Placing Blame
Polite society says not to point fingers, but without facing consequences, how can people learn? Legitimately placing blame is a key to better humanity.
I know that most of what we discuss, argue about, fight over, and differ on tends to be classified as "political," because politics seems to be the vast cauldron where our life's witches' brew ends up. But there's something more fundamental—even more primal—at play here. All our debates are merely avatars for humanity's deeper issues.
It seems to me that both individuals and societies have abandoned logic and reason in a quixotic quest to avoid the unavoidable. What are we working so hard to avoid? I believe it's the consequences that come with being human. If you think about it, almost everything we do, produce, consume, or accumulate is directed towards avoiding some consequence—from accumulating wealth to joining a gym, all are strategies of avoidance.
There are times when actions taken to avoid consequences serve only to create new and more serious ones. For example, I recently read that the US Forest Service canceled prescribed burns in California as late as October, allegedly because the political class and the Democrat-controlled DC bureaucracy feared triggering wildfires that could become a political liability during an election season. The US Forest Service is, after all, a unit of the Department of Agriculture and part of a Deep State that supports the political party that supports it.
Another example of how delaying consequences can lead to even worse outcomes is the fallout from Joe Biden’s faltering performance in the June 2024 debate with Donald Trump. There's no doubt in my mind that Democratic leadership knew of Biden’s rapidly deteriorating mental condition before he even entered the 2020 race. They calculated they could hide it, with the help of a compliant media, long enough to prepare a substitute, thus avoiding the fallout. Had they moved sooner to ease him out, they might have dodged the more significant repercussions. What they hadn’t anticipated was Kamala Harris herself being such a disaster.
Even from childhood, humans learn that our actions have consequences. Some are positive, some neutral, some negative, but each encounter teaches us strategies to control outcomes. We can choose to tackle the problem head-on and guide it towards a resolution that avoids a negative result—or we might not be able to alter the situation's course, and things might end badly despite our best efforts even though we learn from the effort.
When America was closer to nature, the cause and effect of our decisions were starkly apparent—often deadly. However, with the prosperity of modernity, many potential negative outcomes seemed to vanish, leading us to become less concerned with the realities of existence. The disruptions from the pandemics of 2020 and 2021 gave us a chance to learn about the fragility of our modern existence—a lesson from which we are still recovering. Politicians worked tirelessly to inflate the money supply and regulate behaviors coercively to avoid the consequences of their decisions, often making the problems worse. We might think we've dodged a bullet, but over the last four years, we've only delayed the inevitable, and the most vulnerable—whom politicians claimed to protect—were the most harmed.
History is a stern teacher, but unfortunately, humans often learn the wrong lessons. Alongside learning good strategies, we also pick up bad ones. I believe one of the most pervasive avoidance strategies in human history is lying, particularly prevalent among our political classes, regardless of party affiliation.
Sometimes it feels like we're buried under a blizzard of lies, designed specifically to shield liars from the consequences of their deceit.
People often advocate against placing blame, but in my opinion, that's nonsense. Not attributing blame is akin to protecting someone or an organization from facing the consequences of their actions. As every parent knows, ignoring consequences ensures nothing is learned, and when nothing is learned, future consequences only grow, often exponentially.
The ongoing hellscape in California is but the most recent example.
Michael, your comments only fortify what I have thought for decades. To bring in government to solve a problem, create anything that may improve the condition of man, or to explore new horizons will only result in disappointment. Any government solution will cost more, take more time, and perform poorly, when compared to private solutions The end of this is not to try to find good people as even when out founding fathers constructed our nation, they knew that it would work only if it were managed by angels. They also knew that men are not angels,as is so plainly demonstrated each and every day.
Michael, you are hinting to this but is good to spell it out.
If we use the very successful corporate model developed over time to deal with this kind of situations, placing blame is just one step. The organization has to complete the process performing root cause analysis and to develop and then to implement corrective actions and ultimately a system which prevents the issue to repeat.
Many times a task force is set up to do this and to supervise the completion until the issue is solved, the corrective actions are implemented and the system is created.
Instead of this American has become a kindergarten where factions point their finger at one another and try to catch the other side making a mistake, after which they run to the audience and try to get some political benefit from it.
If somebody would try to devise the best solution for burning the place down, this would be it.
In the 40 years since I came to America from an Eastern European Communist country, and I admired how well America was managed, America has become a textbook example of how not to do things, with finger pointing being one of the symptoms, completed by lying, mass media propaganda doing this professionally, and a plethora of other Communist like poisonous actions including mass indoctrination, political correctness, promotion of Marxism in all its forms, and culminating with things like the use of Justice as a political weapon and the process being the punishment, which make me feel that I travelled back in time to where I came from.
America should be very grateful to the Founding Fathers who have foreseen this, and have put in place a system to deal with it. But while this system may prevent total collapse for now, is completely overwhelmed and full of cracks which multiply each day, until it will ultimately fail unless dramatic action is taken, which I am very skeptical that will happen.
I hope I am wrong and once again America will raise above the challenge and will overcome it. Each one of us has a duty to do everything possible to make this happen, and you are a great example of somebody who does this whose example we should follow.