A Crucial Element of Democracy

This is a blog by Robert Gutierrez ...
While often taken for granted, civics education plays a crucial role in a democracy like ours. This Blog is dedicated to enticing its readers into taking an active role in the formulation of the civics curriculum found in their local schools. In order to do this, the Blog is offering a newer way to look at civics education, a newer construct - liberated federalism or federation theory. Daniel Elazar defines federalism as "the mode of political organization that unites separate polities within an overarching political system by distributing power among general and constituent governments in a manner designed to protect the existence and authority of both." It depends on its citizens acting in certain ways which Elazar calls federalism's processes. Federation theory, as applied to civics curriculum, has a set of aims. They are:
*Teach a view of government as a supra federated institution of society in which collective interests of the commonwealth are protected and advanced.
*Teach the philosophical basis of government's role as guardian of the grand partnership of citizens at both levels of individuals and associations of political and social intercourse.
*Convey the need of government to engender levels of support promoting a general sense of obligation and duty toward agreed upon goals and processes aimed at advancing the common betterment.
*Establish and justify a political morality which includes a process to assess whether that morality meets the needs of changing times while holding true to federalist values.
*Emphasize the integrity of the individual both in terms of liberty and equity in which each citizen is a member of a compacted arrangement and whose role is legally, politically, and socially congruent with the spirit of the Bill of Rights.
*Find a balance between a respect for national expertise and an encouragement of local, unsophisticated participation in policy decision-making and implementation.
Your input, as to the content of this Blog, is encouraged through this Blog directly or the Blog's email address: gravitascivics@gmail.com .
NOTE: This blog has led to the publication of a book. The title of that book is TOWARD A FEDERATED NATION: IMPLEMENTING NATIONAL CIVICS STANDARDS and it is available through Amazon in both ebook and paperback versions.

Friday, July 24, 2015

TRUMP’S VALUES?

In this blog, I have written of trump values.  I’ve pointed out that the trump value of natural rights adherents is liberty; the trump value of critical theorists is equality; the trump value of federalists, as far as I am concerned, is societal welfare.  What is the trump value of Trump, Donald Trump that is?  In his latest incarnation, that of a presidential candidate, he is sacrificing a lot – contract arrangements that either provide or potentially provide huge profits – so as to lead the nation to be great again.  Can we trust this man?

A guru, Robert Greene, of business acumen, instructs us that a typical strategy or law of power is the following:
Deception is always the best strategy, but the best deceptions require a screen of smoke to distract people’s attention from your real purpose.  The bland exterior – like the unreadable poker face – is often the perfect smoke screen, hiding your intentions behind the comfortable and familiar.  If you lead the sucker down a familiar path, he won’t catch on when you lead him into a trap.[1]
Do these words of advice, cynical as they are, apply to the Donald?

Before analyzing Trump’s motives in relation to this advice, let me share a bit of further thinking that is relevant to this situation.  Prabhat Ranjan Sarkar, a fairly contemporary Indian philosopher (he died in 1990), came up with a cyclical theory of history.  Short of reviewing the whole theory here, let me briefly report what his thinking outlined, a view of any society as being made up of four basic groups.  The vast majority of a population, according to the theory, consists of labor.  This portion of the population is basically concerned with survival and arranging for reasonable levels of comfort and security for themselves and their families.  The remaining – ten percent or so – is made up of people who are ambitious and want to advance themselves in meaningful ways.  They are talented, in one of basically three ways:  bodily skills, intellectual skills, or acquisitive skills.  By bodily skills, I am referring to dexterity or athletic skills.  Intellectual skills revolve around skills in devising and manipulating ideas.  Acquisitive skills are about securing and even creating material goods and services or the means to acquire those resources namely by the acquisition of money.  The theory goes on to describe the cyclical progression of history as being one in which these three ambitious groups, in a certain order, take turns in running a society – one being the prominent group that holds or controls the levers of power.  For example, we in the US are in control of the acquisitive group.  For outlined reasons, the order of progression is:  the warrior group (bodily skills), intellectuals, and then those motivated by acquiring skills.  Each era of control can last about two to three hundred years.  I was introduced to this theory by reading Ravi Batra in a popular book of the late 1980s.[2]

So what pushes Trump’s buttons:  societal welfare or acquisition?  I don’t know.  But I believe trust needs to be earned.  Here, we have a person who has dedicated a lifetime to acquiring a lot of money – by his own repeated admission – and material resources.  Should we trust that he has evolved and has said to himself:  I have enough and now I want to look beyond my immediate interests and sacrifice for the nation?  Or are we “suckers” being deceived?

