🧵 As a former Republican consultant who left in 2015, I'm often asked why Trump and his minions are willingly destroying science, K12 education, universities, international organizations, public broadcasting, and social welfare institutions.

The paradox of modernity is that each advance in knowledge also creates ignorance, in two major ways.

The first is that knowing more things also increases the number of known unknowns. Our models of reality are not reality itself. Scientific laws are descriptions of physical obligation, rather than the obligations themselves.

When we describe a thing via a model, the model itself becomes a source of doubt, because no model can explain obligations perfectly.

This extrinsic epistemic approach has made modern humans able to advance through science in ways that would appear godlike to any ancient person.

But this new way of thinking is knowing through negation. And it's not how humans did things for the entire history of our species. It's "unnatural."

https://plus.flux.community/p/robert-kennedys-bizarre-obsession

Cumulative advances in knowledge are threatening to people who only want to use somatic reasoning and who respond to all new things memetically. They want to imitate authorities rather than have humility and accept extrinsic realities through abstraction.

This is the conservative epistemology. And it's inherently pre-political. There are many conservatives who are not Republicans or Tories, etc. https://plus.flux.community/p/the-science-behind-why-donald-trump

Besides piling up all kinds of newfangled things, expansions in knowledge also can liberate people from social prejudices.

For centuries, women and other ethnic groups were not fully human. Same-sex attraction & trans people weren't real.

These bigotries are the product of what's often called the "problem of other minds."

Because cognition is inherently private, & language is an only a very partial extrusion of thought, we can't know for sure that other minds are real. https://plus.flux.community/p/renee-good-and-the-problem-of-other

Liberalism originated as #philosophy that said all minds are equal, that no one has inherent superiority, and that anyone can be wrong. This is ultimately why right-wing people hate it so much.

But the problem of other minds also extends to institutions made by other minds.

During the Great Depression and after World War II, the United States and many other countries built governmental and international institutions to alleviate poverty and resolve disputes.

These institutions and the global order they created were very far from perfect, but they were much better than what existed before.

Unfortunately, their creators didn't realize that they needed to continue to advocate for institutions and to always reform them to help more.

People are sometimes surprised that Trump and other reactionary politicians don't have consistent policies.

They shouldn't be. Reactionaries hate abstract systems and coherence. They don't understand NATO, USAID, public broadcasting, literature, or science. So these things must be destroyed.

Government as the ultimate mutual aid, cooperation, consent, and sexual autonomy are concepts that don't make sense in a worldview where only the strong survive.

#Science and democracy need each other, and it's also no coincidence that reactionaries hate both. This is why Trump and his band of totalitarians have been de-funding them and attacking them.

Much more on how and why here: https://plus.flux.community/p/science-is-under-attack-because-it

Science, democracy, and art all go together. And so does sexual freedom. They're all ways of knowing ourselves.

We've known these truths among ourselves, but we have not talked about them nearly enough to the broader public.

That must change. https://plus.flux.community/p/the-right-wing-wars-on-science-and

🧵 As a former Republican consultant who left in 2015, I'm often asked why Trump and his minions are willingly destroying science, K12 education, universities, international organizations, public broadcasting, and social welfare institutions.

There are many reasons, but the main ones are psychological rather than ideological. They struggle with abstract thinking and are afraid of the world...

🧵 As a former Republican consultant who left in 2015, I'm often asked why Trump and his minions are willingly destroying science, K12 education, universities, international organizations, public broadcasting, and social welfare institutions.

There are many reasons, but the main ones are psychological rather than ideological. They struggle with abstract thinking and are afraid of the world...

🧵 As a former Republican consultant who left in 2015, I'm often asked why Trump and his minions are willingly destroying science, K12 education, universities, international organizations, public broadcasting, and social welfare institutions.

There are many reasons, but the main ones are psychological rather than ideological. They struggle with abstract thinking and are afraid of the world...

🧵 As a former Republican consultant who left in 2015, I'm often asked why Trump and his minions are willingly destroying science, K12 education, universities, international organizations, public broadcasting, and social welfare institutions.

There are many reasons, but the main ones are psychological rather than ideological. They struggle with abstract thinking and are afraid of the world...

@mattsheffield many reasons, yes. real reason - he's a tyrant. each of these encourages independent thinking. that works against tyrants and encourages independent thinking. tyrants only want those who agree totally with them. look at all the yes-men in his cabinet and how few there are who will actually challenge him.

@mattsheffield No, no, no, no, no!!! They don't struggle with abstract thinking at all, nor that the problem is ppsychological. They intelligently and lucidly target whatever is a material obstacle to their fascist political agenda.

🧵 As a former Republican consultant who left in 2015, I'm often asked why Trump and his minions are willingly destroying science, K12 education, universities, international organizations, public broadcasting, and social welfare institutions.

There are many reasons, but the main ones are psychological rather than ideological. They struggle with abstract thinking and are afraid of the world...

🧵 As a former Republican consultant who left in 2015, I'm often asked why Trump and his minions are willingly destroying science, K12 education, universities, international organizations, public broadcasting, and social welfare institutions.

There are many reasons, but the main ones are psychological rather than ideological. They struggle with abstract thinking and are afraid of the world...

🧵 As a former Republican consultant who left in 2015, I'm often asked why Trump and his minions are willingly destroying science, K12 education, universities, international organizations, public broadcasting, and social welfare institutions.

There are many reasons, but the main ones are psychological rather than ideological. They struggle with abstract thinking and are afraid of the world...

@mattsheffield
Interesting. Though you seem to ignore economic interests and the need for assertion and preservation of power by the oligarchy in a rigged political system coming to a crisis, both environmental and political, where the accumulated enormous inequalities hang like the sword of Damocles over their heads, making their need to act now urgent. Scientists, intellectuals, their institutions and anyone who can think straight are no allies in such conditions. Isn't that reason enough?

@65dBnoise I'm going a layer deeper than your idea here. Why would oligarchs want such things? They go against the evolved nature of humans as cooperative beings--except to a small minority with differing cognitive habits.