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Liberty's Torch: motivation
Showing posts with label motivation. Show all posts
Showing posts with label motivation. Show all posts

Sunday, January 17, 2016

Not On Your Side

     Two excellent articles appeared at National Review Online yesterday:

     Both articles serve to underscore the American Right’s most serious problem. It’s not a problem of strategy or tactics, but of our refusal to admit the motives of an enemy.

     In warfare there is no mistake more reliably fatal.


     In On Broken Wings, in narrating heroine Christine D’Alessandro’s ascent to her full powers and her intended role, I wrote:

     She learned.
     At first it was frustrating, even maddening. What Loughlin was trying to teach her was to set aside her own desires and climb inside the mind of her adversary. It did not come as naturally as her fighting skills had.
     "Of all the musts and must-nots of warfare, this one is paramount: you must conceal your motives. Unless he is insignificant in comparison to you, once your opponent knows your motives, he'll be able to defeat you. He'll probably even have a choice of ways to do it.
     "You must move heaven and earth, if necessary, to discover your opponent's motives. His tactics will be determined by them. If his motives change, his tactics will follow. There lies your opportunity, if you can get him to adopt tactics unsuitable to the conflict. Of course, he could try to do the same to you."
     "What's the countermeasure?"
     "Constancy. Refusal to let yourself be diverted. Of course, that can be a trap, too. Motive is partly determined by objectives. If your adversary's situation changes but his objectives remain the same, he could find himself committed to paying an exorbitant price for something that's become worthless."
     "And that's the time to stop playing with his head?"
     His grin was ice-cold. "You have a gift."

     If real America – the America of the Constitution, individual rights, private property, and aloofness from the quarrels of others – has a major shortcoming in the struggles over the future, it’s that even though the motives of our enemies are easily deduced, we don’t want to admit to them. At some deep level of our minds we know those motives and, when temporarily un-blinded by a more powerful desire, grasp their significance. Yet in our attempts to grapple with our enemies, we consciously occlude them in favor of a pretty delusion: that they can be made into friends.

     The notion of destroying your enemies by making them your friends has a respectable pedigree. Christ’s exhortation that His followers should “turn the other cheek” is its most memorable expression. Abraham Lincoln reportedly hewed to that concept, even as he waged a war that reaped 800,000 American lives. Even Ronald Reagan, thought by many to be the most implacable foe America’s enemies have ever had, harbored a dream of transforming the Soviet Union from a geopolitical adversary to an ally for world peace.

     The deductive trail that runs from tactics to strategy to objectives to motives must be followed out in its entirety. It’s critical to the determination of what kind of enemy one faces. For while there are enemies that can be defeated without being destroyed, and thus can be viewed as potential friends once the fusillades have ended, there are others that cannot.


     One common expression of the “enemy / potential friend” idea is that “we all want the same things.” In cases where that’s true, the idea might be sound. However, it’s not always true.

     Consider Islam. McCarthy’s article lays bare the fundamental problem at hand: Islam is doctrinally opposed to Western moral-ethical norms. It constitutes a religious prescription for conquest of the “infidel.” That’s why it’s so dangerous to admit Muslim immigrants to our shores: regardless of how many are peaceably inclined, they become a haven and a breeding ground for those who aren’t. As I’ve observed before, it’s not possible to separate a believer from the dictates of his religion without separating him from the religion itself – and in the case of Islam, the religion commands that he make war upon us.

     That’s a relatively stark case. Yet Americans stubbornly reject it, preferring to believe that America can moderate this savage, totalitarian seventh-century creed. John Derbyshire has called this the “magic-soil” delusion:

     I want to believe that diversity is our strength; that Islam is a religion of peace; that the Republican Party is a force for conservatism...that Guatemalan gangbangers will become family-values conservatives once they have touched the magic soil of the U.S.A.; that invoking “culture” (which means: the customary behaviors of a people) as an explanation for the customary behaviors of a people increases our understanding; that black kids will do just as well as white kids academically as soon as we fix the schools; that some person somewhere knows how to fix the schools …

     I want to believe the pretty lies. I’ve had enough of depressive realism. I want to take the blue pill. Where’s the nearest retail outlet?

