U.S. Politics: the Dunning-Kruger Electorate and Sociopathic Politicians

Cognitive biases are "natural tendencies of human brains to perceive a situation in a certain way, irrespective of what a proper, logical, rational interpretation of the evidence shows." It's important to note that cognitive biases might not exist in sufficiently-powerful synthetic brains, beyond some threshold. Even among humans, one occasionally meets a very nice, very kind, very benevolent person who is also a math and engineering genius in comparison to other people. Though this is very rare, such people do exist. Their existence indicates that it might only take an IQ and EQ of 300 or so for humanity to effectively eliminate cognitive biases. Moreover: Even if this is not the case, such might be true for an IQ and EQ of a much higher, but still reachable threshold that is closer to physical limits that are likely to define what has come to be called "the Singularity" or "Intelligence Explosion." In any case, because cognitive biases may not exist in synthetic brains(Numenta,Kindred AI,Vicarious) or AGI, or may exist in wildly different form, human cognitive biases can be analyzed from the perspective of evolutionary biology, in addition to any analysis based on logic, philosophy, or cognitive psychology.

A cognitive bias can align with a correct interpretation of the facts, but it need not. Because the odds of a specific general bias matching infinitely-varied outcomes found in reality, cognitive biases are typically framed as "illogical," or, in some cases, "evolutionarily logical, but locally-flawed." One cognitive bias that has garnered a lot of attention as an explanation for societal failures is known as the Dunning-Kruger Effect, after David Dunning and Justin Kruger, two psychologists from Cornell University.

The "Dunning-Kruger Effect" defines the "pattern found in reality" in which the level of knowledge necessary for self-assessment in any problem domain is the same knowledge that is necessary for expertise or competency within that domain, which leads to those with little or no competence in a domain assessing themselves as competent or even expert within it. David Dunning summarizes Dunning-Kruger the following way: "If you're incompetent, you can't know you're incompetent ... The skills you need to produce a right answer are exactly the skills you need to recognize what a right answer is." Naturally, the less clear an outcome is, the less "all-or-nothing" or "win-or-lose" it is, and the more bad outcomes can be described as "as good as was possible, especially under bad circumstances," the larger the role the Dunning-Kruger effect is likely to play in human affairs. (This last part is obviously true. A person who never wins a chess game cannot plausibly claim to be a relatively good chess player. However, a politician can claim personal excellence at developing a strategy to combat youth drug abuse, while blaming his inevitable failure on "insurmountable odds.")

So, in what domain is "the stated intended outcome" most often the furthest from "the actual outcome"? I believe it's the political domain. As entrepreneur, innovator, and investor Peter Thiel said (2009): "Voting is not under siege in America, but many other rights are. In America, people are imprisoned for using even very mild drugs, tortured by our own government, and forced to bail out reckless financial companies." The stated goals of politicians are rarely, if ever, achieved, unless those politicians also understand that coercion produces poor results. However, politicians who understand that coercion(any "solution" that relies on taxation) produces poor results must then run for office on an entirely different and unusual message than over 99% of the other politicians. Such "unusual" messages (combined with a lack of strategic planning and campaigning expertise) typically result in electoral failure, wasting most of the money spent on the campaign (there are ways of preventing this by running "gracefully-decaying" messaging campaigns that profit by recording useful polling data for future election cycles, but most libertarians are not smart enough to avoid buying into a "zero-sum game" approach to politics).

