Why Americans Don’t Care About Some Things
It sucks when you believe something that nobody else seems to believe, first of all because nobody ever understands anything you say on the subject, and so, to paraphrase a famous philosophical saying, of the things we cannot communicate we must remain silent.
But sometimes something happens, something big and seemingly inexplicable, and people stand around confused, grasping at explanations. And when that is the case, then an opening exists for us to talk about the things we cannot normally communicate — if those things can help explain the otherwise inexplicable.
I’m talking about a recent election you may be aware of.
Necessary Thing to Say So Nobody Freaks
There are a lot of reasons Trump won, the economy, Racism, and Misogyny, probably this little rhetorical argument I am going to be discussing here did not move the dial much at all (which is sort of the point, a rhetorical argument that does not move the dial should be dropped)
There are a lot of reasons Trump should not have won, the treason, the rapes, the idiocy, the corruption, but there is one highlighted by the rhetoric that had absolutely no reason to be highlighted. And every American should know it.
No American Cares if You Are A Criminal
In the months leading up to the recent election of the American President you would often encounter social media posts or conversations that started like this:
I cannot believe that Trump is the front-runner for the Republicans, the man is a criminal, he is a…blah, blah
Now the reason why I am blah blahing out the next little bit is because there is a well known gambit in rhetoric where you should start with your strongest argument first to grab attention.
If nobody cares that somebody is a criminal then starring with “they are a criminal” is starting with the weakest argument.
When you start with a weak argument as to why someone is bad you sound like an easily ignored scold and everything after that weak argument is blah blahed away.
Now I bet you’re thinking, gee that’s great Illuminati Ganga Agent 77 — where were you with this brilliant insight 10 months ago?
Well, I was just hanging out like everybody else, hearing others declare passionately Trump is a criminal and nodding sagely along, yeah, that’s the ticket — although also thinking a bit “aw, come on.”
While nobody cares about somebody being a criminal we have all agreed to pretend to care, years and years ago.
You see nobody cares about somebody being a criminal because of the Prison Industrial Complex
The major fuel of the Prison Industrial Complex for the last 70 years or so has been the War on Drugs, although other things have also contributed.
What the Prison Industrial Complex means if you are an American is that there’s a good chance you know somebody who has been in Prison or is on Parole or Probation that you think is just fine, maybe a loved family member.
It means that an American Citizen is as likely to have a criminal record as they are to have a College Diploma.
What the War on Drugs means is that pretty much every American you meet is a criminal, in that they have committed multiple crimes in their life that if caught they could have gone to prison for (if they were unlucky, but probably just on probation for some time). And pretty much everybody knows this.
Really, in America up to about a decade ago, you could end up in trouble with the law if somebody brought Marijuana to your apartment for a party.
I guess this could still be the case actually, I mean technically Marijuana is not really legal it is, like many allowed things in the U.S, not going to be prosecuted unless somebody with power wants to prosecute you.
On the State level, in a lot of States they say it is legal, but if you get a federal case it is illegal, so if you have marijuana in your legal State and you bring it to a National Park there might be a chance of getting a Federal case, or some other thing that could be Federal. Of course it is true that the Federal Government does not prioritize prosecuting people for personal use of marijuana, but not prioritizing prosecution is another way of saying you’re a criminal, but we got other stuff to worry about. Amusingly now that America has elected a criminal they may go back to prioritizing prosecution of drug offenses.
What the War on Drugs means is that nearly every American above the Age of 30 knows they have committed crimes, that they are a criminal and they are totally OK with that.
What the War on Drugs means is that the last American President (other than Famous Old Guy Joe Biden) that was not a Criminal (I mean in the common day committing of crimes that any of us might do way — not War Crimes) was George Bush, Sr.
Bill Clinton smoked Marijuana when it was illegal to do so, Obama did (and come on, you know Obama did a line or two, and he’s the kind of smart guy who must have tried psychedelics), George H.W Bush did (and also was a drunk driver, and I am assuming extensive cocaine use as well).
This has been an ongoing criticism of the war on drugs for generations, that someday it would destroy any support for or belief in the rule of law, well guess what —IT DID!!
If you and everybody you know is a criminal, in that you have committed crimes, then if you hear somebody is a criminal — you don’t care. Deep down inside in the non-hypocritical part of your mind, you don’t care.
What the war on drugs means is that anyone that is held up as admirable in society, as someone to emulate, is probably a criminal, and we all know it. Hell, in a lot of cases it is part of their appeal, or at least a very clear part of their bio.
What the war on drugs means is that if you start your condemnation of Donald Trump with “he is a criminal” in the back of the mind of just about anyone you are talking to they’re thinking “So what? So am I, so are you for that matter.” Even if they’re nodding along as you say it.
