Fear and Faith

In some earlier posts I talked about fear, and how that drives some of the insanity we're seeing today.

The fear of scarcity, the feeling that there's not enough to go around - those feelings make it easier for people to justify doing whatever they can to secure resources. For themselves. For their families.

I got mine, how you do?

Some of the overpopulation fears feed into this, too. And perhaps contributes to some of the eugenicist views (though that also seems to be tied in to the idea that some people just don't deserve to live. A rather nasty thought process to live by, since that means you pretty much always have to prove that you deserve to live, too. Get too old and weak? Guess you're no longer contributing and deserve to die, then. Oh, wait... but that wouldn't apply to you, would it? It's just an excuse to justify accepting the deaths of other people.)

When I think about how to address those fears, it makes me think of faith.

Faith - that we can find an answer.

Faith - that there is a solution, one that won't force us to make choices about who lives and who dies.

It's like that hydrologist said about the water issues with the Helmand River - there's a way to take care of everyone, it just requires cooperation and coordination.

Fear of scarcity, fear that there isn't enough, fear that you won't be able to survive and that your loved ones are at risk - all of that prevents us from cooperating and coordinating and seeking alternatives. 

If you have faith that there is a way, you'll keep searching to find it. 

This applies to all sorts of things - like lying propaganda. If you had faith that you could find a way while keeping God's commandments (to put this in religious terms), then you wouldn't have to lie to achieve your goals. And you wouldn't have to pretend that your lying is justified, or serving God, either. 

Saying "they started it" and "everyone else is doing it, and we can't win without it" betrays your lack of faith. It keeps you from continuing to search for an alternative, and allows you to justify to yourself doing the exact sorts of things you hate others for doing.

But let's bring this back to fear and scarcity -

Worried we might not have enough water? Think we might have water wars? 

Couldn't that push us to find solutions, like perhaps cheaper and more extensive desalination plants?

Worried about overpopulation? I'm sure we can get pretty creative if we put our minds to it. 

Or is the issue that you don't want to find a better solution? 

You don't want to put in the work, to maybe even sacrifice your time, or money, to find something better?

It's pretty easy to throw up your hands and say "that's just the way the world works", isn't it? 

 

 

Mar-A-Lago Face

I learned about that term because of the whole Susan Dell thing, which I have mixed feelings about. 

On the one hand, I don't really like making fun of people for how they look. On the other hand - WTF happened to her?!?

Let me step back a moment though. 

A long, long time ago I heard that "eyes are the windows to the soul."

I think that's right, and I've tried to pay attention to them. It's kind of fascinating, really. Like - how can eyes sparkle? How can some seem dull and dead? What wizardry is this, that peoples inner thoughts and emotions can somehow be captured by their eyes?

Or perhaps it's really the entire facial expression that does it. Microexpressions. Small muscle movement in relation to our thoughts and feelings. 

I don't really know how it works, I do know that this collection of photos showing soldiers before, during, and after their time in Afghanistan illustrated the point more than I ever expected. Perhaps it's due to the different lighting when the picturing were taken, but I felt that the soldiers pictures from during the war made them look almost fey. It brings to mind authors descriptions of soldiers with a 'fell light' glowing.

We've seen something similar with before and after pics of various well-known figures, though the focus is mostly on whether or not they've had cosmetic surgery. 

Consider the fuss over Jared Kushner a while back. 

The posts I saw commented on whether he'd had some work done, but what struck me the most was the eyes. They almost seemed to twinkle in the first pic. They seemed dull and dead in the second. 

Maybe it's just one bad day? He's lost the cute little dimples and the twinkle in the eye, his skin is pale, his eyes dull... 

It doesn't seem like a good change.

So now let's get back to Susan Dell. 

 

 

The dead eye look isn't there, so the difference isn't quite as bad as it is with Jared. There is the other oddness with the cheekbones, thicker eyebrows, etc. What strikes me here is actually how wide her eyes are. It reminds me of the surprised look of a young ingenue. They're much wider than in the original pic, and I think it contributed to how odd she looked in that horrid White House picture. Like she's a bit too mature to be an ingenue. There also seems to be something a bit off about her eyelashes, which seem to have a bit of eyelid between where the lashes are and the eyeball? 

