Affect: noun (a-fekt): a set of observable manifestations of a subjectively experienced emotion.
Benjamin Franklin popularized the phrase “time is money” circa 1748 in his essay “Advice to a Young Tradesman.” Never since have so few words of advice been accepted so wholeheartedly, while simultaneously being so pervasively destructive. You see, Ben embodied what once passed as the model of what it meant to be a man. He was a “Renaissance man.” But in an ironic twist of fate, his advice murdered the archetype.
As testimony to Mr. Franklin’s advice, speed has become virtually synonymous with business success. UPS moves “at the speed of business.” Mark Zuckerberg thinks we should “move fast and break things” because “unless you are breaking stuff, you are not moving fast enough.” Marc Benioff goes so far as to conflate the terms, stating “Speed is the currency of business.” Can there be any doubt that since Franklin’s time the world has just continued to move faster, and faster, and faster?
To compensate for the demands associated with maintaining such blistering speed, society has responded by delegating knowledge more diffusely. Meaning, of course, each of us knows our role more intimately, while simultaneously knowing less about the world writ large. And while the business community acts as if speed exists in a vacuum, in reality, speed invariably exists in relation to mass. Thus, as applied to society, the “turning the ship” metaphor is incomplete and must be extended. We’re not only a massive ship traveling at tremendous speed, but one powered by eight billion parts, each so singularly focused on the specialized task at hand that no single part has the ability to comprehend the danger posed by the rocks just off the bow. The ship is without a captain.
The tragedy in this is that extremely smart people abound today. What appears to be lacking is leadership born of wisdom. We can always refer to specialists as smart, intelligent, or knowledgable. But how often do we refer to them as possessing wisdom? And, do we necessarily equate specialists with good leadership? Sometimes, I suppose. However, we always seem to equate good leadership with wisdom.
So where does the wisdom that guides good leadership come from? What do the great leaders of the past share that the specialists of today do not? It’s simple. They share a high concentration of knowledge in its disparate forms. For example, Franklin had a wide range of interests including natural sciences, literature, and politics. He was an inventor, civil activist, diplomat, author, and political theorist. Thomas Jefferson was many things, including an architect, author, lawyer, musician, botanist, inventor, philosopher, political theorist, and naturalist. And while Abraham Lincoln didn’t fit the lettered tradition associated with the Renaissance archetype, he certainly made up for it by being a remarkable autodidact in business, military affairs, law, and engineering. For example, he still holds the distinction of being the only U.S. president to receive a patent by designing a system for lifting riverboats off sandbars.
The never-ending quest for speed through specialization appears to have come at a steep cost. We haven’t changed the way each one of us thinks about ourselves individually. Our egos still tell us all that we’re all of above average intelligence. However, we have drastically changed the way we educate ourselves by emphasizing, to an absurd degree, the value we place upon commodifying ourselves to be more marketable. Who has time to learn something that isn’t marketable? We’ve STEM’ed ourselves stupid.
Psychologists talk about the Dunning-Kruger effect. If we’re unaware of what we don’t know to such a degree that we can’t conceive of somebody knowing more about it, we tend to think we’re as knowledgable about the subject as those who actually do know the subject inside out; witness Donald Trump. As such, I think we need a new term to describe what society is suffering due to our dogmatic adherence to Franklin’s “time is money” maxim. Perhaps, the societal malaise can be summed up as mass suffering from the Dunning-Kruger effect.
bruce wilder
The individualism of Franklin who ran away from his family and apprenticeship in Boston and wrote his famous Autobiography, of the self-made Lincoln who was alienated from his father and kept his own counsel on such diverse conventions of his day as religion and drinking alcohol, are notable. But, so are the common tastes of the day that made these men popular leaders.
In the crisis of the Revolution, the country collectively turned for leadership to genuinely admirable men, of which Franklin was one. And, Franklin played the game for sure; he was nothing if not a self-promoter. Lincoln, too, was relentlessly ambitious and a conscious manipulator of his own public image. But, in the crisis of Civil War, the country overlooked his appearance and lack of formal education and bought his careful, moderate, measured wisdom.
How the heck, in the crisis of imperial sum neoliberal collapse, did we get or deserve the stunning array of pundits and politicians we are faced with? The rat-faced Cuomo is popular, despite his hostility to the interests of the mass of people he governs. Wassup wit dat?