The Dunning-Kruger Effect explains the electorate's belief that:

1. the established government is legitimate (when it is not)
2. members of the electorate(voters) are competent to vote for those who will occupy government offices of power (when they are not)

In the domain of governance, this problem is exacerbated by the fact that:

1. The offices of power are corrupt, but are convincingly portrayed, and popularly-recognized as being non-corrupt(legitimate). If most government positions were able to be meaningfully held accountable, they wouldn't exist, or their budgets, scope, and scale would be vastly smaller. Said another way: those seeking power are seeking corrupted power that is not widely recognized as being corrupted.
2. Sociopaths who act on their sociopathy are the types of people who are most drawn to corrupted political power. Obtaining an unaccountable position of power in government confers the ability to steal on those who obtain it, and so, those positions are highly-attractive to those who are "already-corrupt"(sociopathic; kleptocratic) and willing to use the power of office in increasingly-more-corrupted ways.
3. The voters signal their ignorance of the system to those most willing to exploit that ignorance, by their "default interaction"(campaigning in a normal way, voting without protest) with the electoral system. The fact of a corrupt agent obtaining a position within government indicates to that corrupt agent that the system (comprised of unintelligent electors, unintelligent watchdogs, unintelligent rebels, and an unintelligent press) is unable to distinguish what constitutes corruption, and also unable to identify any overt expression of his own corruption or reject his own corrupt plans. After all, he's simply "stating what he intends to do within the existing, already-publicly-accepted paradigm." (Consider what would happen if every single opposing candidate overtly campaigned for the abolition of the office, on the grounds that anyone who holds the office must be immoral, because the office itself is immoral.)
4. The damage to the system is additive and cumulative, over time, because "rolling back or reversing tyranny" is more difficult than "maintaining tyranny at its current level."Levels of public resistance and displeasure can be measured. Anything less than extreme public outcry allows already-existing levels of corruption to persist. Thus, corrupted offices persist at the level of corruption that previously existed, and the fact that a significant support demographic votes for those offices to be filled anew in each succeeding election indicates a level of support for those offices that can be determined by those who seek to hold the office.

So what about the argument that the problems of "totalitarian results of voting" can be prevented by simply not voting? (Sometimes called "principled nonvoting") As it turns out, this argument has severe problems. Here are a few of them:

1. Arguments against voting politically strengthen, and psychologically embolden, dictatorial cults of personality. In the past, when a country's government has stated that the voters cannot be trusted to vote, this argument produced undesirable effects because unelected governments (monarchies, dictatorships) tend to be worse than elected governments. Arguments for restricting voter participation trend toward the elimination of proper elections, and thereby, the elimination of even a minimal level of electoral accountability.
2. Nonvoting doesn't reduce or abolish the power of the offices of political power.The offices of power will not be vacated, unless the populace brings overwhelming resistance and rebellion to bear against those offices, and there is very little support for them. In the USA, we cannot expect totalitarian offices of power to resign or abolish their own post if even 5% of the population continues to vote, view themselves as obedient law-abiding citizens, and pay taxes. Since around 20% of the population votes, and well over 90% view themselves as obedient, law-abiding citizens, there is little hope that the offices will fail to have the support network necessary to persist. The prior means that "principled nonvoting" does little to resist the damage caused by corrupt offices, and, in fact, bolsters their aggressiveness by neutralizing organized political opposition that could be brought to bear against them.
3. Voting doesn't imply consent.There is a natural tendency toward the stupid belief that advocating voting against a corrupt office implies acceptance of the eventual (likely bad) outcome. Nothing could be further from the truth. Indeed, one can vote against a corrupt office, on the chance it will do some good, and with many subgoals in mind, and still engage in an ongoing policy of civil disobedience against, and noncompliance with, the dictates of that office and office-holder. Participating against an unacceptable choice doesn't imply acceptance of that choice, should it win. As Lysander Spooner noted, such participation simply means that a voter attempted, unsuccessfully, to defend himself via the vote.
4. Voting benefits an intelligent strategy, even if the voting system is hopelessly rigged.(a)Even a rigged vote has utility to the party it is rigged against, because participating with a rigged system is necessary to expose the ways it is rigged. (b) Moreover: If a rigged system's unfairness is exposed, that rigged system's counter-system can win supporters away from it, when the unfairness of their system is exposed to them. Those who "sit out" the election have less of a claim to know that the system is unfair. (c) Campaigns often win millions of adherents because they present a choice seen as viable, if the numbers of voters, though shy of what is necessary to win, are large. The best example of this was the 2008 Ron Paul presidential campaign. The campaign won many adherents, uniting them with each other, into political organizations that are still working to reduce the size and power of government today. Moreover, it united people who were "politically competent to some minimum threshold" with one another.
5. The enemy (kleptocratic sociopaths) can easily claim that the intentions behind low vote turnouts imply unmotivated, lackluster resistance to their plans. They then benefit from the public's unintelligent tendency to "give certainty the benefit of the doubt" by appearing to be certain/resolute in the face of uncertain and lackluster opposition. Principled non-voting is easily miscast by "the incumbent powers that be" as "simple laziness," or worse, a complete lack of knowledge(and lack of caring) about the subjects being voted on.

