As Cobb readers may know, I'm in the business of building decision support systems and I am constantly aware of what I call 'Information Thermodynamics'. It takes energy to keep knowledge alive and engaged.
A lot of folks are also aware of the phrase 'low information voters' to explain various political phenomena with which they find disagreeable. This is one of the fundamental problems with democracy in the first place. As I mentioned recently, the purpose of public education in a democracy is to provide the basis for self-rule. But we have a surfeit of educated activists who seek to use democracy to provide the basis for the ascendancy of their ideological policies for the benefit of others. I would argue that such activists see that usage as the only moral justification for democracy, "comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable". Their political frustration at the hands of dissenters is their burden and affliction, a self-identified white man's burden at that.
Nevertheless we have 'astroturf' engagements, which are essentially marketing ventures by the well-heeled to aggregate votes and corral random constituents into agreement with a semiotic swamp of talking points. America, the land of idiot-proof signs for its broad, literate middle-class, has a culture that is well-suited to such marketing. Last time I checked 87% of voters are swayable during election season. Which is to say that only 13% do their own research and otherwise use materials other than campaign propaganda to inform their decisions.
The Ziggurat of Skill helps to illustrate 'the power of the people' to overwhelm. But since we are at a highly political moment in time, with the government shut down and all, such metaphors have overwhelmed my description of what I have found to be a permanent aspect of function. I would like to emphasize, keeping in mind that my Peasant Theory is a functional description of class, the Ziggurat is general.
If I knew how, I'd create a ziggurat chart object. I think it's very useful for Pareto analysis.
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