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Authoritarian’s Lament

Davy Crockett stamp
Davy Crockett was an individualistic hero for children growing up in the 1950s and 1960s. Circa 1967 post stamp printed in USA shows Davy Crockett with rifle and scrub pines. Oldrich / Shutterstock.com

22 May 2019 – I grew up believing in the myth of the rugged individualist.

As did most boys in the 1950s, I looked up to Davy Crockett, Daniel Boone and their ilk. Being fond of developing grand theories, I even worked out an hypothesis that the wisdom of any group’s decisions was inversely proportional to the group’s size (number of members) because in order to develop consensus, the decision had to be acceptable to even the stupidest member of the group.

With this background, I used to think that democracy’s main value was that it protected the rights of individuals – especially those rugged individuals I so respected – so they could scout the path to the future for everyone else to follow.

I’ve since learned better.

There were, of course, a lot of holes in this philosophy, not the least of which was that it matched up so well with the fevered imaginings I saw going on in the minds of authoritarian figures and those who wanted to cozy up to authoritarian figures. Happily, I recognized those philosophical holes and wisely kept on the lookout for better ideas.

First, I realized that no single individual, no matter how accomplished, could do much of anything on their own. Even Albert Einstein, that heroic misfit scientist, was only able to develop his special theory of relativity by abandoning some outdated assumptions that made interpreting results of experiments by other scientists problematic. Without a thorough immersion in the work of his peers, he wouldn’t have even known there was a problem to be solved!

Similarly, that arrogant genius, Sir Isaac Newton  recognized his debt to his peers in a letter to Robert Hooke on 5 February 1676 by saying: “If I have seen a little further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.”

For all of his hubris, Newton was well known to immerse himself in the society of his fellows.

Of course, my childhood heros, Davy Crockett, Daniel Boone, and Captain Blood, only started out as rugged individuals. They then went on to gather followers and ended up as community leaders of one sort or another. As children, we used to forget that!

My original admiration of rugged individualists was surely an elitist view, but it was tempered with the understanding that predicting in advance who was going to be part of that elite was an exercise in futility. I’d already seen too many counterexamples of people who imagined that they, or somebody they felt inferior to, would eventually turn out to be one of the elite. In, for example, high school, I’d run into lots of idiots (in my estimation) who strutted around thinking they were superior to others because of (usually) family background or social position.

We called that “being a legend in their own mind.”

Diversity Rules!

Eventually, I realized what ancient Athenians had at least a glimmer of, and the framers of the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution certainly had a clear idea of, and what modern management theorists harp on today: the more diverse a group is, the better its decisions tend to be.

This is, of course, the exact reverse of my earlier rugged-individualist hypothesis.

As one might suspect, diversity is measurable, and there are numerous diversity indices one might choose from to quantify the diversity within a group. Here I’m using the word “group” in the mathematical sense that such a group is a set whose members (elements) are identifiable by sharing specific characteristics.

For example, “boys” forms a group of juvenile male human beings. “Girls” forms another similar, but mutually exclusive group. “Boys” and “girls” are both subsets of multiple larger groups, one of which is “young people.”

“Diversity” seeks to measure the number of separate subgroups one can find within a given group. So, you can (at least) divide “young people” into two subgroups “boys” and “girls.”

The importance of this analysis is that the different characteristics common within subgroups lead to different life experiences, which, the diversity theory posits, provide different points of view and (likely) different suggestions to be considered for solutions to any given problem.

So, the theory goes, the more diverse the group, the more different solutions to the problem can be generated, and the more likely a superior choice will be presented. With more superior choices available and a more diverse set (There’s that word again!) of backgrounds that can be used to compare the choices, the odds are that the more diversity in a group, the better will be the solution it finally chooses.

Yeah, this is a pretty sketchy description of the theory, but Steven Johnson spends 216 pages laying it out in his book Farsighted, and I don’t have 216 pages here. The sketch presented here is the best I can do with the space available. If you want more explanation, buy the book and read it.

Here I’m going to seize on the Gini–Simpson diversity index, which uses the probability that two randomly selected members of a group are members of the same subgroup (λ), then subtracts it from unity. In other words in a group of, say, young people containing equal numbers of boys and girls, the probability that any pair of members selected at random will be either both boys or both girls is 0.5 (50%). The Gini-Simpson index is 1-λ = 1 – 0.5 = 0.5.

A more diverse group (one with three subgroups, for example) would have a lower probability of any pair being exactly matched, and a higher Gini-Simpson diversity index (closer to 1.0). Thus, the diversity theory would have it that such a group would have a better chance of making a superior decision.

Authoritarians Don’t Rule!

Assuming I’ve convinced you that diversity makes groups smarter, where does that leave our authoritarian?

Let’s look at the rugged-individualist/authoritarian situation from a diversity-index viewpoint. There, the number of subgroups in the decision-making group is one, ‘cause there’s only one member to begin with. Randomly selecting twice always comes up with identically the same member, so the probability of getting the same one twice is exactly one. That is, it’s guaranteed.

That makes the diversity score of an individualist/authoritarian exactly zero. In other words, according to the diversity decision-making theory, authoritarians are the worst possible decision makers!

And, don’t try to tell me individualist/authoritarians can cheat the system by having wide-ranging experiences and understanding different cultures. I’ve consciously done exactly that for seven decades. What it’s done is to give me an appreciation of different cultures, lifestyles, philosophies, etc.

It did not, however, make me more diverse. I’m still one person with one brain and one viewpoint. It only gave me the wisdom(?) to ask others for their opinions, and listen to what they say. It didn’t give me the wisdom to answer for them because I’m only the one person with the one viewpoint.

So, why do authoritarian regimes even exist?

What folks often imagine as “human nature” provides the answer. I’m qualifying “human nature” because, while this particular phenomenon is natural for humans, it’s also natural for all living things. It’s a corollary that follows from Darwin’s natural-selection hypothesis.

