Ep46 -- The Upside of Falling Down

 Hey everybody. Well, we're back after a little hiatus.  I was away over the holidays and then kind of just wanted to see how things shook out after the inauguration, before continuing to do the podcast and, boy, have they ever shook.  At first, I thought continuing to do these, hopefully, insightful albeit subtle critiques of our crazy world would feel kind of pointless, like whispering into a hurricane. But I had a few friends encourage me to get back to it, to not lament the fact that this little podcast will never be a panacea. But just to provide a breather, an opportunity to think about a couple of things, maybe have a laugh, and remind ourselves that the world is still majority non-asshole.  So let's get into this week's episode and as always, thank you so much for taking the time to listen.  

Now I consider myself a relatively neat person that is to say I'm on the Felix Unger end of the Odd Couple Continuum.  I wasn't always that way. When I was a teenager, my room was pretty much the same kind of bomb site as every teenager's room is. And while I did try and clean up after the one ranger that I threw in high school, when my parents were out of town, I set the vacuum cleaner way too high, like shag carpet level high while vacuuming our very short pile carpet. And while I was relaxing on the beach, up in Maine, the following day. My parents came home, saw the mess, and I got totally busted when I got back.  

Ironically, I became a neat person after I joined a fraternity in college. I figured that most people had negative preconceptions about fraternities. Hell, I did before I joined one. And to be honest, many of those negative preconceptions are perfectly valid.  But I figured my fraternity was made up of some pretty smart, decent guys. So why not try to disabuse people of those preconceptions by presenting a clean fraternity house to our visitors?  We had cleanup at noon every Sunday. Which usually meant waking up the hung-over brotherhood for cleanup each week. 

Now, if anyone knows anything about me, it's that I kind of love rituals. So I instituted a musical ritual for cleanup. Firing up the same soundtrack each week using these massive liquid-cooled speakers that some brother bought off the back of a truck in West Philly one day. So see if you can recognize this pretty little ditty.  

[MEAN STREET CLIP]

That is of course "Mean Street" by Van Halen off my favorite of their albums, "Fair Warning".  To this day, that's kind of my walkup music if I want to get motivated to clean the house.  

Okay, so the point of all this is that recently our vacuum cleaner started acting up. It wouldn't hold its charge and would just randomly crap out. So I bought a new one. Now this new vacuum cleaner has a light on it. Which shines straight out the front at pretty much ground level. Illuminating every speck of dust or strand of cat hair on the floor. And let me tell you, it is shocking.  Up until that point. I thought our place was pretty clean. But seeing what was actually there. Was like taking a blue light to your average college kid's dorm room, looking for DNA samples. I mean, like I'm now a little hesitant to use the vacuum. You know, or at least I'm thinking of disconnecting the light. Whereas before I was blissfully ignorant of what was going on right underneath my feet. 

And as I was realizing all that, it struck me that this is a perfect metaphor for the experience I'm having. Rereading or rereading a biography of a man that I'd say has said the single greatest individual influence on the way our world is today.  This is a guy who, I guess the vast majority of Americans have never heard of, but who has shaped the way our country interacts with the rest of the world in ways that we can see and feel every day more than 60 years after he plied his trade for the United States government.  And sometimes I ask myself, wouldn't I be better off if I had no idea about any of that, if I just stayed in the dark. Remember in Pee-Wee's Big Adventure, when Pee-Wee is stuck out in the desert at night, all by himself? Sure, he's nervous not knowing what's all around him. But then he finds out.  

[PEE-WEE'S BIG ADVENTURE CLIP]

Now you ask yourself, yes, he's better off knowing what he needs to run away from, but before wasn't he kind of blissfully ignorant about it all. There's something to be said for that. 

Well, to find out who I'm talking about. And to better understand how his thoughts and actions affect the lives of billions of people today, and why we should all definitely notice all the invisible dirt that covers the floor of American history,  stay tuned. 

I'm Craig Boreth, and this is The Great Ungaslighting, a podcast about how we all get conned into accepting a man-made culture that's out of sync with our human nature, and how we can fight back and put the kind back into humankind. 

But first a word about a sponsor.  Okay, with the cavalcade of corporate titans lining up to kiss Dear Leader's ring these days, I've had plenty of non-sponsors to talk about this week. But one story recently caught my eye, which just rang so ridiculously misleading that I felt I had to remark upon it. You remember the "Internet of things" that was going to transform all our lives, smart refrigerators that could order our groceries or smart toothbrushes that would provide, and this is a quote, personalized actionable health insights. Well, if you thought those things were at best useless and at worst excuses to violate our privacy in the service of profits, well, then you'll love the addition of AI to your home appliances. So this week's episode of The Great Ungaslighting is not brought to you by GE and Samsung, and other electronics companies adding AI to their home appliances.  And also by Forbes Magazine, which last year published this fawning, so-credulous-it's-almost-parody review of these new super smart appliances. I'll put a link to it in the show notes. It's worth reading. So ovens that can tell when your food is done or washing machines that learn about your clothes to optimize your cleaning. That all sounds wonderful, doesn't it? But besides the fact that all of this sounds like AI boosters desperately trying to come up with some use for AI, just as crypto boosters are desperately trying to come up with some non-illegal use for crypto, it's clear to me, at least that the reason these new technologies are being foisted upon us is to increase sales and profits and find new and exciting ways to violate and monetize our privacy.  To think otherwise, given the track record of the companies involved, is the height of gullibility. I mean, do you honestly believe that a technology that is ostensibly intended to extend the longevity of the appliance or save you money by optimizing the amount of detergent that you use will actually do that?  Or will GE just partner with Tide to figure out ways to charge you more for using less?

