politics

The Layer of Madness

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(This column is posted at www.StevenSavage.com, Steve’s Tumblr, and Pillowfort.  Find out more at my newsletter, and all my social media at my linktr.ee)

I’ve written before how many of our leaders seem, well, insane. I’ve also discussed at annoying length about how we’re often unseriousness and irresponsible as a culture, while also plugging Ted Gioia and The Unaccountability Machine. Lately I’ve been speculating on the architecture of this madness, namely how do so many – maybe all – of our so-called leaders become completely nuts.

You know what I’m talking about even if we’re talking about different people. People with bizarre beliefs that you can’t imagine any sane person holding – and they’re in charge. So-called adults acting like aspiring teenage Instagram Influencers who have nuclear weapons. It all seems like acting, and bad acting at that – and we can’t even blame Regan anymore (well, as much).

I’m not saying leaders haven’t been completely bonkers over the aeons. I mean, we still discuss the Hapsburgs. But as I’ve done my various historical readings, it seems we’ve managed the madness without the genetic damage and a particularly pathetic kind of madness at that. I think it’s because our leaders are so abstract.

It’s like everyone is so far away. You can’t be aware of how the world works, of the impact of your work. It’s because of layers.

Think of society as layers. There’s layers of work on extraction – farming, raw materials. Layers of crafting. Layers of communications. Layers of medical work. These different layers connect and support each others, but it’s easy to forget them. For instance, I work in medical technology, but I have to recall things like where drug raw materials come from or how shipping affects us.

As we pile layers upon layers to manage society – layers of banking and politics and the likes. Each layer ads more ability to coordinate, to administer, to process – but also more ways to get abstracted or distant. That may sound like a problem, but some people like that – they don’t want to be responsible or deal with complexity.

I’m musing now that our society’s layers have become so abstract that we’ve got some “upper layers” of media and politics so merged and so abstract the people in them are entirely out of touch unless they want to be otherwise. People raised or trapped entirely in a mix of low-brow politicking, media-spheres, and whatever science fiction they consumed 30 years ago. Everyone echoing each other like a pathological message board.

We may not have the Hapsburg inbreeding, but we’ve got people living on some airy layer of our culture, totally abstract from us, mentally inbred. It’s hard not to go mad even if you don’t want to, and if you do lose your mind as a politician or media star, people will just decide you’re sane. Which of course makes you more mad.

Plus you’re so far away you’re free of responsibility and surrounded by yes-people they can insulate you from reality – but not the rest of us.

I’m not against our modern society, but I think we have to ask if all the different layers have created a unique form of “royalty” even more out of touch than legendary royalty of the past. We don’t see it as our system of media and politics amplifies their madness – and tells them what madness of ours they can take advantage of.

We need to find a way to change how the layers of our complex world connect, else we’ll keep dealing with the insanity.

Steven Savage

We’re Not Serious

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Ted Giola wrote a fascinating article asking if the US is in a crisis of seriousness. I found this relevant as it codified my feelings about many things the last year or two, as well as the election. As I often warn, this column’s inspirations may not be who you think, but it’s easy to think it’s about THEM. So assume this post is about everyone including you and me.

The article is worth a read, so much so that I’ll just summarize it that ye, the US and to an extent the world is in a crisis of seriousness. We’re performative, we’re working on outrage, our culture is about special effects and marketing, but none of it is serious. Everything is a business, marketing, or frivolous – and oft mass-marketed (I’d argue the latter somewhat). Even when we attempt to be serious there’s nothing too serious about it as we churn out memes and pointless protest and anything but real stuff that feels real and is real.

If we can even recognize reality anymore.

This struck me as for the last year or two I’ve been feeling a decreased lack of interest in many things. It wasn’t depression as I had no sign of that. I was enthused about things, new things, in ways I hadn’t experienced before or in decades. But so much felt empty or pointless, disconnected.

New anime, so what. Some films that looked cool, but . . . eh. Same old same old. No there there. Unserious.

Now I look at this idea that so much of life is performative, unseriousness, spectacle (dare I say, a Society of the Spectacle) that I realize how much I don’t care. I’m bogged down in ads I didn’t want, on websites I don’t like anymore if I ever did, and while I can find great, truly real things on YouTube or Roku, a lot, and I mean a lot is performative shallowness.

And politics? Well I couldn’t tell eighty percent of that from my Youtube or Podcast surfing, or the memes that came across facebook, or anything else. So much is InstaXTubeBook posts (made worse with AI), so much is performing. It’s no wonder people embrace “authentic” even if most of the time they don’t know what authenticity is anymore.

But it wasn’t just this performative, unseriousness element. I realized what made this worse than annoying is that our Unseriousness in the US (and elsewhere) is paired with something worse. Something that together with this unseriousness puts us in pretty deep trouble.