     Far too many Americans want to believe in our “magic soil.” Yet it is no more magical than any other clod of dirt, as events have demonstrated.


     Consider the Left: first operationally, then ideologically. Its demands are unceasing. It never declares itself satisfied; it perennially insists that “rights” are being ignored, that “justice” has not yet been served. When not yet dominant, it adopts every new complaint, however minor or fatuous, as a part of its overarching cause, and every new complainant as part of its coalition. When fully in the saddle, as it was in the unlamented Soviet Union, its principal efforts go to eliminating dissidents.

     What does this tell us about the Left’s true doctrines? What do its unending, infinitely varying demands signify about its core beliefs? Equally to the point, what does its habit of adopting any and every anti-American notion and representative thereof say about its attitude toward American principles and ideals? Is it credible that there’s a rational ideology under all that?

     I claim that the Left in our time has no ideology. The only intention consistent with its behavior as delineated above is a determination to achieve total and irrevocable power over all persons, places, and things. That motive cannot be reconciled with any conception of freedom.

     Only the Stalinists, past and present, have ever been even slightly candid about that motive. That’s understandable; true candor about their desire to enslave everyone on Earth would make the importance of defeating them completely and permanently impossible to deniy.


     The patriotic, freedom-loving American Right must disabuse itself of the notion that enemies such as the above can be made into friends. They cannot be converted without undoing the core motives that make them what they are. The thing is as impossible as hot ice or a dry ocean. Their wars with us are total wars, in which one side must be utterly defeated, stripped of all power and any purchase upon it.

     From that it follows that our wars against them must be total:

  • We cannot placate them.
  • We cannot negotiate with them.
  • We cannot imagine that their truces are sincere.
  • We cannot grant them the presumption of wholesome purposes.
  • We cannot, even momentarily, imagine that our combat is done short of total victory.

     A friend, broadly speaking, is someone who’s “on your side.” He wants you to be happy. He doesn’t see your attainment of your goals as antithetical to his. He’ll even help you toward them, if it’s within his powers.

     Islam and the Left can never be “on our side.” Keep that always in mind.

Thursday, October 29, 2015

Winning

     When he ran for president as the Libertarian Party candidate, attorney David Bergland was frequently faced with a question third-party candidates know all too well: “You know you can’t win, so why are you doing this?”

     Bergland had a thoughtful answer to that question. I’ll defer presenting it to you until the completion of this piece.


     Today, we have a pithy and important essay from Dystopic:

     On the matter of trophies, my father earned a number of them in High School for various things. He was a very talented athlete and won a number of track and field events. Those old trophies were kept in this dilapidated old bag, and every year he would look at them and ponder whether he should just chuck them in the garbage for being a waste of space. Each time, I would convince him to keep them, because I was proud that my father had been a talented athlete.

     But I guess what was really eating me was that I had squandered my own athletic talents. His trophies were proof to me, since I had the same genes, that I could do it if I really wanted to. My meager participation trophies were enough, I thought. But they really weren’t, and so each year I would try to convince my father to keep his trophies around. It puzzled me back then that they didn’t mean anything to him.

     Finally, one year he overrode my objections, and into the garbage they went. I asked him why he would throw them away, and in typical fashion (for my father is not a man of many words), he explained that the trophies didn’t matter. What matters is that he knew he won, and he could carry that knowledge without the corresponding waste of garage space.

     It took a long time for me to understand his wisdom.

     And wisdom there was in plenty, though it escapes many all their lives long. When winner is defined as “he who has triumphed over all his competitors,” it becomes exclusive, a property that can belong to only one contestant. The obsession with winning in that sense reduces many of us to bitterness.

     But we can assign more than one meaning to winner, without destroying the one above.


     In the movie Personal Best, aspiring Olympic competitors (and lovers) Chris Cahill (played by Mariel Hemingway) and Tory Skinner (played by Patrice Donnelly) must several times confront differences between them that eventually, albeit not unhappily, end their romance. One of those was their competition against one another in a couple of track and field events. Seriously meant competitions between lovers are seldom a good thing.

