June 18, 2025 • 18 mins
The fiendish thing about the iron cage of alienation is that the harder you try to escape, the harder that gets. The more you try to think your way out, the more surely you lock yourself in.
A case in point: The Democratic Party recently paid $20 million to study how to talk to men.
If Democrats are alienated from men, it might just be because they see them as objects of study, as opposed to human beings they actually know.
And it’s not just men who are becoming strangers to the Democratic Party. It’s black, Latino, Asian, and female voters too. Many are members of the party’s former, blue collar base.
But how can Democrats get unalienated? How do you escape your own mind?
Not by thinking the same old way, harder. You do it by learning to think in a different way.
Find the full transcript and links for this episode at DastardlyCleverness.com.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
Welcome to Dastardly Cleverness in theService of Good, I’m Spencer Critchley.
This time (00:04):
the first draft of Chapter 11 of The Liberal
Backbone (00:08):
“It’s the alienation, stupid.”
As always,you can find the previous chapters
in previous episodes,or at dastardlycleverness.com,
on the Dastardly ClevernessYouTube channel, or at Substack:
just search there for Spencer Critchley.And if you have any comments
or suggestions, I’dlove to hear them. Here we go.
(00:31):
The fiendish thing about the iron cage
is that the harderyou try to escape, the harder that gets.
The cage, after all, is the way you think.
So the more you try to think your way out,the more surely you lock yourself in.
A case in point (00:46):
The Democratic Party
recently paid$20 million to study how to talk to men.
When I heardabout that, my first thought was “It’s
as if they see them as membersof a strange, distant culture.”
And apparently they do, according to this
reporting in the New York Times:
(01:08):
Democratic donors and strategistshave been gathering at luxury hotels
to discuss how to win back working-classvoters, commissioning new projects
that can read like anthropological studiesof people from faraway places.
The prospectus for one new $20million effort, obtained by The Times,
(01:28):
aims to reverse the erosion of Democratic
support among young men,especially online.
It is code-named SAM — short
for “Speaking with American Men: A Strategic Plan” — (01:37):
undefined
and promises investmentto “study the syntax, language
and content that gains attentionand virality in these spaces.”
If Democrats are alienated from men,it might just be because they see them
as objects of study, as opposed to humanbeings they actually know.
(02:02):
If you know
someone, you probably don’t need to studytheir “syntax, language, and content“
or learn about these other “spaces“they inhabit.
And it’s not just men who are becomingstrangers to the Democratic Party.
It’s black, Latino,Asian, and female voters too.
Many are members of the party’sformer, blue collar base.
(02:25):
In recent decades the non-collegeeducated share of the Democratic vote
has shrunk from 55 to 25 percent.
“We are losing support in vastswaths of the country, in rural America,
in the Midwest, the places where I’mfrom,” says the Democratic Colorado
Representative Jason Crow.“People that I grew up with
(02:47):
who now support Donald Trump,who used to be Democrats.
There’s no reason why we shouldn’thave the support of these folks, other
than we have pushed, in so many ways,these people away from our party.”
It is possible that the $20 million
spent on studying how men talkwill prove to have been worth every penny.
(03:07):
But I doubt it.
Studying the problem is the problem.
Studying it more makes it worse.Today’s highly
educated, stuck-in-their-heads Democratsstudy politics instead of practicing it.
They analyze votersinstead of connecting with them.
They commission polls, conductfocus groups, convene seminars,
(03:30):
and yes, pay for an expensive researchproject called SAM, presumably
because that sounds like a regular guykind of name.
But who knows?
Not us, until we do the research.
The results will join petabytes of dataDemocrats have already collected at huge
cost — that’spart of what’s being paid for
(03:51):
by that endless flood of fundraising textsyou’re getting.
They will mine their data, once more,
to try to devise a messagethat surely, this time, will work.
But again, I doubt it.
Yes, if you want to talk to people,especially if you want
to persuade them of something, it’sa good idea to learn about them first.
(04:13):
That’swhy advertisers invest in market research.
But effective advertisersknow that data alone can’t
tell you how to talk to people: how to reach and move them. (04:20):
undefined
That’s why the best advertisersalso invest
in the best creative talentthey can find.
