As I promised yesterday, here is Part One of my Treetise. I pray that the Department Of Permanent Records does not learn of this!
To whomever first reads this Treetise,
I’m just an ordinary citizen who would like to communicate his ideas to Mr. Van Jones. Could you please forward him this treetise?
To Mr. Van Jones, I give you all the credit in the world for your Herculean effort to unify this country. You are the only commentator I can think of who I believe is totally genuine and heartfelt. I can’t thank you enough for the sacrifices you have made for our country. You have inspired me to get off the couch, and do what I can to help heal the divide in this country and support green energy.
My idea is that we should unify the country by focusing on recycling the materials that are essential to build wind turbines and solar energy. I believe that we should funnel these raw materials to the Rust Belt, where they can be used to grow a renewable energy industry and create jobs. I describe exactly how we can accomplish this goal in tomorrow's post Professor Whimsy Cures America: Part Three: The Treetise Part Two.
If you choose to read Treetise Part One, I only ask that you extend me some creative latitude. After all, I am a bonafide Doctor of Whimsy and hold creative licenses in all 50 states. In addition, I have extensive experience working with metaphorical illnesses and am an expert in the American Immune System (AIS). My unique training and credentials make me eminently qualified to offer an accurate diagnosis and treatment of our country’s illness.
Before I offer my assessment, I need to clear up a common misconception of the AIS. Many believe that the term merely designates the physiology of our government institutions. That is simply not accurate. The AIS is the sum total of all systems and mechanisms that the American body employs to neutralize pathogens. As such, it subsumes governmental immunology within a much larger web work of immune responses. It is crucial we understand this, because our government has fallen into a dire level of dysfunction. This particular circumstance has influenced my diagnoses and caused me to formulate a path to recovery that circumvents governmental channels.
My diagnosis is that our nation is suffering from the auto-immune disease RBCF (Rust Belt Coastal Fever).
My recommendation for treatment is that Americans embark on a non-political, grassroots effort to massively increase their battery and electronics recycling rates. While that may seem unrelated to our nation’s current illness, the connection will become evident after I provide more context.
Let me start by explaining a little bit about the operations of the AIS. When a pathogen (serious problem) infects the American body, our population develops a fever (experiences anxiety). This fever mobilizes the AIS to produce an antibody (a solution).
If the American body has encountered that pathogen before, it will likely have effective antibodies at hand. On the other hand, if the AIS has never encountered that pathogen before, it will not have an effective antibody available with which to neutralize it. In that case, the cells within the AIS initiates a vigorous dichotomous response (divided response) to the pathogen. The dichotomy than undergoes a ramification process (debating the issue) that churns out antibodies in an infinite variety. Eventually, the ramification process will generate an antibody that effectively neutralizes the pathogen.
Should the American body experience that Pathogen in the future, it will quickly reproduce the effective antibody and refine it further into one that is even more effective. With repeated exposure to the same pathogen, the healthy American body will quickly develop immunity to that pathogen.
In RBCF, the pathogen subverts the AIS at the dichotomous response step. Instead of the AIS forming two groups of cells that attempt to neutralize the pathogen in a dichotomous manner, the two sides attempt to neutralize each other. In other words, each side sees the other as the pathogen that it needs to neutralize. At that point, the AIS is at great risk of self-destructing in auto-immunity fashion.
To illuminate this danger more concretely, I’d like to move away from the academic language of metaphorical illnesses and speak about RBCF on a more personal level. After the 2016 presidential election, I was horrified that Trump had won. To me, he was clearly a narcissistic demagogue. I felt that the only way people could vote for such a person was if they were racist and uneducated. The idea that such people had gained political power left me feeling threatened and anxious. In essence, my narrative was “I am not safe unless Trump supporters are powerless. I must neutralize Trump supporters” If I imagine myself as a Trump supporter, I know that being the target of such a narrative would have left me feeling threatened and anxious. My natural reaction would be to protect myself with a counter-narrative: “I am not safe unless Hillary supporters are powerless. I need to neutralize Hillary supporters.”