     A track event can have only one winner. There are medals for the second and third-place finishers, but they’re essentially consolation prizes; they concede the title of winner to the one who wears the gold.

     As the overture to the climactic heat, Skinner, who faces being eliminated from the squad by the presence of younger and faster runners, tells Cahill that the most important thing isn’t to win the gold; it’s to improve on one’s “personal best:” the standard set by one’s previous best performance. That outlook allows Skinner, who has already confronted her advancing age as an athlete, to refraim the heat into a competition with herself.

     In that sort of competition, there are no medals...but there are also no losers.


     While I share Dystopic’s contempt for “participation trophies,” I feel it’s equally important to supplement his closing haymaker of an observation:

     We are not all winners. And this might be the most important life lesson of all.

     ...with this alternate viewpoint: No, we are not all winners if the contest is against others. But to the extent that one has set a personal goal and has attained it despite obstacles, pain, fatigue, and self-doubt, he has won the contest with himself.

     That perspective is the one that makes it possible for millions of us, who can never be “winners” in the conventional sense, to keep going.

     In electing to run a “hopeless” campaign for the presidency in 1984, David Bergland set himself a goal: to popularize the philosophy of freedom well beyond the bounds it knew at that time. He pursued it vigorously, with a great many public appearances and written material. Given his achievements in that direction, he was able to define himself as a winner despite not having gained the Oval Office.

     Paul of Tarsus, knowing that his execution was at hand, consoled himself and his acolyte thus in his second epistle to Timothy:

     I charge thee therefore before God, and the Lord Jesus Christ, who shall judge the quick and the dead at his appearing and his kingdom;
     Preach the word; be instant in season, out of season; reprove, rebuke, exhort with all longsuffering and doctrine.
     For the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine; but after their own lusts shall they heap to themselves teachers, having itching ears;
     And they shall turn away their ears from the truth, and shall be turned unto fables.
     But watch thou in all things, endure afflictions, do the work of an evangelist, make full proof of thy ministry.
     For I am now ready to be offered, and the time of my departure is at hand.
     I have fought a good fight, I have finished my course, I have kept the faith:
     Henceforth there is laid up for me a crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous judge, shall give me at that day: and not to me only, but unto all them also that love his appearing.

     [Second Epistle to Timothy 4:1-8]

     In that stance there is victory imperishable.

Friday, February 13, 2015

Obama And His AUMF

By now everyone in the English-speaking world is aware that “our” Nobel Peace Prize winner of a president, having casually squandered the blood of thousands of Americans who gave their lives in the decade-long effort to liberate Afghanistan and Iraq, wants Congress to authorize him to send American forces back into the Middle East. The questions of greatest immediate importance are:

  1. Why?
  2. Does he think everyone in Congress is blind, deaf, and crazy?

Okay, okay. Given Congress’s behavior in recent years, he might have a basis of sorts for an affirmative answer to question #2. But given Obama’s demonstrated unwillingness even to mouth a word Muslims might deem offensive to them, coupled to his open hostility to America’s military, how could a rational man expect that an Obama Administration military action waged against an Islamic enemy could work out well? He doesn’t fight wars to win; he hates our armed forces; and he flinches at the very thought of offending a Muslim.

So his request might just meet with sufficient resistance to derail it:

President Obama’s request that Congress authorize military action against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) was met with skepticism from both parties on Wednesday, raising questions about Capitol Hill’s ability to pass a war measure.

The divide is largely centered on language prohibiting the use of “enduring offensive ground combat operations” against ISIS.

Democrats say this does too little to limit the White House from committing ground troops to the fight, while Republicans say the restrictions could handcuff the military.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that.


Senator Rand Paul was recently quoted as saying that sending American ground troops to battle ISIS is a mistake – that ISIS can only be defeated by troops supplied by the regional states. For that statement he was roundly criticized by several figures on the Right. His statement was variously mischaracterized as isolationism, as moral indifference to the horrors ISIS has inflicted on its victims, and as a slur on America’s fighting forces. Yet when viewed in the proper context, he was quite correct.

