House of Eratosthenes

Okay, we’ve been on a wild tear lately — in response to current events — about the common mistake of placing too much weight on human wonderfulness. The people wrapped up in this are engaged in a hopeless contradiction: They wish to evaluate the human wonderfulness in individual terms, on which some of us are found to possess this wonderfulness and others of us are found to be wanting. But in the Utopia they wish to build, as well as on the road to it, the individual means nothing and is even treated with great hostility. It is a collectivist society they wish to build, on a collectivist foundation with collectivist bricks and collectivist mortar. Designed with collectivist thinking.

Mean Girls We’ve pointed out the mistakes they make, and the mistakes they make about people like me who point out the mistakes they make. We’ve also pointed out that this is, whether they deign to admit it or not, an ugly wellspring of all kinds of toxic detritus in our polices, both public and private, within recent history. It is also a vicious addiction; to take in more of the elixir that quenches the thirst is to aggravate the thirst. People intent on proving their wonderfulness are never, ever quite done proving their wonderfulness. They are druggies on a high — they do not live in a world of cause and effect.

Well, except for one cause, one effect. As soon as we put all the beautiful people in charge of everything, and make sure the ugly people are absolutely ineffectual in everything they do, all the problems will somehow be solved.

Other than that, not a single object in this universe possesses any cause-and-effect relationship to any other object. The whole thing is a big, cosmic gooey mess that, at any given instant, radiates some kind of vibe. A mood, be it euphoric, midly amusing, sad, miserable or frustrating. Everlasting pleasure is ours as soon as the ultra-cool people decide everything and the prudish, puritan & un-hip decide nothing.

You might say it’s a post-modern version of Calvinism.

And so it was not the words, but the argument itself, that fascinated me with ReelGirl’s reaction to Carly Fiorina’s open-mic mishap in which the challenger ridiculed the incumbent Senator Barbara Boxer for her hairstyle.

Let’s get one thing perfectly clear about this: I agree with ReelGirl, at least with her initial inferences. Carly Fiorina’s comment, be it live-mic-ambushed or not, does betray a deficiency of class and not a small one. To add insult to injury, “so yesterday” is appallingly juvenile. The very syllables grate on my nerves.

Nevertheless I am taking issue for two reasons. They’re both good ‘uns.

One: It is laughable and snort-worthy to attack someone — anyone — for failing to give Sen. Barbara Boxer respect for her dignity. Boxer is inherently undignified as a person. Trying to respect her dignity is like trying to respect the masculinity of a man who whores his wife out to strangers. It can’t be done. You can’t give someone respect they do not claim for themselves; you cannot give someone dignity they do not already have; and Boxer has repeatedly shown she doesn’t care one bit about her stature except as it is perceived among the hard left.

Two: The title of Heather’s post falls right into exactly what I’ve been bitching about. This notion that we need to keep mean people out of office. Therefore, we have to keep our offices filled up with nice people. This is central to the essence of my complaint. It is the divide between Architects and Medicators. The former say personalities are irrelevant and what we really need is some wise policy, since they live in a universe of objects connected by cause-and-effect relationships. The latter say the policies do not matter, we just put beautiful people in charge of things and Nirvana will follow.

At this point, my sense of right & wrong is unified with my best guess about what’s going to happen. Medicators are in charge right now, to the maximum extent they ever will be in charge for the next decade and a half. They have reached a zenith and are now on an earthward plunge, like a lawn dart. Their way of doing things has been subjected to a fair test, and it has failed. We put their man-god in charge of everything. The Reinvestment Act of 2009 showed that they don’t have any fresh new ideas that are going to help us. The Oil Spill disaster of 2010 showed that even if they did have some good ideas, they have no ways of carrying them out: All they really offer is a more bellicose and bumptious way of giving orders. They even gave us a four-word bumper sticker slogan that illustrates this starkly: “Plug the damn hole!”

And so early this morning, I effectively killed the conversation, I think, with these paragraphs:

I can see from the title of your post that the important thing to you is to make sure our offices are filled with decent people, even if the resulting policies are terrible. More than a few people are coming around to my way of thinking on this…which is that this is precisely how we’ve gotten terrible policies, by worrying too much about getting “wonderful” people into those positions and keeping them there. So we have a difference of opinion there, and I respect yours. If you’re right and we should be arguing about the candidates’ inner decency, you’re right Ms. Fiorina did herself no credit here. Some of our powerful women feel a burning need to show how snarky they are — hey, blame feminism. Boxer’s done the same thing on more than one occasion.

We’re two years into an era in which Boxer’s party has been in control of everything that matters. If we’re supposed to like the results, Boxer can campaign on that. I hope she does. If we’re not, but we’re supposed to believe the results of the next two years are supposed to be somehow different from the results of the first two…she can campaign on that. Or she can show us how much of a more wonderful person she is than Fiorina. Point is, if you want to evaluate them that way, I think you should do it even-handedly. Only a shallow thinker would systematically excuse every single catty, churlish thing ever done by Boxer, while jumping on the equivalent things done by Fiorina like some hungry predator who’s picked up the scent of blood.

That would be the definition of knee-jerk partisan politics. It would also be the very definition of prejudice — to pre-judge. That isn’t what you’re all about, is it?

Since then, I note the irony: About eleven years ago, our hardcore liberal left-wingers were waggling their fingers at us. Oh, they do this all the time, but at that time it was about something special: Our hardcore liberal left-wing President had been caught having an affair with an intern young enough to be his daughter and then lying about it to obstruct justice, Richard-Nixon style. We were supposed to look past this. Why? Something about “private conduct” and “public performance” or “performance in public office.” Our hardcore left-wing zealots were waggling their fingers over the idea that these were two different things and it was a mistake to conflate them.