Lex
Lots to chew on here and I appreciate it. Like everyone else, I’m pretty sure that I’m above average in intelligence. But. To my mind, intelligence/knowledge/wisdom are journeys not destinations. My motto is to remain curious. If there’s something I don’t know, then there’s something I should learn more about. And my rule is that if someone knows something I don’t, then she’s smarter than me (in at least one thing) and therefore worth learning from.
krake
Agreed, sir.
___________
My parents were cold-hearted bastards. Cruel, at times. Certainly abusive, unforgiving and implacable. They lost custody in a state which rarely seizes children. Only I managed to escape being sent back home, though the costs were high. Foster care, detention centers and group homes brutalize, too, but with familiarity and fealty excised and replaced with bureaucracy.
I have (mostly) forgiven my parents, though, because they were also long-sighted; my father was sometimes even wise, in an ophidian, ruthless way.
They loathed any crown-wearing, any vanity, any laurels resting. They burned it out. They ripped it up. Excellent work was thrown out, if we postured, if we were proud. Bad work was…disciplined.
My father – an engineer, a soldier, who grew up hunting squirrel and hare to survive, whose elderly mother had no television even into the early 1990s – made us practice everything again, again, again. Split and stack four cord of wood, then move it and stack it again. Map out the rotation cycle for every stack, by season, by exposure and angle of sunlight. Map it for three years. Explain why, show why, show the work. Defend the work, but don’t dare get a head swelled up about it. Success is temporary, failure often useful – or fatal. Do the work, then be done with it. Practice the shot. Practice passing. Practice the pitch, the throw, the catch. Practice in the rsin, the wind, the snow. Practice your penmanship. Practice with the bow, the blade. Practice until you learn, and then practice until you know how little you know. Practice until you know how to learn.
And, we learned:
Practice until you hate it, then keep practicing until you love it. Keep practicing, until you neither love nor hate. Do not complain; identify, study, plan. Do not bask in praise; trust no one who gives praise, or receives it – they are soft, they will fail at the crucial moment, they lack: discipline. Worse, they seek advantage over you. They will not share.
Trust the quiet ones, who self-humble but who never perform their humility. Trust no one who performs; they will betray, they will always be broken. Rescue the broken, if their need requires it, then walk away. Never count on gratitude. Do not begrudge the weak, the soft, the broken. It was done to them by the weak, the soft, the broken. Know who benefits from the weakness, the brokenness. Know who pays to produce all the weakness and brokenness. Know who needs the world in misery: they aren’t human anymore. With them, do no work; with them, make no agreement. They are feeders, they are appetite. They cannot tell themselves ‘no’, and so they will always, always be the very worst. Their desire does not liberate, it breaks the world. Everything, for their appetite.
Know your appetites, but do not need them. Know your weaknesses, and do not shame yourself: this is a hatred, always a kind of public masturbation, so that others will hate you too. Know your strengths, but only like you know the color blue, the taste of water, or the smell of birch bark fresh off the tree early in the morning, as elements of the world, as fleeting, as facts you can know but never really possess. So practice, do the work. Do not try to self-please, do not try for happiness, do not try to stop your pain, or your loneliness. They will follow from the work, from the practice. Or, they won’t.
Go, practice something new.
_________
Anyway.
Maybe, that’s a part of how you produce children, then groups of them, then maybe (if the variables we call luck will hold) a people who are not so sure that they deserve the world, or glory, or stuff. Who do not need to believe ourselves excepted from history, cause and consequence.
But it’s also how you start to kill this terrible hunger called America™, a thing which must die, which is so stupid and venal that the only thing it could merit is death.
Willy
I just had a card-carrying Dunning Kruger tell me “Ye shall know them by their fruits.” Okay, card-carrying in the way of a note taped to an oblivious dupes back. This poor guy will remind you endlessly that he’s a PhD, but you don’t need to be a scientist to figure out that he was driven by parental shaming and his own force of will to attain an education well beyond any possible wisdom he could ever figure out on his own.
And now he has to make a fool of himself making quotes like that, after unwittingly pooping out a great many really bad fruits.
I don’t have the time to explain it all (though there are many amusing stories) but I do wonder if that craze from back in the 80s and 90s to raise superkids isn’t partly to blame. When the talent just isn’t there, do we wind up with self-entitled, rationalistic, shaming-blaming alcoholic nutcases ruining businesses?
nihil obstet
Replace “Time is money” with “Obedience is happiness.”
GlassHammer
Your know we can’t even speak a common language due to specialization.