I’ve written here – as many have written elsewhere – about how our economies and governments actually don’t do what we need. A lot of systems have gone stark raving mad, because people focus on things not related to the job they say they’re going to do. You can become rich laying off most of your company and juicing stocks even though your company doesn’t do the job it says it does. Politicians cut all sorts of insane ads to get into office to deliver nothing – its a joke how many get caught endorsing the results of a bill they performatively rejected.

We have economic and political systems where people benefit from not actually doing what they say they’re going to do. We’ve built A System that smart, or clever, or lucky people can manipulate for fame and power, but it has nothing to do with what we say it does. You can get rich by not doing anything useful – and are probably destructive – and be hailed a “leader” or a “genius.”

The Economy and Politics are complex systems, built over decades and centuries, and some people learned how to push the buttons over and over so money pops out.

Now combine the Unserious and Performative with Gaming The System and you get an extremely dangerous and toxic blend. How many so called “leaders” or “experts” are just people putting on an act and who found where the Money Button is? They don’t do anything productive or useful – in fact they’re destructive – but they learned to put on an oft-buffoonish act and how to get that bread.

It reminds me of a person grousing about politics saying, roughly, “at least sometimes kings had to lead a battle.” They weren’t royalist at all, but were making a similar point that useful should be important.

That’s where I find myself, looking at my disgust and dissatisfaction over the last few years, Giola helped me see it. It’s the lack of seriousness and the manipulation of the system, entirely disconnected from anything real. We’ve built a stupidly complex world we didn’t need, didn’t really want, and boy did some idiots get rich off of it.

I said at the start this should be taken as being about you and me first, before we talk The Others. I can honestly say the last year or so I’ve looked back at myself and seen how much I’ve done that was Unserious in the bad way. Yes it got me here, but I can also see how much time and resources and even relationships I wasted not being properly serious.

At least I have the self awareness, but as we’ve been careening around the last few decades, I don’t think a lot of people “in charge” do.

(By the way, don’t expect this to be the last column on the subject. Like “The Unaccountability Machine” this one hit HARD.)

Steven Savage

Madness From The Measure

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(This column is posted at www.StevenSavage.com, Steve’s Tumblr, and Pillowfort.  Find out more at my newsletter, and all my social media at my linktr.ee)

I’m posting this before the 2024 election and everyone is talking about polls. Movements of a tenth of a point garner news stories. Questionable polls flood the zone. Everyone is looking at a few numbers and asking “what does it mean?”

So we know what that means here, I get to talk about the Unaccountability Machine again! If you’re new here, it’s a book on why organizations go stark raving bonkers, which seems pretty relevant now.

One of the many bits of wisdom in the Unaccountability Machine is focus on a limited metric makes an organization go insane. The author is usually talking about shareholder value, which is easily maximized by doing things that don’t actually involve doing useful things. A business can completely undermine itself, especially if it has enough money, and end up propped up by investors while not doing anything. At least until things fall apart.

Going mad from focusing on one number? Sounds a lot like polls doesn’t it?

We’re obsessed with polls, wanting to see the future, to know. Of course these are snapshots in time, and snapshots weighed and changed and tweaked to try to make them accurate. In the end someone asks a few people and then tries to model what their responses mean for the population as a whole. If that sounds vaguely crazy, congratulations, you’re starting to get it.

Trying to get the number right will make you mad, as we’ve seen quite a few times. And you know who I mean.

But also we follow the polls. We want to know what it means, and when you have a margin of error of 2% or more that often becomes meaningless. But boy as we look at those numbers, we all start to go a little crazy one way or another. We’re trying to see the future made by people either lying or trying, but not by those who know.

Watching the number will make you insane as will knowing it may be completely made up.

Finally, yes, there are manipulated polls. It’s been fairly obvious that happens for awhile, but any idiot can call themselves a pollster, and some pollsters are already a few bricks shy of a moral or mental load. So there may also be lots of B.S., making everyone else further crazy.

And then how many of the liars or propagandists are already slamming the kool-aid, believing what they lie about – or knowing they’re lying but not being sure of anything.

I’m really getting all the “nose to the grindstone, get out the vote people” this year. You just ignore the polls unless there are useful extremes and work hard. And boy in 2024, it seems like there’s a lot of weird things where margins of error tell us how much we can do or don’t know so we might as well get to work.

But the magic number tells us nothing, though it will make us and a lot of other people crazy.

What is finally crazy-making is maybe we could actually try to do stuff that works for people in politics. That maybe we need to discuss our poll obsession, or what works. But horseraces make for exciting news and endless amounts of fundraising letters. The news media makes bank on all this, but we keep talking numbers not people.

Which makes it all more crazy.

Steven Savage