Dispelling Delusions of Adequacy

A most difficult service to render among friends.

Years ago, a wise old man, upon hearing me describe the issue of the day, softly snorted and said “delusions of adequacy”. He has since passed on but the wisdom imparted that day has stuck with me.

Quite some time has passed, but as I recall, that conversation had to do with my observations of an opponent attempting some Hail Mary move that had me worked up, but he could already see they were way out of their depth and suggested I either mock, or ignore the effort.

This post is about … personal growth … I guess.

Attention Conservation Notice:

If you’ve already achieved enlightenment you’re free to go about your business. If you’ve never hung from Ygdrassil for nine days and nights, either accidentally or intentionally, in a search for wisdom, perhaps come in while you’ve still got two good eyes.

Volunteer Management:

Domestic politics dropped me into the realm of volunteer management, where one is given a pile of mismatched parts and a set of impossible goals. Having spent a decade self employed and/or involved in startups, this wasn’t so foreign to me. Both environments force you to look for the good in people, places, and things, to work around obstacles.

But you can toss all that feel good bullshit right out the window the minute you’ve got some sort of infiltration problem. I’ve seen a number of potentially viable companies blown to bits by individuals with character disorders, and the net result of the time from Occupy till the Snowden revelations was that not one thing was trustworthy.

Today it’s really strange, the infiltration, the cyborg automation, it’s … I encounter people who are angry that the degree of dissociation from reality THEY CONTRIBUTED TO is such that online environments familiar to them are simply disregarded now. You shit where you eat every day for ten or twelve years, the capable people will find other things to do with their time. We’re at stage three in any environment where people are not signing their names, which is why those spaces, most notably Twitter, are all in decline.

The Oncoming Storm:

There have been two key events for the month of April, from the position of an American concerned about the world at large.

Donald Trump has been failing slowly, for anyone who cared to look, for the last several years. The spectacle of him falling asleep in the first of four criminal trails he will face, while a maximum of a few dozen supporters appear outside, is … telling. This goes hand in hand with Arizona being the fourth state to drop an anvil on the fake electors of 2020. If Trump survives the four indictment gauntlet it seems unlikely anyone capable is going to take a risk for him, given the shabby treatment of those who previously did.

Mike Johnson was pulled aside and shown the ground truth on what is happening in Europe, on what NATO expects if Ukraine fails. Crushing Russia indirectly via the capable, committed Ukrainian military is a far better choice than letting things run one for another year, then the U.S. getting dragged into something we can not avoid.

Domestically I’ve said we’re headed for November’s Civil War Referendum. I’ve been saying We’re Gonna Fight for a while, but now it seems everybody has caught on to the hazard of Christian Nationalism.

Incapable & Unaware:

One of the hazards in the shadowy world of irregulars are folks who mean well, but who are wandering into area in which they have no business. Grassroots groups will attack an armored column with slingshots … and they’re just as likely to flee for their lives, mistaking a Tonkinese for a tiger.

I sometimes think maybe I should buy a gun, but then I remember I live in an urban area and I stopped target shooting twenty years ago. My next big milestone birthday is sixty, which is old enough to admit I can’t see shit without corrective lenses and I go no further than taking the trash to the curb without putting a wrap on my knee. My chosen duty is keeping things “left of boom” and I’ve clearly got no business on the other side of that.

Even so, my overall practice changed a lot in 2020 and then again further in 2023. I got the proverbial “new pair of glasses” and set aside some things I should not have been doing, things for which I had lacked the ability to see on my own.

How do you handle someone who is “playing in traffic”? First you’ve got to decide if you’ve got an infiltrator who’s willfully making messes. Let’s assume we’re already past that and into a very thorny problem - dealing with someone who doesn’t know what they don’t know, who either does not seek or who can not hear wise advise, who can not be urged into introspection, and … who will not or simply can not stop.

Well … go ahead … what are YOU going to do?

Conclusion:

This is the thing most likely to raise my blood pressure. There are multiple situations where I’ve said DON’T. And then *sighed* and said go ahead … but you’re not doing that around me. That lack of introspection typically extends to not recognizing the signals and then being mad when distancing is enforced.

And no amount of social pressure is ever going to overcome that. I’ll put the sources of it out, too, long before I’d bow to such things.

Did I already just say this in Introspection & Investigation?