House of Eratosthenes

The one hundred ninth award for the Best Sentence I’ve Heard Or Read Lately (BSIHORL) goes to Andrew Breitbart, who has been offered a forum for presenting his side of the story by — surprise! — GQ of all places (hat tip to blogger friend Rob Bariton). As the subject turns to Hollywood, he lets fly this piece of bumper sticker goodness worthy of an embiggened font:

Hollywood has traded in the casting couch for the political fundraiser.

The interview continues:

The first thing that a young lady who gets off the Greyhound Bus learns is to see and be seen at liberal-based fundraisers.

You really think that’s the first thing they learn?

One hundred percent.
:
How are you going after Planned Parenthood? In what way?

They’re a corrupt organization!

How so?

These people are the best service industry professionals in the history of the world. They have a dark soul. But let me just say something about Planned Parenthood: I’m pro-life, but it’s because I’m selfish and adopted. It’s not because of some grand theological overview. Nothing drives me crazier than seeing an abortion van driving along at a conservative convention showing aborted fetuses. I think that’s the wrong aesthetic. Randall Terry shoving fetuses in people’s faces is wrong.

Do you think Planned Parenthood is going to be your next ACORN?

It’s not my ACORN. But yeah, I do.

Why do liberals have such boring radio shows?

I wish I could give you a more clever answer, but it’s because they exist in an environment in which they don’t have to ever argue their points. Conservatives know what liberals think because we have to swim in their waters.

Pretty interesting stuff. On the thing about Hollywood driving some crusade for ideological purity, it’s hard to deny it when you watch the Oscars. And it becomes even harder when you take note of that last part, about liberals never having to argue their points…and then you look at what gets pumped out. Follow the plot, follow the moral of the story at the end, closely inspect what the film is trying to say. Freakin’ boring.

I identify with what he’s jotting down here because I once made the mistake of entering management, and I co-mingled with some folks who had this attitude; “let’s make the entire world just like us, starting right here.” I’d seen this before, many years further in the past…previously it was bible-thumpers, this time it was Kerry/Obama-worshiping lefties. Should’ve seen it coming, but in fairness to myself, my role in this was passive rather than active. I didn’t choose to co-mingle. I got co-mingled. I’m guessing that’s how it works. Anyway, it started out promising…and stayed that way…as long as getting things accomplished was more important than showing my team-player-ish-ness, “no mavericks here.” Somewhere along the way, the job came to be about everyone on the team looking at the world exactly the same way to show what a great team we were, and not about getting anything done. No, really: If there was a deliverable and it was missed, but all characteristics that made us unique were completely undetectable, that was a success. On the other hand, if the deadlines got met with everyone tackling their own workload in their own unique way, that was a fail. I think that’s the definition — that’s when the trolley has come off the tracks. At that point, I got drummed out and I probably should’ve been. Now I’m an engineer again; I see it as a win, and a lesson. You want to see how management works, the same way you want to learn how sausage is made.

This is not a unique story in the technical professions, by any means. The paragraph above could have been jotted down by any one of, I dunno, maybe millions of people. Apart from whatever might be unique about my writing style, you’d never know who wrote it. It’s a fairly common story.

And the moral is that creativity is the first casualty when the managers-of-managers put some effort in to what I suppose is a natural, primitive desire, this crusade toward sameness. When they get it in their heads to say “Hey you know what would make our team really great? If everyone on it was exactly the same.” I guess we’re all a little bit like this. You see it in the way principals and teachers run elementary schools. It’s easier to manage a hundred ball bearings of equal size than a hundred objects of assorted shapes, sizes, textures, masses; gives you a lot more latitude to define the word “manage.” Lowers the effort. This, I think, is the root cause of reader Severian‘s rule (paraphrased): “All institutions not specifically chartered to lean right, end up leaning left.”

The casting couch for the political fund-raiser — that just captures it. If we were to napalm Hollywood out of existence completely, and start a new one, when all’s said & done it wouldn’t be appreciably different from what we have right now. That new one would also trade the casting couch for the political fund-raiser, and it would lean left. All institutions do this. They start out with an attitude of, let’s refine our capabilities so we can deal with whatever problem comes up. Which demands thinking like a righty: liberty; freedom; reward for hard work; try and try again, and all that stuff.

