A crucial component of getting myself right is candor and honesty about the socio-political situation and my place in it. There’s more analysis, judgment, invective, and blame out there (and I’m not even on social media, which may well be even worse! Avoiding this keeps me relatively sane – and obviously defines me as an old fossil). Since I must number myself among the elites, whose assumptions about how things are and should be were on the losing side of this election, I have to wonder how I (we) was so mistaken.
The most cogent analysis I’ve read to date is by NYT columnist David Brooks: “Why We Got It So Wrong.” Here’s a sample: Many of us are walking around with broken mental models. Many of us go through life with false assumptions about how the world works…we need a social vision that doesn’t rely on zero-sum us/them thinking. During his first term, Trump unleashed a cultural assault based on his version of identity politics. The left responded by doubling down on its identitarian mind-set. We have to do better this time.
Read it, please. Mental models – of course! Wake up, Paul – you’ve been studying and using mental models for decades (NLP, hypnotherapy, the Enneagram), but it didn’t occur to you to apply it here. Brooks helped me understand myself better.
Thanks for sharing When “Things Go Wrong” this article was very insightful.