But so many Democratic campaignsseem to have been designed
by the research department,not the creative department: all data
all the time, one list of policy pointsafter another, addressed
(04:40):
not to people, but to demographics— “black voters,“ “Latino
voters,” “LGBTQvoters,“ etc., etc., etc.
And even if they do hire more and bettercreatives, let’s remember:
most people don’t like advertising,no matter how good it is.
Democrats are failing to meet a standardthey need to exceed.
(05:03):
When voters listen to a candidate,
they want to at least believe they’rehearing more than a marketing message.
But Democratic Party leaderswill announce each new message,
and even explain how theyand their consultants came up with it,
thereby drawing maximum attentionto how artificial it is.
I think they can’t help themselves.
(05:24):
A literal-minded focuson the mechanics of everything is
typical of life in the iron cage,where only the mechanics are real.
Like the mechanics of syntax, language,and content,
instead of actual connection with living,breathing humans.
Let’s say I become an expertin the syntax,
language, and content used by the French.
(05:47):
That would allow me to speakwith French people.
But could I really connect with them,the way I might
if I had actually been living among them?
Could I win a French election?
After Ifailed at that, let’s say I tried harder,
say by learning some of the latest Frenchslang and wearing new French styles.
When you encounter foreign visitorsto your country
(06:09):
doing that, how often does it fool you?
How well has this approach been working
for Democratic candidates,bouncing along in a tank, wearing brand
new hunting clothes, or droppin’ their g’sin a blue-collar bar?
James Carville famously said,“It’s the economy, stupid.”
And the economy does matter, a lot.
(06:31):
But Bill Clinton didn’t winbecause he was an economist.
His gift wasn’tthat he understood how the economy worked,
although he certainly did.
His gift was thathe understood how the economy felt.
Lots of smart Democratsget the first part.
Too many seemoblivious to the second part.
(06:51):
It’s the alienation, stupid.
But how do you get unalienated?
How do you escape your own mind?
Not by thinking the same old way,but harder.
You can learn to thinkin a different way.
A good place to startis with the Nobel-winning
psychologistDaniel Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and Slow.
(07:14):
It’s based on decades of experimentshe conducted with his late
research partner Amos Tversky.
The book overturns previous assumptions
about how people make decisions,including political ones.
That’s seldom through slow,careful analysis of their options,
which means a whole lot of Democraticcommunication is wasted.
(07:36):
No, we make most decisionsvia fast shortcuts,
in the form of biases and heuristics.For example,
the heuristic of salience: whatever sticks out in our awareness. (07:44):
undefined
A single, emotionally intense
experience will loom over\endless expanses of data.
Consider
Jaws, the original summer blockbuster.
Fifty years after its release,countless swimmers, me among them,
(08:04):
still have an irrational fear of sharks,
even though the risk of a shark attackis minuscule.
The drive to the beachis literally millions of times
more dangerous.But the image is overpoweringly salient:
a lone, vulnerable girl suddenly pulled
below the waves by a 35-foot great white.
(08:26):
So is the lethally efficient shark themeby John Williams:
two notes on a cello, evoking pure terror
rising from the depths of our psyches.
Sleazy salespeople
and demagogic politicians love salience.
Trump, who is both, lives by it.
His actual record in business
(08:47):
is one of incompetenceand serial bankruptcy.
But what’s salient
in the minds of his supportersis the image of the brilliant mogul
he played in two works of fiction: The Apprentice and The Art of the Deal. (08:55):
undefined
The actual record
of immigrants in our countryis resoundingly positive.
Asidefrom their many contributions, immigrants
— including the dark-skinned onesTrump is constantly warning about —
are less likely to commit crimesthan native-born Americans are.
(09:17):
This means that if your neighborhood seesan immigration influx,
the per capita crime rateis probably going to go down.
Trump doesn’t care.
All he needs on any given day is one vividstory of a bad crime by an immigrant,
even if he has to make one up.Democrats run on immigration statistics.
(09:38):
Trump runs on “They’re eating the cats,they’re eating the dogs!”
