“The uninformed must improve their deficit, or die.”
==
“Of course, disinformation,” Quinn said. “I can do that.
I’ll leave out critical events, then I’ll put in false information and twist everything that has happened around into a vague, shadowy history that obscures what really took place.”
Terry Goodkind
==
I almost called this ‘subverting truth.’ I have written about alternative universes before, but what if today’s world, and society, was simply a moshpit of intertwined conflicting narratives. Now. “Conflicting” does not have to be parallel, but rather an intricate mix of shared and unshared aspects – all some dimension of a subverted truth.
Which leads me to the worst subversion.
Rejecting contemporary culture and norms, smirking at reason and science and rational thinking, all wrapped up in the idea that the present situation cannot be improved/rehabilitated/rectified therefore should be destroyed is the worst subverted narrative. It is a weird mix of simplicity and instinct (common sense) narratives suggesting that everything else, or let’s call it reality, is false complexity artfully, falsely, crafted and absent of everyday qualities and it should be destroyed in the interest of attaining something ‘simpler.’ The scapegoats, or the artists of this suggested complex reality, are the ‘intellectual elite’ with evil in their hearts for the everyday person. And this is where the worst subverted narratives reside. In a theme in which ‘culture’ is being destroyed by science and intellectuals/intellectualism – a confused, or intertwined, hatred, if not fear of, science and, inevitably, liberalism (which is tied to intellectualism). This counternarrative is grounded in some faux pragmatism which suggests the human minds, and humanity, as independent forces are doomed by powers of some idealistic imagination/abstract imposed against it. Within this subverted narrative is an irritation with the present ‘progress’ containing a more destructive anger, or despair, at what they perceive as a lack of preservation of ideals, ideas, and tradition, i.e., a vague, shadowy history that obscures what really took place. The subversion goes a bit farther in a weird upside-down narrative in which their own intellectual narrowness is applied toward ‘the other narratives’ where the intellectuals, academia, the experts, are the ones who have the intellectual narrowness and professional dishonesty. In the subverted narratives these are the cowards who cannot face the ‘truths’ of traditions and traditional thinking. I imagine it is a battle between false cultures and identities in which all narratives get squeezed into some simplistic, therefore false, subverted narrative.
Which leads me to subversion solutions.
Therein lies the solution dilemma. Salvation can only come through shared understanding, or common sensemaking, and yet the narratives conflict in parts or whole. This real, and sometimes imagined, predicament can only find salvation through some hidden leader who could deliver people to some common ground or common narrative. In other words, this mythical human being is a symbol as a means to verbally reconcile conflicting/contradicting beliefs and have the ability to create a relatively specious harmony out of the conflicting narratives and diverse views of ‘reality.’ Paradoxically, this mythical person conquers the complexity through some fashioned fabulous formula (most often dull simplicity). This myth confuses reality and becomes endowed with a force in and of itself, paradoxically, losing any real meaning while offering meaning to the everyday peoples. From there the concern is that those abstract reconciliations, vague adaptations of reality, inevitably become actualized by society and we are off to the fantasyland reality race.
Which leads me to ‘community imagined.’
Communities, or sense of community, becomes a victim of abstract narratives. To be clear, a community is a real thing. And while I hesitate to say they are crafted, I will say that communities are shaped purposefully – either through choices, behaviors, norms and/or beliefs. Pragmatically, people move to communities. That said. The main appeal of a community is a promise of a safe haven, sort of a destination, for people in a confusing, uncertain, turbulent, world. The community offers something constant, something predictable, something unconfusing.
“Men and women look for groups to which they can belong, certainly and forever, in a world in which all else is moving and shifting, in which nothing else is certain.”
Eric Hobsbawm
As a corollary, if the world is constantly bludgeoning your community narrative, you will invent an ‘identity’ to replace a true community. Yeah. Identities and communities are not the same thing. Simplistically, a community is inclusive and an identity group is exclusive. Anyway. From there we are off to the ‘craft an identity group to belong to’ races. Now, people may believe they are choosing between identity groups, but their choices are actually grounded in a belief they have no choice but to choose a specific group to which they “belong.” It is this weird conflict of narratives which reflects a fragility of human bonds and that fragility encourages people to twist everything that has happened around into a vague, shadowy history that obscures what really took place. This fragility is the price we pay for having ubiquitous technology combined with the resilient narrative of “we all have the right to pursue our individual goals and the only thing standing in the way of achieving those goals is the individual courage to pursue them.” Yeah. Once again, it is individual power versus collective interest at the core of how we twist everything into a vague shadowy history. And therein lies the main conflict that narratives create to community. It is the uncomfortable paradox that freedom of individual choice almost always denies the individual choice of another. Our way around that is to create a community based on an ‘identity’ which itself is grounded in a simplistic identity-based narrative. This is a community imagined. It is a community crafted out of a simplistic narrative in one based in some form or fashion from the imagination of the individuals within it. That doesn’t mean that there aren’t some rituals and commonalities to provide some concrete lily pads but the reality is the abstract community is crafted from subverted truths. In the end society is in a battle between conflicting narratives and conflicting truths. Choose your battles wisely. Ponder.
“Our culture made a virtue of living only as extroverts. We discouraged the inner journey, the quest for a center. So we lost our center and have to find it again.”
Anaïs Nin
I used to think society’s, or civilization’s, journey could be followed left to right, maybe not on a horizontal line, more like a roller coaster, but definitely like a timeline of sorts. I imagine I thought of a bit like continuous improvement, or progress, even if it had some fits and starts.
I do know we certainly talk about it this way. Agriculture revolution, industrial revolution, whatever revolution. Internet 4.0 <implying 1.0 and upwards>. And we relentlessly tie #’s to people to show “growth” on this semi-linear journey.
But I think I was wrong. Heck. I think everyone was wrong.
I actually think the better mapping of society and civilization is viewed like an atom.
Different cultures and people and ‘civilizations’ zooming around like electrons circling the nucleus.
From a grander narrative perspective this seems like I am suggesting who we were is what we are and what we will be. And, yeah, simplistically I imagine I am on some level. And if you buy that, conceptually, because all these electrons zooming around, because culture, and civilization, is made up of billions of ‘ones,’ it may often seem like we lose our ‘center.’
We really don’t.
Honest.
We don’t.
The center is always there. It is solid. It remains, and will always remain, the compass for that which is right. The nucleus holds it all together. However. What circles the center, the billions of ones with different demands and different needs and different likes and dislikes all of which desire different accoutrements for happiness, they never remain still and very often collide with each other.
And exactly the same time there are media channels and advertising and movies and magazines all screaming at the top of their lungs trying to distract us from our center with slivers of less then meaningful distractions. Distractions that make us question our center or maybe what we think is important <which can be very different from our center>.
Let’s face it. some of the people circling the center can be real noisy shits. In addition, the shit that circles our centers can be noisy sonuvabitchs. All so noisy that, well, it can be the only thing you hear.
And therein lies my point.
I disagree with Anais. Society, or civilization, doesn’t lose its center.
It cannot.
Why?
Because the ‘ones’, the billions of electrons themselves, never lose their center.
Because we, the ones, the individuals, don’t lose our center it’s just that sometimes we lose sight of it. Or we just cannot hear it on occasion.
Or maybe we just don’t listen to it hard enough.
Or maybe it whispers to make it more meaningful for us.
I don’t really think it matters.
Because we don’t lose our center. The center is always there, it is within us, as individuals and as a whole. It is the 8 billion <give or take given the few raging assholes in the world whose center is in their ass> and it is within the ones and it is all the same center.
Call it the moral compass.
Call it the good that resides within everyone.
Call it ‘knowing what is right and what is wrong.’
Call it the soul of humanity.
But ever suggesting we lose our center?
C’mon.
We never LOSE it.
We may misplace it on occasion.
We may just not be able to hear it over the cacophony of Life.
But we never lose it.
Which leads me to losing sight of the center.
Society is an abstract idea grounded in concrete norms, principles and beliefs. The problem is that the world has become less and less concrete and more and more abstract. This creates a societal shift in which structures that bound some individual choices, institutions and guard the valuable repetitions of routines and patterns of acceptable behavior struggle to maintain their shape long enough to let society gain some shape and structure. The cacophony of the world, and some of the tools bludgeoning society, deconstruct time and space so nothing can settle. Open societies have always been vulnerable to those in power (hands of fate), but in today’s world, a globalized world with a myriad of conflicting ‘hands of power’, many of the past certainties just can’t be obtained. So society and social life retracts not to some ‘center’, but rather to safety (they are often not the same). People hide within tribes, live behind walls, carry guns, and start embracing a number of activities and habits which simply increase the sense of disorder in the world through the paradox that the individual feels they are building order. The problem is all of these actions and activities are a function of the fact that a sense of fear is embedded within, stifling our ‘center,’ and, simultaneously, permeating daily routines, attitudes and mindsets. Circling back to fate, this gives us a sense fate will always strike without warning and is indifferent to not only us, but the order and certainty we are trying to construct for ourselves individually. I would be remiss if I didn’t point out that infinite progress becomes unattainable in this situation as we substitute an uninterrupted game of finite objectives and tactics and our dreams get smaller and smaller. This all gets compounded by a governing elite which encourages us to believe there is no possibility of existential security through larger collective actions and shared interests. Instead, they encourage everyone to focus on individual survival, i.e., everyone for themselves, all cloaked in self-responsibility and individual expression. All this does is increase fragmentation and continue to tear apart the basic principles of collective action and shared interests and that tears apart our natural, human, center. Paradoxically, this creates some significant issues for governance. By encouraging all of this, society no longer believes they can be protected by the state or, at minimum, they are unlikely to trust the protection offered by those governing. As a consequence, the citizenry will encourage lashing out with military force or simplistic things like tariffs or isolationism as a reflection of an acceptance that there are certain forces that they cannot control and even worse there are no longer any hopes to be able to subdue the forces which could infringe upon individual survival. This is a negative mindset, negative against globalization, negativity against collective interest, negative against interdependence, basically negative against anything that optimizes or maximizes potential progress and prosperity and certainly negative against our ‘center.’ This is a world of despair. As Oscar Wilde said: “a map of the world that does not include utopia is not worth even glancing at for it leaves out the one country at which humanity is always landing. And when humanity lands there, it looks out and seeing a better country, sets sail.” Progress always resides in the chase of utopias never the realization. A utopia is always simply just an image of another universe different from the existing universe we know, or know of. What does this have to do with a quest for center? Well. The center of our being, collectively and individually, relentlessly anticipates a universe originated entirely through human imagination and human betterment. If you seek to leave a universe of grindingly monotonous life, you must imagine another world. It is at our center in which this imagination resides. Ponder.
“But the brain does much more than just recollect it inter-compares, it synthesizes, it analyzes, it generates abstractions. The simplest thought like the concept of the number one has an elaborate logical underpinning. “
Carl Sagan
“We need to free ourselves from the habit of seeing culture as encyclopedia knowledge, and men as mere receptacles to be stuffed full of empirical data and a mass of unconnected raw facts, which have to be filed in the brain as in the columns of a dictionary, enabling their owner to respond to the various stimuli from the outside world. This form of culture really is harmful, particularly for the proletariat. It serves only to create maladjusted people, people who believe they are superior to the rest of humanity because they have memorized a certain number of facts and dates and who rattle them off at every opportunity, so turning them almost into a barrier between themselves and others.”