Then someone gets the thought going — this team will be greater than the sum of its parts, if we can get it working according to standards. It works, at first. And then there are more standards, then more, then more…then it becomes a clean-up operation when someone notices “I see if I give a job to this guy it will get done this way, but if I give it to that guy it will get done some other way.” Followed immediately by “there must be one best way to do any job, so let’s force everyone to do everything the same way after we figure out what the best way is.” That’s a problem.

You’re not going to see the good, rugged, quality thinking you’d expect, going in to figuring out what that best way is. You’d think the first realization would be “Wow, this will affect every little thing we do, we’d better be sure and get it really, really right.” You’d be reasonable to think so, but you’d be wrong. “How every job, big and small, is going to get done” is destined to be the most casual, breeziest, quickest decision your management team has ever made before, or will ever make again.

The method selected will generally be the method that offers the greatest sense of comfort — “awesome, that’s the way I was already doing it anyway!” — to the people who do the most talking. To the political-animals. Political, small-p, as in office-politics. The ones who can be counted on for very little, apart from getting the last word about every little thing. The people whose single favorite computer application is the e-mail client. At that point, you’re a bureaucracy. People don’t say it out loud because they like earning a paycheck, but deep down everybody knows it is true.

And your organization is no longer capable of doing what it could once do before. Ability comes from resourcefulness; resourcefulness relies on creativity; creativity cannot exist without individual autonomy and freedom. That is why the Oscars are lame, and that is why you aren’t watching as many movies from beginning to end anymore. Your attention span isn’t dwindling. The movies are more boring. Hollywood is practicing that “hey, let’s make the entire world exactly the same, starting right here” thing. They’re sacrificing ability & creativity for something else.

Followed immediately by “there must be one best way to do any job, so let’s force everyone to do everything the same way after we figure out what the best way is.” That’s a problem.

I’m sure y’all are sick of me thumping on this (and I will set up my own blog once I get back with Philmon on some of the details), but you’ve just summed up the Marxist mindset in a nutshell. That’s why all leftists are fundamentally Marxists, and why Marxism is a perfect distillation of a certain, sadly prevalent type of human personality.

Marxism billed itself as the best — indeed, the only — way to do things. If you accept the premises of Marxism, you must logically, necessarily conclude that there is one best and only way to do things, and that this one and only and best way is made inevitable by Reason and History. That’s why leftists never, ever stop, and why they’re so blithely unconcerned about the actual results of their policy. It simply must be right, you see — the Theory decrees it — and therefore it will end up the right way if we just keep pushing.

[The logical, necessary corollary of this, of course, is that the one sure way to make things turn out right is to kill (metaphorically, or in reality) everyone who disagrees, and leftists fundamentally have no problem with this either. Just look around].

It’s a great theory if all you really care about is bossing people around. If you know you’ll never be of any particular distinction, and don’t want anyone else to be either, you can make sure everyone sinks down to your level — and get a nice little sanctimonious charge out of “helping” The Masses. What’s not to love?

[PS my rule you quoted up there is Robert Conquest’s Second Law of Politics. I wish I’d invented it].
- Severian | 03/19/2011 @ 12:09
I shall get that corrected then. Wish I’d said that, too; many’s the time I thought it to myself, before ever seeing it in print.

Interesting thought: Conservatives/libertarians, particularly the Ayn Rand fans, also believe in “the right way” to do things. But they/we perceive it a little bit differently, at a macro level. You could sum it up as “there’s a right way and a wrong way to do everything.” And then at the micro level is where the local authority reigns supreme.

But up at thirty thousand feet, there’s a consistent vision. That’s what all those awesome captains of industry were doing in Galt’s Gulch. Each character was a statement of “there’s a right way to do [blank].” The founder of a copper company, of a steel company, a car company, an oil company, a banker, a judge, even a philosopher and a music composer. Every single one between the ages of 37 and 44 and childless, of course. That’s what I got out of it, anyhow. There’s a right way and a wrong way to do everything.

