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Future Imperfect - When Panic creates a need for an immutable Future, Reality takes a back seat [1]

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Date: 2024-07-20  

To obtain that immutable future, Oracles and portents are sought out, heroes appear; only to crumble to dust when measured against the future that must be created to contain them.

The Perfect becomes the enemy of the Good — or even of the Excellent. Thus, Panic mounts, and the cycle repeats, becoming stronger with each repetition.

The current narrative that seems to have developed in the last few weeks goes as follows: Joe Biden isn’t perfect, our Democracy is facing an existential threat, and we must know with certainty that our candidate will win.

The fact that the future, when human beings (chaos attractors(1)) are involved in it, has never been very predictable, gets blithely ignored. (Argument by authority and appeals to possibility(2) tend to be substituted as the modern equivalent of the pronouncements of the Oracle of Delphi.)

Thus, Biden must resign in favor of a candidate (yet to be chosen) that is, at the least, more perfect than he is. Younger, stronger, male, white, not as openly progressive, and thus more acceptable — to someone or some group, at least. Other adjectives may also apply, and would also apply to any putative running mate.

The driving factor is no specific characteristic, but merely the knowledge that the current candidate is obviously not perfect, and thus cannot create certainty. To avoid having to acknowledge the irrationality of that logic, specific imperfections are made much of, and drive the next cycle.

Unless enough people call bullshit, deny the need for, or possibility of, perfection, and break up the fantasy.

Let’s do that.

H/T to AOC, whose video set me off on this new tangent.

Note 1: I don’t believe chaos attractors is a defined term except in some science fiction, but I consider them to be the human flip side of strange attractors, which occur in the quasi-stable complex social systems people keep trying to build and/or prop up once formalized.

Note 2: An appeal to possibility is the logical fallacy of taking something for granted because it is possibly the case. The fact that an event is possible does not imply that the event is probable, nor that the event will be realized. Paraphrased from Wikipedia

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