Science

Authored by Charles Hugh Smith via OfTwoMinds blog,

You see the irony here: the more successful the old solutions were, the greater our compulsion to cling to them even as they fail.

Humans use inductive reasoning to solve problems. If a solution fixed a problem in the past, we assume it will solve the problem again. This is a rational expectation based on prior experience.

But if conditions change, the solution won’t fix the problem. It might even make things worse.

The difficulty is what’s changed isn’t always visible or obvious. On the surface, things look the same. What’s changed is buried deep in the structural machinery grinding away beneath the superficial sense of continuity with the recent past.

This describes the current global system: conditions have changed but these structural changes are not visible. On the surface, the present looks like the recent past. Yes, technology changes, but this constant churn of new technology has long been part of the system.

Make America Great Again is an explicit call to return to the solutions that worked in the past, specifically The Reagan Revolution of the 1980s, which was characterized by these policies:

1. The federal government is the problem, not the solution. The solution is to reduce the influence and financial footprint of the federal government.

2. Deregulation of private industries, starting with finance. Loosen regulations to enable financial / market solutions, even if they’re disruptive.

3. Focus on growth. Grow the economy by loosening up credit, drill baby drill, reducing regulatory burdens and taxes, etc.

4. Pursue a muscular global policy of America First. No more wishy-washy playing nice: choose sides, but choose carefully because there will be consequences.

5. It’s morning in America. We can get back on track by unleashing America’s native optimism and vigor.

These solutions from the past are compelling because they delivered decades of growth. Of course reality is complicated, and it wasn’t just these policies by themselves that spawned decades of expansion. Demographics, the “peace dividend” and many other factors helped.

And there were spots of bother: deregulation enabled the Savings and Loan debacle in which a third of the nation’s S&L associations closed as $180 billion went up in smoke, losses that cost taxpayers $132 billion in bailouts.

Beneath the political rhetoric, these policies boil down to Keynesian stimulus which has been the de facto go-to policy “fix” for 60+ years: loosen credit, increase government borrowing and spending, encourage risk-taking and “animal spirits.”

As for regulations, the machine increases regulatory burden until it is restrained politically. Unproductive dead-weight regulations pile up along with the occasional regulation that serves the public interest. Sorting out the unproductive regs from the useful regs is tedious, and so private interests “help” by lobbying to get rid of whatever was inhibiting their expansion into malfeasance and fraud, and then we end up with the S&L debacle in the late 1980s and the Global Financial Meltdown of 2008.

Then the political machine rushes new regulations into law. The pendulum swings back and forth.

Political realities are glossed over to fuel optimism for “hope and change.” No politician ever wins re-election by reducing the federal budget. This is an abstraction we claim to care about but in the real world, we care more about decaying bridges where we live, the cost of medications, whether jobs or plentiful or scarce, etc., and so politicians win re-election by sluicing federal funding to repairing the bridge, reducing the cost of medications and funding the defense plant making weapons the Pentagon didn’t want but Congress loved because “defense spending” is viewed politically as a jobs program.

This process cannot be repealed. Congress controls the government’s purse strings, and when re-election comes around then slashing $2 trillion in federal spending will mean defeat and a loss of power. Not many politicians will fall on their sword, and for those who do, to what purpose? Whomever replaces the politician will pursue the same “guns and butter” free-spending budgets that the new leadership vowed to slash and burn.

Beneath the surface, things have changed structurally, and so the tried-and-true solutions won’t work as they did in the past. Our inductive reasoning will slip into magical thinking, and we’ll think that the reason the past solutions aren’t working as anticipated is that we’re not pursuing them vigorously enough, so we do more of what’s failing.

Magical thinking then slips into denial: the old solutions are working, we just have to do push harder. The problems that the solutions were supposed to fix get worse, and we refuse to change course because we don’t have any other solutions in the toolbox except the old solutions that no longer work.

You see the irony here: the more successful the old solutions were, the greater our compulsion to cling to them even as they fail. This clinging strikes us as completely rational: these solutions worked like magic, they will work again in the same way, it’s cause and effect. But conditions beneath the surface illusion of continuity with the past have changed, and so the effects are different.

While we’re focusing on the first-order effects, the second-order effects are melting the buffers we assumed were permanent and forever. Once the buffers are gone, we’re forced to admit the solutions we were confident would work didn’t work, and due to our confidence and unwillingness to admit they weren’t working, it’s too late to stave off collapse.

What if solutions that worked in the past no longer fix what’s broken? We’re too busy doing more of what’s failed to forge new tools that might fix what’s broken–but there’s no guarantee of that, either, if we misdiagnose the problem.

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Authored by Bernard Hudson via The American Mind,

The radical racial ideology has infiltrated the Agency…

Under the best of circumstances, it is difficult for any intelligence service to collect, analyze, and produce actionable, predictive data for a nation’s leadership. This task is made considerably harder when lockstep adherence to a fringe political ideology is imposed upon the workforce tasked with carrying out this challenging mission.