Seeing how readilyso many people fall for such scams, it’s
tempting to conclude that Plato was right: Most people are stupid. (09:47):
undefined
All of us could stand to be humbleabout our brain power.
But we don’t think fastbecause we’re stupid.
We do it because it helped ourspecies survive this long.
In our earliest days,
thinking fastor slow was a matter of life or death.
(10:10):
Consider a rustle in the tall grass.
Or rather, don’t consider it — there’sno time.
Decoding the meaning of that rustle —life-giving opportunity
or lethal threat — requiresinstantaneous intelligence.
Under such circumstances, slowthinking is stupid thinking,
If we stop to carefully considerthe odds of one outcome versus
(10:32):
the other, we are going to end up eateninstead of eating.
So evolution designed us to think slowlyand rationally
only when it’s worth it,and only when it’s safe.
Which is why sleazy salespeople and demagogues are constantly
trying to scare us into thinking fast.
But it’s possible to appeal
(10:53):
to people’s fast mindswithout being sleazy.
And it’s possible to use your own fastmind to connect
with theirs at the speed connectionhappens, moment to moment.
Like Obama did.
Obama understoodthat you campaign in poetry
and govern in prose, as Mario Cuomo oncesaid.
(11:14):
Obama had detailed policies ready
to addressevery aspect of being president.
And if you wanted to know about them,they were on the website.
An Obama campaign eventwas about how it felt to be there,
and the promisethat the future could feel like that too.
That’s why it was drivennot by policy points
(11:34):
but by stories, images, and Obama’sintuitive ability to connect across
all the dimensions of connection,most of which are non-verbal.
The event was designed to answer
the most important question voters have.
That question is not, “What’syour policy on issue X or Y?”
It’s “Can I trust you?”
(11:57):
Can I trust you to do this job,
trust you to look out for meand my family,
and trust you to take care of X,Y and all that other stuff.
You establish trust by
connecting with people emotionally,not intellectually.
Rationalistshave traditionally deprecated emotions
(12:17):
because they see themas interfering with thought.
That’s how Plato saw them,as have most rational thinkers since.
And emotions do interferewith thought — rational thought.
See above re sleazysalespeople and demagogues.
But recent findings show that emotions
are essentialto a different kind of thought.
(12:40):
It's the kind of thoughtwe use to make most decisions —
even the slow ones, in the end.
Around the same time Kahneman and Tverskywere challenging conventional wisdom
on how we think, so was a youngneuroscientist named Antonio Damasio.
Damasio suspected that reason and emotionsare not separate from each other.
(13:01):
Neither are the mind and body,an assumption dating at least to 1637,
when René Descartes declared “I think,therefore I am.” Damasio’s
suspicion appeared to be confirmedwhen he met a patient he calls Elliot,
whose life was falling apart.
Elliot had undergone surgeryto remove a tumor
impinging on parts of his brainthat enabled the experience of emotions.
(13:25):
Damasio tells the story in his bookDescartes’ Error:
Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain:
The surgery wasa success in every respect, and insofar
as such tumors tend not to grow again,the outlook was excellent.
What was to prove less felicitouswas the turn in Elliot’s personality.
(13:46):
The changes,which began during his physical recovery,
astonished family and friends.
To be sure, Elliot’ssmarts and his ability
to move about and use languagewere unscathed.
In many ways,however, Elliot was no longer Elliot.
Consider the beginning of his day: He needed (14:02):
undefined
prompting to get started in the morningand prepare to go to work.
Once at workhe was unable to manage his time
properly; he could not be trustedwith a schedule.
When the job called for interruptingan activity and turning to another,
he might persist nonetheless,seemingly losing sight of his main goal.
(14:24):
Or he might interrupt the activityhe had engaged, to turn to something
he found more captivatingat that particular moment.
Imagine a task involving reading andclassifying documents of a given client.
Elliot would read and fully understandthe significance of the material,
and he certainly knewhow to sort out the documents
according to the similarityor disparity of their content.
(14:47):
The problem was that he was likely,all of a sudden, to turn from
the sorting task he had initiatedto reading one of those papers, carefully
and intelligently,and to spend an entire day doing so.
