Malcolm Gladwell’s book Blink has an interesting point to bring to our attention:
Imagine that I were to ask you to play a very simple gambling game. In front of you are four decks of cards — two of them red and the other two blue. Each card in those four decks either wins you a sum of money or costs you some money, and your job is to turn over cards from any of the decks, one at a time, in such a way that maximizes your winnings. What you don’t know at the beginning, however, is that the red decks are a minefield. The rewards are high, but when you lose on the red cards, you lose a lot. Actually, you can win only by taking cards from the blue decks, which offer a nice steady diet of $50 payouts and modest penalties. The question is how long will it take you to figure this out?
A group of scientists at the University of Iowa did this experiment a few years ago, and what they found is that after we’ve turned over about fifty cards, most of us start to develop a hunch about what’s going on. We don’t know why we prefer the blue decks, but we’re pretty sure at that point that they are a better bet. After turning over about eighty cards, most of us have figured out the game and can explain exactly why the first two decks are such a bad idea. That much is straightforward. We have some experiences. We think them through. We develop a theory. And then finally we put two and two together. That’s the way learning works.
But the Iowa scientists did something else, and this is where the strange part of the experiment begins. They hooked each gambler up to a machine that measured the activity of the sweat glands below the skin in the palms of their hands. Like most of our sweat glands, those in our palms respond to stress as well as temperature — which is why we get clammy hands when we are nervous. What the Iowa scientists found is that gamblers started generating stress responses to the red decks by the tenth card, forty cards before they were able to say that they had a hunch about what was wrong with those two decks. More important, right around the time their palms started sweating, their behavior began to change as well. They started favoring the blue cards and taking fewer and fewer cards from the red decks. In other words, the gamblers figured the game out before they realized they had figured the game out: they began making the necessary adjustments long before they were consciously aware of what adjustments they were supposed to be making.
The Iowa experiment is just that, of course, a simple card game involving a handful of subjects and a stress detector. But it’s a very powerful illustration of the way our minds work. Here is a situation where the stakes were high, where things were moving quickly, and where the participants had to make sense of a lot of new and confusing information in a very short time. What does the Iowa experiment tell us? That in those moments, our brain uses two very different strategies to make sense of the situation. The first is the one we’re most familiar with. It’s the conscious strategy. We think about what we’ve learned, and eventually we come up with an answer. This strategy is logical and definitive. But it takes us eighty cards to get there. It’s slow, and it needs a lot of information. There’s a second strategy, though. It operates a lot more quickly. It starts to kick in after ten cards, and it’s really smart, because it picks up the problem with the red decks almost immediately. It has the drawback, however, that it operates — at least at first — entirely below the surface of consciousness. It sends its messages through weirdly indirect channels, such as the sweat glands in the palms of our hands. It’s a system in which our brain reaches conclusions without immediately telling us that it’s reaching conclusions.
The fact is that most of us come to conclusions about things before we are even aware that we’ve done so. This applies to everything. What we THINK is thinking actually isn’t thinking at all – it’s an unconscious hunch, a conclusion that comes to us, fully formed, and we don’t have any idea how we got there. We then start to look for evidence that supports this conclusion because we don’t realize that the conclusion itself was generated through an unconscious process.
It’s when we allow our choices to be dominated entirely by this kind of unconscious force that we run into problems. The act of consciously thinking, running through the steps to reach a given conclusion, is difficult and requires focus. When you do this, you’re also likely to find flaws and weaknesses in your argument and need to adapt it accordingly. However, when we take on a hunch, an unexplored, unreflected, unexamined conclusion, that’s when we can fall victim to confirmation bias, as well as motivated reasoning. The mind is a hasty machine – we take in information in fits and starts and we try to make sense of it all as quickly as we can. It makes best guesses, it doesn’t verify things.
MAGA is an example of an ideology that has been built ENTIRELY on this kind of unconscious decision-making. Does anyone in MAGA actually think about it? Nope. It doesn’t stand up to rational scrutiny. But it does validate the emotions and biases of the people who believe it. They feel strongly that Trump is the man, and their support of him is thus strengthened. Their attachment to MAGA is based on gut feeling, not rational analysis.
This is the basis of all MAGA. There are many instances you can find online of MAGA apes being asked inconvenient or difficult questions, and they invariably get flustered because they have given their position no conscious thought whatsoever. They are relying on unconscious thought. This is the entire point of MAGA. They can’t consciously justify their position to anyone who asks, so instead they resort to smearing and attacking, and to going on the offensive and never justifying themselves. They MUST refuse to engage with the question because they have no idea what the answer is! That, or they completely miss the fact that their ramblings make no sense, showing absolutely no sense of self-awareness. They’re lost in an unconscious world where the conclusion is never questioned because to do so you have to think. MAGA is driven entirely by unconscious conclusions that they never subject to any scrutiny. It’s just accepted, as an emotional state. It is never examined, questioned, analyzed.
