Government is Magic

Our technocracy is detached it is from competence. It's not the technocracy of engineers, but of "thinkers" who read Malcolm Gladwell and Thomas Friedman and watch TED talks and savor the flavor of competence, without ever imbibing its substance.

These are the people who love Freakonomics, who enjoy all sorts of mental puzzles, who like to see an idea turned on its head, but who couldn't fix a toaster.

The ObamaCare website is the natural spawn of that technocracy who love the idea of using modernity to make things faster and easier, but have no idea what anything costs or how it works.

It's hard to have a functioning technocracy without engineers. A technocracy made in Silicon Valley with its complete disregard for anything outside its own ego zone would be bad enough. But this is a Bloombergian technocracy of billionaires and activists, of people who think that "progress" makes things work, rather than things working leading to progress.

Healthcare.gov showed us that behind all the smoother and shinier designs was the same old clunky government where everything gets done because the right companies hire the right lobbyists and everything costs ten times what it should.

If the government can't build a health care website, how is it going to actually run health care for an entire country is the obvious question that so many are asking. And the obvious answer is that it will run it the way it ran the website. It will throw wads of money and people at the problem and then look for programs it doesn't like to squeeze for extra cash.

The Navy had to be cut to the bone and the Benghazi mission had to make do without security so that a Canadian company which began employing a classmate of Michelle Obama's could score over half a billion to build a broken website. Obama mocked Mitt Romney's criticism of his Navy cuts by telling him that we don't fight with bayonets and horses anymore. Bayonets and horses are outdated. In our glorious modernity, we spend fortunes to build websites that don't work instead.

Modernity has to be built. It has to be constructed brick by bit by rivet by cable by people who know what they are doing. Modernity without competence is as worthless as the ObamaCare website which looked pretty enough to give the illusion of technocratic modernity, but didn't actually work.

Competence is the real modernity and it has very little to do with the empty trappings of design that surround it. In some ways the America of a few generations ago was a far more modern place because it was a more competent place. For all our nice toys, we look like primitive savages compared to men who could build skyscrapers and fleets within a year... and build them well.

Those aren't things we can't do anymore. Not because the knowledge and skills don't exist, but because the culture no longer allows it. We can't do them for the same reason that Third World countries can't do what we do. It's not that the knowledge is inaccessible, but that the culture gets in the way.

It's our very hollow modernity that gets in the way of our truly being modern. We can no longer build big things because the ability to implement vision on a large scale no longer exists. We can still do impressive things as individuals, but that's also true of Kenya or Thailand. And in China, they can carry out grandiose projects, but those projects have no vision or competence.

We used to be able to combine the two by competently implementing grandiose visions, but our "modern" culture is the roadblock that prevents us from working together to make the great things that we can still envision individually.

Our modernity is style rather than substance. It's Obama grinning. It's the right font. It's the right joke. It's that sense that X knows what he's doing because he presents it the right way. There's nothing particularly modern about that. In most cultures, the illusion of competence trumps the real thing. It's why so many countries are so badly broken because they go by appearances, rather than by results.

The idea that we should go by results, rather than by processes, by outcomes rather than by appearances, was revolutionary. For most of human history, we were trapped in a cargo cult mode. We did the "right things" not because they led to the right results, but because we had decided that they were the right things. There were many competent people, but they were hamstrung by rigid institutions that made it impossible to go from Point A to Point B in the shortest possible time.

And we're right back there today. The entire process of ObamaCare was the opposite of going from Point A to Point B. It was the least competent and efficient solution every step of the way. There was no reason to think that its website would be any better. The process that led to it being dumped on the American people was completely devoid of any notion of testing or outcomes. It was the right thing to do because... it was the right thing to do. It was cargo cult logic all the same. So was its website.

Healthcare.gov, like ObamaCare, was going to work because it was "good". Its goodness was by some measure other than result. It was morally good. It was progressive. And so the deity of liberal causes, perhaps Karl Marx or Progressia, the Goddess of Soup and Economic Dysfunction, would see to it that it would work. Karma would kick in and everything would work out because it had to.

This brand of magical thinking was once commonplace. It still is. And it's why things so rarely work out in some of the more messed up parts of the world. But the sort of attitude that would once have made anthropologists shake their heads is now commonplace here. Savages in suits, barbarians with iPads are certain that things will work because they have appeased the gods of modernity with their fonts, they have made a website that looks like a functioning website. And like the cargo culters who built fake control towers expecting planes to land, they thought that their website would work.

Competence is built on the unhappy understanding that things won't work because you want them to, they won't work if you go through the motions, they will only work if you understand how a thing works and then make it work by building it, by testing it and by expecting failure every step of the way and wrestling with the problem until you get it right.

That's modernity. It isn't glamorous. You can see it in black and white photos of men working on old planes. You can see it in the eyes of the astronauts who first went to the moon. You can read it in the workings of the men who built the longest suspension bridges, laid undersea cables and watched their world change. They were moderns and their time is done. They have left behind savages with cell phones who make decent tinkerers, but whose ability to collaborate falls apart in large groups.

The difference between savages and civilized men isn't that savages are dumb and civilized people are smart. Savages can individually be quite clever within their parameters and civilized folk can be quite stupid. It's the ability to extend that intelligence in groups that makes for a civilization.

Savages cannot work together. They can fantasize, but they can't build anything bigger than a small group can manage. Savages are warriors, but not soldiers, they are tinkerers, not engineers, they are inventors, not scientists, they cannot work together on a large scale and thereby push past their own limitations as a culture and grow. They may have individual geniuses, but they cannot pass on what they learn.

