Episode IV: A Green Hope

When I moved to Toronto in early 2019, I had the notion that I would get more involved in politics. 

My analysis of society always circles back to the same conclusion. We know the problems. We know the solutions. We just need to do the hard work of motivating people to assume the short-term costs of the solutions for the sake of their long-term benefits. The problems persist, I think, because of a lack of political will.  

If that’s true, the next conclusion follows quickly from the first. To influence the political will, one must play the political game. And to do that, I need to volunteer to help one of the teams playing the game.  

Unfortunately, when I had a look at the usual suspects back in early 2019, my motivation to get involved cratered. I didn’t see any party where I would easily fit in.

I accept that winning elections is an important part of advancing policy, but I can’t really stomach the idea of stumping for policies whose only function is to win votes. I’d much rather start with the best policies and work hard to convince voters of their merits. Most political parties, as you’d probably guess, don’t seem to share my view. 

Today, I can write “most” parties rather than “all” because I now know that I overlooked the Green Party of Ontario. As luck would have it, I stumbled across their 2018 election platform the other day. When I read it, I was pretty much, “yes, yes, and yes” (x3).

Looking back on it now, I’m not sure why it didn’t occur to me to take a closer look at the Greens in Ontario. I have voted for them in the past. I’ve also voted for the Greens at the federal level.

Moreover, I have since learned that the party had a significant breakthrough in the last election. They elected their first Member of Provincial Parliament in the riding of Guelph. Mike Schreiner, the leader of the party, was elected with an impressive 45 per cent of the popular vote (29,082), a 25 per cent increase over his tally in 2014 (10,230). After such significant step forward, I would have thought they’d be on my radar.     

Whatever the reason for my oversight, on the plus side, it means I have a very easy and straightforward opportunity to help out. I can’t be the only person in Ontario who shares my political values, who wants to get more involved in politics, and who has also overlooked the Greens. 

Ergo, this post. 

Give their 2018 platform a look. If you like what you read, buy a membership and sign up for their virtual convention on November 7, 2020. I’ll be attending, and, if all goes well, I will get more involved in the party and see what I can do to help them elect more MMPs in the next election.

I write, “if all goes well”, because I have been down this road before.

There is much more to a political party than its platform. The party’s culture will likely trump all other considerations, when it comes to deciding how much time I will volunteer to the cause.

My hope is that the Ontario Greens are still sufficiently deep in the political wilderness that they haven’t attracted the kind of people who think the pursuit of power always trumps principle, but, at this point, it is impossible to know.

In their platform, they say that they want to do politics differently, but that could be an empty slogan. More charitably, their vision of “differently” might simply be different than mine. Ultimately, there is only one way to find out: once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more!

The tenor of our age: nihilism born of egoism

When I die, my ability to experience will die with me. How I lived, how long I lived, and how I am remembered won’t make any difference to me because I won’t be able to experience it. From the perspective of experience, death voids everything. Unfortunately, from that very same perspective, living is not that much different.

Living is a series of loosely connected experiences of now, each of which is quickly forgotten. We overlook the ephemeral nature of experience because of the illusion of memory. Our memories are an experience of now masquerading as an experience of then. We don’t experience the past through memory. We don’t know it either. We imagine it. Whatever our imagination may conjure for us, there is only now, the experience of now, and nothing.

Nihilism to the left of me; oblivion to the right; here I am, stuck in the middle with now.

But, hold on.

I may not be able to experience again an experience that has past, but many past experiences effect my experience of now. I can’t experience again those many hours I spent reading, writing and studying, but the positive effects of those experiences stay with me. Likewise, I can’t experience again the cigarettes I’ve had, but their harm stays with me too. Experience may be the means through which we interact with the world, but living in the world is not reducible to our experience of it. There is much more to living than experience.

From this perspective — the perspective of living — the focus on the non-experience of death is myopic. The effects of my life will live on, for better and for worse, long after I am here to experience them. This longevity of effect is nothing like the immortality that the experiencing self craves, but it is the easy proof that death does not void everything. The experiencing self will be extinguished, yes, but its effects will persist long enough to be relevant, whether they are experienced by the extinguished self or not.

