“As you can see, Captain Kirk is a highly sensitive and emotional person. I believe he has lost the capacity for rational decision.” – Star Trek (TOS)
I fired my dermatologist. Too many rash decisions.
Back several decades ago when I had more hair on my head than on my back and ears, I read an article about Nucor Steel™ and how they made decisions. I don’t remember it, and after 20 seconds of looking I couldn’t find it.
That doesn’t make a difference, because I said so. At the point in company history when the article was written, Nucor© was experiencing a resurgence in growth and profitability. It was almost like they were steeling.
One of the things that surprised me was the culture of humility at the company. One of the executives made the comment that, if they did everything right, they would get just over 50% of their decisions right. That’s flip-a-coin level of accuracy, yet the company felt that was an excellent result.
Nucor© was right. Decision making isn’t easy.
Part of the reason is that decisions are, mostly, made in a fog of uncertainty. Except for my hairline, the future is uncertain. If Jerry Seinfeld would have told me in 1988 that experts said that the Soviet Union would have dissolved completely by 1992, I would have said right back to him, “Who aaaare these people?”
I tried to write poetry about the Seinfeld television show, but I could never get past the first Costanza.
A few people actually did predict the Soviet collapse, but most people viewed the Soviets as an unstoppable force. If you would have asked the average Joe in 1988 if the Soviets were more likely to:
- produce a space robot that would claim Mars as rightful Russian territory and then rip Rocky Balboa in half while playing the Soviet national anthem out of speakers tastefully mounted on its butt, or,
- collapse into a pile of wet borscht,
the average man on the street would have stored up WD-40® to properly welcome their new Soviet Robot Overlords with appropriate levels of lubrication.
When the Soviets pulled out of Afghanistan, they had lost their national pride, and were so tied up in internal dissension that they tore themselves apart.
Huh. History may not repeat. I wonder if it rhymes? Corollary: does Joe regret the Afghanistan pullout as much as he regrets the pullout that led to Hunter?
Discuss. Difficulty adder: PG-13.
Hunter Biden: “Paying taxes is like smoking crack. I can quit anytime I want to.”
But the point of this digression was to show that decisions are hard because the future is uncertain, especially if you run out of CCP members to “buy” Hunter Biden’s paintings. Seriously, someone should tell the Biden family that corruption is not a race.
Nucor™ showed courage in admitting that nearly half of the time, making a good decision was something they didn’t do. Most people put far too much stock in their ability to predict the future of a world that can turn upside down faster than a car driven by a Kennedy.
Reality has a way of making decisions difficult. But it gets worse. Decisions are hard even when the only uncertainty is the future. But what happens when there are groups that are actively attempting to influence you?
I recall the war in Bosnia. Why was there a war in Bosnia? Because the Soviets tried to mash multiple ethnicities together in a region that had been using Archdukes for clay pigeons since 1914. Since the Soviet Union was based on mashing together the jet engine from a MiG-21PF with a T-34/76 tank chassis and calling it a “recreational vehicle” mashing together people that have hated each other since Hadrian was building walls made sense to them. Making the Balkans Soviet Stronk!
Please don’t ask about the mileage it gets. And don’t ask to see the Sport Edition.
I bring up Bosnia not to make jokes, but to recall a time when propaganda worked on me. I recall picking a newspaper (or magazine??) up, and seeing an editorial cartoon. In the cartoon was a soldier holding a dead child. I don’t exactly recall the words underneath, but the idea was that Bosnia kids were being killed, and somehow this was the fault of the United States for not intervening.
I’ll admit, the cartoon won me over. I don’t want kids to die. Where was Bosnia? I could have come close to it on a map, there’s a reason that the CIA recruited me (this is actually true), after all, and it wasn’t only for my flowing locks of golden hair (the hair part isn’t so true).
But why was it so important that the world suddenly cared how I felt about some backward place in the eastern Mediterranean where it seemed that Albanian plumbing was so advanced it seemed to be magic to the Bosnians? Where people fought about (for all I know) who had the better hat?
Because I was being manipulated.
Albania: still better hats than Bosnia. I apologize if this starts a war.
I’m not sure that it matters why I cared, but what I learned from that experience was that I was being manipulated. The easiest way to convince people to do something is to manipulate their emotions. People ultimately make decisions based on . . . emotions.