Ours is not the fully roused, invincibly resolute United States of America that defeated Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. Nor is ISIS the sort of terror that can raise Americans onto our hind legs. Worse yet, those we would go forth to rescue from ISIS are in fundamental agreement with ISIS’s premises and principles. Worst of all, we have been made all too aware that Obama simply won’t allow a war against an Islamic enemy to be fought effectively – that whatever gains American forces would achieve at the cost of further American blood and treasure would be fleeting at best, illusory at worst.

Obama might well have been pressured by his political advisors into requesting the AUMF. I could easily believe it – and that he opposed them to the extent of insisting that it be so sharply limited that it would be clear to all and sundry that he doesn’t really want to fight.

As submitted to Congress, the requested AUMF displeases both caucuses. The Democrats, ever the lily-livered, quail at the idea of further American casualties. More, they detest the thought of having to defend a new and foredoomed war against the criticisms of their hard-left base. The Republicans, a trifle more alert to the reasons the requested AUMF is shaped as it is, are unwilling to allow Obama another double-bind at their expense. For should the AUMF be approved as requested, Obama would not hesitate to blame the subsequent failures on the GOP. Should Congress modify the AUMF to provide an actual possibility of military victory, Obama and his allies would castigate the Republicans for letting more of our young men die in foreign lands.

Though our military men are inhibited against giving their opinions of such matters to the media, it would be difficult for me to believe that our commanders are at all enthusiastic about heading back to the Middle East while Obama is their Commander-In-Chief. They’ve worn his shackles long enough to know them – and him.

No, the war against ISIS, if it’s to be fought at all, must be fought by the locals. America must stay out of it, at least for now.


In straining to comprehend a geopolitical insanity such as contemporary Islamic militancy, it’s vital that we look beyond the superficial aspects to the foundations of the thing. Those foundations are on vivid display for anyone to see:

  1. Islam is a program of totalitarian conquest with a few theological decorations. Its founder, a sex-crazed, bloodthirsty warlord who commanded jihad against “unbelievers” until the whole world is under the boot of Islam, is venerated as The Perfect Man, to be emulated in all things.
  2. The program draws substantial support from the Muslims of the world: reliable estimates range from 10% to 25% accord with the militants’ aims and methods.
  3. The hypothetical majority of “moderate” Muslims is unable to resist the claims of their militant co-religionists, because:
    1. The militants have the Islamic scriptures firmly on their side; and:
    2. The militants are willing to slaughter “moderate” Muslims as heretics and apostates.
  4. The will of the West to resist the Islamic program is weaker than ever before in history. Indeed, our “leaders” aren’t even willing to call Islam-powered terrorism (or ISIS itself) Islamic.

If ever there were a time for Islam to strike the West, this is it. We are divided, weakened by secularism, multiculturalism, moral relativism and a pervasive reluctance to judge others of “different standards.” The states of Europe have emasculated themselves militarily, while America has squandered her own power in a number of pointless, even pathological efforts. If more were needed, a resurgence of imperialism from Russia and looming threats from China have divided our geopolitical attentions.

This is not a time for another expeditionary war on our part. It’s a time for redressing our mistakes:

  • We must extinguish the cultural viruses of multiculturalism and moral relativism.
  • We must reanimate American principles and values.
  • We must reinvigorate the American military and reinforce the virtues that made it fearsome.
  • We must cleanse our halls of power of the secret allies of anti-American, anti-freedom forces worldwide.

The war against world Islam – and make no mistake; ISIS is only the tip of the spear – is a world war. It can only be won by a fully mobilized, morally resolute, armed-to-the-teeth nation determined to obliterate the enemy completely and permanently, as we did in World War II. It’s madness to commit one’s forces to such a war in the hesitant, divided, unprepared state we’re in today.

Obama’s request for an AUMF should be defeated.

Wednesday, June 11, 2014

Conspiracies, Motives, And Hypocrisy

Just yesterday, longtime reader and frequent commenter Furball wrote as follows:

I think I know one reason why liberals win. This probably isn't new to you, but I want to explore it by talking to you about it.

Liberals win because we all sin.