Now here’s where it gets tricky
We have all Agreed to Pretend To Care About being a Criminal
I guess someone more forgiving than me might say these are the little hypocrisies that allow society to exist. We pretend to care but we don’t really care.
This is because being a criminal is a really good tool of moral condemnation that has existed for just about all of human society, we don’t want to throw that away — it would make much of our cultural heritage not comprehensible or relatable.
So often they are a criminal is trotted out by a group that dislikes someone and everybody in the group can feel the elation of moral condemnation despite it being a thing that nobody really cares about.
Now I bet people reading to this part are seething because of course Donald Trump’s crimes are not like the crimes of Stephen King, well known guy who did a shitload of drugs in the 80s. And they’re right, Donald Trump’s crimes are crimes that should be seen as important, morally repugnant, and dangerous, but that doesn’t matter because one of the big missions of American Culture for pretty much all the time any of us have been alive has been to destroy any belief in the rule of laws and institutions, with the intense cooperation of those institutions.
You sowed the wind, you reaped the whirlwind, and nobody cares what the crop report is.
Nobody cares that Donald Trump did what should be considered serious crimes, just like nobody cares that Stephen King did what are called Serious Crimes (smoking pot, snorting cocaine, probably amphetamines, oh the horror!)
Nobody cares about Donald Trump being a criminal because America spent generations saying that people like King were criminals, while they were celebrated and rewarded.
The Strong Hold of hypocrisy on The Public Imagination
Many Americans, having spent lifetimes pretending being a criminal is bad while idolizing people who have committed crimes, and being criminals themselves, are not able to understand that they only use criminal as a tool to beat up someone their group already agrees is bad.
You can use criminal in the group and get everyone to agree immediately, yes he is a criminal and being a criminal is bad. YES, but you cannot use it as a convincing piece of rhetoric that someone is bad. Criminal is for someone you have already decided is bad, not as a reliable indicator of moral worth.
Let’s go back to Stephen King, a guy who has committed a lot of drug crimes. If I say Stephen King is a criminal pretty much everyone will say no he’s not, or that’s because the system is messed up, or what he did shouldn’t be against the law. I agree with all that, nonetheless he is a criminal. And I’m not saying this because I think doing drugs is bad, which anyone who knows anything about my written output would not expect me to.
But People Love Cops!
No. Some people love cops, and even more people claim to love cops. Of the people who love cops in America you will probably find either
- the very rare individual who actually had a cop help them out and has not had negative personal experiences with cops.
- the person would like to be a cop.
Of the people who would like to be cops you will probably find either
- The very rare individual who had a cop help them when they were young.
- The person who had some crime happen to them when they were young and wants to protect people from suffering the same thing.
- The person who likes holding power over others, who likes to be feared.
Of the people who claim to love cops in America you will probably find
- People who see cops as punishing the criminals they have agreed to pretend to care about, these are generally criminals that are immigrants or of different racial groups than their own.
- People who are afraid of cops.
Often in order to get someone you are afraid of to be on your side you ‘respect’ them, which amusingly is convict logic. A certain portion of the population who seems to love cops would probably describe it as cops being the Alphas.
Loving the cops is another thing we have all agreed to pretend to do. Except of course for certain social movements every now and then which are willing to call things as they are, most Americans, who are criminals, spend their time walking around talking about how cool cops are and how much they ‘respect’ them.
Amusingly the people who vote Democrat are less likely to idolize the cops than the Republicans, but the Democrats elected a Prosecutor, and the Republicans elected a Criminal.
A few times I’ve seen people complain about the difficulty of supporting a prosecutor but they were doing it anyway, I doubt Harris lost even 1 percentage point because of having been a prosecutor in a nation where most people are criminals (33% convicted, many more never caught) but I bet she did lose some, and I doubt she gained any for it.
Because if nobody really cares that people are criminals, then there is no reason to applaud that you are a prosecutor and maybe some reasons to hold it against you.
Uninformed voters did not know Trump Was a Criminal
Man, nobody uses the word stupid anymore do they.
I’ve read some of the usual non-educated, uninformed voter complaints, that people don’t know Trump was a criminal, I’m not going to go through the trouble of getting these out, you’ve probably seen them too or experienced them yourself — the scenario is something like this:
I told the guy in my office who voted for Trump that Trump had 34 felony convictions and he said he didn’t know that, how can you be so uninformed!!?
Now it might be that they are uninformed but I’ll put up another conjecture:
They didn’t care.
They didn’t care because they had heard he was a criminal and they knew everybody is a criminal and most of our recent Presidents have been criminals but when you come like any crazy person talking about stuff (being a criminal) that nobody cares about they responded with the common American way of handling something they don’t care about, consider inconsequential and unimportant, they say “I didn’t know that, sorry” and then go on, glad to get away from the crazy Karen who keeps talking about somebody being a criminal like that is actually a real problem that people care about. Crazy stuff!
