Sure. Australia. See y’all la…
What? You weren’t kidding?
Sigh…
Okay, let’s lay this out straight. Nations-states can rub their tummies and pat their heads at the same time because nation-states are made up of LOTS of people and have a bunch of those people working in their governments. No one person has to do it all.
Individual humans have limitations. We can’t know everything we need to know at any given moment about the whole world. A supercomputer couldn’t do it. A supercomputer shoved into someone’s noggin – besides being icky as all get out – would only be the worst of both. No one person can do it all.
Nation-states don’t have unlimited focus. Most put at least one poor schmuck in charge and that guy will only have a limited bandwidth. If he or she wants to get anything done, they will have to be selective about what they prioritize. Meanwhile, there’s some pencil pusher in a basement keeping up with the goings on in Namibia, should anyone ever want to know.
Delegation is a big asset, especially if you haven’t mucked up your authoritarian government to hopeless levels of paralysis. While the President is trying to keep China from ticking off any more of our allies, the State Department has a ton of folks doing all that keeping up with the changing world part. Being a nation-state has its perks.
But not only does the president have limited bandwidth, so does the media and the public. We can’t process all the available information – no one can. So we focus on what we think is most important or at least the most attention grabbing. Right now, for both the media and the public, that’s Russia and China in the foreign policy space and Republicans suddenly acting like elected representatives again in the House domestically.
See? We can pat our heads and rub our tummies, too!
Of course, our limited bandwidth comes with more than space limitations. We get tired of hearing the same old news. We are primed to pay more attention to action than slow moving things. This makes sense but isn’t always a great thing. Sure, if the tiger is leaping out of the forest, you need to know it now, but a lion stalking up slowly through the grass is just as deadly.
Sounds so much worse than it is. That’s because we haven’t taught kids how to prioritize or process information worth a darn in the last four or five generations. Yes, that includes my generation – I’m not THAT old… yet.
Unless you are getting security briefings every morning from the Secret Service, you can safely take a day off from the war in Ukraine. They don’t need you to understand the battlefield and, for those of you who support Ukraine, they really don’t need you getting burned out. You don’t have to watch every video about Russia – that’s my job!
Seriously, being well informed doesn’t mean drowning in information. I admit, I pay a lot more attention to the Ukrainian battlefield than I have ever paid to any war before. But that’s because this war has presented a goldmine in terms of learning opportunities that I could never have gotten from the Lamestream Media, not even when they were still halfway good at their jobs.
The United States Military will never come and ask me to plan a battle for them – not even as the hilarious joke it would be. I wouldn’t agree unless we were talking about pixels – pixels reboot, people don’t. Point being, I’m not military and don’t play it on TV. That’s not why I want to learn about the battlefield stuff.
Militaries hate this but they are political organizations both in mission and by nature. Groups of people making decisions, even hierarchal ones, are political by definition. What happens in the military side informs the political and vice versa. Understanding the basics and some of the jargon of what the military guys are talking about better informs my own foreign policy analysis.
Besides, they’d get all confused when I wanted to use a battleship. I might like battleships, you know…
If you want to be better at foreign policy analysis, I strongly urge you to listen to a variety of military perspectives on this war. If you just want to be well informed, a good news article each week will get you up to speed. You worry about selecting your sources, not about getting every scrap of information.
That works in domestic politics as well although in both, the frequency of needing to get good information will change as the importance does. It sounds so complex but you already do this part to some extent naturally. We pay attention to crisis. If something has your attention, you’ll want more information.
To be well informed, be more selective. Decide how much information you want – do you need every detail or the overview? Then decide where you will go for that information. Newspaper? Videos? Podcasts? Radio? Lamestream? Then go get it.
If you need more or less, adjust accordingly. How much information you need depends on what you are trying to do with it. If you are a military analyst you need a lot of details about the battlefield. A well informed voter needs the important information about the situation. The guy trying to strap an Abrams into a cargo jet needs to know where to hook what and he doesn’t need to know where the jet is heading. Information is very situational.
So relax. It’s okay to not follow every little detail of every foreign policy matter. What’s not okay is to ignore every issue because it’s political. An uniformed voter isn’t a good voter. A perfectly informed voter doesn’t exist. Find that happy medium and decide who you want to represent you on that basis.
China and Russia will be there next week when you’re ready. Probably.
