Words are NOT violence: Jumping on the bandwagon to reflect on Charlie Kirk’s death

Before I address the status of words, please give me a moment to clarify my understanding of the category of violence, specifically the categories of violence that should properly be regarded as criminal, or at least immoral. I accept that common usage differs from technical usage, but we need to be careful that the common sloppy usage of the word “violence” does not contaminate the technical applications or we risk doing great harm. 

Martial arts are not violent in the technical sense that I am concerned with here, even though in common usage they are. Consent is the distinguishing factor. I trained in martial arts for about five years in my youth. My training involved hitting, kicking, and otherwise doing things to other people that could, and sometimes did, result in them being injured. I was also injured from time to time by others. Injury is a central prototype of harm and  the “common sense” category of violence is often applied when harm results from one person hitting or kicking another person independent of taking consent into account. However, I do not regard my martial arts training as violence in the criminal sense nor even in the milder immoral sense, even though obvious harms were done from time to time. The active decision I and my sparring partners made to participate in that type of training removed those activities from the category of violence. 

Taking another example, if you accept that consent changes one of two identical sex acts from a violent criminal offense into a nonviolent, noncriminal one, I assert that consent has the same power in martial arts. This applies to any instance of an inherently dangerous nonsexual voluntary physical interaction between two people. The mutual understanding that makes consensual sexual activity nonviolent is equivalent to the mutual understanding that martial arts practitioners have with regards to those dangerous activities. What may be called “violent” in casual conversation, as martial arts and other combat sports routinely are, does not rise to the level of a crime nor does it even rise to the level of being immoral, nor should it when consent has been established. Sex and martial arts are both activities that can only be evaluated for the presence of violence through understanding the experiences of those involved; the directly observable features of neither of those activities are reliable guides to the presence nor absence of violence. Judging violence to be either criminal or immoral requires both the presence of harms and the absence of consent.

Removing the issue of consent for a moment, what harms are being done by words such that they are labelled as violence? This whole reflection on violence has arisen in the wake of the murder of the conservative firebrand Charlie Kirk. In a social media post I equated Charlie Kirk’s death with the deaths of eleven Venezuelan folks that were summarily executed by the US Navy on the orders of the President, children killed in Gaza, and children killed in school shootings. All of which reflect events that had been reported in close succession. In response to that post an acquaintance pushed back on my claim that words are NOT violence. I assume that the pushback was based on taking Charlie Kirk’s words to be violence. The logic being that if he chose to legitimate violence as a political tool, then perhaps we should be less alarmed by his being violently murdered in public. 

“Stochastic terrorism” was the particular phrase that was used in the pushback to my post. I was not yet familiar with that phrase, but a trivial surface reading intuitively led me to the idea that this was probably a categorical error. It sounded to me like a term to describe the strategy of known terrorist organizations, like the now defunct Tamil Tigers of Sri Lanka, who would train people in the ways of terror then have them set up unremarkable lives in the capital city with orders to wait until some insult to their ideals or an assault on their organization occurs and then enact their righteous violence against the enemy. This is called a “sleeper cell.” Since there is no coordination amongst the “sleeper cells” and the main terrorist organization they usually go undetected and sometimes successfully carry out their spontaneous plans for retribution (often killing themselves in the process). 

My intuition about the phrase was at least partly wrong; it turns out that it refers to rhetorical strategies attributed to political leaders who are implied to be using the sleeper cell strategy except without the step of training the terrorist. They use their rhetoric to demonize their political enemies and sometimes an ideologically aligned person perpetrates violence against that enemy. The idea is that the politicos just have to talk dirty and dirty deeds will be the result, so on the surface it seems logical and morally correct to hold the politicos responsible.

Here’s the problem. This relies on a chain of justification that falls into several of the traps of the three great untruths that were explained in the book The Coddling of the American Mind by Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukanioff. Here they are:

The Untruth of Fragility: The belief that people are fragile and that exposure to challenges makes them weaker, rather than stronger. 

The Untruth of Emotional Reasoning: The idea that one should always trust their feelings, even when they may be distorted or misleading. 

The Untruth of Us Versus Them: The tendency to view life as a simplistic battle between good and evil, leading to polarization and a lack of nuance. 

One of the key steps in the justification for taking words to be inherently violent is the second untruth. In the wake of tragic events it is easier to allow our emotionally tinged  thoughts to short circuit our analysis. If we identify ourselves with the people in the events, either victims or perpetrators, we automatically, outside of conscious awareness, seek out a story of the events that will protect our identity from being associated with guilt for perpetrating the crime and/or being associated with any righteous justifications for targeting that particular victim. When Charlie Kirk died both his fans and his detractors quickly stoked the fires that would get a justification train rolling in their favored direction. They were acting in accordance with a combination of the untruth of us versus them and emotional reasoning. 