Imagine you’re a scrap of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA). Your job is to produce copies of yourself. If you’re going to be successful, you’ll have to code for ways to make lots of copies of yourself. The more copies you can make, the more successful you’ll be.

Over the past four billion years that life is estimated to have been infesting the surface of Earth, a gazillion tricks and strategies have been hit upon by various scraps of DNA to promote reproductions of themselves.

While some DNA has found that promoting reproduction of other scraps of DNA is helpful under some circumstances, your success comes down to promoting reproduction of scraps of DNA like you.

For example, human DNA has found that coding for creatures that help each other survive helps them survive. Thus, human beings tend to cluster in groups, or tribes of related individuals – with similar DNA. We’re all tribal, and (necessarily) proud of it!

Anyway, another strategy that DNA uses for better survival is to prefer creatures similar to us. That helps DNA evolve into more successful forms.

In the end, the priority system that necessarily evolves is:

  • Identical copies first (thus, the bond between identical twins is especially strong);

  • Closely related copies next;

  • More distantly related copies have lower priority.

We also pretty much all like pets because pets are unrelated creatures that somehow help us survive to make scads of copies of our own DNA. But, we prefer mammals as pets because mammals’ DNA is very much like our own. More people keep cats and dogs as pets, than snakes or bugs. See the pattern?

We prefer our children to our brothers (and sisters).

We prefer our brothers and sisters to our neighbors.

We prefer our neighbors to our pets. (Here the priority systems is getting pretty weak!)

And, so forth.

In other words, all living things prefer other living things that are like them.

Birds of a feather flock together.

That is the basis of all discrimination phenomena, from racial bias to how we choose our friends.

How Authoritarians Rule, Anyway.

What has that to do with authoritarianism?

Well, it has a lot to do with authoritarianism! Authoritarians only survive if they’re supported by populations who prefer them enough to cede decision-making power to them. Otherwise, they’d just turn and walk away.

So authoritarian societies require populations with low diversity who generally are very much like the leaders they select. If you want to be an authoritarian leader, go find a low-diversity population and convince them you’re just like them. Tell ‘em they’re the greatest thing since sliced bread because they’re so much like you, and that everyone else – those who are not part of your selected population – are inferior scum simply because they’re not like your selected population. The your followers will love you for it, and hate everyone else.

That’s why authoritarian regimes mainly thrive in low-diversity, xenophobic populations.

That despite (or maybe because of) the fact that such populations are likely to make the poorest decisions.

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The Empire and the Five Kings

The Empire and the Five KIngs cover
The latest book by Bernard-Henri Levy

15 May 2019 – It’s always nice when you find someone who agrees with you. When it’s somebody with the intellectual chops of Bernard-Henri Levy, it’s especially gratifying.

When I heard Levy’s interview with Fareed Zakaria on the latter’s GPS show carried by CNN, I felt impelled to rush out and obtain a copy of his latest book: The Empire and the Five Kings.

I’m very glad I did.

Beside having a writing style that’s easy to follow and pleasant to read, Levy’s book provides a look at world events from an unusual perspective and lots and lots of details that I could never have known otherwise. Whenever I can learn something new, I count the time well spent. Learning so much in 250 pages (I didn’t read the Index that takes up the last 11 pages) counts as time very well spent!

I do have to say, however, that Levy trots out words even I have to look up! His delight in his massive vocabulary I have to forgive, though. After all, I long ago decided not to coddle my readers with restricted word choices. If they have trouble puzzling out words that I use, they can just bloody well go look ‘em up!

Levy does not make the mistake Henry Miller was so notorious for: delighting so much in his facility with various European languages that he left his readers puzzling over long passages in French or German. If you haven’t traveled extensively in mid-twentieth-century Europe and lived there long enough to be steeped in the languages, you’re left wondering what he’s on about, and whether you’re missing something important to the story.

Levy no doubt is equally fluent in a long list of languages, but mercifully avoids tormenting us with them. The book is very definitely presented in more-or-less standard English.

To quote Levy’s bio on the back flap inside his book’s the dust cover: “Bernard-Henri Levy is a philosopher, activist, filmmaker, and author of more than thirty books …. His writing has appeared extensively in publications throughout Europe and the United States. … Levy is cofounder of the antiracist group SOS Racisme and has served on diplomatic missions for the French government.”

Joan Juliet Buck, former editor of French Vogue, writing in Vanity Fair called him “an action-driven intellectual who moves fast, writes fast, and is listened to with respect.”

“What is an ‘action-driven intellectual,’” you ask?

That is an important – arguably dominant – part of Levy’s character. Action-driven intellectuals are, as Levy admiringly describes in his preface, the “type of writer that a great French resistance fighter, Roger Stephane, called ‘the adventurer’ …” Levy lists among his admired adventurers, T.E. Lawrence, Ernest Hemingway, George Orwell, Andre Malraux and writer-mercenaries like Xenophon. He seems proud to count himself among their fellows.

From someone with fewer war stories to tell, that would sound like hubris. From Levy, however, it seems (in the immortal words of Walter Brennan in the first episode of the TV series The Guns of Will Sonnett) “No brag. Just fact.”

So, what does this action-driven intellectual have to say? Especially, what is he indicating by his title, The Empire and the Five Kings?

It is a little difficult to be sure whether his volume is a salutation to the embattled resistance warriors of the world fighting against the rise of autocratic dictators (especially the Kurdish Peshmerga resisting threatened genocide by Turkish President and would-be dictator Recep Tayyip Erdoğan), or a cry of warning about the chaos threatening Western democracy from all sides, or even a shout of hope for democracy’s future. Perhaps it’s best seen as all of the above.

