Last night I had a dream about a kingdom in a faraway land, closed off from the outside world by very high walls. The kingdom was ruled by a strong and wise King, who did everything he could to make sure everything inside the walls worked as normally as possible. Toward that end, he made sure to sit in judgment of a swift trial whenever anyone was caught doing something strange.

The sentencing looked a lot like that scene with the old guy in Judge Dredd. The convicted strange-person would be banished forevermore from the kingdom, and sent to walk outside the great doors and live outside the high walls, forever. This would be a huge ceremony with great celebration and fanfare. The villagers would gather by the great doors and jeer at the unfortunates forced to walk through them, throwing rotten vegetables at them. The people of the kingdom rejoiced in the power and wisdom of their king, and once the great doors slammed shut behind the condemned man, they imagined the worst.

A left-handed blacksmith was caught pounding on a new horseshoe with his left hand instead of with his right hand. He was banished from the kingdom.

A farmer’s wife was caught harvesting eggs from the chicken coop, grabbing them by the pointy end instead of by the big end. She was banished from the kingdom.

A boy was caught cleaning the horse stables with gloves on his hands. He was banished from the kingdom.

Nobody was too concerned about learning what happened to these people, but at suppertime they would let their imaginations run wild. Giant eagles would carry the condemned to their nests to feed their young, said an old woman. Jackals would drag them to the ground by their necks, and tear into their bellies, said an old man. Giant ants would cover them head to toe while they slept, and eat them alive, said a particularly obese little boy. The villagers saw them take the “Long Walk” through the great doors, the doors slammed shut, and the condemned might as well have disappeared. Then the villagers went back to their normal lives doing their normal things…as normally as was possible.

Then a funny thing happened.

They ran out of horseshoes. People had horses, but they couldn’t ride them anywhere.

They ran out of eggs. Families went hungry.

Nobody was cleaning out the stables, at least, not as quickly as they needed a cleaning. There was horse maneure everywhere.

Disease became rampant. A famine struck the kingdom.

The problems became worse and worse — and as they did, the wise, benevolent king became more strict about making sure his subjects were doing everything the normal way. A one-legged man was banished for limping wrong. A farmer harvesting corn was banished for wearing his harvesting bag over his right shoulder instead of over his left one. Another farmer was caught milking his cow by pulling on the teats in the wrong order, and he was banished.

Food became more and more scarce.

In desperation, someone finally decided to go hunting; and so, for the first time in a century or more, the villagers stepped outside the high walls of the great kingdom.

What did they find?

They found — another kingdom. Their whole world had existed inside of another one, a greater one…in which people weren’t afraid to do things in creative new ways. A larger kingdom full of stable boys shoeveling horse waste with gloves on their hands so they would stay healthy; farmers’ wives picking up eggs by whatever end was handy; and blacksmiths building horseshoes by swinging the hammer with whatever hand could do it the fastest and best. The handicapped made their way in whatever manner they chose, and nobody scolded them for it. The corn was piled high at harvest time because people picked it in whatever way they wanted to. The milk flowed freely because it was milked in whatever way made the most sense to the guy doing the milking.

The villagers realized that the “condemned,” upon walking out of those great doors, simply took up residence in the larger kingdom. The villagers had imagined that they had ostracized the condemned, but all this time, that had really only been ostracizing themselves. They sought to bind others and free themselves, and succeeded only in binding themselves and freeing others.

And in the great kingdom there was no disease, and there was no famine. People lived life fearlessly…pausing only to gaze at the high walls isolating the tinier kingdom in their midst, and shake their heads sadly. As for the villagers from the smaller kingdom, they had locked themselves up in a prison and hadn’t even known it. Bound by rules that made no sense. Deprived of freedom enjoyed by others. Blinded by their own ignorance. But — of course — painfully “normal.”

Upon waking, I realized my dream was simply Logan’s Run in reverse. The City of Domes citizens had rejoiced in the “renewal” of the thirty-year-olds on “Lastday,” presuming this was the natural outcome of “Carousel.” The spoiler was that there was no renewal and everyone who was dead was dead-for-good. In my dream, the villagers had presumed that anyone who was shut out of the gates had ceased to exist; the spoiler was that those who were ostracized, not only continued to exist, but enjoyed a greater standard of living than those who went on inside the high walls of the smaller kingdom.

They had become obsessed with normalizing things, and in so doing had going through a sort of play-acting like they were causing someone’s existence to come to an end. Out of sight, out of mind…but in the end they realized it was their own existence, if any at all, that they had brought to an end. They had sought to make their kingdom — their micro-kingdom — the epitome of cleanliness, and instead had made it into an object of filth.

My dream seems to have a lot of smooth parallels with real life, and the errors we tend to make as we live it. I think Rod Serling would have liked my dream.

Why is it that people who can’t take advice always insist on giving it?

— James Bond, Casino Royale (2006)

Crummy Factor #5: Innovation Comes to a Standstill
Day-to-Day Impact: Good ideas are ignored, and employees get resentful.