It is not thinking.
MAGA is not made up of thinking people. It’s made up of people dominated by unconscious emotions, schemas, preconceptions, biases, stereotypes, complexes, and neuroses. When you act entirely under unconscious direction, can you really be called conscious? Or do you function merely on an animal, subconscious, primitive level? When your consciousness has no autonomy over your thought processes, has it in fact ceased to function altogether? Is MAGA really unconscious?
If you can’t explain why you like something, or what about it you find good, does it make sense to like it in the first place? This kind of preference makes sense with respect to things like ice cream, but against objective political reality, it’s irrelevant.
That’s why rich people are never threatened by democratic politics – because they know that the proles’ unconscious drives will always win in the end. And unconscious reasoning is MUCH easier to manipulate, hence Donald Trump’s spell over the MAGA Cult.
The cult has a total lack of autonomy. It has CHOSEN not to think. No wonder it’s so fucked up. It has abdicated the privilege of conscious thought. That’s exactly why facts are so irrelevant to them.
The difference between MAGA and the card game described by Gladwell is that in the card game, the participants eventually catch up to what their unconscious has already assumed. But MAGA apes never catch up – their minds never grow. Their conclusion was formed in 2015, and they never moved beyond that point. There’s no conscious realization of how unfounded this conclusion is, no examination of the evidence, no reasoning about its probability or exploring other options. None of that ever happens in MAGA land. It’s all about total deference to the Trumpinator.
They don’t think; they feel, they imagine, they fantasize, they preconceive. Any thinking person would realize they are being played by a billionaire rich kid, but MAGA seems to have a blind spot right where Trump is. Trump is the center of MAGA’s universe, and everything else in MAGA’s mind is organized around it, like planets orbiting a star. This is the illusion of organization, the illusion that the world makes sense.
And in reality? The world is totally different from what MAGA imagines it is. MAGA is full of – not thinking, but PRE-THINKING. The natural precursor to thought is present, but thought itself is absent. It’s not there at all. This is what you see in Trump and MAGA when they start babbling, bloviating, sputtering nonsense. It LOOKS like conscious thinking, but IT’S NOT.
Conscious thinking is rational, coherent, discrete (self-contained), linear, organized. When someone is talking in a way that makes no sense, you know they are NOT CONSCIOUSLY THINKING. They are spouting the nonsense generated by their unconscious, which they CALL real thinking, but it isn’t. It is essential to understand the difference.
And as soon as you begin to recognize what non-conscious thinking is, you begin to notice it in your own life. Question your beliefs. WHY do you believe it? How plausible is it? Can you construct a convincing case for it? The MAGA loons NEVER concern themselves with these questions. Organizing their thoughts is too hard. Thinking requires too much discipline. So they settle for the easy, quick way out – letting their unconscious do all the work. It’s a lot easier and more satisfying than having to take on all of the hard work. But the results are abysmal. The results are total delusion and psychosis.
MAGA has an entirely different mode of reasoning and decision-making, an entirely different approach to logic and thought that does not correspond to rational analysis, which it denies, which it mocks. The only thing that motivates MAGA is a drive for satisfaction of a need – not the desire for truth.
Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs tells us that until our lower needs are satisfied, we cannot go on to satisfy higher needs. MAGA belongs to the middle part of the hierarchy that revolves around social connection and acceptance, and the upper section that’s all about esteem, recognition, and respect. MAGA apes are safe in their ordinary lives, but they feel ignored. They feel trampled on. They feel unimportant, unheard, unseen. The Trump message is that these MAGA apes DO count, they DO matter. They feel important, and their opinions are heard. This is why the MAGA apes are so fiercely loyal. They’re a lot like dogs.
But MAGA is not a healthy way of meeting their needs. Eventually they’ll all have to face reality. The reality is that the world will not bend to MAGA, nor should it. You can’t fight the world and win.
Arguably, people only start thinking rationally when they have four of the five sections on Maslow’s hierarchy satisfied (in theory, they could do this at any stage, but in practice they are always distracted). For example, there’s no use thinking rationally if you’re starving to death or if you feel unsafe. If you don’t have social connections, you’ll be an outcast, and your focus will be on being liked. If you aren’t recognized at all and you have no confidence or self-respect, then you’re just trying to find a way to feel worthy. Only when we reach the stage of self-actualization do we seek out ways to be rational and wise. MAGA will never reach here, obviously. They’re too busy desperately pretending they aren’t stupidly insecure, just like Trump, who’s permanently stuck on the esteem layer.
If you’re not in a good, secure place in life, being rational is exceptionally difficult, but not impossible. MAGA apes, whose needs are consistently not met for varying reasons, gravitate toward MAGA because it provides a way of FEELING better without having to put in the effort to GET better. MAGA is born out of dysfunction and emotional deficit.
And Musk wonders why his public image is absolute garbage. $500 BILLION … and one of the most MONSTROUS people on earth.
