A Lack of Finesse

On moving fast and breaking things.

I still don’t hate or love Donald Trump with sufficient ferocity to burnish my credentials with certain partisans. That is because I recognize, unlike others I guess, that he is unable to defy the laws of physics. If you are new, please let me remind you of an axiom of my current mindset.

A simple moral principle: when a future change is framed as a problem which we might hope our political system to solve, then the only acceptable reason to talk about the consequences of failing to solve that problem is to scare folks into trying harder to solve it. If you instead assume that politics will fail to solve the problem, and analyze the consequences of that in more detail, not to scare people but to work out how to live in that scenario, you are seen as expressing disloyalty to the system and hostility toward those who will suffer from that failure.

Chaos
In this week’s news, stocks are flip-flopping, I realize that I’ve missed a golden opportunity to buy gold, Warren Buffet is revealed to own some significant fraction of Treasuries and Trump is backpedalling on Chinese tariffs. Oh yeah and a professor or two is moving to Canada because Harvard is in trouble with the government, again.

Meanwhile I have been off into the historical fiction around the case of a certain Alfred Dreyfus, whose name used to conjure up world-historical analogies in the realm of civil rights. Dreyfus, for those of us old enough to be born before whenever it was that USA Today made anybody money, was a Jewish Army officer wrongly convicted of espionage in France which drew the ire of the morally inclined. The affair was not resolved for twelve years. So here I am, once again justifying some measure of my indifference relative to the sorts of kinetic action populations have experienced in history. Meanwhile, my FICO score has fallen 8 points. Poor poor pitiful me.

The unfortunate side effect is that I’m not as responsive to ordinary social situations that engage intelligent folks with passion. I’m just vaguely aware, for example, that a Democrat had his house torched by some dingbat anti-semite, and this man, the current Governor of Pennsylvania, is by some lights the most righteous replacement for the current Commander in Chief, four years from now. So some of this dropping off of finesse is my fault. I’m not parsing the details.

What’s really at issue is whether or not we (we meaning those of us who move and shake, and or enable movers and shakers) feel that there is some measure of evolution necessary in reform. Those Americans who voted Trump into office this time and last time wanted him to move fast and break things. That’s something he’s fairly good at. But then we have to ask if it’s ultimately constructive. What did Trump break between 2016 and 2020 that Biden never fixed, besides hearts?

Broken Windows
I used to litter. On purpose. As an insouciant young man, I would drop trash on the sidewalk, say the paper napkin from my finished ice cream cone, or paper sleeve from my NYC Sabrett dirty water dog. “I’m stimulating the economy. It’s somebody’s job to clean up this mess, so let them do it. If it gets too clean around here janitors will lose their jobs.” I considered the analogy extended to broken windows as well. Next time, Sal’s Pizzeria will install tougher windows, ones that can stand up against Mookie’s chair. At some point I encountered the economic counter-argument. Sal has to close down for repairs and net loses business at the one thing he’s good at. America’s janitors could be getting an education and get better jobs. There are opportunity costs here. So I see it both ways on the simple example.

However this discussion with Tyler Cowen and Jennifer Pahlka gets to the heart of the question of the necessity of chaos in reform. It left me unsatisfied, but leaning towards the need for moving fast and breaking things. That is because, by nature I am more convinced that there’s more stupidity in the status quo than we generally realize. Furthermore, I have a very hard time accepting the idea of captured markets. That is especially the case with those things the government has a near monopoly on, like the use of violence, not least because we humans are all inherently violent, and that is what we resort to when all negotiations fail.

I’d rather be punched in the nose than bankrupted in civil court.

I think you would too, and yes I think various American institutions need to be punched in the nose. A punch in the nose focuses the mind, not quite as much as a noose, but we are talking about reform. Reform is what’s happening everywhere people are thinking about what Trump is breaking. NATO, WTO, DEI, USAID, INS. Ultimately we have to ask how much can he break that can’t be fixed by Josh Shapiro? Or are we just complaining about our FICO scores?

