In the Czech version of this blog, I wrote that the Harris campaign is based on the image that Trump is a de facto part of the Biden administration and that Harris represents a rebellion against Biden (and Trump). A couple of readers countered that no one could believe that.
Of course, if we were to present anyone with the sentence, “Donald Trump is a close associate of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris is an independent revolutionary rebelling against them,” everyone would assess it as false on its face. That’s just not how campaigns work. That’s the talk about the various similarities between Biden and Trump. And then again, about Harris bringing radical change and, of course, hope. There’s an emotion attached to each of those claims. They settle in the human mind and gradually cause one to perceive the world differently. Selectively. So the mind gradually learns to erase the facts indicating that Biden and Harris were the closest collaborators and that Harris was responsible for all of Biden’s screw-ups, from outright criminal activities to the Afghanistan debacle to disastrous economic policies associated with rising prices and high unemployment. Stupid Trump is compounding this by spreading graphics depicting Harris as a Maoist revolutionary, giving the impression that Trump is a defender of the establishment. But the establishment is Biden! Real supporters of the liberal Democratic oligarchy won’t be fooled by this, but it will cause damage in plenty of other bubbles.
And behind it all is a conflict between rational assessment of the facts and emotion. I have a long-standing argument with a colleague about this. He is a highly intelligent and superbly educated man, but he is wrong on this point. He thinks that emotions are a tool of cognition and that they allow us to capture some part of reality that escapes rationality.
But I’m afraid that’s not the case at all. Feelings motivate us to act where cold reason could not. They make us feel good or bad. We can share them with other people. They enhance our performance and creativity. In short, they are very important. It is essential to work with them, to try to understand them and to manage them. To work with our own feelings in the same way that we work with clay, petrol or other materials. But they cannot, in principle, be an instrument of knowledge. If we surrender fully to our emotions and substitute them for reason, nothing awaits us but a fall into pre-rational barbarism. After all, we see this today in our elites, who make decisions about wars and economic policy purely on emotion, without any rational control. Do the Russians make us angry? Then we have to go to war, we don’t need to know anything else. Does the idea of a scorched planet strike fear into our hearts? Then we have to impoverish our own people or ourselves, we don’t need to know anything else. And behind all this, of course, there is a lot of manipulation by those for whom it is convenient.
Of course, the colleague I mentioned sees it the other way around. Perhaps we will have the opportunity to discuss this in a direct open debate one day.
Either way, feelings are not convenient for judging advertising and propaganda. Just because Kamala Harris evokes revolutionary emotions does not mean she is a revolutionary.