The Empire, of course, is how Levy sees the United States. He sees it, however, as the best kind of empire: a reluctant one dragged to the center of the World’s stage by universal acclaim.

The United States never wanted to be an empire, he opines. Instead, after the double World War of the early twentieth century, the victorious allied western democracies desperately needed a leader; a standard bearer to head their parade into the glorious – and hopefully peaceful – future they were yearning for. And, there was nobody else around that was up to the job. So, the United States put on a sheepish grin and, channeling their inner Fess Parker, said: “Well, shucks, folks. If ya really want me to, I guess I could give it a lash.”

That’s how Levy sees America in the latter half of the twentieth and the first decade of the twenty-first century.

Then something happened.

Levy offers no blame or even critical analysis. I, however, am willing to venture an opinion.

Imagine Fess Parker standing up there with his folksy grin, pushed unwillingly into standing up to do his level best – only to be pelted by tomatoes.

It was bad enough to see angry crowds shouting “Yankee Go Home!” in the ‘50s and ‘60s. They’d all been through Hell, and were, in the immortal words of Arlo Guthrie: “Hung down, brung down, hung up, and all kinds of mean, nasty, ugly things.”

They’d been just havin’ a tough time.

It was reasonable that the world’s people would be feeling pretty awful and might take it out on the one who’d come through the whole experience looking like the Champion of the World.

That was the United States, so we could overlook a few over-ripe tomatoes and shouts for us to go home.

But, when a bunch of towel-headed Saudi Arabian expats from Afghanistan flew airliners into a few of our most iconic buildings, killing thousands of our friends and neighbors (not to mention relatives), that proved a bit too much.

Fess Parker decided to do what those ingrates told him to do: “Go Home!”

“You don’t like the way I’m policing the World?” he said. “Well, then, you can just go do it yourselves. I’ll just go home and mow my own grass. You can clean up your own darn messes.”

That, Levy sees in horror, leaves the field open for the Five Kings – the autocrats jostling to beat up everyone else in the schoolyard – to do their worst.

Putin wants to be crime boss in Russia and reconstitute the failed U.S.S.R. as a secular kleptocracy. Ali Khameni and his Revolutionary Guards want to bring back the theocracy that kept the Sultan’s subjects abjectly subjugated in twelfth-century Iran. Erdogan yearns for the glories of the Byzantine Empire. Mohammad Bin Salman wants the wealth and power he sees as his birthright “owning” a Saudi Arabia that dominates the oil wealth of the Middle East. Xi Jinping wants to rule China as a commercial empire dominating the Far East (at least).

They all want autocratic power sans censure, sans limit, and sans end.

Levy rightly surmises that the other seven-and-a-half billion of us living on this planet might object to being told what to do by those five.

At least, he suggests, we should!

I happen to agree.

Where Levy and I disagree is in his diagnosis of what’s going on in America.

Levy gets into minor difficulty when he tries to follow the footsteps of De Toqueville by explaining America to Americans. Like many of today’s observers (and especially rehabilitated Marxists like Levy) he fails to recognize how close rabid love of democracy is to rabid populism, and how short the fall is from there to that most virulent form of authoritarianism – fascism.

Levy is not the first cultural transplant who’s made critical misapprehensions about American character. Alistair Cook, embarrassingly blurted out an opinion to the effect that “Americans yearn for an aristocracy” on national television. He’d mistaken Americans’ yearning for material success (especially among ‘50s-era suburbanites) for an unmet desire to fawn over wealthy aristocrats.

America is not England. We remember suffering the birth pangs of the Revolutionary War to, as Tom Selleck’s “Mathew Quigley” character intoned: “… Run the misfits out of our country. We sent ‘em back to England.”

I especially censured rehabilitated Marxists above because the journey from Marxist to Stalinist is so short that it generally happens in the blink of an eye. It happens so fast that hardly anyone recognizes the change. It’s like a jump cut mid-sentence in a movie to catch a reaction shot. Above all, Marxists never seem to see it coming. But, that’s a rant for another day.

Lacking a view of that slippery slope from democracy to fascism, Levy seems at a loss to understand the Trump phenomenon. While Levy laments America seeming to lose its way on the world stage, what’s actually happened is that we’re in the middle of making the transition from democracy to fascism. While most of us are scratching our heads, trying to figure out why our democracy seems to have stopped working, large swaths of our leadership – led from behind by Donald Trump – are busy reconstructing our democratic government into the Fourth Reich!

I say “led from behind by Donald Trump” because, unlike Mussolini, Hitler, and Franco, it seems that Trump does not have a clear idea of what he is doing. Old-time (twentieth-century) fascists were quite sure of what they wanted and how to get it.

Trump does not seem to know that. It is unclear whether he has any coherent ideas at all. It’s like he’s suffering Wernicke’s aphasia: unable to understand or compose coherent language. He seems more like a cat reacting to movement of a laser pointer – all reaction and no thought. Others on the Far Right, however, do have a clear idea what they want and what they’re doing, and they are attempting to herd Trump’s scattered thoughts into their preferred direction.

Of course, when they stop needing him (specifically, his Reality-TV “charm”) as a front man, he’ll be gone in a heartbeat! See what what happened to Leon Trotsky.

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Why Target Average Inflation?

Federal Reserve Seal
The FOMC attempts to control economic expansion by managing interest rates. Shutterstock.com

8 May 2019 – There’s been a bit of noise in financial-media circles this week (as of this writing, but it’ll be last week when you get to read it) about Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell’s talking up shifting the Fed’s focus to targeting something called “average inflation” and using words like “transient” and “symmetric” to describe this thinking. James Macintosh provided a nice layman-centric description of the pros and cons of this concept in his “Streetwise” column in Friday’s (5/3) The Wall Street Journal. (Sorry, folks, but this article is only available to WSJ subscribers, so the link above leads to a teaser that asks you to either sign in as a current subscriber or to become a new subscriber. And, you thought information was supposed to be distributed for free? Think again!)