Let’s be clear that I am stoking the fires of justification with this piece. Justification can be a reasonable and desirable process. But instead of taking sides for or against Charlie Kirk I am trying to stoke the fires of a justification train against perpetuating violence in and of itself. Specifically, I want to make the case that equating words with violence is actually a capitulation to the forces that favor the use of violence in all forms. In short, when you conflate words with violent acts you have surrendered the field of play to players that want violence (that is, immoral and/or criminal violence) to be an acceptable ploy in political gamesmanship. 

The causal connection between the words of one person and the actions of another are extremely difficult to establish, though not impossible. Let’s suppose that we go along with the idea that words are violence. What stops our political opposition from picking out our words as being violent when they precede some act of violence? What standards of evidence or principles of reasoning do we use to make an accurate and reliable causal attribution to one set of words and not another set? If we make a passionate speech in which we use words that suggest vigorous opposition to our political enemies and in some short amount of time later one of our prominent political opponents is violently assassinated, why aren’t we guilty? Should there be a window of time in which we prosecute the speech of every public figure who opposes the dead person because they surely incited the violence against that person? Do you seriously believe that you can control which words get labeled as being violence such that your side will get the benefits without suffering oppressive drawbacks from the other side wielding the same tools? 

This is a slippery slope argument. I believe that there is a slippery slope towards the perpetuation of violence if some words are taken to be violent. If you claim words are violence there is no principle to distinguish between the words you and your opposition used in the lead up to any given act of violence. If we had access to an omniscient truth teller who could accurately and reliably distinguish which words led to which acts of violence AND could discern whether or not there were violent intentions behind those words, then we would not need freedom of speech. But, in the real world we have access to neither accurate causal information nor reliable means of detecting intentions. Thus, freedom of speech is required to ensure a fair playing field (regardless of whether or not we can ultimately achieve it.) The crux of freedom of speech is that either all words can be freely spoken (within strict limitations on when words are causally implicated in violent acts) or no one is safe from being prosecuted for their words. 

Harm is a necessary but not sufficient condition for something to rise into the category of violence. Even if we accept that the words incited violence that resulted in harm, that fact does not mean that the words should be included in the category of “violence.” Rape is violent not because of the physical violations of bodily integrity; it is made violent by the psychological violations of the primary human needs for relatedness, autonomy, and competence. Consent is crucial because the exact same physical “violations” of bodily integrity can become ecstatic celebrations of bodily pleasure. Consent is the transformative element.

What are the conditions of consent that are necessary for harmful words to be transformed from violent to nonviolent? Consent requires a state of mind in which the choice being made is a legitimate one. Psychological harm occurs when a perpetrator thwarts plans, blocks paths, and/or creates a situation in which the plans and paths are exclusively attainable by capitulating to the perpetrator’s demands. This is also known as coercion. My field of expertise is in psychology, specifically Self-Determination Theory (SDT). SDT has empirically demonstrated that all humans must have their primary psychological needs for relatedness, autonomy, and competence satisfied in order to have well-being. Harm results from the thwarting of those needs. This makes sense of how emotional manipulation that forces a victim to sacrifice one of their needs in order to satisfy another is harmful. The words that were used were the tools of the manipulation, but if there was no physical action against the victim there was no violence even though there was harm. If the perpetrator used only gestures without words, there is still harm and still no violence. We need to recognize that the harms are being caused by the way that the perpetrator arranged the situation, including through the use of words to manipulate the victim’s perceptions of the situation, the victim’s ability to think clearly about the situation, and their ability to act effectively on their goals and aspirations. The harms are real and reprehensible, but the words the perpetrator used do not belong in the category of violence. They are the tools of violence in this example and words are not as amenable to policing as cars, guns, and other physically manifested tools.  

But are all harms inherently the result of violence? Or can some harms be the result of non-violent activities? If I flip a woman off and she takes it to be threat which causes emotional trauma, did I do violence to her? If I say, “fuck you” to a woman and she takes it to be a threat which then causes her to have an emotionally traumatizing experience, did I do violence to her? If I use my middle finger to sexually assault her and she is emotionally traumatized, did I do violence to her? I hope we agree that in every one of these cases harm was done, but in the third instance the harms were the result of violence in the criminal sense. The first and second are less clear, but, crucially, in the third case it was not the action I took that created the violence, it was the lack of consent. 

