Many of us, either continually or occasionally, regard the “strange” actions of others as being stupid, evil, or uninformed. There is no need to provide examples of “strange” actions since America is now so fractured that it would be harder to find examples of shared “solid” understandings.
In light of the chaos in the public square, I have concluded that it doesn’t make any practical or realistic sense to call those who do “strange” things either dumb or evil. Most of our differences are based on how we perceive the world, and not differences in race, sex, intelligence, social class, region, etc. Sure, there are statistical correlations based on all these variables, but for every variable, there are many notable exceptions. Moreover, it does not make sense to get very excited about small “strange” actions. Since we have so many BIG problems, it is bizarre that Americans get excited over an ad for women’s jeans.
My simple question is, “How can we move towards a unified, shared American perspective, instead of the fragmented one we have now?”
Taking a page from Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, we need to focus on anomalies between what we think works in America and what actually works. Kuhn outlined the give and take among scientists when they debated what they believed was the true nature of the universe. He called the agreed-upon “truth” normal science. As long as the prevailing scientific understanding accurately described the universe, then the well-established theory was accepted. However, what happens when the theory does not predict or explain something? What happens when a theory goes to hell in a handbasket? Kuhn called observations that could not be explained by normal science anomalies. Anomalies are self-evident. For millennia, humans believed the Earth was flat. However, at some point, a few scientific thinkers found anomalies in the understanding of the Earth’s shape.
Using Kuhn’s anomaly tool, it is better to focus on the weaknesses in our theories about how America works instead of doggedly defending them. Defending bad ideas or beliefs is wrongheaded, but it is not necessarily because we are stupid. The underlying problem usually involves a “strange” belief that was believed to have “worked” for someone at some time. An example that I witnessed firsthand a long time ago involved a young man who was a Latin major at a prestigious university. He was utterly convinced that America should operate like a Greek city-state.
I created a video that I posted to YouTube that shows a series of anomalies in a few political and social domains. It very briefly identifies a few perspectives that have, should, or will produce unfortunate results. For example, one anomaly concerns a nature-loving motorcycle rider who got off his bike to feed a wild bear. He had no concept or perspective on wild bears. Incidentally, this actually happened a few weeks ago in Romania. Another segment shows the nearly automatic response to negative news (“Change the Channel!”). Another segment depicts the common habit of men and women to spend most of their time with like-minded people. Instead of identifying problems with their thinking and expanding their horizons, many of these coffee shop meetings reinforce their existing biases.
One of the final segments indirectly addressed a new authoritarian trend in American politics. Trying or succeeding to fire non-political people in government because they will not debase themselves to the political will of the President is especially troubling. Converting highly credible government functions into agencies of political expediency is straight out of the playbooks of Stalin, Hitler, and Mussolini. Trying to fire the head of the FED is a vivid example of an anomaly! It is the road to hell.