House of Eratosthenes

Hillary Clinton’s non-testimony testimony this past week has me waxing philosophical. Next year I’m closing out my first half-century on the planet. That’s a rather ethereal, fluffy reality that’s hard to grasp. I know how to grasp it though: The probability that I’m past the midpoint, has ceased to be a likelihood and is now a certainty. What am I to do with that bit of cheerless information? First, we can distill it further: If life is a book, maybe I’m not yet on the final chapter but I know I’m in the final part of it. My perspective on the whole thing no longer matches the perspective of: A young adult, a teenager, a toddler, a baby. My dreams and complaints bear only a passing similarity to their dreams and complaints. Whereas, the complaints of those with one foot already in the grave, assuming they still possess all their faculties, match mine thought for thought and syllable for syllable.

One should strive for the most uncomfortable paradigm shifts, both large and small; that’s how we learn. Have I got any more earth-shattering humdingers headed my way, from this point forward? Perhaps, but the evidence suggests I should keep an eye out for just the smaller ones. On the other hand, if I’m wrong, it would be beneficial to jot down what I don’t expect to see changing, throughout the course of my second-half-century…or beyond. Think of it as a bread crumb trail.

The geezers have it in common with me — I have it in common with them — that we’re distressed the younger minds don’t show some more curiosity. This lament from the middle-agers precedes me by a great deal: “Leave home, pay your own bills and solve all the world’s problems while you still know everything!” Exasperation gives way to humility. We ask ourselves, “Was I that arrogant at that age? Did I show that much confidence about so little understanding?” and after just a moment or two of honest reflection, someone like me has to answer: I was worse.

Maybe that closes the matter. Sit down Grandpa, drink your Ensure and stuff a sock in it. I’d actually be open to this, but for one thing: That’s one of the things I’ve been noticing. The “Beverley Hills 90210” societies in which the young enjoy a complete monopoly on coolness, cachet…it being their turn to talk, all of the time…they don’t do well. Sometimes they prosper, on paper, as in pulling down very high numbers of dollars at their jobs, and blowing very high numbers of dollars on frivolities as well as essentials. But they don’t do well over time. How could they? The wisdom doesn’t accumulate, doesn’t get passed down from one generation to the next. No one in his sixties has anything to say that’s worth saying unless he looks like he’s in his thirties. And on average, whatever that guy’s saying isn’t going to reflect reality too well, since his facial features don’t. You can’t fight reality on one front, and claim to be its ally on another. That’s another thing I’ve noticed.

You want to find someone you can trust? Or, apply some test of trust to the people you’ve found already, or who found you? Look for the man who is willing to admit to his faults. Not, I hasten to add, eagerr to admit them. Just willing. Eagerness to admit faults is yet another problem, and that’s yet another thing I’ve been noticing in this first half-century. It stands to reason that men who are eager to discuss their mistakes are also eager to make some more. No, look for the guy who is eager to inspect the effects, to identify what he wants to do better next time. And to compile an inventory of mistakes from that.

Before I learned those things, I had very little interest in politics. I remember my revulsion against Ms. Clinton’s husband, when he came on the scene, had a lot less to do with political ideology than it did with public behavior. It was connected to my profession. Bill Clinton reminded me a lot of many people, not just one or two, who had made my life a bit less bearable. In hindsight, I know their role was to educate me, show me how to take responsibility for communicating details, by taking very little responsibility for it themselves, or none at all. This is something I needed to learn. Had I spent the entire time around people who took this responsibility on my behalf, I wouldn’t have learned it.

I haven’t been putting much thought into whether other people needed to learn the same thing. Maybe that’s a mistake. I’ve been blogging here & there about a bit of this and a bit of that, but I haven’t explored this particular bunny trail too much. Grandpa’s been sitting down and shutting his cakehole, as ordered. Anyway, I had this flash of inspiration about my “real job”: I excelled at making complex computer network systems behave a certain way, but ultimately this talent wouldn’t be worth a whole lot if I couldn’t communicate what these certain-ways were, or what they were supposed to be. This was a very sobering, even unpleasant, realization because that meant I would have to figure out how to communicate with people who thought differently, saw life differently. I would have to achieve some skills in places where I had no talent at all, in order to make use of the other places where I had more to offer. Rather like a potato or cabbage farmer, who knows how to grow the biggest produce for miles around, but can’t drive the cart to get it to market. I still remember that little jolt of economic panic, as if it was yesterday. What to do?

