This was the biggest shellacking of all. It's going to take a long time to figure out what's going on or where we live anymore and since it's obviously not where we thought we lived, there's going to be a strong impulse to double down on our identities and values. I bet we're in for an onslaught of self-righteous certainty from all of us would-be pundits when actually this is a good time to get more curious and expansive than we have been.

Here then are some guesses, nothing more. They're ones I've been exploring for a while now because I've long thought that what we're doing isn't working.

People rarely change when what they're doing is getting them what they want. You can't just reason people out of satisfying habits. That what they're doing isn't working for us isn't going to keep them from doing it if it's working for them. If someone is hurting you in ways that satisfy them, you won't get very far appealing to their empathy and compassion.

Instead, you have to invest yourself in a different kind of empathy and compassion. I have great respect for marketing. The customer isn't always right—in this case, they’re dead wrong. Still, you'll tend to have more leverage over them if you put yourself in their shoes and remember ways in which they've been your shoes, too.

We tend to shun the dark arts of empathy and compassion. Torturers put themselves in their victims' shoes to figure out how to inflict pain on them. It's not Kumbaya empathy and compassion. It's not sympathy and charity, but it is how you change people. Sometimes you have to humiliate people to change them.

I don't think it's working well for us to appeal to the sympathy and charity of those drawn to fascism. It's bad marketing. It's appealing to our needs to feel virtuous. It ignores where they're coming from. I have no sympathy or compassion for these fascists. I'm trying to figure out how to hurt them because otherwise, I don't think they'll be moved to change. They have long had a way to interpret our softness as evidence that they’re right. It rewards their sado-narcissism. Give and inch and they reliably take a mile.

I see three basic ways to deal with any conflict: Variations on assertion, accommodation, and distancing. I was an enthusiastic participant in the counter-culture’s peace movement toward accommodation and distancing. Give an inch and they’ll reciprocate and if they don’t, live and let live elsewhere. I was plenty smug about it, like those peaceful solutions solved reality

I now think of our peace movement as a fleeting, situation-dependent fad. We lived in a briefly peaceful and abundant time and place. We were momentarily safe enough that we could afford to be soft. We extrapolated stupidly, as though everyone everywhere could do that like if we all got nice on the count of three the world would live as one.

We thought that with sympathy and charity, everyone could always turn every win-lose into a win-win. It worked where we lived. We thought you could just roll it out worldwide, like the people in developing countries should just lighten up as we did in Northern California. We came across as pretentious and misguided. It invited a fascist response and has left us unprepared to resist it.

For the past few years, I’ve been focused on assertion, verbal combat, and psychological warfare as our underdeveloped skills. I’ve thought of them as necessary bulwarks against the physical violence that is upon us sooner than we ever expected.

On this, I’ve had very little traction with my peaceful anti-fascist allies. In the comment sections on my videos, I have exchanges with Trumpists and liberals. Hundreds of commenters have counseled just be nice and just don’t talk to them. Accommodation and space-taking aren’t working but we’ve been squeamish about tainting ourselves, as if fighting would make us no better than they are. The fascists are the first to tell me that.

I’ve gotten thousands of comments from Trumpists accusing me of hypocrisy. It’s like if I assert in response to their relentless assertion, I’m the problem. They tell me aggression doesn’t work. I keep in mind that the whole object of the fascist game is for nothing to work. Which is why I keep exploring. The make-or-break question for humankind is how to humbly humble humans who will say and do anything to avoid humility. It’s a very hard question to answer.

I think it’s very late for us to develop verbal combat skills, but maybe not. At least it’s useful to learn from our mistakes in case we ever get another opportunity.

Sado-narcissism is a human thing. We’re an anxious species for reasons I explain elsewhere. Humans need reassurance and affirmation the way hummingbirds need nectar every 15 minutes. We get by comparing ourselves to others. We can either self-elevate or put others down. In a way, sado-narcissism is redundant. Status is relative. Narcissism includes putting others down. Still, I think it’s useful to get explicit about it, and to recognize it in ourselves. Trump mesmerized us all, those who wanted to self-elevate like him those like us who self-elevated by thinking of him as beneath us.