Antonio Gramsci
Velvet curtain of culture.
Iron curtain of ideology.
Samuel Huntington
==
This is a slightly different discussion about speed and speedy stuff. Farnam Street did a topnotch job outlining speed versus velocity, and I wrote an entire series on velocity, but today I am focused on speedy looking less-than-important stuff and more important slower-speed human nature, in other words, meaningful cultural movement versus superficial culture movements.
Which leads me to most culture is inertia disguised in speedy clothing.
Most culture is misidentified by 24/7 culture scam artists posing as futurists, trend spotters, and social influencers, i.e., people who monetarily benefit from hype and, most specifically, ‘speed hype’
· ** speed hype is typically captured in the ubiquitous phrase “the world is moving faster than ever.” It’s not.
Most businesses, with good intentions, get caught up in the speedy inertia wheel of doom. So, let’s talk culture in two ways:
1. culture of human whims.
2. culture of human nature.
The former is about cultural shifts, or shifting, (some big, some small) and the latter is about foundational movement (the inevitable cadence that always exists). Ultimately, this becomes a battle between whims and nature. Sure. Sometimes a whim is a reflection of some deeper human truth and has some enduring nature, but for the most part whims are whims, fads are fads, and things that look good in the ‘shift phase’ look pretty stupid in a rearview mirror. But within the battle of whims and nature the word ‘culture’ is wielded like a dull axe. To be clear, as Dick Hebdige, author of The Meaning of Style, said “culture is a notoriously ambiguous concept.” Personally, I believe we shouldn’t be landing on one definition but rather, well, “the best thing about definitions, like $100 bills, is to have plenty of them” (Robert Ardrey). That said. Simplistically, culture is the elements of human nature that make up the experiences of a group. Yeah. Culture is the work of whole peoples and their interactions. It moves at the pace of language, experiences, and stories. To be clear. Events, religion, ideologies feed into language, experiences and stories, but those things are not culture, but rather stimulus of culture. Regardless, all this means cultural truths are tied to the rhythms of human nature/biology and connectivity between peoples – the cadence of humanity. I know businesses prefer talking about profitability, objectives, and KPIs, or even what culture they may ‘have,’ but the more a business can tap into the cadence of nature and humanity, its cultural truths, the more enduring the business idea will be. I would suggest that it is through culture that we make sense of our lives so when a business taps into the movement of culture, people’s lives tend to move with it.
Which leads me to inertia or, in other words, irrelevance.
Forever is a long, long time.
And has a way of changing things.
The Fox and the Hound
We accept inertia, irrelevance, far too easily/comfortably. Why do I think irrelevance is accepted? To be fair it’s easy to confuse the irrelevant as being relevant in today’s speedy FOMO world. First. Let me point out that speed can look an awful lot like inertia. So, if you think running in the hamster wheel of hype is doing a lot of ‘important things’, you are wrong, but ‘feels’ like good shit is happening. You are more likely just doing a lot of things and the business is never really moving or gaining value. Second. A misguided understanding of value. This misunderstanding is most often discovered in opportunities missed. If you emphasize the speedy stuff, or just speed alone, as offering the highest value, you will inevitably miss out the slower moving opportunities which offer foundational, and sustainable, value. Mistaking all that speedy stuff for culture is transactional value versus enduring value and, in most cases, I would argue a business is leaving dollars on the table.
Which leads me to how to navigate offering relevant value.
First. Slow down (the world is not moving so fast you will miss anything significant). Second. I would suggest find the relevant cultural movement. To be fair, it is tricky to find the natural, biological, cadence tucked in human nature. The problem is we have a collective shortsightedness grounded in “living in the now,” but in order to maintain a thriving business you need short term results without being shortsighted and you need a long-term view while ‘being’ in the short term. I have found Stewart Brand’s pace layering an invaluable tool for thinking about how brands can ‘navigate the long now.’ In other words, ground a business in culture in terms of human insights, not popular relevant(?) culture.
Let me explain. Remember. Cultural insights are grounded in human nature. These things have a bit of timelessness to them. In pace layering terms they are the slow moving truths that people gather around, or, as James Carse said: “a culture is not anything persons do, but anything they do with each other.”
These things are easy to overlook because they are the things that hold us all together when it seems like the world is moving too fast for us (while technology is shouting at us to go faster). If a business leans into these cultural truths, human psychological truths, they construct a strong but flexible structure built to absorb shocks and, in most cases, incorporate them. Instead of breaking under stress, like something brittle, the business accommodates what the world throws at us and yet its cultural truths move so slowly, they seem like they are unchanging.
Fast learns, slow remembers.
Fast proposes, slow disposes.
Fast is discontinuous, slow is continuous.
Slow and big controls small and fast by constraint and constancy.
Fast gets all our attention, slow has all the power.
Stewart Brand
Business walks a variety of paths every day. But today rather than looking at as terrain and paths let’s think of these paths in concentric layers. I, personally, believe everyone should think about Stewart Brand’s pace layering and from a larger perspective, societally, I believe we could all use a good lesson in navigating the long now rather than focus solely on the now (and the short term). Societally we certainly have a collective shortsightedness grounded in “living in the now,” which I would argue isn’t particularly good for any of us. But for a business that is the kiss of death. An enduring, thriving, business demands a long view and I believe that long view is found within a cultural insight. Here is the harsh truth. Most businesses skate on the superficial surface of irrelevance because they ignore cultural truths. For the most part brands are ignoring these truths for temporary happiness. Far too many brands view fads, fashion, much of social media as cultural truths and, for the most part, they are not. Cultural truths are grounded in human insights – psychological, behavioral – which power our hopes and dreams and anger and happiness and, most importantly, connection with other humans. Today’s brands see ‘culture’ in the fleeting outside world of fads and fashion and style and useless gadgets-of-the-moment which are just the momentary mindless, the irrelevant, clothed in a veneer of connectivity.
Remember. Culture is not static, its transitory. Culture is a process (that which is acquired) as well as a product (that which has been acquired). Culture is both backward looking as well as future looking (nostalgic or memory grounded as well as utopian or dream looking). Culture is a refraction, not a reflection. Culture is a macro narrative made up of micro-narratives (sub cultures).
Which leads me to infinite movement.
Business is addicted to finite stuff. Projects, initiatives, weekly goals, all rolled up n KPIs. Business loves to isolate things and ‘make them perfect’ while espousing infinite value. Look. Forever, infinite, is about time and it isn’t. What I mean is we associate forever with time and, yet, it is timeless so time is almost irrelevant to ‘infinite.’ What is relevant to forever (or let’s call it ‘the long now’’) is constancy and adaptation. Please note I never said “control.”
“We control nothing, but we influence everything.”
Brian Klass
Ah. Control. Now, being the type of outcome-oriented people we are; we actually try and apply some measurement to infinite progress (yes, measuring that sounds like an oxymoron) and all it does is increase the perception of speed and encourage inertia. We look like we’re filling up time with important things, we feel like we are filling up time with important things, we even sit around conference room tables pointing at numbers that look important, but for the most part none of those things are contributing, in any significant way, to the constancy and adaptation which is the key to navigating the layers of pace every culture and business exists upon. In fact, all of those things are just attempts to take snapshots of all the blurry unimportant things speeding by. Yeah. The numbers are an attempt to convince you that the unimportant is important.
So we measure meaningless stuff and hold on to old things, including thinking, for too long. Businesses get caught in the wretched hollow in between shiny fast moving meaningless shit and the old thinking which only increases burden on a daily basis and the people gravitating to either side of FOMO or stability. Therein lies inertia. Therein lies path dependence.
Here is the crazy thing. The whole idea of infinite far too often tethers us to our past or inertia which is not very productive. Maybe worse is as we grow away from infiniteness, we grow closer to the understanding of finiteness, measurement by measurement, fad by fad, widget by widget. Paradoxically as we focus on all the shit speeding around, all the whims and fads, we reduce nature to silly things we convince ourselves are important.
==============
“Let me tell you a truth … no matter what choice you make, it doesn’t define you.
Not forever. People can make bad choices and change their minds and hearts and do good things later; just as people can make good choices and then turn around and walk a bad path. No choice we make lasts our whole life. If there’s ever a choice you’ve made that you no longer agree with, you can make another choice.”
Jonathan Maberry
============
Which leads me to paced learning.
Rather than discussing fast or slow, let’s discuss pacing – and learning. The reality is that organizations learn. That may sound a little odd because organizations are made up of people and we typically talk about learning in individualistic ways. However, organizations and the systems are implemented by people and in turn influence people’s mindsets, attitudes, and actual behaviors. So, when I say that organizations learn what I mean by that is that they encase their learning in programs and standard operating procedures that the people within the organization routinely execute. That is the system. The problem with this is that all of these programs and procedures typically generate inertia. And this inertia inevitably increases as the organization brings in new people and reward conformity to the system and its ‘learned implementation.’ This is done over and over and over again embedding past learning in the present (and future). As the successes accumulate the organization doubles down on the existing system emphasizing efficiency. The consequences of this are inevitable – the system itself becomes complacent, people learning slows, and inertia sets in. To be clear. Inertia and complacency is a double whammy to a business. It slows culture down and human nature (natural adaptation) down. So how should organizations learn? Well. As William Starbuck said “organizations must unlearn.” Unlearn is an awkward way of saying that systems must be systemically dismantled piece by piece and iteratively rebuilt. And what that means is that the people within the organization need to be self-aware enough in order to be able to influence not only organizational systems, but organizational learning. This is where hierarchy comes in. In most businesses organizations are constructed in a hierarchy. What this means is that the higher up the manager is the more likely they are to dominate organizational learning as well as organizational implementation. This means that most managers invest the majority of their energy in terms of learning the existing system and not unlearning aspects of the system, i.e., trying different things and innovation. It may sound odd, but past learning inhibits new learning. The only way to create space for new learning is to be able to discard some old learning, i.e., unlearn.
Which leads me to human nature (human movement).
Nature is never still. Nothing, in nature, is ever infinite other than possibly adaptability. This truth includes humans and human nature. Adaptability is a complex coherence of faster and slower moving aspects (static and dynamic). Typically, the aspects seek an optimal equilibrium situation through reactions and interactions (connectivity) where all become stable in a coherent sense enabling movement. In fact, maybe that defines infinite and progress. What I mean by that is optimal is only attainable in a temporary state (finite) therefore the pursuit is always infinite. This means true ‘achievement’ is not possible therefore progress is the only reality-based construct. Anyway. I would suggest the most interesting systems are dynamic in that they are non equilibrium systems that form order from actively dissipating entropy. Ah. Entropy (and its relationship to paces and pace layering). I would argue that entropy increases as the total surface of what is exposed to external stimuli is decreased. This decrease surface connectivity creates an overall increase of entropy. To be clear. “Surface” is a complex weave of whims and human nature at speed. Discerning between the two is important because if the ‘external stimuli’ you elect to expose yourself to are ‘whims’ that will only increase entropy (that is the paradox of speed). This doesn’t mean that there can’t be constant re-formation of order; just that there is an increased likelihood of entropy. I believe it was physical chemist Ilya Prigogine who viewed the paradox of evolution as one of an engine running down and the other of a living world unfolding toward increasing order and complexity. In his theory, the second law of thermodynamics – which is the law of ever-increasing entropy or disorder – is still valid, but the relationship between entropy and disorder is different. At bifurcation points states of greater order may emerge spontaneously without contradicting the second law of thermodynamics. The total entropy of the system keeps increasing, but this increase in entropy is not uniform or symmetrical. In the living world order and disorder are always created simultaneously. What this means is that there are always islands of order in all seas of disorder and their role is to maintain and increase their order. And therein lies another thought, one in which that speed, inertia, and cultural movement will always have aspects of order and disorder. Well. That thought will make every business uncomfortable.
