On Governance

Today is election day, and the insanely long and vitriolic race for the presidency will be over in just a few hours. As I prepare for a night of awaiting results, my mind is turning from thoughts of this specific election, to thoughts on the nature of governance itself. For instance, it is a guarantee that either candidate will fulfill their promises and plans after the election. This is not just a matter of whether they want to or not: they can’t. The realities of real life and system of government will simply not allow them to. This, is pretty much a given. What constantly blows me away is the amount of people who cannot grasp this.

For instance I voted Obama, as will most people with my political inclinations. The difference between me and most other libs that I talk to though is that I am not disappointed with Obama’s first term. It went pretty much how I thought it would. Better, in fact. Most people however, were disappointed. Among the reasons given are:

We did’nt get single payer healthcare – You were never getting it. It wasn’t even on the table. It wasn’t even promised in the first campaign.
The Economy did not return to the 90’s boom time – It’s not going to. The boom was a bubble that was unusual and not the norm. By 2008 the economy was so close to collapse that even Bush’s economists admit it would take years to stabalize, much less recover.
The unemployment rate is still too high – As with the point above, there is only so much a president can do, especially when there is both unprecedented resistance to ANYTHING from across the aisle, and a steep learning curve for a new administration.
Guantanamo didnt close. Nope. Because essentially lawmakers on both sides of the aisle were happy to pander to their constituency and act like Islamic terrorists are super-villians with powers far beyond those of our ordinary criminals.
We are still in Afghanistan: Yeah, he pretty much promised that we would be re-focusing on it. We now have a time table to end it.
We are flying drones illegally into Pakistan: Yeah, he pretty much said that would happen too. How do you think we found Bin Laden? Apart from that Pakistan is a nuclear power that is (partially because of our policies) coming unraveled. It is too late to just ignore them and leave them to their own devices.
We still don’t have Gay marriage: Another thing that was never on the table. In fact he promised that it was NOT on his agenda in the first campaign and has now come around on it.

The list could go on and on, but it boils down to two things:

Things that he never said he would do, but that liberals hoped he would do anyway.
Things that just could not get passed or implemented.

If McCain were elected four years ago, we would have a similar list. If Romney wins tonight, we will have a similar list in four years.

Here is what I want you take away from this. Your Strategic Sorcery Election Day lesson:

The real task of Governing and Managing not about choosing between a good and bad options, but choosing between two bad options.

People that have run something in their lives tend to realize this easily. It is the same in business, in government, or in running a club. When you are, in Bush terms, “The Decider”, the choice is often not about something you want and something you don’t. Being able to deal with that, is part of what can make you successful in life. Clinging to an unattainable ideal because nothing else will do, tends to yield ineffectual complainers.

So, if you are preparing for management in a company, or to own your own business, or to seek elected office, keep an eye out for the following situations and prepare yourself to deal not only with the choice itself, but the blowback from others for your choice:

1. The Double Negative: Simply a choice between two different but almost equally bad outcomes.
2. Mortons Fork: A choice where the outcome will be the same, but occur for different reasons.
3. Hobsons Choice: A choice between a bad action or no action at all.

When you can accept that, even with magic, these possibilities are going to be part of your reality, you have taken a good step forward in Strategic Living.

Click Here to Leave a Comment Below 15 comments

Randy Barbosa

When I try saying this to some people, it does not go well, though you might be saying it much more concisely than I usually do. It’s nice to see that others do realize these things. Not that I’m surprised that you’re one of them.

Charles

“Politics is the art of the possible” as the English politician Rab Butler said.I think, tho’, to be fair, the weight of expectation on Obama’s shoulders was horrendously immense, but, despite that, the boy done good, again relatively speaking. Good point, Jason, love your blog because of the mix of badly needed common sense and speculation. Another thing: people talk glibly about dilemmas, but the point about them is that both options are bad, or have major drawbacks, it’s not just the act of choosing, it’s the choices on offer.

Rachel Izabella

You hit the nail on the head here. Thank you for the frequent doses of common sense and telling it like it is.

Matthew

“The real task of Governing and Managing not about choosing between a good and bad options, but choosing between two bad options.”

Matthew

Oh, Goddess. Muscle memory takes over and I post before I actually say what I want to! Please delete that precious post…

“The real task of Governing and Managing not about choosing between a good and bad options, but choosing between two bad options.”

I cannot help but think of an old line from a Judge Dredd storyline… “Better the Democrat you know than the Devil you don’t.” I may have mixed that one up slightly, bit that’s the gist of it. Choosing between two evils is still choosing evil, but also counts as choosing what’s going to (hopefully) leave a mess that can easily be cleaned up further down the line.

J Random

I see two things in this post:

A person who is able to think rationally about complex issues, and arrive at conclusions that make sense.

A person whose sources of information are controlled by propaganda mills hostile to his own vital interests.

There’s an ancient saying in the data processing industry: Garbage in, garbage out. It does not matter how well your mind functions, if it is receiving information with a consistent set of selective biases.

Kill your television, start doing independent research on the network, and if you can overcome the cognitive dissonance barrier and process information that directly contradicts your established world-view, using rules of evidence in the most objective framework you can maintain, you may eventually find yourself living in a very different world.

A good starting point would be to confirm or deny the hypothesis that Osama BinLadin died of kidney failure and pneumonia in early 2002. Were the video and audio presentations attributed to him after that date authentic, and what is your basis for making that determination? What is the source and quality of the evidence that he was killed quite recently, and what happened to the people who were present at the reported event? The objective is to adjust your level of confidence in each among a set of competing narratives, not to determine “what really happened.”

