What is it that will solve all of this mess? What can we possibly do that would bend the divisive, snarling, bloodstained arc of human history towards something a little less obviously horrible?
And on the other hand, we all think we know the answer, and every one of us answers that question in a slightly different way.
That is both a blessing and one of the reasons the story of our species is so consistently monstrous. Our desires crash into one another, our countless disparate songs of the best possible future creating a terrifying dissonance.
Where, then, is the solution? Where is the path out of this wreck of dust and ashes?
I was recently asked where I thought folks might come together in my community to build understanding, to listen and to find something that would restore the breach between us. Where might we convene, and what might that look like?
I admitted that while I had an answer, I wasn't sure it was the answer that my good-hearted questioners were looking for. My answer is Jesus. That's precisely why I'm doing the Jesus thing, after all, why I've made living according to his teachings the goal of my existence.
I mean, that's what we're attempting, every single time we gather at church. We're attempting to live in a way that defies our histories, both collective and personal. Trying, at least.
"Because you know," I said to my questioner, "we Christians always get along just great." I got a little laugh at that, Lord help us.
Still and all, it's where I choose to put my hope. Because where nations are ruled by the sword, and markets are ruled by Mammon, a community that defies those norms with a fierce gentleness seems the only viable option.
We are, apparently, about to enter into a time of rapid unscheduled disassembly. The American people, in their infinite wisdom, have chosen to tear apart the social order that rose from the greatest generation and America's rise to power following the Second World War.
It's time to try something new! Let's break it all apart, and rebuild it!
So we're going to completely dismantle the regulatory structures of government. The systems for weather reporting and prediction? Sure, they ain't broke, but they aren't ideologically acceptable. Turn 'em over to the private sector. The systems that check that our food is safe? They impede freedom, and so do the systems that require radioactive waste to be carefully disposed. You're convinced that you can do better. The social protections that were put in place after Americans last starved en masse, when the entire banking system collapsed a century ago? Bah! You can do better.
Let the miracle of innovation and market-solutions do their job, we say. We're entering into a period that will be defined by what I think we can fairly call the SpaceX strategy. You try, and you fail. You determine the reasons for that failure, and you try again. And you fail. You do this over, and over, and over again. Fail, eat, sleep, repeat, until you stop failing. It's iterative and evolutionary, and under optimal circumstances, it works.
But there are some nontrivial caveats writ into the Terms of Use.
Here, the two key principles for constructive failure need to be brought to mind.
1) Failure must be a learning opportunity.
We have to be able to fail. Failure is how we learn. Failure is how we grow, and how we improve. But to fail well, we have to be able to acknowledge that we have failed. For rockets, this is pretty danged obvious. Well, that didn't work! Try again!
In my little church, we also try new things. Sometimes, like our Community Garden or our Little Free Pantry or our livestreaming, they take off. Getting to livestreaming involved a whole bunch of learning from failure. We showed forbearance and patience, and members with technical aptitude took over from the eager but less apt pastor (ahem), and we got there.
But for governments, particularly ones that have an authoritarian bent or ideological blinders, this is waaaay harder. Like, say, the Clinton/Bush-era offshoring of American manufacturing. Ain't no way you can persuade Rust Belt factory workers that this was a good thing. No way in the world. It was a catastrophe, and was always going to be a catastrophe. It made the investment class richer, and royally reamed everyone else. Or Reagan-era Keynesian economics, in which the assumption was that you could govern a great nation with fairy dust and unicorn farts. That Voodoo never, ever worked, unless the plan was to cast shackles of forever-debt around this nation. It created deficits that are unmanageable, and told the lie that government in a Republic can survive if its citizens contribute nothing.
Your choice, when something fails, is to 1) acknowledge the failure and the need for a course correction, 2) double down on the propaganda and the hype, or 3) blame someone else.
Politicians and pitchmen will almost always steer away from door number one. Ideological information systems are for crap at recognizing their own shortcomings, or acknowledging when errors have been made. Corporate hype machines are equally wretched, and authoritarians are the absolute worst. You gonna be the one to tell Dear Leader that he was wrong? Do svidanya, comrade!
When your knee-jerk reaction is to double down when confronted with disconfirming information, you can't ever learn from your mistakes. Like an overconfident cokehead driving a Hummer EV in a blizzard, you ignore the signs, and just get yourself deeper and deeper into trouble.
When your hype machine requires every failure to be trivial, you gloss things over with spin, and people who know no better see the pretty pretty sparkle falling from the sky rather than realizing something has gone very, very wrong.
And therein lies the second principle: decatastrophization.
2) Failure must not actually kill you.
Decatastrophization. It's a big ol' made-up word.
All it means is that you can fail without doing significant damage. It is safe to fail. This is key. To fail and learn, you have to survive the failure.
This is easy if you're building rockets. Oops, blew that one up! Golly, looks like that one also exploded! Tee hee! No biggie.
You just pour government dollars or investor money into the next one, and you keep at it until things finally start working. Then, and only then, do you put human beings into your ships, because Kerbal Space Program levels of fail are less funny when the screaming astronauts are actually screaming astronauts.
But when you're responsible for disaster relief, and you try something wildly different? When that doesn't work, what happens? Or if you're responsible for ensuring that food isn't dangerous to eat, and you kinda sorta miss something? Or if a new and unanticipated virus comes along, and you call it a hoax, politicize it, and then promote both resistance to basic hygiene and quack remedies...or destroy public health entirely? Or if you put a halt to the systems and structures that fund cancer research, without any plan to replace it? These scenarios exact a significant, unrecoverable price, one measured in human lives.
People die. People die by the thousands, the tens of thousands, the hundreds of thousands.
Or, if you screw up the entire planetary ecology, billions.
When a nation fails to recognize and grow from failure, that failure comes at an existential cost.
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