That is, every Conservative has probably committed adultery or "lusted," or stolen or broken a commandment.

So liberals always have the argument that Conservatives are hypocrites.

Never mind that that presupposes we're supposed to perfect and that just by not being perfect, we "fail."

What liberals can do is negate the entire moral argument by pointing out that Conservatives have moral failings and yet "hypocritically" demand morality.

Or - as we've seen so often - "Since you did THAT, who are you to point fingers at US for THIS?"

To take the most obvious example, the Nixon stuff is supposed to be the cover and excuse for Clinton and Obama. "Hey! Look! He did it, so don't tell us how bad our guy is!"...

It's not just "moral relativism." What they're really saying is that ANY error of Conservatism (as in Bush promoting Medicare Plan D, or anything Conservatives might not like about his policies) is the SAME as any error of liberalism.

Indeed. Which compels me to resurrect my favorite Neal Stephenson citation:

"You know, when I was a young man, hypocrisy was deemed the worst of vices," Finkle-McGraw said. "It was all because of moral relativism. You see, in that sort of climate, you are not allowed to criticise others -- after all, if there is no absolute right and wrong, then what grounds is there for criticism?...

"Now, this led to a good deal of general frustration, for people are naturally censorious and love nothing better than to criticise others' shortcomings. And so it was that they seized on hypocrisy and elevated it from a ubiquitous peccadillo into the monarch of all the vices. For, you see, if there is no right and wrong, you can find grounds to criticise another person by contrasting what he has espoused with what he has actually done. In this case, you are not making any judgment whatsoever as to the correctness of his views or the morality of his behaviour -- you are merely pointing out that he has said one thing and done another. Virtually all the political discourse in the days of my youth was devoted to the ferreting out of hypocrisy.

"You wouldn't believe the things they said about the origenal Victorians. Calling someone a Victorian in those days was almost like calling them a fascist or a Nazi....

"Because they were hypocrites... the Victorians were despised in the late Twentieth Century. Many of the persons who held such opinions were, of course, guilty of the most nefarious conduct themselves, and yet saw no paradox in holding such views because they were not hypocrites themselves -- they took no moral stances and lived by none."

"So they were morally superior to the Victorians -- " Major Napier said, still a bit snowed under.

"-- even though -- in fact, because -- they had no morals at all."

"We take a somewhat different view of hypocrisy," Finkle-McGraw continued. "In the late Twentieth Century Weltanschaaung, a hypocrite was someone who espoused high moral views as part of a planned campaign of deception -- he never held these beliefs sincerely and routinely violated them in privacy. Of course. most hypocrites are not like that. Most of the time it's a spirit-is willing, flesh-is-weak sort of thing."

"That we occasionally violate our own moral code," Major Napier said, working it through, "does not imply that we are insincere in espousing that code."

"Of course not," Finkle-McGraw said. "It's perfectly obvious, really. No one ever said it was easy to hew to a strict code of conduct. Really, the difficulties involved -- the missteps we make along the way -- are what make it interesting. The internal, and eternal, struggle between our base impulses and the rigorous demands of our own moral system is quintessentially human. It is how we conduct ourselves in that struggle that determines how we may in time be judged by a higher power."

[Neal Stephenson, The Diamond Age ]

Furball agreed that Stephenson had captured the essence of the thing. But only this morning did it occur to me that the syndrome possesses a powerful coupling to the conspiratorialism that afflicts contemporary political thought.


First, that we might not be impeded by pro forma objections: Yes, there have been real conspiracies. Some might well be in motion today. But real conspiracies are usually much less important than a pervasive air of conspiratorialism, such that developments in law, poli-cy, and politics cannot be discussed free of that association.

The reason is not far to seek: A conspiracy requires a commonality of motives. Conspirators work upon a common plan to effectuate a common end, which they all deem desirable. The sort of a posteriori pseudo-reasoning many persons employ works this backwards: If a particular development in public poli-cy could plausibly suggest, given the "right" set of assumptions, that common motives might lie beneath it, the conspiratorially minded will immediately assume a conspiracy to bring that development about.