I want to put the fascists down. I want to humiliate them though not for my therapeutic self-satisfaction which would be a distraction grounded in my values not theirs. I aim to be strategic about it.

To motivate fascists to change, you have to demean what elevates them and interpret what gives them strength as a sign of weakness. We call their macho posturing toxic masculinity. That doesn’t work. Again, it makes us look like snowflakes. It’s bad marketing. It holds them to our standards instead of preying upon their standards.

Karl Rove rightly said you don’t attack your enemy’s weakness; you attack their strength. Wrong enemies but I think he’s right. For the past few months, I’ve been experimenting with bold, unshakable accusations of gynophobia and homophobia. Their bravado is fear of women and fear of gays. I’ve been accusing them of a homoerotic man crush on Trump. A fascist movement is not macho; it’s weak. Fascism and Fag originally meant a bundle of sticks. Fascism is a weak man’s way to hide within the safety of numbers.

I’m not tentative in my delivery. Though I’m experimenting, I talk to fascists as though I’m stating the obvious. It riles them up. I’m relentless and unshakeable. I’m not trying to persuade them; I’m trying to confuse, hurt, and disappoint them so I state my opinion as fact.

It goes against my values to poke fun at their femininity and homosexuality, but this is marketing. This is psychological combat. My version of the golden rule is whatever you do unto others is fair game for them to do unto you. They’ve been psychologizing us and calling us weak for decades. I have no problem acting that out with them. I don’t lose my bearings. I respect women and gays lots. They don’t, so I pick at that by performing my humiliating assertion, mirroring their style.

I’m way too late. As always, I’ve squandered my whole life learning things I now already know. I don’t know if I’ll have the balls to keep poking at them this way. The world has changed suddenly. Things that were safe to try are suddenly not. I don’t want to die. Still, I don’t want to shrink either. I’m strategizing for a long game, both into the past and the future.

I have a dream. I can imagine a society inoculated against fascism because everyone knows that bravado is gynophobic homoeroticism. I envision a society where people ridicule the fascist urge.

Granted, what I’m doing here is what everyone does in a crisis, claiming that what they’ve long believed would have solved it. Still, that’s my guess and it’s a foreign one to most of my allies. So I thought I’d share it in the hope that our brainstorming gets a bit more expansive. Because what we’re doing clearly isn’t working.

The culture war is not fundamentally between left and right, liberal and conservative, progressive and reactionary, tolerant and intolerant.

Fundamentally it has nothing to do with ideals, values or visions of the future. It’s a fight between decent people and sociopaths.

Psychopaths are congenitally shameless. Born, that way, they are neurologically deaf to the inner nag of empathy.

Sociopaths aren’t born but made. Some are brainwashed but many are not. Many are motivated sociopaths because being one is tempting, satisfying, efficient and effective.

Sociopaths learn how to be shameless. We underestimate the appeal of shamelessness. Shame constrains us. Shamelessness is a liberation. If you learn to be absolutely shameless – even shameless about your shamelessness, you grant yourself the ultimate dream come true, a reliable feeling of perfect freedom and perfect invincibility, as though you can do anything and whatever you do beats all. Sociopathy is like being granted a wildcard/Trumpcard.

Learning to be absolutely shameless is easy. It takes no study and very little practice before you get the hang of it. Whatever path you’re on has easy detours down to the haven of motivated sociopathy.

There are many ways to learn it. They all boil down to learning to blurt words as if you really mean them, without you thinking about their meaning at all.

What words? Any words that declare you the winner. No matter what you do, you can always find words to blurt that will do the trick and if you don’t care which words you use, but use them with intense conviction, the trick will work – so long as other people misinterpret you as meaning your words

Once you’re getting away with it, it’s smooth sailing. Even if people say “shame on you!” you can just blurt more shameless words that make you feel like a winner.

Once it’s smooth sailing your conscience just atrophies. You don’t need it anymore and it only gets in your way. Eventually you become a proud, deaf shameless sociopath blurting whatever makes you feel invincible no matter what you do.

