I realize regular readers will recognize this as the same old message that constantly burns freshly in my soul. You can skip this if you want; somebody else needs to see it.
You can’t fix several centuries of stupid.
The US Congress is constantly holding hearings on all kinds of problems. Virtually every government function I’ve ever seen is run by people who have completely forgotten how their agency got started. It seems not a single agency puts much emphasis on the ostensible mission that justifies its existence, and spends far more energy and resources on simply cooking up new justifications. In other words, you cannot make a bureaucracy work at anything but bureaucracy itself.
Pair this with another basic principle: Good people don’t want to tell other people how to live. That means an office with power to tell other people how to live will always draw people who aren’t good. They are seldom actually bad people, just folks somewhere below the line of goodness.
So we end up with government that is inevitably less than optimal, and always trends to worse. Progress? That’s a fairy tale. It’s a false dichotomy that we either calcify yesterday’s inadequate solutions or rush to meet tomorrows unexpected needs. Rather, the right way is to match resources to current needs as much as possible. Needs are not the controlling factor, nor are the resources. It’s the matching that justifies all the training and expertise.
All of this presumes a wider system that embraces the more fundamental mission of government. Therein lies the sandy bottom, the first and most basic failure. We can pretend that our government and organizing principals and documents all point to some objective ideal, but we are talking about humans. The power of ideas only shows up in people who believe in ideals. Most people believe in something, but not the things that make for good government. We are all too busy with our own needs. We can’t make it a rule that people learn that their needs have to include others, not in our Western world.
Worst of all is our cultural mythology that makes us so terribly individualistic. Our pantheon of heroes does not include servants. There is no glory imputed in service. Sure, we pretend there is, but no one actually buys it in sufficient quantity to strengthen the moral foundation on which we build. It amounts to pebbles in the sand as “building on a firm foundation.” The only place we allow sacrifice is for the sake of individual greatness. Only at the far extreme of the communist anti-human I-don’t-exist do we see any kind of reduction in the myth of The Great Man. All of it posits an impersonal, objective ideal.
We have no place in our imagination for how this represents such a radical position. We have no sense of perspective, that for the vast majority of human existence on this planet things were totally different. I have been threatened for suggesting that what came before Western Civilization was better. There’s some visceral and childish bellicosity that clings to this security blanket out of fear for the unknown. But it’s not unknown. All the vast lore of human existence is dominated by a different approach that we reject. It’s known, but ignored until someone mentions it, and then the berserker’s rage comes out. Blasphemy against the god of material impersonal objectivity.
Focus your energies on fixing people, not institutions. People as individuals can move, if we peel away the rags swaddling the truth people have tried to hide. Wisdom is an alluring lady when you dress her properly. As Solomon noted in his call to his nation, she’s a lady worthy of matrimony. He knew she couldn’t be found in the best kingly rule he could build, but only by individuals in their own unique approach. He left unstated the obvious point that truth is for the ladies a real man calling for their soft surrender to his unlimited protection and support. Our Western mythology ignores the real individualism of God’s unique regard for each of us as our Creator.
Activism for change presumes the system is just fine. It assumes we can just make some minor adjustments in how our civilization pushes into the sand and things will be dandy. There’s a whole planet of bedrock out there and we keep everything in the shallow wadis until the next rainstorm washes it all away.
Can you hear that distant thunder?
