Wednesday Rant

The mark of an educated person, not necessarily a learned one, is the ability to listen, understand, and ultimately to criticise what has been heard.

So it is with great discomfort when I start hearing what some of the leaders are saying out there with respect to various socio-economic issues. No, I am not pointing at the leaders of my current residing country specifically, but as a general observation for people who hold leadership positions in countries and companies that make more than a dent in today's world.

The first thing that comes to mind is this: in the bid to get ``sound bites'', have they lost their mind? Some of the things that are said, while not blatantly false, fall in the category of ``dude, it's obvious and banal---tell us something we don't already know, and more importantly, how you intend to solve them''. It pains me greatly when these folks start to spout intellectual nonsense to advance an agenda that seems not to take care of the people they are supposed to make decisions for by proxy.

It also pains me greatly when there is the blatant abuse of the appeal to authority fallacy. Here's how it typically works: there's a problem that needs to be solved by some kind of management action (I use ``management'' here as a generic term for the decision-making process). Pundits, experts and ``experts'' are assembled into working committees to thrash out the issues relating to the problem. If there is some form of management discipline, well-constructed studies are performed to get actual data to measure the current situation before actions are proposed; more often than not, such studies are rendered in an informal manner, with little checks and balances, and those results are provided to the working committee. The working committee then undergoes a ``brainstorming'' session to talk things through before publishing a fifty-page report with an executive summary on the whole problem and the associated action that they recommend.

The leader involved reads the executive summary and then publically announces an endorsement of the working committee's findings and moves to enact the actions suggested. And the rest of us who need to work within the outcome of the decisions will reap the effects, be they good or bad.

The sequence of actions that I just described highlights the underlying appeal to authority. The working committee's legitimacy is invested by the leader's call for action. The actions suggested by the working committee have their weight from the fact that they were the appointed working committee by the leader who wants to solve that particular problem. The working committee made up of the experts with a report, now gain an authority independent of the original legitimacy that was invested by the leader. The leader then takes the actions suggested and applies them, appealling to the authority of the committee of experts as the final justification as to the applicability of the actions.

What if the actions failed to solve the problem and created new ones unforeseen?

No one takes the responsibility. The leader takes not the blame because it was the working committee of experts that provided their expert opinion on what needed to be done. The working committee takes not the blame because the leader is the final arbiter of the actions to be taken; moreoever the liability, should they be the ones to take it, lies with the working committee and not its constituent members. Since the working committee is ephemeral (assembled only to study and solve the problem before being dismissed), there is ultimately no entity to take responsibility for the outcomes of the actions, good or bad.

This means that even if the educated person listened, understood, and chose to criticise the action plan, there is no one there to accept the feedback to do something about it.

I'll let that steep for a moment.

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What I mean then, is that when policies are pushed out by leaders, there's no turning back no matter how big the backlash may be. No turning back whatsoever. There has been cases where legislation was forced to be aborted due to a large blowback from the public, but such legislation never stayed dead for long---they always come back, not in the same form perhaps, but in some other related form. It's like a hydra---you cut off the head of the big, problematic action plan, two smaller ones, piecewise of the original action plan, return in place and are likely to be left alone.

This is a systematic problem that has no easy solution, because social institutions these days have surrendered the option of violence to only the state organ, and all non-violent ways have easy means of circumvention by those who lead due to the monopoly of both rule-making and use of violence. No, I am not advocating anarchy, but am merely pointing out the heavily stacked odds against getting any real change done.

In theory, leaders who are obtained via a democratic process can easily be displaced by their voters when the time comes for a general election; I am now referring to public office since it is not the norm to have an egalitarian approach with respect to private enterprises like corporations. In practice, their displacement is protected through the use of both hard and soft power projections, i.e. the threat and use of violence (force), or the threat and use of penalties (``don't vote me and something bad happens''). Under such circumstances, the educated person faces the classic dilemma---to think rationally (avoid the threats and keep the person in power), or think irrationally (displace the person and hope that the threats do not materialise). Since bodily harm is threatened, many will choose the rational [short term beneficial] option.

I don't even want to talk about leaders who are there by appointment. There are no non-violent ways of displacing them, and the best way to avoid having to deal with them is to not be there, i.e. leave. If going away is not a choice, too bad---there's no way out. Sorry.

But back to the displacement of leaders via a democractic process. It appears that to be a proper and responsible citizen of a country or state, education is insufficient---a person needs to be educated and courageous. Since the last world war, much of the world has focused on educating their people. I don't think it is particularly successful given the natural tension between the thinking person and the subservient person, but there has been some good results. The second property though, I believe it has been lost since the last world war.

There's hardly any reason to develop the courage to stand up for one's thoughts and purposes. In fact, there is good reason to suspect that there has been active attempts by leaders to suppress such courage acts, all in the name of security, sedition and subversion. Because those who dare to stand up threaten to disrupt the harmony that is the status quo. Because those who dare to stand up threaten the way of life that everyone has grown to accept and expect.

Because the courage to stand up for one's thoughts threaten the leader when there are no other natural enemies to expend such courage.