#dialetics

on contradiction, by mao zedong

We will be consumed by our triviality at the cost of what is really important.

I enjoy learning new things, largely because I think I enjoy seeing things in new ways noticing subtleties and so on. Something that I was recently introduced to codified or, I suppose made pithy, a suspicion I had harbored if not a pattern I had recognized for a long time and often times tried to express. That is Parkison’s Law of Triviality. Learning about any new thing commonly triggers what is known as the Baader-Mienhof Phenomenon. Essentially that is when you learn something new and begin to notice it everywhere, it’s a symptom of various cognitive biases in the brain and I myself often experience it it. It is something I would like to discuss in part with you. Largely, because I would like to make you the reader think.

Parkinson's law of Triviality is simplified, that the more complex an issue, the more difficult it is to understand and consequently the less likely an individual is to have an opinion on it. The classic example given when explaining it is a city council meeting where three items are on the agenda. (quoting directly from wikipedia):

“The first is the signing of a £10 million contract to build a reactor, the second a proposal to build a £350 bicycle shed for the clerical staff, and the third proposes £21 a year to supply refreshments for the Joint Welfare Committee

1) The £10 million number is too big and too technical, and it passes in two and a half minutes.

2) The bicycle shed is a subject understood by the board, and the amount within their life experience, so committee member Mr Softleigh says that an aluminium roof is too expensive and they should use asbestos. Mr Holdfast wants galvanised iron. Mr Daring questions the need for the shed at all. Holdfast disagrees. Parkinson then writes: "The debate is fairly launched. A sum of £350 is well within everybody's comprehension. Everyone can visualise a bicycle shed. Discussion goes on, therefore, for forty-five minutes, with the possible result of saving some £50. Members at length sit back with a feeling of accomplishment."

3) Parkinson then described the third agenda item, writing: "There may be members of the committee who might fail to distinguish between asbestos and galvanised iron, but every man there knows about coffee – what it is, how it should be made, where it should be bought – and whether indeed it should be bought at all. This item on the agenda will occupy the members for an hour and a quarter, and they will end by asking the secretary to procure further information, leaving the matter to be decided at the next meeting."[5]

The concept touches on something near and dear to my heart: the propensity for the public to become utterly consumed in ultimately trivial social issues while leaving the the broader more impactful, complex, issues to other experts. It is something that I think hits at the core of Democracy itself.

Anyone who has followed me for any amount of time will know that I love Slavoj Zizek and, no doubt many of you now follow me because of the Slavoj Zizek based content I have propagated (not necessarily produced but shared or commented on). In an entry entitled “A Crisis in Manufacturing Consent” published in newsweek he states.

“[In Democracy] [w]e act as if we are free and freely deciding, silently not only accepting but even demanding that an invisible injunction (inscribed into the very form of our free speech) tells us what to do and think. As Marx knew it long ago, the secret is in the form itself. In this sense, in a democracy, every ordinary citizen effectively is a king—but a king in a constitutional democracy, a king who only formally decides, whose function is to sign measures proposed by executive administration. This is why the problem of democratic rituals is homologous to the big problem of constitutional democracy: How to protect the dignity of the king? How to maintain the appearance that the king effectively decides, when we all know this is not true?”

Essentially you, as a citizen are intentionally distracted by issues which are of small importance for two reasons.

1) To maintain the illusion that you the voter have power, to make you feel important in the grand scheme

2) To keep you distracted from the issues of pressing importance.

On the first point I believe people like to have opinions! Having a codified, defined, path of thought makes one feel intelligent. If I asked any person on the street they could give me a solid answer on their position on sexuality or whether the toilet paper should hang with the flap inboard or outboard they could 9/10 times give me an answer. If I ask them how they feel about the specifics of our economic sanctions on Russia and how much of a role they play now that oil prices have fallen so low and Russia’s number one export is now largely unprofitable anyway, they’d likely be flabbergasted (I like to bring up economics a lot because it’s complex and no one understands it). Ultimately we all want to have a say; we want to feel important; we want to feel like we are influencing things, and taking part in history. Largely I think this feeling is a sham. We only want the feeling without the effort, the thing without the thing itself. We want to have opinions but, we don’t want to have them on any hard topic because we are more concerned with other things. Most of us don’t nearly have the energy when we are consumed with entertainment or, the business of living life itself. So ultimately, we end up with a large majority of people being highly opinionated about something fairly trivial or something on which there can be utterly no compromise and a pretty much totally ignorant about anything outside of that realm.

Ironically,  many people go out of their way to educate themselves about these subjects. People will read about gender theory or the religious practices of  United States founding fathers (I swear if I hear another mention of how Thomas Jefferson was a good Christian because he once wrote a form letter with “in the year of our lord” on it I might just go on kill) and develop highly sophisticated opinions and positions about things which overall lack substance to begin with. Because that extra level of detail makes them feel extra-intellectual (this is about 95% of the content on Tumblr outside of like art and humor). Much of the time they fall into the trap of beginning with an answer or conclusion then doing research retroactively to support it e.g. “the US is a christian nation (conclusion), look Thomas Jefferson was a Christian (link), he once wrote a letter where he wrote specifically ‘in the year of our lord’(evidence)”. This sort of behavior I think is a basic constituent of our democracy. People like to feel like public discourse is functioning, but it rarely raises beyond the level of this bullshit. When it does most of democracy experiences this as a crisis, “why are we being forced to decide something for which there is no clear answer?” people panic and freak, just look what happened in 2008. We like to feel we are in control, but the moment we have to take the reigns from the experts we put in power specifically to take care of the bullshit we don’t want to be bothered with: to put roofs over our head, water in our pipes and power in our outlets, we experience that as something going very wrong in the system.

And here I move onto the second claim, that this mechanism, the institutional use of triviality is now going very wrong. A while a go I talked at great length about the TPP and I find it to be a perfect example. Democracy is fundamentally a system in which we only formally decide, however the people who decided for us have become so intoxicated by their own power, so corrupt, that they no longer care about providing for us and are more concerned with funneling money into their own pockets. The worst part is that we are so engaged in this triviality that we have hardly noticed. We have willingly given the reigns to someone else, an army of experts and now that they are leading us to the slaughterhouse we haven’t noticed and even if we did we wouldn’t (and have proven) we don’t care enough to do anything. We’d rather be caught up debating whether some media is sexist or not than be concerned about living in a future where we’re wealthy enough to even afford that media let alone critique it. Some of us are so utterly enthralled with untangling and defeating covert systems of oppression and domination that they completely and willingly ignore the overt ones.

15|5|2015

Nothington

Dialetics

Red Wood