Assessing the Negative

Gradations of failure & response

Somewhere I read a three part rubric having to deal with decisionmaking and I only remember the last two.

1. (forgotten)

2. What is the chance that something can go wrong? (Risk Assessment)

3. How much damage is likely to result from that thing going wrong? (Recoverability Assessment)

I will use the term of the day, first encountered by me from Jonathan Haidt in his landmark Coddling of the American Mind. Catastrophizing. I tend to do this but only because I want to be the hero of the catastrophe. So I generally do a kind of negative assessment which is somewhat different than the above.

1. How long will it be before it all goes to shit?

2. Can I escape this apocalypse?

3. How useful will skills be when it happens?

I spend most of my time assessing the timeline and scope of #1. For example, before it went to shit in the LA Riots in ‘92, I had spent a lot of time chasing cops around with a camcorder. I shared the same collective memory of black youth cuffed on the curb or head slammed and spread eagled on a squad car hood. But I never got it on camera. Weird, now that I think about it, I haven’t seen much of that at all in my doom scrolling either. Then again, I tend to prefer watching YouTube violent fails of the Darwin Award variety.

In ‘92 it turned out that I was on the other side of the continent in Brooklyn. I walked the empty streets of Park Slope at midnight completely alone while LA burned that Thursday night. In fact, I wanted to be in the midst of that shitstorm, but I was not. I had already had my fill of Los Angeles and I GTFO’d nine months ahead of time.

When it comes to domestic affairs, I tend to see things in such extreme terms. My benchmark for agitation tends to be the late 60s and early 70s, back when Central Park was a playground for rapists, Hollywood made disaster movies and one could generally expect feral motorcycle gangs and race riots every summer. Occupy and even Seattle Antifa and the Capitol invasion don’t compare. These days I still smell fear in the air, but are the Proud Boys as ubiquitous as Curtis Sliwa’s Guardian Angels once were?

Annoyance
My baseline attitude is one of disdain and annoyance. I went out of my way in this picture to stare down the Nazi back in 1973 at the inaugural parade of newly elected LA Mayor Tom Bradley. I wasn’t afraid at all. I just wanted to look him in the eye and let him know it.

Then again I only expect annoyance when I go out in public. My house is calm. My karma is placid. My inner peace is secure. There is no smoke in my temple. Since I expect annoyance in all domains that are beyond my control, it doesn’t bother me. There is no generally no visible affect in my annoyed behavior. I don’t have anything positive to say, so I stay quiet or I make laughing sarcastic remarks. I am always prepared to laugh at the Three Stooges, even when they are in my employ, so long as they can mostly handle their idiot business. The way to deal with annoyances is to have a sense of humor about the plurality of fools and their foolishness. That is until they cause me problems.

Problems
My second assessment level is that of problems. Since I am an engineer by profession, I tend to seek problems out and brainstorm solutions. In fact, I have a fairly well established rubric for the classification of problems. You may have read it a couple of years back. I remind you.

I always expect to be dealing with problems. But I don’t go around using that other popular term ‘problematic’. I am very clear and specific about problems that are my responsibility and those that are not. I chose to be a professional, also a husband and a father. So in fact I have plenty of problems to entertain and otherwise take up my time.

Trouble
Trouble is the state of affairs where conflict is inevitable and action must be taken in order to avoid or control damage. Whereas with problems you may have some leeway in your undertaking, trouble doesn’t leave you any choice. You are in trouble and you must get out of trouble. You deal with it or your face considerable consequences. If you have a problem, you can always say “Not my monkey, not my circus.” When you have trouble, the monkey is already pissing in your punchbowl and he’s heading towards the IV in your mother’s arm.

The way to deal trouble is to yell. Well that’s step one. Let it be known that trouble is on your doorstep. Find out quickly if you have friends who can help. If your friends can and will help, that’s great. On the other hand, you may need professional help, but you must be a very smart consumer of that help. Don’t panic.

Danger
The difference between trouble and danger is that trouble can be administrative. Danger means that there is significant risk of the kind of damage from which you are going to have a hard time mending. The particular awfulness of danger is that there are some types of trouble that escalate quickly into danger. Most of us have evolved a sense of what kinds of activities are inherently dangerous, but there are many swift and hidden dangers. When these occur and they are not our fault, we call them freak accidents. When they are reasonably predictable, we angrily ask ourselves “What the hell were you thinking?”

Danger is when the monkey is not only pissing in your face but you are doing wheelies on a motorcycle in the rain with no helmet, such is clear and present danger. Wisdom is the difference between trouble and danger. Keeping your head when everything around you is going to hell. It’s no excuse to do meth because others are doing fentanyl. Don’t flirt with danger.

Destruction
Destruction is irreparable damage. It is the result of an actual catastrophe. Of course destruction, like danger and trouble can occur in very small doses, like one more scoop of ice cream, one more drink for the road, or one last night together before we break up.

The problem with destruction is that evolutionarily, we try to think our way around it. Nothing quite speaks to the kind of wishful thinking I always fear myself slipping into when I make excuses for incompetence. As a stoic observer, I become oblivious to destruction. Like I said, I enjoy watching fail videos. It limits my willingness to expend the energy of empathy. I wonder at times whether or not my empathy centers have been damaged, or even destroyed due to overexposure.

Obvious destruction is cathartic, because it rarely gets worse. We find the vicarious experience of destruction to be instructive, and we tell ourselves that nothing we do will lead us to such ends. We watch horror films with such confidence, but are we made wise?

The Stoic Approach
The point here is to expand our skills in order to engage problems with confidence, to deal with trouble with a straight face, to not panic when trouble arrives and to work our damnedest to avoid danger. But even in retrospect to be honest with ourselves about how we may have been damaged and maintain some reasonable approaches not to discount what is broken. On that last point the following quote is very instructive:

“You rationalize. You defend. You reject unpalatable truths, and if you can’t reject them outright you trivialize them. Incremental evidence is never enough for you. You hear rumors of holocaust; you dismiss them. You see evidence of genocide; you insist it can’t be so bad. Temperatures rise, glaciers melt—species die—and you blame sunspots and volcanoes. Everyone is like this, but you most of all. … You turn incomprehension into mathematics, you reject the truth without even hearing it first.”

More on that later.