OPERATIONAL THINKERS AND PROCEDURAL THINKERS -- WHERE LOGIC NEVER MEETS
The Trump phenomenon has thrown up a fascinating undeniable and observable split in human behavior. There is no middle ground, one either hates him or loves him. Leaving aside people who has to treat him as their interest dictates, it seems to me there is some personality trait that can explain the way disinterested people behave towards Trump. I discern that people whose brains are blue-collar wired have a different take on Trump from those who are elite-wired.
Blue collar-wired and elite-wired are simply terms I coined which has nothing to do with pay scales or positions in life or how credentialed, how many certificates a person has on the wall. It's about how a person mediates throughout his daily life. The way he sees and reason things out that formulates his opinions.
Core Difference In Mindset
Blue collars ask : "Does it work?"
Elites ask: "Is it aligned with the process?"
Blue collars are Operational Thinkers; Elites are Process Thinkers. This fundamental distinction radiates outward into worldview, politics, morality and even language. The red and blue highlights to associate with Republicans and Democrats is intentional and I will cover this in the closing.
Competence under pressure vs credentialed interpretationBlue-collar types are people who deals with making things and systems function in real time; they cannot talk away constraints; their immediate feedback is whether it works or it doesn't work. As the term implies, they are predominantly the lower level technical, front-office, maintenance, service workers, tradespeople, people who build stuff, business operators, soldiers, police, etc which encompasses the professionals managing them -- operations managers, engineers, developers, etc. Their authority comes from competence under pressure.
Elite types are people whose work and status depend on designing, managing, interpreting, or narrating systems. They work one or more layers away from consequences. The mediate reality through rules, language and institutions. Examples are academics, think-tankers, senior bureaucrats, consultants, strategists, policy planners, journalists, editors, NGO leadership, international organisation leadership, politicians, etc. Their authority comes from credentialed interpretation.
How they see reality differently
Blue collars:
"If a pipe bursts, a policy memo doesn't stop the flood."
They see reality as stubborn. Systems are only as good as their weakest point. You can't cheat physics, timing or human limits. Failure is concrete and often personal.
Elites:
"If something fails, the instinct is to redesign the framework."
For them, reality is mediated. Outcomes emerge from systems, incentives and narratives. Proper design can prevent brute conflict. Language shapes what is possible.
What they trust
Blue collars:
They trust experience over theory; people who have "done the job"; plain speak; and "fixes" that work now, even if messy.
They are suspicious of abstract assurances; long chains of command; and language that substitutes for action.
Elites:
They trust credentials and institutional vetting; models, studies and historical analogy; process legitimacy; and consensus among "peers".
What is their moral intuition
Blue collars:
Responsibility is individual and local; you own what you touch; fairness means -- you pull your weight.
They struggle with - blame diffusion ("the system failed"); moralising without skin in the game.
Elites:
Responsibility is distributed; outcomes are often structural; fairness means -- the system compensates for imbalance.
They struggle with -- personal blame; uneven enforcement; "hard" boundaries that generate moral discomfort.
Their political instinct
Blue collars:
They favour enforcement over aspiration; rules are tools, not sacred texts; prefer visible authority over invisible government.
This is why blue-collars tolerate harshness more than hypocrisy.
Elites:
They favour regulation over discretion; prefer soft power to coercion; and trust process to civilise conflict.
This is why elites tolerate inefficiency more easily than illegitimacy.
Understanding why their logic forms the way they do
Blue-workers:
For them, mistakes are punished immediately; authority must be earned fast; survuval depends on action, not explanation; and there is little insulation from consequences.
For blue-collars, reality trains them to think operationally.
Elites:
For elites, their work is the system; they manage trade-offs they themselves don't experience; stability depends on predictability and legitimacy, and they are rewarded for coherence, not speed.
Their environment trains them to think procedurally.
Blue collars fear collapse. Elites fear disorderThe Conservatives-Republicans are Red (blue-collars) and Liberals-Democrats are blue (elites). Their mindset and logic are at odds. They talk past each other because they are solving different failure modes.
When Elites say: "Trust the process."
The blue-collars hear: "Ignore what you're seeing with your own eyes."
When blue-collars say: "Just fix the damn thing."
Elite hear: "You're undermining the system that keeps us from chaos."
Blue-collars live in actuality.That is the bottom line causation for the conflict. Both are brilliant in their domains — Elon Musk excels at bridging abstract vision into relentless operational grind, while pure process thinkers often generate the foundational abstractions that others later operationalise (or exploit). The wiring difference is largely about where the mind anchors its compute: concrete doing vs. abstract becoming.
Elites live in abstraction.
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