So, on closer inspection, the fact of death, in itself, is not the source of the nihilism that is often associated with it. Instead, it is the myopic focus on experience. If outcomes only matter to me when they are directly experienced, death may seem like a good reason not to care about any outcome at all because, at some point, all experience will come to an end. However, that very same focus on experience will likely lead someone to also disregard or ignore outcomes that they don’t directly experience while they are living. If a person’s own experience is the only thing that matters to them, why would they care about what’s happening in the next house, the next city, or the next century? The short answer: they wouldn’t.

Nihilism blooms not in the corpse of god nor in the ever-present fact of death nor in the loss of faith and tradition. It blooms instead in the belief that a person’s own experience is the Alpha and the Omega, the First and the Last, the Beginning and the End. Nihilism is a product and consequence of egoism, in whatever form it happens to express itself: religious, philosophical, or economic. It this relationship, I think, between egoism and nihilism that best explains the tenor of our age.

Why aren’t more teams outside of sport playing Moneyball? Because they’re human, stupid.

After reading Michael Lewis’ Moneyball, I asked myself: why hasn’t this data-driven approach to the evaluation and recruitment of talent been embraced by more teams and organizations outside of professional sports? Why, after all of these years and with the very tangible success of professional sports to look to as an example, why are we still evaluating and recruiting talent like we always have? 

After all, when you cut through the sound and the fury of Lewis’ tale, the innovation described in Moneyball is pretty straightforward. Billy Bean and Paul DePodesta of the Oakland Athletics use data to identify players who are undervalued by other teams and then sign them to contracts at a bargain price. Essentially, they get more for less by exploiting information the other teams ignore. It’s smart, but it’s also a tactic that every bargain hunter, thrifter and value investor understands. Because the core idea described in Moneyball is so straightforward and has been so widely celebrated, you would think (or, at least, I would) the data-driven approach to the evaluation and recruitment of talent described in Moneyball (or something approximating it) would have swept through all other industries by now.

Instead, it seems that most teams and organizations rely on recruitment practices that are probably older than baseball. You know the drill: after a largely arbitrary sorting process based on self-reported data points (i.e. a resume is pulled out of a hat based on a crappy keyword search or because a friend-of-a-friend recommends that it be pulled), the evaluation of a potential hire boils down to a highly subjective gut-check, which may or may not be based on an assessment of the candidate’s skills in highly artificial circumstances. A few reference checks later — which everyone agrees are useless — and, blammo, a new hire is being onboarded. If a professional sports team recruited like this, it would be out of business in no time. How is it possible that so many teams and organizations continue to recruit in this essentially arbitrary fashion? 

Overlooking the rhetorical nature of my question, you might reply, “well, probably because most teams, organizations and industries don’t have access to the kind of dataset baseball has. Baseball has always been kind of nutty for numbers.” To which, I might reply, great point, Dave, but there is no necessary reason why a baseball-like dataset couldn’t be developed and maintained by, say, a professional association. Isn’t the market supposed to identify opportunities like this and fill them? Potential employers, it is fair to say, would probably pay oodles of money to access this kind of data, if it led to better and less costly hires. Moreover, I would quickly add, not giving you a chance to get a word in edgewise, because that’s how I roll, once someone is hired, a team or organization can create and maintain as much data about the new hire and their performance as they would like. So, if some hungry-for-success team or organization wants to evaluate a new hire based on their contribution to the success of the team or organization, generating the right kind of data should be a straightforward exercise once the person is onboarded.

Instead, much like the recruitment process itself, the evaluation of new hires seem to be largely a matter of feel. If a new hire “fits” into their new team and seems to contribute, the recruitment process is normally judged a success, whether or not the person measurably contributes to the success of the team or organization. To be fair, group harmony and team cohesion is always going to play a role in any team’s success. However, group harmony and team cohesion are very often a by-product of team work rather than a catalyst for it. Whether or not a person “fits” is probably irrelevant, so long as they make some effort to cooperate and work well with others. Proximity and time will take care of the rest. 

Before you interrupt me with another objection that I already have a clever reply to, it was probably around this point in my thinking and writing that the penny dropped. Duh, Sterling, of course, most organizations and industries hire based on “feel”, where “feel” more or less translates into, “yep, gut sure says that they’re like me.” We humans are tribal. From the very outset of our lives, we tend to form relationships and social groups based on physical proximity and physical similarities. Why would it be dramatically different for the workforce? Well, Sterling, I guess I was assuming that competition and/or the desire to achieve our aims would have nudged us to adopt more rational, coherent and less arbitrary approaches to building teams and organizations. Whether an organization is for-profit or not-for-profit, it makes much more sense to recruit people who measurably contribute to the achievement of the organization’s aims rather than people who just happen to look and talk like the friends-of-friends we have in common.