As a rhetorical strategy starting out “Trump is a criminal” is guaranteed to turn everything afterwards into blah, blah.
Rhetorically Strong Arguments focus attention
What would work better is starting with a strong argument — Trump is a rapist and a pedophile, because that is a part that people will probably think — hey that’s some bad stuff let’s hear the rest.
Or maybe just hey if you think that I can see why you hate the guy., but nobody says I can see why you hate the guy if you say they are a criminal — criminal is a yawn and “oh yeah?” But people for some inexplicable reason often put the rape and pedophilia in the easily ignored, blah blah part of their statement.
They lead with the weak he’s a criminal because they are not self-aware enough to know they don’t actually care about the category criminal at all, and that nobody else cares either.
Necessary Thing to Say So Nobody Freaks, part Deux
Obviously this is not a complete explanation of why Trump won, not at all, which I think boils down to mainly economics and people not understanding that the inflation they experience now was transferred throughout the economy due to decisions and events that took place back when Trump was last President, because they don’t understand that information takes time to travel between component parts of the economic system, and thus the results of these events become apparent years afterward when the information they represent has been evenly distributed.
The disaster of the last Trump Presidency was apparent when he left, but it had not been evenly distributed until it was time to elect him again. OOPS for us, Lucky for him.
Notes for Our European Friends
The following video was actually what caused me to write this article, because while it is just incomprehensible to me that so many Americans run around starting off their condemnations with “he is a criminal” it is more understandable coming from an European, even someone you thought might be smart enough to figure out all the implications of having a society with, again, as many criminal records as there are college diplomas.
So “how about, if you’re genuinely trying to understand why America would vote for a convicted felon”… (see he starts off with that, like it’s the most important thing)
Consider — what would your opinion of the Justice system of your own country be if you could go to jail for drinking a beer (people may not smoke as much pot in European countries as in the U.S so moving the context for them), if this had been the case for most of your adult life, and for the last 3 generations, but everyone you know has drunk a beer at least a few times, including everyone that your society says are the best most important people there are?
What would your opinion be of the Justice system of your own country if you had to worry about being beaten up or killed when interacting with Police. I know pretty much only non-White people have to worry a great deal about being killed by police, but even White people should be servile around them in the U.S if they want to avoid unpleasantness — for Americans here, Europeans can often talk shit to their police and get away with it. Really, I have seen Danes curse out their police and tell them to fuck off and the police politely fuck off! Try that in the land of the free.
What would your opinion of the Justice System of your country be if you had to worry about getting your money taken away from you if you were found to have a beer in your possession or if you had a large amount of cash on you.
Now I know a lot of Europeans who are well enough informed about the U.S justice system and who think it is an immoral mess who still, like idiots, go around asking why would you vote for a felon? If you think that many people in the U.S that have criminal records should not have them, why do you think people should care if someone is a felon? Be consistent, please!
In the case of Great Britain especially, I know that the percentages are pretty close, 33.3% of Americans have criminal records, 27% of Brits, the difference here though is the American situation has been going on for several generations.
The difference is that Americans have been doing drugs since the 60s, living in fear of the cops for it, and nobody cares about being a criminal.
Improve your rhetoric.
Conclusion
You may be thinking to yourself, but I care if someone is a criminal!
Maybe you do.
If all of the examples I have given here don’t make you think it over, if you hear the names Stephen King and Robert Downey, Jr. and think “those guys are criminals!”
If you cut family that have done drugs for some years out of your life because you don’t want to be associated with criminals.
If you have refused to take a polite puff of Marijuana or a line of coke at a party because you are not a criminal! Then yes, you may be one of the outliers, still statistically speaking my point holds, Americans are criminals and they do not care if someone is a criminal.
But if you are a criminal, then please come to your senses and admit that you only pretend to care about people being criminals, which is what everyone else does.
This election has shown a bunch of messed up things about America, and the fact that nobody cares if you are a criminal but only pretends to is one of the very minor revelations — but nonetheless it was shown to be the case. Where we go from here is probably to hell, but that was what the war on drugs set us up for a long time ago, anyway.
On Memetics
I could have put a lot of references to Illuminati Gangas work with memetics to bolster the case here with theory but I decided to forego this for a more direct and non-Academic argument. Agents 13 and 81 may expand on this with a more memetics focused article in the future.
This article was by I.G Agent 77 and has all the things you expect from him; words, words that are the names of various drugs, arrogance, and a somewhat slapdash conversational style that allows you to go through a lot and at the end think — well that was too many words wasn’t it?
Although in this case what he said wasn’t that funny, although it was maybe somewhat clever in some parts.
