A Better Life for All Humans

 A Better Life for All Humans

The following is a concept intended to promote thinking about what really matters in life (a person's end goal), how that end goal is common to all humans, and how focusing on this common fundamental goal could improve everyone's life.  An excellent book that describes a similar concept is Wellbeing, Science and Policy, by Richard Layard and Jan-Emmanuel De Neve.  https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/wellbeing/B64B0CDF6266FB37FBE263B9F4A1BA57   

1. a) All humans now and in the future have an intrinsic desire for a better life - for a high quality of life (QoL),  and b) a high QoL is their sole end goal (the goal of which all other goals are sub-goals),  and c) all of their actions are, consciously or subconsciously, in service of (means to) this overarching impetus or urge,  and d) given a choice between alternatives, everyone will (consciously or unconsciously) choose the options that they believe (even if mistakenly) will most contribute to their quality of life (most improve their life), either in the short term or long term. 

2. How a person subjectively feels about their life is all that matters and they know how they feel. They, and only they, can assess their well-being - their quality of life. 

3. We can objectively measure a person’s assessment of their quality of life (their current QoL Score) by asking them one simple question (the QoL Survey): How would you rate your life on a scale of zero to ten, where zero is the worst life you can imagine and ten is the best life you can imagine? 

4. Therefore we should adopt as society’s only end goal (aka the QoL Goal) a sustained high quality of life (a QoL Score of say 8 or more) for every human current and future.

5. We should establish as society’s QoL Imperative the maximization of the rate of progress toward that end goal.

6. For each institution/purpose/societal role, we should establish a QoL Index (a mathematical/statistical formula using everyone's QoL Scores), which is the metric for assessing the effectiveness of our efforts at progress toward the end goal.

7. The QoL Index is a utility function of the QoL Score of all members of the population to which the index applies. The index would be created/defined by the population to which it applies, using a democratic method. Presumably it would give greater weight to those with the lowest QoL Scores. When deliberating on the best index to adopt, it might be useful to consider a population of just you and your best friend. If one of you has a score of 8 and the other a score of 2 (or vice versa), what weightings would you want the index to include?

8. When faced with making a significant decision (including deciding on rules/laws, morals, heuristics, etc.), we should do (to the extent feasible) a QoL Analysis which estimates/predicts the immediate and future impact on the QoL Index of each option/alternative including the null/do-nothing option. Choose the option that is most likely positive for the QoL Index.

9. We should periodically measure the current QoL Index using the one-question QoL Survey (to get each individual’s QoL Score), calculate the rate of progress, and the current point in our journey toward the QoL Goal.

10. No human wants a lower quality of life.

11. The goal of having a high quality of life (QoL) is an individual, personal goal, and is every person’s end-goal.

12. The conduct of human affairs is not a zero-sum game. There always exists win-win options that enable every human’s QoL to improve.

13. There are any number of things/factors that positively impact a person's quality of life, and any number that negatively impact their QoL. Their net quality of life is the "sum" of these - similar to a financial balance sheet that calculates net worth. Any persistent negative can always be outweighed by positives.

14. Given a choice between living in a world where everyone has high quality of life (QoL) or one in which some do not, there is no reason for anyone to choose the latter. 

15. Other things being equal, a person with high QoL will get at least some further QoL boost if others, especially those with low QoL, get a higher QoL. We all benefit from maximizing the rate of progress toward everyone having high QoL - it's win-win. 

16. The goal of every human having a high QoL is aspirational. We will likely never reach that ideal. But there is no limit to how closely we can approach it. 

17. The challenge is to identify and choose individual and collective actions that maximize our rate of progress toward that ideal. 

18. Maximizing our rate of progress toward a high QoL for all should be the sole goal of our governments and public institutions.

19. The social sciences can help in identifying the most effective individual and collective measures - what works best.    

20. We are all different and need to find our own mix of factors that most improve our life.  A society that maximizes the choices realistically available to everyone will likely have a higher QoL Index.  The last thing we want to do is unnecessarily restrict people's choices. 

       -oOo-

Why Trump Can Be Elected Repeatedly

 Why Trump Can Be Elected Repeatedly

November 14, 2024

 

Since the Nov 5, 2024 presidential election, in which Donald Trump was elected decisively, there has been much commentary on why he prevailed, as there was in 2016 when he similarly gained far more electoral college votes than Hillary Clinton.  This time around he also received more votes nationwide – the popular vote.  The following are some of the categories of reasons given in the commentaries I have seen so far: 

• Dissatisfaction with economic conditions. 