Unfortunately, this is the situation the Central Intelligence Agency and other agencies of the U.S. Intelligence Community are in: to America’s detriment, their leadership enthusiastically imposed Diversity, Equity and Inclusion ideology upon their employees.

To underscore how deeply DEI has metastasized inside the host, in a recent enlightening and publicly available statement, the CIA’s Chief DEI officer said there are three criteria by which an intelligence officer can be promoted at America’s most important foreign intelligence service. Only one of them is related to mission impact.

The others are a rather vague “corporate mindset”—and DEI.

Of the three, adherence to the cant of DEI is the most important; those who do not vocally and unreservedly support it are denied promotions and meaningful assignments. Like rallies held by authoritarian regimes, you do not want to be the first to stop clapping at the approved, serial pronouncements.

It’s ironic that a CIA created to oppose the Soviet Union would embrace the ideological straitjacket that is DEI, an enterprise that uncomfortably mirrors the USSR’s political commissars. Guardians of the party’s orthodoxy, the commissars were coequal with the leadership inside the government agencies where they were assigned, holding considerable sway over who was promoted and who got what assignments. While they were successful for some time in keeping the ruling clique in power, their endless purity tests and unreviewable power helped breed endemic cynicism among the government workers who had to play along to keep their jobs. It accelerated the systemic, institutional incompetence that plagued the Soviet Union to the end of its unlamented run.

Since DEI, the uniquely American take on the USSR’s commissar system, has been imposed on the Intelligence Community, there has been sufficient time to evaluate its impact on its mission, which is the only metric by which any intelligence service’s value should be measured. Using that standard, there are three conclusions we can draw about the effect DEI has had—and none of them are positive.

First, DEI does not fill a gap in the law; it is a quota system masquerading as equal opportunity. It is important to recall that the DEI enterprise has been imposed upon a federal workforce that already operated under long-existing regulations which mandate fair treatment of all employees. The modern U.S. Intelligence Community had successfully built an environment where anyone could succeed, provided they were willing to work hard and make sacrifices, two concepts one almost never hears uttered by DEI’s most vocal proponents.

As it has come to be practiced, one of DEI’s major outputs has been to combine the outside consultant’s mania for numbers with the fervor of heresy-seeking.

At every administrative level, the modern IC seeks to know and document the race, sexual orientation, county of national origin, disability, and age of anyone seeking promotion or a new assignment. This information is apparently formally incorporated into every Human Resources panel, which has determinative power over the vast majority of assignments and promotions. Findings which do not match the vague and ever-changing standards are almost certainly identified as requiring remedy. (Of course, vague and unreviewable standards are the hallmark of how DEI is practiced within the federal government.) The remedy frequently imposed involves adjusting the recommendations of promotion and assignments panels to make them compliant with the current orthodoxy. This means that assignments, promotions, and opportunities will go to individuals less qualified than other candidates in order to serve the alleged greater good.

Second, as it is driven by a core belief that much within institutions is oppressive and unfair, DEI fuels an institutionally distracting grievance culture. Because it seeks to measure personnel outcomes based more on fringe identity politics than on mission impact, it provides a ready-made tool for anyone to challenge a strictly merit-based promotion and assignments system. Anyone who has served at a senior level in the federal government understands (even if they will not publicly speak of it) that there is a wide disparity between the top performers in their workforce and the bottom quintile.

Because DEI prioritizes identity, including self-identity, over mission impact, it has tended to encourage a culture where the least capable workers demand the most of the senior management’s time and attention. Rather than focus on supporting the top performing employees who drive outsized gains in every human institution (including federal agencies), senior managers must constantly navigate an ever-growing number of grievance claims—many of dubious validity and any of which, if mishandled, could harm or derail that senior official’s career.

This creates a peculiar work environment, where the senior-most managers are increasingly evaluated more through the lens of how their less capable and more aggrieved employees view them, rather than by the mission value those senior managers bring to the challenging task of understanding and clandestinely confronting America’s adversaries.

Finally, DEI is a thought-and-sentiment-monitoring mechanism, allowing a fraction of the IC’s non-operational and non-analytical workforce to reach into any level of an organization and assess the personnel and operations of that office against DEI’s blurry and ever-changing goals. Combined with the grievance-seeking culture which is always DEI’s fellow traveler, it creates an informant culture which seeks out alleged non-compliance at every level of an organization with a zeal that would impress the early Soviet Union’s counter-intelligence apparatus.

It is almost certainly less career threatening in the modern CIA to dispute findings related to the plans and intentions of America’s key foreign adversaries than it is to show anything less than full support for the DEI apparatus. No doubt or heresy will go unnoticed or unaddressed. It is not unreasonable to assume that, for senior managers, many types of mission failure would probably be more survivable than being assessed as unsupportive of DEI.

The tragedy is that the CIA, and the broader IC, have incredible capabilities, but none of those are enhanced by the dangerous, fringe orthodoxy that is the modern DEI machine. Abolishing that apparatus will improve the only metric that should matter when evaluating an intelligence service: how well it collects and produces foreign intelligence and how effectively it gives America’s enemies pause.