If you are like me, you have long known at a base, emotional level that the whole policy cycle — agenda setting, development solutions, decision-making and implementation — does not involve you. Wars are started, poverty ignored, the climate thrown out of balance and the police/prison system develops without anyone asking you — no survey, phone call, vote or post card. Not only were you not consulted, but in all likelihood no one you have ever known has ever had any impact on any policy outcome (though this is less true at Dartmouth).
Although what I’m saying comes from relatively mainstream political science literature — see the 2014 study from Martin Gilens at Princeton University demonstrating that, when controlling for the preferences of the economic elite and organized business interests, the preferences of the average citizen have virtually no correlation with policy outcomes — most people don’t need academic papers to know this. They know it simply from exposure to the media.
This is unsurprising. We can think of the 24/7 news cycle as a sequence of Pavlovian learning contexts. The subjects (us) are repeatedly exposed to sequences of events in which two stimuli are paired, and our reaction to the first stimulus has no effect on the manner of the second. If you remember “Psychology 1” at all, the irrelevance of the subject’s response to the outcome is what makes Pavlovian (or classical) conditioning different from operant conditioning, in which the subject’s actions have some influence on the outcome.
Gregory Bateson, an anthropologist, psychologist and cybernetician, described how an individual or culture repeatedly exposed to Pavlovian learning contexts could come to acquire a sense of fatalism, defeatism and passively accept any outcome. Such an attitude is the result of a higher order learning process; the subject not only learns the proper reaction in each context, but also learns to expect contexts where it has no agency.
The political media trains us to feel that our only choices are the usual suspects: what to watch, how to react, donating to candidates, and the single binary votes every four years. There’s also the new way in town to be a passive consumer: what to click on. Some people stay there, sitting in front of their television yelling. Others delude themselves into thinking that is what democracy is supposed to look like. A growing group is now taking a third course of action: turning off the television, forgetting about politics and embracing political apathy. Maybe some get into sports, where at least there is little pretense that one’s fandom actually propels their team towards victory.
Don’t read this as a scathing critique of the apathetic. I have real respect for the decision to turn away when confronted with the evident uselessness of engaging in politics and sheer stupidity of the process. But this election is different — millions of Americans have collectively recognized their own position as disempowered Pavlovian dogs, and realized that, despite the symbolic web that makes us feel this way, elections are still, at least technically, decided by the people.
In November, Bernie Sanders was polling at around three percent.
I said to myself, half jokingly, that he could win as long as we all tried really hard. I would have been wrong, unless thousands of other people felt the same way.
Since then, I have written code, made many calls and interacted directly with well over a hundred different volunteers. I have witnessed authentic and effective self-organization, participating in building organizations that will long outlast my involvement with them. I have been interacting with the political process through channels that previously did not exist.
On the night of the Iowa Caucus on Feb. 1, I chatted with fellow Bernie volunteers online as the results came in. Of course, none of us were individually necessary for the near 25 percent climb in the Iowa polls since May, but we were all collectively indispensable. This feeling of collective necessity is the opposite of fatalism; instead, it is the emotional character of a movement, part of the conscious fabric that makes any collective action possible. I invite you to reclassify yourself as a participant — not a spectator — in the political process and to attempt to force creative ways of engagement that suit your interests. I understand that this reclassification forces you to leave the safety of blameless personal irrelevance.
Realistically, the possibility of success and failure are inherent parts of any situation in which one’s effort actually matters; each possibility requires the other. However, I don’t think I’ll beat myself up over the very real possibility that a few more phone calls would have won Iowa.
I am not asking you to do this out of the goodness of your heart or a belief that it is your democratic “duty.” Instead, I want you to avoid the following situation: you are 80-years-old, with a virtual reality headset on. A political bell rings on some futuristic news show. You salivate, and no food comes. You take your headset off and look around at a world on fire, wondering where you went wrong.
If you’re convinced, but don’t know what to do, email me.