Or he might spend a whole afternoondeliberating on which
principle of categorizationshould be applied:
Should it be date, size of document,pertinence to the case, or another?
(15:10):
The flow of work was stopped.
One might say that the particularstep of the task at which Elliot balked
was actually being carried out too well,and at the expense of the overall purpose.
One might say thatElliot had become irrational concerning
the larger frame of behavior,which pertained to his main priority,
while within the smallerframes of behavior, which pertained to
(15:33):
subsidiary tasks,his actions were unnecessarily detailed.
His knowledge base seemed to survive,and he could perform
many separate actions as well as before.
But he could not be counted on to perform
an appropriate actionwhen it was expected.
Understandably, after repeated adviceand admonitions from colleagues
(15:54):
and superiors went unheeded,Elliot’s job was terminated.
It may not be
fair to compareElliott to today’s Democrats.
But it’s hard to resist.
Like Elliott, most Democratic
politicians are smartpeople who know lots of things.
But, also like Elliott, many strugglewith making decisions
(16:16):
and sticking with them— decisions like “What do I stand for?.”
The tempting correlationis that both Elliott and alienated
Democratshave become cut off from their emotions.
And as Damasio’s research indicates,
people need emotionsin order to make decisions.
If you don’t have ready accessto your emotions,
(16:38):
being smartcan make your decisions harder.
You can consider all kinds of options,but you can’t pick one.
To do that, you need to feel that
one option is better than others.
Damasio writes, “The powers of reason
and the experience of emotiondecline together."
Obviously, alienation isn’tthe same as brain damage.
(17:03):
And I don’t mean to suggestthat alienated Democrats
have no feelings at all: they cry and laugh like anyone else. (17:06):
undefined
But so
much of what they say is so affectless.
the pain and joy of lifetransmuted into abstract concepts.
A notorious example was providedby Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer
after Trumpslashed grants to Harvard University,
(17:27):
including money for vital medical researchaffecting millions of lives.
Asked what Democratswere going to do about it, Schumer said,
“We sent him a very strong letterjust the other day asking eight
very strong questions.” That’s
just so weirdlybloodless, and hormoneless.
(17:48):
The good news is,lots of Democratic voters
noticed, and made their emotions clear.
Maybe that’ll show up in the data.
Or maybe more Democratic leaders,including some new ones,
will show they don’tneed data to know how to talk.
More on that next time.
Welcome to Dastardly Cleverness in theService of Good, I’m Spencer Critchley.
This time (00:04):
the first draft of Chapter 11 of The Liberal
Backbone (00:08):
“It’s the alienation, stupid.”
As always,you can find the previous chapters
in previous episodes,or at dastardlycleverness.com,
on the Dastardly ClevernessYouTube channel, or at Substack:
just search there for Spencer Critchley.And if you have any comments
or suggestions, I’dlove to hear them. Here we go.
(00:31):
The fiendish thing about the iron cage
is that the harderyou try to escape, the harder that gets.
The cage, after all, is the way you think.
So the more you try to think your way out,the more surely you lock yourself in.
A case in point (00:46):
The Democratic Party
recently paid$20 million to study how to talk to men.
When I heardabout that, my first thought was “It’s
as if they see them as membersof a strange, distant culture.”
And apparently they do, according to this
reporting in the New York Times:
(01:08):
Democratic donors and strategistshave been gathering at luxury hotels
to discuss how to win back working-classvoters, commissioning new projects
that can read like anthropological studiesof people from faraway places.
The prospectus for one new $20million effort, obtained by The Times,
(01:28):
aims to reverse the erosion of Democratic
support among young men,especially online.
It is code-named SAM — short
for “Speaking with American Men: A Strategic Plan” — (01:37):
undefined
and promises investmentto “study the syntax, language
and content that gains attentionand virality in these spaces.”
If Democrats are alienated from men,it might just be because they see them
as objects of study, as opposed to humanbeings they actually know.
(02:02):
If you know
someone, you probably don’t need to studytheir “syntax, language, and content“
or learn about these other “spaces“they inhabit.