But the Marxists…yeah. Principle and vision are not enough. It’s all got to be reduced down to a procedure driven, sequenced script. Only the power brokers at the center of the hub are allowed to exercise any decision-making, otherwise someone might come along and steal some of the spotlight.
- mkfreeberg | 03/19/2011 @ 12:34
Not having read Atlas Shrugged, I can’t comment too much on the Randian vision, except to say that Ayn Rand herself was very much a my-way-or-the-highway type personality, and that “pure” capital-L Libertarianism is every bit as fallacious as doctrinaire Marxism.

I think the problem with both is that the word “right” has simultaneous functional, procedural, epistemological, and ethical connotations (and probably more). Most people — myself certainly included — have a hard time clearly differentiating which kind of “right” they mean in discussions like this… not least because it’s oh-so-easy to score debater’s points by blurring the distinction.

I’m just noodling here, so I may be full of crap…. but I think I can illustrate what I’m talking about with a content-neutral example: baseball.

There’s a “right” way to hit a curveball in all four senses.

Functionally, the “right” way to hit a curveball is: whatever way gets you on base. This says nothing about the other three ways. For instance, if you lean into a high and tight curveball and you get plunked… hey, you’re on base.

Procedurally, it’s “swinging the bat in such a way that it impacts the ball squarely.” Doesn’t matter if it’s a home run or a foul pop or a dribbler back to the mound — you’ve swung the bat in the approved way taught by baseball coaches from Abner Doubleday forward.

There’s an epistemologically “right” way to hit a curveball. Something like, “what are the truth conditions under which it can be known whether the bat impacted the ball?” I.e. how do we know we “hit” the ball, and was the pitch in fact a curveball as opposed to a slider?

There’s even an ethically right way to hit a curveball: you don’t consciously aim at the pitcher’s head when you’re hitting it.

The problem with both Randian Libertarianism and Marxist Socialism (speaking only for myself here) is that they only know — and, to be fair, only strictly claim to know — the “right” thing in the epistemological sense. Marxists say the state will inevitably wither away because the Logic of History requires it, and Randians claim that societies will spontaneously self-regulate, and self-optimize, because the Logic of Laissez-Faire requires it. Both go wrong when they introduce evaluative language into their arguments, either consciously (because they’re trying to win the debate) or just because it’s hard to keep everything strictly straight without sounding like an enormous pedant (in the way I deliberately did above).

When Marxists want to win a debate they accuse us of “not caring about the little guy.” When you point out that their policies are objectively hurting the little guy, they “win” the argument — in their own heads at least — by falling back on epistemology (or, most likely, ingrained, half-understood notions about the nature of “capital” and the requirements of History). Similarly, when Randians want to win an argument, they point out that no collective can understand an individual’s wants and needs better than he himself can… but without any reference to the content of those individual wants and needs. What if the individual wants to commit murder? There’s a “right” way to do that, too, in all but the ethical sense, and doctrinaire Libertarianism is just as ill-equipped to argue about why it’s wrong as is doctrinaire Marxism.

[Yes, yes — I know Rand would argue that her definition of “liberty” entails only the autonomous individual and that it doesn’t impose on others. But: there are no autonomous individuals. “Autonomy” is at bottom arbitrary. Which is actually what the doctrinaire Marxist would argue, actually — we’re nothing outside of our social position. Thus the extremes meet, just like they do in practical politics].

So it seems to me, anyway. Any thoughts?
- Severian | 03/19/2011 @ 13:40
Ugh. Just re-read my last. Guess I’m not immune to attacks of blathering pomposity, eh? Feel free to delete.
- Severian | 03/20/2011 @ 18:28
Nuh-huh. I want to answer it. Soon as I get a wild hair up my ass and a case of insomnia…
- mkfreeberg | 03/20/2011 @ 19:15
Man, pretty much all of that went right over my head. And I thought I was a pretty bright guy.
- cylarz | 03/23/2011 @ 16:23

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