The nature of the situation is important to notice. Let’s imagine that this event occurs in a public venue in which I am a performer and it is a type of theater in which bawdy dialogue and rude gestures are expected. In the first and second instances her consent was implied by her choice to participate as an audience member. It was a clearly a poor choice on her part, but I, as a performer, should not be held responsible for her reaction to a normal activity expected to happen within the context of that art form. (Sidenote: I have contempt for trigger warnings in theater because I believe it is a defining feature of theatrical performances that transgression of social norms is to be expected. If you don’t want to be triggered, either don’t patronize theatrical content or take responsibility for your fragility by actively inquiring within your community to help you make better judgments about what performances would be appropriate for you. Building a community that cares that much about your vulnerabilities will be much better for you than being anonymously “protected” by generic trigger warnings.)

If words are violence, advertising is violent. Any random communicative effort might become an instance of violence. The practical question is, how can we sensibly deploy consent as a meaningful boundary? First, there has to be a meaningful distinction between voluntarily participating in an activity or not. Public discourse must be put in the realm of implied consent. Semi-public discourse that is mediated by something akin to a social media platform should help folks discern the public from the private (though the opposite seems to be the case on most platforms today.) 

In summary, words are not violence for both practical and technical reasons. Technically, there must be both the presence of harms and the absence of consent for anything to rise into the category of criminal violence. The context of public discourse implies the consent of those who are consuming it in the media or attending to it in the public square. The harms might be real, but the consent makes all the difference. We need to do better about the assessment of consent, but it does not bode well for if we abandon the standard of consent as a defining feature of the forms of risky interaction that we will judge to be either immoral or criminal.  

I will specifically point out that we need to be careful not to assume that our fellow citizens are morally fragile. Utilizing government to relieve fellow citizens from the burden of making moral decisions is not realistic nor is it desirable. If anything we need to encourage more moral deliberation, not less. The champions of using the powers of our local, state, and national governments to police speech are infantilizing our citizenry, not protecting them. 

Part 2: Regarding Criminal Bosses and Free Speech

Removing words from the category of violence does not mean that criminal bosses can hide behind free speech. The legal system has carved out reasonable means of prosecuting the instigators of criminal acts by others. Admittedly, it is difficult to accumulate sufficient evidence, deliver persuasive arguments, and amass the political will to prove the causal link between a crime boss and the actions of his cronies, but that difficulty is fully justified if you are morally committed to justice for all. Unfortunately, we now have a criminal head of state who has convinced his cronies on the Supreme Court to carve out an exception for him. So, in this one instance we do have a crime boss who appears to have immunity from prosecution for the crimes he is asking others to commit. He is so assured of his immunity that he does not even have to hide his murderous intentions.

That crime boss labeled a boat with eleven people on it as a “drug runner” which placed it in the category of a “terrorist threat” which is claimed to be reasonable justification for a summary execution of everyone on board. What is to stop him from labeling a man speaking Spanish as “possibly illegal” who might be a “drug mule” or a “drug dealer” therefore a “terrorist threat” who can be summarily executed by ICE agents? What about a “leftist” supporter of “Palestinians in Gaza” who must also be a “terrorist threat” that can be summarily executed by any federal officer? In principle I believe that no one is safe anywhere in the world as long as this crime boss and his Supreme Court cronies remain in positions of power. The crime boss has repeatedly stated his concern for this country’s decline and how it is failing; the longer he holds power the more it becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy.

My religious faith community supports me in taking the dignity and worth of every individual person to be endowed by God. The routine violation of that dignity by this administration is immoral. It does not matter what policy objective they are pursuing, the dignity and worth of each and every person is meant to be protected by the constitution and by our obligations as a member of the United Nations and other international groups. 

I take the sanctity of human dignity to be a universal aspiration. Those who oppose or deny it are under the influence of nefarious forces that have confused, distracted, or emotionally manipulated them. Nefarious forces of perceptual distortion, cognitive confusion, emotional chaos, and materialist (anti-spiritual) values have achieved a level of systemic influence recently that is alarming. The people who are acting out this agenda are not evil, though all of their actions against the dignity of men, women, and children are. Some of them will be so intractably convinced of the righteousness of their cause that they may well fight to the death for their beliefs. We should not oblige them with lethal opposition because that gives them the win. It makes their prophesy of an American hellscape on earth self-fulfilling. 

