Good vs. Bad

Much has been lost in our modern world. Our societies have exploded with wanton complexity, cloaking our actions in a veil of confusion. As we stumble about, it is important that we reoriented ourselves back to a saner version of morality. Without this, we so easily lose sight of what is truly important in our brief but tumultuous existence.

It’s hard to say what makes a person ‘good’. There are still many good people out there, and they cover a broad spectrum of attitudes and behaviors. Bad however isn’t too hard to define. Pretty much every bad person that ever lived, lived a life of self-obsession. They are, it always seems, the center of their own universe. They come in all shapes and sizes, but their selfishness, self-absorption and self-centeredness lump them together into a rather obvious pile.

Bad people are bad because they mostly choose themselves over others. That choice, although rooted in our instinct for self preservation, pits their actions against their presence in our societies. From selfishness comes a stunning variety of heartless, mean and often brutal acts. Actions that we fully understand are bad, even when we aren’t entirely clear on the underlying motives.

Bad people do the best for themselves, regardless of the consequences and they feel entitled to do these things because everything revolves around them.

Now it’s not that one can never ‘act in their own best interests’. Life doesn’t always allow us to be selfless, but rather it’s the degree in which one does this that matters. Sometimes you have to put yourself first, but not always and not without appreciating the consequences. We’re intelligent beings, so we can understand our impact on the world around us. If we choose to.

People don’t have to be bad, often they are because it’s just the easiest thing for them to do. Unfortunately we celebrate and often reward this type of selfishness, but regardless that doesn’t justify the behavior of these people. Nor does it provide an excuse for the rest of us to mirror their bad choices. Fundamentally, most people want to be good people so we should just give into our nature and try to raise ourselves out of the muck whenever possible. A good deed a day is a great start.

Meritocracy

A meritocracy sounds like a great idea. After all, it supposedly lets the best people rise to the top, the ones that have the most merit. Unfortunately, it seems to rarely work that way.

Merit ideally comes from what people have actually done, their contributions in a specific area. But the visibility of merit comes from self-promotion. That is, if you do a lot of work, but nobody notices, then it is unlikely to be recognized.

As such, to get a lot of merit one has to make sure their peers are aware of their contributions. This naturally favors extroverted people, those that like interacting with others. Introverts on the other hand, are more likely to keep their heads down and just quietly contribute in the background.

In time, the personality bias would work itself out. That is, the strength of the contributions would over shadow the self-promotion. Well, except that there are many ways to ‘game the system’. The most obvious and most common is for extroverts to take credit for introvert’s merit. Since the introverts are quiet, and shy away from conflict, this is easily accomplished. Thus you get a lot of things like ‘visionaries’ that aren’t, since that is a very easy way for someone to steal credit from the people else.

Since the scorecard is really based on self-promotion, another way to game the system is to minimize the contributions, while maximizing the promotions. That is, you do something small, trivial and hastily, then just spin it into something big. We also see this all of the time. A deep investigation into many people with significant merit reveals that their claims are wildly disproportionate to what they actually did, and how successful it really was.

Of course, general human decency is believed to be why people don’t routinely game the system. However, if you look again at the personality types, not only are they extroverts but they are also staggeringly over-confident. And it’s this over-confidence that allows them to maximize their self-promotion and claim credit, even when it is detrimental to those around them. They simply justify it to themselves as deserved, so it is no longer such a bad act.

You’d think that underlying metrics can counter-balance this, but few meritocracies are actually based on real facts, and even then without concrete proof, real facts can be fabricated or spun. Thus it comes right back to self-promotion.

So it would seem that meritocracies are not generally based on contributions, but rather on the claims of contributions, and that it makes more sense if you want to get to the top to spend one’s effort on making claims, rather than the actual contributions. In time, more and more people figure this out, so that any meritocracy will eventually degenerate.

Change

Complexity is an odd beast. As it grows it encompasses more and more stuff, eating it up like a ravenous dinosaur. And it’s all these little tidbits -- things that vary -- that combine to become the real underlying problem. If you don’t understand these ‘variables’ then you can’t truly tame the complexity; bend it towards your goals.

But our species has always had a problem in dealing with too many things at once. We can take only a few select issues into account; we can’t fathom the whole picture. We do not see the beast for what it has become and as such we simply focus on a leg, or a tail, or some other part in seclusion from the whole. We narrow down our vision, while convincing ourselves that we can see the whole thing. But we can’t.

When you seek to change a complex multi-variable system -- particularly one that is massive, ugly and hugely chaotic -- simply fiddling with a small piece of it will always generate unpredictable results. That’s OK if you’re expecting it, but only if you are expecting it. If however, you’re convinced that you ‘get it’ when clearly you can’t, then that delusion blinds you to the results. And that blindness most often makes the problems worse, not better. There are -- not surprisingly -- many more ways to make bad changes in this world then there are good ways. So a change without understanding is likely a change for the worse. If it isn’t obviously bad right away, then it might just be more fuel for the complexity beast to devour. To grow and get worse.

For some rather short-sighted reason, we’ve become collectively convinced that action, any action, is better than the status quo. But action without thought, without a real understanding of the the complexities involves, is action that is most likely to feed the problem, not solve it. But now we have a great many “leaders” bent on acting. And as a consequence we have a rapidly growing beast to deal with. One that gets worse every year. One that gets larger every year. One that includes more and more variables every year. And one that nobody really understands anymore, or can manage.

So it is not action that we need. It is not change that we need. It is simply a way to get the beast back under control and to simplify our circumstances back to a point where we can act again. Where we can make changes that aren’t stupid, careless and risky.

We need to stop taking wild guesses, stop narrowing our gaze and start accepting that we’re in a mess. A huge mess. A mess that nobody knows how to fix, that no one wants to fix, and that is going to be painful to fix.

A mad rush forward of ideas and action is a mad rush over the cliff. It’s what we’ve been doing so far, and I honestly suspect it’s what we’ll be doing right up until the moment we are in flight. Our species after all is a wee bit smarter than some of the others, but collectively were not very bright.