I’m not going to rehash what Macintosh wrote, but attempt to show why this change makes sense. In fact, it’s not really a change at all, but an acknowledgement of what’s really been going on all the time.

We start with pointing out that what the Federal Reserve System is mandated to do is to control the U.S. economy. The operant word here is “control.” That means that to understand what the Fed does (and what it should do) requires a basic understanding of control theory.

Basic Control Theory

We’ll start with a thermostat.

A lot of people (I hesitate to say “most” because I’ve encountered so many counter examples – otherwise intelligent people who somehow don’t seem to get the point) understand how a thermostat works.

A thermostat is the poster child for basic automated control systems. It’s the “stone knives and bearskins” version of automated controls, and is the easiest for the layman to understand, so that’s where we’ll start. It’s also a good analog for what has passed for economic controls since the Fed was created in 1913.

Okay, the first thing to understand is the concept of a “set point.” That’s a “desired value” of some measurement that represents the thing you want to control. In the case of the thermostat, the measurement is room temperature (as read out from a thermometer) and the thing you’re trying to control is how comfortable the room air feels to you. In the case of the Fed, the thing you want to control is overall economic performance and the measurement folks decided was most useful is the inflation rate.

Currently, the set point for inflation is 2% per annum.

In the case of the thermostat in our condo, my wife and I have settled on 75º F. That’s a choice we’ve made based on the climate where we live (Southwestern Florida), our ages, and what we, through experience, have found to be most comfortable for us right now. When we lived in New England, we chose a different set point. Similarly, when we lived in Northern Arizona it was different as well.

The bottom line is: the set point is a matter of choice based on a whole raft of factors that we think are important to us and it varies from time to time.

The same goes for the Fed’s inflation set point. It’s a choice Fed governors make based on a whole raft of considerations that they think are important to the country right now. One of the reasons they meet every month is to review that target ‘cause they know that things change. What seems like a good idea in July, might not look so good in August.

Now, it’s important to recognize that the set point is a target. Like any target, you’re trying to hit it, but you don’t really expect to hit it exactly. You really expect that the value you get for your performance measurement will differ from your set point by some amount – by some error or what metrologists prefer to call “deviation.” We prefer deviation to the word error because it has less pejorative connotations. It’s a fact of life, not a bad thing.

When we add in the concept of time, we also introduce the concept of feedback. That is what control theorists call it when you take the results of your measurement and feed it back to your decision of what to do next.

What you do next to control whatever you’re trying to control depends, first, on the sign (positive or negative) of the deviation, and, in more sophisticated controls, it’s value or magnitude. In the case of the thermostat, if the deviation is positive (meaning the room is hotter than you want) you want to do something to cool it down. In the case of the economy, if inflation is too high you want to do something to reduce economic activity so you don’t get an economic bubble that’ll soon burst.

What confuses some presidents is the idea that rising economic activity isn’t always good. Presidents like boom times ‘cause they make people feel good – like a sugar high. Populist presidents typically fail to recognize (or care about the fact) that booms are invariably bubbles that burst disastrously. Just ask the people of Venezuela who watched their economy’s inflation rate suddenly shoot up to about a million(!) percent per annum.

Booms turn to busts in a heartbeat!

This is where we want to abandon the analogy with a thermostat and get a little more sophisticated.

A thermostat is a blunt instrument. What the thermostat automatically does next is like using a club. At best, a thermostat has two clubs to choose from: it can either fire up the furnace (to raise the room temperature in the event of a negative deviation) or kick in the air conditioner (in the event that the deviation is positive – too hot). That’s known as a binary digital control. It’s gives you a digital choice: up or down.

We leave the thermostat analogy because the Fed’s main tool for controlling the economy (the Fed-funds interest rate) is a lot more sophisticated. It’s what mathematicians call analog. That is, instead of providing a binary choice (to use the club or not), it lets you choose how much pressure you want to apply up or down.

Quantitative easing similarly provides analog control, so what I’m going to say below also applies to it.

Okay, the Fed’s control lever (Fed funds interest rate) is more like a brake pedal than a club. In a car, the harder you press the brake pedal, the more pressure you apply to make the car slow down. A little pressure makes the car slow down a little. A lot of pressure makes the car slow down a lot.

So, you can see why authoritarians like low interest rates. Autthoritarians generally have high-D personalities. As Personality Insights says: “They tend to know 2 speeds in life – zero and full throttle… mostly full throttle.”

They generally don’t have much use for brakes!

By the way, the thing governments have that corresponds to a gas pedal is deficit spending, but the correspondence isn’t exact and the Fed can’t control it, anyway. Since this article is about the Fed, we aren’t going to talk about it now.

When inflation’s moving too fast (above the set point) by a little, the Fed governors – being the feedback controller – decide to raise the Fed funds rate, which is analogous to pushing the brake pedal, by a little. If that doesn’t work, they push it a little harder. If inflation seems to be out of control, as it did in the 1970s, they push it as hard as they can, boosting interest rates way up and pulling way back on the economy.

Populist dictators, who generally don’t know what they’re doing, try to prevent their central banks (you can’t have an economy without having a central bank, even if you don’t know you have it) from raising interest rates soon enough or high enough to get inflation under control, which is why populist dictatorships generally end up with hyperinflation leading to economic collapse.

Populist Dictators Need Not Apply

This is why we don’t want the U.S. Federal Reserve Bank under political control. Politicians are not elected for their economic savvy, so we want Fed governors, who are supposed to have economic savvy, to make smart decisions based on their understanding of economic causes and effects, rather than dumb decisions based on political expediency.

Economists are mathematically sophisticated people. They may (or may not) be steeped in the theory of automated control systems, but they’re quite capable of understanding these basics and how they apply to controlling an economy.

