Who’s Drinking the Flavor-Aid?

Jim Jones [Powers Boothe] in 1980’s Guyana Tragedy: The Story of Jim Jones.

This historical event is where the phrase “drinking the Kool-Aid” originated. Actually, Jones gave his flock generic Flavor-Aid.

Several years ago, when I worked for a very large company, the company was going through yet another “reorg.”
I remember a meeting in which a Senior Vice President faced over 100 members of her division.
She enumerated the many adjustments we were about to go through, and (making it clear that she disagreed with the changes), commented that we all had to “drink the Kool-Aid.”*
In other words, we all had to pretend that the reorganization was a fine idea, and “go along,” without complaint.

Superman (George Reeves) in Adventures of Superman, which aired 1952-58.
The voiceover ended with the tagline “Truth, justice, and the American way.”
(In 2021, DC Comics updated the Superman tagline to “Truth, justice, and a better tomorrow.”)

In trying to figure out this period of political polarization, I’ve decided that we’ve been drinking different flavors of Kool-Aid.
I had been drinking the fantasy that Democrats and Republicans were basically similar, we were all in a melting pot, and most citizens believed in my family’s interpretation of the slogan associated with Superman: “Truth, justice, and the American way.”
When Donald Trump was elected President via the Electoral College—while losing the popular vote—I finally realized that I’d been drinking some serious Kool-Aid.

I had completely missed that some people had been traumatized by having President Obama as President for eight years, couldn’t conceive of a woman as their President, and/or cared deeply for a candidate who I perceived as a conman.
I hadn’t paid much attention to Trump (because I had a bad opinion of him after living in New York City in the 1980’s and 1990’s).
However, many Americans had listened to him, and had responded powerfully to his message.

Scene from Monty Python and the Holy Grail, with Peasant 2 (Michael Palin) screaming “Help, help. I’m being repressed,” as he’s being strangled by King Arthur (Graham Chapman).

Some Trump supporters think that they are being supplanted by people of color and immigrants.
They also tend to interpret the “American way of life” in a way I had never considered.
In this world view: White men should be in power, “outgroups” (like LGBT and “non-white” people) should accept a lower status, and White Anglo-Saxon Protestant societal values should be placed on a pedestal.
(It’s true some Catholics, Hispanics and Southern Italians are allied with MAGA, but their own cultures are thereby repressed.)

Furthermore, most Trump supporters are extremely cynical about Government.
They think it’s obvious that elections are stolen, the Federal government is corrupt, and politicians steal.
When I hear MAGA people being interviewed, it seems that their only real goal is to elect politicians who will cut taxes, and stop the tide of “outgroups taking over society.”

In the book The Truth About Lies: The Illusion of Honesty and the Evolution of Lies, by Aja Raden, Raden quotes a 2002 study by Colleen Seifert, a psychology professor at the University of Michigan, who specializes in complex human cognition.
According to Seifert: “when people are presented with evidence that the information they’ve been exposed to over and over is factually untrue, the attempts to refute it further entrench their belief.”
[Emphasis mine.]
Once someone is convinced of something, and it feels “like truth” to them, convincing them otherwise is close to impossible.

The U.S. seems stuck in a place in which about 60% (?) acknowledge that an unfit criminal held the nation’s highest office for four years, and another 40% (?) seem to believe that he did a good job and it would be fine if he were President again.
Making the situation worse, only half (or less) of U.S. citizens can be persuaded to vote, and it’s unclear which side the non-voters are on.

Eleanor Roosevelt (Gillian Anderson) in The First Lady—the 2022 TV series.

In 1940, Eleanor Roosevelt (1884-1962), then First Lady of the U.S., wrote an essay entitled “The Moral Basis of Democracy,” saying:

We are in truth the melting pot of the earth. Our solidarity and unity can never be a geographical unity or a racial unity. It must be a unity growing out of a common idea and a devotion to that idea.