It must be a tough way to go through life. These “private” shortcomings are not supposed to count for anything…unless pointing them out happens to help, in some way, the leftist agenda. And then, suddenly, they are all that matter. They trump questions that really are important, like policies that are smart, or stupid, likely to culminate in good or poor results.

Getting your dick sucked by an intern who could be your daughter’s college roommate, doesn’t matter. Tossing out a Valley Girl screed about someone else’s crappy hairstyle, is a debilitating character defect.

It’s all decided by which letter is in the back of your name.

Like I said, it must be a tough way to go through life.

If there’s any merit to the reaction you describe, I think it lies in one thing that is observably true: All people have emotional needs that must be met in order for them to coexist peaceably, even if they themselves are not aware of those needs or lack the skills to articulate them usefully. (The people who have absolutely no emotional need from anyone are also the people who have no emotional connection to anyone; we call these people sociopaths.)

The value of the Medicator function — I would suggest Mediator is a better term — is its use in negotiating conflicting emotional needs to achieve the maximum possible satisfaction for everyone involved, so that the tasks and functions those people actually do in their Architect function (you’ll notice I distinguish them by function, rather than person, because I believe we all have elements of both) can be organized to mutually support, reinforce and enhance each other. Personalities are never irrelevant, no matter how brilliant the Architect; the simple belief that we can treat people like their personalities don’t matter is itself a personality flaw (because it betrays a profound hubris and contempt for other people) that will undermine anything an Architect tries to accomplish, no matter how brilliant he is.

I can’t count the number of times Republican, conservative and right-wing bloggers and pundits bemoaned the fact that Bush was either incapable or uninterested in arguing for any of his policies; they praised the fact that he tried to go ahead and act rather than do nothing but talk, as Obama seems mostly to do, but over and over again his ineptitude at winning people over impeded a lot of what he wanted to do.

There is merit in the argument that it is better to have someone who acts rather than talks, vs. someone who only talks and doesn’t act, but it might be better still to have someone capable of both.
- Stephen J. | 06/11/2010 @ 17:15
I can’t remember where I went into this, but somewhere I had explored this in detail: Yes, we do have the ability to do both, but we become enmeshed in deploying one or the other when we are faced with a complex challenge. A complex challenge is something that 1) we haven’t achieved before 2) we didn’t expect 3) lies between us and some other goal we want to reach…and some other stuff. It requires original, creative, resourceful thinking.

Also, it’s easy to form a vision of fulfilling that challenge by one way or the other.

We all tend to enmesh ourselves further into our chosen half, by reliably deploying one method or another to meet the challenge. I think the example I used might have had something to do with Blondie and Dagwood’s sink — Dagwood wants to fiddle with the parts of the sink, Blondie wants to call the plumber.

I no longer believe people nurture some mix of both of these. I think it’s like using a right hand or a left hand; individuals favor one or the other. You see how a new acquaintance will meet one such challenge, you can predict with reasonable likelihood how he will meet all of the others. But I do agree with you, we do have the fundamental ability to do both. We just don’t use it.
- mkfreeberg | 06/11/2010 @ 19:20
It’s certainly true people tend to favour one over the other; I have, perhaps, more faith in people’s ability to realize their preferred method won’t work or isn’t working for a particular challenge, and either do the best they can with the other method, or call on someone who can do better with that method. (It does seem to me that many practicing Mediators are quicker to call on people with better Architect skills than Architects are willing to call on others with better Mediator skills — but that’s a basic philosophical difference: calling on other people is itself a use of a Mediator skill and thus self-reinforcing, while calling for another Architect’s skills is an admission that your own are inadequate, and thus self-weakening. Venus vs. Mars, as ’twere.)

Where the people you rightly criticize go wrong is to take this truth and run with it into the trap of thinking that Mediator skills are all that matter; that elected office should involve nothing except persuading others to cooperate (or persuading them to pass the laws that force them to), and that someone with demonstrated flaws in doing this — someone “mean”, someone who believes in constructive criticism rather than encouraging praise, someone who will burn bridges as not worth maintaining rather than build them because any bridge is worth maintaining — cannot be fit for the office.
- Stephen J. | 06/12/2010 @ 06:59
(It does seem to me that many practicing Mediators are quicker to call on people with better Architect skills than Architects are willing to call on others with better Mediator skills…)

The ones you call “mediators” are always going to excel at this, and anything that has to do with communicating with others…on average. The Architect really doesn’t excel until such time as he has an opportunity to declare a project and put a proper impenetrable perimeter around it. He works in solitude. He’s better at building things because only he has the proper tools to lay down a foundation of rules for whatever he’s going to build: Inside the perimeter, everything has to work his way, and outside the perimeter he doesn’t care. So he’s more Libertarian by nature.

Medicators are perpetually confused because they don’t have the perimeter. Things should just simply work this way, regardless of where they are. Obama is a perfect example of this, just listen to Him speak…”I just think [blank] should [blank].” Control freak. Their tendency is to try to get everything to work a certain way, usually by motivating others by means of cheer, applause, “we can do this,” outrage, anger, and then after awhile they give up. And so they rely on the others to build.real things.
- mkfreeberg | 06/12/2010 @ 08:50

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“Mean Girls”Friday, June 11th, 2010

“Mean Girls”
Friday, June 11th, 2010