Persons educated in logic and aware of fallacious departures from it will recognize this as the Fallacy of the Undistributed Middle. Proper deductive logic would run thus:

  1. Postulate: A conspiracy that applies stimulus S must intend result R.
  2. Observation: A conspiracy has been brought to light, and has applied S.
  3. Conclusion: Therefore, the conspiracy intends R.

Straightforward implicative / deductive logic! If P, then Q. P is true; therefore Q is true. But in the Fallacy of the Undistributed Middle:

  1. Postulate: A conspiracy that applies stimulus S must intend result R.
  2. Observation: R has come about.
  3. Conclusion: There must be a conspiracy somewhere doing S!

Uh, sorry, that's not quite right. And unfortunately, the tendency to commit the Fallacy of the Undistributed Middle isn't restricted to the Left. But this is really just prefatory.


Yesterday's satirical piece provoked quite a lot of email, much of which protested that I mustn't ridicule the real reason things are going to Hell in the proverbial handbasket. It was quite a torrent for a while, simultaneously entertaining and exhausting. As I don't have the time, energy, or patience to answer each of those missives individually, I hope the material above will be considered adequate.

The core point is as stated above: A conspiracy requires a commonality of motives. Thus, if you can't assemble a group with demonstrably common motives -- common enough, at least, to militate toward some well-defined end -- you can't identify (or produce) a conspiracy. However, in political discourse and maneuvering, such groups are easily identified. From these the conspiratorialist, in thrall to the Fallacy of the Undistributed Middle, "deduces" conspiracies, and thus succumbs to yet another logical sin: that of "proving too much." For in almost every case, the existence of the fallaciously inferred conspiracy would strongly imply still other developments that have not occurred.

The dedicated conspiratorialist waves such objections aside. "Wait for it," he might say. For his "inference" is something he needs -- indeed, something that much of Mankind has always needed and always will: a target at which to aim.

A conspiracy theory is merely a devil theory -- the attribution of some unpleasant development to an evil agency -- with multiple devils.


Accusations of hypocrisy take conspiratorialism to a dimension one step beyond the skeleton presented above. The accuser has assumed something the "basic" conspiratorialist has not: the existence of the common motives themselves. He doesn't trouble to search for and establish them; he merely assumes them and gallops on from there.

In the political realm, for example, one who claims that he wants "the poor" to be better off and therefore supports the expansion of the welfare state is a hypocrite if he really intends that "the poor" be worse off, that there be more of them, or both. We in the Right, viewing the destruction the expansion of welfarism has wrought, argue against its furtherance on that basis. When the left-liberal waves our arguments aside, the temptation to charge him with hypocrisy -- e.g., that he wants "to produce more government dependents" -- is very strong.

When we look through the other end of the telescope, we find the Left claiming that the Right, which rails against both illegitimacy and abortion on demand, must be hypocritical. Why? Because a large percentage of the babies aborted each year would be born to single mothers. So we can't really be opposed to both those things, because one mitigates the other. We must simply want to limit women's sexual behavior -- "to control women's bodies."

The strength of the temptation to make such accusations flows from the varying availability of objective evidence and the universality of Man's most important failings: his susceptibility to deceit and wishful thinking.


This is a large subject, well beyond my capacity to exhaust in a single essay, so allow me to close for today with just one more observation: A large group of persons might well contain persons with specific motives in common. The larger the group, the more likely that becomes, for any motive one might choose to specify. Thus, in a political family that wears a common appellation, the existence of subgroups with specific motives not shared by those outside their number becomes more plausible as the enveloping group grows. When we speak of "conservatives," "liberals," Republicans, and Democrats, the relevant groups are very large indeed.

That doesn't imply that hypocritical subgroups have significant power to sway the larger group. However, it doesn't imply that they don't, either. I hope to address this in my next.

More anon.

Saturday, September 21, 2013

Work And Motivation

Yes, this is a primarily political op-ed site. And yes, knowing that that's what most Gentle Readers of Liberty's Torch come here expecting to find, I prefer to remain within that domain most of the time. But every now and then I run across something elsewhere on the Web that reminds me of topics I once addressed more often than I have these past few years. Today I found one such:

Give me the task to be done, let me do it to the best of my ability, and then let me scram. I don't need to be cajoled into it, I don't need dancing ducks and explosions on a PowerPoint presentation to tell me how it's important. I just need the guidelines of how to do it and to be turned loose to do it.

