"Building a more resilient information environment."

 Yesterday, Secretary of State, Anthony Blinken, made a speech in Korea which he closed by saying "We can become so overwhelmed by lies and distortions – so divided from one another – that we will fail to meet the challenges that our nations face.  Or we can meet this moment and do what democracies do best.  We can welcome diverse voices and perspectives.  We can think critically and debate vigorously.  We can actually grow and self-correct."  The tile of his speech was "Building a more resilient information environment" and it is the international version of speeches made by presidents and others inside this country relating to the need to "save our democracy and protect free speech."  

I agree with absolutely everything that Blinken said, but note that nothing in his speech addressed a more fundamental problem, and that is the willingness and ability of humans to "grow and self-correct."  Who is it that decides what is true and what not.  What do we do if we do not "think critically and debate vigorously?"  If we do not "actually grow and self-correct."  Our Secretary of State is talking to foreigners.  Who is talking to you and me?

I spent thirty years talking to foreigners, sometimes with a gun in my hand and sometimes dressed in a suit and wearing a necktie.  Every single one of them, farmer and politician alike, had a different perspective about my words and every single one of them was far more interested in my actions than my jabber.  I spent several years telling my Vietnamese friends about the importance of democratic values and then I walked away from them and left them to the people that I had been urging them to kill.  Colleagues of mine recently did the exact same thing to Afghan friends and we are seriously considering doing it again to our Ukrainian friends.  A strong probability exists in the minds of many that we will do the exact same thing to our Taiwanese friends.  A Russian propagandist sums it up:  "America will hump you and then dump you."

Here, inside this "bastion of democracy", free speech is venerated as an intellectual concept and vigorously denied in practice.  The American government does not control speech. Corporate algorithms and individual disinterest, guided by tribal propagandists, does the job for us.  As a political scientist, I find the situation fascinating.  As an American, I find it disgusting as well as tragic.  In today's America, you and I hide from each other's germs and ideas with equal vigor and we reduce thought to that which we find comfortable.  We ignore all that does not fit into our physical and intellectual neighborhoods.  Those of us living in suburbs, "distant" from urban decay, spout isms without end, but show little interest in far too many people "living" on the street, save to deplore it.  We uniformly refuse to recognize that we are intellectually abandoning the concept of America and activists are championing concepts today that were once anathema.  We fail to understand that our disinterest in urban blight is the exact same thing as our disinterest in the plight of far, far too many people in this shrinking world.

There is little difference, save details and scale, between crime in our cities and war in foreign countries.  Both are facilitated and encouraged by our cowardly disinterest and our ability to pull imaginary, intellectual covers over our head and hide from reality in our "devices."  We choose to pontificate about, rather than deal with, issues.  Some of us see Russia, or China, or Iran as the threat.  I see the greater danger to be our unwillingness, you and me, to admit that we see what is happening to this once near-great people.  I ask myself why and conclude that the most fundamental reason is that we are cowards, too stupid to admit to what we all see happening.

Before the invention of nuclear weapons on top of satellite-guided ballistic missiles, it was eminently viable to periodically knock each other over the head with clubs and bows and arrows, or tanks and supersonic airplanes, but the nature of war has changed and we should think more about what a post nuclear conflagration would look like just down the street from where you and I live.  I argue that to be more important than any of the drivel that you and I are talking about today.  You can put more chips in the bag, lower the price of gasoline, snuff the fetus at any stage of development, ensure that nobody grabs anybody by the pussy, correct everybody's use of pronouns to include him and her, and ensure that nobody's feeling are bruised by any misuse of the English language, and we will still solve the population problem by making it impossible to grow anything on what is left of this chunk of rock spinning in space, unless you and I stop yelling at each other and start talking to each other substantively about very real issues.