By: Martin Merritt, esq.
Past President, Texas Health Lawyers Association
Past Chair, DBA Health Law Section
martin@martinmerritt.com
“Please Tell Me you Didn’t. . . How to Keep Clients Out of the Jailhouse, Poorhouse and Lawyers Out of the Nuthouse” -Blog
As you can tell, I love talking about health law & litigation issues, and general wellbeing, if you have any health law questions or better yet, need to refer a case, just call or drop me an email and I will happily talk.
“Any man who hates babies and dogs can’t be all bad.”
–W.C. Fields, You Can’t Cheat an Honest Man.
Tomorrow is election time and once again, and we are getting blasted with advertisements like — “Larsen E. Whipsnade . . . What kind of man doesn’t pay his bills, hates children and dogs and drinks a lot more than we think would be a reasonable amount . . .”
Okay, that really just describes W.C. Fields’ deliciously awful character in 1939’s You Can’t Cheat an Honest Man. On the other hand, you could “swing a dead cat around a room” and do better than Congressional approval ratings for both sides hovering between 10% and 18%.
We don’t seem very good at choosing people who aren’t “Larson E. Whipsnade.”
Naturally, South Park said it best in Season 8’s “Vote or Die,” where Eric Cartman described the choice of a replacement mascot (after PETA made the kids get rid of their South Park “Cows” mascot), as a choice between a “Giant Douche” and a “Turd Sandwich.”
As horrible as we are at this “choosing” business, at least we do get to choose and then go home knowing that it is over for a while.
The Machiavellians. In 1943 James Burnham published a wonderfully readable book, The Machiavellians, Defenders of Freedom, which covers more impenetrable books from three of the great political philosophers Gaetano Mosca, who wrote The Ruling Class (1896), Robert Michels, who wrote Political Parties (1911) and Vilfredo Pareto who in 1897 coined the 80/20 “Pareto Distribution.”
I read these (so you don’t have to.) In a nutshell, the idea is that out of a general population, the overwhelming majority really don’t care about politics. It is the Machiavellians, always a smaller group of “the elite” that derive power from the larger unfocused population.
It also doesn’t matter whether the system is a monarchy (with kings and court), a theocrasy (with priests and popes), communistic (with supreme leaders and a politburo) or capitalistic (with Kim Kardashian as our leader.)
The trick for the Machiavellians, according to Burnham, is to “confuse the struggle for existence” of the unfocused masses with the Machiavellians’ struggle for “pre-eminence.”
That’s why the “Vote or Die” title of the South Park episode is such genius– the only issue is the choice of a school mascot. But how are the Machiavellians going to get the general public care one way or the other?
Of Tall Buildings and wine glasses. Every structure has a natural pitch—known as its “resonant frequency”—and if engineers do not account for it, the results can be catastrophic. Wine glasses do the same thing on a much smaller scale. Jazz singer Ella Fitzgerald proved this point in the 1970’s with glass-shattering television commercials which asked, “Is it live or is it Memorex?”
When wind and street noise (like a political speech) match the pitch of a structure or tall building, the sound resonates and grows louder. The building will begin to “hum” and amplify the noise at its natural resonate frequency until things start to break.
A similar, slightly different, thing happened in Washington state 1940 at the Tacoma Narrows Bridge. The wind started blowing and wouldn’t stop. Soon the bridge, known as “Galloping Gertie” began waiving like one of those “rope things” trainers use at the gym until the bridge tore itself apart.
People have a similar kind of natural resonant frequency. When testing humans on the “Big Five” Personality Traits which go by the acronym “O.C.E.A.N.” (Openness, Conscientiousness, Extroversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism), psychologists can reliably predict political ideology. Turns out, about half the people are more liberal and half are more conservative. You can Google the question and it will tell you how this works.
One way Machiavellians convince the unfocused masses to care enough about politics is to find something that “resonates” with just a “smidge” over half the people. But, we get bored with it, whatever “it” might be, so next time, they will try something else from an endless pool of choices.
But the good news, we get to vote, elections do end, and the wind does die down. . . long before anything actually breaks. . .at least for a couple years. If your side doesn’t win, there is always 2028.