The Monkey Governments and the problem with "Us vs. Them"

So, when I argue with a conspiracy theorist that is telling me that there's a massive government conspiracy, one of their fallback positions tends to be, "Well, are you telling me that you trust the government?"  The answer isn't going to be, "Of course I trust the government!  The government knows what's best for me at all times!"  I don't think many people really believe that.  But that doesn't mean that I support their conspiracy ideas, too, nor their ideas as to how the government really works.  The most basic reason for this is, essentially, that I'm not trusting a Monkey Government, while they're not trusting  a (rather Machiavellian) Shakespeare Government.

What do I mean by that?  Well, basically, I'm going with the analogy of the government being like a story, or more specifically a play.  The conspiracy theorist sees a Shakespeare at work, some malevolent hidden figure that's writing the script, and everything that happens within the narrative is thanks to this hidden power.  Meanwhile, continuing with that analogy, I more see it as a bunch of monkeys hammering away at keyboards to try to make their own narrative.  Eventually we may get something systematic, comprehensive, and with little conflict; but it'll take a very long amount of hammering away with a great many monkeys to get to that point.  And just because you have it, doesn't mean another power might not come in and take it away from you.

See, the larger a conspiracy is, the more fallible it is.  The more people you have involved in something, the more likely something is going to slip.  You can't keep people from blabbing forever.  Instead, what you more of get is the monkeys; but I'm not saying that everyone involved is stupid, but I will say that they are ignorant.  Yes, I am saying everyone is ignorant, even me.  No one knows everything, no one can see or foresee everything, and some people are naturally more ignorant than others; but when you compare what someone knows to what they DON'T know, what they don't know will always be a greater amount.  Nor am I necessarily saying that it's just a bunch of individual monkeys; no, we can get monkey coalitions, corporate monkeys, monkey special interest groups.  But ultimately, every group has limited knowledge and limited interests.  We even elect a presidential monkey, but with the balance of powers for monkeys, that monkey is still just part of the machine.  Even dictator monkeys are generally kept in check with having to reinforce their power to keep internal revolt from occuring, and have to worry about foreign monkey powers trying to dethrone them.

That's the point here.  The reason politics can be tragic, seemingly arbitrary, seemingly random, and downright contentious at times, is because politics isn't under control by a Machiavellian Shakespeare.  Countries and factions don't go to war or revolt because it was written into the play.  It's more a bunch of monkeys all trying to hammer out something that sounds good, get upset with each other, and then start to fling feces at each other.

Okay, perhaps I'm starting to stretch the analogy.  You have to admit, though, imagining WWII as monkeys flinging feces at each other is probably more amusing than it should be.

But here's the tricky thing.   For the most part, these monkeys are trying to do good.  Who they're trying to do good for is an issue in and of itself, but it's going to be for someone (in the case of a truly sociopathic dictator, generally themselves and their immediate family).  Communists want to do good for the working man (communist dictators are a different story).  Socialists have a similar goal, but aren't as extreme as communists.  Even Nazi Germany was trying to do good in eradicating the Jews.  Jews were seen as a major problem to having a happy civilization, they were seen as traitors that hurt the Axis war effort in WWI, and propaganda films had to show them as base, inhuman creatures that did more harm than good in their existence.

In fact, I'll go a step further here:  Nazi Germany wasn't unique.  They were under a spell of Nationalism; where Communism makes demons of the Bourgeois, Nationalism makes demons of those that don't fit within the nation.  For the Nazis (and, in fact, many people throughout history, not just the Nazis), that was the Jews; Jews didn't conform to the national idea, the national language, the national customs, the national religion; for the same reason is why gypsies were also targeted.  There was also the Armenian Genocide, which is an even better example of monkey politics.  See, Turkey was also setting itself up under Nationalism, and their ideas of national heritage, language, and religion did not incorporate the Armenians.  The Armenians were killed off as much as possible, one million of them being slaughtered.  But the US government today won't admit that it's a genocide, purely because of political concerns with Turkey; the US wants Turkey as an ally, and to question Turkey's policies is to question their nationalism, which is still strong.

Now, I don't know if I have a good segue into this, but I'll go ahead and try:  "Us vs. Them" is a really problematic way of thinking.

Who's us?  Who's them?  Why is the them so much worse than the us?  If you're a police officer, you tend to think in "us vs. them"; there's you, and then there's the public, there's the criminal, etc.  If you're in the armed forces, there's the "us" of the soldier, and the "them" of the civilians, the "them" of the enemy.  If you work at McDonald's, there's the "us" of your fellow employees, there's the "them" of your customers and management (if you take by my examples that management is your enemy then... well, I'll let you be the judge).  Now, to take the example of someone that works with customers, how you view the "them" will largely depend on your mindset and experiences, but possibly not in the way you think.

You see, I can almost guarantee you that if you work with customers, you'll get just as many, if not more, cases of "good" customers than you will "bad" -- "bad" being defined as a customer that will yell your head off for something unjustified, or otherwise is a source of stress for no just cause.  If you get many good customers, you enjoy your job, and you've made good friends with some customers, you probably won't think too poorly of your experiences, even with a few bad customers that made you roll your eyes.  If you didn't like your job, and you think back to it, your thoughts will generally be on how you didn't like the job, and your first thoughts will be justify your dislike; you'll remember the bad examples of customers.  Of course, many people avoid that altogether, can mock the bad customers while also remembering the good ones.  But the point is, three people can have the same experiences, but for subjective reasons, have totally different views to those experiences; one has bad experiences with bad customers, one has good experiences with good customers, and one has a mixture of both and can recognize that.