Back to the above advice.  No one will accuse Trump of being bland.  But Greene gives us a modification to the law.  When one is successful in deceiving, one is apt to make a reputation.  Greene offers the example of B. T. Barnum.  So outrageous were his tricks and reputation that he became a source of entertainment.  Is Trump’s flamboyancy such a source; is it so outrageous that we are willing to pay the price of admission to see the show?  And the price here is the presidency.  I believe not, but who knows?  After all, as Soren Kierkegaard pointed out:  “The world wants to be deceived.”[3]



[1] Greene, R.  (1998).  The 48 laws of power.  New York, NY:  Penguin Books.  Quotation on p. 23.

[2] Batra, R.  (1987).  The great depression of 1990:  Has it already started coming true?  New York, NY:  Dell Publishing.

[3] Quoted in Greene, p. 30.

Tuesday, July 21, 2015

THE ELEPHANT

In this blog, I have pointed out the importance of the subconscious in determining behavior.  I have read the analogy of seeing the conscious mind as a rider on top of an elephant, the subconscious.  While the rider can sort of guide the elephant, once the enormous animal determines to go a certain way, the rider is just that: someone going along for the ride.  I would say that most of our education assumes that the subconscious, at best, is an incidental source or determiner of our behavior.  This is a faulty assumption in that it gives short shrift to the true nature of the power the subconscious plays in our decision-making processes.  This is especially true in our social studies, including our civics instruction.

This bias is not a product of mal-intent.  It is a product, mostly, of ignorance, an ignorance not limited to our educators but to us generally.  But this is changing, and quite quickly.  There is a significant amount of relatively recent and current research on the role our subconscious plays in decision-making.  One insight that has emerged from this research is the relative strength of the subconscious in its ability to take in information.  Some estimates hold that the mind can take in 11 million pieces of information at any one time, whereas the conscious mind is limited to forty pieces of information.  What the conscious mind does is create narratives out of all that information.  And the thing is that subconscious information is hot, as in laced with emotions.  The conscious puts order to all that, but it does not eliminate those feelings.[1]

One unfortunate bit of history is that our concern with the subconscious was initiated with the work of Sigmund Freud.  Not to denigrate the contributions of Freud, but he placed our awareness of the subconscious with sexual drives.  Yes, sex is part of the story, but only one part.  A lot more is going on with our subconscious.  One other concern, for example, is our views of politics and governance.  Therefore, civics related theory and planning need to address the effects of the subconscious on political decisions.  We need a whole area of research that addresses this area of our thinking and feeling.

I will leave you with one thought.  Our subconscious has, as we approach adulthood, a great deal of subconscious “baggage” when it comes to politics.  This is true even for those young people who don’t give much conscious thought to the subject.  A lot of it can be of the nature that “justifies” a person’s indifference.  Even for those people, as the experiences of life might intrude in this indifference, such as when confronted with unexpected taxes or fees, or an un-neighborly neighbor, or an unpleasant encounter with a policeperson, these subconscious feelings and ill-defined beliefs come into play.  Even for this type of person, one finds it difficult to have an objective discussion about the problem.  That built-up baggage plays its role, and conclusions about authority and government readily interfere with the now involved person being able to see what is really going on.  In such a state, a person finds it difficult to interact in mutually advantageous ways.

I will, in future postings, visit this subject again.



[1] Brooks, D.  (2011).  The social animal:  The hidden sources of love, character, and achievement.  New York, NY:  Random House.