In any case, I regard the present federal administration of the United States of America to be criminally violent. Not because of their words, but because of their actions. They have summarily executed people against our laws and in violation of international laws and treaties as well. I regard our current Supreme Court to be complicit in those crimes because they have abandoned logic and their moral sensibilities. They have placed the President’s official acts above the law. They have supported the administration’s criminal violence against people who speak Spanish, take low paying jobs, congregate in certain areas, and on other utterly trivial pretexts. This despite saying that similar kinds of discrimination are unacceptable in college admissions. I sadly conclude that the protections of human dignity that are stated in our constitution as the freedoms protected by the Bill of Rights can no longer be expected to be upheld by any of the three branches of our federal government.  

The Science of Freedom, Oppression, Liberation, and Equity

The nature of being human must be inherently determined by what we require in order to have well-being. This means that the rigorous model for distinguishing primary human needs provided by Self-Determination Theory (SDT) necessarily gives us insights into human nature. This is a link to a 15 minute video that explains the science of needs in the context of education.

Humans are universally recognized as yearning to be free. Having a precise model of how that yearning occurs in human experience through the lens of the well-established psychological model of SDT means we can more precisely define freedom. Freedom is proximately about having our needs satisfied, but freedom is ultimately about enabling each and every individual person to contribute productively to the collectives that make that individual freedom possible. 

Oppression is proximately the neglect and/or thwarting of needs, but ultimately the use of collective powers to prevent some people’s needs from being satisfied either through direct acts against those people’s efforts to satisfy their needs or systematically preventing them from having access to whatever resources would enable them to satisfy their needs (a.k.a. structural oppression). 

Liberation from oppression requires both the removal of barriers to need satisfying resources and actively educating the oppressed folks about their restored freedoms. An educated person is one who perceives accurately, thinks clearly and acts effectively on self-selected goals and aspiration that are appropriate to their situation without necessarily being aware that any of those things are happening. Education is centrally about the agency to act in community; it is only peripherally concerned with the tools of our culture, such as academics. The centrality of agency follows from the fact that it is an unwavering necessity across all time and space while the choice of which tools to use in any given situation will vary according to accidents of history and society.

Equity is ownership of the collective in which we are embedded. Ownership means that we have the power to contribute to the governance of the collective, to participate in making the decisions that will affect us, and to participate in resolving the conflicts that we experience as a consequence of collective decisions and of the behavior of others. Achieving equity requires four elements: 1) define needs scientifically (SDT), 2) distribute resources fairly to satisfy needs, 3) remove structural barriers to need satisfaction, and 4) satisfy needs with parity across groups. 

Inspired by Dover, M. A. (2019) A Needs-based Partial Theory of Human Injustice: Oppression, Dehumanization, Exploitation, and Systematic Inequality in Opportunities to Address Human Needs. Humanity & Society, 43(4) pp. 442-483. DOI: 10.1177/0160597619832623

Against Magical Beliefs About Language and Schools

I periodically run into claims about the role of language in thinking that are dangerously close to assuming that language has magical powers over the human mind. One recent example is from an article defending the need for classical liberal education by a philosophy professor named Chris Nadon in an article entitled “Against Lived Experience.”  In a paragraph that is constructing the straw man version of “student-centered” schools that he so valiantly slays with his argument, he said, “We cannot think without language.” 

If we decide to take this statement at face value we have to assume that deaf children who have not yet learned sign language are not thinking. We have to assume that all pre-verbal children are not yet thinking, either. We also have to assume that all animals are unthinking, as well. I live at a llama ranch and train llamas. The idea that they don’t think is utterly absurd. Or to be more precise, due to having a substantial basis in lived experience with pre-verbal children and other non-verbal animals, I can’t take seriously any definition of thinking that could be used to support that claim. 

An important question we need to ask is, What do we really know about thinking? For simplicity I will rely on probably the most famous authority on thinking today: the late Nobel Prize winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman. In 2011 he wrote the best-selling book Thinking Fast and Slow, which is his review of how one conclusion about thinking has become pervasively accepted within psychology: we have two types of thought, a fast intuitive type of thinking and a slow deliberative type of thinking. It might be plausible to posit the idea that our slow deliberative type of thinking involves the substantial use of language; however the fast intuitive type of thinking is plainly not dependent on language. In order to take Nadon’s statement to be true either means that, because an estimated 90 to 99% of what occurs in our brains is in the fast intuitive category, we have to ignore the majority of our thoughts or we have to redefine the word “thinking” so radically that we reject the possibility that pre-verbal children and all animals even think at all. 

Why should we care about claims about the role of language in thinking? The problem is that when we misunderstand the role of language in thinking we put our focus on language; which usually leads us to ignore the more subtle aspects of thought that do most of the real work in determining our actions in the real world. 