Think about it, if the jocks — of all people — have figured this one out, why hasn’t anyone else? 

Then, it was around this point that another penny dropped for me. Most people agree that Michael Lewis’ version of the events in Moneyball “torques” the facts for the sake of a more compelling story. In particular, it seems likely that there was far less conflict and debate about the data-driven approach Bean and DePodesta championed. Strictly-speaking, once a certain caricature of scouts and scouting is set aside, the difference between player evaluation and acquisition as it was traditionally done in baseball and the approach described in Moneyball is one of degree rather than kind. Moreover, by the time that Beane and DePodesta had turned to data to drive their player acquisitions, amateur data aficionados had already been using data to dissect and criticize professional baseball’s approach to player evaluation and acquisition for some time. The notion that data could lead to better recruitment practices was already well and truly in the air.

It’s also important to remember that Bean and DePodesta were evaluating and recruiting players who had already been through a very long and very difficult vetting process. To be among the players who are even on the radar of being considered for a spot on a professional baseball team, a lot of people in the baseball community would have already vouched for that player in some way or the other. It’s not like the Athletics were using data to recruit hockey goalies to be catchers or signing Tim from the mailroom. If a team is trying to decide between signing this guy and that guy, and everyone already agrees that both of them are part of the very exclusive club known as professional baseball, why wouldn’t you roll the dice and pick the cheaper guy if the data also seems to predict he would do fine. Shorn of Lewis’ drama, the Athletics faced a pretty simple choice. On the one hand, they could continue evaluating and recruiting talent as they always had and expect the same middling results or, on the other, they could take a chance on a newish approach broadly recognized as having some merit, generate results no worse than they might otherwise expect, and save money while doing it. Really, when you think about it, it’s a no-brainer, but, “the not-so-remarkable tale of safely entrenched insiders making an even safer bet that works out better than expected” doesn’t make for compelling dust jacket copy.

With all of that throat-clearing now well in hand (uh, gross), the answer to the question I started with is this, I think: teams and organizations outside of professional sports haven’t yet broadly adopted a data-driven approach to the evaluation and recruitment of talent because, all things considered, the age-old approaches work well-enough; as a result, no well-established insiders have felt compelled to try something new. On the one hand, successful organizations tend to attract a lot people who have already been vetted in some fashion. Randomly picking, more or less, among those people who present themselves for selection is probably a safe bet and, if random selection is a safe bet, why not also pick people “like me,” if it will make you and everyone else on the team feel more comfortable with the new hire. On the other hand, struggling organizations tend to cut employees rather than than make new hires and, you can be sure, any hires they do make are going to be on the safe and familiar side. In other words, even after very many years of working together in groups to achieve different aims, it seems that we humans haven’t confronted any situation that would compel us to change how we recruit people or how we evaluate their contributions to our efforts. And, if it hasn’t happened yet, don’t hold your breath! Businesses fail every day and entire industries have collapsed over the years and yet these very negative consequences have not driven business or industry insiders to fundamentally and systematically rethink how they evaluate and acquire talent. If it hasn’t happened yet, I doubt it it will happen anytime soon.

Now, if you are like me, at this point, you might be somewhat disheartened to realize that organizations build their teams using methods that wouldn’t look out of place on the schoolyard (i.e. pick that kid, he dresses like us!). However, if you are a normal human being, you are probably actually thinking, “Are you serious?” Did you really only just figure out that hiring decisions are primarily an exercise of “like” hiring “like”?” Well, sort of. I have always understood that humans have a habit of grouping together based on superficial similarities and excluding those who are superficially different, but I have always thought of it as a bad habit, which would eventually be broken, both at the individual and group level, either consciously as people and societies matured or unconsciously through something like competition. What has dawned on me (thanks to Moneyball and baseball!?) is that the human tendency to socialize, build teams and act collectively by looking for and finding people “like us” is so fundamental that nothing will ever compel us to change, other than a true evolutionary shift in our DNA, which, strictly-speaking, is just a fancy way of saying, “if people who embrace difference reproduce more than all those other people who prefer homogeneity.” It’s “we like us” and “different like them” all the way down. 