Add it to natural aging and whatever cosmetic surgery was done and it really makes her offputting. Combine that with that odd pose and the shoulder pads in that White House picture and... yeah. I can see why people freaked out.

Apparently all of this is normal for the women in those circles? Like... they like making themselves ugly so much that there's a whole term for it?

Fascinating Look at Rationalists

https://asteriskmag.com/issues/11/why-are-there-so-many-rationalist-cults

Where is the Love, VI - Finale

 I want to circle back to where I started, but first I'm going to clarify what I mean about 'asking the right questions.'

Picture, if you will, someone running for office who asks themself "How do I take care of my people?"

Now, picture someone else running for office who asks "How do I win the election?"

The different question leads to a different focus, and different priorities.

Though not necessarily. If, for example, the first candidate believes "To take care of my people, I have to win elections" and the second believes "To win elections, I have to take care of my people"... then you might not see much of a difference in behavior.

However, if there is a conflict between these goals - if, for example, someone thinks they can win the election without actually taking care of people - then you may see some very different behavior.

This is why I keep bringing up Trump's comment that "I like the numbers where they are" when he refused to let a ship infected with Covid to dock. That statement illustrates, to me at least, that he is much more concerned with the appearance of taking care of Americans than he is with actually taking care of them. 

So let's go back to my earlier discussion on forgiveness and love, and why it's so hard to do.

It's easiest to illustrate this with RFK Jr, who has been pushing anti-vax nonsense as the Secretary of Health and Human Services.

First, I would hope that someone in that position would focus on one question - "How do I keep Americans healthy?"

And if you ask that question sincerely, then you will follow where the evidence takes you. If study after study after study after study shows that people who got vaccinated had lower death rates and lower hospitalization rates, than anyone who cares about actually keeping Americans healthy would encourage them to vaccinate.

To continue believing otherwise can only happen for a few limited reasons.

1. He isn't able to update his beliefs when evidence contradicts them (like in the article in my previous post). He is in denial, or irrational, or whatever.

Basically he's incompetent. He has the right goal but doesn't have the capability to actually achieve it.

or 

2. His goal isn't to keep Americans healthy. I'm not sure what other goal he has, though given some of the other things he's doing I lean towards eugenics of some sort. Basically he's trying to get people killed. 

Basically he's malicious. All of his efforts are used to push us towards a result that is harmful to Americans as a whole. (He might have convinced himself it isn't, especially if he buys into some of the bullshit ideas that underpin eugenics, so he may also be incompetent in addition to being malicious.)

I find it hard to forgive either, because he is in an influential position where his poor decisions really do have an effect on other people. People who haven't done anything to deserve it, have never harmed him in the slightest.

If he was just some dumbass flipping burgers, then who cares if he's an incompetent and malicious fool? If he lived on an island with others who believed like him, so that his nonsense never left that island then I probably wouldn't care either. Because they all chose not to get vaccinated, and they'd be isolated enough that maybe it wouldn't even matter. 

But neither is true.

Incompetence or malice? Or both?

And how badly have we failed as a society, that someone like that is the head of our government health efforts?

 I do sometimes try to think about what would drive someone in that direction. I mostly come back to fear.

A belief in scarcity, that there are limited resources, and that there needs to be some way to decide who 'deserves' those resources. 

Or maybe fear of something else, I don't know. This entire way of thinking is alien and abhorrent and I dislike feeling as though I'm trying to excuse it.

Fear, if that's what it is, just basically throws this back in the 'incompetent' column, because you have to be pretty incompetent to let fear push you into bad decisions. (It happens a lot, it's true. I remember when I realized that the South basically let their fear of an abolitionist North push them into kicking off the Civil War, which pretty much led to their own fears coming true. Not that that was a bad thing since it led to emancipation far earlier than it otherwise would have. I just find it a bit ironic.)