In the case of someone like professor Nadon, he might be deceiving himself about the importance of language in educating children and as a consequence of being a school leader may be imposing requirements upon students and teachers that do psychological harm. His straw man argument against “student-centered classrooms” is premised on language having the magical property of restraining thought. Continuing from the prior quote, he said, “With limited words come limited thoughts.” This is a version of linguistic determinism which is typically stated as the idea that if Eskimos have more words for snow and we-who-are-not-Eskimos have less words for snow, we are unable to think the same kinds of thoughts about snow that the Eskimos have. A similar example is that if a language has terms for colors but does not include a word for, say purple, then the people who speak that language might not perceive that color. This hypothesis has been proven false. The ability to perceive gradations of color and properties of snow are not magically limited by the language that people speak and/or think with. The linguistically limited repertoire of words might make reasoning slower and communicating more difficult, but it does not limit the thinking that is possible. 

Language does influence thought. However, those influences are subtle and difficult to tease out. For a deeper understanding of how language is influenced by how our bodies exist in the world, I rely primarily on the works of cognitive linguist George Lakoff and his collaborations with philosopher Mark Johnson. Their main work together is book called Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought. The idea is that there are universal perceptual experiences that are wired into our brains starting in our pre-verbal younger lives and they determine some key aspects of how we construct our linguistic abilities and patterns of reasoning. A whole lot of thinking, shaped by bodily experiences of taking action and other perceptions, determines the development of language. This is the opposite of linguistic determinism. It is important to take this into account when we are thinking deeply about how language works in our minds and how our minds shape our actions. 

Nadon singles out in quotation marks the word “agency” which he implies is “[a]n immediate cause of our failure … [to] … demonstrate the tangible benefits of reading and writing about difficult books.” This is of personal interest because I have written a book called The Agentic Schools Manifesto which is about the importance of agency in educating children. Unfortunately, he must have relied on claims about agency and definitions of agency that are imprecise and poorly articulated given his portrayal of what he thinks it means and how it would be implemented. His portrayal of “student-centered” schooling seems like a cartoon version of how such schools are written about. Most writers who criticize that kind of school also create cartoon versions, therefore his version appears to me to be a cartoon of a cartoon with no basis in or connection to reality. 

Here’s the crux of the issue for me: taking language as the be all and end all of educating children has led to global systems of schooling that value the 3Rs of symbol manipulation (a.k.a. academics) to be their central defining feature. In the course of delivering all the knowledge, skills, and information out of the teachers heads into the heads of the children they have taken up institutional forms, policies, and practices that do psychological harm to children. But Nadon claims the classical academy approach would, rather than merely transfer information, “[turn] around … the whole soul.” I don’t buy his assertion because decades of research into the psychological needs, motivations, and engagement of schoolchildren in academically focused schools all over the world has consistently shown that they have their needs neglected (sometimes actively thwarted), their motivations are more controlled than autonomous, and their engagement is usually behavioral, not agentic. I mention the motivation and engagement to be thorough, but the most important causal piece is the needs. I know of no basis for claiming that the classical academies approach to academic schooling satisfies psychological needs any better than any other kind of academic approach. However, in my books I have presented an abundance of arguments and evidence to support the claim that schools that take agency as their focus do a better job of routinely satisfying psychological needs. 

You would not send your child to a school that starves, dehydrates, suffocates, or recklessly exposes your child to the elements. School personnel that did those things, or even allowed them, would be criminally prosecuted for negligence at the very least. That is because those are all physiological needs that can kill someone when they are neglected or thwarted. It is utterly mystifying to me that schools that routinely neglect the primary psychological needs of children and their teachers still dominate the industry. 

I don’t care if a school calls itself a classical academy, claims to be student-centered, or applies any other label to their school; what I do care about is that every school meets their obligation to provide the kind of psychological conditions that satisfy the needs of all the humans in the school. When they do anything less they are undermining their own educative goals and causing harm, too. The children and their teachers don’t usually die from this kind of neglect, but they are harmed, nonetheless. All schools can do better on this account. The words we apply to schools do not have the magical power of educating students. Words don’t limit our ability to think and act on behalf of children and their teachers.

Independent of the words we apply to schools, they need to be places where children are nurtured, where every child and every teacher has their primary psychological needs satisfied on a routine basis. School leaders can’t control whether or not their students’ and teachers' needs are satisfied in other places and times, but they can ensure that needs are met in their space and in their time. That is the least we should expect of them.  

