[lbo-talk] What They Teach You at Harvard Business School

Dwayne Monroe dwayne.monroe at gmail.com
Thu Aug 21 10:50:54 PDT 2008


Miles:

Interesting sociological question: can an industrial society be sustained if people repeatedly ignore evidence inconsistent with their own assumptions?

...............

Yes. At least for awhile.

But a cold war of sorts is being waged between two competing camps of elites.

There are, for lack of a better, and less 20th century freighted term, the technocrats. I'm already regretting using that word because it's tired and old and also because I'm sure someone's going to tangentially lecture me about the horrors of, say, Stalinism or some other real-life Kafka nightmare (we do love to lecture each other here about how awful we are!).

In any event, the technocrats -- take someone like Michael Bloomberg, for example -- use information to inform policy and, to varying degrees, belief. Does congestion pricing work? Is it an effective tool for reducing Manhattan's carbon profile? Well, there's the data-driven answer and then there's the do-gooder, 'Save the Earth!' answer. (Yeah, I'm biased about that). Remember when Bloomberg responded to a supposed terrorist threat to NYC by saying that people needed to 'calm down and get a life'?

Yeah, that was a t-crat talking.

On the opposite side, there's the mixed camp of 'values' warriors, various ideological preoccupations (see, for example, 'End of History' types, neo-Straussians, corporate narrow brains and allied cognitive tradespeople leaning left and right), grand theories about Human Nature and both old and new fashioned religous belief.

Often, these are useful tools (tool, defined here as an effective survival tactic). But, this menagerie is usually more resistant to modification than the t-crat.

Here's an example.

Yesterday, I argued with a guy about the US' response to the Russia/Georgia conflict. He insisted that the United States needed to 'get tough' and show that 'we're back'.

I asked about the difference between the 'toughness' he longed to see -- which is tightly wound up with the romance of the cruise missile -- and Washington's policy of the past 8 years (really, the past couple of generations but he couldn't absorb that so why bother?). In other words, if multiple invasions and relentless bellicosity weren't a demonstration of the breed of 'resolve' he lusted after, what counted?

And here's where things got very interesting. Because the Bush admin's Operation Kick Planet's Ass has failed on practically all fronts, my debating opponent emotionally and intellectually divorced himself from it. Not only that, BushCo's ineffectiveness (indeed, counter-effectiveness) not only inspired him to disown Team Dubya, it prompted him to *re-interpret their actions -- which were once considered to be the essence of America Is Back! excitement -- as not tough so after all*.

The belief in verbal and machine-aided violence (didn't Buckminister Fuller call this 'killingry'?) persists but its failures are jettisoned to maintain the internal cohesion of belief. Which is why McCain can use the same old tired phrases and receive a warm reception

He can endlessly appeal to the illusion of power, even while the actual exercise of power paradoxically weakens potency.

Here's K-Punk, writing about some right-wingers' adoption of 'Dark Knight' as an allegory for their incoherent struggle:

In a couple of intricately argued posts, Inspersal demonstrates that The Dark Knight by no means presents 'tough choices' as 'hard but necessary'; on the contrary, whenever Batman resorts to torture, it either yields nothing or is counterproductive. What neocon readings of the film must overlook is that this is exactly the same in geopolitical reality: far from being unpalatable but necessary, the Iraq misadventure, Guantanamo Bay, extraordinary rendition etc have either achieved no results or made things worse. What's interesting here is the doggedness of the neocon fantasy, which is precisely a fantasy of 'being realistic' - astonishingly, elements of the American right appear to actually still believe that the Bush administration's policies are successful, and that the American public has rejected them on the grounds of highminded (liberal) ethical qualms rather than for pragmatic-utilitarian reasons (too many of our boys being killed).

[...]

full -

<http://k-punk.abstractdynamics.org/archives/010555.html>

I'm fascinated by the idea that the real fantasy at work -- the core fantasy -- is the "fantasy of being realistic". What was it C. Wright Mills called this: crackpot realism?

Yeah.

So anyway, getting back to the main thread, one of our problems (and I mean as a species forced to step up our game in the face of climate change and other planet-scale issues) is a cacophony of fantasy realisms, each competing for dominance.

It's difficult to see how we can collectively solve the Big Problems if a sizable percentage of us are impervious to correction yet convinced of our ruthless realism.

.d.

-- "The primary functions of a fusor are 1) Generate neutrons 2) Look really cool 3) Kill you with extremely high voltages if you screw up."

syntaxglitch ...................... http://monroelab.net/blog/



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