I picked the book Careless People back up again (between the death of my brother's fiancee, job hunting, and various other things I'd stopped reading it for a while) and it reminded me of some thoughts I'd had a while back.
Namely - that not everyone has the same background in my fields of interest.
I know, I know... that's sort of a 'well, duh!' statement. Bear with me.
I remember first thinking about this when recalling my experience with some of my fellow officers in the Army.
Actually, thinking even further on this - the military offers actual leadership training, in a way I don't think many people get any more. That's where I first heard 'leadership is an art and a science', after all. And my ROTC commander was the one that encouraged us to read business management books, like the One Minute Manager.
I'll admit that I didn't initially see the connection between business management resources and the military, but both deal with people, so there's some overlap. (And actually, there are multiple reading lists for junior officers, and the reading choices are not just about military history. Oh... my first battalion commander gave us an assignment to read one and write a book report, and I got a very positive comment on mine. I think I did it on Embattled Courage? I probably still have the report somewhere, but I'm not going to dig through my old records to find it.)
Anyways. The point was that people have different backgrounds, and things that I considered obvious and well known are... not. At least, not to someone who didn't have the same schooling.
Which I think about, with regards to Careless People, because I have had a life long interest in decision making and public policy and so on and so forth... and while I won't say these people are actually dumb, it's quite clear that their backgrounds did not include any of that. My impression is that most of it was all tech related, maybe business management related, but they were really not the ones to grapple with how tech effects society. At least, not initially.
Which, well... I get that it's the company you created, and of course you want to be involved in how it grows, but I can't help thinking that if you really dislike all that boring policy and people stuff that maybe you ought to reconsider being the CEO? Find someone who actually wants to do what the job requires?
Well, that's neither here nor there. It really seems like people who didn't have the background to understand - Idk how to describe it, but people in general? The social sciences? It's not just about politics or public policy after all, it's all those fuzzy things that don't have neat and clear solutions - they just sort of stumbled into a situation that required skills and understanding that they just didn't have.
Which, well... okay. I would have hoped for and expected some sort of due diligence and attempt to learn that, but whatever. I also would have expected better from the one guy who really was involved with politics, but honestly if that's what Harvard is turning out these days then you probably could have just pulled some random person off the street and the same knowledge level. But then again, people go to those schools more for the connections and networking, don't they? (Yet another reason why I won't call them 'elite'. Or maybe just 'elite at networking' or something.)
So they stumbled into a situation that a tech and business background wasn't really enough to address, and instead of really sitting and thinking about it the responses were more reactionary.
Just... dealing with situations as they developed, which meant sometimes being pushed into making policy decisions on the fly.
And then Facebook became the influential force we all acknowledge it is today, but by that point the initial reactionary responses and the natural tendency to resent being told what to do came into play (even if the pressure to regulate, especially with dissatisfaction overwidespread misinformation, was entirely predictable and probably could have been handled earlier if people had sat down and really thought about this. With the right people, of course.)
Furthermore, as I've said before, this seems like just a snapshot of what the wider 1% is like... and that's discouraging.
Yesterday I talked about how wise monarchs were rarely followed by similarly wise successors. I think part of the problem is that we aren't all that great at passing along wisdom. In game theory, they talked about how copy mistakes meant that in an ongoing game of competing strategies where a successful strategy was copied... sometimes it didn't get copied exactly the same, and that would change how things played out.
I think passing along wisdom is kind of like that. The successor may copy parts of their predecessor's strategy but never the whole of it. Which is also probably why we sometimes get a wise ruler after one that was less so... it's not always one way of course.
Anyways, the point is that it seems obvious the wisdom of earlier Americans (and the most powerful of them) have clearly not been passed along to the current era.
Separation of church and state is one of the big ones. These white christian nationalists don't seem to care about how ugly it gets whenever that is ignored. Do they really have reason to believe it'll be different this time?
Not that it'd be okay even if they had, since they'd be disregarding the faiths of all the non-christian Americans, as well as atheists. I've got nothing against people of faith practicing in their private lives, but you would think a religion in which we are told
“And when you pray, you must not be like the hypocrites. For they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and at the street corners, that they may be seen by others. Truly, I say to you, they have received their reward. But when you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret. And your Father who sees in secret will reward you."
Matthew 6:5-6
And
“[God] … shows love to the foreigners living among you and gives them food and clothing. So you, too, must show love to foreigners, for you yourselves were once foreigners in the land of Egypt.”
Deuteronomy 10:18-19
And when the Samaritans were a distinct ethnic group that grew alongside Judaism and we have an entire parable about how the Samaritan who had mercy on a man who had been mugged and left for dead was a better role model than the priest who avoided him because he wanted to avoid having to do all that ritual cleansing for touching a dead body (or perhaps fear that it was a trap and he'd be mugged as well). Point was, the Bible itself tells us to love our neighbors, that those neighbors can be foreign or different, and that it's more important to care for each other than to get bogged down with other details.
Ahem.
Right, white christian nationalists are only one part of the problem. There's also what seems like a very childish and juvenile level of partisanship, which cares more about putting one over on the other political party than about governing. And after our Founding Fathers wrote all that stuff about the evils of partisanship!
It's very frustrating to see people with the power to truly make a difference - and then they just absolutely waste it making things worse.
Seems like they don't deserve all those rewards our system gives them.
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