Friday, November 15, 2024

Failing to Fail

Being able to fail is a gift.

All of us do fail, now and again.  Some of our failures, like my experiments with new plants in my garden, are trivial.  There was that time I believed a few chattery Youtube gardeners and Reddit posters who swore up and down that you could plant "potato towers."  Just plant taters at the base of said tower, and they'll grow and grow and grow upwards as you add compost to an ever rising wire-frame.  Did it work?  Nope.  Potatoes don't do that.  Lesson learned.

Or the time I didn't move slowly and patiently through the process of installing a light fixture.  Or the time I rushed and didn't properly torque down the oil drain plug on my motorcycle.  Mild electrocution and/or struggling not to crash as you slide wildly on the highway are nice gentle reminders to take your danged time, son.

There've been worse failures.  My first church failed.  It was a long shot revitalization effort, but there were plenty of times I didn't speak up when I needed to speak up, or let my tendency to anxious paralysis prevent me from doing what was needed.  There was pain, there was reflection, there was correction.  Eventually, I realized there was no path, and spoke that truth.  When folks wouldn't hear it, I stepped aside.  It was rough.

If we do not fail, we do not learn.  But what if we cannot fail?  If pride and ego prevent us from ever seeing our own contribution to a misfire or a catastrophe?  Or if admitting failure is ideologically unacceptable, as it requires us to admit that the whole ethos of our chosen tribe is flawed.  Then we will fail, and fail, and fail again, until all is ruin and our lives are a bitter wreck.

And here lies a deep challenge for the next four years.  This isn't another list of what the Democrats did wrong, and here's how to fix it, and blah blah blah.  And sure, progressives can struggle sometimes with course correction, particularly when they've "progressed" into a new "truth" that doesn't actually reflect reality.  I'm naming a larger challenge. 

We're about to have a government that doesn't know how to learn from failure.  Donald Trump is congenitally incapable of admitting failure.  The MAGA ethos is similarly inclined.  Everything is someone else's fault.  Or failure never happened, it's really success, in the same way that January 6, 2021 was a beautiful day of love and peace, and the COVID years were the best ever, and nonstop nationwide riots and civil unrest during the inchoate brutalism of his first administration must have all been something we imagined in our pretty little heads.  

The information ecosystem Trumpism created to serve its Lord and Savior simply won't admit error.  It's a closed loop, sealed off from reality.  It is numb to negative input, which means that it is oblivious to damage it does to itself, right up until that damage becomes life threatening.  Like, say, someone who has lost all sensation and circulation in their feet, as my Dad did late in the process of his dying from CHF.  

This is pretty much exactly what happened in the old Soviet Union.  Back when I worked at the Aspen Institute, one of the studies my program funded looked at how environmental degradation helped hasten the collapse of the Eastern Bloc powers.  Under communist rule, untreated waste filled the rivers, and unfiltered emissions choked the air, and all of it was swept under the rug by The Approved Media.  No counterpoint was admitted, and disloyalty to the party line was actively suppressed.  There was no system for critical feedback, no way of course correcting.

Even when people started getting sick, their illnesses were ignored, and their complaints about the obvious cause were silenced.  But it kept worsening.  Family and friends of communist party leadership sickened, as the blight of unfettered and unaccountable industry spread.  It reached a point where everyone knew, because the rivers were dead and the hospitals were full, and all of a sudden, the apparatchiks refused to crack down on the activists.  Like silencing voices criticizing the misbegotten war in Afghanistan, or naming the causes of the actual fallout from Chernobyl, these failures to fail cost the Soviet Union its existence.

Because if you cannot admit failure, there's no way to learn from it, and you will fail existentially.