Social Deadlock

I just read an article on the Washington Post, by Daniel Henninger, talking about the failure of modern Progressives to Govern, in which he makes reference to a phenomenon known as Social Deadlock.

Social Deadlock is the official name for that problem where a bunch of people get together to talk about subject X but spend the entire time talking about how to talk about subject X instead. In this case it references how the Climate Change activists spend all their time parsing proper names and inclusion and so forth.

While I normally never turn down an opportunity to bash Progressives and Climate Activists, in this case I don't really think its limited to the modern Left.  For those of you reading overseas, this isn't limited to America either, as Henninger talks about Hollande and the UN meetings over Climate Change. It is certainly global as far as the 'West' is concerned.

I will say I believe it is more pronounced on the Left, however.  I think it is recognized as a 'Left' oriented phenomenon, a Progressive Problem, which is why they use the term 'Social Deadlock'. Giving it a nice scientific name makes it a mere organizational problem, rather than a fundamental one.  It takes the sting out of insulting them for this monumental failure.

The problem is simple, everyone wants to seem to be doing something, no one wants to actually do it. We've raised people who are more interested in Style than Substance.  They are fundamentally unserious people.  You know who else suffers 'Social Deadlock'? Children and people arguing over inanities.  So, either the Global Warming crowd haven't made it past the Prom Design Committee stage of organization, or they are well aware that they are not talking about anything serious.

Sadly, I think that, for the main, its the former.

Something happened a little over ten years ago in the West, not a political sea change, though one seemed to accompany it. I'm not entirely sure what it was, but I suspect a small number of the right people, people from previous eras, either died off or retired from public life. The people who stepped up to bat seemed to believe that that the Status Quo would continue indefinitely, carried by inertia.

I don't mean the Status Quo in reference to Republicans vs Democrats, Right vs Left... I mean that Gas will continue to be sold at the pumps, Food will continue to be sold in stores and electricity coming through the wires. You know: The building blocks of modern civilization.  Perhaps they believe that a house, once built, remains forever without any work.

Its endemic to the so called ruling class, the moneyed intellectuals (but never, ever call them Rich!), who go to Ivy League Schools, set up shop in New York or Washington DC.  They have no idea how things really work, and they look down on people who do as inferior.  But its not limited to them: all around the country I've met so many people who are nearly thirty who can't maintain their own cars, who adopt the attitudes of teenagers about 'stuff'.  A handful have hobby interests, like customizing Computers and so forth, but they are the exception.  I won't diminish their rational for learning 'how shit works'... hobbies are as good a reason as anything.

The thing of it is this: The Status Quo will not remain.   You can't punish the people who keep the system running indefinitely, you can't print money until the ink wells run dry. You can't 'govern' by golfing and jetting to meetings in exotic lands, by conference and fiat.   Someone with their hand on the wheel needs to know 'how shit works'. It doesn't have to be the king, and history often shows us that it wasn't, but they have to know.

Our current generation not only doesn't know, they don't want to know... they actively despise knowing.   They want to talk and think, to be 'Idea Men', to be overseers holding the whips that drive the peons to accomplish great deeds. Their highest ambitions are to recreate the building of the great pyramids... but even back then someone had to know 'how shit works'. Simply whipping your slaves to work harder won't make a great monument if no one knows how to build it.

Here is how a 'Climate Change Conference' should look, in a world run by adults, by people who understand 'how shit works':  instead of arguing over terms and, I assume, avoiding trigger language, someone sets forth a significant major goal... say, sustaining average global temperatures, or reducing the number of Hurricanes per year. A committee is assembled to determine, for the whole conference, how best to measure these changes, another sets smaller goals that work towards that goal. Things like reducing carbon emissions by X percent world wide.

Now you have two things: A metric of progress towards a goal, and a means to get there.

Something drastically lacking in the modern climate movement, by the way.  They have emergent crisis that demand 'things be done, right now! Do MORE!', with no real goals other than 'Do MORE NOW!'.

You know what you don't have in that senario?

Social Deadlock.

Which exposes a fundamental flaw in this way of thinking.   Nothing can ever be done about 'climate change' because no one involved actually understands how to accomplish anything, much less organize people. They know how to agitate, how to think and have grand ideas, and how to get appointed to various non-profits.

And they shun anyone who could organize such  conference as being beneath them.  Now, at least a number of influential people in the climate movement probably don't want such a person for the simple reason that: They know its a sham, and actually making forward progress would undermine their money-train, but what about the rest of them? The True Believers, what is their excuse?