The Blind Men and The Elephant

Some rooms are for addressing the elephant. Some rooms are for putting costumes on the elephant. And finally, some rooms are for elephant worshipers to shout at each other about the best viewing angle.

The bottom line here is that the elephant rarely goes unacknowledged. The meta perspective of these weak-walled silos and their fragile psychological opposition is something akin to The Truman Show.

Elephant (Ad)Dressing

Conspiracy theories have always existed. Sometimes they are born out of paranoia. In a political economy with large multinationals and unstable international relations, paranoia isn't especially maladaptive. Seeing the utility of interconnectivity between investment strategies and how to utilize the shifting media landscape to contort the public's sense of scandal means that the distinction between a juicy rumor and a conspiracy theory might be more related to education and financial means than to moral signaling. Cable news is for watercooler talking points in the Elephant (Ad)Dressing Room and the service worker in your life.

Elephant Costumes

Polarizing characters have been "stealing" the spotlight for ages. I never quite understood why anyone would watch someone like Honey Boo Boo unironically, but I was raised by a video-game-fearing Christian mother and a neurotic NY Jew father (if you can count a parent that's constantly working). Now Trump is POTUS, and I feel like I missed dress rehearsal.

I've always been fascinated by brands that offer different products on different continents. International brands acquire smaller companies in order to open channels for their own dominance. Sometimes they change names, and they cause the creation of new legal branches. Depending on the brand's economic roots, its practices can be perceived as predatory or necessary for competition. I wish to evoke your sense of the neoliberal boogie man here. It has a bad reputation, but I think this is contrived and politically motivated. If the standards go from "more glitter and rainbow sprinkles"/"use the word Unicorn/Mermaid", to "are your practices sustainable?", we're going to have a lot of Derek Zoolanders.

This is all to say that I don't expect the political climate currently developing in the United States to resemble the democracy that we've known. Whether democracy is relative or if comparative politics is accessible to most people are additional topics.

Some forms of bias just don't receive the media attention that they possibly should.

Passionate Elephant Worshipping (Anthropologist and Enemy of the State)

Have you ever heard of the Horse-Shoe Theory? Radical Centrism?

Horse-Shoe Theory says that the political extremes begin to resemble one another. Radical Centrism says that to be a centrist is radical in a world of polar extremes (that coincidentally resemble one another).

Are Anarchists Enemies of the State? Is the female bank teller more common than the bank teller? Are most anthropologists anarchists?

In a shifting political economy, the very notion of politics changes. An individual's sense of money changes. Their motivations regarding their own deals and investments change for the sake of agility. Some people have deep state knowledge regarding contingencies in far away lands, and their own political inclinations might need someone with your socially meaningful statistical data.

They might think that your vaguely disappointing performance in culinary school makes you an asset in a project that they are hoping to make fail so that they can have X person declare bankruptcy in order to reposition them within their international public policy influencing network of professionals - you don't know what people are plotting. Stop pretending that horseshoe theory and radical centrism exist. This is about money before it's about political theory.