An epiphany. Why the world is so messed up.

SolitaryRoad.com

Website owner:  James Miller

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Def. Epiphany. 1 capitalized : January 6 observed as a church festival in commemoration of the coming of the Magi as the first manifestation of Christ to the Gentiles or in the Eastern Church in commemoration of the baptism of Christ

2 : an appearance or manifestation especially of a divine being

3 a (1) : a usually sudden manifestation or perception of the essential nature or meaning of something

(2) : an intuitive grasp of reality through something (such as an event) usually simple and striking

(3) : an illuminating discovery, realization, or disclosure

b : a revealing scene or moment

Merriam - Webster Dictionary

In the sense of the following definition

Epiphany. (1) : a usually sudden manifestation or perception of the essential nature or meaning of something

(2) : an intuitive grasp of reality through something (such as an event) usually simple and striking

(3) : an illuminating discovery, realization, or disclosure

I would say my website is primarily a large collection of epiphanies. Around 4:00 this morning while in a state of half-sleep, half-wakefulness I had another epiphany. It was this. A main reason this is such a messed up world has to do with organizations and the problem of organizing and using people, the problem of how to manage people, how to train them, how to use them to perform some particular job, make some product, etc.

I think the cause of most of the foolishness, screw-ups, muddles, etc. that one encounters in so many organizations trace back to bad management — bad management at some or all levels.

People come in a gigantic assortment of personality traits, types of ability, skills, backgrounds, strengths and weaknesses, levels and kinds of knowledgeability, etc. and one problem is simply finding the best person for a particular job. If the job is a very simple one that nearly anyone can do such as repetitively installing some particular part on an automobile assembly line, this may not be too difficult but most jobs in modern organizations are not so trivial. Most are quite complex requiring specialized knowledge and experience. For example, the jobs of plumber, teacher, encyclopedia salesman, secretary, hairstylist, waiter, engineer, and science researcher require different things of people. Some people have a kind of personality that make them good salesmen; other people have traits that make better accountants. A manager in an organization is supposed to utilize people under him so as to achieve an efficiently working machine that accomplishes some particular task. With all of the many bad propensities in human nature things may not work so well in practice as they do on paper.

I think most of the people in positions of power and authority such as bosses, supervisors, officers in the military, politicians, etc. are just regular people. They are not necessarily conscientious, careful, thoughtful people of good understanding who can be depended on to do things right, get things right, act as they ought, etc. Instead they are products of a society; average, run of the mill types inclined to all of the many human weaknesses, foibles. They may be incompetent, arrogant, impatient, etc. An officer issues some imprudent order that his men have to obey and many die. Soldiers are sent on some foolish mission without adequate maps or information with heavy consequence. Someone didn’t do their job in the way they ought to have and everything is just all fouled up. A boss is not able to hire the right kind of people because of some law passed recently by Congress on non-discrimination or affirmative action (and the way that law has been implemented by superiors) so he is hiring all of the wrong kinds. People are being hired into some government organization that really has nothing to do. Newly hired people aren’t being given proper training for a job and are just floundering. The students in a school are getting a very poor education because the teachers are all doing a very poor job of teaching.

From personal experience I know that there are gigantic differences in the quality of education provided by different elementary and secondary schools here in the USA. Some schools provide a very good education. Others provide a very, very bad education. The difference can be dramatic. I went to a small, one room country school and I think I got an excellent, grammar school education (grades 1 - 8) there. See Basic Principles of Teaching. The reason is that I had some very good, conscientious teachers who were well organized, knew how to teach well, and took their job seriously. They were good people, worked hard, were all business, and I now realize how lucky I was to have had them. I believe that in that little one room school I received an elementary education that was at least as good, and possibly a lot better, than that provided in most of the large city schools today. I attended a large high school in a nearby town that was also very good. The teachers were good and doing a good job. However, in the second semester of my sophomore year I attended a medium sized high school that was a big country club, a joke. The students in my English class were systematically going through all of the same principles of grammar that I had studied way back in the 6^th or 7^th grade of my country school. The students in the geometry class were still studying from the 2^nd chapter of the geometry book. See A traumatic experience in my sophomore year in high school We do live in a crazy, messed up world! Things are often far from what they should be.

