How the Civil Rights Movement Ignited Today’s Failing System of Systems . . . and what we can do about it

June 15, 2023

The Civil Rights Movement is one of those eras in history that make us proud; proud to be American, proud to be human. Who can forget its iconic martyr, Martin Luther King, his ringing words that inspired a nation?

And yet, it turns out that this momentous turning in American life is having unintended consequences, namely an increasingly fragile “system of systems” due to decreasing competence of people who work within them.

America must be understood as a system of interwoven systems; the healthcare system sends a bill to a patient using the postal system, and that patient uses the mobile phone system to pay the bill with a credit card issued by the banking system. All these systems must be assumed to work for anyone to make even simple decisions. But the failure of one system has cascading consequences for all of the adjacent systems. As a consequence of escalating rates of failure, America’s complex systems are slowly collapsing.

In short:

The core issue is that changing political mores have established the systematic promotion of the unqualified and sidelining of the competent. This has continually weakened our society’s ability to manage modern systems. At its inception, it represented a break from the trend of the 1920s to the 1960s, when the direct meritocratic evaluation of competence became the norm across vast swaths of American society.

In the first decades of the twentieth century, the idea that individuals should be systematically evaluated and selected based on their ability rather than wealth, class, or political connections, led to significant changes in selection techniques at all levels of American society. The Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) revolutionized college admissions by allowing elite universities to find and recruit talented students from beyond the boarding schools of New England. Following the adoption of the SAT, aptitude tests such as Wonderlic (1936), Graduate Record Examination (1936), Army General Classification Test (1941), and Law School Admission Test (1948) swept the United States. Spurred on by the demands of two world wars, this system of institutional management electrified the Tennessee Valley, created the first atom bomb, invented the transistor, and put a man on the moon.

By the 1960s, the systematic selection for competence came into direct conflict with the political imperatives of the civil rights movement. During the period from 1961 to 1972, a series of Supreme Court rulings, executive orders, and laws — most critically, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 — put meritocracy and the new political imperative of protected-group diversity on a collision course. Administrative law judges have accepted statistically observable disparities in outcomes between groups as prima facie evidence of illegal discrimination. The result has been clear: any time meritocracy and diversity come into direct conflict, diversity must take priority.

This entire — long, detailed, analytic — article is well worth reading:

Complex Systems Won’t Survive the Competence Crisis

 

In the interest of accuracy, DEI, or Diversity Equity Inclusion needs to have its letters reversed, to Diversity Inclusion, Equity: DIE.

This developing systemic disaster is nobody’s “fault.” It’s simply a massive and accelerating unintended consequence of a glorious ideal.

How do we work with this knowledge, this contradiction between what we wanted and, given what seemed to be needed to get there, we actually got?

So important to continuously remember that people are of equal value, but not of equal competence, or I should say, not of equal competence in any particular area of expression. Every human being is unique. Each one a genius! — if allowed and encouraged to follow his or her original nature.

Give people their heads, connected to their hearts, and they will flourish, no matter what the color of their skin.

Force people to “measure up” to something external to them, then only the most advantaged will flourish.

It’s time each of us takes back our sovereignty. Build the new world from there, one free of systems of systems that capture free individuals into preformed slots, forcing them to ignore or repress the parts of themselves that if, allowed to unleash would ignite an explosion of creativity on this planet.

Yes. Let us re-imagine the dreaded nuclear blast as a miraculous explosion of creativity.

 

P.S. I know this sounds utopian, impossible.

Start here, inside yourself.

What would you be doing in life if there were no obstacles?

Take one tiny baby step in that direction.

Come on, you can do it!

Take another baby step,

no matter how foolish you feel.

Pay attention to any synchronicities that arise

for they are trail markers, blazing the path ahead

Take another baby step.

Keep going.

Watch the world rearrange itself in the direction of your intent.

The new world will arise through thousands, millions, billions of tiny experiments

(and experiments imply both failure and success; with each failure, learn from it and keep going)

performed by those who are taking back their sovereignty,  

trusting the universe,

knowing deep inside

that if they follow their nature,

nature will take care of them.

I BEG TO DIFFER, with Mattias Desmet

June 14, 2023

 

 

“Get on the train – hardly any words are exchanged between people anymore. Our minds are tethered to a tiny screen – digital connection has replaced the human bond. If you casually greet a passer-by – a once-obvious way of affirming the human bond with no other intention – you will immediately sense the problem and, possibly, an unpleasant reaction in return (an unspoken question of: “What does this idiot want of me?”).”

Not that I don’t gratefully celebrate his way of understanding, articulating, and warning, of the totalitarian tendencies emerging from the increasingly disembodied culture we are more and more enmeshed in, but I, personally, have found that it’s actually quite simple to connect with passersby. The key: a truly open heart. As you walk by the Other, for one split second (or more) when you look up, into the Other’s eyes, when you instantly penetrate the eyes to the soul, then the Other wakes up! For that one split second (or more), his or her soul, enlivened by that singular unexpected opportunity, breaks the entire face into a heart-felt smile.

All this assumes that the Other is NOT on his cell phone when he walks by. A big assumption. Around here, somewhere between 50% and 75% are on their phones when walking. Hint: It helps to walk with a dog.  For some unknown? reason, the presence of a (naturally open-hearted, innocent) dog can break the habitual isolation, and serve easily as intermediary between one human and another.

Besides walking with a dog, the key, obviously, is this: the person who connects with the Other, whether stranger or familiar, must him or herself be attuned to, and moving from, the soul. Our souls, while individual, are also, as Desmet very well knows and speaks of, though without using that word, all enmeshed in, portions of, the larger unified consciousness that interpenetrates and enlivens the whole.

“In real conversations, people’s bodies constantly resonate with each other. The facial and body muscles of the listener contract in the same way as those of the speaker, and the same areas of the brain are activated. When people speak with each other, they form a supra-organism on a psychic and subtle-physical level. They are connected by a psychic membrane that imperceptibly transmits the most subtle emotions from one person to another. In this way a kind of spontaneous empathy occurs in the interlocutor (unless the ego structure is extremely developed, as in psychopathy).”

He’s right, the body is key: the coalescence, the harmonics, of our bodies, attuned with one another, without our even realizing it, move and have their being as one. Which is why personal contact is so much more satisfying than digital.

What animates the body? The soul. One’s personal portion of life’s primal expression.

Digital Depression and Lonely Masses