“Strategy’s endgame is to spark movement. But as an intermediary measure, feeling moved by the process is an indicator you’re doing it right. Because if you’re doing it right, you do embody new people. New messages. New audiences. A new tone of voice. Strong vicarious vibes. And by doing so, things get raw. Raw precedes real. And real is something that provokes a response.”
Rob Estreinho
Stewart Brand, Pace Layering
Which leads me to cultural movement.
Let’s say this is about experience versus experiencing. I tend to believe most people are misguided when they focus on experiences, and selling experiences, rather than focusing on experiencing (which is more about human nature). Here’s what I mean. Experiences are an outcome of experiencing, and experiencing is a complex culmination of connections:
1. Connection to human nature.
In other words, the biology which creates the comfortable or the purposefully uncomfortable cadence that seems natural to us (note: this is actually embodied in a number of cultural cues)
2. Connection to context and environment.
This Is the environment which expands or reduces potential.
3. Connection to other humans.
In fact, human nature experiencing is autopoiesis. Autopoiesis means self-making. It is the main characteristic of life in that it is self-maintenance due to the natural internal networking of the system itself. It constantly maintains itself within the boundary of its own making. But it also implies that a living system is the totality of all of its mutual interactions, i.e., connections (as listed above). Through connections multiple mini transformations continuously take place and, yet, at its core the system/human/human nature maintains its individuality. Is this apparent contradiction between adaptation and constancy which actually explains a healthy system. I say all of that to suggest all living systems need some constancy and yet still need some change through adaptation. I say that to suggest human nature, culture, is constancy constantly, slowly, adapting.
Which leads me to end with the fact most people discuss culture incorrectly.
Human nature is at the core of culture. Whims and fads are simply temporary features of human nature’s more systemic rhythms. The reality of culture is that it is not a particular speedy thing. With that in mind, rather than giving so much attention to speedy stuff, maybe we should invest just a bit more energy focusing on the less speedy stuff. I seriously doubt we will miss out on anything truly meaningful in the process. Ponder.
====
“It is misleading to argue that cultural circulation has been democratized. The means of circulation are algorithmic, and they are not subject to democratic accountability or control. Hyperconnectivity has in fact further concentrated power over the means of circulation in the hands of the giant platforms that design and control the architectures of visibility.”
“That proves you are unusual,” returned the Scarecrow; “and I am convinced that the only people worthy of consideration in this world are the unusual ones. For the common folks are like the leaves of a tree, and live and die unnoticed.”
The Land of Oz
“Men have become the tools of their tools.”
John Stuart Mill
==
Let me begin in an odd place. Progress is the inevitable increase in complexity. This means when we speak of a simpler past, in many ways, we are correct. The less things are connected, the more simple it is. And if there is one thing one could say about civilization’s progress, it is that we have been quite good at inventing things that connect us. The consequence of that progress is, well, increased complexity. This complexity has a variety of different consequences, but let’s focus on individuality today.
Which leads me to self-expression as a tool for individuality.
Today’s world demands that we each, individually, cultivate a habit of constant self-expression. More and more we are encouraged to ‘be yourself,’ “bring your whole self everywhere,” and more and more we are encouraged to become more aware of our ’emotional selves.’ This is encouraged whether we want to or not or whether it’s healthy or unhealthy with regard to the health of “me.” This happens because we live in a self-expressive culture and society. In addition, we are constantly encouraged to trust our instincts and our impulses above anything else. In other words, trust the things inside ‘me’ and distrust the forces outside that we perceive discourage our instincts and impulses or even suffocate what is best for me. All of this means self-expression is a weapon against a world attempting to make us less unusual, less distinct, and less of ‘me.’ I would argue this isn’t really a true battle’, but I don’t think it’s too far off to suggest that everyone wants to etch a sense of self in the walls of the world – through behaviors, habits, and attitudes. The trouble arises in that, paradoxically, self-love has a nasty tendency to encourage unhealthy focus on instincts and impulses. Unhealthy self-love isn’t always ego-ism, but it does encourage ignoring wisdom from others and the outside world. Along those lines, true love demands connectivity and through that connectivity it has a nice tendency to counter unhealthy instincts and impulses by balancing them out with what other people value. In fact, true love eliminates the distinction between me and you. I want to be careful with the word eliminating. I do not mean to suggest that ‘me’ is completely erased, but rather me has a reflective mirror with which to objectively and subjectively reflect upon itself. “Me’ becomes a bit of a blend of all the people one has met and all the conversations one has had. Its kind of like Hanzi Freinacht’s transvidualism. Anyway. In other words, your personal and unusual no longer reside solely in the purview of ‘me,’ but also in the context of the collective. I would argue this is where the healthy unusual resides.
Which leads me to ‘me’ and competition.
I don’t think it’s a big stretch to suggest society encourages competition as a means of maximizing one’s “me potential.” Well. That is fraught with peril. For example. In recent research lower social-class university students (and other adults) do worse than their higher-class counterparts on a reasoning task only when they’re led to focus on outperforming others. Competition, in other words, exacerbates social inequality. In other words, competition constrains potential. I would posit this occurs because people with higher status, and wealth, believe life offers them more chances even if they get something wrong, while lower class people feel like there is less margin for error. I would also posit competition encourages ‘less unusual’ among the masses, i.e., conformity enhances probability of survival/some thriving, as well as encourages mediocrity. I would argue that in a competitive world, every ‘me’ must to start with where power lives. This is counter to self-reliance, self-responsibility and ‘power of me’ narratives because all of those things suggest you should think in terms of your influence on the world. Instead, in a competition-based world, you need to first and foremost understand your influence is in the hands of the existing power. This is painful to say, but there are no real independent individuals in this world. I would be remiss if didn’t point out technology has exacerbated this issue. Technology makes us feel more independent and, yet, the reality is it makes us more dependent upon other people’s opinions, attitudes, beliefs and input. We have, in other words, become tools of our tools. Which leads me to communities of unusual.Communities of unusuals may seem weird to suggest. And, to be clear, I am not suggesting a conformity of a certain type of unusual, but rather I am suggesting a coherent community of those who are unusual in some way. I suggest a community because when you are in groups, you can be very powerful. You can change things. You have confidence when things go wrong that you don’t when you’re on your own. It changes the concept of power. In fact, it is Grace Blakeley, at the end of Vulture Capitalism, who reminds everyone that when people work together, they have more power than any system.
Which leads me to eccentricity (the word most associated with unusual).
I, personally, do not believe unusual is equal to eccentric, but let me explore eccentricity a bit. I could find the only person to have looked into eccentricity: David Weeks, an Edinburgh psychiatrist and co-author of the 1995 book Eccentrics: A Study of Sanity and Strangeness. What he discovered during a ten-year study of 1,000 peculiar people < including a Chippewa Indian who walked everywhere backwards and two Californians who hypnotized frogs> might surprise you. I think most people believe that extreme eccentricity is a short step from serious mental disorder. But, in fact, Weeks’s subjects suffered less from mental illnesses such as depression than the majority of the population.
Fewer than 30 had ever been drug or alcohol abusers. He also found that eccentrics visit the doctor 20 times less often than most of us and, on average, live slightly longer.
The study conclusion? People benefited from non-conformity. Simply put, those who don’t repress their inner nature in the struggle to conform suffer less stress. Consequently, they are happier and their immune systems work more efficiently. Overall, Weeks found that eccentrics tend to be optimistic people with a highly developed, mischievous sense of humor, childlike curiosity and a drive to make the world a better place. Well. Kind of maybe makes you start thinking about envying eccentric people rather than laughing about them, huh?
Anyway. I believe eccentrics are the people who tend to see problems <and life> from new and unexpected angles. Their slightly odd, off kilter, perspective allows them to conjure up innovative solutions. They are the visionaries, even within smaller individual life moments, who make giant imaginative leaps. Weeks, in his study write up, suggested maybe that like the occasional mutations that drive evolution, eccentrics may provide the unusual, untried ideas that allow human societies to progress. Not too shabby for folk who are very often dismissed as cranks and crazies and nutjobs.
“No new horror can be more terrible than the daily torture of the commonplace.”
H.P. Lovecraft
Which leads me to I am worried about the world.
Society, and communities, appear to have abolished any type of eccentricity <or individuality> within meaningful power positions. Society, which tends to dictate behaviors, seem designed to promote the rise of the ‘accepted and acceptable’ behavior. Think about that. One can be fairly sure that you won’t find too many Teslas surfacing in the next few years as they are weeded out early by the application of standardized policies designed to produce standardized human beings. When I was younger it seemed like businesses had their share of quirky, slightly nutjob, people and they added color to the office. They added a dimension to the work, and workplace, which sometimes made a tough day better and a tough assignment less challenging. Not always, but at minimum it made the experience more interesting by far.
Anyway.
Look. I am not suggesting more people be eccentric, but maybe possibly less people should find conforming as important as they do. Maybe embrace being, well, unusual. That’s it. If for no other reason than a research study suggests you may be happier.
“Success is liking yourself, liking what you do, and liking how you do it.”
In the end I imagine the challenge remains that we reside in a world that glorifies individual success, yet, our greatest power lies in our ability to come together. A truly empowered and resilient society can only arise from a sense of unity and collective purpose, not self-interest. How can we reclaim the power of the collective without losing our sense of self? Maybe we should be asking how we can create more communities of unusual. Maybe it will be the communities of unusuals who will be most likely to have the ability to navigate increased complexity and ensure progress for civilization. Ponder.
“Because we would be forced to truly reckon with the harm our default approach perpetuates. And that would be an existential threat to our business models.”
Dr Jason Fox
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“That’s the thing about pain. It demands to be felt”
John Green
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Suffice it to say, people do not like pain. Especially self-inflicted pain. So we avoid a shitload of things. One of our main avoidance tactics is ‘default.’ Default is simply a term for ‘not noticing.’
Which leads me to say that noticing things can be painful.
We ignore a lot of shit. Why? Because it’s convenient to do so. Because in order to acknowledge something we would have accept something. And acceptance is a small quiet room. And acceptance can be painful. Not physically painful, just mentally so. Now. Small quiet room sounds like it needs to be small. It doesn’t. It’s often just a space you carve out in an immense system – like a society, a community, a business, or even a business model or system of doing things. It’s a space where you can hide from things you may not want to face. It’s a space where you are not demanded to reckon for the larger system.
Which leads me to say that Life, in & of itself, is demanding of accepting pain.
We are certainly pleasure-seeking beings and despite all our dystopian rhetoric we invest a shitload of energy on ‘finding happiness.’ That said. Suffice it to say that whatever we emphasize has a nasty habit of demanding attention. Good and bad. But, more often than not, in our analyzing of ourselves and what is around us we emphasize the ‘less than’, the ‘imperfections,’ and the pain. They all demand to be felt.