People become proud motivated sociopaths by many routes. Some just get fed up, say “Aw, hell no! I’m tired of being pushed around” and start blurting cliches they get from popular culture. For example, they can say “just deal with it” to people who are already dealing with it by challenging them. And weirdly the people back down. If they grab a cliché that works, they’ll use it more.

Some people fall into a patch of such cliches all clustered around some brand-name ideology which enables them to make a crusade out of proudly, shamelessly insisting that they’re the winners. It could be any brand, left, right, spiritual, religious, philosophical, whatever.

As a cluster, the words are hypocritical ways to play god or a god or demagog’s humble servant lording it over everyone.

Omnipotence: “I’m heroic because I’m winning/I’m heroic because I’m losing.”

Omniscience: “I know everything/I don’t know about that, so it’s irrelevant.”

Omnificent: “Shame on you for not living up to my moral standards/Moral standards are for losers”

Motivated sociopaths take shameless pride in their hypocrisy. Still, they’re consistent about one thing: “I never contradict myself and no matter what happens, it proves I’m right, righteous and heroic.”

Sociopath simply means “socially-sick” – pretty vague. There are vulgar names for them too, also vague. I call them Trumpbots – lowercase “t” not after the Donald though he fits the description perfectly as would a leftist parroting the same cliches.

The word “trump” means both fake as in “trumped up” and “beats all.” A Trumpbot robotically plays fake trump cards. Again, it’s a tempting lifestyle that one can fall into from any angle, left, right, center, religious, spiritual, philosophical. One can become a Trumpbot for anything or nothing. Once one falls into this tempting lifestyle there would be no reason to leave so long as one can get away with it.

So how can we keep them from getting away with it? How can we make motivated sociopathy costly? How can we honorably shame the absolutely shameless? How can we humbly humble people who will say anything to avoid humility?

The answer is simple and obvious and yet consistently overlooked in our culture wars: Expose and flout their Trumpbot formula; taunt and flaunt the alternative.

Expose and flout their trumpbot formula:

Flout: Care about their words as much as they do: Not at all. You’ve been taught to listen, value and be open to everyone’s ideas. That’s wrong. Do that with decent people but with trumpbots it’s as enabling as listening to a psychopath.

Expose: If you have to deal with a trumpbot, simply declare over and over that they’ll say and do anything to pretend they’re right and righteous. You know what they’ll do in response? They’ll confirm your diagnosis. They’re one trick phonies. They’ve got nothing else. When they trumpbot at you in response, say “there he goes again.” Again and again. They’ll give up and declare themselves the winners but you will have cost them, especially if you do it in front of others.

Taunt and flaunt the alternative:

Taunt: What’s the alternative to being a trumpbot? Being human, trying to guess what best to do. Experiencing ambivalence and being brave enough to show it. Trumpbots want you cornered, wincing at your moral failings. Trying to prove your morality to them is deadly. They don’t care about morality. They’ll shame you for immorality and then laugh at you for caring about morality. So be yourself. Stand your ground without trying to prove it. Your power lies in taunting them with brave honest humanness while they’re robotically playing God.

Flaunt: If they accuse of you of violating some moral code (that they don’t care about) don’t deny it. For example, if they shame you for shaming, say “Of course I shame, like everyone, like you just did, trying to shame me for shaming. I try to shame where it’s deserved whereas you pretend you don’t shame while shaming.”

It is our civic duty to make motivated sociopathy costly.

“News” means two things, what’s happening and what’s surprising. In information theory, it means surprise. It’s not news that you still have air to breathe or that millions live in poverty. More of the same is not news because it’s not surprising.

By information theory’s standard, it’s no surprise that news reporting is all about surprise, shock and the extreme versions of everything. Extremist trolls are surprising and therefore newsworthy, dominating subtler interpretations of what’s going on.

There’s a fundamental human bias toward “trolltalitarianism,” domination by the extreme, trolling version of any idea. There’s a strong bias toward extremism built right into our powers of attention. We ignore what’s subtle, we perk up about what’s extreme. Even when an idea originates as subtle, what makes the headlines won’t be.

POLL: Should Trump be allowed to hold office again?

