The Snapshot Syndrome

A behavioral defect.

A behavioral problem many people have is what I call The Snapshot Syndrome – a tendency to focus on, and make judgments and decisions on, fixed “snapshots” of a given situation, instead of considering trends, projections of the future, reasons for which the situation exists, not to mention other more important issues than that current situation.

For example, there is a subset of voters (*) who ignore deep ideological issues and broad long term sociopolitical trends and objectives, and instead base their support of a candidate based on the current, immediate, “snapshot” of some metric of personal (and/or national) (perceived) well-being, in some cases, metrics over which the given candidate(s) have limited to no control over. If the economy is booming on Election Day, the incumbent is favored; if the stock market just crashed and a recession has begun, the challenger is this empowered. Of course, not only is it possible that these events took place for reasons independent of government policy, but regardless, it is possible that they may become reversed after the election, even if government policy remains unchanged. Further, there are other more important issues; what benefit a “booming economy” if the current administration is promoting race replacement immigration? Or if outsourcing, high skilled immigration, and massive income inequality mean that others benefit from all of the “booming?’’ And even if this is not the case, there may be other issues and concerns, putting aside the issue of the very likely temporary nature of the “snapshot,” as I have already indicated. Another possibility is that a candidate can “trick” voters by pretending to support views that they have heretofore rejected, in order to influence the voters’ perception of the current “snapshot” of candidate stands on issues, without considering the broad context. Arizona Republican voters who were fooled by McCain’s squint-eyed steely assertion that “we’ll build that wall” had their “snapshot” of an immigration restrictionist McCain vanish from view once the election was over, and the reality of Open Borders Invade the World Invite the World McCain once again (and predictably) became painfully obvious. That stupidity could have been avoided by considering the whole context and using the past to predict the future, instead of depending on a fixed, situation-at-the-current time view of the political situation. Voting by “snapshot” is a highly irresponsible and superficial approach to the democratic political process.

Another example are fools who say “the native population of country A does not face any threats of demographic replacement since as of today the alien population percentage of A is only X” completely disregarding that X has been increasing, all projected trends suggest that X will continue to increase and increase markedly, and A has been increasingly the focus of legal and illegal immigration.  Any sensible view would be that A is indeed threatened, and one cannot assume that the “snapshot” on any given day will be fixed for all time. Indeed, looking at any nation suffering from race replacement, at one time in the past, that was not happening, and a “snapshot” at that past time would have resulted in a completely false picture of future possibilities. And, indeed, those morons who said that country A was demographically safe until the end of time saw their imbecilic assertions quickly disproven.

Yet another example of The Snapshot Syndrome is to consider the status of an ethny at one given time and project that endlessly in the future (and sometimes the past as well). Thus, if an ethny has been having a great “run” for the past several centuries, then that is asserted to be evidence of their permanent and innate superiority, ignoring that the ethny is now in decline, was at a lower status in the past, and that other groups were in higher status in the past. Indeed, one consequence of projecting the current “snapshot” backwards in time is the rewriting of history, so that the accomplishments of other groups are falsely ascribed to that group that has been more recently been “on top.”  I’m sure we can think of a certain example of this historically popular among Der Movement. Of course, in some cases, like the Negro, the current “snapshot” is actually an accurate predictor of the future and is accurately manifested in the past – when a “snapshot” is consistently supported over historical time and is explained by plausible mechanisms, then it may well be accurate. Not all “snapshots” are misleading. But many of them are, and the tendency to judge by “snapshot” alone is a behavioral defect we should all strive to overcome.

Footnote

*Another issue in the mainstream political sphere, albeit unrelated to the main topic of this post (but is related to the broader issue of behavioral defects), is people having campaign posters on their property and stickers on their cars. There’s a bit of need of a childish need of political self-expression and also the power of conformity – the idea being people are more likely to vote for a candidate of they see many other supporting the same candidate (and vice versa). Regardless, it is stupid.