My final analysis places all the blame for the current situation on two networked entities, "parties," or "groups":

1. The existing sociopathic political establishment. The highest levels of the sociopathic system of governance, and the enforcement apparatus on which it depends, are responsible for the tyrannical conditions under which the average American citizen-juror now lives. Unlike the libertarian movement, the sociopathic system as a whole is highly effective at obtaining its goal, once one understands that its goal is theft on a grand scale, not the fulfillment of self-contradictory and impossible-to-achieve campaign promises.
2. The ineffectual United States libertarian movement. The United States libertarian movement has not cared enough about individual freedom to learn what it takes to reinstate the abolitionist variant of classical liberalism. This is a knowable subject that has historical precedent. As Morton Blackwell (the founder of the Leadership Institute) said: "If your philosophy is good and true, then you owe it to your philosophy to learn how to win."

The system of "The United States Libertarian Party" (and the Garrisonian abolitionists in the middle 1830s and 1840s) did not care enough about individual freedom to learn how to win. (The highest offices the U.S. Libertarian Party has ever won were simultaneously 4/40 seats in the Alaska State Legislature, from 1978 to 1982. One man with above-average strategic political comprehension and electability masterminded this victory -Dick Randolph.) Since their victory in Alaska, the U.S. Libertarian Party has won 9 city council seats in the suburbs of Detroit (also the work of a small, 3-person team that was masterminded by one man -Greg Dirasian, followed by Barb Goushaw and Fred Collins), and 4/400 State Legislative seats in New Hampshire. To make winning the New Hampshire legislative seats(prior to the Free State Project!) seem like a significant victory, the National Libertarian Party would always dishonestly fail to mention that New Hampshire has 400 super-tiny state legislative districts, and that the limiting variable is the number of electable, small-L libertarians. (For this reason, New Hampshire was a terrible choice for anarcho-zionism.)

Those who wish to differentiate themselves from the pack and reverse this trend should read the following essays:

1. The Real Nature of Politics by Morton Blackwell. (Political Strategy)
2. Surviving Voir Dire by Clay Conrad.(Functional Political Philosophy; Political Messaging; History)
3. "Turning Point"(2004) by Roger Simon. (Political Strategy and Tactics)
4. "A Plea for Politics"(2009) by Dan Greenberg. (Political Strategy)

More importantly, libertarians who wish to obtain the minimum knowledge necessary to create a high measure of individual freedom should directly interface with the system that directly causes and perpetuates tyranny. They should do so in a way that directly reduces the power that tyranny has. They should go out and register 100 new libertarians into their local Libertarian Party. If they cannot do this, then they should absolutely never criticize those who can.

Even in pro-tyranny environments, with no other initiatives or referenda to use as a "stopper petition," I was able to register a minimum of 25 new libertarians per day. Most of the people the Libertarian Party employs refuse to do this job, and cannot do it. (This is because the Libertarian Party's "ballot access director"(and overall "decider of all things of importance; allocator of 90%+ of the LP's money") purposefully employs mindless "socialist-by-default" petitioners from California's initiative petitioning industry, in order to sow dissent and chaos into the liberty movement.)

By arguing that libertarianism cannot succeed except by the introduction of some new amazing technology (blockchains, seasteading, etc.), libertarians ignore the only technology that has ever resulted in an increase in individual freedom: political technology.