Slowly becoming the person I should’ve been a long time ago.
In other words. Many things in life demand to be felt. And maybe it is because of that we numb ourselves to as many things as possible figuring it is the only way to manage our way thru the onslaught of things demanding and demanding and demanding. Pay enough attention, or give them enough emphasis, and the clamor of their cries for attention seems deafening if you listen too closely.
I say all of that to state an essential part of ‘numbing ourselves’ is to deemphasize how the system, or structural things, affect us. This can go several ways. You can deemphasize the effects of the system because you know you are getting screwed and you feel like there is nothing you can do, and will continue to get screwed, so you deemphasize and get on with getting on. On the flip side if you haven’t been screwed by the system and done well you de-emphasize the effects of the system because acknowledging the system and structure de-emphasizes what you may see as your strengths and the attributes you apply to yourself that you believe got you to where you are today. Regardless. As noted earlier, it depends on what one emphasizes.
“What matters isn’t being applauded when you arrive—for that is common—but being missed when you leave.”
Baltasar Gracián
Which leads me to say that society, in and of itself, has a shitload of invisible things that can create pain.
Society is strewn with systemic things. Many of things lurk, invisibly, in the general ‘doings’ of how things work in society. Racism, hierarchy, inequality, inequities, power, all chug along beneath the surface of everyday life. If I were to have to explain why some things we think we should be done and aren’t being done, I would point to these invisible things (rather than some of the visible ‘common sense’ things the loud mouths point at) as the causes. I suggest that because invisibility, and invisible things, is isolation and I am not sure anything can really be built in isolation. Created? Possibly. Built? Yikes. I don’t think so. One person, an individual, can rarely build something without help. Help as in tangible <doing help> or intangible <emotional support>. So if you notice the default things in life, make the invisible systemic things visible in your mind, well, its gonna be panful to see. But its also the path to progress.
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“We ignored truths for temporary happiness.
six word story
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Which leads me to business.
If there is one place in which we ignore invisible pains, it is business. This is because business asks you to focus on some random shit which only encourages you to embrace default shit as often as you can. Even worse, it gets a bit personal. Yeah. The business world makes us think about being visible and not being ignored to an absurd level. Huh? Things like ‘you have to be your own cheerleader!” or ‘you have to promote your accomplishments’; things like that. The implication is that the only way to not be invisible is to make sure you are not ignored. Theoretically this is okay, but in practice what this mean is a lot of noise from people who are doing things just to be visible and the things they are actually doing should be ignored. But here is the truly egregious thing. This ‘be visible’ ideology cloaks the truly corrosive invisible things which create scenarios in which the invisible people of value are not deemed worthy.
“As human beings, we have a natural compulsion to fill empty spaces.”
Will Shortz
In other words, if all you are doing is holding up the universe you are fucked. Uhm. That’s an existential threat to the universe.
Which leads me to circle back to the opening Jason Fox quote and how noticing is an existential threat to the system.
It was Grace Blakeley who said: “Disobedience to authority is not an indication of selfishness; it’s an assertion of an individual’s autonomy.”Noticing IS disobedience. In fact, I would argue society’s progress has always been driven by this kind of disobedience. Driven by the ones willing to notice the ‘invisible hands’ slapping the shit out of people and saying its ‘abuse of society,’ or, at an individual level, ‘abuse of my autonomy.’ Revolutions always begin with people noticing things and disobeying the defaults within a system if not the system itself.
In the end.
If you think about this, and these issues, well, even if you attempt to ignore it, once thought about, it begins to nudge its way into your thinking. Call it a splinter. A splinter is something you have to notice. And splinters are painful. Ponder.
At the same time, it is undeniably true that we frequently apply new technology
stupidly and selfishly. In our haste to milk technology for immediate economic advantage, we
have turned our environment into a physical and social tinderbox.
The speed-up of diffusion, the self-reinforcing character of technological advance, by
which each forward step facilitates not one but many additional further steps, the intimate
link-up between technology and social arrangements—all these create a form of
psychological pollution, a seemingly unstoppable acceleration of the pace of life.”
Alvin Toffler, Future Shock, 1970
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I almost called this weak and powerless. This is about how experts have to feel weak and powerless in the onslaught of opinions, misinformation and selective use of facts out of context. Experts face an instantly-gratification-desiring fragmented public in which debatable points (usually facts taken out of context) gain velocity while the experts ruminate on the proper response. This is what Toffler called “sped-up diffusion.”
I’d also note that one of the things about the internet is everyone gets a voice. What that means is the non-expert, including the petty minority seeking to diminish an expert so they look ‘taller’, can gain quite a volume and velocity in their non-expert voice. They take molehills <data out of context, oversimplification, fabricated speculation, etc.> and speak of them as mountainous point of views. Psychologists say that this behavior from people who make mountains out of molehills stems from some unrelated insecurity or unhappiness, but I would suggest in a “diffusion world” people will use any opportunity they can to ‘self-reinforce’ their perceived self image/character.
I’d also note one of the things in a ubiquity web world is that while things have always changed, it’s increasingly difficult to compare them against the past. What I mean by that is on the worldwide web the past is always being ‘scrubbed’ and parsed. Incremental, contextual, fragmentary pieces are elevated into mountains … despite truly being molehills. At exactly the same time someone is, sometimes quite convincingly <or connivingly>, attempting to show that a real mountain is simply a molehill. Basically, everything on the internet is inherently fluid and nothing seems immutable.
I say all this to suggest ‘cancel culture’ is a slightly absurd concept – particularly within the context of experts. Everyone has a frickin’ voice and everyone is using it. In fact, it’s almost the opposite of ‘cancel’ in that it’s more a maelstrom of bullshit views going viral in an environment in which there are no constraints. The expert stands no chance. Shit. No one would stand a chance. They get deconstructed into nothingness and, yet, they are somethingness we should all be caring about.
In the good ole days an expert maintained their expert status by defending their expertise. Someone would challenge them, offer objections or criticism, and then the true expert would hunker down and address them all. After a bit we just accepted, having successfully defended their expertise, they were experts and listened.
Today is a bit different. Ok. Today is a lot different. It is a de-massified and de-synchronized world which means an expert needs to defend within an asymmetrical attack zone. This asymmetry gets tricky because in some contexts what non-experts say can be close enough to the truth to have some usefulness but in most situations, they offer serious distortions of systemic truths and significantly harm normative, and formative, attitudes and behaviors – and truth. They appropriate experts’ terms and flip them back in a false equivalence situation – a big lie (a real one) is countered with “you are saying a big lie!” which, well, isn’t. Its like a grade school argument where “it’s not me, it’s you.” This asymmetrical deconstruction occurs mostly by deconstructing the patterns of expert logic. I specifically note ‘expert logic pattern’because in an internet-based world all of us are constantly under attack from a variety of signals and they usually arrive in routine, repetitive patterns. Psychologists have noted that “when something changes within the range of our senses, the pattern of signals pouring through our sensory channels into our nervous system is modified.” What that means is we defend against modification that challenges the routine, repetitive patterns and, yet, feel a desire to respond. We are of our environment and yet distinct from it. Simplistically this means any progress is herky-jerky and asymmetrical.
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“I do think today’s skepticism toward progress is because the late-19th-century view of progress was somewhat naive. People were oblivious to the real risks and problems of progress.”
Jason Crawford
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I say all that because (a) experts tend to thrive in symmetrical arguments and environments and (b) progress demands some adaptive reaction.
Which leads me to overstimulation.
If you buy into everything I have said, then one has to take a fairly close look at the effect the internet/social media/24-hour news has on us. We have to because any expert ‘construction’ takes place within that context. First. The onslaught of internet creates a sped-up diffusions which demands us, humans, to have an adaptive reaction. Second. We may not always actually adapt, but we will have a reaction which makes us feel like we have to consider adapting – that reaction to adapt is nonstop. The truth of this is if you never get a break and pressure is sustained and we are forced to constantly choose between adapt or not adapt <as well as assess what to adapt or not> our pituitary gland spits out some substances. One of these, ACTH, goes to the adrenals. This causes them, in turn, to manufacture certain chemicals termed corticosteroids. When these are released, they speed up body metabolism. They raise blood pressure.
Well.
I got to the physiological point to get back to how experts get deconstructed into nothingness. If the environment raises our metabolism and blood pressure all an expert does is, well, amplify both within that ‘sped-up diffusion world‘. Why do I say that? Well. Let me circle back to symmetry and asymmetry. Experts, being experts, thrive on symmetry while non-experts, under stress, survive within asymmetry. What that means is while experts give their symmetrical, logical, best only to be deconstructed into nothingness in the asymmetry of, well, everything.
This is a really bad time for civilization because it is a really bad time for experts. As I have noted in the past, today’s world encourages the guy at the corner of the bar to think he is as smart or has better common sense then the experts. That is not only not true but a dangerous belief. The internet has created a form of psychological pollution, a seemingly unstoppable acceleration of the pace of life, in which experts are getting run over and squished into nothingness.
Let me end by saying having experts weak & powerless is not good for us. Deconstructing experts into nothingness does nothing good for us – people.
“I don’t really care about stuff, but it isn’t really about stuff is it? No. It generally isn’t about the stuff. Even When it is. And even when the motivator is greed. Really just about having. Marking out your territory, making it bigger and bigger, and giving yourself more corners to put your stake in the ground as though more and bigger will protect you from, well, the sense that you can’t really control anything. So maybe more is what protects you from the lack of control.”
SJ Rozan
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“Organizations are goal directed, boundary maintaining, and socially constructed systems of human activity.”
Howard Aldrich, sociologist
I almost called this machine and the machine in a technology world, but let me begin with ‘invented boundaries.’ The first time I stumbled into this thought was in Donella Meadows ‘Thinking in Systems.’ Dumbing down her brilliance, basically she suggests a complex system has no real boundaries and we, people, create them in order to make sense of the system (or the situation). Conceptually, this is a really important thought. This means most boundaries are imaginary, not concrete solid structures, to create controlled spaces for humans as protection (or a means to find enough certainty about something to ‘do’ something) against “uncontrollable factors,” or, as a weapon against human’s natural imagination and freedom to explore. Either way, it is an attempt to create some definition in a human world within a world which actually defies simple definition. We are surrounded by boundaries. Rules, process, hierarchy, class/caste, playgrounds, fences, pick your environment and I can find you a constraint or boundary. Maybe I am talking about what Robert Ardrey suggested in ‘The Territorial Imperative’ – territoriality as the power of things to impose their own assumption of time and space by means of our sensory involvement in them. All of this gets compounded by whether the boundaries are set by, and for, humans or technology (the machines). I would argue business, in particular, is crafting boundaries and constraints as dictated by machines/technology rather than humans. From there we are off to the “so what do we expect once we have established the boundaries/constraints” races. That said. If there was ever an example of the territorial imperative, I struggle to find a more relevant boundary than growth.
Which leads me to growth (and scale).
