consistency: I would rather work with the hobgoblin
> A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Out upon your guarded lips! Sew them up with packthread, do. Else, if you would be a man, speak what you think to-day in words as hard as cannon-balls, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day. Ah, then, exclaim the aged ladies, you shall be sure to be misunderstood. Misunderstood! It is a right fool’s word. Is it so bad then to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.
Emerson committing the cardinal rhetorical sin of “[well doesn’t this kind of make me like Jesus]”.
The aged ladies have it closer, I think – but then, I’m not one who would be a man.
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I read Politics in China by William Joseph. I don’t know that I’d totally recommend it – it seems a good foundation for further study that I myself don’t anticipate doing. Still, an undergrad text is very efficient. One thing that struck me was the “Mass line” stuff about which I’ve got to read and think more before making comment1.
Another thing – stupider, maybe, to have had it strike me as it did – was the Gao Gang affair. Here, have some Wiki:
> Mao had a series of private conversations with Gao in late 1952 or early 1953 where it is believed he expressed a degree of dissatisfaction with Liu and Zhou, apparently remarking that they were too cautious in their attitude towards the pace of socialist transformation in China. The details of what Mao actually told Gao are still unclear: whether he approved any action towards Liu and Zhou or merely expressed his frustrations to a friend in private. What is significant is that Gao took Mao’s words as consent for a move against these two senior cadres.
> […]
> At a Politburo meeting on 24 December 1953, Mao confronted Gao and gave him a serious warning that his activities were a severe threat to party unity. At the conference, Mao’s position was clear: he condemned Gao for forming “an anti-Party alliance”.
> This effectively marked the end of Gao’s attempts to advance his position as he realized that he did not in fact have Mao’s support.
Look, I recognize that this is the cartoon version of how a certain kind of totalitarian state works, but I’ve always presumed that that kind of backbiting jockeying for Daddy’s attention and approval based on tenuous inference wasn’t _really_ ever important in any corridors of real power. This because: **how the fuck could anyone ever get anything done.** The achievements (lifespan! literacy!) of China’s development seemed too important to have come out of a shitshow like that. Maybe that’s wrong – maybe I should just be even _more_ impressed they were possible at all.
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I want to start putting more listings of media up here. A couple quick words on Wolf Hall. I don’t even really mean “reviews” in the fullness of the term – even the small observations, recommendations, decrials that I might toss out into the stream on Mastodon. Having them gathered in one place seems useful. Forget algorithms: people are very good at calibrating a social source. _Ah, she**would** like Netflix’s Decameron, wouldn’t she_. _Hmm, she**is** the DJ Pikachu kind_.
For all that we make much of our own perceived self-contradictions – yes, yes, I contain multitudes **goddamnit** – there’s value in exposing even one’s heterogeneous tastes. We are more legible to more of each other than we imagine, and it’s often inexpensive to make ourselves more legible still. It’s ego to imagine being hard to understand comes from being a deeper kind of person. It’s childish to value surprising people when you can skip over many assumptions and misunderstandings with adequate social signaling.
Every single person who sent me Kelmscott Mono was dead-on, and I heap blessings on all your heads.
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I received the advice: Sometimes you have to just keep repeating yourself over and over and over again and people get it eventually.
At the time, I laughed. I said something like: No, it’s not like them coming to understand something they didn’t comprehend the first time – rather, it reinforces people’s mental model of how _he’d_ respond to some thing or another, so we can start aping him to each other in places he doesn’t have time to be. Influence via imitators.
I can see it a little differently now, too. We are asked to reconcile impossibilities, to achieve X and Not-X simultaneously. Speed is important, but also quality, but also learning, but also experimentation, but also frugality. Some get mealy-mouthed about voicing which things they want us to sacrifice in favor of which others in which contexts. To say over and over and over again, loudly and publicly, that we should do A in such-and-such a way, and that it is the same approach we should bring to B, and that it is the same trade-off we should make with regards to C… it doesn’t _just_ let me anticipate when D comes around that he’d argue for that same path forward, but it also signals to me that someone will have my _back_ at the Politburo conference if I go for it.
You can’t control all the details, because you don’t have time to be in touch with all the details, to give sign-off at the level it’d take. You need to figure out how you need other people to deal with the details, and you need to represent that to them over and over and over again – not just so they understand what you’ve said, not just so they come to agree with it, not just so they can apply it in novel situations in your absence, but so they know they can count on _you_ for it.
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What would it look like to value clarity in signaling? How do we fail to put our cards on the table at times when it’d make it easier for everyone around us?
The flash of counter-intuitive insight, the unexpected take: you need those, too, but you can’t _run_ things around them, not at _scale_.
Assemble the bigger picture. Repeat it to people. Over and over and over. You are only ever working with the shadow on the wall.
1. Suffice to say for now: this reading recommendation followed a conversation about Seeing Like A State and how we might understand its arguments to be relevant in design of science-engineering collaboration. Ha Ha Boy Do I Have Opinions. ↩
