Playing with matches; burning down the house…
As cruel as its intentions are, the outstanding quality of this administration appears to be its utter stupidity.
Competence:
a: the quality or state of having sufficient knowledge, judgment, skill, or strength (as for a particular duty or in a particular respect)
Dear Wannabe Masters of the Universe,
If it were not so tragic in its results, the delusion that getting rid of, or controlling, everyone you fear, everyone who is not a bona fide card-carrying, ass-kissing member of your tribe, will result in competence, is hilarious in its stupidity.
Competence is, in one sense, a value-neutral quality. Nefarious schemes as well as noble ones need competence to carry them out. The problem for you is that your aims are so narrow, so dependent on fear and ideology, that you can’t access the actual qualities that produce competence.
Fear is not competence. Smash and grab is not competence. Censorship of everything that does not fit into your tiny little conception of what serves you, and what does not, is not competence. Your fantasy, that for some mysterious reason, rich white men are superior to everyone else, does not result in competence. It just proves that you are stupid.
Any way of thinking or seeing that requires a rejection of empiric evidence is stupid.
It’s the old if all you have is a hammer then everything looks like a nail… As appalling as it is that you want to delete everything from the public discourse, from all records of the past and present, that doesn’t fit into your particular make-a-wish dreamworld, it is also mind-numbingly stupid. I am embarrassed for you. Do you think that erasing everything that scares you will actually delete reality? If so, how stupid do you have to be to think that?
Competence in the real world requires responsiveness to changing conditions on the ground. It requires a willingness to accept and integrate new information. Your brittle belief system is not flexible enough to attain competence. There are few, if any, areas of expertise that do not require negotiation with reality. The ability to negotiate with reality is a definition of expertise.
Stupid is as stupid doesn’t
The stupidity is baked into the weltenschauung. If all you can see is us and them, if you have dehumanized everyone who is not under your thumb, if the only relationship you understand is one of dominating or being dominated, if all you want to do is use force to hurt people and make them do what you want, then you are oblivious to actual cause and effect.
You are unable to gauge the effect of your actions because your worldview has no room for understanding. It has no room for humility or an open mind. Let’s face it, you are stupid.
Stupid, stupid, stupid
Some reasons why your desire for domination, for imposing your will on the world, is such a stupid, incompetent way to operate:
1. Because there comes a point at which greed kills the golden goose. That’s us — everyone who is not part of the 1%. Capitalism, in all its shortsighted, underhanded, rapacious glory, actually needs consumers who can spend money, so making the hoi polloi ever less able to do that is a shoot-yourself-in-the-foot strategy.
2. Because taking away from those with too little to give to those with too much is not a sustainable system. It creates an extreme imbalance that compels revolution. By ‘revolution’ I do not necessarily mean large groups of people with pitchforks grabbing all the 1 percenters and marching them down to the guillotine.
I mean a natural process, like too much rain so that a river rises over its banks, or a balloon into which too much air is pumped so that it pops, or as Lao Tzu (translated by Witter Bynner) puts it:
Keep stretching a bow
You repent of the pull,
A whetted saw
Goes thin and dull,
Surrounded with treasure
You lie ill at ease,
Proud beyond measure
You come to your knees:
Do enough, without vying,
Be living, not dying.
3. And last but not least…
For what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul? Or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul? ~King James Bible
Note: For those of you who don’t care for the bible, or the idea of a soul, just substitute the word integrity or sanity in the quote above. Both words imply a connection to reality that goes beyond individual desire or will. And if the use of the word ‘man’ for all of humanity bugs you, substitute the word person and they/their instead of he/his.
Where do we go from here?
The real competence we need to live, learn, and create in this century is the rare skill of knowing what we don’t know. This opens the door to new awareness, new understanding, new syntheses.
There is an expansion of consciousness happening in the world today. Much of what appears to be ‘evil’ (or at least stupid, cruel, and damaging) is a reaction against that expansion of consciousness — the smallest of men fearing what cannot be controlled by force.
To be clear, when I say ‘expansion of consciousness’ I’m not talking about partisan culture/politics. I’m not talking about getting on a high horse of self-righteousness from which to belittle and censor others. Real consciousness is about facing yourself and your own actions in the world; it’s not about telling other people how to think and feel. It’s about accepting yourself as both more and less than what you think you are.
There’s no going back
The suffering instigated by human fear, greed and stupidity is real. There is only one direction we can move in if the human species is going to get its act together, and that is the direction of intelligent, humble awareness that results in integrity, sustainability, fairness and compassion.
While there may be or have been small pockets of relative sanity and/or stability here and there, there’s no going back. There’s no making anything great AGAIN. The big picture is humans have been pretty darn stupid ever since we started figuring out how to use our opposable thumbs to get what we wanted. Our evolution towards less stupidity is a slow and laborious process.
Playing with matches; burning down the house…
Is playing with matches and burning down the house the only way we can learn? The old saying: Good judgment comes from experience; experience comes from bad judgment. We are in a race against ourselves, or between ourselves and time. How stupid do we have to be before we come to terms with who/what we are?
How many times do we have to bang our heads against a brick wall until our heads are bloody and the wall is fine? How many times do we have to bang our heads against a brick wall until we notice that the wall is hardly wider than a door and we could easily walk around it?
I don’t know. I suggest that it is possible, as an individual, and as a community, whether that community is a family, or a neighborhood, or a nation, or a world, to grow up. To become wiser. Wiser never means without fault or flaw; if anything it means acceptance of/integration of fault and flaw. It means awake, aware, humble and brave. It means kind and committed. It means patient and steadfast. It means creative.
So many questions…
Is there a metaphysical quality to our lives that, beyond all attempts to tame, control, abduct and misappropriate it, deserves to be respected, not out of fear, but out of love and faith in what is real?
What is the relationship between this quality and our everyday lives?
When will our awareness of interconnectedness catch up to the reality of the interconnections that actually exist in this world (many that we have created), between people, nations, humans, the natural world… between the myriad systems we use to manage need and complexity?
What is our end game here?
Seriously, what is it?
I originally wrote the article below in 2020. It's as pertinent now as it was then, maybe more. (If only all it took to stop iniquity was a bucket of water…)
Perfect. Can you share this with every member of Congress?