It makes me wonder if there was a reason God's messengers always start off with "Be Not Afraid".

Or maybe I'm being too generous, and they really are evil assholes. It'd kind of be nice to know, though I'm not sure if knowing would make any sort of difference.

Can I forgive someone for being incompetent and/or malicious to such a degree? Is that really what we're being asked to do here? 

Hell if I know. That things have come this far feels more like a damning indictment.

On Seeing Clearly

I would say this post is also about making sure you update your understanding over time 

I've been pulling a final post to close out the theme of my recent posts, and will probably do so later today... And this article seemed loosely related to what I've been thinking.

Where is the Love, V - Continued

Like I said in my last post, there are more layers to this judgyness.

First point - as someone once said, if you want a zero defect army you will soon have no army at all. We are imperfect, we do make mistakes, and it seems like there are two ways of handling this:

You can go a punitive route and address those mistakes by giving real consequences for them - but you also then need to give people a way to recover from them. To learn and grow. Otherwise you will lose a lot of people, and the few you keep may just be the ones who covered up their mistakes better or never risked doing anything that could go wrong in the first place.

Or you can avoid penalizing people entirely for their mistakes, but if you go that route you have to be fair and consistent and apply it to everyone. No double standard. Otherwise penalties are just an indicator of who has power and who doesn't, and isn't really related to their mistakes at all.

I have heard officers criticize how generals are no longer held accountable, and often look back at WWII and Eisenhower's generation. There are multiple stories of officers were penalized or demoted for a failure, like General Miller. But such failures were not necessarily a career ender, just like I talked about with that warrant officer in my previous post.

Going back to some of the people I served with - some of the things I judged them for were indicators of low experience or poor training. Things that could probably be fixed eventually. And how are they ever going to get that experience or learn to do better if they're not put in the positions where they can learn?

So that's another layer - the system and culture around them. 

I also realized that some of the things I thought were pretty obvious (like avoiding groupthink) were things I learned about in specific college courses I took. 

And the way ROTC programs work is that cadets go through the training and courses required to get a commission on top of their bachelor's degree. By which I mean - some of my fellow cadets majored in chemistry, or computer science, or biology. 

They did not have the same classes I had. They did not learn the same things I learned. And sometimes they just legitimately didn't know.

Ignorance is not incompetence. And, again, people can learn and grow.

Which brings me to the next layer, where I go right back to judging them anyway.

Sort of. 

This is all getting a bit convoluted, but try to follow me here.

Someone once asked - is it better to have a perfect plan, executed imperfectly? Or an imperfect plan, executed perfectly?

I would argue the latter, because perfect execution includes checking on the progress of your plan and adjusting it as needed to meet your goals.

If your plan isn't that great, but you're good at monitoring it's progress and adjusting as needed, then you will get where you are trying to go.

On the other hand, if you're plan is perfect but you suck at implementing it... it doesn't matter how great the plan is. It will fail when things inevitably go wrong, or someone fails make a deadline, or they fail to communicate with each other where they're at in the process.

The important part, to me at least, is that follow through. It's knowing how to evaluate your progress, adjust course if needed, and effectively communicate any changes to that plan.

So someone may not start out as a great leader, and that's fine. The military is full of dumbass privates (affectionate) and butterbar lieutenants (also affectionate) who don't know shit, and somehow most of them end up being competent non-commissioned and commissioned officers anyway. 

The important part isn't being perfect from the get go.

The important part is knowing how to learn and grow along the way. 

And most of our solders do. 

Rather than applying this to planning, though, I'll apply it to learning how to lead your troops.

If you want to be a good leader, you will evaluate your progress and adjust course if needed. You will ask the questions. You will do the work. 

So the ones I am judging, the ones I am side-eyeing, I am doing because they don't seem to be doing the work. 

You're in a position that comes with certain privileges, primarily because of all the responsibilities and duties that come with it. Trying to keep those privileges without taking on those responsibilities and duties is the height of incompetence. 

