Concepts for the Current US Mess
An unforeseen disaster is never the consequence of a single factor, but rather is like a whirlwind, a point of cyclonic depression in the consciousness of the world, towards which a whole multiplicity of converging causalities have conspired
– Carlo Emilio Gadda (in That Awful Mess on the Via Merulana)
It’s hard for me to write a focused blog post at the moment because there just seem to be too many active problems. I could have written a focused blog post about a programming topic, but that feels tone-deaf. So instead this will be a scatter-shot blog post about ways of thinking that could help us out of this mess. Also, since I usually write about programming, I will try to feed the lessons back to programming.
For context (if you’re reading this in the future or from another country) the US has had a really bad year. We nearly started a war with Iran, we impeached our president but couldn’t get him out of office, and then we completely failed our response to the global pandemic. After initially doing nothing and hoping it would just go away, the US decided to react in the most costly way possible, causing mass unemployment while still proving mostly impotent in fighting the virus. Now, after that huge sunk cost, we have mostly given up on fighting the coronavirus, just in time for a new problem to arise: Massive amounts of protests all over the country, some of which even turned into riots. The immediate cause is that the police killed another unarmed black man because he was briefly resisting them. But of course it’s pent-up anger from years of police brutality. And of course it couldn’t have come at a worse time with mass-unemployment and a pandemic still raging through the country.
All of this didn’t have to be, so here are some helpful tools of thought:
Probably Dance 