Charities vs. Government Services

Meme:

Stupidity is celebrating charitable donations while denigrating the creation of a society in which charities are not necessary because of taxes paying for government services. Before claiming false equivalence, read the notes.

Notes: 

I’ll get to the equivalence point in a moment.

Complaining that government collection of taxes is coercive is childish. 

Consider a 3-year old boy who wants ice cream for breakfast and gets a healthy meal served to him instead.

There are consequences for the behaviors that follow. 

If he refuses the food, he goes hungry. 

If he refuses long enough concerned parents might even coerce him into eating.

In any case, we recognize that the demand for unhealthy food is a normal behavior for a small child and we provide food that we know is appropriate.

The childish demand is ignored but food is still provided. 

Now, let’s fast forward to the child becoming old enough to work.

At 15, 16, or 17 years old it is reasonable to demand that the child contribute to the common good, to the family system that provides that healthy food. 

What if the child refuses to contribute?

As a caregiver we cannot starve them, but we are empowered to ensure that the teenager’s food is contingent on some form of contribution. 

We need to be sensitive to their needs, but we also need to ensure that they are maturing into an adult who will contribute to the common good.

The government is like the parent of a child in the sense that it takes on tasks that a childish person does not realize are contributing to the common good.

That is what government of the people, by the people, for the people is all about.

Regarding equivalence: Governance consists of making decisions and resolving the conflicts that arise from the decisions that were made. 

All organizations are forms of government. 

The mechanisms of funding (coercive or voluntary) do not relieve them of the burden of making decisions and resolving the conflicts that arise from the decisions that were made. 

If you perceive taxes as coercive, that is your childishness on display. 

You should be ashamed.

I don’t want to contract for infrastructure, make weather predictions, nor enforce safety rules in mines. 

Those things are necessary to the proper functioning of our society, so the common good demands that those things be done.

As an adult I am expected to contribute to that common good through taxes because neither charities nor businesses are the right mechanism for supplying those things. 

And if you think they are that is a conflict that has to be resolved through the proper mechanisms of governance, not according to the childish whims of one person. 

Refusing to pay your fair share and complaining that the resulting consequences are coercive is childish.

Don’t be childish.

Trump: the Anti-Trust

I am creating a series of memes that portray Trump as the Anti-Trust.

Taking such an overtly political stand outside of education might seem like a departure from my usual modus operandi, so I shall explain.

The core of my work in education is about making the case that trust is central to learning and teaching. 

Specifically, trust arises out of the satisfaction of needs.

Another way to say it is that trust is a by-product of experiencing equity. 

There are four practical steps for producing experiences of equity:

1. Define needs scientifically
2. Distribute resources fairly to satisfy needs
3. Remove structural barriers to the satisfaction of needs
4. Satisfy needs with parity across groups 

(Numbers 2, 3, and 4 are slightly modified versions of consensus definition of equity presented by the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine.)

Understand that this equity recipe is universal to all humans. 

That understanding gives you the key to my inspiration for creating the “Trump: the Anti-Trust” memes.

Nearly everything I have heard about how the Trump administration is managing the federal bureaucracy leads me to believe that they are consistently undermining equity and destroying trust in the federal government.

They are distributing resources unfairly.

They are destroying institutions that are supposed to remove structural barriers to the satisfaction of needs.

They are erecting structural barriers to need satisfaction.

And it all stems from Trump.

This description of Trump by Michael Lewis in his interview with Stephen Colbert inspired me.

He said, "He likes chaos.  

"If I’m trying to predict what Donald Trump is going to do and where he’s going to go, one rule is look for where there is trust in the world and he will try to destroy it. 

"He’s really uncomfortable with trust. 

"And I think there is a logic to it. 

"The logic to it is, he himself is untrustworthy.

"And I don’t mean that as an insult.

"It’s just true, right? 

"He lies all the time, and when he says something true it’s kind of an accident.

"He stiffs people on deals, all that.

"That’s the way he thinks you move through the world. 

"If we’re in a world in which we trust each other, he’s at a disadvantage, he doesn’t belong. 

"But if he eliminates trust between people, he’s leveled the playing field. 

"He gets the world into a place where he’s good at it."

This is the most sensible explanation of Trump I’ve ever heard. 

I have been against Trump-ism all along, but this description of his attitude to the world crystalized the distinction between Trump-ism and conservatism. 

Conservatism seeks to conserve something valuable in our society. 

Conservatives rely on trust, not the opposite. 

I respect conservatism.

I see myself as this kind of conservative.