Economics, of course, has been around as long as civilization. Hesiod (ca. 750 BCE) is sometimes considered “the first economist.” Contemporary economics traces back to the eighteenth century with Adam Smith. Control theory, on the other hand, has only been elucidated since the early 1950s. So, you don’t really need control theory to understand economics. It just makes it easier to see how the controls work.

To a veteran test and measurement maven like myself, the idea of thinking in terms of average inflation, instead of the observed inflation at some point in time – like right now – makes perfect sense. We know that every time you make a measurement of anything, you’re almost guaranteed to get a different value than you got the last time you measured it. That’s why we (scientists and engineers) always measure whatever we care about multiple times and pay attention to the average of the measurements instead of each measurement individually.

So, Fed governors starting to pay attention to average inflation strikes us as a duh! What else would you look at?

Similarly, using words like “transient” and “symmetric” make perfect sense because “transient” expresses the idea that things change faster than you can measure them and “symmetric” expresses the idea that measurement variations can be positive or negative – symmetric each side of the average.

These ideas all come from the mathematics of statistics. You’ve heard of “statistical significance” associated with polling data, or two polling results being within “statistical error.” The variations I’m talking about are the same thing. Variations between two values (like the average inflation and the target inflation) are statistically significant if they’re sufficiently outside the statistical error.

I’m not going to go into how you calculate a value for statistical error because it takes hours of yammering to teach it in statistics classes, and I just don’t have the space here. You wouldn’t want to read it right now, anyway. Suffice it to say that it’s a well-defined concept relating to how much variation you can expect in a given data set.

While the control theory I’ve been talking about applies especially to automated control systems, it applies equally to Federal Reserve System control of economic performance – if you put the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) in place of the control computer that makes decisions for the automated control system.

“So,” you ask, “why not put the Fed-funds rate under computer control?”.

The reason it would be unreasonable to fully automate the Fed’s actions is that we can’t duplicate the thinking process of the Fed governors in a computer program. The state of the art of economic models is just not good enough, yet. We still need the gut feelings of seasoned economists to make enough sense out of what goes on in the economy to figure out what to do next.

That, by the way, is why we don’t leave the decisions up to some hyperintelligent pandimensional being (named Trump). We need a panel of economists with diverse backgrounds and experiences – the FOMC – to have some hope of getting it right!

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Radicalism and the Death of Discourse

Gaussian political spectrum
Most Americans prefer to be in the middle of the political spectrum, but most of the noise comes from the far right and far left.

7 November 2018 – During the week of 22 October 2018 two events dominated the news: Cesar Sayoc mailed fourteen pipe bombs to prominent individuals critical of Donald Trump, and Robert Bowers shot up a synagogue because he didn’t like Jews. Both of these individuals identified themselves with far-right ideology, so the media has been full of rhetoric condemning far-right activists.

To be legally correct, I have to note that, while I’ve written the above paragraph as if those individuals’ culpability for those crimes is established fact, they (as of this writing) haven’t been convicted. It’s entirely possible that some deus ex machina will appear out of the blue and exonerate one or both of them.

Clearly, things have gotten out of hand with Red Team activists when they start “throwing” pipe bombs and bullets. But, I’m here to say “naughty, naughty” to both sides.

Both sides are culpable.

I don’t want you to interpret that last sentence as agreement with Donald Trump’s idiotic statement after last year’s Charlottesville incident that there were “very fine people on both sides.”

There aren’t “very fine people” on both sides. Extremists are “bad” people no matter what side they’re on.

For example, not long ago social media sites (specifically Linkedin and, especially, Facebook) were lit up with vitriol about the Justice Kavanaugh hearings by pundits from both the Red Team and the Blue Team. It got so hot that I was embarrassed!

Some have pointed out that, statistically, most of the actual violence has been perpetrated by the Red Team.

Does that mean the Red Team is more culpable than the Blue Team?

No. It means they’re using different weapons.

The Blue Team, which I believe consists mainly of extremists from the liberal/progressive wing of the Democratic Party, has traditionally chosen written and spoken words as their main weapon. Recall some of the political correctness verbiage used to attack free expression in the late 20th Century, and demonstrations against conservative speakers on college campuses in our own.

The Red Team, which today consists of the Trumpian remnants of the Republican Party, has traditionally chosen to throw hard things, like rocks, bullets and pipe bombs.

Both sides also attempt to disarm the other side. The Blue Team wisely attempts to disarm the Red Team by taking away their guns. The Red Team, which eschews anything that smacks of wisdom, tries to disarm the Blue Team by (figuratively, so far) burning their books.

Recognize that calling the Free Press “the enemy of the people” is morally equivalent to throwing books on a bonfire. They’re both attempts to promote ignorance.

What’s actually happening is that the fringes of society are making all of the noise, and the mass of moderate-thinking citizens can’t get a word in edgewise.

George Schultz pointed out: “He who walks in the middle of the roads gets hit from both sides.”

I think it was Douglas Adams who pointed out that fanatics get to run things because they care enough to put in the effort. Moderates don’t because they don’t.

Both of these pundits point out the sad fact that Nature favors extremes. The most successful companies are those with the highest growth rates. Most drivers exceed the speed limit. The squeaky wheel gets the most grease. And, those who express the most extreme views get the most media attention.

Our Constitution specifies in no uncertain terms that the nation is founded on (small “d”) democratic principles. Democratic principles insist that policy matters be debated and resolved by consensus of the voting population. That can only be done when people meet together in the middle.

Extremists on both the Red Team and Blue Team don’t want that. They treat politics as a sporting event.

In a baseball game, for example, nobody roots for a tie. They root for a win by one team or the other.

Government is not a sporting event.

When one team or the other wins, all Americans lose.

The enemy we are facing now, which is the same enemy democracies face around the world, is not the right or left. It is extremism in general. Always has been. Always will be.