It seems that few of us are devoted to the ideal of Democracy. She goes on to say:

Moreover, no one can honestly claim that either the Indians or the Negroes of this country are free. [Roosevelt used the accepted terminology of the times.] . . . Few members of the older generation have even attempted to make themselves the kind of people who are truly worthy of the power which is vested in the individual in a Democracy. We must fulfill our duties as citizens, see that our nation is truly represented by its government, see that the government is responsive to the will and desires of the people. . . We must maintain a standard of living which makes it possible for the people really to want justice for all, rather than harbor a secret hope for privileges because they cannot hope for justice.

Do Americans still hope for Justice?
About a year before she wrote this essay, Mrs. Roosevelt wrote another essay called “Keepers of Democracy,” which appeared in the Virginia Quarterly Review (Winter, 1939).
She says:

There is a growing wave in this country of fear, and of intolerance which stems from fear. . . when we allow one group of people to look down upon another, then we may for a short time bring hardship on some particular group of people, but the real hardship and the real wrong is done to democracy and to our nation as a whole. We are then breeding people who cannot live under a democratic form of government but must be controlled by force.

Have we bred people who cannot live under Democracy?
How many voters no longer hope for justice?
Is the simple difference between the two sides that some are willing to endure an authoritarian government (as long as they are accepted into the group that is “on top”), while others want to live equally with others and make the bargains necessary to live in a Democracy?

*In case anyone is too young to know where the phrase “drinking the Kool-Aid” originated, it comes from the story of Jim Jones—a cult leader who died in 1978, with around 900 followers (at least 200 of them children). According to Wikipedia, Jones asked his group to ingest grape-flavored Flavor-Aid (misidentified as Kool-Aid) plus cyanide, as an act of “revolutionary suicide.”

Truth Versus Truthiness

Only those born before 1980 are considered digital natives.
I’m classified as a digital immigrant, because I was born around the same year as the Ferrante Mark I—the world’s first general-purpose computer.
I grew up in the days of rotary phones and three TV networks, and I didn’t own a personal computer until the early 1990’s, when I purchased my first OS6 Macintosh. 

I went through a phase when I played games on my Mac, but I only liked clue-finding games.
I never devised an avatar, or played computer games with people around the world.
I met my husband at an office for freelancers—where people could get their resumes typed and use drop off boxes—not via Hinge or Tinder.
My only avatars are the sticker emojis I made on my iphone, and the self-portrait I cobbled together from ready-made choices for Facebook.
My favorite Apps are IMDb, the FoodNetwork, YouTube, and Goodreads—sites where I can look up information or be entertained, not communicate with others.
I’m definitely a digital immigrant.

Most of the science-fiction I read is old—very old.
I enjoy rereading authors that I first read in the 1970’s—among them, Isaac Asimov, Primo Levi and Olaf Stapledon.
Authors have been discussing the ideas of whether artificial beings should be legal “persons,” or whether artificial intelligence will supersede humans, for a very long time.

In order to broaden my horizons, I decided to read more recent science-fiction, and I happened upon The Lifecycle of Software Objects by Ted Chiang.
According to Wikipedia, Chiang isn’t a digital native either.
(He was born in 1967.)
However, he’s won four Nebula Awards and four Hugo Awards; and he writes philosophical science-fiction—my favorite category.

Just as Karel Capek invented the word “robot” for his 1921 play R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots), Chiang invented the term “digient” for “digital entities.”
In The Lifecycle of Software Objects, digients are virtual pets created as past-times for wealthy customers, who are then expected to parent them.
The novella is the story of two central characters (Ana and Derek), and their digients (Jax, and siblings Marco and Polo).
At the beginning of the story, Ana and Derek both work for a company that creates and sells digients.
After the software company goes bankrupt, Ana and Derek opt to take over the care of their favorite digital entities, so that their cherished entities may “live.” 

