Psychology

Well Yes, They Lie

by

(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 trying to figure out why people are surprised that other people, especially powerful people, lie.

Yes, of course I’m inspired by the whole thing where people are surprised Trump suddenly backs H1B visas, or at least sounds like he does. I mean why are people surprised that politicians are lying and how do they ignore previous disappointments? People are also surprised that businesses lie to them even after buying a bunch of terrible projects. Don’t even start me on movies, where lying about quality has become an art form while the films aren’t art but so much a sad cry from help from marketing.

I’m looking at YOU, Kraven. How do you mess up “sexy chest-revealing badass hunter”?

Anyway, it seems we can complain but we keep believing the lies. I mean look how people are talking Jimmy Carter being decent like we’re surprised someone is. But then we go ahead and believe some salesman or politician who lies to our faces as it’s the right lie.

And look, I get some people lie, even good ones, especially politicians. Some folks have to keep secrets even if they’re usually terrible about. Politicians and marketers have to put some polish on some potential turds. People are gonna get lie-adjacent, and yeah we get that.

But how do we keep being surprised that people lie to us blatantly when they’ve kept doing it? Especially when they’re politicians and big companies who you’d think we wouldn’t trust, considering our constant cultural elements of “don’t trust these things.”

I think it’s because cynicism also begets faith. Which also sounds like a dynamite alt-metal album title

Anyway by aging fantasies of music aside, think about what happens when you get real cynical about people. You don’t trust anyone. You’re not sure who to count on. Mistrust is hard even when it’s warranted. It’s wearing.

So you also want to trust someone. Cynicism can, in some ways, generate trust because you want someone to help you solve the problem. When you’ve got a big enemy, you want a big friend to help you.

Mistrust breeds trust.

Of course people know this. Ever notice how a lot of conspiracy theorists afraid “of the system” also sound pretty authoritarian? They want to fight The Conspiracy by establishing something that sounds just as bad when you think about it – they just promise you’ll be on top. People trust them because so much mistrust gets sown – or they come with it.

If you ever follow any podcast about conspiracy theorists you’ll quickly see how they’re often absolutely, blatantly lying. It honestly gets tiring, and I follow these things since it’s kind of relevant to my job in IT and medicine where lots of conspiracy theories get pointed.

Ultimately we need to know how to form trust appropriately – with communities. Know who you can trust, know what real trust feels like. That lets you also evaluate other relationships, especially more distant ones like with politicians and media figures. In time they might be worth trust, but you need some real trust to avoid the trust/cynicism fluctuation – and to get together to push politicians and leaders who need some pressuring.

You ever hear people rant about how we lack community? Well, I’m leaning to believe the ranters as I get older. If we form real relationships it may help us detect ones people are using to manipulate us. A little more trust might just breed effective mistrust as we have something to believe in and something to protect.

But at least for now maybe we can be a little more suspicions – even of ourselves.

Steven Savage

Yes, We Need Bureaucrats

by

(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)

One thing I hear a lot is “we don’t need bureaucrats.” Now I’ve certainly been frustrated by bureaucracy – what do you think inspired this column – but I also know it’s needed. The problem is not bureaucracy, but it’s how we approach it.

Any complex system – a government, school, play, hospital, etc. is going to have things that need to get done. Orders and record-keeping, tracking and validating, all those everyday things that are important. There are also standards to be followed, and when it comes to say FDA validation or security assessments, you want to get those important – but often boring – things done.

Such things need bureaucracy and bureaucrats. Someone has to pay attention, shuffle the papers, fill out the checkboxes, and triple-check the forms that triple-ensure something isn’t going to kill you. Not everyone can do that – and I say this as someone who is sort of a bureaucrat, a Project Manager.

A bureaucrat provides, however abstract, a moral authority in a complex, boring, and specific situation. As much as you may not want to Do The Paperwork, the paperwork has a point as does the person doing it. Someone is responsible, if kind of abstract from it.

The thing is when we pay attention to bureaucracy, people usually see two things:

First, people see these bureaucratic processes but don’t understand them. Because they don’t understand them they think they’re useless, or pointless, or a burden. Bureaucracy, much like IT setups, often has to be turned off before people notice they need it. In fact, many people’s frustration with bureaucracy comes when it breaks because they didn’t notice it.

Secondly, people don’t think about improving bureaucracy or realize people are trying to make it more effective. Trust me, bureaucrats do ask how to make things run better, but that takes time, needs support, and may not be obvious. Just recently, as of this writing, I found out how one person I knew had completely overhauled an entire validation process, and I hadn’t known even though I worked with them for a year.

We don’t see how much good bureaucracy does or how it improves. When a process fanatic like me misses it, yeah, we all do.

Steven Savage

We’re Not Serious

by

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