Growth is one of business’s territorial imperatives. Yeah. If you buy what I just said, invented boundaries limit growth. That doesn’t mean growth cannot occur, just that because it is bounded, you will never really know how high is up. Interestingly, this also is true of power. The growth of power is less about the machine or technology itself, but rather how it is used and wielded by the will of the institution (and those in power). That said. ‘The machine’ represents a kind of warped ideal that institutions use to guide tangible output objectives. This has consequences. The main one is that is the machine has created a non-human operating context in an environment populated by humans. People live in bounded conditions that, while may not be less-than-human, are certainly not at optimal humanity. This ultimately creates a disaffection from our senses leaving a general sense of being unsatisfied, as a human, all the time. And this is mainly because machines and technology craft invented boundaries around the social aspects of people – the networks and connections. What I mean by that is machines and technology have augmented our ability to ‘distribute’ thoughts, ideas, social connections and a variety of things that add value in the marketplace of people and business. In fact, as Metcalfe’s Law states: “as the number of people involved in any communications technology increases, there is exponential growth in the amount of communication paths.” This is known as the network effect and it has both good and bad properties. It is fairly clear in the not-so-distant future AI will help us make all kinds of decisions. Despite technology’s potential for good, it also has an equal potential to affect people and society in not-as-good ways. Maybe worse, technology and machines can be wielded by those in power to manipulate all those things (and constrain them as they see fit). It may sound simplistic, but if we can invent some boundaries and navigate the technologies between the benefits it can bring and the challenges it can create, society will benefit. Often the challenges get showcased in books, movies and media in ways that often can make the negatives seem exponentially stronger than any technology positives brought to bear. And then we look at business in general as business, focusing on ‘maximize the return on investment’ as it does, will implement things not with the good of society in mind, even as a sub objective, but rather to meet some specific business objectives. Add on to that how business views humans and connectivity as ‘social machines’ to be built and optimized and you begin seeing how humans ger screwed in this bounded world crafted for them. I bring this up because the technology of the future will allow powerful networks of people to coordinate efforts for effective decision-making, matching people to those who can help solve the most challenging problems or exploit the exponential opportunities and even crafting governance (constraints) to complex competitive environments. What I mean by this is we are quickly moving towards a time where it will be possible to use technology to create and use people, as social machines – passive recipients with aggressive intent – created by institutions (the owners of the technology) to produce specific results. Uhm. That’s directed behavior within a bounded environment. This shapes ‘humans to technology’ rather than ‘technology/machine shaped to humans’ ultimately creating a fundamental incapacity to organize people. Yeah. I just said that (despite all the claims technology makes about increasing human potential). I say that because technical/technology imperfections demand technical/technology solutions in this scenario and while humans are demanded to operate the ‘machine’ they do so even if the natural sense/rhythm of humans doesn’t really align with the rules of the automation/technology. The human/machine becomes a weird less-than-optimal interaction between machine and human within some invented boundary.
This gets a bit worse. When things go wrong in an invented boundary space, instead of un-inventing the boundary we try and fix what is within. How? Through machine-like processes. We want to restore meaning and unity and patch together that which machines have stripped. Yet. The only way we seem to do it is through technical means – process, initiatives, tracking, etc. to fix it we seek to make behaviors and attitudes an object of ‘human processes’. Once again, the process imposes a technical solution. Oddly the solution can indeed restore some semblance of meaning and purpose and unity but only by virtue of total integration of the people INTO the process/system which originally produced the issues. We see the ’human issues’ as symptoms of people incomplete of the machine system. Problems are symptoms of people just not being in sync (or ‘complete’ with the system) rather than the system not well designed for optimal human performance. What this means is to achieve the goals we actually mean to complete the process (make the system whole). Yes. We seek to modify humans (behaviors, attitudes) to ‘fix them’ so the system (process) will work the ‘way they are supposed to.” Ponder that as you think through how many times you have heard or even said) “if they would only do this.” I believe it was Jacque Ellul who said “such persons may exist, but it is probable that the ‘joyous robot’ has not yet been born.” In this ‘man versus machine’ world all processes are related to everything. This machine mentality, the machine (processes are always the right way things should be done) means we continuously ask, and assess, people to compensate for the disagreeable components, and consequences, of the system. Typically, businesses do this by isolating different components (specific activity) to ‘fix’ those consequences. Once again, in this scenario humans, and their natural instincts for work and craftmanship, doesn’t really have a presence except to the degree the individual is subject to economic conditions and to the degree that mechanical conditions permit means for which processes can be exercised UPON the humans. The truth is a focus on efficiency (which every business has whether they accept it or not) creates a conflict between human operational acceptance and operational application on humans. Every human process has some version of a designed, circumscribed, sphere of action and none of them ever really match either the human’s actual skills nor their potential. So even though a business may be ‘human-centric’ it is actually a relatively impersonal technical operation when viewed this way. How do I know? Well. Pick a person off the street and the process will never work on them. From a meta narrative perspective, this is determinism, not freedom. It is a psychological war in which the individual must be engaged because the environment/context does not create conditions for the natural will of the individual. Processes have devolved to technical procedures, not traditional thinking, its evolution (exponential) is too rapid for new traditions of thinking (which undergird attitudes and behaviors) to take hold therefore thinking – and norms/principles/etc. – simply holds on for dear life to a technological world running wild. I would be remiss if I didn’t point out that when process is embedded into every aspect of life, including society and community itself, it ceases to be an external stimulus and actually becomes part of each individual’s substance (way of being). The machine is no longer ‘used’ by humans, but absorbed by and has ultimately absorbed in some ways, humans. This gets even worse. The machine represents the ideal toward which ‘techno social’ (or techno productivity) strives so that ideal becomes, well, how people measure life. Machines may have begun the war on humans, but technology is going to win that war.
“Social growth was formerly reflective or instinctive, that is to say, unconscious. But new circumstances (the machine) now compel us to recognize a kind of social development that is rational, intelligent and conscious. We may ask ourselves whether this is the beginning not only of the era of spatially finite world, but also of the era of a conscious world.”
Henri Guitton
“Machines sanctioned social inefficiency.”
Lewis Mumford
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“Humans are not adapted to the world of steel; process adapts him to it.”
Jacques Ellul
Which leads me to people & humanness.
Today’s work demands different qualities in a person none really that beneficial to the mental health of the person. It subjects everyone to a very similar way of life, tends to put everyone in the same ‘working bucket,’ puts everyone in similar invented boundaries, and actually threatens/rewards everyone the same way. Working people now work, generally speaking, in a constant state of tension, mental pressure, spiritual absence (meaning, not religion) and a system which almost demands a level of submission (to the institution as well as to “the way things are done in a machine/technology growth system). By being involved and committed to the machine system most people simply then seek ways to contrive support for the system. Worse? Exceptional becomes less of a human quality and more of ‘working the system exceptionally well.” How boring is that shit? So, people go home and into the community emptied of humanity by the machine system and, uhm, what do they talk about? In a business world in which technology creates a world in which almost everything works well, or at least well enough, it diminishes substantive human conversations of life, home, family, etc. and increases a focus on the subconscious hollowness where technology, tinged with fear, anguish, despair seeps into anything that could be positively meaningful. Well. That was a painful sentence to write.
Which leads me to Marshal Durbin on cognitive anthropology in 1973: “Culture is best seen as an asset of control mechanisms – plans, recipes, rules, instructions, which are the principal bases for the specificity of behavior and are essential conditions for governing it.”
I buy that there are some organizing principles underlying cultural behavior and I buy that those principles offer some boundaries or constraints for ‘normal accepted behavior,’ but I chafe on ‘control mechanisms.’ Well. Let me say this. I do not believe culture she be viewed as a control mechanism, but businesses, and institutions in general, are infamous for using culture to attain power thru authority and defining what ‘best’ is; so ‘worst’ can be isolated. Or, circling back to an earlier point, the institution wants to manipulate the malleableness of culture. Institution power seeks to do so because culture is an open system, not a closed system (and those in power hate that). What I mean by that is people are consistently ambiguous and vague and it is extremely difficult to understand what people are thinking when they make up their minds to do something. Therefore, if humans are in a constant mental flux the culture itself is a bit malleable. Uhm. Malleable demands control, or boundaries, in the eyes of any business institution; i.e., time to invent a boundary.
Which leads me to speed.
Speed is violent. Therefore, speed is an enemy of boundaries – invented or not. Maybe I could add that speed is also at war with “humanness,” i.e., the boundaries of what humans can handle. Maybe think about this like car racing – either on a closed track (an oval) or an open track (road race). Each have boundaries, limits, constraints, and effective speed exists within the limits and balancing of technology, humans and nature. Beyond that, the easiest example of this is ubiquitous information. The immediacy of information immediately creates the crisis in reasoning power thereby squeezing and reducing the size of the action so that the action matches the squeezing of time as the field of action. The small bounded space increases the power of almost anyone. An individual with a computer or even a single bot can lead to a speedy catastrophic chain of events. in addition, speed encourages us to ignore the threat of information proliferation and the speed of that proliferation allows any irresponsible individual to borrow or own a piece of that information, at speed, and elevate it beyond any boundaries that everyone else may desire to have in place. This, in turn, creates social conflict between those who seek to preserve a principled ecosystem (some do so to protect their smaller community domain and some do so to protect larger society). This also becomes a conflict of rivalries between information. What I mean by that is that a social group can establish a boundary within which it contains certain information and as the speed increases around that boundary conflict arises as information bombards it. The speed of all this creates a sense of futility. In fact, within the violence of speed, humanity actually stops being diverse in its sense of futility and will, as a consequence, fragments into hopeful communities and despairing communities (and everything inbewteen). That thought is a derivative of a Paul Verilio thought. Anyway. The other way to think about this is using Stewart Brand’s Pace Layering. The outer circle is speed – violently buffeting life, minds, and attention. The inner circle, nature, is the slower cadence of behaviors and habits. Speed is constantly attacking culture and psychological and behavioral insights that give us our natural rhythm. The speed is unnatural, and therein lies the conflicts between the boundaries.
Which leads me to “in the box” effective navigation.
Of course we need to slow down a bit, maybe festina lente, but there are aspects of complexity, even within boundaries, which are important. The truth is there are linear, causal, aspects within complex systems. Maybe call them fractals or maybe call them constraints (gates to be opened). Goldratt explained constraints (Theory of Constraints) and business and people ignore what he outlined decades ago. I say this to suggest probabilities, predictions and scaling are often dependent upon how successfully one can identify constraints and seek out the fractals, linear gateways, the connections, that unlock potential and opportunities.
** note: the structure of networks tied to the systems within an organization matters toward meeting productive ends objectives
Yeah. High falutin’ theory or not, everything is about connections. Connections between parts of a system as well as connection between, and of, people. The boundaries help us define the connections and clarity of connections leads to effective navigation.
“AI (algorithms) doesn’t know that human beings exist at all. From the algorithm’s point of view, each person is simply a click history.”
Professor Stuart Russell
The truth is the technology is destabilizing to many connections because they stretch existing systems & the ways of thinking. As we’ve seen time and time again technology has a noticeable effect on our social economic and societal institutions. This creates a dramatic shift in the locus of power which affects what happens within the boundaries of the system. What I mean by that is it all may feel like chaos, but it is simply power applied against limited powerful in a rigid invented boundary (within which the powerless have nowhere to go). That said. Without the power brokers who attempt to control outcomes, especially within boundaries, humans naturally converge, not because of processes, but as natural dynamics of a system and human nature. People naturally pursue progress that is visible which begets, well, infinite energy and intrinsic power. This is called operational freedom. If done through process, it is operational totalitarianism. To be clear, some boundaries are important because the more vague the outlines, the more we tend to design processes, and the less freedom we will actually have (even in an open system). That may sound a bit counterintuitive, but systems have both function and purpose, not Purpose, but purpose. It can simply be growth with the ‘how’ left up to the system and the people operating the system.