It’s time to put people like this in a cell, never to see the light of day again, for stealing from the People. They are thieves, gangsters, and conmen. They are exploiters and conspirators.
Fuck off, you bourgeois fuck. Obviously someone who’s never gone hungry in their life. And always the entitlement, as if people like Musk should be allowed to have that much money, as if they’ve REMOTELY earned it.
Again, fuck off. An enemy of the working class. Let’s spell it out for the fuckers who don’t seem to get it.
Capitalism is a zero-sum game. When someone takes more than their fair share, they are STEALING it from the workers who DID earn it. People aren’t poor because they “don’t have the drive” to get rich – they are poor because it’s literally impossible for everyone to live comfortably, purely because of people like Musk.
ANYONE who talks like this guy is a privileged PIECE OF SHIT, going out of their way to defend the billionaires who exploit us all.
Poor people aren’t poor because they’re lazy; they’re poor because of a system DESIGNED TO FUNNEL WEALTH AWAY FROM THEM AND TOWARD THOSE WHO ALREADY HAVE MORE THAN ENOUGH.
The reason why it’s made so much is because it’s sense that no one ever seems to listen to. Meanwhile, here you sit on the other side of the fence with a totally POINTLESS interjection.
It’s greed, not politics.
No one thinks that.
Since it’s someone who’s STEALING FROM IT, yes. Who are these fucking idiots, crawling out of their little holes to defend this guy?
Imagine having so little imagination that you can’t work out how more balanced wealth would help people in poverty.
No, actually, you are retarded.
Yawn. Fuck off. Absolute prick. No one’s literally begging – just suggesting that wealth be more equal. Oh, but what could you have against that, huh? Clearly you hate poor people.
It’s also very easy to spend your own money when you have millions or billions of dollars worth of capital. Fucking dickhead. You think Elon Musk is frugal in the least just because it’s his money? You must be an actual goddamn ape.
Anyone who sees fit to defend billionaires can FUCK OFF. It’s always the same – acting like working class people are entitled for demanding less wealth inequality, when, actually, it’s people like Musk who are entitled fucks. All billionaires are SCUM and anyone who says otherwise is scum, too. The system is RIGGED against ordinary people. It’s no failure of ours that we aren’t all millionaires. It’s the FACT that capitalism is a zero-sum game – some people have to lose in order for other people to win in the extreme ways they do today.
You call it fair when Musk makes billions off the labor of others? That’s exploitation. That’s theft. If you’re one of those assholes who say, “Oh, he earned it”, well, you’re just proving how utterly RETARDED you are. No one could EVER be such a hard worker as to deserve that amount of capital. Capitalism is not about merit. It’s about control, ruthlessness, predatory policies, refusing to pay fair wages, squeezing every bit of profit out of your workers and your customers and clients.
These people call the poor idiots for not just becoming rich themselves and becoming independent, yet they forget that in order for empires like Musk’s to exist, there must be a massive labor pool of financially dependent people.
Defenders of Musk can go fuck themselves. Nobody needs them and their mind-numbingly stupid arguments.
Here’s the thing. If we lived in a perfect system where everyone was given exactly what they deserved and no more, and we didn’t have people who are billionaires since birth because they inherited a bunch of capital, and businesses were forbidden from being predatory, then being poor WOULD be your fault. But that’s not the world we live in – open your eyes! We live in a world where most of the wealth stays in rich families FOREVER because they live well below their means. When someone is a millionaire, they are in a very different position to someone who’s poor. Poor people don’t and can’t accumulate capital. They’re constantly working for a shitty wage and constantly being fleeced by corporations. None of the money STAYS in the lower classes. It’s always heading upward, right into the pockets of the people who already have more than they’ll ever need.
Having a lot of capital gives you an EXTREME advantage over small businesses, so someone who starts out with, say, the million dollars Trump claims his father loaned him, already has a VAST advantage over most other businesses. Having a lot of capital makes it easy to acquire more, like a snowball rolling down a hill. Meanwhile small businesses are suffering with every bit of economic turbulence that any large business can just take. Oh, and having a lot of capital also means you can accept more losses, so you can focus on rapid expansion at a loss in order to lay the groundwork for extreme profits later. These are just a few of the ways in which billionaire rich kids have advantages over you, so when you claim that the poor just don’t have the “drive” to change their circumstances, you are demonstrating that you are totally ignorant of how businesses work and how being poor tends to turn out in the long run. The fact is that the vast majority of people born poor will die poor, and the vast majority of people born rich will die rich. Social mobility is almost gone. For every success story you hear about in the news, there are THOUSANDS more that didn’t turn out that way.
If you think that’s a fair system, there’s something wrong with you.
So, don’t go defending this predatory capitalist Musk as if he’s the best thing since sliced bread. Moreover, he doesn’t give a shit about you anyway, so why do you give a shit about him?
Seriously, get it together, you morons.