Car dealers do it. They depend on it for every aspect of their playbook. With a young buyer, they heighten the importance of the decision. “This is one of the most important decisions you’ll ever make,” is a line I heard when I was in my 20s.
Then they manage the buyer’s emotions, step by step, until they have a signature on the bottom line. They do this a dozen times a week. Buyers do it a dozen times in their life. Who do you think might be better at this?
In my thirties, I decided to use this evil power for good. When I gave a safety speech at a company lunch (where family was invited) I emphasized my point by giving my speech while holding a baby in my arms. It was one of the employee’s kids. My speech was about the importance of fathers coming home.
It was planned.
Someone came up to me afterward and told me what an impact the speech had on their life, they even remarked what emotions it brought up in them, watching me holding an employee’s baby while I emphasized employee safety and the idea of dads coming home so they could raise their children.
As if it was an accident.
All work and no play makes Jack an indentured servant.
I used emotions to manipulate people that reported to me to keep them alive. Was it just as manipulative as the political cartoon that made me feel something about a European nation that has only visited my blog 20 times?
Yup.
The Albanians have been here 39 times, and they only have one computer in the entire country, and it has a pull start like a lawnmower, so by definition I like them better than the Bosnians. Go, Albania! I hope you get that second toilet soon!
Almost every decision you and I make are based on our emotions. It’s amazing how easy it is to hack those emotions. I’ve tried it. People standing in line to make a copy at the copier?
Try this, “Hey, can I jump ahead? I just want to make a copy.”
Every single person in line in front of you wants to do exactly the same thing. They just want to make a copy.
Yet? Most times if you give them a reason, they can emotionally rationalize letting you cut in front. People (mostly) want to be nice. So, if you can give them a reason to feel good about themselves? They’ll take it.
You should be glad I rarely use my powers for evil.
I auditioned for a part in Hamlet. The director told me to come back when I was older. He thought I’d be a good Yorick.
All of the current debate about the ‘Rona has been couched in just such manipulative terms. “Two weeks to stop the spread!” “We won’t stop this until we have herd immunity!” “Coronavirus? It’s what’s for dinner.” “Kill the Unvaxxinated, they are Unclean! Burn them like witches!” And, to be fair, there has been no shortage of emotional rhetoric from the right, either, but since most people on the Right just want to be left alone, it’s a lot more boring.
In World War II the use of “chaff” was introduced. Small aluminum slivers dropped from aircraft were used to produce false RADAR echoes. The idea was to introduce so many signals that the real signal of where the enemy aircraft was overwhelmed by the false signals of the slowly fluttering and falling strips.
We are in a time and place where information, real information, is attempted to be drowned out by pleasure, distraction, and disinformation. These are the chaff of modern information.
First, pleasure: Let FaceBorg® and Twitttter™ and Instaham© are used to distract our attention online. Top it off with Netflax® and YouTubs™ and Otheronlineservice©? Pleasure and distraction were achieved.
Second, there is a halo of false news. I’m not sure when the peak of real news existed, but I do know it’s not now. People who are speaking the absolute, provable truth are censored from social networks. Why? To reduce signals that compete with the “official” signal, even if that “official” signal is false.
The common consensus truth isn’t the real Truth. It’s been filtered and sanitized and set for our consumption. It’s what we see after they release the chaff.
Based on my sense of humor, my sense of humor says I’m 12, my brain says I’m 28, and my body says, “How is it not dead yet?”
Decisions are how we determine the fate of our lives, yet groups are continually attempting to get into our OODA . OODA stands for the Observe-Orient-Decide-Act loop, not what I call The Mrs. at 2am on a Saturday morning.
In 2021, the attempt to alter observations and increase disorientation is blinding. It’s chaff.
If successful, your decisions are owned by people who want to manipulate you, and not for good.
The solution is a difficult one. It involves examining the data you take in, understanding the source, and really making as careful an observation as you can. You can’t make a decision without emotion, but the best bet is to be as autistic as possible.
Pull your emotions as far away from the decision as you can. Look closely.
Be autistic. The train is fine.
Orient yourself with values and beliefs. Those should change only very slowly in any person’s life. Does your decision match with your values? By the way, you do keep track of those, right?
Then decide. If you’re as good as Nucor™, you’ll get a little more than half of your decisions right.
(Post inspired by 173dVietVet’s comment last week, even though this probably wasn’t what he was looking for.)