It is possible that the truth will make you free. Or, at least, prepare you to cope more effectively with the limited options the world is going to present to you in the coming years.

Balthazar

Thank’s Jason. I found this post pretty darn spot on.

Andrew Watt

Jason, thanks. I spent a year working in Washington DC, first for a congressman, and then for a couple of left-wing and a couple of right-wing lobbying groups. The notion that these guys are running some sort of a con or conspiracy on America is ludicrous… most of the congresscritters I spoke with in the course of my work barely knew which way they were voting on a given bill without an earnest, bright young thing tagging along. Their primary skills were meet-and-greet, keeping names straight, and sort of having a public philosophy that could be swayed by horse-trading and the practicalities of what could get past their particular committee or subcommittee. When Gingrich took over the House, all of the professional advisory staffs of all the committees got dissolved, little by little; the much-smaller political staffs of the Members of Congress took over, and suddenly the Congresscritters were listening to know-nothing naive idealistic kids from their home districts instead of numbers crunchers and policy analysts with years of experience on limited ranges of issues.

Art of the possible, indeed!

The truth is, I don’t need to know if Bin Laden died in 2011 or 2002. It doesn’t matter to my daily life. Knowing that piece of information clutters up my boundaries and makes it harder to rule My Kingdom, because I don’t know where My Kingdom fits within a larger context. What I do need to know is a bunch of folks with very broad, very deep Kingdoms, with expansive boundaries who handle problems much more life-or-death than mine… agreed to make it appear that Bin Laden died at the command of President Obama. They agreed to shape the world so that this particular narrative became the dominant one.

And that’s worth a vote, in my book. Magic or military force, creative writing (with a downed helicopter for a prop) or politically-risky decapitation strike makes no difference to me, personally. But it empowers my kingdom for it to be so, and so I accept that narrative.

This is one of the lessons of Rufus Opus’s Hermetics, and in my mind one of the lessons of the Strategic Sorcery course: there’s more than one narrative out there, sure. But at the end of the day you still have to rule YOUR OWN KINGDOM. And with the limited information you have, and the one vote you get, you get to have a tiny amount of leverage on a being or entity much larger than yourself (in this case, Columbia/US).

Make the choice, and go back to ruling your own kingdom.

Just as a disclaimer – I seem to have a talent for starting fights, but do not intend to do so in this case. That being said –

It seems that what you’re saying boils down to that it doesn’t matter if you’re being lied to so long as those lies make you feel better. Is that so, or am I just reading you wrong?

Inominandum

WAY wrong.

It is about dealing with the facts on the ground as they are, rather than bitching about all the worlds problems without presenting any viable solutions.

It is about realizing that people are imperfect and that this is an imperfect world, and dealing with that fact,

It is about realizing that you don’t know all the facts, and that if you did, and had a responsibility to people that elected you, you would probably make different decisions yourself.

Fair enough, but where’s the line between acting within the constraints of this world and doing something just for the sake of doing something?

Inominandum

The line is in seeing the difference between two imperfect scenarios and doing something to make one of them happen.

The difference between Obama and Romney is a REAL difference. The difference between a Democratic Senate and a Republican Senate is a REAL difference. These differences will effect peoples income, healthcare, civil rights, and military involvement. The fact that the choice will not instantly create peace and equanimity for all people everywhere, or that candidates will not even be able to impliment that things that they would ideally like to, is not reason to vote third party or “protest” by not voting.

In personal life, these choices will often come down to shitty situations that don’t benefit me, and shitty situations that will benefit me. We regularly choose the latter…

Never let striving for the ideal keep you from engaging the reality at hand.

solxyz

Fatuous. While I agree that most of the things that O. failed to do were in some sense politically infeasible, we should still be disappointed. We should be disappointed to discover that our so-called democracy has so little power to effect and establish justice. Many of the things that Obama promised and failed to do – such as rolling back the war on drugs, running an open and transparent administration, and ending a number of civil liberty violations of the previous administration – are things that are, at least theoretically, entirely within his power as head of the executive branch. O. was (or at least seemed to be) the most sympathetic, man-of-the-people candidate in a generation. Seeing how little we got out of it, we realize that we’re not going to get anything better through normal political means. That should be disappointing.

I voted for Jill Stein, but I live in a uncontested state. Im not quite sure how I would have voted if I lived if Ohio.

Agreed. Obama had, for instance, total discretion over how aggressive his administration was going to be with raids on medical marijuana dispensaries or with warrantless wiretapping, and he made a conscious decision to raid MM dispensaries eight times more frequently than Bush, and to approve something like four times as many warrantless wiretaps. Obama isn’t a friend of civil liberties. The only good things he has done, and these do deserve credit, were to be more aggressive with reaching consent agreements with corrupt police departments (like the NOPD down here and the Orleans Parish Sheriff’s office, both of which were corrupt, brutal, and ineffective) and to be slightly less willing to be Likud’s -itch.

That being said, I hope it’s obvious that I don’t like Republicans either. I have to respectfully disagree that compromise is a necessary or useful thing in some situations. Where we are now, with the structural decay of our economy, spying, semi-fascism, and unaccountable, secretive government is not the fault of Bush or of Obama, or of any other single person. It’s the result of millions of well-meaning people voting for the lesser evil.

On Governance

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