Ordered Indian from a new place.
Turns out their prices are pretty good. So good, in fact, that my usual order at a street-level Indian place, a chicken sharwarma platter plus two samosas, was only $11.
Now the whole reason I tried this place is that they have the whole “delivery is free if you order $20 or more of food” deal of which I am so fond.
But I only had $11 worth of stuff. And that, to me, was definitely a meal’s worth of food. So I shrugged and decided I would pay for delivery this once.
So I clicked the “order” button.
And one second later, it occurred to me that I could have ordered more than one meal’s worth of food.
I mean, duh.
But there does not seem to be any way to cancel your order once it’s out there on Skip the Dishes, so I have to live with my mistake.
I have to sit here and eat the meal that was perfectly fine for me before I thought of the mutli meal thing, irrationally feeling like I got ripped off.
Talk about eating your words!
Pulling my little wagon
An image occurred to me a little while ago that I think might help in my adjustment to the new reality of my oratory gifts.
The image was of me as being someone who gathers people together in an old fashioned wagon then pulls said wagon. like a tug pulling a cruise ship, to where he thinks people need to go.
I think by putting it in such sweetly corny imagery, my mind is helping me deal with the enormity of my potential future responsibility.
It’s way less scary than imagining myself as a shepherd with a big flock. I know that logically,. one would think there was not a big difference between the two.
Either way I am leading a big group, after all.
But the wagon image is way less scary to me because in it, I am not solely responsible for the well being of my flock. I am not their paternal leader whose job it is to keep their whole society together with me at its head.
I’m just someone taking them to someplace I think they will like.
I’m not a shepherd. I’m a tour bus operator!
That would not, of course, be how things actually worked out. Human beings have a strong need for leadership, and the fact that modern democratic individualist societies make it socially impossible to ever actually admit you want to follow a leader only makes the matter worse by making it something you can’t think about rationally or see yourself as a part of, and the need grows unchecked in people.
So it all goes on subconsciously. Certain people intuitively know how to appeal to this leadership deficit in people and use that fact to manipulate and exploit people, and they get away with it precisely because in order to resist them, their victims would have to pass through the intellectual no man’s land that is the self-admission that they need a leader or some other trusted figure and that they, therefore, are not the ruggedly autonomous individuals society tells them they are.
Very long sentences!
That they are, in fact, a herd animal like any other and exist in a sea of influences and persuaders and other very much non-autonomous things which have a serious impact on their lives and the lives of everyone they know.
Ironically, it is those very herd instincts that make it so hard for us to admit things to themselves and thus become exploitable sheep, because in order to protect ourselves from the predatory leaders, we would have to go against the strong social programming that tells us that only weak, foolish, and stupid people fall for such things.
And we’re not any of those. Right?
Incidentally, this is also how con artists survive. Their greatest ally in their quest to bilk people is the fact that most people will be far too ashamed of their weakness in falling for the grift to ever tell the police, or anyone, really.
So the authorities never a chance to find the offender and the herd never gets alerted to the fact that there is a predator among them.
Now transfer that upward to politics and the trend becomes clear.
Right now, there’s something like a third of the American people who remain hardcore Trump supporters no matter how badly he abuses them and takes them for granted.
Why do they take this abuse? Because in order to fight back against it, they would have to admit to themselves and the world that Trump fooled them.
And he did a humiliatingly half-assed job of it, too.
And in a modern society, the only thing worse than getting fooled is admitting to the world that you could be fooled.
In the deep structure of the zeitgeist of a modern democracy, being that “weak” would make you a terrible citizen and a betrayer of the common good.
It’s like being the person who got fooled into opening the gates for the barbarian hordes. Or the sheep that leads the wolf back back to the herd.
It’s not a crime in the sense that it is an aggression against another individual. In a way it’s far worse. We have a certain degree of respect for criminals.
But the “weak sister” does just as much harm if not more, and does so out of weakness. That makes them both “weak” and therefore unworthy of any respect at all AND someone who has seriously trangressed against their society.
There is no limit to how much someone like that can be hated.
So they will support Trump to the bitter end, when it literally becomes impossible to support him any more because he’s not around to support. He’s out of power and out of public life entirelty and living out the rest of his days in Nixon-like obscurity.
And maybe then, once things have cooled off enough, some of them will admit that they never really supported Trump at all.
Hey it happened with Mulroney.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.