With accounting bureaucrats empowered, most managers can forget about pushing out new R&D projects, marketing campaigns, and innovation efforts. Although going aggressive can put a company in a better position to survive a slowdown, few firms can resist becoming risk-averse. Thus, mid-level leaders find themselves pulling back and focusing entirely on how to meet short-term financial goals. Not only can this strategy set a company back competitively, it also can demoralize top performers.

A mid-level employee at Restoration Hardware says slowed consumer spending has the company in lockdown mode. The staff used to be intense and driven, but motivation has deteriorated as top-level management becomes fixated on saving every penny instead of investing in better tools to manage inventory. “There are people like myself who are capable and willing to create the tools,” she says, “but it’s a combination of not having the financial resources or the desire for change.”

From Five Signs You Have a Crummy Job.

You know what I’ve noticed from my twenty years in the industry, is that when things start to look like this the word “change” becomes as popular as it ever has been, even moreso. It is the concept that loses it’s luster. The syllable itself does just fine.

I remember long, seemingly endless processions of big muckety-mucks who’d just been hired to fill the position left vacant by the last muckety-muck, and each guy would call an entire division in to a cafeteria somewhere. Just like those assemblies from high school. And he’d answer every question conceivable except for “so is this going to cost me my job?” and talk, and talk, and talk about change.

Saying exactly the same stuff the last guy said.

Then he’d high-tail it out of there inside of a year, and we’d be listening to exactly the same speech again from some other guy.

I think that’s where America is right now. I see it in Sen. Obama, big-time. The guy talks about change, but he’s delivering exactly the same speeches we heard before. He’ll end up being another Jimmy Carter before he’s done; everything he touches will turn to crap, in the years after he’s thankfully out of office there won’t be any reasonable way to doubt it anymore, and his biggest fans will insist that even though President Obama did a lot wrong and nothing right, we are all to think of him as a really nice, decent, all-around good guy.

And sixteen years from now, we’re sure to fall for the same crap from someone else. It’s what we deserve; we think we’re hungry for change, we say so, but we don’t act like it.

cat∙tle∙ness (intangible n.)

1. The proclivity of some to live like human cattle, meandering throughout their entire lives without changing the direction or outcome of anything by means of their participation, even as they may place great emphasis on the endeavor to so participate.
2. More specifically, the drive to become more receptive to the ideas of others, and to find creative new ways to communicate those ideas to even more others, coupled with a stultifying and bewildering apathy regarding what those ideas should be or the logical merits thereof.
3. The desire to criticize that which is already being criticized by others, nevermind whether or not it makes sense to criticize; coupled with a steadfast refusal to be the first to criticize something, even though it might make a lot of sense to criticize it. Human cattle tend to use the “box of donuts” rule when it comes to criticism — it’s okay to grab the biggest gaudiest dripping maple bar and start ripping into it rapaciously once someone else has already busted the box open, but nobody wants to go first.
4. Loosely, it may refer to a determination to live life for the purpose of being happy, and for no higher purpose, since cows are kept for the purpose of producing a product and it is often said they produce it in greater quality and quantity when they’re happy.
5. A drive to convince other humans in proximity to live their lives like human cattle, by means of scolding, encouragement, coaxing and bullying. To denounce individuality and independent thinking in others, once one has purged those things from his or her own psyche.

24. People who imagine themselves as part of a group, with no individual identity, don’t want anyone else to have an individual identity either.

— From Everything I Know About People, Minus What I Was Told When I Was A Child

Cattleness is both a behavior and a membership; an important part of the behavior is to seek to expand the membership. All instances of cattleness involve this recruiting, but all efforts to recruit are not necessarily related to cattleness. The litmus test is that a great, universal, infinitely-expanding mob of people is invited to participate in the behavior — but the privilege of defining what that behavior is supposed to be, is confined to an elite few.

Therefore, the commoners propel, and the elite steers; the commoners pretend to do the steering while obediently awaiting their next orders. Where that dichotomy takes place, you have cattleness.

And my inspiration, of course, is the post previous in which we’re treated to the sight of box office star Will Smith faithfully following that “Box o’ donuts” rule in criticizing a President who’s not going to be President anymore in half a year no matter what. His criticism? There must be something wrong with that guy, because the Europeans are being rude to us.

Will Smith has a bigger brain than the average cow, I’m sure; the problem is he isn’t channeling the surplus nodes and synapses, and therefore it doesn’t very much matter what equipment he has upstairs. The thought “y’know, maybe this says a lot more about rude Europeans than it does about anything else” appears to have made itself a stranger in those parts. I don’t know how you avoid even pondering it for a second or two, but thanks to his cattleness he seems to have accomplished exactly that.

Maybe I’m too tough on the guy, making up a whole new word just for him. After all, it’s not like he’s the first hollywood dimwit to criticize George W. Bush; and it’s not like he’s the first celeb to criticize President Bush just because Europeans are being rude to Americans.

It’s not like he’s the first guy to say any of the things he’s said.

But that’s exactly the point. Isn’t it?