Trump, most of the time, sounds to me like an inarticulate boob. I don’t get how he navigates from Action A to Result B, especially in light of the number of people who despair and whine about the fact that he’s got, absent another bullet, more than 1000 days remaining in the Oval Office. There’s too much noise. But I also don’t see how that makes him evil, racist, fascist, treacherous or incompetent. He’s the last person on the planet his opponents want to steelman. This from some people who can’t decide what a woman is or promise to save the planet. To be clear about it, populism makes for authoritarianism. That’s why I desist from populist politics in general, especially from the sneering sorts who believe Action A would always work if it weren’t for those Other damned kids.

Insect Negotiations
I still remember the day when I learned the term ‘emergent behavior’; the NPR guest made his explanation in terms of ants. Ants do things that seem intelligent to human observers, but the individual ants only sniff the butts of the ants they’re following. It reminded me of the fact that ants only war with other ants. My colony needs what your colony has, therefore we kill you, down to the last ant.

This is the brutal world of ants, dictated by their biology which like the overwhelming majority of life forms, makes them territorial. Ants, unlike humans, have invented no economic or political justifications for their actions. They don’t understand the laws of physics. Our world, consequently, is far less brutal and authoritarian than the ant world. We do have political and economic regimes, and although we are subject to the same laws of physics and instincts for survival, and plain old scarcity of necessities, we’re not always sniffing the butts of the humans we follow and sacrificing all for the queen.

Politics, thus, is what Trump understands quite well. It’s still the art of the deal. It’s lying and getting away with it in conscious defiance of everything but the laws of physics. Maybe that’s why he wants us to placate every hot kinetic warring faction so that Americans can keep away from the focusing of the mind that the noose of war compels. When bombs are dropping, nobody cares about their FICO score. When babies are kidnapped and missiles are flying, suddenly we figure out what a woman is and we’ve figured out who exactly the Others are.

Mean Mugging
But over here, we like our fantasies and dramas and self-deceptions. We pretend to know more than we do, we just want to slide into our comfort zones. We enjoy the distance our outside voices can give us. We like actresses who can screech like the most conceited HOA Karen imaginable, and throw a left hook to boot. We like the idea that our voices and our cameras will give us the courage to follow soldiers on a mission of assassination, because democracy. We like the idea that our symbols matter and that our angles have weight.

That’s all just politics. Politics is the lie that we can live with. And you can live with that lie so long as it works for you and doesn’t press you towards the kinetic. Where you can drive through the countryside for miles in and out of war zones and you never need to pick up a kinetic weapon. Politics is how we intellectually finesse the physical conflict our minds and instincts feel. Until the bottom falls out of the market and you can no longer afford comfort.

You And Your Subscriptions
So let’s face it. Even though we don’t know the depth, complexity, robustness and sources of our supply chains, we expect our subscriptions to matter. We’re literally invested. We are providing what the industries love to call ARR, annual recurring revenue. We want a steady supply of wifi, news, gasoline, electricity, natural gas, and political positioning. Its what we as humans do. We eat, clothe and shelter ourselves so that we can do our negotiations. Nobody is more clever than those businesses who have monetized human communication. I gotta talk, you gotta talk. So we’re sold the promise of unlimited talk minutes. So long as we can talk, we can stave off the kinetic necessities. So we’re all political in some way. We’re trying to convince someone to accept us. We’re trying to get what we want without punching somebody else in the nose, or lifting a finger — but maybe lifting a smartphone.

Honestly, I do the minimum amount of public politics possible, but for decades I have been leveraging digital infrastructure with words and code. But at some point even that leverage is going to face Murphy’s Law. Then I will become desperately political. I’ll be old and weak and will fear a punch in the nose like death itself. I will beg and plead and mean mug and negotiate and swear never to break another window as long as I live.

At that moment I will try to finesse everything possible because I won’t want to face physical reality, the threat of death — not social death, actual death. I will try to defy the laws of physics with whatever expedient I can find. I will accept greater leaps of faith than I ever have, and I will make greater promises than I have ever made. I will master the arts of ingratiation and flattery because I will believe my life depends on it.

Then suddenly I will be vulnerable to the okeydoke. I will no longer be disloyal to the system. I will identify with the Party and fall in line, sinking or swimming like whoever’s butt I’m sniffing.

Or maybe, like Socrates, I will arrogantly and fearlessly drink the cup, grateful for the absolute finality and truth of death.