And it’s not just men who are becomingstrangers to the Democratic Party.
It’s black, Latino,Asian, and female voters too.
Many are members of the party’sformer, blue collar base.
(02:25):
In recent decades the non-collegeeducated share of the Democratic vote
has shrunk from 55 to 25 percent.
“We are losing support in vastswaths of the country, in rural America,
in the Midwest, the places where I’mfrom,” says the Democratic Colorado
Representative Jason Crow.“People that I grew up with
(02:47):
who now support Donald Trump,who used to be Democrats.
There’s no reason why we shouldn’thave the support of these folks, other
than we have pushed, in so many ways,these people away from our party.”
It is possible that the $20 million
spent on studying how men talkwill prove to have been worth every penny.
(03:07):
But I doubt it.
Studying the problem is the problem.
Studying it more makes it worse.Today’s highly
educated, stuck-in-their-heads Democratsstudy politics instead of practicing it.
They analyze votersinstead of connecting with them.
They commission polls, conductfocus groups, convene seminars,
(03:30):
and yes, pay for an expensive researchproject called SAM, presumably
because that sounds like a regular guykind of name.
But who knows?
Not us, until we do the research.
The results will join petabytes of dataDemocrats have already collected at huge
cost — that’spart of what’s being paid for
(03:51):
by that endless flood of fundraising textsyou’re getting.
They will mine their data, once more,
to try to devise a messagethat surely, this time, will work.
But again, I doubt it.
Yes, if you want to talk to people,especially if you want
to persuade them of something, it’sa good idea to learn about them first.
(04:13):
That’swhy advertisers invest in market research.
But effective advertisersknow that data alone can’t
tell you how to talk to people: how to reach and move them. (04:20):
undefined
That’s why the best advertisersalso invest
in the best creative talentthey can find.
But so many Democratic campaignsseem to have been designed
by the research department,not the creative department: all data
all the time, one list of policy pointsafter another, addressed
(04:40):
not to people, but to demographics— “black voters,“ “Latino
voters,” “LGBTQvoters,“ etc., etc., etc.
And even if they do hire more and bettercreatives, let’s remember:
most people don’t like advertising,no matter how good it is.
Democrats are failing to meet a standardthey need to exceed.
(05:03):
When voters listen to a candidate,
they want to at least believe they’rehearing more than a marketing message.
But Democratic Party leaderswill announce each new message,
and even explain how theyand their consultants came up with it,
thereby drawing maximum attentionto how artificial it is.
I think they can’t help themselves.
(05:24):
A literal-minded focuson the mechanics of everything is
typical of life in the iron cage,where only the mechanics are real.
Like the mechanics of syntax, language,and content,
instead of actual connection with living,breathing humans.
Let’s say I become an expertin the syntax,
language, and content used by the French.
(05:47):
That would allow me to speakwith French people.
But could I really connect with them,the way I might
if I had actually been living among them?
Could I win a French election?
After Ifailed at that, let’s say I tried harder,
say by learning some of the latest Frenchslang and wearing new French styles.
When you encounter foreign visitorsto your country
(06:09):
doing that, how often does it fool you?
How well has this approach been working
for Democratic candidates,bouncing along in a tank, wearing brand
new hunting clothes, or droppin’ their g’sin a blue-collar bar?
James Carville famously said,“It’s the economy, stupid.”
And the economy does matter, a lot.
(06:31):
But Bill Clinton didn’t winbecause he was an economist.
His gift wasn’tthat he understood how the economy worked,
although he certainly did.
His gift was thathe understood how the economy felt.
Lots of smart Democratsget the first part.
Too many seemoblivious to the second part.
(06:51):
It’s the alienation, stupid.
But how do you get unalienated?
How do you escape your own mind?
Not by thinking the same old way,but harder.
You can learn to thinkin a different way.
A good place to startis with the Nobel-winning
psychologistDaniel Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and Slow.
(07:14):
It’s based on decades of experimentshe conducted with his late
research partner Amos Tversky.
The book overturns previous assumptions
about how people make decisions,including political ones.
That’s seldom through slow,careful analysis of their options,
which means a whole lot of Democraticcommunication is wasted.