Authoritarians always go for one extreme or the other. Hitler went for the right. Stalin went for the left.

The reason authoritarians pick an extreme is that’s where there are people who are passionate enough about their ideas to shoot anyone who doesn’t agree with them. That, authoritarians realize, is the only way they can become “Dictator for Life.” Since that is their goal, they have to pick an extreme.

We love democracy because it’s the best way for “We the People” to ensure nobody gets to be “Dictator for Life.” When everyone meets in the middle (which is the only place everyone can meet), authoritarians get nowhere.

Ergo, authoritarians love extremes and everyone else needs the middle.

Vilifying “nationalism” as a Red Team vice misses the point. In the U.S. (or any similar democracy), nationalism requires more-or-less moderate political views. There’s lots of room in the middle for healthy (and ultimately entertaining) debate, but very little room at the extremes.

Try going for the middle.

To quote Victor “Animal” Palotti in Roland Emmerich’s 1998 film Godzilla: “C’mon. It’ll be fun! It’ll be fun! It’ll be fun!”

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Six Tips to Protect Your Vote from Election Meddlers

Theresa Payton headshot
Theresa Payton, cybersecurity expert and CEO of Fortalice Solutions. photo courtesy Fortalice Solutions

6 November 2018 – Below is from a press release I received yesterday (Monday, 11/5) evening. It’s of sufficient import and urgent timing that I decided to post it to this blog verbatim.

There’s been a lot of talk about cybersecurity and whether or not the Trump administration is prepared for tomorrow’s midterm elections, but now that we’re down to the wire, former White House CIO and Fortalice Solutions CEO Theresa Payton says it’s time for voters to think about what they can do to make sure their voices are heard.

Theresa’s six cyber tips for voters ahead of midterms:

  • Don’t zone out while you’re voting. Pay close attention to how you cast your ballot and who you cast your ballot for.

  • Take your time during the review process, and double-check your vote before you finalize it;

  • It may sound cliche, but if you see something say something. If something seems strange, report it to your State Board of Elections immediately;

  • If you see suspicious social media personas pushing information that’s designed to influence (and maybe even misinform) voters, here’s where you can report it:

  • Check your voter registration status before you go to the polls. Voters in 37 states and the District of Columbia can register to vote online. Visit vote.org to find out how to check your registration status in your state;

  • Unless you are a resident of West Virginia or you’re serving overseas in the U.S. military, you cannot vote electronically on your phone. Protect yourself from text messages and email scams that indicate that you can. Knowledge is power.

Finally, trust the system. Yes, it’s flawed. Yes, it’s imperfect. But it’s the bedrock of our democracy. If you stay home or lose trust in the legitimacy of the process, our cyber enemies win.

Theresa is one of the nation’s leading experts in cyber security and IT strategy. She is the CEO of Fortalice Solutions, an industry-leading security consulting company. Under President George W. Bush, she served as the first female chief information officer at the White House, overseeing IT operations for POTUS and his staff. She was named #4 on IFSEC Global’s list of the world’s Top 50 cybersecurity influencers in security & fire 2017. See her profiled in the Washington Post for her role on the 2017 CBS reality show “Hunted” here.

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Reaping the Whirlwind

Tornado
Powerful Tornado destroying property, with lightning in the background. Solarseven/Shutterstock.com

24 October 2018 – “They sow the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind” is a saying from The Holy Bible‘s Old Testament Book of Hosea. I’m certainly not a Bible scholar, but, having been paying attention for seven decades, I can attest to saying’s validity.

The equivalent Buddhist concept is karma, which is the motive force driving the Wheel of Birth and Death. It is also wrapped up with samsara, which is epitomized by the saying: “What goes around comes around.”

Actions have consequences.

If you smoke a pack of Camels a day, you’re gonna get sick!

By now, you should have gotten the idea that “reaping the whirlwind” is a common theme among the world’s religions and philosophies. You’ve got to be pretty stone headed to have missed it.

Apparently the current President of the United States (POTUS), Donald J. Trump, has been stone headed enough to miss it.

POTUS is well known for trying to duck consequences of his actions. For example, during his 2016 Presidential Election campaign, he went out of his way to capitalize on Wikileaks‘ publication of emails stolen from Hillary Clinton‘s private email server. That indiscretion and his attempt to cover it up by firing then-FBI-Director James Comey grew into a Special Counsel Investigation, which now threatens to unmask all the nefarious activities he’s engaged in throughout his entire life.

Of course, Hillary’s unsanctioned use of that private email server while serving as Secretary of State is what opened her up to the email hacking in the first place! That error came back to bite her in the backside by giving the Russians something to hack. They then forwarded that junk to Wikileaks, who eventually made it public, arguably costing her the 2016 Presidential election.

Or, maybe it was her standing up for her philandering husband, or maybe lingering suspicions surrounding the pair’s involvement in the Whitewater scandal. Whatever the reason(s), Hillary, too, reaped the whirlwind.

In his turn, Russian President Vladimir Putin sowed the wind by tasking operatives to do the hacking of Hillary’s email server. Now he’s reaping the whirlwind in the form of a laundry list sanctions by western governments and Special Counsel Investigation indictments against the operatives he sent to do the hacking.

Again, POTUS showed his stone-headedness about the Bible verse by cuddling up to nearly every autocrat in the world: Vlad Putin, Kim Jong Un, Xi Jinping, … . The list goes on. Sensing waves of love emanating from Washington, those idiots have become ever more extravagant in their misbehavior.

The latest example of an authoritarian regime rubbing POTUS’ nose in filth is the apparent murder and dismemberment of Saudi Arabian journalist Jamal Khashoggi when he briefly entered the Saudi embassy in Turkey on personal business.