I noticed there was a certain personality type that always seemed to be around when I failed this way. President Clinton served as a living archetype of this, back then, and he still does, now his wife does too. These people make good leaders and colleagues for someone else, not so much for people like me. At least, I used to think that. Lately I have begun to entertain the idea that they don’t make good leaders for anybody at all. And as far as good colleagues…well, I suppose that happens now and then. You can make entire collectives out of people who think and strategize and speechify this way. And they’ll be very happy working together, and be fun to watch occasionally. Although they won’t get a lot done. Very little that’s positive, anyway.

But that’s not a problem for me to solve. People like me need to avoid having people like them, as colleagues or bosses. They aggravate me, and I anger them. That’s a fourth thing I’ve learned. I learned it awhile ago. My revulsion against the modern liberal, actually, came out of this. Until that point, I thought Jimmy Carter’s streak of failures was some sort of an anomaly, hanging like an albatross around the neck of one failed past president. Around this time, I began to realize that Carter’s pattern of failure was the modern liberal’s idea of success.

A fifth thing, which continues from the fourth thing, would be a list of the things we don’t want to see in these leaders. Or shouldn’t want to see, anyway. This is perhaps the one realization I’ve had, from the five decades, that would have helped me out at an earlier time.

1. The first thing we should not want to see in our leaders, is eagerness to be the leader. People who harbor this kind of zeal to bark out orders to others, make bad leaders. I remember one gentleman, no longer with us, who didn’t work this way. He’d hang back, let everyone make their own decisions about how to do their work from one hour to the next, one day to the next, one meeting to the next. Then he’d come alive, like a fly-eating house plant, when a question surfaced that would require some authority to be answered properly. Until that happened, he knew how to lie dormant and let the team resolve the smaller issues the way the team saw fit to resolve them. Contrasted with that style, the “little emperors” constantly barking out orders cause a lot of trouble. They destroy morale, because they want to hog all of the credit whenever something good happens, and when something goes awry you can count on them hunting for somebody to blame.

2. A very close second: We should make a much better effort to weed out those who work the crowd’s emotions too much. It really isn’t very important which emotions, positive or negative, make up the candidate’s stock-in-trade; doesn’t matter if they’re working up the crowd’s enthusiasm, wistfulness, loneliness, fears. When you’re talking about people who can achieve results no other way, have made a Maslow’s Golden Hammer out of strangers’ emotions, you’re talking about people who only pretend to have any control over the situation at all. This is why you see leaders looking for scapegoats. If they generate the results they want by working the crowd’s emotions, and they’re not getting the results they want, well…yes, that has to be someone else’s fault, of course. How could it be otherwise?

3. We should be paying very close attention to how leaders delegate. Be wary of the leaders who shun details. This is tricky because delegation is a necessity in even the simplest of projects, and it is in the nature of delegation to entrust details to someone else. The question is, what does the leader do with these delegated-details? The leader we don’t want, thinks he’s too good for them. Think about the relationship between the captain of your passenger ship, and the ship’s engines. Yes there are layers of officers and engineers between the skipper and the engines, nevertheless the former “owns” the latter, and should be ready to go down with the ship if he doesn’t know them as well as he thinks he does. In fact you, “captaining” your commuter vessel, have a similar relationship to the rivets that keep the bridge intact that supports your combined weight. Such captains are captains of not just the ships, but the parts, the crew, and most importantly, the strands of trust that form the webbing that keep it all afloat. So stay away from leaders that delegate, as a way to discard, duties and details.

4. In the same way we need to be avoiding leaders who shun details, we should be avoiding leaders who conceal them. We should be making a particularly keen effort to avoid leaders who make a sport out of this sort of (occasionally) clever obfuscation, as we’ve now seen both Clintons do.

