[480] Blah Before The Storm

I have the same few lines repeating in my head and I want them to progress. I’m stuck on the idea of “systems thinking.” My take is that you try to see things through from conception until the end and account for as many variables as possible.

The concept was introduced to me using a water spout and a tub. You have the spout, water, and tub to consider. Under perfect conditions you turn the spout on and the tub fills up in 30 seconds. Upon running the experiment you find that it actually took 38 seconds. Your window of things you have to consider widens. Is the faucet outside and wind is blowing the water away before it reaches? Is there a leak in the tub? Is something backing up the water? So perhaps you run your test inside, make sure there’s no problems with the faucet, and the tub isn’t leaking. Now the water takes 32 seconds. What’s the problem now? Air pressure? Is the building on a decline? Is the line where you’re going to call the bucket “filled” marked properly? What starts as a simple proposition and experiment starts to experience endless confounds.

When I try and consider systems, I try to think of different ones that play together. You have the “human” system. All the good and bad we are capable of is molded by our environments and experiences. I’m living within the confines of my body within the confines of my town and its weather and its laws. Nothing I think to do or say will negate or dismiss the physics of the “existence system.” It becomes a very broad and confusing way of trying to consider how to “generally help” something. You may infer, it’s not a method that screams results.

No less, the first step, in my estimation, of actually doing meaningful good is to accurately depict the nature of the problem. It’s a never ending source of frustration to listen to politicians and angry activist types who scream about some issue in particular they don’t like, but they don’t have 3 examples of how it fits into anything. “Bring back Glass-Steagall!” Like it wasn’t just 1 of dozens of pieces of legislation over years that were dismantled. Like the world of high finance and armies of lawyers don’t already have a plan if Bernie goes directly after them.

If you think of the money system, the political system, and the basic human animal system, the first two are dramatically more resilient. When you’re bored with trying to decode the language of finance and law, a hundred people are getting paid to find it the most interesting thing in the world. When you find the will and gumption to hit the voting booth, thousands of lobbies are lined up to make sure your guy stays in power by doing things you don’t have to notice. We’re not individually capable of maintaining the kind of built in reinforcing mechanism of big systems. When you organize you can start a trend that infiltrates the system, think Black Lives Matter making it into debates, but at this system’s core, black kids are still gonna get shot disproportionately and you’re just the whiny child it says “fuck it, here’s ice cream!” to once in awhile.

Can that be changed?

My thought is that it can only change when things become decentralized. When the system doesn’t educate you. When the system doesn’t feed you. When the system has no authority to use your money for illegal and deadly activities that keep you stuck, things shift and shift quickly. In order to decentralize, you need to educate. Urban farming is cool, there’s like ten people who know how to do it. There’s all kinds of new schools and methods being employed, all we hear about is privatization.

I think what compounds the problems in the effort to educate is that the system keeps you busy, distracted, and tired. You have to work several jobs to struggle. You’re stressed out about debt. You’re living with parents or pretending to be better off than you are. And have you seen Making A Murderer?

My task is to try and catalogue for the sake of telling coherent stories. When a superintendent can reform a poor area by focusing on all the things poor kids need in order to exceed in one aspect, school itself, it speaks to the larger project. Why can’t that be done elsewhere, right now? Asking and answering those kind of questions I think will dig up the roots of system impediments. The clogs in the faucet of necessary money. I think when you can tie people’s effort to actual results it helps reestablish empathy and a connection to where you live. This to stand in place of the romantic accounts, which I hate, of places like my town which come across as sentimental blurbs from a “Places to check out!” segment in a magazine.

If this all sounds like a big boring walk around about a hugely vague plan I’m working on, I’m sorry. This is really hard to think about and I want to find a way to not only judge success, but come across indicators to suggest what a sustained movement in the right direction would look like when my tool is employed. Say I connect another superintendent and see the sparks of things changing in a poor area elsewhere. Is that good, or throwing a dime in the fountain instead of a penny?

My concern is for the years we’re stuck with Clinton allowing big money to do its thing. The project almost more complicated if trying to engage a decentralization plan as people are struck by continual blows of neoliberalism. Best case, moving the ball forward at the local level in service to things Bernie puts forth.

Now I’m thinking of Hydra. Is the world truly organized like drug cartels? I have a suspicion, but I want to believe there’s too many moving parts for it to be as coherent as we might see in shows like The Blacklist. I’m embolden and terrified by the fact that my greatest ally is our own human stupidity. If I can build a system that outlasts someone’s will to dodge it. It would need it’s own kind of reinforcing loop that certainly wouldn’t be impervious to corruption. Does it make the effort less worth it? Are we all essentially forced to just ride it out in service to ourselves? Will I drive myself crazy thinking “I have a way! I have a way!” only to grow resentful and cold when it all blows up in my face?

I suppose I have to claim my project an extension of my ego and selfishness and nothing else. No one gives a shit until they see how it impacts them. I don’t expect them to give a shit until I figure out how to show “all of it” affects them. The task is to be a storyteller. The task is to identify. If I aim small at those two ends much of the gaps should fill themselves in. This is apparently what I’m betting on. Single documentaries set balls in motion to shut down exhibits at Seaworld. Just create a useful information factory and let people run with the product.