“You need to have an open mind!”

I bumped into a local acquaintance at the Farmer’s Market this weekend. His latest frenzy (he’s gone through several dozen in the 8 years I’ve known him) is AI terror. Technophobia is not as new thing. Old people and uneducated people and unskilled people have been afraid of “progress” almost as long as we’ve been banging the rocks together. After he failed to create any sort of panic in his audience (me), he quickly walked away, shouting over his shoulder, “Tom, you need to have an open mind.”

There are “open minds” and there are open minds. Being open to emotional content is the path to becoming a mindless cult member. At this point in my life, I may not be able to take much of any even slightly emotional argument seriously. That “lack of charisma” problem that many Democratic candidates are curse with is nothing more than a refusal to resort to appealing to their listeners’ amygdala and aiming, instead, for their frontal cortex. One of Richard Nixon’s media advisors, Roger Ailes, wrote “Voters are basically lazy. Reason requires a high degree of discipline, of concentration; impression is easier. Reason pushes the viewer back, it assaults him, it demands that he agree or disagree; impression can envelop him, invite him in, without making an intellectual demand…. When we argue with him, we…seek to engage his intellect…. The emotions are more easily roused, closer to the surface, more malleable.” Ailes described exactly the tactics he’d use in running Fox News a couple of decades later. Screw reason, poke ‘em in the emotions and they’ll never even think about thinking for themselves. Or, as Rick Santorum once blatantly honestly said, "We will never have the elite, smart people on our side." Nope, but they can count on most of the characters on the below-average side of the IQ curve and that will consistently be half of any population.

I have read You Are Not So Smart and listened to the audiobook and Podcast so often that I bought both versions of the book, along with You Are Now Less Dumb. I usually read a book once a decade and my library resources are more than adequate for my purposes, but not when it comes to how badly our brains work, especially under emotional impulse. When I was a young man, I fell victim to practically every sucker-the-rube scam known to humans, but I’ve tried to make a personal policy out of “Screw me once, shame on you. Screw me twice, shame on me.” I’ve been burned more than a few times failing to heed that advice, but I’ve avoided disaster for most of my life believing that when it comes to con artists “forgiveness is for suckers.” I didn’t call my motorcycle column and blog “Geezer with A Grudge” for nothing.

An “open mind” is the kind of mindset that allowed Hitler to con all of the British politicians who met him into believing he was benign, in fact the ONLY important British leader who distrusted Hitler was Winston Churchill, who was also the only one who didn’t speak face-to-face with the Nazi bastard. Likewise, I prefer to obtain my own information on important subjects through READING about and studying those topics. I don’t know a lot of stuff, but the stuff I do know is regularly and largely misrepresented in the media, YouTube (especially), advertising, and in most person-to-person “communications.” That means I don’t listen to sales routines over the phone or in person; “Just give me the literature and I’ll get back to you if I’m interested” is usually enough to kill a sales pitch in the bud. I’m not real bright and it takes me time to absorb the information that usually has to be extracted from sales literature with as much effort as taking a college physics or chemistry exam. They don’t make information easy or even available, more often than not.

I’m a big believer and observe in track records, too. If you’ve been wrong almost always (Talkin’ to you Republicans.) and don’t show any evidence that you realize you were regularly on the wrong side of reality, history, morality, and decent behavior (Still talkin’ to you Republicans.) I have no interest in your opinions and doubt your ability to acquire and assemble facts that are coherent or even honest.

American Lawlessness

I can't run no more,
With that lawless crowd.
While the killers in high places
Say their prayers out loud.
But they've summoned, they've summoned up
A thundercloud.
They're going to hear from me. Leonard Cohen – Anthem

But they likely won’t hear from enough of us, will they? Usually, in American history, the “thunderclouds” that get summoned are in service of the 1%, the planet killers, the real “baby killers” who do their work in quantity not quality, and outright criminals who belong either behind bars or standing in front of a firing squad convicted of treason. But the United States are no longer united and at least half of the voting public (those allowed to vote) are “that lawless crowd.”

You see their distain for law and order, peace and quiet, the public spaces, and decency practically everywhere you go. You hear them flaunt laws and polite behavior all night long in practically every town in the nation. They do it for both fun and profit and they do it knowing the police are, mostly, on their side. The country is rapidly becoming half-“that lawless crowd.” And they are clearly proud of their ability to repeatedly commit crimes against the “public good” and national security without consequences. How will this play out on both the world stage and locally? Probably, badly.