I have to correspond with Engineers in an entirely different manner than how I would for the Accounts, the Accounts need to be spoken to in a different manner than the Project Manager, the Project Manner spoken to differently than the Division Head, and on and on….
Specialization created separate ways of thinking and from that came seperate ways of reading, writing, speaking, and listening.
To lead one successful large scale project you need to master a dozen variants of English.
I would tell you my job is a Project Manager but honest to God I am really just a translator with a lot of languages at my disposal.
GlassHammer
Here is a tip for communicating with highly specialized individuals that have a skill set they developed mostly through formal education. (This will not work for people who learned through doing.)
Talk to them like a teacher talks to a young student. Use phrases like “Do you think we should do X ?”, “Maybe we should do Y, do you agree?”, and “The answer might be X”. They eat it up and think you are being both professional and nice.
You are not being nice…. but that isn’t going to dawn on them.
Rich
I think this is why Navy Medicine turned to pediatricians for leaders. And where they couldn’t find “leaderships” in pediatricians, they instead chose nurses. Treat every subordinate like a child and punish their honest failures as the impudence of a child under the hellfire reign of an overbearing mother.
I’ll try to string together a few more prepositional phrases next time
Eric Anderson
Awww come on, nihil!
Don’t move the goalposts on me now.
This post was inspired by our little back and forth the other day 🙂
Eric Anderson
Awww come on, nihil!
Don’t move the goalposts on me now.
This post was inspired by our little back and forth the other day 🙂
Joan
@krake,
Was that section on how you were raised from your personal experience, or was it a quote lifted from somewhere? I found it fascinating to read, though if these lessons were the sugar coating on a life of abuse then I rescind my compliment. It touched on a couple of things in my own personal experience that got me to thinking, though, so I’m grateful for that.
There is a difference between honest humility and blind obeisance to authority, but that distinction has gotten lost in our society. It makes sense how things got this way, though that certainly doesn’t make it right.
There is also a need for people to realize their own agency and through failure gain the confidence to do things for themselves. Again, a society that wants apathetic cogs in a machine instead of standup citizens is what got us here.
I witnessed the transition from teaching actual skills to corporate “skills” in my time in Scouts. In my earlier years, I learned how to shoot twelve gauges, tie knots, start a fire, ride a horse, first aid and CPR, how to navigate with no technology…we even had a three-day weekend where we were dropped off in canyon lands in my home state and expected to not only figure out safe food and water and a sleeping arrangement, but to navigate to the pickup spot. We had an emergency whistle if we got bitten by a snake or something else went really wrong, but no cell phones back then. Anyway, in the later years (and a change in troop leadership) we had to learn “management skills” which amounted to babysitting the younger girls, so I quit.
someofparts
I was struck by a video where Hillary complained that Bernie was a professional politician, claiming that it was the only job he had ever had.
In the comments to the video, posters noted that Bernie had in fact had plenty of jobs before he entered politics. They were just a variety of working class jobs – doing delivery, being a retail clerk – things like that.
Commentors figured out that what Hillary meant by not having a job was that Bernie had not been a professional – an attorney, a banker or a doctor. To Hillary, that meant he had not worked at all – at least not seriously.
To me, that sounds like doubling down on just the kind of blinkered specialization we are talking about here.
Stirling S Newberry
“Your know we can’t even speak a common language due to specialization.”
I don’t help people with computer-problems, I help computers with people-problems.
nihil obstet
Sorry, Eric. Good post. I just thought there was a challenge there to come up with a maxim that describes our society but that is so outrageously opposed to the way we think about ourselves that everybody would reject it. After I submitted, it occurred to me that we might be so far down the road towards authoritarianism, that nobody would find it outrageous.
I tried to come up with something else, but decided that we’re swimming in platitudes so deep that it’s hopeless. “We’re all in this together” as the poorest work at the lowest paid and most dangerous jobs. “We all want the same things” when it’s about that wonderful bipartisanship, but you need something other than “One size fits all” when it’s about universal health care.
krake
Joan,
All true, in so much as a distillation can be.
—
As a brief confirmation: we enrolled our children in scouting, based on my own experience, including O of the A. Without affirming the glaring problems with the BSA, or the God and Country rubbish, it was formative and enjoyable for me and my siblings. Camp, jamboree, winter survival and the intro to organized orienteering were something like joy. And a respite.
Scouting, for my children? Fundraising, competitive childcare and a tiresome schedule of coloring, fees and dick dads showing off their affluence toys.