Newsmakers play upon the trolltalitarian bias from opposite extremes. Proponents of an idea will be tempted toward extremism in order to cut through the din. Conversely, opponents of the idea will want to paint it extreme as possible to make a salient caricature of it. Shades of gray turn black and white to capture our attention.

Trolltalitarianism is frustrating for those who hold a subtler version of an idea. Religion and spirituality take many subtle forms, but what we hear about are the extreme versions. Likewise, political views get oversimplified toward ideological purity, absolutism and impracticality, because that’s what shocks, sells, emboldens and worse, wins simpler hearts and minds. Extremist loud-mouths capture attention by appealing to people who don’t have the bandwidth to think subtler thoughts – people so harried by everyday life or so education-deprived that they can’t handle subtlety.

It’s easy to point fingers at the extremists we oppose and to claim that our ideas are misunderstood but the problem runs deeper than that. It’s about attention, our extreme of consciousness and how it always shifts toward surprise. Trolltalitarianism isn’t about one extremism or another dominating but about the distracting allure of extremism in general.

Extremism is a relative term: Extreme compared to what? What’s the reference point by which you can claim that some other idea is extreme. Elsewhere, I’ve favored the term absolutism based on its original meaning “dissolved away,” in other words, ideas insulated from all possible challenges. Absolutism is often the means to extremist ends a way of making an idea shocking, new and threatening enough that it turns heads.

The term “extremism” is useful but doesn’t speak to the appetite for it, or its tendency to dominate the news. Hence, we need a term the way extremism prevails, for which I’d suggest trolltalitarianism.

Advances in media technology don’t cause trolltalitarianism; they exacerbate it. The problem originates in how attention works, again, the extreme of consciousness. We're all living in the 21st century, ADHD.

We’re often told that we should be more grateful for what we have, more attentive to what’s already working in our lives. Still, among the things to be grateful for is our inattention to what’s already working. It frees attention to focus on problems yet to be solved, for things that can’t be handled by unconscious habit. Whatever keeps happening we handle unconsciously. Nobel prize-winning decision theorist Herbert Simon called this human trait “satisficing.” We don’t obsess over what’s sufficiently satisfying when there’s a squeaky wheel we grease it just enough to dampen the squeaking and then shift our attention to the next loudest squeaky wheel. We don’t optimize; we satisfice, shifting our attention away from the sufficiently satisfying.

As such, conscious attention is not a computer but something akin to a computer programmer. Anything that stays the same can be handled with unconscious habit, the equivalent of a computer algorithm. What rises to consciousness are matters as yet unsettled, the doubts that arise from surprising events. Consciousness stuffs as much as possible into unconscious habits, in order to free up attention for surprises.

Satisficing is efficient. We should all be grateful for our ingratitude. Still, it has a variety of perilous side-effects, chief among them our rubber-necking toward what information theorists call “surprisal.” Here’s another perilous side-effect.

These days, most of us feel pretty independent. We think we don’t need other people so much. Labor-saving technology means we don’t have to get people to do this, that and the other thing for us. We assume that we could go it alone if we had to.

Actually, we couldn’t. Our false sense of autonomy results from the reliability of our the people and things we depend upon. Lose electricity, the internet or public services during a government shutdown and you’ll soon notice how dependent you really are. When the habits of what service us, serve us reliably, we form unconscious expectations. We accumulate habits of unconscious dependence. We ignore what we depend upon.

The same can happen in a relationship. When your partner is always there for you, you’ll tend to assume them. Ironically then, we notice our dependency most when what we depend upon disappears. We feel most dependent when we’ve lost what we depend upon. As the song says “You don’t miss your water ‘til your well runs dry.”

Combine these two side effects and you’ll get extremist versions of autonomy, for example, Libertarian and anarchist extremists, loud-mouths proclaiming their absolute independence. They don’t need other people, their burdens and their challenges. What use are fellow citizens who disagree with them? People who disagree with their extreme trolling opinions are dead wood, second class citizens little better than illegals. Liberty is a virtue we all value. Libertarianism extremism ignores liberty’s cost. For anyone to feel independent, what they depend upon must be kept reliable.