We did have one bad teacher in that grade school that I attended. It was when I was in the 7^th grade. She was a lazy elderly lady who just wasn’t much inclined towards work. She liked to talk and mostly she spent her time visiting with the children. It was a very easy, relaxed atmosphere but I knew it was wrong. She wasn’t doing her job and we weren’t learning. I told my parents about it and the next year we had another good teacher.

My college years were ugly, traumatic years for me. Poor teachers, poor textbooks, the heavy stress at exam time, and a system that I felt was very harsh and unfair. Your entire mark for a subject was dependent on two tests — the midterm and final tests. I often felt those tests were poor, tricky, unfair.

The first job that I landed after finishing college turned out to be one that you could have trained a person with only an 8^th grade education to do. They were hiring only college graduates but it didn’t require a bit of knowledge of mathematics, physics, chemistry, etc. (It was like a waste of all of my education.) The second job that I got was much the same. Again they hired only mathematics and science graduates but the work was essentially doing calculations on an old mechanical Monroe calculator all day. The work could have been done by someone with an 8^th grade education. My third job did require a good deal of mathematics background, but that job had its own set of frustrations. The problems we were working on involved different technologies and disciplines and we were always being yanked from one technical area we knew nothing about to another — asked to do things for which we had no training or background.

In general, I think management types are often political, people-oriented types. These types may not be careful, thoughtful, conscientious type people well versed in detail. They may often be broad brush, airy, dreamer types who think in terms of the big picture, general ideas, common assumptions. People such as legislators and high officials may be making laws and rules based on ideological considerations and doctrine and personal philosophy rather than on a good understanding of life and how things really work. Good understanding involves concern with detail, thought, questioning, and careful examination and analysis. The careful, thoughtful, analytical, conscientious person is one person out of a hundred and is not the type who typically winds up in positions of authority. Life is full of assumptions and most are wrong. An ordinary person, a conformist, a non-thinker, is always acting from a lot of bad assumptions. He is a crowd follower and the crowd is usually wrong. Because everyone thinks something doesn’t mean it is true. The person who winds up as a legislator in Congress (or as the president of the country) doesn’t get there because he is a deep, thoughtful person with a good understanding. He is there because of his philosophical / political stands and his ability to influence common people and get their votes. He may get elected by telling people the kind of things they want to hear instead of the truth they should hear (i.e. things like we just can’t afford that or such a program just won’t work). So often knaves and fools lead and the masses follow.

I am sure that if you talked to a manager he would tell you of all of the frustrations of being a manager. He would probably tell you of all of the difficulties of finding good, honest, dependable, hardworking, competent people; of the time and difficulties involved in trying to train people; of the frustration of all of the constraints that he has to work under such as those involved in getting rid of poor employees due to employee rights, employee protection laws, labor unions, etc.; and of the frustrations of dealing with foolish orders passed down to him from above that he has to comply with.

In my own personal life I have been quite successful in most projects that I have attempted. I compare my personal successes with the government’s successes in its projects. I think of President Johnson’s War on Poverty, the long unending War on Drugs, the terrible financial condition of state run programs like Social Security and Medicare, the inability of the government to control illegal immigration into the country (with millions upon millions of illegals now in the country), etc. Why does the government seem so incompetent to do anything? To solve any problem you have to think about it, you have to get a correct understanding of it. You can’t solve it just by handing it to a committee or throwing a lot of money at it. For insight see Governance by Committee.

Sham. I see it everywhere. I see it in religion, politics, education. I think this world mostly runs on sham. Why? Because most people just don’t care much. They don’t really care about other people. They don’t really care about doing what is right. They really only care about themselves, their own interests, and no one else’s interests. They care about their own advancement. They care about appearance. They care about looking good. But they really don’t care about the substance. They really don’t care about getting it right. Without conscience they will fudge, finagle, paper over, pretend, deceive.

Mar 2019