The most popular theory of the crime lays blame at the feet of Mohammad Bin Salman Al Saud (MBS), Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia and the country’s de facto ruler. Unwilling to point his finger at another would-be autocrat, POTUS is promoting a Saudi cover-up attempt suggesting the murder was done by some unnamed “rogue agents.”

Actually, that theory deserves some consideration. The idea that MBS was emboldened (spelled S-T-U-P-I-D) enough to have ordered Kashoggi’s assassination in such a ham-fisted way strains credulity. We should consider the possibility that ultra-conservative Wahabist factions within the Saudi government, who see MBS’ reforms as a threat to their historical patronage from the oil-rich Saudi monarchy, might have created the incident to embarrass MBS.

No matter what the true story is, the blow back is a whirlwind!

MBS has gone out of his way to promote himself as a business-friendly reformer. This reputation has persisted despite repeated instances of continued repression in the country he controls.

The whirlwind, however, is threatening MBS’ and the Saudi monarchy’s standing in the international community. Especially, international bankers, led by JP Morgan Chase’s Jamie Dimon, and a host of Silicon Valley tech companies are running for the exits from Saudi Arabia’s three-day Financial Investment Initiative conference that was scheduled to start Tuesday (23 October 2018).

That is a major embarrassment and will likely derail MBS’ efforts to modernize Saudi Arabia’s economy away from dependence on oil revenue.

It appears that these high-powered executives are rethinking the wisdom of dealing with the authoritarian Saudi regime. They’ve decided not to sow the wind by dealing with the Saudis because they don’t want to reap the whirlwind likely to result!

Update

Since this manuscript was drafted it’s become clear that we’ll never get the full story about the Kashoggi incident. Both regimes involved (Turkey and Saudi Arabia) are authoritarians with no incentive to be honest about this story. While Saudi Arabia seems to make a pretense of press freedom, this incident shows their true colors (i.e, color them repressive). Turkey hasn’t given even a passing nod to press freedom for years. It’s like two rival foxes telling the dog about a hen house break in.

On the “dog” side, we’re stuck with a POTUS who attacks press freedom on a daily basis. So, who’s going to ferret out the truth? Maybe the Brits or the French, but not the U.S. Executive Branch!

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POTUS and the Peter Principle

Will Rogers & Wiley Post
In 1927, Will Rogers wrote: “I never met a man I didn’t like.” Here he is (on left) posing with aviator Wiley Post before their ill-fated flying exploration of Alaska. Everett Historical/Shutterstock

11 July 2018 – Please bear with me while I, once again, invert the standard news-story pyramid by presenting a great whacking pile of (hopfully entertaining) detail that leads eventually to the point of this column. If you’re too impatient to read it to the end, leave now to check out the latest POTUS rant on Twitter.

Unlike Will Rogers, who famously wrote, “I never met a man I didn’t like,” I’ve run across a whole slew of folks I didn’t like, to the point of being marginally misanthropic.

I’ve made friends with all kinds of people, from murderers to millionaires, but there are a few types that I just can’t abide. Top of that list is people that think they’re smarter than everybody else, and want you to acknowledge it.

I’m telling you this because I’m trying to be honest about why I’ve never been able to abide two recent Presidents: William Jefferson Clinton (#42) and Donald J. Trump (#45). Having been forced to observe their antics over an extended period, I’m pleased to report that they’ve both proved to be among the most corrupt individuals to occupy the Oval Office in recent memory.

I dislike them because they both show that same, smarmy self-satisfied smile when contemplating their own greatness.

Tricky Dick Nixon (#37) was also a world-class scumbag, but he never triggered the same automatic revulsion. That is because, instead of always looking self satisfied, he always looked scared. He was smart enough to recognize that he was walking a tightrope and, if he stayed on it long enough, he eventually would fall off.

And, he did.

I had no reason for disliking #37 until the mid-1960s, when, as a college freshman, I researched a paper for a history class that happened to involve digging into the McCarthy hearings of the early 1950s. Seeing the future #37’s activities in that period helped me form an extremely unflattering picture of his character, which a decade later proved accurate.

During those years in between I had some knock-down, drag-out arguments with my rabid-Nixon-fan grandmother. I hope I had the self control never to have said “I told you so” after Nixon’s fall. She was a nice lady and a wonderful grandma, and wouldn’t have deserved it.

As Abraham Lincoln (#16) famously said: “You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.”

Since #45 came on my radar many decades ago, I’ve been trying to figure out what, exactly, is wrong with his brain. At first, when he was a real-estate developer, I just figured he had bad taste and was infantile. That made him easy to dismiss, so I did just that.

Later, he became a reality-TV star. His show, The Apprentice, made it instantly clear that he knew absolutely nothing about running a business.

No wonder his companies went bankrupt. Again, and again, and again….

I’ve known scads of corporate CEOs over the years. During the quarter century I spent covering the testing business as a journalist, I got to spend time with most of the corporate leaders of the world’s major electronics manufacturing companies. Unsurprisingly, the successful ones followed the best practices that I learned in MBA school.

Some of the CEOs I got to know were goofballs. Most, however, were absolutely brilliant. The successful ones all had certain things in common.

Chief among the characteristics of successful corporate executives is that they make the people around them happy to work for them. They make others feel comfortable, empowered, and enthusiastically willing to cooperate to make the CEO’s vision manifest.

Even Commendatore Ferrari, who I’ve heard was Hell to work for and Machiavellian in interpersonal relationships, made underlings glad to have known him. I’ve noticed that ‘most everybody who’s ever worked for Ferrari has become a Ferrari fan for life.

As far as I can determine, nobody ever sued him.

That’s not the impression I got of Donald Trump, the corporate CEO. He seemed to revel in conflict, making those around him feel like dog pooh.

Apparently, everyone who’s ever dealt with him has wanted to sue him.

