Incompetence and Fear are a Potent Mix in Politics

Watching the Conservative Party of Canada provide aid and comfort to the ever decreasing and increasingly desperate antivaxxers in Canada I cannot help but think that they could have avoided all of the problems they have been having if they were competent, if they would show a little courage and if they would think past the next round of polling from the public pollsters.

None of this has happened and the result is they cannot gain any traction against a government that is getting longer in the tooth with each passing week. 

The simple fact is the majority of Canadians support the measures that have been taken by governments to bring COVID under control and return to a semblance of pre-COVID normalcy. Unfortunately, there is a small and ever decreasing minority of Canadians who disagree with these measures and the gap is not even close. Over 80% of Canadians are double vaxxed, the number who have three shots is in the 70% range and both are increasing. Therefore, the number of antivaxxers is less than 20% and that diminishes on a daily basis. So which group has the Conservative Party hitched its wagon to? The smaller one of course. *Face palm*

It has got to the point where they are actually offering overt support for a protest that started out as an "antivaxxer" protest but is quickly morphing into an antigovernment, white supremist protest. If some of the more extreme elements of these protesters are able to voice their positions and they are in any way connected to the CPC that party will turn off voters in all of the parts of the country they need to have any hope of gaining power, namely the major cities and their suburbs. If the protest becomes violent, like some fear, then that would be even worse news for the CPC. Their only saving grace would be the compliant media which will attempt to shield them from the worst fallout.

So, why are the CPC doing this? It does not take a genius political operative to figure out that going against the opinion of the vast majority of Canadians is not a winning political strategy.

One reason maybe the CPC brain trust just cannot do simple math, although I do not believe that. What I believe is the CPC is following the strategy that they have been following since 2006. Keep your base happy and energized and then try to convince enough non-aligned voters to vote for them. It worked in 2006, 2008 and 2011. It has not worked since then but they have not changed their strategy to account for the new reality. That is the incompetence.

The fear is the Peoples Party of Canada. In order for the 2006-2011 strategy to work the CPC has to keep its base intact. The PPC is threatening that with their simple-minded message. Crucially, the antivaxxers have decided that they trust the PPC over the CPC to stick to the message. The result is the CPC has to attempt to win them back.

That presents a very high risk of alienating the majority of Canadians. You cannot alienate the vast majority of voters and expect to win an election. I believe there are a few people in the CPC that see this but the combination of fear and incompetence amongst the real power brokers in the party prevents them from changing their approach. 

Senator Manchin is a feature not a bug

I keep seeing stories and comments about the holdup of several very important bills in the US Senate because of Senator Manchin. That is, just this one Senator, representing a rather small state, is holding up many important bills. Many commentators conclude that such a situation proves that the US system is broken.

I disagree. The system is working exactly how it was designed. As I have stated before the men who created the United States purposely created it so that its federal government would be weak. They were all frightened that one of their number would set themselves up as a king so they created a system to prevent that.

It worked for a time when the American ruling class were all pulling in the same direction but when that changed the system was helpless to prevent the country from tearing itself apart, leading to a long, bloody and painful civil war.

That national trauma lead to the ruling class again agreeing on the direction of the country, with the only disagreements being on how to move in that direction. Beginning with Ronald Reagan that agreement began to break down until the US finds itself in a situation where the ruling class and American society has broken into two distinct, mutually hostile factions. 

One of the results of that is what is happening in the US Senate. 

I do not know for certain what is going to happen in the US but I would remind you that the last time the US split as badly as it is splitting now it lead to war. That may not happen this time because the split is not confined to definable states but then again that might just mean that if war does break out it will be a messy and confusing one.

Are Humans getting dumber?

I recently saw a summary of a movie called "Idiocracy". It came out in 2007 and its basic premise is a person from that year gets frozen and is thawed out in 2507. The world he finds is one where human intelligence has regressed to the point where starvation is rampant because farmers are watering their crops with Gatorade, because it is superior to water because it contains electrolytes. The 21st Century guy is not very bright in the movie but he is a freaking genius compared to the rest the population so he becomes a hero and saves the day.

It seems like a silly movie and I have no desire to actually watch it but it does raise the question contained in the title to this post.

Almost everything about humans indicate that we should not have survived, let alone thrived, in the Darwinian competition that is the natural world. We are smaller, weaker and slower than almost every other predator out there. As well, we have small teeth and claws, barely suitable for inflicting harm on our own species let alone inflicting harm on those creatures that provide us with the sustenance to stave off starvation. 

Of course, evolution solved that problem by giving our species big brains and the cognitive abilities to go along with it. With those we overcame our physical limitations and conquered the world. We did not do this all at once. It took 10's of thousands of years and I would bet that along the way humans, both individuals and groups numbering in the hundreds or thousands, paid for lapses in intelligence by being denied the ability to pass their genes on to the next generation. In short the constant threat of death to our pre-historical ancestors made it necessary to continue developing their brains, their cognitive abilities and acquire the new skills that these allowed to happen. 

So thousands of years later here we are at the top of the food chain. If one of us is eaten by another predator it is always the result of an accident as opposed to a successful hunt of that human by that predator. Our gaining control of many natural processes or our ability to predict many of those that we cannot control has reduced the dangers of large numbers of us being wiped out by some natural disaster. There are exceptions to that as the COVID pandemic indicates but things like that are becoming an exception as opposed to an every present threat. So without the constant threat to our lives will our species continue to make the necessary adaptations to survive and considering the only adaptation that our species perfected was to increase our intelligence and cognitive abilities the question becomes will our species continue to do that?

I do not know the answer to that question and although many would say yes because of what we are seeing in the world today I would remind then of one thing. If you take the intelligence of all humans and plotted it on a graph it would look like a bell curve. That is, in general, there there is the same proportion of people with below average intelligence as there are with above average intelligence. So, there have always been stupid people around the only change now is there are more avenues for stupid people to demonstrate their stupidity. 

However, we cannot forget that a species only survives if it can continually adapt to the world around it. If it does not adapt it dies. The corollary to that is if the world around the species is no longer a threat to it then the need to adapt is reduced and the species may stagnate or regress. We do not know for certain if that is true because no species has ever accomplished that feat but it is a logical extension of the Theory of Evolution.

While it seems that we are getting dumber as a species that could just be a by-product of the information revolution we are currently experiencing giving the less intelligent among us equal access to the communications tools. It could be skewing our perceptions. However, we cannot discount the idea that our species is stagnating or even regressing as a price for our success at taking over the world.