Moreover, on a personal level, it is also dawning on me that whatever I have accomplished in my life is probably best understood as being a consequence of my similarities to others  rather than my differences. I’m not a beautiful unique snowflake; I’m a me-too drug. And, yes, while I am one hundred per cent talking about social privilege, I am also driving at something that runs deeper. Returning again to evolution (which probably should be the subordinate clause that starts every discussion about human nature), in my experience, evolution is often characterized as a triumph of difference because it is a heritable difference in phenotype that leads to a reproductive advantage that, over many generations, leads to a new breeding population. Hurray for difference — so long as you overlook the fact that the difference is one tiny bit in a whole lot of sameness. Without the sameness, the little bit of difference wouldn’t ever take hold in a breeding population. To put it bluntly, if you are too different, your difference ain’t being passed along to anyone because you won’t get the opportunity to reproduce and, if you are really different, the breeding might not even work. In other words, what makes you and me human are the ways in which we are the same; insofar as we aspire to be unique, it it only possible because we are like others — and not in spite of it.

And that is the moral of a completely different after-school special than the ones I watched growing up.

Within the mirror of COVID-19: a vision of a better society.

Many years ago, during my PhD research, I audited a lively political theory seminar. As you’d expect, at some point, we discussed the ethics of health care.

From the outset, the conversation was framed by the assumption that health care resources are necessarily scarce. Society, it was assumed, would be crippled by the costs of health care, unless they were carefully rationed. The notion that we might organize society to make health care a top priority was characterized as absurd. Society, it was declared with table-thumping authority, must be organized around higher ideals than the good health of all. What are we, animals?

In the years since that seminar, it has seemed to me that most policy discussions about health care begin and end with very similar table-thumping assumptions about the nature of society, its highest aims, and the presumed scarcity of health care resources. Time and again, health care discussions begin with the assumption that we must do more with less, instead of discussing how we might do much more, if only we realigned our priorities. 

Fortunately, during a crisis like the COVID-19 pandemic, most everyone seems to understand that we have a duty to do everything we can to keep as many people as possible as healthy as possible. At a time like this, it is easy for most people to understand that society can’t function if everyone is ill, dying or dead. Moreover, people also seem much more willing to do much more to prevent all ill-health, suffering and death — perhaps, because the consequences are top-of-mind. Unfortunately, once the crisis passes, if past experience is any measure to go by, it seems likely that people will very quickly forget their present concern for the good health of all.  

It is important to remember, I think, that the costs of preventable ill-health, suffering and death are as real when they happen over time as they are when they happen in a wave. Admittedly, the high volume of health care needed during a pandemic is a unique challenge in its own right, but the actual suffering caused by preventable ill-health, suffering and death doesn’t disappear when it is spread over time. It may be less dramatic, more easily managed, and more easily hidden from view, but all of the costs remain: human, social, and economic.  

So, if it is true during a pandemic that we should do everything in our power to keep as many people as healthy as possible, I think, it should also be true when there is no pandemic to focus our attention. Our good health is the very foundation for everything else we value — whatever we might value.

I don’t care if you are financier, a poet or a small business owner, your pursuit of the good life is not possible without your good health and the good health of everyone else.

This pandemic, I hope, has reminded us of that fundamental fact. 

The good news is that this pandemic will eventually end. It will end precisely because we are making its speedy resolution our top social, political and economic priority. The bad news is that, once the crisis is over, we will likely fall back into that old habit of thinking that the good health of all is a priority easily trumped by other considerations, like the marginal tax rate of our wealthiest citizens. It is my hope, however fleeting, that our response to the COVID-19 pandemic will remind us that we can accomplish much, when we align our social, political and economic priorities to serve the good health of all.  In recent history, we have organized society for the sake of the power and privilege of a few “royal” families, to wage total war, and to maximize shareholder wealth. Perhaps, now is the time to organize society for the sake of the good health of as many people as possible.

I have no symptoms. I have locked myself down. You should consider it too.

I have no symptoms. I have not travelled recently. As far as I know, I have not been in direct contact with anyone who has travelled recently. The risk that I have COVID-19 is very low — almost nil. I have, nevertheless, by my own choice, locked myself down. I have not left my apartment since Monday evening. 

Why is that? 

The short answer: I want to be certain that I am not spreading the disease now and that I won’t spread the disease in the future. 