In my books I have clearly stated that I am anti-bureaucracy.

This commitment might seem to imply that I might be in favor of the DOGE program, but that is not true.

DOGE is not anti-bureaucratic, DOGE is unprincipled wanton destruction of valuable institutions that exist for the purpose of removing structural barriers to need satisfaction. 

DOGE is led by and is only serving the interests of Trump and his cronies.

It is the essence of Trump-ism.

Trump-ism is neither progressive nor conservative, it is not even anti-bureaucratic, it is crony-ism. 

I want government to progress away from bureaucracy. 

I want to conserve the equity and trust building institutions of the federal government.

I am against crony-ism, regardless of which party it might be aligned with. 

Trump-ism is a brand of crony-ism, so I am against it. 

For a deep dive into the foundations of my politics read my post entitled First Principles for Political Realism

First Principles for Political Realism: Rights, Needs, & Equity

Recent events in my home country of the United States of America have prompted me to extend my perspective on equity in education beyond the schoolhouse. I have been striving to rethink education from first principles for over two decades. Evidence that I’ve made some progress is that The Independent Press Association gave my book Schooling for Holistic Equity awards in both Psychology and Education. Now, the political situation in my nation has taken such a tragic and foreboding turn that I cannot help but apply what I’ve discovered more broadly.

My perspective is primarily grounded in the science of Self-Determination Theory, the most widely respected and productive model of human psychological needs, motivation, and engagement in the world today. The principles I am sharing today go beyond that scientific grounding into the realm of politics. Given my presence on a few social media platforms my biases are easily discoverable. For eight years I was the co-founder and primary administrator for Portland Clean Air which fights industrial air pollution in Oregon. That suggests that I tend to favor the left side of the political spectrum in the USA, though I think there are valid and important criticisms of both major parties. I may have once or twice been registered as a Democrat decades ago but have not been affiliated with either of the two major parties since. The point being that I have aspired to a degree of independence from the ideological commitments of the major political parties; this is also consistent with my educational perspective. I have criticisms of both progressive and conservative sides in the education arena, too. My aspiration is to ground my critiques as solidly as possible in science, though going beyond that limited realm is necessary.  

I believe that the first principles that I have posited for education have relevance to our current political situation, both nationally and globally. My principles below start off with a bold statement about what makes the United States Bill of Rights and the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child meaningful. The current events here in the USA show that the current executive branch has abandoned almost all meaningful pretense that the constitution, and the Bill of Rights specifically, are relevant to their policies. What makes my perspective unique is that mainstream schools, public, private, and charter have never even put up a pretense that the UNCRC was relevant to their policies here in the USA. We are the only nation in the world that has not ratified that particular convention. The fight against institutional reluctance to honor the rights of children must now be extended to a fight against institutional reluctance to honor the rights of the entire population of the USA. 

I. The United States Bill of Rights and the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child are meaningless unless they are used to achieve pervasive need satisfaction (a.k.a. liberty and justice) FOR ALL

I.A. Human rights are legal fictions that are useful for dealing with reality, they are neither real nor fantastical

I.A.1. Griffins, nifflers, and unicorns are fantastical beasts that are not real

I.A.1.a. They are only useful to those who profit from talking about them and those who are entertained by that kind of talk

I.A.2. Center of gravity, zero, and mind are useful fictions but they are not fantastical

I.A.2.a. They are broadly useful for understanding unseen features of reality

I.A.3. Rights are useful fictions for systematically creating a societal pattern of pervasive need satisfaction (see item II.) 

I.B. Proper enforcement of human rights will create equity (except for the legal ownership aspect stated in item I.B.1.d.)

I.B.1. Equity is: 

I.B.1.a. parity among groups in regards to getting their needs satisfied 

I.B.1.b. distributing resources fairly to satisfy needs

I.B.1.c. removing barriers to need satisfaction

I.B.1.d. a felt sense of and/or legal ownership in a collective

I.B.2. Those subjected to enforcement actions should have their human rights respected through fair decision making and participation in conflict resolution (a.k.a. due process), in spite of being accused, and in some some cases being guilty, of violating the rights of others 

I.B.3. If ignoring or undermining human rights leads to the neglect or thwarting of needs, the result will be members of a collective that are alienated from it

I.B.3.a. Being alienated from a collective to which you belong by the actions of people, individually or through the operation of institutions, is oppressive 

I.B.3.b. Being alienated from a collective to which you belong by circumstances that are not caused by people is not oppression, though it is unfortunate

II. Needs are real 

II.A. Needs are the causal sources of well-being 

II.A.1. Equity, except the legal aspect, is an inherent outcome of systematic need satisfaction by a collective

