On Having Zero Agency
I am not sure I remember too much from my high school philosophy class, other than the lesson that I probably would not be actively pursuing a career in philosophy. But I remember one discussion about displaying one's rebellious nature by doing the exact opposite of whatever an unfavored person said. The teacher made the point that if you always did the exact opposite of what person X says, then you are just as much ruled by X as any of X's most cultish followers. In such a case you have completely abdicated your agency to X.
I took the lesson from that, which I still try to follow to this day, that you have to process people's actions and ideas one by one. Certainly this is not to say that there is no room for trust and reputation. If I have found myself agreeing with someone historically and they have been proved right on certain topics time and again, I am going to give their next statement a lot of credence -- but I am still going to mentally challenge it to some extent. And for individuals, this sort of reputational trust can vary by topic. If my wife gives me a read on a person, I am going to assume she is correct; if she opines on navigation issues when we are walking around an unfamiliar city, I am going to treat that with a lot more skepticism.
Most will have guessed where I am going with this -- the opposition to Trump has reached this point of zero agency. Smart people I know will mock everything Trump says, even if it is something they would normally agree with or at least entertain. People who are extraordinarily skeptical of all medication suddenly think that concerns about Tylenol during pregnancy are totally absurd. The whole Tylenol story is actually pretty interesting -- a Harvard dean's imprimatur seems to tick the credentialism box that was so prominent in COVID, but a look at the quality of the research and the money involved tends to make one very skeptical. And of course a lot of what RFK says makes me skeptical. The whole story is a really interesting, including appeals-to-authority issues we had during COVID, only with the parties reversed. But no one really looks because if Trump said it, it must be mocked.
This tendency of the Left to throw away all agency when it comes to evaluating policy during this Administration is a target of great mockery on the Right. Memes such as the one below are everywhere.
I have been thinking about all this because I have been trying to figure out why I have zero energy to blog of late. Every time I sit down to the keyboard, I am exhausted in advance. And I think the reason is (for me) the immense effort to parse current politics on a case-by-case basis and communicate it in a way that people will read rather than going ballistic because I didn't pass a belief conformity test in the first paragraph. I once told someone that I feel like the last person in America who can opine on Trump's actions case-by-base, though of course that is an exaggeration (and something of an affectation I admit).
You can read through these pages and see that I have written that Trump's trade policy is dead wrong, his attempted expansions of Presidential power are dangerous as hell, his need for petty revenge and his love of trolling the media online are beneath the dignity of a President. But write one thing like, "The Russian collusion charges ... turned out to be complete inventions of the opposition party" and all the agency-less litmus testers ask me why I am always defending the guy. Crazy. By the way, I will say it and be done with it -- the Russian collusion story was BS, it smelled like BS from the beginning, and was actually a scandal in that it was clearly engineered by the opposition party. And it likely had more to do with Trump's 2024 election than any other single factor [other than Biden's dementia] because the unfairness of it energized his supporters. Russia collusion was Wile E Coyote Acme rocket of political issues, reliably blowing up in Democrat's faces.
For me, the worst manifestation of all this is seeing people actively cheering setbacks in Trump-led peace processes (eg Ukraine, Gaza). Are you guys f*cking crazy? I understand being skeptical of Trump's international actions, though to be honest I have not seen him do much internationally that is better or worse than other recent Presidents. For example, yes he lawlessly blew up that suspected drug ship (to absolutely no benefit that I can see) but Obama and Bush droned Middle Easterners over and over. Be that as it may, if someone can stop the killing on reasonable terms in either of these areas, they have my total support.