I mean, come on people. How many times are we going to fall for this? Having some shiny new object dangled in front of us while our pockets are picked from behind.  It's funny and not funny ha ha how we still think of the potential negative consequences of AI as something that might happen sometime in the future. The fact is we've already seen what can happen and it ain't pretty. As Yuval Harari and his coauthors wrote in the New York Times in 2023, social media was the first contact between AI and humanity. And humanity lost.  And that was a very primitive form of AI at work. And we all now know what it has done to our society.  Can anyone possibly believe that we as a species in our current intellectual state, are anywhere near capable of defending ourselves against AI at its current level of sophistication?  If you do, well, I've got a fancy new GE oven to sell you one that features Flavorly AI, the purchase of which I'm sure you won't eventually look back on and ask yourself, what could you possibly have been thinking, allowing that thing into your life? 

And we're back. 

Okay, the book that I'm reading, for what I think is the third time, it's called The Devil's Chessboard by David Talbot. And it's essentially a biography of Alan Dulles, who as an intelligence officer during world war II clearly committed treason by negotiating conditional surrender with high-level Nazis to avoid prosecution so they could come back and lead Germany's defense against Soviet expansion;  who cut a deal with a young Richard Nixon to hide the evidence of his treason in exchange for essentially paying Nixon to run for Congress;  who overthrew democratically elected governments in Guatemala and Iran and the Congo; and who somehow, even though the Kennedy's despised him,  got himself onto the Warren Commission investigating JFK's assassination a couple years after JFK forced him to resign as head of the CIA.  That last accomplishment led to this great Woody Allen line. 

If you read reviews of this book, they usually focus almost exclusively on the Kennedy assassination, which only occupies like the last hundred pages or so. Now Talbot clearly believes that Dulles was intimately involved with Kennedy's death. But my takeaway is that, it doesn't even really matter whether or not Dulles was involved.

What's clear to me is that if Dulles wanted to get rid of Kennedy, and he hated Kennedy, and felt he was bad for business in the same way that Arbenz in Guatemala. And Mossadegh in Iran and Lumumba in the Congo were all bad for business. All democratically elected and overthrown by America, by the way.  If Dulles wanted to get rid of Kennedy, he certainly had the expertise to do it, and it would have been among the easier undertakings of his career.  And I don't think Dulles was an idealogue, at least not a political one. He believed in plutocracy above all else, that the wealthy by virtue of their wealth were better than everybody else, and should therefore make all the decisions. The threat of communism was just a conveniently useful excuse to undertake illegal and blatantly anti-democratic activities. It was really just all about the money. Arbenz wanted to nationalize banana plantations for the benefit of the Guatemalans. That's bad for United Fruit. So Arbenz's got to go. Mossadegh wants to nationalize Iran's oil for the benefit of the Iranian people. That's bad for business and he's got to go. Lumumba wants to nationalize Congo's copper mines. Well, you get the picture. Oh, by the way, if all of this talk about exploiting natural resources sounds similar to the shakedown we're now putting on Ukraine for its rare earth minerals. Well, it should. 

Long, long before Matt Taibbi described Goldman Sachs as a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money,  Allen Dulles was using the might of the us government and its intelligence powers to do exactly the same thing. 

All of this is to say, we may have been thinking about the point of America, all wrong. As kids, we're taught and believe that America is the shining beacon of freedom that is intermittently interrupted by greedy, immoral plutocrats who screw things up for a while and then we get back on track.  I am beginning to believe that what America really is, is a vehicle to enrich plutocrats that every once in a while has a fit of moral awakening that tries to do the right thing, which is rapidly and unceremoniously beaten down. Now you may think, well, that's demoralizing.

We're just totally screwed. But I don't see it that way. For one thing, while the actions of our current administration are in many ways, unprecedented, the sentiment has always been with us. It's been pushed back before and it can be pushed back again.  Could we have passed the point of no return with media and corporate consolidation firmly behind the plutocrat agenda?  Possibly, but maybe not.  And you're already starting to see, as people begin to understand what the federal government actually does for them, they're not too happy about those services being taken away.  And also it's a reminder that what we're trying to do in this country to create a genuine multi-ethnic representative democracy, is really hard. As Anand Giridharadas pointed out the reason why we're falling on our faces, maybe because we're trying to jump so high. It's going to take hard work and a lot of fighting to push America back toward its founding ideals.  It's important to remember that it's only been since 1965 and the Voting Rights Act that America could even call itself an actual democracy without a big asterisk next to its name.  And the pushback since then has been vicious, well-coordinated, and unrelenting. While the defense of equality has been occasionally enthusiastic, but genuinely rather apathetic, working under the assumption that American democracy is somehow inherent and self-sustaining.  Well, if we're going to learn anything useful from our current tumbled, it's that, that is definitely not the case.  Finally thinking of America as a plutocracy punctuated with a few brief moments of democracy means that we can't be satisfied with a few small or even big victories here and there. We have to realize that the foundational structure is vulnerable.  We have to understand as Thomas Pickety showed in his book Capital in the 21st Century, that market capitalism naturally tends towards plutocracy and oligarchy because a return on investment. We'll always be greater than a return on labor. And that wealth and power will always accumulate disproportionately at the top and destabilize society.  If you want lasting democracy, you have to restrain the market enough to break that connection. And if you don't, if you're unwilling to think about American society differently enough to fight for something structurally distinct from what we've been doing so far. And I'm looking at you, democratic party establishment, you're not solving the problem. 

All you're doing is slightly delaying the inevitable. If we're fortunate enough to have the opportunity to delay the inevitable after this administration. I for one tend to believe that if we do have that opportunity, we will finally be clear-eyed enough to take advantage of it. 

Well, that's it for this week. As always, if you liked this episode, please share it with anyone, you know, who might also find it. Interesting. And until next time. Be kind to yourself. Cut each other, some slack. And he was your damn turn signal.