If we are to avoid that type of auto immunity tailspin, we need to understand the basic pathogenesis of RBCF. In a nutshell, RBCF subverts the AIS by exacerbating these three behaviors: APATHY, DENIAL and COMPARTMENTALIZATION.
Below are the components of RBF with the correlate behavior they illicit.
1) COMPLEXITY / APATHY
Both the causes of the problem and its possible solutions are complex. Most people will grow tired of struggling to understand the problem and working towards its solution. The end result is that folks become apathetic and their minds drifts towards problems that at least offer the pleasure of righteous indignation. As evidenced by the high number of Americans that respond indignantly to Trump’s tweets, such a pleasure is highly addictive. In my capacity as a scholar of whimsy, I recommend that Americans exercise great caution while reading Trump’s tweets.
2) GRADUAL DETERIORATION / DENIAL
Slow deterioration facilitates the psychological defense of denial, especially when the deterioration takes place over several decades. Who among us will labor to see the bigger picture if doing so would increase their anxiety? Only people suffering from a serious psychiatric disorder would engage in such masochism. The rest of us rationalize away what we don’t want to conclude. Most commonly, we convince ourselves that slow deterioration is no deterioration.
3) CLUSTERED HARM / COMPARTMENTALIZATION
A problem severely impacts certain regions of the country, but not others. Those unaffected by the problem are often hundreds of miles away from the folks who are suffering. Such a dynamic facilitates the psychological defense of compartmentalization – “out of sight, out of mind.” If compartmentalization continues long enough, the affected and unaffected regions will develop completely different narratives. At some point, the compartmentalization will become untenable, and the two sides will have to reckon with each other. If their narratives have diverged to a large enough degree, each side will feel invalidated and threatened by the other. The two sides will begin to perceive each other as a pathogen, and the American body will develop RBCF.
The degree of virulence at which RBCF manifests corresponds to the degree of difference at which distinct regions suffer the effects of a problem. If two distinct regions experience suffering of a similar degree and nature, they are unlikely to attack each other. On the other hand, if the degree and nature of suffering between the two regions is highly divergent, they are likely to form narratives that are at odds with each other. In such a case, there is a high probability of mutual hostility. Given this dynamic, the best way to treat RBCF is to focus one’s energy on resolving the clustered harm/compartmentalization component as much as possible.
Towards that end, I have listed below the concrete factors that led to the especially virulent strain of RBCF that currently afflicts us:
1) Increase in automation
2) Steel Industry moves from the United States to China.
3) The general migration of factories to Mexico.
4) Natural gas outcompeting coal as a cheaper and cleaner alternative for electricity generation
Clearly, all four of these events have characteristics of complexity, gradual deterioration and clustered harm. However, the quality of clustered harm and diverging experience is most prominent in event four (the decline of coal). For instance, the rise of cheap natural gas has devastated the Rust Belt, but has benefited the Northeast. Case in point: The steel smelters that once operated in Indiana and Ohio were at one time all coal-fired. These smelters were designed with extremely high chimneys, so the noxious soot from the coal ash wouldn’t pollute the immediate environment. Instead, the soot hitched a ride in the jet stream and drifted over the Appalachian Mountains. The sulfur from the coal then mixed with moisture in the air and fell upon the Northeast in the form of acid rain. When those coal smelters switched to natural gas, the Northeast no longer suffered the effects of acid rain.
Northeasterners, such as this writer, have never experienced the horrific economic devastation that results from the closing of coal mines. Hence, we tend to overlook the economic devastation that these coal mining communities have suffered. Our experiences have conditioned us to think of coal not in economic terms, but of its negative impact on the environment. Thus, our focus is almost exclusively on regulating the coal industry. For those coal miners who have lost their jobs, it must seem like Northeasterners are constantly pushing a pillow down on their face. They must wonder why we continuously fret about what will happen to the environment at some distant time, but don’t care much about their current suffering.
Part two of this treetise titled Professor Whimsy Cures America: Part Tree: Treetise Part Two will be available tomorrow.
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