Pavlov’s Dilemma
In high school, a friend of mine wrote a paper titled Rascal Rasputin Rampages Russia about the end of the Romanov Empire and the lead-up to the Bolshevik Revolution, one of the most impactful populist overthrows in human history, and a mere 100 years ago. When I was in college, I was a dual major in Economics and Government with a focus on development economics. I spent some considerable time studying comparative revolutions. In fact, after writing a paper on the Cuban Revolution (I still have it in my file drawer at my Ithaca house from forty-five years ago about an event sixty years ago), I was recommended by my professor for graduate study in the economics of revolution. I thought about it for a hot moment, because who isn’t prone to intellectual flattery like that, but I knew my future lay more in implementing and managing than in pondering great thoughts. Shortly thereafter I applied to and was accepted into the Cornell business school to study for my MBA. The rest is history, but now history feels like it is yet again repeating itself.
Now that I am blogging regularly, I am back to thinking and pondering things I see and hear. My biggest influences that guide my thoughts are MSNBC, the Financial Times and the New York Times. Morning Joe, the daily FT Briefings and daily NYT Briefing are my daily outline for thought. I go in whatever direction those three sources lead me, which is to say I am somewhat guided by their thinking, but I am more guided by their focus on specific arenas. This morning the things that are hard to avoid are the topics of globalization (the source of much of the world’s prosperity for the last century) as epitomized by the G-7 meetings (and the Trumpian view of the world as highlighted against the backdrop of serious world leaders) over the weekend and the ongoing riots in Hong Kong and what that means for China, populist sentiment and the global economy. And then there is the ongoing Brexit issues facing Boris Johnson, the latest stooge on the global stage.
I saw the class picture of the G-7 crew taken in Biarritz with the famous lighthouse in the background. Trump is front and center (would we or he have it any other way?) with President Macron, his bestie, by his side. The one out-of-place person seemed to be Boris, who was at the extreme left of the team, looking with his unkempt shock of floppy blonde hair, like the last guy picked from the backstop. And then this morning in the FT I read about Dominic Cummings who is described as a “shadowy strategist behind Brexit”. He was coming out of his working-class row house with a big bottle of Schweppes Bitter Lemon with his shirt untucked, looking very Bannon-esque. Does the Schweppes bottle suggest a nationalism that an Orangina bottle would not? That’s when I thought of Rascal Rasputin and his scraggly beard in an era of neatly trimmed and regal facial hair. I think it’s fair to suggest that shadowy figures always lurk in the background during times of great upheaval. Sycophants abound at the fringes of power when unstable and narcissistic leaders stomp around decrying the ills of the world that must be defeated.
On the other hand, you have Joe Walsh and the Mooch, Anthony Scaramucci, both avid Trump acolytes who have decided that it’s time to break from the pack of dogs and turn on the lead dog with the orange hairdo. A friend forwarded a text exchange with the Mooch where he forwarded a picture of a sign from Woodstock Home & Hardware that said, “Trump’s wives were immigrants, proving again they’ll do jobs Americans won’t.” The negative things being said by Walsh and Scaramucci get more serious and more negative from there. Bannon has not exactly been flattering towards Trump either, though he has not launched an anti-Trump media campaign like these two. Both show their future political and pundit ambitions in the way they state that they are contrite about their former support of the man in the high tower. It makes me wonder about when Dominic Cummings is due to reverse field on Boris. Will it be after the October 31 Brexit drop-dead date or just before so he can stand back and wag his finger at whatever outcome doesn’t suit his narrative? Who cares about a border in Northern Ireland anyway, right?
What I am having a hard time understanding is whether today’s cast of crazies is worse than those that the world has been forced to suffer in the past. Is it simply the nature of the beast that Rasputin will whisper into the ear of the Tsar while the Princes plot to dispose of the monk? And does it all portend the end of the world as we know it?
Enter Pavlov and his definitive Nobel prize-winning work on conditional reflex. We all think that Pavlov worked with a dog, a bell and a food pellet. He really did much more in the realm of physiology as well as behavioral psychology. He focused heavily on the digestive system and how we work in a bodily sense with the stress of expectation. Dogs salivate in anticipation of food and based on a learned reaction to a bell or other stimulus. We are all no more than dogs at our core. We condition ourselves to react to stimuli. As a student of revolution, I’m starting to hear a dog whistle. To mix metaphors, my spidey senses are tingling. I feel a revolution coming on.
For most of seventy years the world has grown under a regime of globalization. The more we need each other for continued economic prosperity, the greater the odds for ongoing peace. The more peace, the more prosperity. Now that growth from globalization may have peaked or at least paused, the Rasputins and Cummings of the world are seeing their opening to blow a whistle or ring the bell into the ear of the crazy, otherwise non-ideological, leader of choice. Get your digestive juices flowing. Get a food pellet. Bark out loud to keep the other dogs at bay. Meanwhile, the marginalized people of the world, the ones at the wrong end of the stick or otherwise known as the 99%, watch all the “rescaling” going on and hear the dog whistle as a call to arms.
That makes for Pavlov’s Dilemma. The stimuli not only evoke the intended reaction, but also awake the other forces brewing underneath the surface. We know from history that once the beast of populism is awakened, especially in the era of social media platforms and ubiquitous and democratized communicators (a.k.a. smart phones), the digestive juices of change are hard to abate. The thing that nationalism highlights more than anything is income and wealth inequality. Initially, the false leaders play to that, but soon, the reality of inequality overwhelms, and the voice of Rasputin becomes the rasp of Rasputin. Pavlov and Rasputin lived in the same time and place. I have no clue if they knew each other, but they surely saw the link between what each was doing and the way each would characterize an important era in human development.