Is there a remedy for our innate trolltalitarian tendencies? Is there any way to counter the extremes of consciousness so we can hear the gray within the black and white fray?

Education perhaps which, at its best, cultivates greater tolerance for, and curiosity about ambiguity and subtlety. Or maybe we just have to wait until we get jaded by the din of attention-seeking extremism and tune it all out.

The kid is in his room playing video games. Mom calls to him that it's time to do chores and homework.

The kid's head is in the game, a first person shooter. He's in a tank mowing down everyone in his path. There's some heroic theme to the game but the details don't matter. All he knows is he's on the side of everything right, righteous and mighty. It's his call of duty, and now his mom is saying duty calls. Fuck that!

Still playing, he brays at his mom through his bedroom door, spouting whatever to get her to back off. He pouts, moans, whines, bleats, blasts, snarls, barks, scolds, preaches, condemns, threatens — to him it's all just noises to keep his pathway clear, the airhorn of intransigence.

He brays it all with theatric earnestness to give the impression that his substantive arguments trump all other considerations. All the braying means is, "Reality can go fuck itself and so can you because I'm not budging."

His mom is trying to teach conscientiousness by example. The kid's fake earnestness tugs at her which plays right to the kid's advantage. As she poses counter-arguments as though he's doing more than braying, the kid gets to keep on playing.

—

Lying is knowing you're not telling the truth. Bullshitting is not caring what's true. The kid doesn't care what's true. He's bullshitting to bulldoze through anything that thwarts him – bullshitdozing. And it's working because his mother is lulled to sleep, dozed off on the bullshit.

Bullshitdozing is all there has ever been to the Trump cult. The reasons why reality owes the Trump cult total accommodation are as irrelevant as whatever arguments the brat brays.

This alone, explains the incoherence and hypocrisy. It's not calculated but cacophony. You wouldn't expect a goat to bray coherently. It's all just animal grunting and territorial pissing, the anthem rock of "You change. We won't."

Sure, it's shifty but in the service of pure shiftlessness, and we've spent four years trying to reason with it like the mom trying to reason with a master bullshitdozer plowing through everything in his path. He's the indomitable snowjob showman, and it has gotten him this far.

Now for a moment, please set aside your disdain, disgust and hand-wringing about that kid and admit to this:

Like all of us, you'd prefer that reality accommodate you rather than you having to accommodate reality. You've got your groove and you don't want to be thwarted, stalled, waylayed. You'd rather that other car lets you through first. You'd rather be proven right than have to rethink things. You'd rather reality conform to your habits so you can avoid the hassle of conforming to reality. It's just easier.

There was at least a bit of that impetuous impulsive petulance in you growing up and there's no reason to assume it just disappears. We're not all egomaniacs or narcissists, but we do like to get our way by getting things out of our way. We all have a craving for intransigence. We'd rather others budge so we don't have to.

With some people, that craving gets so strong and the excuses get so self-convincing that they just go all-in on intransigence. I suspect that's all that the Trump movement ever was and understandably so.

Reality always pinches. It's been pinching more lately. Trump just presents unflinching indominitability, "We shall not be moved" with no higher cause than having to move being less fun than making others move.

Last night's debate was the first moment in four years when Trump was in public as an equal to others.

All he had to do was make sure his appearance of unflappable dominance remained uninterrupted, and it wasn't hard at all. Trump is unmoderatable under current social norms. He bullshitdozes through the norms like the video-game brat.

He didn't blow it; he nailed it. His best strategy is to continue to pose as indomitable, demonstrate the inevitability of his total dominance through increasingly brazen uncloseted fascism and hope to seduce more closeted goons.

The choice couldn't be starker:

Trump's platform is indomitability. If he wins, say goodbye to give and take. You'll be free like a Russian citizen, able to go about your business so long as you never get anywhere near threatening his cult's absolute dominance. His message is crystal clear, "Reality can kiss my ass. I'm not changing for anything or anyone."

Biden's platform is soft, compromising and compromised even by age, but you can count on him to care, try and delegate effectively.

Want the thrill of blind budge-proof bluster? Join Trump's goon squad.

Had enough and don't like where it's going? Vote Biden.