Progressives know who the Real Villain in the health care debate is. It's Big Insurance. Or it's Big Pharma. Or Big Providers. Or Big Republicans, though they blame Big Lawyers and Big Patients. But Big Republicans wouldn't be big - they're minorities in both the House and Senate - were it not for Big Blue Dogs, aided if not outright led by Big President.
Or maybe the Real Villain is me ... Big Storyteller.
More below the fold....
The Real Villain is ... Me. (Idiot America, Non-Cynical Saturday)
One of the problems Charles Pierce cites in Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free, is that we rely on storytelling; a compelling story is more attractive than a reasoned argument or scientific evidence. It's true that much of our discourse is driven by what Pierce calls the Gut: passionate, defensive, intuitive, and often wrong. The Gut likes stories, especially stories with clear heroes and villains. The Gut takes sides and then asks the mind to rationalize its decisions.
But as cognitive scientist (and Kossack) George Lakoff shows in The Political Mind, a book we'll explore more next week, Pierce's Gut is inescapable. The Gut is the cognitive processes that precede and direct conscious reasoning. By the time we're aware of reasoning, which the Enlightenment claimed was the first step toward knowing, the Gut is already believing. It may a stretch to say the Gut chooses the destination and reasoning chooses the route, but it's not much of a stretch. We rarely tell the Gut "I'm not going there." Instead we select principles and/or facts to get us there, and call that route "reason."
The Real Villain in health care ...
As we've discussed this week, the health care debate has been a case study in the manufactured ignorance and confusion Pierce calls Idiot America. Conservatives have painted President Obama as the villain in a plot to kill old people, take over health care as a first step toward replacing capitalism with socialism/fascism (as if those were the same ideology), and generally Destroy Everything That Is Good About America. Some progressives have also painted President Obama as the villain, if only for his failure to paint a clear villain on the other side.
The underlying problem, as I sarcastically suggested in the introduction, is that there is no single, evil, causing-the-whole-problem Real Villain in the health care debate. As jd in nyc demonstrated in the rescued diary Breaking Through Public Option Nonsense, there's no one reason we spend almost twice as much per capita on health care yet we're ranked 34th in health outcomes. The failures of health care happen throughout the system, and for-profit insurance is only one piece of that puzzle.
There's no single Real Villain in the health care story. It's a complex story, and complex stories are difficult to understand. Complexity is a fertilized petri dish for the virus of induced ignorance. In the absence of factual simplicity, we'll take fictional simplicity: disinformation, manufactured controversy, conspiracy theories, religious or ideological fundamentalism, anything that reduces the complex factual goo to a simple story with a Real Villain to oppose.
Maybe we're just not biologically wired to understand complexity, though the many ways we have done so would seem to suggest otherwise. Maybe we just don't get enough practice. Maybe the Real Villain ...
... is Big Storyteller.
It's perhaps no coincidence that the Republican Revolution of 1980 was presaged by the narrative revolution of 1976. The cinematic ennui born of Watergate and other emerging scandals gave way to the simplicity of Star Wars. Reviewers and audiences applauded "the return of stories where you can tell the good guys from the bad guys, and the good guys win." Star Wars appealed to Pierce's Gut. All the nation needed was an actor to tell us it was "Morning in America" and designate an "Evil Empire," and conservatism's simplistic narratives came to dominate our political dialogue.
As a novelist, the series I'm most proud of featured a network of groups maneuvering with and against each other to manipulate or take advantage of international events. The groups were patterned after well-known interests, though I freely used creative license to exaggerate their histories, coherence, and agendas. Each sought more power than it had, albeit for different reasons. None was strong enough to act alone. Each had informants within or alliances with some of the others. None was entirely good or evil. The villain in one book might help the heroes in the next, and vice versa.
It was larger-than-life fiction, but for me it came closer to the complexity of the real world than easy, breezy Hero vs. Villain stories. Many critics panned it, and it never reached breakout sales. My editor and agent and I agreed to drop it. I've never been really excited about a story since.
I say that to concede a personal bias. I believe Big Storyteller lets us off too easy. (Yes, that's my Gut talking.) Big Storyteller conditions us toward easy, breezy Hero vs. Villain stories, and when reality doesn't fit that model it's all too easy for to sweep in and confuse us with all the tools of Idiot America.
We can't think without the Gut, but George Lakoff suggests we can retrain the Gut to steer us toward better-reasoned outcomes. It's hard work, and it takes practice and repetition to rewire those cognitive frames. The stories we read and watch and tell - art as "alternative life experience" - can help us learn to synthesize complexity.
Or they can tell us to keep looking for the Real Villain, and let us fall into ignorance and confusion - Idiot America - when no single Real Villain exists.
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Happy Saturday!