I’m going to work from the bottom up in describing the symptoms of an empire in rapid decline. At the dead bottom—where local, state, and federal laws are broken and flaunted on a moment-by-moment basis—are vehicle noise laws. Here is one of many places where you can see that rural areas are in a state of far more deterioration than their urban cousins. On mild spring-thru-fall days, you can hear the sounds of blatantly illegal vehicle exhaust systems coming from every direction. While it is clearly and obviously illegal to alter any EPA/DOT-approved vehicle’s intake and exhaust system, local and state cops ignore those criminals because of . . . money. Irrationally powerful special interest groups like the IAPO (International Association of Professional Bar Owners) spent buttloads of cash putting up obstacles to prevent the weak attempts of “law enforcement” from patrolling the obvious sources of a substantial number of vehicle deaths and serious injuries: bar “closing time.” That same pack of gangsters and the amazingly powerful (and totally lame) MIC (Motorcycle Industry Council) put up all sorts of political noise when the noise their customers make destroys the peace and quiet and citizens begin to demand actual law enforcement (instead of minority harassment.).  And cops?  They are both terrified of biker gangs reprisals and too often the gang members. The same goes for the characters with illegal exhaust systems on their pickups, Honda Civics, and other assorted law-breaking vehicles.

That’s one of many examples of lawlessness at the lowest levels of society. At the national level, we had a violent insurrection that attempted to cancel the votes of tens of millions of Americans in an effort to install a egotistic, foolish reality show actor and his 3^rd-tier élite handlers as a permanent dictatorship. Everything works top-down and our culture is infested with lawless 1%ers who imagine themselves to be above the law and, worse, the law itself. When those at the top of society or business consider themselves to be ungoverned by law and order, that attitude showers across the nation with all of the worst people imagining themselves to be “special.” No only are they not special, but they are capable of destroying anything that is special within their reach.

The Incredible Power of Luck and Finding Suckers

I recently read two automotive industry books, first was Ludicrous: The Unvarnished Story of Tesla Motors, and the second was Driving Honda, Inside the World’s Most Innovative Car Company. Those two companies could not be more unlike wile still being in the same industry. One company (Tesla, if you’re clueless)  is driven by a narcistic megalomaniac and the other is driven by a company philosophy. The cars produced by the two companies are equally different: Teslas are all about status and “belonging” to a cult and Hondas are primarily reliable, flexible transportation. One company exists to promote the fame and fortune of its owner, man-boy Elon Musk, and Honda exists “to provide products and services that expand people's dreams and potential.” The difference is apparent, even obvious, in the products, the employees, and the customers.

I committed a fair portion of my working career to manufacturing and, even, a substantial portion of my early audio engineering experience to producing products of my own design . In fact, from my perspective it was hard to beat the best moments I experienced in manufacturing products I cared about. Likewise, I would have rather died in a motorcycle crash at 30 than having gone through my worst half-dozen moments in manufacturing (which all occurred during my 10 years in medical devices). Manufacturing anything is a team effort and that includes designing the equipment necessary for manufacturing. Anyone who claims to have designed a product that was mass produced is a lying sack of crap. From the original concept to the finished product, there are dozens if not hundreds of hands and minds that shape and finish a product into something that is useful, safe, and cost-effective.

Weirdly, there has never been a shortage of people who are willing to do the hard work that is necessary to make and improve a product or service. Usually, those people go unnoticed not just by the public but by the people who have the most to gain from their hard work. Every rich asshole from Henry Ford to Elon Musk has lucked into a few hundred dedicated, talented, hard-working people who foolishly bought into the rich guys’ bullshit and made the lucky idiot rich in spite of himself. I’ve had a ringside seat for a half-dozen of those rags-to-riches lucky business histories. In only one of the lot was the “founder” a critical (or even useful) component in the companies’ success. In most, the founder/founders was/were an impediment that employees had to work around to keep the business alive. In none of the second group of mismanagers were the people who had the most to gain even mildly aware of their good fortune. In that one instance where the founder was a critical component, he was also very aware of his own shortcomings and consistently grateful for the contributions of the people who carried his ass from rags to riches (although he started out pretty rich).

Luck usually has more to do with success than does brilliance, talent, strategy, or even hard work. But yiou’d never get that story from the lucky few who are successful, or at least rarely is that kind of self-critical honesty present. Most “founders” do everything they can to purge their institutions of evidence of their mindless luck as quickly as possible. Some do it ruthlessly and fairly successfully, like Musk and Tesla or Jobs and Apple, and many more do it ham-handedly often killing the golden goose before it is fully hatched. But they all depend nearly totally on being lucky enough to con the right people into committing to what is presented as a “mission” early in the business’ history and doing all of the hard, boring, detail work that is necessary to actual success. Some, like Trump, not only misunderstand how little he contributed to the success of his one-and-only public corporate meltdown but blame the people who did the work for dying on him. Most are like Henry Ford who carefully scraped away all of the evidence of his own good fortune so ruthlessly that he “destroyed” his only son, Edsel, to keep his own competence myth alive. Without the fatal consequences, the same went for Musk and Jobs.

The next time you hear some half-wit babble about his self-made zillionaire status, try to imagine what it would be like to have built something spectacular,—believing your hard work and contributions would result in some kind of recognition and reward—having to listen to a non-contributor brag who ended up on top of the corporate turd-pile purely out of luck and conniving viciousness. It happens more often than not, but the public perception is one more example that “history is written (and advertised) by the winners.”