If you're in a leadership position, it's not to lord it over everyone else. It's to make sure that your people are in the right place, at the right time, with the right training, with the right resources, doing the right tasks to accomplish the mission. 

It seems to me that some people, somehow, wind up in these positions without any interest in or care for doing the actual work required.

Which brings me to another layer. (Or should I say 'why?'  This is a bit like going through the '5 whys') 

Sometimes people stick around in positions they really aren't suited for. And I think it's because of the status and privileges that come with that position, or some other ego-threat that prevents them from looking for something more suitable.

To elaborate on "positions they really aren't suited for", I do think everyone has a talent in something. It's just that their talent might not be for the thing they are trying to do. Ideally, we want to have the right people in the right positions on the bus (as Jim Collins said in his book Good to Great.)

If someone isn't performing very well, and if it isn't because of some failure in training or resources or establishing expectations, then it could very well be that their talents aren't suited to the role they are trying to fill.

What you want is an easy way to move people in the positions that do suit their talents. One where they can excel, and you can set them up for success. (Note again, that they are not a failure. They're just not in the right place.)

But people resist being moved, and will sometimes cling quite desperately to a role they clearly aren't suited for and don't even seem to enjoy.

And they will quite naturally resist the most strongly when it's a position of power and privilege. 

I think that someone who truly cares about being a good leader will ask the right questions and learn and grow and eventually, probably, be pretty good at it.

But the ones who just want the status and privileges? Inevitably they will make mistakes, too. Everyone does, it's part of the process.

But instead of using that to learn and do better, it makes them realize that they could lose all those perks and privileges.

It makes them scared.

So they feel threatened, they get defensive, and they attack. They create a self-fulfilling prophecy where they make bad decisions that make people question their abilities which make them feel even more threatened which makes them make even more bad decisions. And they will always blame other people, always think that everything would have been fine if it weren't for _____. 

And so they fail. Which often makes them cling even more desperately to their power and position, and can easily turn them into tyrants.

Tyrannical rulers are incompetent rulers. (No, Peter Thiel. Evil is not competent.)

If they were competent, they would get people to willingly go along.

If they were competent, they wouldn't be threatened by criticism. They would know how to address it without suppressing it.

If they were competent, they wouldn't feel a need to hide their mistakes or find scapegoats and distractions.

The thing I am judging them on, the 'competence' they lack in, isn't that they screw up in the first place. 

It's that they let their fears push them into an ongoing series of bad decisions, ones that create the worst kind of command climate where everyone is scared to speak their minds and afraid of giving bad news or getting caught making a mistake. 

The kind of command climate that inevitably leads to terrible decisions.

 

 

Where is the Love, V

 There was something more I wanted to say along the lines of my previous posts, but I struggled to figure out where to start or how to say it.

So I have decided to go about it sideways.

Or backwards.

We shall stalk this idea, slowly following it's trail through the trees and grasses, getting closer and closer to it until we can pounce on it and make it ours.

Or, in other words, I'm going to start with something that seems completely unrelated. Two quotes from two very different traditions, though there are definitely some similarities on certain topics.

Judge not lest ye be judged

- Matthew 7:1 

 

If you keep your mind from judging
and aren't led by the senses,
your heart will find peace.

 - Tao Te Ching, Ch 52

I do try not to judge others, and I have noticed how often some form of judgement still creeps in.

It's there in the connotations and sub-text, there in our body language. We can say "tall" or "short", and often there's a hidden judgment. "Tall" is good. "Short", if associated with a man, is generally bad. If a woman, it might be good. 

Good and bad are poor words here, I'm really trying to capture nuanced subtext. Short men have a negative subtext, but calling a girl woman a "short stack" might be calling them cute and being flirty. 

Tall and short are, to me at least, easy to pull back on the judgement for. After all, your height is genetic and it mostly just means some people have an easier time reaching higher places than others.

Anything genetic is easy to look at that way, actually. It's not like anyone had a choice in their genetics, so what is even the point in casting judgment on it? 