We have not yet been reduced to savagery, but our incompetence increases in large groups to such a staggering extent that it often seems not to be worth the trouble. Individual geniuses can occasionally carry large groups on their shoulders, micromanaging them, terrorizing them and motivating them, the way that tribal chieftains do, but without that singular personality the whole thing collapses.

The United States government is the ultimate giant unworkable mess. It is a living cargo cult where everyone marches around following routines that are supposed to yield great prosperity, but never do. The processes themselves are broken and make no sense, but the cargo culturers of the government cannot and will not hear that. They know that the government will magically make everything work.

The cargo culters on the islands, who once witnessed the might and power of the American military during WW2 make American flags and uniforms, they build airstrips and wooden control towers, and wait for the planes to land and make them rich. They don't understand why these things should work, but they do them anyway because that is how they remember it happening.

Our own cargo culters invoke FDR and JFK, they talk about the New Deal and the Great Society, they make grand promises and roll out big programs, and then they wait for it all to work. They don't understand themselves how or why it would work. But government is magic and the appearance of a thing is just as good as a real deal.

Build a website and it will work. Pass a law and they will come. Get a degree and you're competent.

There is no need to know how to do a thing. You don't need engineers or competent men. All you need to do is remember the great dreams of the past, listen to a few inspirational JFK speeches and then carve a computer out of wood and wait for free health care to arrive.

In cargo cult America, the food is free, the cell phones are free and the money can be printed forever because government is magic.

Its the damn term paper people.

I have been thinking along the same lines as this article. What is really odd is that it was the US government, in a previous generation, that pretty much created the discipline of project management, and especially the management of large projects. Think of D-Day, and the coordination of hundreds of thousands of people in the military, and millions in industry, to ramp up production of a naval fleet to retake Europe, and the execution of the plan.

Or the other mega project, the Apollo space program, coordinating with tens of thousands of workers on a spacecraft and support structures with millions of parts that had never been created before. And they did is with slide rules and adding machines, and a couple of primitive computers. Yet when they put the first Apollo rocket on the pad and lit it, it flew.

How are these less complicated than a health care website?

How are these less complicated than a health care website?

The gas molecules in a rocket engine behave in a rather complicated fashion, but their behavior may be characterized according to some rules which are much simpler than the resulting behaviors, and the rules generally do not change for the purpose of thwarting efforts to achieve desired results.

Programs which are designed to achieve results contrary to human nature often fail to take into account the existence of feedback loops which will actively work against the claimed objective. Government is much better at successfully doing things that can actually be done, than things which cannot.

The people who put those projects together had REAL DEGREES.
Degrees that required them to learn to think and reason before they could earn them.

Now we have a whole new bunch running the show with degrees that the only requirement to earn them is to be able to repeat things like a parrot .

Sad thing is it’s easier to reason with the real parrot

government can never work

you seem surprised at the web site not working. i’m not

the government has had more than a 100 years to get the government schools right and most of the students graduating are almost illiterate. and keep in mind that there are many private industries supporting the government schools with educational materials, computers , internet etc and still the government can't make the government schools work,

the gov has had 100 years to get the IRS working and instead the IRS oppresses conservatives and does dance videos with money they take away from us at the point of a gun. government is an abomination that must be abolished except for military and or border control.

ditto for government housing ( the public housing projetcts)

you might think the government taking money away from us at the point of a gun to go to the moon is gov working . i think think that idea is part of the problem . that many accept that it's ok for the government to take money away form the citizens at the point of a gun to go show off in some stupid race for the moon or what ever . that's freedom? no that's the problem that so many don't see that as the abomination that it is , that a gov that has a monopoly on force also taxes us to do such ridiculous things (in my opinion anyway ). and even if it were such a noble thing by what right do these gov thugs have the right to take away our hard earned money and our property to go to the moon, to go get rocks on mars , to do fake global warming hoax research, to oppress conservative with their IRS? no they have no right . the only thing the fed gov should do is military and border control. defending the borders from invading armies or migrants.

and the appearance of a thing is just as good as a real deal.... Build a website and it will work...

FreeRepublic.com works and Healthcare.gov doesn't work - and it's so weird, because at least for a while, Healthcare.gov had a prettier picture on the front page. Certainly, a site with a pretty picture up front should work and it should work better! At least, our cargo cult administration thought it would work - and alternative fuels should work too - because they work on TV. It's just a matter of finding some dilithium crystals.

What we are seeing in Obama is the emergence of Post Modernism...i.e. reality is what you say it is, morality is what you want it to be, and truth doesn't exist.

What we are witnessing is the failure of Post Modernism because it is nothing but a bullsh!t philosophy which has only one real use...the trashing of traditional America and its Judeo/Christian foundation.

Newsmax
Obamacare Website Company Had Ties to Obama Fundraising, Michelle Obama
Sunday, October 27, 2013 06:15 PM

By: Jennifer G. Hickey

CGI Federal, which secured a $678 million no-bid contract to build the Obamacare exchange web portal, has come under increased scrutiny for ties between senior executives and the Obama administration following the disastrous rollout of the healthcare website.

Toni Townes-Whitley, a senior vice president at CGI Federal, is a Princeton classmate of First Lady Michelle Obama, the Daily Caller reported. In addition to being college classmates, both Obama and Townes-Whitley are members of the Association of Black Princeton Alumni.

According to Federal Election Commission Records, Toni Townes-Whitley gave $500 in 2011 and 2012 to Obama’s reelection, and another $1,000 to the Obama Victory Fund.

http://www.newsmax.com/Newsfront/cgi-federal-scrutiny-obama-fundraising/2013/10/27/id/533310

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.