5. Process and outcome. I’ve noticed things about this before. What’s the job, is it one of generating a certain desired end state, or is it one of following a defined process? The leader should match the job. The litmus-test question is only obvious: What do you do if you’re put in a position where you have to pick? Sometimes it’s appropriate to blow the results, because the process demands that you fail. Some leaders are a good match for this. Others are a bit like James Tiberius Kirk with the Kobayashi Maru Scenario.

6. We should stay far away from leaders who mistreat rules. I mean, the ones who seem to think the whole point of having rules is to hurt society. These would tend to be the ones who, overall, can be seen citing rules as reasons for not doing something. Can’t build that dam, it would violate the Endangered Species Act; can’t prosecute that crime, don’t have enough evidence that the guy did it. Most murder mysteries on the teevee have someone like this, it’s usually the killer: “Fine Lieutenant Columbo, you know I killed him but you have no proof!” During the five decades I have noticed, both in fiction and in real life, that it’s the same people who are everlastingly wandering around in these stink-clouds of stalemate, constantly coming up with new ways to say the same thing: “Aw shucks, I guess that’s the end of the trail and we’re going back empty-handed.” It isn’t that these people lack vision. They have a very strong vision, and it’s a vision of not getting the job done. A real leader is someone who starts the exercise with a vision that the goal WILL be attained, the question that lingers is how. What’s it take to do it, what has to be done, who’s the best person to do them. In my fiftieth year, I’m old enough to remember when that was part of the definition of “leader.” I guess that’s changed, somehow. We need to change it back if that’s the case.

7. A real leader believes in the rising tide lifting all boats. You’re looking at the wrong guy if he’s often seen to make a big deal out of who has how much; whose “turn” it is to pull out a victory; “everyone has to get a trophy or else no one does.” Call ’em what you will, the pivot-point people, the see-saw people, pie-people, zero-sum, balancers. They don’t have their eyes on the prize. This gets into outcome over process, again. Like Gen. George S. Patton said, “Have taken Trier with two divisions. What do you want me to do? Give it back?” That’s how you see it when your bus is teetering on the edge of a cliff, and someone manages to pull it back — you don’t care if that person is a man or a woman, gay or straight, right? And you’d never think of saying “Let it fall, we’ve had plenty enough [blank] people saving the day for now, we need to see some saves by someone in a different ethnic or economic group.” A real leader sees victory in victory. The team scores, the team succeeds, the team prospers. That’s the right mindset.

The distinction we’re really making here is between excellence and mediocrity. It can be hard to recognize this because the mediocre leaders have their followers, and the followers don’t see those leaders as mediocre. Jimmy Carter was a good example of that, and so are Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. That’s what makes these spectacles embarrassing, even by proxy against those who are merely watching, not supporting. It’s awkward because there’s supposed to be something special and extraordinary about Obama and Clinton, and even their most exuberant fans cannot say what this is.

They can’t, but I can. What makes them extraordinary is their ability to sell liberalism. Period, full stop. This has a powerful potential to convince people there is something remarkable about the people, because there is something remarkable about this feat. Liberalism is not easy to sell. At least, not across a decent stretch of time, throughout a sustained cycle of “buy some, experience it, buy some more.” It isn’t easy to sell that way because it’s not a good idea. It takes a special liberalism-salesman to sell it that way.

When these “fans” of rock-star liberal politicians talk up how special and amazing these rock stars are, they’re talking about that.

“Have I got any more earth-shattering humdingers headed my way, from this point forward?”

As somebody said: “Life is a series of lessons. Each lesson will be repeated until you learn it. At that point you will be given a new lesson.”
- vanderleun | 10/24/2015 @ 12:00
And someone else said, “but I’ve learned so much! I’m ready! Obi-Wan, tell him I’m ready!!”
- mkfreeberg | 10/24/2015 @ 12:25
It COULD be worse!
Dog Years.
Just imagine how much extra annual “insufferable” and “excruciating” one must endure “experientially”(I’m REALLY getting to despise that word) for each point to the right of the bell curve!
- CaptDMO | 10/25/2015 @ 12:13
[…] Morgan Freeberg gets ready to roll over the tens digit: […]
- dustbury.com » Quote of the week | 10/25/2015 @ 12:31

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