On Fear and Incompetence.

When the angels met the shepherds to announce the birth of Jesus, the first thing they said was 'Be not afraid".

That seems to crop up quiet a bit in the Bible, actually. "Do not be afraid".

Fear really does seem to be the mindkiller. I remember when I realized that, in American history, the slave states were afraid the northern states would outlaw slavery... and there's quite a bit of history leading up to the civil war that was centered around that. It seems ironic, though, that that fear led the south to try to secede - and ultimately brought their fears into reality. (Slavery is evil, and it seems the north wasn't going to free the slaves until pushed into it because of the war, so perhaps that was for the best. Then again, would we still have the lingering issues we do today if it had happened less abruptly? Yet can you really be okay with letting slaves suffer a minute longer than necessary... ? But if it led to less suffering now...  Since we don't have time travel that's mostly just hypothetical, though worth thinking about as we consider strategies for bringing about change.)

I was reminded of that while reading Adults in the Room, because in his preface Varoufakis mentioned Oedipus (and the self-fulfilling prophecy at his birth), and claimed that "Fearing that Greece's undeclared bankruptcy might cause them to lose control over the West, they imposed policies on Greece that gradually undermined their political control, not just over Greece but over... the West."

I think this is a recurring pattern, I've seen it with managers. 

In one of our courses we asked whether it was better to have a good plan with poor execution, or a poor plan with good execution. I think it's the latter... because any good plan of execution will include feedback. You have to assess whether your plan is actually achieving your goals (as well as whether it's happening on schedule, and a bunch of other things.)

If your plan isn't working as is, good execution means adjusting your plan as needed, and if you do that enough then eventually your poor plan will become a good plan. 

The trouble, though, is that feedback sometimes is scary. If you worked hard and think you're doing a great job, hearing criticism sounds like an attack. Like they're saying you suck, you failed, you aren't really good at all.

That's when criticism and feedback starts seeming like a threat to your authority, and people often respond poorly.

And so they do things that ultimately do make them fail. (This is part of why getting out of your bubble, valuing people who have the courage to speak up - especially when it's something you don't want to hear, and various other things are so important.)

We see the same dynamic with saying like 'it's not the mistake, it's the cover up.' 

People can be very forgiving if they know you were trying your best, and that you changed when you saw it was necessary. Take John F. Kennedy - the discussions on groupthink often talk about the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion. Then they go on to talk about how JFK took the lessons learned from that failure and used it to improve his team's decision making, best shown during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Anyways, Varoufakis mentioned two rather disturbing things (if you take him at his word, and for the purposes of this post I will). 

One was a call where someone basically threatened his son. The other was the way the 'troika', as he calls some of the established powers in Europe that were pressuring Greece during their crisis, basically tried to engineer a bank run when he and the party that made him Finance Minister came to power.

Both are the kinds of things that are hard to get attribution for, much like cyber attacks, which is why I said I'd take him at his word for this post. You can have a pretty good idea of why something happened without necessarily having the sort of proof you could take to court, and with all the conspiracy theories going around I generally lean towards 'you need to put up some proof for me to take it seriously', but that's more about needing some sort of standard then because people's theories are always wrong. (Though theories that require over 60 different judges of different political affiliations to be in on it don't really pass the sniff test.)

Anyways. As for the threatening phone call, I have to wonder about the people behind it. I'm assuming the caller worked for someone (and why didn't they question who they were working for, that they accepted an assignment like that?) Was that someone one person? Ten people? Did they have some sort of misguided justification that led them to think they were doing the right thing? Were they so focused on power that they knew it was wrong and just didn't care? Seriously, if you're sending threatening calls to people doing things you don't like, you probably ought to think long and hard about how you got there.

As for the bank run... I've come across indications that there can be some pretty shady things going on in economics/finance. (Iirc, there was something funky that helped trigger the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy, too).

I don't feel knowledgeable enough to speak out about that, other than to say that economics seems about half con artistry. 

Hmmm. That's not quite right. It's more like this - stock prices are supposed to reflect the company's ability to return value when they pay their stock holders. Some analysts to really in depth analysis of a company - their financials, the market, their plans for the next year - and make some judgment about just how much the stock is worth.

Others - are more about reading what everyone else is doing. Like in poker, which is as much about interpreting the body language of the other players as it is about knowing how good your hand is and the odds of getting what you need on the next flop.

Between people trying to buy low and sell high based on their assessment of what everyone else is doing, and programs that will buy or sell based on fluctuations in price, we often see severe swing that don't seem to have anything whatsoever to do with the basic fundamentals of the company. Con artistry. (Okay, not always, but there's plenty of room for it.)

Anyways, let's say there's the consensus of the IMF, ECB, etc. And their consensus is that austerity measures are required. 

A person focused on serving the people will evaluate the results and adjust as needed if it doesn't seem like their plan is working... whereas someone who is insecure will react as though it's a threat that needs put down.

The bank run sounds like the latter. Like, if your consensus is correct, if your policies are right - won't that become obvious when people try something different? (Same thing goes for Argentina, and China for that matter. They didn't act in keeping with the consensus - if the consensus is correct the failures will be harder and harder to hide. Unless... unless you do something that allows them to blame the failure on something else. Like a bank run.)

It really sounds more like bullying and control issues, rather than knowledgeable people acting on behalf of the public.

And that's the problem, isn't it?

Just like Trump's obsession with the optics of covid meant he didn't make policies focused on protecting American lives.

In short - it's incompetence, and you will lose power if you can't fix it.