No Such Thing as Dysfunctional

Business management types like to say that there’s not really any such thing as a dysfunctional organization. Every organization, they say, is already exquisitely tuned to function in the way that it does and achieve the results it achieves, and those functions and results work just fine for somebody there.

What we call dysfunction is often something formerly positive that’s now outdated, or a flaw it was easier to overlook in the past. Either way, it persists for a reason: it benefits someone. No matter how poisonous the ecosystem, something lives in it. Thrives in it. If you want to change something, you have to understand who benefits from the status quo, and what they might lose by changing it. The things that are lost might be financial or procedural, or more abstract losses of status or self-image.

The application of this principle to our current situation is left as an exercise to the reader, but this article in the Catholic intellectual mag Commonweal struck me as particularly relevant to the issue:

Americans are, of course, the most thoroughly and passively indoctrinated people on earth. They know next to nothing as a rule about their own history, or the histories of other nations, or the histories of the various social movements that have risen and fallen in the past, and they certainly know little or nothing of the complexities and contradictions comprised within words like “socialism” and “capitalism.” Chiefly, what they have been trained not to know or even suspect is that, in many ways, they enjoy far fewer freedoms, and suffer under a more intrusive centralized state, than do the citizens of countries with more vigorous social-democratic institutions. This is at once the most comic and most tragic aspect of the excitable alarm that talk of social democracy or democratic socialism can elicit on these shores. An enormous number of Americans have been persuaded to believe that they are freer in the abstract than, say, Germans or Danes precisely because they possess far fewer freedoms in the concrete. They are far more vulnerable to medical and financial crisis, far more likely to receive inadequate health coverage, far more prone to irreparable insolvency, far more unprotected against predatory creditors, far more subject to income inequality, and so forth, while effectively paying more in tax (when one figures in federal, state, local, and sales taxes, and then compounds those by all the expenditures that in this country, as almost nowhere else, their taxes do not cover). One might think that a people who once rebelled against the mightiest empire on earth on the principle of no taxation without representation would not meekly accept taxation without adequate government services. But we accept what we have become used to, I suppose. Even so, one has to ask, what state apparatus in the “free” world could be more powerful and tyrannical than the one that taxes its citizens while providing no substantial civic benefits in return, solely in order to enrich a piratically overinflated military-industrial complex and to ease the tax burdens of the immensely wealthy?

How can we even begin to fix these glaring problems when doing so would require acknowledging that they exist, acknowledging that we are not exceptional or great or universally admired or even particularly free?

Americans have grown up boasting about our nation being the land of the free and the home of the brave, and here we are, in thrall to capital and terrified, and our sole consolation is insisting against all evidence that we are free and brave. Just not free or brave enough to face our failings and do the work to fix them.

Some radicals say that the system is producing the results it was designed to produce. But “design” isn’t entirely accurate. Like almost all enormous systems, our society is built piecemeal, almost everything an unintended consequence of something else. A lot of people are doing their best within it.

On the other hand, some people are definitely trying to make it worse, like the folks at Turning Point running a troll farm hiring underage fascists to pump disinformation into the ether.

It’s Getting Hot In Herre

Twitter reminded me last week of this article from 2018, when California was facing its worst-ever fires, floods were rising everywhere else, and global temperatures broke record after record.

The whole thing is worth a read, but here are two key grafs:

As we made our way across a broad bay, I glanced up at the electronic chart above the captain’s wheel, where a blinking icon showed that we were a mile inland. The captain explained that the chart was from five years ago, when the water around us was still ice…

In 1991, [an Exxon researcher] found that greenhouse gases were rising due to the burning of fossil fuels… the rise in the sea level could threaten onshore infrastructure and create bigger waves that would damage offshore drilling structures. As a result of these findings, Exxon and other major oil companies began laying plans to move into the Arctic, and started to build their new drilling platforms with higher decks, to compensate for the anticipated rises in sea level.

I can’t find the origin, but there’s a little warning floating around my feeds these days: “Don’t think of this as the hottest year in the past century. This is the coolest year in the next century.”

Doomscroll

Cultivating Joy

An iPhone charger is somehow a shelf for a very small cat.
Cat + synth somehow sounding good.
Fig, again.
This may in fact be the best sports headline.
Baby flamingo.
Kitten, or gazing into an abyss of cuteness?
The photo’s a little low-contrast and all but the dog’s name is Fusilli and I love him.
Sound on for this narrative of joy.

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