Daniel Kahneman (2011) Thinking, Fast and Slow.

I lost this book and found it, which added a bit of emotional heft. On the cover, Daniel Kahneman’s publishers remind of us of three things about Thinking, Fast and Slow based on print size. The International Bestseller, Winner of the Nobel Prize and quote, ‘a lifetime’s worth of wisdom’.  

On the 5^th November 2024, a large group of people got to place a small bet. They could bet on a narcissistic, psychopathic, rapist, tax dodging, cheating, dim-witted and lying draft dodger or they could bet on a black woman. The next scheduled U.S. presidential election will be held on 7^th November 2028.

Kahneman explains this by the lazy, bigoted brain problem. System 1, Captain Jerk, is  impulsive, hitting warp drive to save energy to fight another day. System 2, is Mr Spock. Thinking his way logically around simple and complex problems. And you’d never find System 2 being a sex pest and fellow flier of Jeffrey Epstein.

Framing works the same way as propaganda. Framing is propaganda. Lies become truth if they are repeated often enough to make them seem real. We remember stories better than facts.

  Kahneman’s Two Selves (the Experiencing Self vs. the Remembering Self),  System 1-heavy opening that focuses on the ‘things we forgot to remember’ and does not conduct a pre-mortem (of how bad can it be when narcissistic, psychopathic, rapist, tax dodging, cheating, dim-witted and lying draft dodger) mounts a civil insurrection, but calls it something else and invites everyone else to call it something else. And prosecutes those that fail to believe it was anything else and calls them losers. Which they are, of course, because they did lose and System 1, Captain Jerk is always right.

Post-mortems justify what we already know or think we know about things like race relations, our place in the world and how global warming is hooey made up by people with pointy ears.  Kahneman picks apart confidence in our own stories about ourselves (plural). We love stories that make the world feel predictable as a Trump electoral victory, or the war in Ukraine being shelved for the next midterms and chalked down as another triumph and possible Nobel Peace Prize, but most of our explanations are illusions based on warped drives.

We think we understand the past, so we believe we can predict the future. Your emotions don’t drive you. Facts stay in the slow and sure lane. We think and reason. Many Americans may wonder why President Trump provokes such a visceral reaction among others. Kahneman used President Harding as the best-worst example. But his book was published before President Trump was elected. Instinctively, it’s not just world leaders, most of us recognise his cartoonish dumbness and greed to be liked that offends us on every level. We wrongly think the world should be better than this. The President of America should be better. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. Even some Americans remind us, only three more years—not once but twice elected. Three years too long. Long enough to start World War 3 and Armageddon. Read on.    

https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0CVBVVGD6