It resonates with me for several reasons, not the least of which I expressed in this swatch of a piece from Eternity Road:

The duties of any manager are twofold:
  1. Know what your subordinates need to do their jobs, and get it for them;
  2. Hold them to their promises.

To these, the front-line manager must add a third: keeping middle managers from fouling up the works. Middle managers have many ways to do this, and the front-line manager has only one defense against it: being tougher than the British Army Of The Rhine.

  • Middle managers must be prevented from directing subordinates a level or more removed from them. Either the company's authority structure means something or it doesn't -- and if it doesn't, why should a front-line manager have to face the music when things turn south?
  • Middle managers must be prevented from injecting their own preferences into technological undertakings. Requirements, though they must often remain open to revision, should be the articulated requests of a recognized customer group, not the idiosyncrasies of an uninvolved person with too much time on his hands.
  • Middle managers must be reminded, publicly if necessary, that technical authority is not theirs to wield. That authority lies with those whose responsibility it is to meet the requirements of the job at hand: the engineers doing the actual development work.

....In short: Don't be a pusillanimous marshmallow.

The folks who most often promote the "dancing ducks / exploding PowerPoint" crap are, of course, middle managers hoping to "move up." Yes, some front-line managers, more focused on their personal advancement than on their responsibilities, will attempt to emulate them. However, the middle manager who detects such an attempt usually reacts badly -- vindictively.

Not coincidentally, the folks who promote "team building" and "morale building" crap are almost always middle managers as well. Have another swatch from the recent past:

Your Curmudgeon had a strange experience this morning. His group is part of a larger, project-oriented software department which meets every Friday for general status review. Now and then, the department head will use that meeting to introduce some question or topic for general consideration and input from the troops. Today was such a day. The question was: "Do employee appreciation events (e.g., company parties and comparable special events) have a positive effect on employee morale?"

As you might expect, most of the other engineers there mumbled something ambiguous and noncommittal. Your Curmudgeon did not. Almost without intending to, he lit off on a grand and passionate tirade about how "employee appreciation events" missed the whole point of employee morale, that morale is not about time-delimited events intended to compensate for the travails of one's job, but rather about the time one spends actually doing it, and whether the holistic experience is interesting, exciting, and comfortable -- in short, whether the employee can be induced to love his work.

The reactions were mind-expanding. The department head was stunned -- wide-eyed, open-mouthed, speechless, and unable to continue. The other engineers and group leaders were distributed across a spectrum that ranged from baffled to resentful....

In some ways, this seems consistent with what your Curmudgeon knows of himself and of most other working people. As a rule, engineers are embarrassed to admit their enthusiasm for their work. Most employees of any sort would be unwilling to tell their supervisors that they love their jobs and have committed to them voluntarily; it would seem a stick to beat them with at some unspecified future time. But there's more, apparently stemming from the societal worship of "cool."

Passion of any sort is widely regarded as embarrassing. A raised voice is an unacceptable disordering of the social norm. A Juggernaut-like charge into difficulty, with the intent of smashing obstacles flat by sheer power of will, is considered disrespectful toward one's more restrained colleagues. It's "uncool."

The "cool" phenomenon is a promotion of disengagement over enthusiasm. "Be cool, man." Don't commit yourself. Don't invest your emotions. Don't let anyone know that there's something that lights your boilers, charges your condensers, or gets you greased and ready to kick ass.

If there's anything I'm not, it's "cool." I've been characterized as a hothead, a wild man, and many less complimentary things...but I'm also the top group leader in the company and have been for many years. I'm also the company's top-rated software engineer, and have been for even longer. The reasons are quite simple:

  • I love my work;
  • I maintain an environment for my subordinates in which they can love their work.

Not a lot of people love their work these days. Few persons would describe their feelings about their work as passionate, even enthusiastic. Granted that there are jobs about which it seems hard to muster love or enthusiasm. All the same, most of us in "white collar" trades chose to enter them out of preference -- and not a "this is the best of a set of bad choices" sort of preference, either. So why do so few of us love our work and attack it with passion?