Which leads me to gamification.
“How” is rarely left up to the people operating the system. In fact. “The system”, more often than not, will manipulate people to operate the system the way the system powerbrokers want them to operate it, i. in comes gamification. Gamification, in and of itself, isn’t a bad thing. I actually created an online early education learning platform grounded in gamification. Most online game are grounded in gamification., i.e., fail just often enough to learn how to navigate to the next level (progress). My friend Dr Jason Fox wrote a fabulous book on business gamification called “the game changer.” He offers a wonderful section on something called contextual momentum. ‘It is an outline of how people and organizations can gain some balance between specific goals and open possibilities while still making progress.’ Gamification at its best helps someone manage for the right things at the right level where ultimately the motivation is progress more than some simple short-term races to some specific milestone. Alas. To our mutual dismay both Jason and I watched as the power brokers of the system began to use gamification to invent boundaries to, well, game the operating system. Oh. And game people. Therein lies several problems (outcomewise as well as moralwise). Suffice it to say gamification focuses on parameters to change things and, yet, there is not a lot of leverage in parameters. They are constraints, not expanders. That is not to say parameters aren’t important as things which can set the stage for all the things to come, but they are not ‘the thing’. The truth about gamification is that the structure of the system influences behavior and the structure of the situation influences decisions. It is all related. Parameters only provide some constraints or boundaries for how we view situations (either limits or offers expansion opportunities).
And maybe that is where I will end.
All boundaries, invented or otherwise, influence how we view situations. We are what we see. We do because of what we think we see. Choose your boundaries wisely. Some may actually be cages.
“Changes of regime, revolutions, and so on occur not when rulers are overthrown from below, but when one elite replaces another. The role of ordinary people in such transformation is not that of initiators or principal actors, but as followers and supporters of one elite or another.”
Pareto
“a conspiracy of an easily located set of villains”
Wright Mills
Anyone who reads pieces I write know I am generally optimistic about technology and its future. So let me begin by recommending a podcast with Jim Pethokoukis and Marc Andreessen which was conducted after Andreessen’s ‘the techno-optimist manifesto’ was published. I recommend it because while I chafed at lots of the written manifesto, and still disagree with many points, listening to Marc discuss it softens it up a bit and fleshes out some of the thinking that is not always possible to communicate in writing. I encourage everyone to read the companion piece to this one, a discussion on technocrats, because my biggest concern with Marc, and other technology people like him, is he makes some very scary things – things with massive existential risks – sound incredibly reasonable.
That said. Tucked into the podcast is a short section where Marc discusses ‘elites’ and ‘masses.’ It’s a bit jarring to hear “elites” particularly when it is discussed in terms of “the people who influence the decisions for the masses.” Both words, elites, and masses, are burdened with a number of negative halo perceptions. So today I discuss the concept of circulation of elite.
Which leads me to Pareto’s “circulation of elites.”
The circulation of elites is defined by the process whereby the ability to govern and the powers of government lie in the same hands as well as that process which allows for the expression of social interests within the elite circles. The circulation of elites theory is grounded in a belief that people are unequal intellectually and morally and the more gifted, those who are most capable in any particular grouping, are the elite.
“By elite, we mean the small number of individuals who, in each sphere of activity, have succeeded and have arrived at a higher echelon in the professional hierarchy.”
It was Emory S. Bogardus who said:
“The theory of elite is that in every society there are people who possess in a marked degree, the qualities of intelligence, character, skill, capacity, whatever kind, that there are two classes of elite, that the two groups are disjunctive at any given time, that there is an up and down circulation of elite.”
Circulation, or upward and downward circulation amongst the members of the elite and non-elite, is a typical characteristic of an ongoing cycle of social change. That said. Very few individuals may join the ranks of elites from the non-elite groups. And a few elites may become non-elite members of society. In a fair economic system, heck, a fair system in general, there should be a constant and free circulation of elites. Unfortunately, the circulation of elites is seldom ideally free or unimpeded. In fact, typically the only time a vast change in elites occurs is either through revolution or war. Despite that, as Pareto suggested, it is true that a steady flow of elite into vital positions enhances a stable society that does develop and progress – just not optimally.
“History is the grave-yard of Aristocracy.”
Pareto
The cycle of history plays a really important role in that small ‘circulation’ of elites I mentioned earlier. It suggests an existing elite emerges, dominates, falls into decadence and falls in power to be replaced by new elites who have had disdain for the decadence or seek power with their new wealth. But, once again, most of the circulation of elites is on the edges – small percentages highlighted to create the perception of ‘movement.’ Certainly, some non-elite, by their merit, may rise to the level of elite and, of course, on rare occasions revolution overturns the elite class, but for the most part elites stay elite.
‘By the circulations of elites, “the governing elite is in a state of continuous and slow transformation. It flows like a river, and what it is today is different from what it was yesterday. Every so often, there are sudden and violent disturbances. The river floods and breaks its banks. Then afterwards, the new governing elite resume again and slow process of self-transformation. The river returns to its bed and once more flows freely on.”
Pareto
Which leads me to how circulation is managed and limited.
Control and power is easier if you control and have power over the everyday population’s (masses) perceptions of what the system is and should be. To be clear, perception isn’t reality. Reality is reality. That said if the Elites can shape a perception, which encourages most of the people to generate a reality close enough to that perception, control can be maintained. What I mean by this is elites establish images of the system that prepare the people for their own particular conditions within which they will survive or thrive. Elites shape reality in a number of ways, through numbers, through imagery, through words, all with the intent to generate enough success for the masses so their position can be maintained. This is a bit easier than one may think because reality is unlikely to be as we believe it to be. Which means that we approach everything with just a bit of skepticism because its never exactly how we wish it could be (or believe it should be) therefore begin thinking there is something wrong – just not with us or our own view. This leads the everyday person to begin questioning data/information which doesn’t support the perceived reality and that leads the everyday person to give up on science or rational thinking and embrace some dubious non empirical speculative thinking. This is bad (but elites take advantage of) because it is rational thinking, in particular, which helps us understand things about ourselves and our relation to the world. But possibly the most important image elites foster is one of safety. When the societal imagery is crafted well the Elites are seen as the safety net for the entire circus. The masses become dependent upon the Elites for a level of thinking. What this means is that the everyday person offloads some of the really important shit for a number of very good reasons and yet it will inevitably decrease learning among the masses of everyday people themselves. It is a structure and a system of dependency or somewhere there is some powerful leader or group of Elites who exist to ensure that no catastrophic events follow as a consequence of the irresponsibility of certain individuals. This entire perception driven system encourages all of the everyday people to assume someone else, never them of course, is stupid and likely to do irresponsible things and it is the elite who ensures that ‘stupidity and irresponsibility does not affect me as an individual.’ Ultimately this means that the majority of people mirror the system that they are placed within. That is basically how the elites embed control.
Which leads me to elites as a concept.
No matter how one decides to discuss ‘elites’ it has a nasty taste to it. For the most part we think of them as a group of people who believe they are smarter, more capable, and “more,” than the majority of society. Simplistically, partially true, and partially false, elites are the few who have the power and the majority are the many who do not have power to ‘pull the levers’ of policy and governance and business. This power decides who gets what, when, and how as well as the participation in the decisions that allocate things to society. They are the few who participate in the decisions that shape our lives while the majority of people are the many whose lives are shaped by institutions, events and the elites. Now. An elite group is not some conspiracy cabal desiring to oppress or exploit the masses. The reality is many elite decision makers may actually care about the welfare of the majority, but, they do so with an eye toward maintaining their own status and power and wealth. Regardless of theyir attitudes, we are stuck with them governing. This may chafe, but the reality is they possess more control over more resources and more information and knowledge of the processes then everyday people (note: this doesn’t mean an increasing amount of everyday schmucks think they are as qualified as the decisionmakers). This isn’t to suggest a well-organized, well informed, mass of non-elites can’t seek some control, but the truth is the majority of Americans are relatively apathetic and ill-informed about politics and public policy and, if we are honest, they have a surprisingly weak commitment to the freedoms that would actually give them power. What this means is that the critical element for the health of society (and a country) consists of the beliefs, standards, and competence of elites. This would also suggest that if society issues arc toward indecision, disaster, and crisis, the responsibility rests with the elite, not the majority, to find the solutions. This doesn’t mean the ‘masses’ never have any impact on the attitude of Elites, but only that elites influence masses more than masses influence elites. Once again, generally speaking, elitism is not a conspiracy to oppress society. It also doesn’t imply that those in power constitute a single body polity. This also doesn’t mean that the Elites in power are always in conflict with the masses and always desire self-interested goals at the expense of the public interest. All this means is that the decisions and direction are controlled by the elite. In the end elitism implies that public policy does not always reflect the demands of the people so much as it reflects the interests and values of Elites. This also means any change in policy or direction only occurs when, and if, the elites redefine their own values as well as what they value. And while the general attitude of an elite group is it is that it is always in their best interest to preserve the institutions and the systems, that doesn’t mean that public sentiment can’t affect a change in their attitudes and beliefs which can modify the existing systems. I would be remiss if I didn’t point out that last sentence reflects that most changes tend to be incremental rather than revolutionary.
Which leads me to the economic elite.
It would seem like the main distinction between Elites and 99% is based primarily on control over the economic resources of society. This means that industrial and financial leaders compose a major part of the elite. This has been true since the dawn of time. Industrialization pooled extreme wealth creation and made a few men spectacularly wealthy. From there it became a short leap for the economic elite to believe they, rather than the government, should direct the country’s development. With that I offer a quick historical lesson from Heather Cox Richardson:
In June 1889, steel magnate Andrew Carnegie published what became known as the “Gospel of Wealth” in the popular magazine North American Review. Carnegie explained that “great inequality…[and]…the concentration of business, industrial and commercial, in the hands of a few” were “not only beneficial, but essential to…future progress.” And, Carnegie asked, “What is the proper mode of administering wealth after the laws upon which civilization is founded have thrown it into the hands of the few?”
Rather than paying higher wages or contributing to a social safety net—which would “encourage the slothful, the drunken, the unworthy,” Carnegie wrote—the man of fortune should “consider all surplus revenues which come to him simply as trust funds, which he is called upon to administer…in the manner which, in his judgment, is best calculated to produce the most beneficial results for the community—the man of wealth thus becoming the mere trustee and agent for his poorer brethren, bringing to their service his superior wisdom, experience, and ability to administer, doing for them better than they would or could do for themselves.”