II.B. A scientific understanding of needs recognizes primary, secondary, particular, and derivative needs 

II.B.1. Persistently thwarting the universal primary physiological needs for air, water, food, and shelter causes death

II.B.2. Persistently thwarting the universal primary psychological needs for sleep, relatedness, autonomy, and competence causes increases in anxiety, depression, and other forms of psychological distress (death can be an indirect result) 

II.B.3. Persistently thwarting secondary needs does not affect well-being, even though supporting secondary needs boosts well-being (e.g. beneficence, a.k.a. benevolence)

II.B.4. Particular needs are causes of well-being for an individual (e.g. being put on life support systems in a hospital after a car accident), in a specific situation (depending on a space capsule as an astronaut in orbit), or in a cultural milieu (knowing what to eat versus starving to death when lost for an extended period of time in a specific ecosystem)

II.B.5. Derivative needs are terms that consist of combinations of other types of needs (e.g. meaningfulness, a.k.a. purpose) 

II.C. A person’s true identity consists of the unique combination of need satisfiers that ensures individual well-being which is also aligned with achieving the well-being of the collectives in which the individual is embedded 

II.D. False identities arise from:

II.D.1. A collective pursuing collective desires and/or need satisfaction without regard to individual consequences (e.g. conscripted soldiers as cannon fodder, corporate wage slavery, national or international test scores)

II.D.2. A collective exerting control over an individual’s behavior by pitting that individual’s needs against each other and/or distorting the individual’s understanding of their situation (e.g. abusive interpersonal relationships, “cult” mind control, ideological purity movements in politics and religion)

II.D.3. An individual deactivating or distorting one or more of their needs in response to delusions about themselves, the world, and/or the relationship between the two, which they know as their situation (e.g. mental disorders)

III. Political advocacy in favor of universal need satisfaction through the enforcement of human rights will be optimally effective when voters and other decision makers can perceive the connections among 1) the issues they face, 2) the policies that are proposed to address those issues, and 3) how the satisfaction of their needs can be aligned with collective well-being 

III.A. Everyone always has and always will vote according to some version of their identity 

III.A.1. Despite folks sometimes misunderstanding it, identity politics (in the psychological sense stated in items II. C. & D.) is the only kind of politics

III.B. A realistic political party:

III.B.1. Clearly articulates their values (an emotion-laden form of discourse) in a manner that is strategically aligned with their constituents’ issues and is supported by specific policies

III.B.2. Refines their platform through internal debate among allies

III.B.2.a. Allies should discuss the issue of how to level criticisms of each other’s strategies and tactics in way that will minimize undermining the broader movement in the public eye

III.B.3. Supports built-in accountability structures (check and balances) that avoid the worst hazards of both bureaucracy (a long-standing wide-spread grievance) and political infighting (dominant pattern of the current regime)

III.B.4. Governs best in the face of principled, effective opponents who share a commitment to universal human needs satisfaction and human rights

III.B.5. Will disagree with other parties on how the State should enforce human rights, what issues are currently faced by their constituents, and/or what policies would be the best for enforcing rights, addressing issues, and expressing shared values

III.C. Ideological purity is an extreme form of collective delusion

III.C.1. Ideological purity movements in politics and religion are fundamentally based on mass generation of false identities (as identified in item II. D.) 

III.C.2. Ideological purity is reinforced by political advocacy that relies on strong emotions elicited in association with ideological framing of issues without regard to policies and their effects (e.g. Trump-ism) 

III.C.3. Ideological purity is politically effective in the absence of a proper opposition

III.D. In the absence of both a proper opposition and ideological purists, effective political advocacy occurs when issues and policies are ideologically aligned, which means those policies might not align with the realities of individual and collective human need satisfaction (e.g. mainstream party politics, pre-Trump)

III.E. Proper structuring of institutions can achieve the alignment of diverse individual need satisfactions while maintaining collective well-being, though it is difficult and can sometimes become fragile (like now) 

III.E.1. Both state and corporate governance should be seen in this light because any benefit that might be gained through tyranny is always fragile (while properly structured governance is usually stable with fragility arising only occasionally)

III.E.2. The civil society sector should be considered a necessary third element in a system of checks and balances for anti-fragile national/global societal structures 

III.E.2.a. Complex systems are more stable with an odd number of elements (e.g. having more than two political parties, a media/scientific ecosystem dominated by civil society entities balancing out a societal system that would otherwise be dominated by for-profit corporate entities and state-controlled entities)