Donald Trump and Post-Rational Politics
As human beings, we often seek leaders who are “true to their word”, i.e. have a certain level of consistency between what they say and what they do. It makes them seem more honest, trustworthy, principled — and usually, more likable.
The reality, though, is that if you’re in a leadership position of any sort you’re going to be dealing with a lot of conflicting information, many of which are ambiguous and contradictory. If you were to try to embody all of them at once, you’d become a hypocritical and self-contradictory mess.
Most politicians try to hide this reality from the public in order to keep the appearance that they have principals and values that they always uphold, even if they really don’t in their everyday practice. (It’s basically impossible for anyone to do so, after all.) What Donald Trump did in the 2016 elections was to throw away the facade and embrace hypocrisy as part of his identity and brand. And it worked.
Some are calling this the age of “post-truth” or “post-rationalism”, where facts and logical consistency no longer matters. It’s a depressing thought, particularly for techies who operate on principals of rationality and reason as their guiding force for making the world a better place. But it’s obvious now that there needs to be a better way of thinking about how these things work, if technology is to be a positive influence in yielding desirable political results.
Facts still matter, since they are still part of reality. What I’ve always been skeptical of, though, is the value of logical consistency. The world is too complex and chaotic to fit into the neat little rule systems we create for ourselves — by being insistent and obsessive about these rules, we turn a blind eye to the broader reality that exists outside.
The Internet has a long history of “debunking” ideas and people who don’t meet its criteria for providing a logical, rationally consistent experience. A politician said one thing while doing another. A person argued one point, but contradicted themselves a few sentences later. Someone was found to be a hypocrite after doing the exact opposite thing of what they supposedly believed. It might feel good to “expose” people’s flaws in this way, but now that it’s clear that these attacks do little to nothing in the long run, we are definitely in need of another approach.
Rather than punishing these instances when they occur, I think it would be more productive to explore the reasons why these contradictions exist — what happens between the cracks of our rational constructs is where the truth is most likely to lie, after all. As the saying goes: we’re all hypocrites, some of us are just more honest about it. If we can learn to accept contradictions as part of our world and part of our life, the ideas and conversations that we have about making progress forward will be that much more meaningful.
Can our technological products be made to accommodate contradictory sentiments and semantics in a meaningful way? Sure. But at the same time, it does mean having to give up certain things in order to pave the way for something new. Personally I would have preferred change to come in a different kind of package, but since we’re now in turmoil anyway, we might as well use the opportunity to build something bigger and better this time around.