At the source of economic success attitudes and beliefs resides the fact America has never lacked for anything. This creates a sense of infinite abundance and a lack of appreciation, or respect of, of any scarcity. One of the consequences of this attitude/belief is that the ‘masses’ are continually drawn to ‘possibilities’ which, as a counterweight, simultaneously increases the likelihood of despair when possibilities are not attained. All of that said. We need to remind ourselves that the technology industrial machinery are solely instruments and it is people who are the true source of America’s power. Today there is tier of technocrats, business autocrats and inherited wealth who make up a more significant portion of the elite. In fact. Recently we recorded the first instance where inheritance, not entrepreneurship, has been the primary source of wealth for the majority of new billionaires. It is expected this trend will continue for the next 20 years (1000 billionaires passing an estimated $5.2 trillion on to children). The shift in the elite class will continue to accumulate wealth because we are in an economic period where market power consolidates in the hands of a few and market power has unprecedented power over governance and policy which ensures the power structure remains intact. I mention this shift only because it changes the challenges of how to break up the elite. Anyway. Circling back to an earlier comment, this is not a conspiracy within which there is some global cabal who ultimately make all of the decisions for everybody, like puppet masters, but rather they are part of a group of influential people that influence public policy and programs that impact society. And while people may be chafing on this whole concept of elite group making decisions I need to point out that the Founding Fathers of the United States were quite elite. They had elite education, elite experiences, and clearly viewed the United States not just in an isolationist or nationalist perspective, but as a nation among nations and had a very intentional international collective view. But getting back to economic elites, these economic elites – just like other elites – do not wield limitless power, they are nominally held in check by the ‘masses’ (shifting needs, wants, legitimate concerns, of the people). In fact, the process of the ‘circulation’ is often triggered by the existing elite’s ineffectiveness to meet the present problems, which effects their wealth, and new wealth ‘circulates’ into the economic elite. To be clear with regard to this group, as John Kenneth Galbraith said in A Short History of Financial Euphoria, “the relationship between intelligence and wealth is specious at best.” So, we do not always get the best and brightest simply through an economic narrative. That said. In capitalism, particularly with the advent of certain types of technology, wealth determines social status, and those possessing a disproportionate share of the capital, resources, and money to wield it all have assumed a disproportionate share of power. This inevitably creates a class bias based primarily on wealth where wealth is a fixed factor of the elites. In fact, while my information is dated, let’s say the wealthiest one-fifth of all American families hold nine out of every ten elite positions on the federal level with the next wealthiest controlling the remainder, save for a few token positions scattered among the rest.
Which leads me to experts versus elites.
I guess experts are part of the elites, but we need experts; not elites. I am not suggesting that we view those with the best qualifications and competencies as ‘the few who are chosen and everyone else is a failure and deserves to be forgotten,’ I will suggest that experts mostly get chosen because fewer people can actually do what they do – and do it well. I get that people are sick of experts, but that is misguided thinking because experts are experts for a reason. But, maybe worse, people are sick of thinking that people can actually do something they cannot do or make decisions they cannot make. The absurd overarching view becomes “a decision is a decision and anyone with common sense can make it.”
That is absurd. And, yet, that perception creates a reality in which those who truly have superior competence and excellent qualifications are treated to the unending joy of explaining why that doesn’t translate into a commodity. All this to say that we have a competency crisis at hand. If qualifications do not matter … if experience does not matter … if everything you have done is second guessed to a point of … well … nothing meaningful, then anyone and everyone is competent enough to maybe not do any job, but certainly able to make the same decisions anyone else can make. Reread that. If that doesn’t send a shiver down your spine, I do not know what will. Look. Even a blind squirrel finds a nut on occasion. And even the guy at the corner of the bar can find the right decision on occasion.
What made me include experts is that I had the unfortunate experience of listening in on Lex Fridman’s podcast with Jared Kushner. You can go on YouTube to find a couple of critiques of the podcast which outline the many lies and half-truths Mr. Kushner showcased. I’m not going to talk about that. But tucked within the podcast is a moment where Mr. Kushner physically ‘air quotes’ experts. What he espoused was that he was able to see things and think of things because he was an outsider and that the experts in particular on diplomacy and foreign policy – they just couldn’t “see things because they were, well, experts.” This is one of these insidious arguments that have a minutia of truth. Experts certainly can be blind to alternative ideas and thinking, but for the most part they’re experts because they have more experience, have seen more things, have a deeper education into the intricacies and complexity of that particular topic. While as an individual, they may have some objective blindness, within an expert group there is usually a healthy dialog and debate which leads to some fairly robust thinking. The main point of this particular little section is that the circulation of Elites was a theory developed when the Elites were aristocracy. In today’s world elites can be a number of different things or made up of a bunch of different groups – of which one can be experts. The experts who are directly involved in policy development, governance, and the development of system ideas can often be found in the Elites, but many experts reside outside of the elite category. They can range from academia, whose increased abstract knowledge may only equal decreased usable or relevant knowledge, to experts with specific specialties or skills (note: they are more likely to ease into the elite group if they are of value to the value creation of the elite). Within the circulation of Elites I would suggest that there’s a difference between expertise and expertism. Expertism is talking down from the authority of privilege and position. Expertism typically inhibits any systemic transformative adaptation and tends to maintain the institutions and the system construct of power and control. Expertise are true experts who offer us the structural knowledge who can enhance an adaptive adaptability and create the progress a society deserves.
“The theory of democracy as self-government must be understood as a myth, formula, or derivation. It does not correspond to any actual or possible social reality. It does not, however follow that the theory of democracy is without any influence on the social structure. The ruling minority always seeks to justify and legitimize its rule in part through a formula, without which the social structure would disintegrate. The positive significance of democratic theory is as a political formula of this kind.”
Which leads me to the irony of democracy (Dye and Zeigler, The Irony of Democracy) and elites.
Democracy, the construct, and traditions, are nurtured by those elites whose existence depends upon the continuation of democratic principles in the system. Democracy does not technically mean “self-government” or “government by the people,” but it does constitute a unique mechanism where there is a symbiotic relationship between the masses and the elite – one in which the elites seek to control and the masses nudge the behaviors of the elites. They are interdependent. The elites cannot ignore all realities and, yet, they can shape perceptions AND reality. That said. The elites circulate within this interdependence with an eye toward maintaining their status and control. I say that so that those of us in the 99% do not fool ourselves when elites do things that benefit us. Ultimately in any system, the responsibility for stability lies in the hands of the rulers–the elites who, “with few exceptions, have a special stake in the continuation of the system in which their privilege rests.”
“Elite theory pinpoints the central … actors. It does not tell us how much power they have with respect to any given social policy, and it does not tell us what social goals they will pursue”
It is important to remember that because it was Machiavelli who attributed fraud as an indispensable characteristic of the viable “ruler-type,” i.e., the elite. With fraud elites can continue in power by manipulating other elites and the 99%. Yeah. The elites are characterized by their ability to captivate the 99% via stories, uhm, fraud (lies).
“The useful lie serves to direct men into action and at the time create the basis of leadership”
Which leads me to my final issue with elites as they circulate themselves.
Look. I don’t begrudge the one percent their wealth or even their status. What I do have a grudge against is the system that they have crafted so that the one percent, or this group of Elites, constantly circulates itself. They’ve created a self-sustaining system within which 99% of the people cannot participate. Let me clarify that last point. 98.9% of the people cannot participate. Because that is what the circulation of Elites have crafted within their system where 99.9% of the elites constantly circulate allowing .1% to be eliminated and .1% to be added. This creates the perception that the circulation of Elites is a myth because the exceptions are highlighted as they get added. And it’s also possible that I have a grudge against this circulation of Elites because this elitism is typically not based on either social status or intellectual achievements to be able to sustain the system which allows them to exist. And therein lies ‘the rub.’ They have the most power and, yet, they do not have the most intellect to wield that power. It was Tolstoy who said that the state insured that the wicked dominated that criminals were far less dangerous than a well organized government were essentially violent forces held together by intimidation corruption and public indoctrination and, well, Galbraith said what I noted earlier. But where it becomes truly unconscionable from a society perspective is that it almost seems like the governing elite only know three things: money, propaganda, and fear. Each are not discreet in and of themselves, but a rather intricate DNA weave whirling around each other. The elite become elite by working the margins of ethics and norms when the more rules you break the more success you have. This gets compounded with a mindset where the game, i.e., where there are only winners and losers, never stops. This means that any pause for peace by the masses in the daily struggle simply becomes another opportunity for Elites to squeeze more out of the system. But maybe the worst aspect is the elites always view social problems as problems to be solved only if solving them would not reduce some dependence of a system. yeah. Sadly, there are no grand plans no grand strategies just a lust for power and an insane addictive desire to accumulate more and more because too much is never enough. And maybe that is where I end. With my disgust for the circulation of the elites.
“You held me underwater and asked me why I could not breathe.”
In the United States the concepts of personal responsibility with regard to one’s fate, or destiny, and individualism can be quite toxic. What I mean by that is there is a strong narrative that your success, or failure, is solely in your hands. The consequence of this is all, and I mean all, ‘failures’ or disappointments are placed upon the shoulders of the individual – no matter the circumstance or context conditions. Sure. The backlash to this is “victim mentality,’ but I do wish we would ponder why a victim mentality even exists (because it doesn’t have anything to do with ‘weak’ pandered everyone-gets-a-trophy childhoods). Toxic individualism makes society ignore some really important systemic things.
Which leads me to the title of this piece.
The system, more often than not, is shoving your head underwater. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t let you up for some air on occasion, just that more often than not it holds you underwater and then, uhm, toxic individualism asks you why you can’t breathe. Yeah. That’s the metaphor for the day. So, the system holds you underwater, but you begin thinking not being able to breathe is your fault, your responsibility, and you are accountable for the situations you continuously find yourself in. And before people begin thinking I am suggesting it is always some nefarious existential threat to our survival, what I am going to suggest is that the system itself – society as well as in business – tends to not be set up to offer you pathways to most easily optimize your potential. That is a subtler version of holding you underwater. All that said my guess is (I have no research) that the system and its conditions hold someone underwater far more often than anything an individual does, or doesn’t, do.
Which leads me to how society can hold you underwater.
Let me end with some context – society within which we live. What I mean by this is individualism comes at the expense of collectivism, or let’s say, ‘community awareness.’ While it isn’t always zero sum, there is always a tinge of ‘me’ versus ‘we’ and the tinge becomes a full-on washout when it is toxic individualism. I would also argue that individualism makes us societally, well, stupider. Okay. That was harsh. How about maybe we are not getting stupider, it’s just that our social intellect isn’t optimized, in fact, our intellect gets reduced by individualism. Yeah. Circling back to social intellect, this isn’t just about us, individually, this is about us, collectively. Societies, systems (political & economic), thrive when the social intellect is robust and expansive, not small minded and reductionist. Therefore, any intellectual bargain society’s participants make impacts the effectiveness of not only society, but the systems. And, yeah, individualism demands, on some level, a bargain with the larger collective and community.
Look. I clearly believe in personal responsibility and personal accountability, but I also clearly see how the universe tends to be indifferent to you and the system is often not the fairest of fair. All of those things can be simultaneously true. But maybe most importantly for today is take a minute and wonder why you feel like you are underwater because, well, it may not be you. Someone or something may be holding your head underwater. Ponder.
“We live mythically, but continue to think fragmentarily and on single planes.”
Marshall McLuhan
“We see the world piece by piece, as the sun, the moon, the animal, the tree; but the whole, of which these are shining parts, is the soul.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Everything we perceive as reality is, in fact, constructed from fragments and fragmentation which, even when rationally constructed, can make life pretty confusing for the everyday person. Basically, this is a survival technique in that we grab onto some fragments to make sense of things the best we can. What becomes an existential survival crisis is WHAT fragments we grab onto. As Tony Fish suggests our root problem is that everything when framed with a maths or data mind is a decision. When framed by a psychologist or social scientist, everything becomes a choice. To someone who has authority and responsibility, or plays with complexity, everything is a judgment. Confusingly everything is an opinion to a judge. Math and data offer tantalizing fragments to judge and rationalize reality – sometimes well and sometimes not as well. That may all seem very confusing, but dependence upon different framing and beliefs, i.e., rationalizing fragments, creates some ‘life efficiency’ for each of us while simultaneously creating a brittle coherence to the community. In addition, this also tends to be reductionary. What I mean by that is inevitably this encourages us to act situationally rather than act based on scenarios. Once again, this is a reductionary life where we react as a matter of rule, work through heuristics (our rationalizing fragments) and then simply repeat the majority of our behavior, i.e., the shadows of previous decisions shine a spotlight on decision-making in the present.