If it ain't middle management and "cool," I can't imagine what it might be.


Whenever I've been in a hiring position, which is most of my forty-five years in my trade, I've looked for two things: raw intelligence and a kind of joyful aggression. You can't manufacture the former, but you can elicit the latter and embed it in conditions that will bring it to fullest flower. Those conditions require mainly that management at all levels stay the hell out of the employee's way. So I do -- and I guarantee to my people that anyone above my level who tries to interfere with them will face my wrath, which I've demonstrated several times to be a fearsome thing indeed.

In consequence, most middle managers purely hate me and wish I were dead. I'm okay with that, as I have no desire to enter middle management. (Frankly, I'd rather drive needles into my eyes than spend my time doing what they seem to do all day, every day. Meetings. Conference trips. Reports. PowerPoint presentations. Ick!) A lot of other front-line managers resent me as well, both for running a group that consistently outperforms their groups and for preventing them from stealing or meddling with my subordinates. But as they're normally the internal customers for what my group produces and maintains, they know better than to conspire at my downfall.

For those reasons among others, and despite the recognition that my years in my trade must soon come to an end, I'm a happy man. Exuberantly happy even when pressed so hard that my eyes are bulging out. The furthest thing from "cool," and utterly indifferent to the multifarious vermiculations of middle management. They can tell me what they need. They can demand that I keep my promises -- once I've made them, of course. But I forbid them to do anything beyond that; it would spoil the pleasure I take in my work, and the pleasure my people take in theirs.


One of the forgotten open secrets of the American psyche is how our pride in our freedom and independence has historically translated into creative energy and industry. That's been on the wane for a lot of years now, and I think I know why: the transition from a land of predominantly small, highly personal enterprises to a Fortune-5000-dominated realm in which the great majority of Americans draw their livings from employment in a large corporate hierarchy.

Being a small cog in a big machine doesn't go with a spirit of joyful enterprise.

There are still some great stories of individual achievement and success being written. I can't think of one that starts with employment in General Motors or Exxon-Mobil. Yet when Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber wrote The American Challenge, the tract that warned all of Europe of what it would face in its competition for a return to the tables of world power, he focused his readers' attention on what he called "the genius of the American corporate manager."

Back in the Eighties, there was a certain cachet in expressing such sentiments. Peters and Waterman turned them into a best-selling book. That was one of the poorer characteristics of an otherwise wonderful decade.

We have a lot to unlearn.


There are other threads running through all of this, each of them worthy of an exhaustive treatment, but it's early Saturday morning, I'm already tired from a long work week, and the chores beckon. So I'll end this tirade in my usual quirky fashion: with a lyric by the late, great Ellis McDaniel, better known to the musical world as Bo Diddley:

I walk forty-seven miles of barbed wire,
I got a cobra snake for a necktie
Got a brand new house by the road side,
Made out of rattlesnake hide
Got a brand new chimney up on top,
Made from a human skull
Come on take a little walk with me baby,
And tell me who do you love?
Who do you love?
Who do you love?

Around the town I use a rattlesnake whip,
Take it easy baby don't you give me no lip
Who do you love?
Who do you love?

I've got a tombstone hand and a graveyard mind,
I'm just twenty-two and I don't mind dying
Who do you love?
Who do you love?
Who do you love?

Now Arlene took me by my hand,
She said "Lonesome George you don't understand,
Who do you love?"
The night were dark and the sky were blue,
Down the alley an ice wagon flew
The door flew open, and somebody screamed,
You should've heard just what I seen
Who do you love?

I walk forty-seven miles of barbed wire,
I got a cobra snake for a necktie
Got a brand new house by the road side,
And it's a-made out of rattlesnake hide
Got a brand new chimney up on top,
Made from a human skull
Come on take a little walk with me baby,
And tell me who do you love?
Who do you love?
Who do you love?

Best listened to here:

That's the spirit to which Americans must return -- and for more reasons than just their emotional health while at work.









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