The key statement in the opening paragraph is “as far as I know.” Yes, I am probably not a risk to others, but the evidence seems pretty clear that people without symptoms or people with only mild symptoms are spreading the disease. When it comes time for me to leave my apartment — when it is essential for me to do so — the only way to minimize the chance that I am not a carrier is to self-isolate now. 

While this may seem a bit over-the-top, I need to take this step precisely because so many people who are at risk aren’t taking the pandemic seriously. People who appear to be healthy right now are out and about spreading the disease to other people who will also appear healthy long enough to spread the disease to others who will also appear healthy and so on. One of those people could be me for all I know. I am pretty sure I’m not infected, but, because those who are genuinely a risk aren’t playing their part, I can’t be sure. 

Fortunately, if I can go ten or twelve days without leaving my apartment, I will be pretty confident that I don’t have the virus and I won’t spread it. If I make it to fourteen days of self-isolation (the incubation period probably isn’t longer than fourteen days), I will be almost certain that I won’t put others at risk. For me, at this point in time, when most of my normal activities are already on hold, a couple of weeks in my apartment seems like a pretty small cost to pay for the certainty that I will be part of the solution and not part of the problem — a problem, I don’t hesitate to remind you, that will kill people. 

Practically speaking, I also suspect we are currently in a period of relative calm when the risk of infection is very high precisely because so many people aren’t taking the pandemic seriously. Once lots of people are sick and the hospitals are filling up to the breaking point, I am guessing that the risk of catching the virus in the community will be much lower because the sick will have no choice but to stay at home in their misery; healthy people who are a risk will hopefully recognize the tangible consequences of their actions and adjust their behaviour. 

Looking further down the road, I also want to be healthy when the storm finally hits — and it seems pretty clear that things will get very rough sooner or later. The only way to ensure that I am healthy enough to help others and to continue working is to self-isolate now. And again, to hammer the point home, if it is essential for me to leave my apartment to help others or for work after this period of self-isolation, I probably won’t be putting others at risk. That’s peace of mind that I’m willing to eat leftovers for.

I should also acknowledge that I am both lucky and privileged enough to be able to make this decision for myself. I can easily work from home, my employer officially encouraged all of its employees who could work from home to do so, and my job is about as secure as a job can be in these difficult times. If I am laid off, I also have enough savings that I should be able to weather the economic storm if I am careful. For the time being, I don’t know anyone who needs help or assistance on a regular basis. I have no prescriptions to fill. I have plenty of natural light in my flat, plenty of friends I can reach electronically, and I can workout easily in my apartment. By blind luck, in recent weeks, I even accidentally stockpiled some tasty cooking in my freezer. On Monday, to prepare for my solitary confinement, I only had to buy a couple extra bags of coffee (i.e. no hoarding required). Barring the unexpected, I should be able to stay isolated for another ten days easily or, at least, until it is essential for me to leave my apartment.  

And this is the key consideration: if it is essential that you go out, you absolutely should. No argument here. There are many legitimate reasons to break isolation both now and in the future. However, before you go out, ask yourself, “Is it essential that I go out today? Can I accomplish this task by some other means? Can I put it off until later?” If you can, please do. Additionally, please take whatever steps you need to take right now to minimize your reasons to leave your home in the future. Because the storm is coming, the time to prepare is now — not when it arrives. Now is the time to identify and solve the challenges of isolation while you are in good health and better spirits. Because sooner or later, either the government or the disease will make the decision to isolate for you. 

If you’ve made it this far but you are not entirely convinced that the time to self-isolate is now, please take a few minutes to read an article André Picard published today. Here, I think, is the key message:

As the number of infections rise, we need to behave as if we could all be infected, as if everyone around us could be infected. […] As the risks grow, our actions must accelerate. 

Ultimately, this isn’t about you or me. It’s about some of the most vulnerable members of our community, the front line workers who are going to do everything in their power to contain this storm when it hits, and the very real hope that we can get this pandemic under control. Taking action — even drastic action — is driven by the hope that our actions and choices can make a difference. To carry on as if nothing has changed is the stuff of despair — not hope. If, like me, you are lucky enough to be able to decide for yourself to self-isolate now or, at least, to minimize the time you spend out of your home, please do it now. There is very good reason to believe that this simple choice will help reduce the spread of the disease and make the time ahead easier for all of us.