Which leads me to social media’s superweapon: reinforcement learning.
Social networks are designed explicitly to command human attention and hijack free will. They are weapons of the science of persuasion and psychological vulnerabilities. Not only are algorithms designed to optimize engagement at any cost, but they triple down on that engagement through reinforcement learning – driving you down deeper and deeper into the darkness, fragment of engagement by fragment of engagement. Each step farther down into that blackness takes you farther and farther away from engaging with more meaningful, thoughtful, enlightening fragments (if not wholes). But where the reinforcement loops work hardest is by slinging endless customized content, tantalizing fragments, to captivate attention every step of the way. More and more data gets fed back into the algorithm reinforcement loops to further refine the manipulative powers and refine the ‘fragment house’ they offer as your home. It feels like a stream of consciousness when it really has little to do with your own conscious and more about fragments of consciousness some algorithm consciously teases out. Ah. But it gets a bit worse. While you feel actively engaged, you are really skimming along the top of superficial, non-demanding, fragmentation dressed up as meaningful “whole truths.” Reinforcement learning encourages you to see castles of sand as solid homes for enlightenment. And it does so deftly guiding you away from the time, and thoughtfulness, true enlightenment and understanding demands. We end up in unenlightened little fragments of cubbyholes tucked in tight with no room for any additional ideas.
Which leads me to what this means for personal identity.
Technology, through social media, aggressively attacks our identities blasting it apart in an onslaught of detailed fragments. This, in turn, makes social media & technology seem even more demanding of us, despite the fact it actually has a relatively simplistic structure (but warped by algorithms), consequently people started feeling a need that more detail was required, i.e., actually embrace the enemy. This doom loop of detail made something peculiar happen. Our identities gradually prove themselves incapable of absolute, whole, concepts. Identity simply becomes details. And, if the details aren’t coherent and well thought out, your identity simply became fragments floating out in technological space being bombarded with random algorithm driven asteroids.
As Marshall McLuhan would say we live mythically but continue to think fragmentarily and on single planes. It seems like almost all the action and reaction occurs at exactly the same time ignoring any complexity and ignoring any combinatorial consequences. So it appears that we live in the present, in some mythical way, continuing to think in the old fragmented space and time patterns. Inevitably this creates what Marshall McLuhan suggested as “the age of anxiety.”
Which leads me to unique and belonging.
Speaking of anxiety, let’s move on to uniqueness and belonging. The theory of organizational change revolves around the idea that if you cannot disturb the organizational identity filter then nothing changes. In other words, if a society wants to evolve and learn it must have the capacity for internal dialogue. Learning happens reciprocally, in context, and is vital to a thriving system. This is where diversity comes in. Diversity plays a role because it enhances community, if and only if, there is a vibrant network of relationships and if there is a free flow of information throughout. But let’s get back to uniqueness and becoming. Within lies a paradox of individuality and connectedness to un-like thinkers. The ubiquitous world of technology allows us to connect with more people, more ideas, more information. Most of it is beyond the limits of our cognitive capacity which traps us in this horrible doom loop of where does our ‘self’ begin, and where does it end (uniqueness), which leads to a doom loop of where does who I am and what I will be (becoming) begin and end. Hanzi Freinacht is the one who suggested the idea of transvidualism where the self actually contains part of the whole (fragments) which while most likely true only leads us to even more anxiety-driven questions: what does the self hold on to? Who are you? Is your reality yourself? is your identity ever just one thing but in constant motion and morphing with each interaction? I would be remiss if I didn’t point out all these questions suggest opportunities to accept our self-limitations and purposefully seek out, within the collective, ways to be part of things that are bigger than ourselves without losing are self-identity. But I imagine my larger point here is that people are increasingly a collection of fragments, some changing and some unchanging, and the proportionality of those two aspects is incredibly important in accepting ‘self,’ uniqueness, and belonging in a world with increasing fragments. And that becomes fairly important because if the increased fragmentation simply creates small-minded tribes that only generates societal friction. Arguably, tribes of equals are not always that smart mainly because they are hunkered down around a small campfire of fragments.
Which leads me to suggest the larger social issue actually resides in our misunderstanding of uniqueness and separateness and being part of a collective group.
Problems arise when uniqueness is associated with ‘being separate’ and when separateness gains a sense of faux specialness. When unique is tied to separate it tends to transform into an unhealthy sense of specialness (unique individualism) or a kind of narcissism feeding into a belief we can endlessly take from the collective without repercussion; because it feeds our isolated self in a zero-sum world. I would argue we far too often conflate uniqueness for separateness. Yeah. The truth is everything we do as ‘someone unique,’ we actually do as part of the collective whole. The paradox is we are unique because of the way we are interconnected with the rest of the humans. Yeah. Uniqueness is emergent from connection to other human beings (if not all nature). What I mean by that is each species in nature is unique, and plays a role in a vast symbiotic web of life, humans also play a role in a vast symbiotic web of humanity and society. What this means is a healthy sense of uniqueness, which begets healthy becoming, actually requires an active personal and societal strategy of deepening connections and integration of ‘fragments,’ not of separation. All that said. Ponder this. There is something odd about saying that everything is unique because this makes uniqueness something that everything has in common. Quite the contradiction to say that everything is the same insofar as everything shares in the quality of being unique, no? This is an important and sometimes mind bending contradiction, but I think it is important, especially in a fragmented world, to recognize uniqueness does not contradict some aspects of sameness because both sameness and uniqueness arise out of interconnection. Not to get too philosophical, but the universe is unique in relation to everything else, so everything in the universe is the same as everything else. I challenge everyone to take any two objects, or events, and list the ways they share common properties and qualities. This happens even if two things seemingly have nothing in common. But from a fragmented society perspective, what is truly ironic is it seems like we have a society obsessed with individualism and, yet, has little room for truly unique forms of self-expression. Despite individualism rhetoric, society (and social media) consistently denigrates our sense of self and does not allow for the formation of self reflectively unique personalities. I would argue fragments play a significant role in this. What I mean by that we have actually become quite limited (despite a ubiquitous online world) in how we can represent ourselves and others because communication has become overwhelmingly superficial through sound bites, tweets, and status updates which dominate connection platforms where we have to represent who and what we are. The superficiality is contrary to the type of reflective and prolonged engagements that truly foster uniqueness and self. Circling back to Marshall McLuhan, society seems to have an unhealthy focus on images, memes, superficial montages of misleading imagery, combined with an unnatural compression of time and space. What I mean by that is while time has not sped up, we actually treat time as fragments in which we use or are lost. All of this simply generates shallow forms of communication and understanding and, ultimately, differences (not uniqueness) which inevitably does not meet the true depth and nuance of uniqueness. Just as a reminder, this matters because personal clarity demands we seek places or people that remove doubts and obstacles about who and what we are. Self is an integrated image of oneself as a unique person and if we are only integrating the superficial into our self-feedback system, well, we will inevitably end up being shallow people desperately, and continuously, seeking meaning.
“The study of a situation should not seek to control the parts, or even the whole, but rather discover the underlying patterns which make up the aspects of potential.”
Which leads to me to a system that encourages fragmentation.
While its easy to point to technology, I would be remiss if I didn’t point out culture, or the overarching system itself, almost encourages fragmentation. What I mean by that is market-based capitalism emphasizes individual choice, competition, and zero-sum thinking, and the collective intelligence that arises from different choices. All that sounds good, or maybe okay, but it tends to create societies that are purposeless and fragmented and individual based (or collaboration is only seen as a necessary means to further self success), or as Arthur van den Bruck said, “gives everyone the freedom to be a mediocre man.” Yeah. Capitalism actually encourages mediocrity. Okay. How about over time the arc of capitalism bends toward mediocrity. The system is in a constant conflict by what stands and what changes, what’s bounded what is not, and how the existing power structure stratifies or doesn’t. what that means is while it often doesn’t appear like it, the system is mutually emergent; not unidirectional. And what that means is the reality is there is always a bit of resistance against the destructive fragmenting and destabilizing aspects of capitalism’s trappings. But the system encourages many people, under the guise it increases likelihood of success, to encourage individualism, alienation (zero-sum competition), fragmentation, entrepreneurial innovation, and all the things that discourage collective action which would actually force some change or at least challenge the existing power structure. Circling back to Tony Fish, maths and numbers and data are the primary weapon the system wields to encourage fragmentation (to the benefit of those in power). It is a daunting to challenge the fragmented system and society (which is monopolistic institutionally) because the system encourages individuality seeking to fragment any significant collective/community because it is actually ONLY a collective/community who can destruct an existing system and create a new one and those in power know that. That said. Beyond the increased emphasis on ‘self,’ the system almost encourages us to confuse, and conflate, what is ordinary and what is exceptional – for each individual (thereby confusing uniqueness, separateness and becoming). Sure. The system celebrates individuals, but typically not the ones who consistently invest in the greater good, more typically the economic successes. The truth is the economic narrative encourages fragmentation by encouraging everyone to believe individual successes begets collective progress. That is an incredibly flawed premise. Progress is never linear and is almost always asymmetrical and is optimized through collective action; not individual action. Lastly. The weird thing is the current system almost encourages pettiness and small-minded thinking in its facilitation of fragmentation and use of fragments, but that is another piece for another day.
“there is no ‘right time’ there is just time and what you choose to do with it”
Which leads me to connectivity and connections.
It may seem odd to end a piece on fragments with connectivity, but hear me out. Fragmentation is here to stay. We can try and wish away all the structural and transactional aspects of the larger system and society that enables fragments and fragmentation, but it’s just wishful thinking. Our efforts should be directed at educating people on how to enhance connectivity and reward communities and connections, in other words, learn to use fragments well. I have argued in the past that fractals, small linear components of a larger complex system, is where insights reside. I believe the same is true in a large, fragmented, complex society. While the blur of fragments and fragmentation encourage us to believe everything is vague and tenuous, the truth is connections and connectivity is what tethers us to sanity, community and meaning. It is within the experiences of connection which shapes us (even though we may not notice the actual shaping). Our self-identity, and ‘becoming,’ is the ultimate result of a complex series of steps, choices, and experiences over a long period of time. But, possibility, my larger point is collaboration, which is the outcome of connectivity, is just a means to an end and if the end justifies that means then you do what the end desires, not what you think is the right way to do something. Ultimately, people flow to ideas when the idea needs people. And maybe that is where fragments, in today’s world, are truly failing us. If fragments had the opportunity to flow freely and coalesce into grander ideas that benefit societal progress, I believe we would all be applauding a fragmented world because we were actually flowing to ideas that permit society to prosper – as a whole, not just individually. But that’s not the way its working. Fragments are actually driving us into smaller and smaller people and a smaller and smaller society. Ponder.