Reality-Based Community
“People like you are still living in what we call the reality-based community. You believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.”
“That’s not the way the world really works anymore. We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.”
“And while you are studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out.”
“We’re history’s actors, and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”
This quote from Karl Rove is one of the best encapsulations of what America’s governing philosophy has been for a while. It played off an awe for the Presidency and its surrounding administration for a public whose political imaginations were built by The West Wing, Harry Potter, and The X-Files. Either we had super competent and ruthless political actors who strove for the perfection of their statesmanship, students who used the power of friendship and love to defeat a fascist uprising, or the lone wolves nibbling at an elaborate conspiracy that would change the world if revealed. Needless to say, all three interpretations of the institutions of power have collapsed for a far more disappointing reality.
No one actually knew what they were doing this whole time. Ignorance, incompetence, and insatiable greed: it turns out these three factors have both explanatory and predictive power. In a world that is too overwhelmingly complex for any empire to control except through a violent and totalitarian imposition of monopolies, reality cannot be determined by on-the-ground facts. There are simply too many details to be transmitted through too many layers of bureaucracy for a centrally-planned organization to have the ambition of infinite growth.
Between accepting that reality is too complex to be deterministically controlled and inventing a new reality where ignorance is bliss, social institutions and their constituencies have largely chosen the latter. Eventually, ignorance goes from bliss to virtue. The popularity of the positive psychology movement is little more than blissful ignorance and feel-good slogans detached from empirical reality, trickling-down from executives and managers who hope TED Talks deter conversations about collective action, like unionization. As Barbara Ehrenreich has said:
“The ideology of positive thinking is not just a matter of attitude. It is a way of coping with a world that has become increasingly difficult to control.”
“Hard-headed corporate culture is becoming interested in how to get more work out of fewer workers. They’re realizing that if their workers are happy, they will work harder and more productively. So they’re leading the charge.”
“The flip side of positivity is thus a harsh insistence on personal responsibility: if your business fails or your job is eliminated, it must be because you didn’t try hard enough, didn’t believe firmly enough in the inevitability of your success.”
“Breast cancer, I can now report, did not make prettier or stronger, more feminine or spiritual. What it gave me, if you want to call this a ‘gift,’ was a very personal, agonizing encounter with an ideological force in American culture that I had not been aware of before - one that encourages us to deny reality, submit cheerfully to misfortune, and blame only ourselves for our fate.”
I can now report, too, that this force is alive and well in the recovery community for all types of mental health protocols. You repeatedly hear the concepts of accountability and responsibility, but there’s next to no discussion about the actual models of health or wellbeing unless some New Age nonsense is used with the aesthetics of exotic and ancient mysticism in the place of evidence and common sense. There is next to no discussion, for example, of the concept of recovery capital. Perhaps because, inconveniently, studies show that community recovery capital has a greater bearing on someone’s sustained abstinence than individual recovery capital. In other words, our institutions are unwilling to discuss collective action or community resilience when personal coping skills and positive psychology tools can be thrown at you through manualized protocols. “You can’t change anyone except yourself” says the institution trying to change you into accepting an inability to change the world around you.
No book captures this better than The Four Agreements, which explicitly discourages you from blaming the government for restricting freedoms while telling you that no one can abuse you more than you abuse yourself. I’ve ranted at length about how repugnant the book is to me for its advice alone, setting aside the bastardization of other cultures to fit the author’s preconceived framework. Supposedly, everyone is inside their own dream that is composed entirely of things they agree to, and by simply not agreeing to external conditions. The fact that this book made its way into treatment centers as a basis for psychoeducation classes is beyond my understanding. It moves firmly beyond positive attitudes and into magical thinking about taking 100% control of your life.
It gets even worse through TED Talks and motivational speakers with YouTube channels who repeat truisms divorced from both scientific consensus and complex lived experiences. As Edgar Cabanas and Eva Illouz point out in Manufacturing Happy Citizens (2019):
“Positive psychology has helped to transform happiness into a commodity, a lifestyle, and a form of social control.”
To Succeed Reality
“Everything changes. The studio was gonna tank when I bought it, everyone was gonna stay home with video tapes. But guess what? No! They wanna go out. No one was gonna watch network except you give it zing, and they do. You make your own reality. And once you’ve done it, apparently, everyone’s of the opinion it was all so fucking obvious.”
Succession is one of my favorite shows just under The Sopranos and Twin Peaks.
I binged The West Wing during my high school years when my career aspirations included law and policy, but House of Cards was being released at the same time. The two had very different premises for what politics at its core was, and radically different premises for what people at their cores are. Reportedly, Veep is the show that political staffers say comes closest to their experiences, but there’s also a fascinating podcast that was released alongside Succession that interviewed real political figures about their feelings about the show. Most notably, the actual Murdoch family saw the show and considered new possibilities about the cahos that would ensue about the succession planning of Murdoch’s businesses, leading to Mark Devereux drafting a real document as a representative of Elisabeth Murdoch to the family trust, termed “the Succession memo.”
What the show nails is the ambiguity found in the way power and reality interact. Where do the people who run the news get their news? How much of reality changes based on the news, and how much does the news change to reflect reality? How do impersonal systems that are bigger than any individual still end up shaped by each individual acting within it? Some say a bad system beats a good person every time. Others say every institution is the shadow of a single person.
In one episode, a Republican meeting to decide which nominee to support for President is described as a place where you don’t have to pretend to like Hamilton. It’s a clever nod to The Room Where It Happens, a song in which negotiations between Hamilton and Jefferson happen behind closed doors over dinner, rather than out in some public forum as he used to when he was young and looking for opportunity. In the course of my very short foray into that world, I’ve felt Succession comes closest to nailing the philosophy the world seems to run on.
“Oh, oh! There are rules? Do you know something Greg? There are no fucking rules.”
“Nothing is a line. Everything, everywhere is always moving. Forever. Get used to it.”
“Life’s not knights on horseback. It’s a number on a piece of paper. It’s a fight for a knife in the mud.”
“The future is real. The past is all made up.”
Though incredibly cynical and nihilistic, there is nonetheless something that reminds me of Eastern concepts of impermanence and detachment. Once we let go of the need to impose a moral righteousness onto the world, and once we accept that everything about reality changes, where does that leave us? Being radically free through being radically untethered? Are we empowered or powerless in the face of that realization, that the absurd universe provides no stable rules to learn and protect oneself through?
And what does it mean when the core of our information and investment infrastructure runs on some perverse version of this principle? If finance is driven by the management of risk and return, and risk relies on the expectations others have of what reality will be, and everyone is gaming everyone else’s expectations to get ahead in their own reality, have we short-circuited the entire process of informed judgment? Are we in control of our succession planning at all? Is it just might makes right in the end, big eats small, winners writing the history over the corpses of the losers?
Or can a David with a nugget of truth take down a Goliath whose blind spot has been misconstrued as an asset? Does the truth eventually win out in the end if only because it can be independently approached through innate human curiosity? Is our desire for stable codes and principles, continuity and legacy, something greater than ourselves, all indicative that we’ve lost our way from some state of affairs that our limited, finite selves could manage? Is our present state cynicism and nihilism, even embrace of absurdism, just an adaptation to a world that’s constantly changing, and to resist it is to have the currents turn against you?
“That’s it! We don’t know. We can’t know. But I’ve got my suspicions. I’ve got my fucking supsicions.”