. . . and sometimes it’s even hard to say for sure what it is.
I have just spent at least four days doing the equivalent of staring into space, while my overheated brain tried to parse the current situation, and all I got out of it was Field Too Large. Even massive conversions to Metadata didn’t help a whole lot. What came up at the end was both spectacularly simple and totally useless: The fighting that’s currently going on is primarily between factions of the 1%, because that’s where current power concentrations are, and what we’re looking at is fractal side effects that make relatively little sense in any normal context. (Hence my fractal flames as the image.)
Poor DJT is firing off tweets almost at random, everybody has a theory for what’s going on, and none of them look as though they’ll make much difference in solving the mess we seem to be in.
I’m beginning to see why Conspiracy Theory can get so tempting, and why war has always been one of the proposed solutions to almost any major crisis: they both simplify things, you see. Or at least they seem to.
Since neither is acceptable, or particularly useful, as a strategy going forward, though, we need to take a look at what might be.
But when the question is “who’s in charge?”, and the answer is “nobody,” how do we make sense of what’s going on? Because we can’t make plans for the future if we don’t know what the hell’s going on in the present, can we?
Well, er, yes. We can. In fact, we do every day, without any greater real level of confidence than is apparent now. We just normally don’t notice that we’re doing it. Trust me. (ducks rapidly and dives under a handy desk...)
We spend the majority the time that we think we’re thinking, in fact working to simplify the world we’re seeing to the point where we can handle the simplification. And most of the time, it mostly works out eventually, as long as we don’t look too hard at what we’re doing. And stealing simplifications from other people, because they worked, more or less, with a little fudging.
And then sometimes we get a situation like the one we’re in, where the problems are multiply layered, and major, and new factors are coming onto the scene not only faster than we can integrate them, but with massive helpings of cognitive dissonance from one to the next.
It’s okay. There are a couple of rules that help, at least somewhat;
- Don’t attribute motives, good or bad, to the people involved. They don’t know what’s going on either, and they’re reacting by rote, no matter how well they manage to justify their actions. This saves a great deal of wear and tear on the nervous system, no matter how good it would feel to find a scapegoat or two to blame the mess on.
- Don’t try to lay things out in a reasonable fashion; there isn’t one. Or, rather, there are a thousand different patterns that can be found, as long as you’re willing to ignore major amounts of data. All you can be sure of is that anything you come up with is going to be missing major amounts of information.
- Breathe. If you can calm down, and help the person next to you to do the same, and together spread that calm to a larger group, eventually things will simplify, at least from the perspective of the group, and you’ll see actions that you can take that will help in the short term. The larger the group, the greater the number of actions, and the longer the term for which they will be valid.
- Always keep in mind — “they,” whoever they are, do not have an overall plan; they’re winging it and shedding feathers as they go. The biggest problem is that something really stupid might get done along the way. Trust that in most cases it can be corrected once things settle, and do your damnedest to help them settle.
- Give yourself permission, and room, to be wrong. Once you manage that, it’s easier to extend it to other people, rather than concentrating on finding nits to pick.
Dealing with reality and chaos is a lot harder, and nowhere near as satisfying, as Conspiracy Theory is, but at least it offers the potential for real solutions, eventually. Welcome to the Reality of Confusion. Some of the water is kinda okay, IMHO . . .