Curmudgeon’s Navel Gazing:

Abraham Lincoln by Alexander Gardner, 1863

Adaptive Curmudgeon put up an excellent post. The post has two parts. The first is about the nature of people. The second is about motorcycles. The first part is great, so I stole it:

Did I make the correct choice? Let’s back away from the trees of motorcycles and discuss the forest of life: Why do people do stupid shit? Some stupid shit is gloriously innocent: “Hold my beer and watch this…” Nothing wrong with that. Other stupid shit is so predictably doomed to fail it hurts to watch. That’s the shit to avoid!

Ever see people do stuff so absolutely mind bogglingly moronic you wonder how they derived the slightest hope it would succeed? Think of paths were people march into bad results that are more or less a certainty. The fool that smokes 3 packs a day while bitching about their health. The moron that’s always broke who just took on more payments. The dude who eats shit from his harpy wife until she takes half his money and runs off with the UPS guy.

Many of us sleepwalk into the woodchipper… repeatedly. We’ve all seen it. It’s a human thing. We need self-control to avoid predictable failures.

It’s hard to plumb an individual man’s mind. It’s easier to observe big groups as they take obviously unwise paths. This is best examined for a time and place far removed from your current situation; thus to avoid your own biases. War is often (usually!) avoidable and it’s always horrible. With 20/20 hindsight the precursors that created most wars seem unthinkably obvious.

I suspect the American Civil War was like that. Pressure built for whole human lifetimes. Nobody diffused it in advance. Few people correctly predicted the hell that ensued. Everyone thought it would be a spat… a faffing about… a skirmish. It was nothing like that. Americans were incredibly effective at killing Americans. Things happened in a way that didn’t happen in Britain or Brazil.

What’s weird is that it wasn’t sudden. The ethical division in the populace had been there literally since the founding. As Lincoln so eloquently put, we had four score and seven (87) years to sort our shit out. We didn’t. Many nations had to thread the same needle. Many did so without bloodshed. Why not us?

I think we deliberately chose to avoid resolving things and instead used it as a political hot potato; a loser’s game in the long run. We let a real problem become merely one-upmanship. Each new State became a brand new battle. “Will the new State side with Team A or Team B? How does the addition of that new State change the balance of power? Who gains? Who loses?” Two points of view never finding or seeking compromise. Keeping the kettle on boil instead of inching toward resolution. America played politics until things had already gone to shit and by then neither side could find a way out.

A forever game of political one-upmanship instead of resolving legitimate issues. Sound familiar?

The “States as pieces on a gameboard” thing still happens right now… or rather it’s frozen in a stalemate. Puerto Rico isn’t a State. It’s bigger than some States. It could be a State. Yet, if we add it, some would benefit and some would lose… so it stays balanced on the knife edge of a nation that has razor sharp political edges. Maybe that’s for the best, I’m not in Puerto Rico so I don’t know. But it’s odd that we went from 13 colonies to 50 states and then lost the use of the tool. (We last added states in 1959; Hawaii and Alaska.)

Existing States can be split as needed. It has happened before. West Virginia split from Virginia in 1863. Maine separated from Massachusetts in 1820. Now that’s considered “unthinkable”. If we split a State someone would benefit and someone would lose. Notice that release of pressure or responsive governance is irrelevant? It’s not even considered. It’s all about short term wins and losses in the forever game.

A rancher in East Rattlesnake, Oregon; where it barely rains, the neighbor is six miles away, and coyotes outnumber people has to live under rules made by a foreign power. His State is run from Hippietopia where it never stops raining, there are more lesbian drug dispensaries than tractor supply stores, and people consider skate boards a legitimate form of transportation. Chaining those two disparate worlds together is exclusively for the benefit of people who care for the game. The welfare of ranchers or skateboarders isn’t relevant.

The dude trying to run fence isn’t selfish. He legitimately chafes under regulations made by people who are unlike him and possibly hate him. His part of the State can’t split off because endless friction is not just tolerated but embraced.

How long has it been this way? Has the rancher eaten shit for his full 87 years yet?

Back to my original example, after decades of building pressure, Republicans elected their first president. The Republican party specifically supported abolition. It was a hotly contested election. As soon as the guy was sworn in, everyone freaked out. Sound familiar?

(I pause here to help uninformed victims of America’s dumbed down public schools. Many if not all societies had slavery at one time; from Aztecs to Egyptians, from Vikings to Venice, from Congo to Constantinople, Byzantium to Brazil. Slavery faded out in fits and starts (with many caveats); often due to boring economic factors or occasionally because of soaring enlightenment ideals. America’s transition involved the first Republican President; Lincoln. Even now people debate the way the mess happened. Ironically, most folks who riot in our urban areas on sunny summer weekends; gathering to piss and moan and stamp their feet at the base of a George Floyd statue erected on Martin Luther King Jr. boulevard have no idea of this. They howl against the party that took up arms to end slavery. Before you set out to change the world, read a book!)

To me, war seems the least wise way to resolve the situation. Why wasn’t 87 years enough to figure it out? Careers were made on the endless struggle. Lives were lived in support or opposition. Earnest, dedicated, citizens on both sides bled out together in Gettysburg. It could have been an eight decade series of committee meetings.

Here’s the lesson I take from it: Humans are herd animals. Once they settle on a path, change is beyond the mind of most humans. A self-actuated human can break free but the rest will plod, stupid and complacent, like robots. Each step is another step on a path that was laid out long ago. There will be times when someone says “this is stupid, lets see if we find a new way”… but it won’t resonate. Humans unthinkingly continue doing stupid shit until you bury them in box lots.

We all carry this weakness. Only the use of our barely understood monkey derived mind gives us a small chance to escape. When shit seems sketchy, a humble man will ask himself “am I the cause”. Maybe, if I’m on a track that’s “wrong” or “stupid”, I can figure it out in time. “Oh no! I’m being an idiot! I’ll stop following this path right now!”

When’s the last time you adjusted your sails to the changing wind? If you don’t occasionally change settings you’re not steering the ship. Fools take the next step because they already took the last one. Don’t be a fool.