That worked out fine, however, for Donald Trump, the reality-TV star. So-called “reality” TV shows generally survive by presenting conflict. The more conflict the better. Everybody always seems to be fighting with everybody else, and the winners appear to be those who consistently bully their opponents into feeling like dog pooh.

I see a pattern here.

The inescapable conclusion is that Donald Trump was never a successful corporate executive, but succeeded enormously playing one on TV.

Another characteristic I should mention of reality TV shows is that they’re unscripted. The idea seems to be that nobody knows what’s going to happen next, including the cast.

That leaves off the necessity for reality-TV stars to learn lines. Actual movie stars and stage actors have to learn lines of dialog. Stories are tightly scripted so that they conform to Aristotle’s recommendations for how to write a successful plot.

Having written a handful of traditional motion-picture scripts as well as having produced a few reality-TV episodes, I know the difference. Following Aristotle’s dicta gives you the ability to communicate, and sometimes even teach, something to your audience. The formula reality-TV show, on the other hand, goes nowhere. Everybody (including the audience) ends up exactly where they started, ready to start the same stupid arguments over and over again ad nauseam.

Apparently, reality-TV audiences don’t want to actually learn anything. They’re more focused on ranting and raving.

Later on, following a long tradition among theater, film and TV stars, #45 became a politician.

At first, I listened to what he said. That led me to think he was a Nazi demagogue. Then, I thought maybe he was some kind of petty tyrant, like Mussolini. (I never considered him competent enough to match Hitler.)

Eventually, I realized that it never makes any sense to listen to what #45 says because he lies. That makes anything he says irrelevant.

FIRST PRINCIPAL: If you catch somebody lying to you, stop believing what they say.

So, it’s all bullshit. You can’t draw any conclusion from it. If he says something obviously racist (for example), you can’t conclude that he’s a racist. If he says something that sounds stupid, you can’t conclude he’s stupid, either. It just means he’s said something that sounds stupid.

Piling up this whole load of B.S., then applying Occam’s Razor, leads to the conclusion that #45 is still simply a reality-TV star. His current TV show is titled The Trump Administration. Its supporting characters are U.S. senators and representatives, executive-branch bureaucrats, news-media personalities, and foreign “dignitaries.” Some in that last category (such as Justin Trudeau and Emmanuel Macron) are reluctant conscripts into the cast, and some (such as Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong-un) gleefully play their parts, but all are bit players in #45’s reality TV show.

Oh, yeah. The largest group of bit players in The Trump Administration is every man, woman, child and jackass on the planet. All are, in true reality-TV style, going exactly nowhere as long as the show lasts.

Politicians have always been showmen. Of the Founding Fathers, the one who stands out for never coming close to becoming President was Benjamin Franklin. Franklin was a lot of things, and did a lot of things extremely well. But, he was never really a P.T.-Barnum-like showman.

Really successful politicians, such as Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt (#32), Bill Clinton, and Ronald Reagan (#40) were showmen. They could wow the heck out of an audience. They could also remember their lines!

That brings us, as promised, to Donald Trump and the Peter Principle.

Recognizing the close relationship between Presidential success and showmanship gives some idea about why #45 is having so much trouble making a go of being President.

Before I dig into that, however, I need to point out a few things that #45 likes to claim as successes that actually aren’t:

  • The 2016 election was not really a win for Donald Trump. Hillary Clinton was such an unpopular candidate that she decisively lost on her own (de)merits. God knows why she was ever the Democratic Party candidate at all. Anybody could have beaten her. If Donald Trump hadn’t been available, Elmer Fudd could have won!
  • The current economic expansion has absolutely nothing to do with Trump policies. I predicted it back in 2009, long before anybody (with the possible exception of Vladimir Putin, who apparently engineered it) thought Trump had a chance of winning the Presidency. My prediction was based on applying chaos theory to historical data. It was simply time for an economic expansion. The only effect Trump can have on the economy is to screw it up. Being trained as an economist (You did know that, didn’t you?), #45 is unlikely to screw up so badly that he derails the expansion.
  • While #45 likes to claim a win on North Korean denuclearization, the Nobel Peace Prize is on hold while evidence piles up that Kim Jong-un was pulling the wool over Trump’s eyes at the summit.

Finally, we move on to the Peter Principle.

In 1969 Canadian writer Raymond Hull co-wrote a satirical book entitled The Peter Principle with Laurence J. Peter. It was based on research Peter had done on organizational behavior.

Peter was (he died at age 70 in 1990) not a management consultant or a behavioral psychologist. He was an Associate Professor of Education at the University of Southern California. He was also Director of the Evelyn Frieden Centre for Prescriptive Teaching at USC, and Coordinator of Programs for Emotionally Disturbed Children.

The Peter principle states: “In a hierarchy every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence.”

Horrifying to corporate managers, the book went on to provide real examples and lucid explanations to show the principle’s validity. It works as satire only because it leaves the reader with a choice either to laugh or to cry.

See last week’s discussion of why academic literature is exactly the wrong form with which to explore really tough philosophical questions in an innovative way.

Let’s be clear: I’m convinced that the Peter principle is God’s Own Truth! I’ve seen dozens of examples that confirm it, and no counter examples.

It’s another proof that Mommy Nature has a sense of humor. Anyone who disputes that has, philosophically speaking, a piece of paper taped to the back of his (or her) shirt with the words “Kick Me!” written on it.

A quick perusal of the Wikipedia entry on the Peter Principle elucidates: “An employee is promoted based on their success in previous jobs until they reach a level at which they are no longer competent, as skills in one job do not necessarily translate to another. … If the promoted person lacks the skills required for their new role, then they will be incompetent at their new level, and so they will not be promoted again.”

I leave it as an exercise for the reader (and the media) to find the numerous examples where #45, as a successful reality-TV star, has the skills he needed to be promoted to President, but not those needed to be competent in the job.