Anyone who has ever had anything to do with the Toyota Production System, Just In Time process flows or the Theory of Constraints will have heard the idiom, “ When you lower the river, that’s when you find the rocks.” These are a paraphrase of Toyota’s Chief Engineer Ohno, who noted the way to find the issues in any process is to reduce or remove the buffers that hide the problems, to deliberately reduce the buffers of time, capacity, inventory, and financial contingency that are currently necessary to absorb variation and uncertainty, in order to reveal where the system needs to be changed.
As a nation and a world, we are going through some difficult times right now.
Due to the insane reaction to the Covid pandemic and our acquiescence to some pretty shocking uses of government to “protect” us, we lowered the water level of our economy, the river that drives our nation, and unsurprisingly, we began to see rocks. The issues within both the global and domestic supply chain were brought to the surface. When that happens, when the buffers are drained our of a system, things that in the past would not have garnered much attention all of a sudden become both prominent and critical.
I’m not saying that the damages to facilities in our food supply chain are normal, what I am saying is that when the slack is taken out of the inventories along the chain, anything that stops the flows going into that supply chain get noticed quickly – these are the “rocks” alluded to in Ohno’s premise and the are have always been there, lurking below the surface.
I want to remain hopeful and optimistic but with each passing day, that is increasingly difficult to do.
Now, not a day passes when there isn’t something that hits the public consciousness at the level of the feckless approach to the ChiCom party balloon (and the revelations that the Military and Security States during the Trump administration might have been withholding information from the Commander in Chief), the Disney animated CRT “rap” claiming “Slaves built this country” or the abusive spectacle put forward by CBS in the form of the Grammy Award show.
I expect I will be adding Biden’s forthcoming exercise in surrealist propaganda, his SOTU speech, to that list very soon.
When I look at all of this in the context of Ohno’s idiom, what I see is a lowering of the American river due to a generational war on traditional American culture, relentless attacks on our system of jurisprudence, the savaging of religion and morality, and the decades long infiltration of our representative republic by communist/collectivist forces.
To resolve these issues, America and the world must remove the rocks. Those that won’t budge easily must be blown up – and I don’t mean that people must be killed or harmed, but the same tools that have been used to diminish foundational values can also be used to do the same to the rocks of Satanism, communism, Critical Race Theory, and the Deep State.
How do we do this?
Together.
It doesn’t have to be this way. We are allowing a minority that wants to change their world to change the world of the majority.
It logically follows that if a vocal minority can exercise the heckler’s veto over aspects of American culture, the majority can certainly do the same.
We just have to speak with one voice when we hit them.
One of the greatest scams of collectivism is that communists hate the common people – that is to say that they even loathe themselves – and one can see that in their self-destructive behaviors and ideologies.
If you study Marx’s writings, as I have, it becomes clear he has an open disdain for the common people he pretends to champion. His own theory of the “dictatorship of the proletariat” requires a culling of “undesirables” and even then, he acknowledges that such a “total democracy” requires a power structure to create and manage the plans for all aspects of socioeconomic and political life.
In perhaps the greatest bait and switch scam in the history of confidence schemes, Marx’s brand of communist economic organization is nothing less than a prescription for the concentration of power within a few elites, rather than the promised dissolution and dissemination of power to the people.
Paul Kengor’s “The Devil and Karl Marx” (and Marx’s letters themselves) should be required reading, especially for both the Congressional Progressive and the Congressional Black Caucuses.
We should remember that when the river is low, it is low for every boat.
H.L. Mencken said:
“Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard.”
It’s time we give it to them.
Good and hard.
Excellent analyses, reflections, and conclusions.
Love the metaphor and whole heartedly agree. Just wondering how we unify and hit back with one voice!