(07:36):
No, we make most decisionsvia fast shortcuts,
in the form of biases and heuristics.For example,
the heuristic of salience: whatever sticks out in our awareness. (07:44):
undefined
A single, emotionally intense
experience will loom over\endless expanses of data.
Consider
Jaws, the original summer blockbuster.
Fifty years after its release,countless swimmers, me among them,
(08:04):
still have an irrational fear of sharks,
even though the risk of a shark attackis minuscule.
The drive to the beachis literally millions of times
more dangerous.But the image is overpoweringly salient:
a lone, vulnerable girl suddenly pulled
below the waves by a 35-foot great white.
(08:26):
So is the lethally efficient shark themeby John Williams:
two notes on a cello, evoking pure terror
rising from the depths of our psyches.
Sleazy salespeople
and demagogic politicians love salience.
Trump, who is both, lives by it.
His actual record in business
(08:47):
is one of incompetenceand serial bankruptcy.
But what’s salient
in the minds of his supportersis the image of the brilliant mogul
he played in two works of fiction: The Apprentice and The Art of the Deal. (08:55):
undefined
The actual record
of immigrants in our countryis resoundingly positive.
Asidefrom their many contributions, immigrants
— including the dark-skinned onesTrump is constantly warning about —
are less likely to commit crimesthan native-born Americans are.
(09:17):
This means that if your neighborhood seesan immigration influx,
the per capita crime rateis probably going to go down.
Trump doesn’t care.
All he needs on any given day is one vividstory of a bad crime by an immigrant,
even if he has to make one up.Democrats run on immigration statistics.
(09:38):
Trump runs on “They’re eating the cats,they’re eating the dogs!”
Seeing how readilyso many people fall for such scams, it’s
tempting to conclude that Plato was right: Most people are stupid. (09:47):
undefined
All of us could stand to be humbleabout our brain power.
But we don’t think fastbecause we’re stupid.
We do it because it helped ourspecies survive this long.
In our earliest days,
thinking fastor slow was a matter of life or death.
(10:10):
Consider a rustle in the tall grass.
Or rather, don’t consider it — there’sno time.
Decoding the meaning of that rustle —life-giving opportunity
or lethal threat — requiresinstantaneous intelligence.
Under such circumstances, slowthinking is stupid thinking,
If we stop to carefully considerthe odds of one outcome versus
(10:32):
the other, we are going to end up eateninstead of eating.
So evolution designed us to think slowlyand rationally
only when it’s worth it,and only when it’s safe.
Which is why sleazy salespeople and demagogues are constantly
trying to scare us into thinking fast.
But it’s possible to appeal
(10:53):
to people’s fast mindswithout being sleazy.
And it’s possible to use your own fastmind to connect
with theirs at the speed connectionhappens, moment to moment.
Like Obama did.
Obama understoodthat you campaign in poetry
and govern in prose, as Mario Cuomo oncesaid.
(11:14):
Obama had detailed policies ready
to addressevery aspect of being president.
And if you wanted to know about them,they were on the website.
An Obama campaign eventwas about how it felt to be there,
and the promisethat the future could feel like that too.
That’s why it was drivennot by policy points
(11:34):
but by stories, images, and Obama’sintuitive ability to connect across
all the dimensions of connection,most of which are non-verbal.
The event was designed to answer
the most important question voters have.
That question is not, “What’syour policy on issue X or Y?”
It’s “Can I trust you?”
(11:57):
Can I trust you to do this job,
trust you to look out for meand my family,
and trust you to take care of X,Y and all that other stuff.
You establish trust by
connecting with people emotionally,not intellectually.
Rationalistshave traditionally deprecated emotions
(12:17):
because they see themas interfering with thought.
That’s how Plato saw them,as have most rational thinkers since.
And emotions do interferewith thought — rational thought.
See above re sleazysalespeople and demagogues.
But recent findings show that emotions
are essentialto a different kind of thought.
(12:40):
It's the kind of thoughtwe use to make most decisions —
even the slow ones, in the end.
Around the same time Kahneman and Tverskywere challenging conventional wisdom
on how we think, so was a youngneuroscientist named Antonio Damasio.
