Love, thine enemy

Another seemingly small thing is dignity. We’ve all got to let everyone have their dignity. It was hard coming from a place where controlling other people was a normal and even approved of us all being controlled. A place where a tiny number of people who owned everything got to say what happened to everybody else. The deal was, if you were nobody, and usually a man, you would still have one place that you were in control. Your home. When the original research was done on what was called brain washing, the techniques for breaking people’s will and bending them to what you wanted to happen the researcher came up with a list of about ten things. Breaking the will often didn’t involve physical violence, just undermining, destroying confidence, isolation creating an extremely strong dependence on the breaker.

Do you recognise this, yet?

The entire owning system is built on this and its victims so blinded to it that they can’t see the harm it’s doing to them. Look at the objective world carefully you can see very clearly that the systems are failing, food will soon be expensive and maybe even hard to come by, the mad dependence on fossil fuels is unsustainable. So why was nothing done? The abusers trapped you, convinced you a bunch of trivial nonsense they had manufactured was what actually mattered, and then left you there. You could see there were problems, but you wouldn’t believe in them.

Believing that the world is different from the actual harsh reality is a fool’s game. It’ll kill you and all the things you love eventually. But slowly, ever so slowly, and you won’t see death until its skull face looks back at you from a mirror and you realise whose face it is.

The worst part, the most painful part, is that the trap is made with love. When they break you and stop all the questions, the thinking, they make you love and trust them. You start saying we when it should be they. You think your owners care about you and will help you if you are in trouble. You fool. There are thousands of you, all interchangeable, and they will replace you faster then the time it takes the door to close on you when you leave.

So your love for them is your enemy if you want to survive. They’ve told you not to believe there’s an extinction level event coming, or to welcome it because of some idiot religious fervour they beat into you when you were too young and dependent to realise what it really meant. Your heart, the blood rose, you are hypnotised by its thorns. You can’t lift your head and see what they’ve done to you, the tracery of your own suffering is so fascinating. All the endless trivia they surround you with is designed to keep your neck down, eyes on the floor.

I can’t help you. If you can’t see I can’t help you. If your feelings have been numbed I can’t help you. If you don’t understand what empathy is because everything’s been turned into a spectacle I can’t help you.

I want to, but I can’t.

Winners means losers – work in progress

Rewarding people is always a bit fraught. Several things can happen, sometimes at the same time. First the rewards can come to be expected, so they aren’t rewards any more, then people get very pissed off when they don’t happen for whatever reason. Then you could be the kind of idiot who rewards some and not others, makes them compete for your largesse. That’s even sillier. If there are winners then there will be losers. No-one likes to do their job and be a loser. Everyone expects to be rewarded, and given a gold start a plus rating. But the thing is, who created the environment they have to work with?

You did. You unwittingly set the limits on what they can do because it’s a straight jacket that will hold them and forever limit what they can achieve. If you’re lucky, maybe ten per cent of the time they will make a difference, the ten per cent you can’t control. The bigger the organisation the bigger the anomaly. Big organisations need consistency before they need great performance or they can’t plan, don’t know what to do with the extraordinary, and can’t deal with it. The extraordinary doesn’t scale. Everything is very fair, and nobody gets what they need. While all this nonsense is going on you’re losing out to much smaller organisations that aren’t limited by the drive for normal.

Some idiots think they have understood the dance of numbers and say you must always lop off your worse performing people every few months. This would be funny if it wasn’t so mad. If they perform badly it’s your fault. No amount of bullying and threatening will make them any better. The human cost of this stupidity is also astonishingly high, you will never get the best out of folks who are always worried they’re going to be fired for things that are completely out of their control. This is because your system prevents them from doing so. You’re punishing, and getting rid of people who are perfectly good at what they do. It also means that the only evaluation score anyone should have is adequate – most things are out of their control, so adequate is all they can be.

Think about it.

So, assuming you believe that humans can do truly amazing things, and indeed don’t have to just be some hideous version of a corporate adequate how do you square this circle? How do you even recognise that it is a circle?

You must start from three things. First, recognise that what you do is part of a system of things that you can’t always control. Second, you must be brave enough to let the system belong to everybody who is affected by it. Third, you must start with people’s needs. The needs of the people you’re serving come first. The cheapest, most effective, blah di fucking blah system you can build starts with the needs of the people who are served by it.

When you know the needs you know what to do, and you also know what a true version of adequate is. This means that an idiot politician can’t just announce services will be cut (or even given more resources). First you must identify the needs, identify what the bare minimum is and codify it in some measurable way. Not targets, just knowing that the right things are happening.

Only then can a system be built to meet those needs, and only then can it be improved upon.

It isn’t hard, but it’s also not the trivial task people pretend it is.

Bird by Bird

“If something inside you is real, we will probably find it interesting, and it will probably be universal. So you must risk placing real emotion at the center of your work. Write straight into the emotional center of things. Write towards vulnerability. Don’t worry about appearing sentimental. Worry about being unavailable; worry abut being absent or fraudulent. Risk being unliked. Tell the truth as you understand it. If you’re a writer, you have a moral obligation to do this. And it is a revolutionary act – truth is always subversive.”

Anne Lamot, Bird by Bird