There are other terms, though. Loaded terms where judgment seeps in. Like 'slut', which carries one of the heaviest loads of hidden - and not so hidden - judgment.

Given that Jesus hang out with prostitutes and refused to cast stones at an adulterous woman, I'm pretty sure Jesus would never slut-shame. And yet our society is full of people judging others - women especially - for who they're having sex with.

To me, that's also a fairly easy layer of judgment to let go of. I don't particularly care who is (consensually) sleeping with who. Unless, of course, it's someone I'm in a committed relationship where we've agreed not to. Even then, the issue is less about the sex and more about the lying, poor self-control, poor emotional maturity, and poor judgment. (As in, if you've agreed to be in a committed relationship and you want to change that - you talk to your partner first. And accept that you might lose that relationship entirely if they're not willing to accept that change. You don't just pursue your own selfish desires, hope not to get caught, and then think you can somehow keep your other relationship the way it was, and I am constantly amazed at how often people keep making that foolish mistake. Makes for lots of songs about heartbreak I guess.)

Note - you just saw whole bunch of judgment. I'm side-eying one of the most common bad decision people make, ever. One I'm not even fully exempt from.

I'd also like to point out that in this case, I am not saying that those people are bad. Or evil. Or terrible. Just - poor judgement, poor self-control, and poor emotional maturity. 

All things that people can get better at. If they choose to.

I know text is a terrible way of conveying sub-text and body language, but I want you to think of it like saying someone is a terrible cook. Like - you would never trust that person in the kitchen, you may choose not to eat any dishes they make, but you don't think they're a waste of space that shouldn't exist.

And if they took a cooking class and put some effort in, you eventually might be willing to try some of their cooking again.

In a similar fashion, if someone made poor decisions in the past but has put in the work to learn better, I'd try not to keep holding that past against them.

This is the layer of judgment that I'm much less comfortable letting go, because there are real world consequences to the behavior I am judging.

Not just in personal lives, either. 

I started thinking about this more because of my experience in the Army. I worked with some very competent and talented people - but there were also some that were... not.

Some of them were very nice, and I didn't wish them ill at all. But would I want to have them in a leadership position if I was sent into a combat zone? Where my life, and the lives of the people around me, might depend on them?

...

...

Thank God that never got truly put to the test.

That sort of scenario reminds of a story a warrant officer I knew once told me. He was a Vietnam vet I worked with during our deployment to Iraq, and he talked about how his team was ambushed once. I don't remember the exact situation, but they were driving vehicles of some sort when they were hit.

The officer in charge froze up, and wasn't making the right call (if you are unfamiliar with the situation - freezing up in an ambush site is a terrible decision. You're pretty much in their kill zone, where they will keep shooting at you and killing you and you need to move. Quick. Which way will depend on if it's a near ambush or a far ambush and whatever your team has already communicated to do, but the point is you move.) 

This warrant officer said that he basically shoved the guy aside, took the wheel, and got his team moving. He said he was demoted, which isn't a surprise. He also got a private "Atta boy" for making the right call, which also isn't too surprising. At least, not surprising if you have competent leadership. Also, given he was a warrant officer when I met him, he clearly had not been kicked out of the military or denied a later promotion.

The reason I relayed all that is this - I judge the poor leadership of the person who froze. And I judge it hard.

Again, not in the sense that I think they're a terrible person who deserves to die. I don't even know the guy, or if it was his first ambush ever... freezing is a pretty normal reaction to situations like that. It's part of why the military trains so endlessly. When the shit hits the fan you're likely to start doing what you trained to do without thinking, which is significantly better than just locking up and getting shot because you're an easy target.

At the same time, if you're in a leadership position in a war zone, you absolutely need to be ready to make the right calls in combat. 

If you can't, you're going to get your people killed.

What I have learned, then, is that when it gets to leadership and decision-making I am in fact very, very judgy. 

I have opinions. And I have whole blog here to share them.

There are more layers to this, too. But this seems like a good stopping point, lest this post get ridiculously long.