In the same way, two people can have the exact same viewpoints and yet identify themselves with seemingly diametrically opposed sides.  For example:  Abortion.

In the case of Abortion, there are considered to be two major "sides": pro-life, and pro-choice.  Pro-life is so-called because they support life, and presumably they define life as starting at the embryo -- but I'm not sure if all pro-life "advocates" actually do define life as starting then.  Pro-choice is so-called because they support the choice of the mother; they aren't going to say "pro-death", and it would be inaccurate to say that, because they're not centered on the killing of the fetus, but on the mother's decision whether to keep it or not.

Now, we have two people that define themselves.  They aren't on the extremes of either group.  Observe:

Person A says:  "I'm pro-life.  I do make an exception for cases where the woman is raped, is too young to bear a child, or in cases where the birth of the child would kill the mother."  If you press him further:  "Well, I can see an abortion before the egg is fertilized, or even shortly after."

Person B says:  "I'm pro-choice.  I do make an exception for the third trimester, though."  You might even convince them down to the second trimester.

Where is the huge divide between these two?  Both are willing to ban abortion for a certain period of the baby's development, both have cases where they think the woman has a choice.  Neither is truly "pro-life" or "pro-choice" in the extreme definitions of the term, because neither has fully adopted the viewpoints of the extreme examples of their respective sides.  But both define themselves as one side or the other.

Now let's say I want to make a blog post about abortions.

I open with "I'm pro-life" or "I'm pro-choice", and you, the reader, see this.  Now, if you're my diametric "opposite", your brain is probably already starting to shut down, or it's going into "opposing argument mode", where you look at my post trying to find things to nitpick or argue against.

I can avoid this by not coming out and saying which I am, but generally you're going to connect which side I might fall on; even if you're not out to do so, it's a subconscious thing we do when reading people's arguments, since we innately do want to know where people are coming from, and we have an innate ability to fill gaps.  The problem is, often times we fill gaps with what we THINK the person thinks, and not what they SAY the think; and the less they say, the more we can fill that gap with the stereotype.  In this case, if I'm pro-life, and I mention only a few things about being pro-life, you might think that the ideas I haven't stated would fall under the extreme end of being pro-life; what the extremist advocates tend to state.

Often, when I argue with someone, I'm told that I'm the "1%" of my side that "seems rational", while the "other 99%" have crazy ideas.  Well, take the above examples; if you saw many people from a specific side and assumed that they all were in that 99% without asking them what they really felt or thought, then what you say would be technically true, but based on an assumption that probably isn't true.  It could just as easily be true that 1% of that group makes extremist arguments, and 98% are assumed to share it (the other 1%, of course, being those few "rational" ones that actually come out and say what they think in a less divisive fashion).

Okay, I'm going to end this long post with one last example:

I once had a conversation with someone about their experiences with people from a small country (I think an African country, but I forget which one, unfortunately).  He basically said they're all assholes, and he knew that because he personally met people from that country, and they were all assholes.  "That's the problem with using personal experience to generalize..." I started.  He seemed taken aback and said, "Then what else should I use?", as if I was being crazy.

Well, here's the problem with that:  let's just say he did meet many people from that country, let's just say most of them men, if not all.  Let's say he met 20 men from that country, and they were all assholes.  Wow, 20 people all assholes from one country?  Maybe there's something to that!

But 20 people out of how many?  Let's just assume that this is a small country.  Even small, that could give it a population as "high" as, say, 200,000 people.  20 men out of 200,000 people?  That doesn't seem so representative, now.  In fact, it falls well below the scientific standards for a blind sample size.

Now, a big example of this kind of generalization, are the many US citizens who think that we're at war with "Islam", and not islamic countries; or the many people who think that people that are Muslim are intrinsically like the terrorists, are all massively violent, etc. etc.

Well, how many Muslims do you think are in the world?  200,000, like above?  2 million?  200 million?

Try between 1.3 billion to 1.65 billion.  Carl Sagan's billion with a b.

Now, take every bit of footage ever used to depict violent muslims; people cheering for bombings, Muslim riots over the Danish cartoons, etc. etc.  One argument is that these massive crowds show what Muslims worldwide must think.  But it really doesn't, does it?  If 1.3 billion people rioted, attacked, and were violent, then there would be a massive force to deal with well beyond what our military is currently tackling.  In fact -- and I haven't actually crunched the numbers to do this, so I'm more speculating -- I think that if you took all the Muslims that appeared violent in media reports, and put them all on a field, including with suspected terrorists, they would fill a space that could be measured in football fields in the double digits.  Put 1.65 billion Muslims on a field, and I think you'd need one hell of a huge field!

That's the problem.  Our "personal experiences" don't match the reality, because we have such a small sample size.  But we think of a negative event like 9/11, we think of negative events like wars against Muslim believers, and we see the riots against the Danish cartoons, and a picture forms.  That picture is necessarily limited.

But that's the problem with monkey governments.  It's always going to be limited.  You aren't Shakespeare.  To deal with large groups, you have to generalize sometimes.

And this is probably why politics will always be the mess it is.