• Backlash to “wokeism”, feminism, “socialism”, etc.

•  Shifts in the composition of, or relative preferences of, various voting blocs.

•  Working class, male, white, and Christian grievances.

•  Missteps by his opponent during their campaign.

• His opponent’s fatal flaws.

• Flawed policies or messaging by Democrats in general.

• Systemic biases such as the electoral college.

• Inappropriate coverage by the news media.

While factors in each of these categories and others commonly cited might have played a role in at least a subset of elections, even collectively they seem inadequate to explain Trump’s dominance. With regard to his dominance, consider the following:  

• Trump was elected overwhelmingly in all three Republican presidential primaries in which he was a candidate, in 2016, 2020, and 2024.  These races did not involve a Democratic opponent but did involve very credible and capable Republican opponents often with policies very similar to those of Trump. 

• Trump was elected decisively in 2016 and 2024. 

• Trump was almost elected in 2020 despite the nation being in the depths of a deadly and distress-inducing pandemic and its economic side effects including massive unemployment – a huge hurdle for an incumbent. 

Consider also that Trump did so well despite his obvious (even to his supporters) serious character flaws, chaotic first presidency, endless and overt lying, breaking of all manner of democratic and social norms, his advanced age, his impeachments and legal entanglements, etc.  On paper he is a deeply flawed candidate.  This is why no one took him seriously at first. 

 

Trump’s superpower is his extraordinary ability to persuade voters that he is their best option.  What part of this ability comes from his genetics (1), from his upbringing, and from his adult life experiences, can only be guessed at, but one way or another he has come to have what appears as an instinctive ability to persuade the masses to adopt his world view.  There is no evidence that it is the work of his assistants and advisors.  He is a lone wolf using unscripted rhetoric that comes to him seemingly automatically (as if instinctive) and endlessly. 

 

He uses demagoguery, lies, stories, innuendo, hyperbole, and many other rhetorical techniques to amplify grievances, instill a sense of victimhood, and trigger disgust, outrage, mistrust, and fear of “them”, while presenting himself as the only means of saving “us” from the evil-doers.  Except for illegal immigrants, criminals, filthy people, academics, the transgendered, and Democratic Party operatives, he includes everyone else in the “us” category – the good guys – thus not overtly offending 90+ percent of potential voters.  He has even stopped including Muslims in the “them” category. 

 

Such tactics are commonly used to some extent by politicians of all stripes, including his opponents.  What is novel are the extraordinary quantity, quality, and extremity of deployment of these techniques by Trump.  He has thus been exceptionally effective at connecting with and inflaming people’s emotions and primal tendencies – those that are negative with regard to his opponent and positive with regard to him.  It seems the emotions are so fully usurped as to suppress or at least override any reasoning.  At this he seems better than any cult leader, any mega-church preacher, and any other politician.  Short of a Democratic replica of Donald Trump, no Democratic candidate or campaign could have changed the outcome in 2016 and 2024.  Trump is a uniquely superb manipulator of the human psyche (2). 

 

There is another important factor in Trump’s success in elections.  The repeal of the FCC’s Fairness Doctrine in 1987 and the subsequent erosion of most restrictions on media ownership consolidation, enabled the rise of Fox News and talk radio networks that were able to profit mightily from handing much of their far-reaching broadcast time to extreme right wing commentators.  These highly popular talk shows gradually convinced a large swath of the U.S. electorate to believe in many of the “evils” that Trump was then able to build on in his rhetoric.  These talk show hosts, their message increasingly repeated and amplified by algorithmic platforms and popular influencers on the Internet, laid the groundwork for Trump’s political career.  It is possible that even Trump’s superpower would not have been sufficient to be elected president prior to 2016, and it seems he knew this.  He explored running in all presidential elections as far back as 2000. 

         -oOo-

Footnotes: 

1. I recommend Robert Sapolsky’s lecture on religiosity which addresses the genetic factors at play in spiritual leaders https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4WwAQqWUkpI.  

2. To understand why we (every one of us) are susceptible to emotional manipulation (regardless of our political affiliation or which stripe of politician or marketer is doing the manipulation), I recommend the book What’s Our Problem by Tim Urban –  https://danielfitzgerald.medium.com/book-review-whats-our-problem-66e1cbf172f2.  Is the human mind no longer fit for purpose, given that it was optimized for a hunter-gatherer life and not for our very different and very complex modernity?