Theme: Governance

OPEN LETTER : CABLE NEWS PROGRAMMING FOR THE NINE OR MORE NATIONS OF AMERICA

(working document)

A news network that you want in your living room, like any other point of view that you want in your home as a participating member of your family, must assume a moral point of view, and must assume a moral point of view that is shared by the family.

Morals rules are aspirational. Morals are status-enhancing if we respect them. As a society becomes wealthier, and as people become wealthier. We use advocacy of moral codes as evidence of our status. Moral advocacy is a form of conspicuous consumption.

Everyone in this world prefers to see the world through his or her moral lens. Everyone must grasp the world through a moral lens. We do not have a choice, since moral rules represent our personal ‘brand’, ‘tribe’, ‘political alliance’, and commonality of interest.

Moral codes roughly reflect our ancestral family structures. The more diverse our polity, the less reliance on the Absolute Nuclear Family that was a requirement for membership in the american culture, and especially with the more single motherhood we create – the less homogenous are our moral codes, and the more difficult it is to construct a ‘voice’ that sits in your living room and speaks in your moral language.

The conservative moral lens remains homogenous – we can see it weekly in the ratings. Conservatives consider the absolute nuclear family as the central political and economic unit.. The classical liberal lens is not homogenous – because they have lost faith in the constitution and democracy. The democratic center is no longer homogenous because moral homogeneity is no longer something that they can struggle for. The progressive lens is no longer homogenous largely because it is no longer aspirational, but status quo, and further progressivism is now considered (rightly) radical.

As such the entire country is no longer morally homogenous. Our moral language has ceased to be one creating a culture with a universal morality, and has devolved entirely to arguments over the fairness of the distribution of wealth obtained by little more than our post-war inheritance of the British empire, our vast military power that gives us preferential trade negotiating power, the world’s use of the dollar as a reserve currency and as the petro currency (used to buy oil). Our wealth comes from four primary sources:

i) The reliability of our courts in adjudicating commercial conflicts – unique to the Anglosphere, and the Anglosphere’s conquered territories (including continental Europe and Japan.)

ii) Our ability to sell off plentiful land and homes to an expanding population, given our ability to generate almost infinite expansionary credit.

iii) Our favorable trade status, and the scale of our market.

iv) Our ability to both possess the worlds largest military for free. (Yes, really.) Because our entire military is paid for by selling debt to foreign governments for use in the purchase of oil, as a reserve currency and as necessary for trade, then inflating away that debt rapidly, thereby indirectly taxing the world for our military.

That’s the unique feature of America. That’s it.

(UNDONE: Smith vs OWS the same message: is money.)

The last century and a half was an experiment in the use of mass media rather than the church and public square for the formation then dissolution of a certain moral code. That moral code of the progressive era encouraged political enfranchisement of new members of the post war consumer class. So technological innovation in media, marketing, consumer goods, and political innovation worked together to establish a new moral code for a large body of new consumers – participants in political and economic life.

The press worked constantly to advance that moral code, then to advance a new, alternative homogenous moral code. And that moral code eventually reached it’s maturity, saturation, and became the status quo sometime prior to the tech crash in 2001.

But what happened now that that moral code is no longer aspirational – it is the status quo. People are searching for an identity that isn’t just consumer participation, or little pink houses, but some other aspiration identity. Something that makes them feel a part of something. That “something” does not have to be homogenous. It can be local. Europe is in the process of failing to act like the united states, while the USA is in the process of demonstrating that the european model of multiple states is preferable. Small states cannot easily make wars, and they can be culturally and morally heterogeneous. Empires cannot.

But they are searching for that identity in an economic, cultural, racial, familial, environment of a fractured moral code, broken into segments with the help of public intellectuals, immigration, the dissolution of the nuclear family, the reversal of the rule of law as constraint on policy, and willing policy makers.

We live in a domestic empire consisting of somewhere between nine and twelve nations, each with different moral codes, and different economic interests, different cultural and racial compositions, and radically different family structures.

The marketing solution to a heterogeneous polity is to market to those moral codes, and explain and appreciate the differences, with reverence. Now that the media has created a diverse polity with diverse interests and diverse moral codes, and diverse family structures, the homogenous aspirational consumer moral code non longer sells.

It would be far more interesting to see eleven super-regional MORAL points of view on issues, and NOT to see them debated, than it would to ….. (UNDONE)

(UNDONE: whereas conservatives … ignore parties, politicians)

No news media has tried this strategy. It may be antithetical to the personality types driven to media careers – a decidedly gravitational monopoly in favor of the assumption false consensus biases. However, we can, with ease, construct multiple channels of media from competing shouting voices; each representing a fragmentary moral code. Or we can create instead of conflict, explanation and understanding.

We can create contrast by illustration and experience rather than talking heads and conflict. The purpose of talking-head conflicts (using people like me) is to justify each side’s extreme perspective, while advancing neither, in an effort to convince the undecided. Instead, the european (more pacific) model is to simply state the position and let the viewer contrast it with his position, and decide.

It is obvious that the competition understands their niche. it is obvious which niches succeed and fail. It’s also obvious that the newspaper->weekly rag, and immediate-news solution is not of interest to viewers who can self select their own news from the internet.

But no one provides MORAL editorial services. No one provides americans with curation ACROSS moral codes. That is an open position in American culture. It is an enormous market in a heterogeneous empire consisting of multiple fragmented polities with multiple fragmented moral codes.

This approach, the ‘nine nations approach’, would be much more interesting, and create more permutations, more interest and more insight than the tirades of marginal indifference that defines Washington DC and our state legislatures for no other reason than the founders chose first-past-the-post majority rule.

Cheers.

CD