with borderline personality disorder (“instability in mood; black and white thinking; chaotic and unstable interpersonal relationships, self-image, identity, and behavior”). But the trio of symptoms at narcissism’s core— grandiosity, need for admiration, and lack of empathy—fits tyrants to a T.(127)

It is most obvious in their vainglorious monuments, hagiographic iconography and obsequious mass rallies. And with armies and police forces at their disposal, narcissistic rulers leave their mark in more than statuary; they can authorize vast outlays of violence. As with garden-variety bullies and toughs, the unearned self-regard of tyrants is eternally vulnerable to being popped, so any opposition to their rule is treated not as a criticism but as a heinous crime. At the same time, their lack of empathy imposes no brake on the punishment they mete out to real or imagined opponents. Nor does its allow any consideration of the human costs of another of their DSM symptoms: their “fantasies of unlimited success, power, brilliance, beauty, or ideal love,” which may be realized in rapacious conquest, pharaonic construction projects, or utopian master plans. And we
have already seen what overconfidence can do in the waging of war.

All leaders, of course, must have a generous dose of confidence to have become leaders, and in this age of psychology, pundits often diagnose leaders they don’t like with narcissistic personality disorder. But it’s important not to trivialize the distinction between a politician with good teeth and the psychopaths who run their countries into the ground and take large parts of the world with them. Among the pacifying features of democracies is that their leadership-selection procedure penalizes an utter lack of empathy, and their checks and balance limit the damage that a grandiose leader can do. Even within autocracies, the personality of a leader—a Gorbachev as opposed to a Stalin—can have an enormous impact on the statistics of violence." (pp 560-2)

It is interesting to contemplate this in the light of the impending inauguration of Donald Trump.  Is he an example of "good teeth" or more of a pathologue?  If it is the latter, Pinker may be overly confident about the "pacifying features of democracies" and their ability to "penalize an utter lack of empathy."  We can only hope (and work hard to ensure) that is not overly confident in "their checks and balance"s that "limit the damage that a grandiose leader can do."

In Zuccotti Park by Michael Greenberg | The New York Review of Books

In Zuccotti Park by Michael Greenberg | The New York Review of Books

Occupy Wall Street Drives Economic Coverage | Project for Excellence in Journalism (PEJ)

Occupy Wall Street Drives Economic Coverage | Project for Excellence in Journalism (PEJ)

Generally Assembled at #OccupyWallStreet—By Nathan Schneider (Harper's Magazine)

Generally Assembled at #OccupyWallStreet—By Nathan Schneider (Harper's Magazine)