It’s Much More Complicated Than That!

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Trump won.

For me, who now spends too much time on the Internet, it wasn’t a surprise, but it is still a great disappointment.

For all of us who are educated, secular, informed, and who try to think rationally, believe in science, keep most of our emotions under control, and read the NYT and the New Yorker, this victory is hard to endure.

How could a man who lies about everything, seems to know so little, and campaigned on racism and misogyny, be elected to lead the land of the free and the home of the not really so brave?

It’s really not so difficult to understand. (I wrote about it before the election here https://medium.com/@therapistmumble/it-isnt-just-the-coal-miners-it-s-most-of-america-that-got-left-behind-8e2c153343bf#.26xmk8o7v )

Trump was brilliant. He gave simple answers to complex problems. He played up fears and stayed away from reason. He invoked a mythological past and avoided the real present and looming future.

That worked because what is really going around the whole world is very confusing to everyone. In involves complex interactions of many factors, and that makes every outcome uncertain. Working hard does not guarantee success as much as working smart. That makes the divide between the rich and poor even greater. Most of the “working hard” jobs are being replaced by machines, algorithms and robots. That includes doctors and lawyers, as well as the garment workers in Vietnam. Soon we will have driverless cars, trucks and planes. We don’t really need waiters any more. We no longer go to department stores or malls, unless we are poor and out of date.

The people who are doing well, those who work smart, or whose parents or grandparents did, now compose an international class. They are not necessarily loyal to one country. Scientists are working all over the world, they go to international conferences and read international journals.. The money to finance new companies comes from hedge funds, sovereign funds, venture capitalists, and investment banks that are international. All major corporations have offices all over the world, and they send people all over the world to work in them. The people in all those professions know each other and work together. They have formed their own class.

They have no contact with the White couple in Wisconsin who lost their union jobs, or the Black family in Flint who can’t drink the water.

One thing that became very clear from the election results is how much all of us are living in our own bubbles. We associate with, and think like, the people in our own neighborhood. The Blue states were very Blue. The Red states were very Red. In the swing states the rural areas were very red and the urban areas very blue. In the Blue areas the LBGTI people flourish, and there is a great deal of diversity. In the Red areas, not so much. There is more religion in the Red areas, while the Blues are more secular.

It is the interaction of these evolving demographics with all of the changes consistently being introduced into our world by technology that most of the people who voted for Trump find so unsettling. The Tump voters are attracted to the idea of living in an America when it had half the current population. That’s when men worked nine to five for a decent wage, if they were White. Women stayed home and baked cookies ( and always ready for sex). If you got cancer, had a heart problem or drank too much then you died at fifty, but health care was paid by your employer..

Neither of our current political parties, or anyone that I can think of ( tell me if I’m wrong) who is in the political sphere now, has any idea of how to deal with this much change. They don’t really understand how the new world is working so they still try to solve the old problems. They try to create jobs, control the deficit, and keep everyone in their place. Those problems are no longer relevant. That leaves older people feeling confused and younger people feeling screwed.

We all know that Trump can’t bring the jobs back, immigrants are not the problem, and women have more of the necessary skills to do well in this environment.

What no one can tell us is what life will be like when driverless Ubers take us to very expensive restaurants, Watson tells us when to take our pills, Tinder tells us whom to date, Amazon tells us what to buy, Facebook tells us what our friends are doing, and Wells Fargo is automatically deducting our student loan payments from the bank accounts where our unemployment benefits are automatically deposited. Our Amazon Echo will play us music, turn on the lights and order food. Women will be taking care of their mothers and going to book groups while men will be having virtual-reality sex with images of Melania.

Yes, those of us who really care about others, and it is half the nation, should continue to do what we can to establish real justice and equality for all. That is something that America has always carved into marble, but it never paid attention to the “all.” We need to do that even if it means trying to bring about a single payer health plan and a guaranteed annual wage. Those ideas will always be a tough sell here in profit-oriented, private-enterprise, free-market USA.

But while we keep trying, we have to realize that there will be a strong resistance due to the influence of a few thousand years of human culture. This pull is so strong that it seems that it must come from our genes. One such primitive behavior is a man’s to need to dominate women. Those alpha-male types have always seemed to feel that it is their role to force themselves onto women in order to spread their sperm, or just to get their rocks off. Women have learned to tolerate that, knowing the harm that resisting can bring. Another very strong tendency is to fear people who we don’t know, especially if they are a different color, worship a different god, or cook food that smells weird. In such cases it seems justifiable to slaughter a whole lot of those people. We do that out of fear that they will rape our women, take our food and cut our throats. That’s not an unreasonable fear. Those things still happen: Rwanda, .Bosnia, Syria, ISIS.

Those kinds of tendencies make it very difficult to convince any group of people to share their food, shelter and money with a group of different people whom they don’t even know, even if they live in the same country.

That is why our way forward to a peaceful, just and more verdant world is not clear. These problems are new, different and very complex. They are different than the usual struggles between liberals and conservatives, Republicans and Democrats, North and South. We have to take into account that demographics are changing, science is changing, medicine is changing, relationships are changing, families are different, what it takes to make children is different, and the climate is changing rapidly and dangerously. The skills that people will need to survive in the next few decades will be different than the skills people needed during the past few hundred years.

These problems will need different kinds of solutions than anyone in any political party is offering. The first step is to recognize that. We need to find a way to get over the anger, develop some modicum of trust, and look at what’s going on. If not there will be more people left behind, a bigger division between the have and have nots, continued conflict, and a lot of dead fish.

Please note:  This post was first written for my other blog which can be found at https://medium.com/choosing-our-future

I have been posting more stuff there than here.  I would appreciate it if you would sign up for Medium and check it out.