Chiang deals with both psychological and philosophical issues in The Lifecycle of Software Objects.
The principal subject is raising and educating the “infant” digients.
He further mentions that digients are equipped with “pain circuit breakers,” so they’ll be “immune to torture,” and thus “unappealing to sadists,” bringing up the fact that sociopaths will still be a societal problem in the near future.
I especially enjoyed the message board sequences in which obviously “bad” parents grouse about their “bad” digient children.

At one point in the story, the digient siblings, Marco and Polo, ask to be “rolled back” to an earlier point in their “lives,” because they’re unable to resolve an argument.
Is it right for “daddy” Derek to allow this; or should he force his “children” to work out their own disagreements, so that they may grow emotionally?
Later, Marco and Polo ask to become corporations, or legal persons.
Should Derek permit this?
Is it child abuse to separate a digient from its’ friends, and fan clubs, or to alter its’ programming so that it can become a sex slave?

Scene of Robbie the Robot disabling the weapons of  “Doc” Ostrow (Warren Stevens) and Commander Adams (Leslie Nielsen) in 1956’s Forbidden Planet.

In Chiang’s novella, Ana disagrees with a company that wants her to help train a digient that “responds like a person, but isn’t owed the same obligations as a person.” [Italics mine.]
This scene reminded me of two TV series in which androids/robots are traumatized—The Orville (2017-?) and Westworld (2016-2022).
In season two of The Orville, we learn about the history of the Kaylons—a society of sentient artificial lifeforms (created as slaves) who exterminated the biologicals who created them.
In Westworld, the first season begins with human-like androids being the prey of depraved humans, but by season four it’s all-out war between androids and humans—that seems to end on earth in the same result as on planet Kaylon.

The central question is whether it’s ethical to enslave a sentient being—be it a virtual entity, robot, android, or human.
Is enslaving non-biologicals just as wrong as enslaving a fellow biological?
In a world in which human life is less important than money, is it senseless to worry about the treatment of virtual or robotic creatures?
After all, while many of us say we believe in fair play, unselfishness, and truthfulness; almost no one thinks we should carry through with these beliefs in our daily lives.

Scene of Charly Burke (Anne Winters) talking to the Kaylon Isaac (Mark Jackson) in The Orville episode “Electric Sheep.”

People can justify any bad action, as long as it makes them feel better.
We can justify not paying back a loan because the lender has more money in the bank than the lendee.
We can justify breaking laws, because other people are more corrupt—the classic pot calling the kettle black.
Few believe that the way to build a life is to be honest and truthful all the time.
Some of my favorite novels on this subject are not science-fiction.
(I recommend two Fyodor Dostoevsky novels—The Idiot, and Demons, also titled The Possessed.)

Because people can justify any bad action, the erosion of generally-believed truths is quite dangerous for society.
A 2016 Sanford study* came to the conclusion that digital natives are unable to judge the credibility of online information, or distinguish between an advertisement and a news story.
The inability to tell truth from truthiness (on the web) is also evident in digital immigrants—perhaps, more so.
In a world where we have no generally believed truths, and we only believe what we want to believe, how is an organized society possible?

We first heard the word “truthiness” on The Colbert Report—Stephen Colbert’s mock news show (which aired from 2005 through 2014), in which he portrayed a far right news personality.
In Colbert’s book America Again (2012), the same character satirically discusses voter fraud (page 165) and goes on to recommend ending voter fraud by ending voter registration (page 166).
Little did anyone think in 2012, that 10 years later, in 2022—40% of us would believe that the 2020 election was illegitimate, or that later several states would actually pass laws making it harder to vote.

Ultimately, the most important conflict is not one between digital natives and digital immigrants, right versus left, the intelligentsia versus average people, or even “woke” versus “anti-woke.”
Instead, I think that the most crucial divide is between people who want to try and seek out truth and reality in this confusing world, and those who prefer living in their cocoons.

*”Evaluating Information: The Cornerstone of Civic Online Reasoning,” by Sam Wineburg, Sarah McGrew, Joel Breakstone and Teresa Ortega (2016) the Stanford History Education Group.