Damasio suspected that reason and emotionsare not separate from each other.
(13:01):
Neither are the mind and body,an assumption dating at least to 1637,
when René Descartes declared “I think,therefore I am.” Damasio’s
suspicion appeared to be confirmedwhen he met a patient he calls Elliot,
whose life was falling apart.
Elliot had undergone surgeryto remove a tumor
impinging on parts of his brainthat enabled the experience of emotions.
(13:25):
Damasio tells the story in his bookDescartes’ Error:
Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain:
The surgery wasa success in every respect, and insofar
as such tumors tend not to grow again,the outlook was excellent.
What was to prove less felicitouswas the turn in Elliot’s personality.
(13:46):
The changes,which began during his physical recovery,
astonished family and friends.
To be sure, Elliot’ssmarts and his ability
to move about and use languagewere unscathed.
In many ways,however, Elliot was no longer Elliot.
Consider the beginning of his day: He needed (14:02):
undefined
prompting to get started in the morningand prepare to go to work.
Once at workhe was unable to manage his time
properly; he could not be trustedwith a schedule.
When the job called for interruptingan activity and turning to another,
he might persist nonetheless,seemingly losing sight of his main goal.
(14:24):
Or he might interrupt the activityhe had engaged, to turn to something
he found more captivatingat that particular moment.
Imagine a task involving reading andclassifying documents of a given client.
Elliot would read and fully understandthe significance of the material,
and he certainly knewhow to sort out the documents
according to the similarityor disparity of their content.
(14:47):
The problem was that he was likely,all of a sudden, to turn from
the sorting task he had initiatedto reading one of those papers, carefully
and intelligently,and to spend an entire day doing so.
Or he might spend a whole afternoondeliberating on which
principle of categorizationshould be applied:
Should it be date, size of document,pertinence to the case, or another?
(15:10):
The flow of work was stopped.
One might say that the particularstep of the task at which Elliot balked
was actually being carried out too well,and at the expense of the overall purpose.
One might say thatElliot had become irrational concerning
the larger frame of behavior,which pertained to his main priority,
while within the smallerframes of behavior, which pertained to
(15:33):
subsidiary tasks,his actions were unnecessarily detailed.
His knowledge base seemed to survive,and he could perform
many separate actions as well as before.
But he could not be counted on to perform
an appropriate actionwhen it was expected.
Understandably, after repeated adviceand admonitions from colleagues
(15:54):
and superiors went unheeded,Elliot’s job was terminated.
It may not be
fair to compareElliott to today’s Democrats.
But it’s hard to resist.
Like Elliott, most Democratic
politicians are smartpeople who know lots of things.
But, also like Elliott, many strugglewith making decisions
(16:16):
and sticking with them— decisions like “What do I stand for?.”
The tempting correlationis that both Elliott and alienated
Democratshave become cut off from their emotions.
And as Damasio’s research indicates,
people need emotionsin order to make decisions.
If you don’t have ready accessto your emotions,
(16:38):
being smartcan make your decisions harder.
You can consider all kinds of options,but you can’t pick one.
To do that, you need to feel that
one option is better than others.
Damasio writes, “The powers of reason
and the experience of emotiondecline together."
Obviously, alienation isn’tthe same as brain damage.
(17:03):
And I don’t mean to suggestthat alienated Democrats
have no feelings at all: they cry and laugh like anyone else. (17:06):
undefined
But so
much of what they say is so affectless.
the pain and joy of lifetransmuted into abstract concepts.
A notorious example was providedby Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer
after Trumpslashed grants to Harvard University,
(17:27):
including money for vital medical researchaffecting millions of lives.
Asked what Democratswere going to do about it, Schumer said,
“We sent him a very strong letterjust the other day asking eight
very strong questions.” That’s
just so weirdlybloodless, and hormoneless.
(17:48):
The good news is,lots of Democratic voters
noticed, and made their emotions clear.
Maybe that’ll show up in the data.
Or maybe more Democratic leaders,including some new ones,
will show they don’tneed data to know how to talk.
More on that next time.
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