Data, analytics, and the human condition: life lessons from baseball’s data-driven revolution

The history of professional baseball is, I think, the story of talented, skilled and experienced individuals relinquishing some of their decision-making autonomy to better coordinate their actions with others for the overall benefit of the group. In recent years, data, analytics and the people who effectively evaluate them have played a key role in this coordination effort. As a result, baseball’s history is, I think, a useful case study with which to better understand the value of the broader data-driven revolution that is well underway in many parts of our lives.

In the early days of professional baseball, individual players played as they pleased within the rules and conventions of the game. The manager was able to exercise some control over some on-field decisions because he decided who played each day. He used that authority to bend players to his will, whether or not his will led to success. In some remarkable instances, players were “too good not to play,” and they continued to play as they pleased, succeeding and failing according to their own set of rules. Their natural god-given talent was taken as proof that they could play by a different set of rules or none at all.

Today, because of data and modern analytics, managers and players are now relying on the advice and decisions of people who have often never played the game and who rarely step on the field. At first, these data-driven and analytical outsiders had to persuade the insiders to act on their insights and recommendations. Eventually, the people who control the pursestrings recognized the value of data-driven analysis and decision-making. As a result, the data nerds are now themselves insiders and enjoin rather than entreat. It also seems likely that their influence on the game will continue to grow. For example, data-driven analysis is now influencing player development, which historically, as far as I can tell, has been an unfathomable mix of toxic masculinity, superstition, blind luck, and occasional strokes of genuine and well-intentioned pedagogy.

This turn towards player development is happening in large part because most teams for the most part have now embraced data, analytics, and the people who effectively evaluate them. As a result, the competitive edge associated with the analytics  revolution has been blunted somewhat. For example, even if a clever analyst is able to identify an innovative way to evaluate players, whatever advantage that is gained will be short-lived because player acquisition is a very public activity. Eventually, some other team’s analyst will crack the code underpinning the innovative and unexpected acquisition. In contrast, if a team can use data and analytics to improve their player development, which happens behind the mostly closed doors of their training facilities, to turn average players into good players and good players into stars, there is a huge opportunity for teams to win more games at a much lower cost. They can sign players based on their current value and develop them into higher value players while under the original contract. Crucially, because teaching and development must always be tailored to the student, even if we imagine that an ideal system for player development can be broadly identified and it becomes widely known and understood, there will be plenty of room, I think, for innovation and competitive specialization. Although a handful of very successful teams already have a history of identifying and nurturing talent in-house, the future of player development will probably look a lot like the recent history of data’s influence on player evaluation, tactics, and strategy. Data, analytics and the people who effectively evaluate them can be expected to identify more effective approaches for player development, discredit others, and more accurately explain why some traditional approaches have worked.

I suspect that the analytics revolution has had such a profound impact in baseball only because baseball’s culture was ruled for so long by superstition, custom, and arbitrary acts of authority. This culture likely emerged, I am prepared to speculate, because there were so many exceptionally talented players competing for so few spots. Because all of these players were willing to accept pretty much whatever signing bonus or salary they were offered, if these exceptionally talents guys failed for whatever reason, from a team’s perspective, it didn’t much matter because there were plenty of hungry, talented and cheap guys waiting to take their place. Some guys made it through and some guys didn’t; as far the teams were concerned, it didn’t much matter who made it through or why they made it through — so long as those that did could help to win games. Of course, this model only works when players are cheap. It should come as no surprise that teams have become much more interested in accurately evaluating their players and investing in their development now that signing bonuses and player salaries are substantial and much more reflective of a player’s true contribution to the team’s bottom line. Thanks to collective bargaining and free agency, an economic motive was created that forced teams to treat players as valuable assets rather disposable widgets.

For a fan of baseball — or a fan like me, anyway — one of the unexpected outcomes of a deep dive into baseball’s analytics revolution* is the realization that the action on the field is very much an effect rather than a cause of a team’s success. Evaluating and acquiring players, developing them, motivating them, and keeping them healthy is the key to winning pennants. Yes, there will always be room for individual on-field heroics that help turn the tide of a game or series, but a player is on the field and physically and mentally prepared to make the big play only if a tremendous amount of work has already been done to put him there. And while I will resist the temptation to make the intentionally provocative claim that the analytics revolution in baseball highlights that on-field play is the least important aspect of a team’s success in baseball, it is nevertheless clear that that the data-driven evaluation of all aspects of the game highlights that the managers and players are only one piece of a very large system that makes on-field success possible. At this calibre of competition, with so many talented players on the field, an individual game is probably  best understood as a competition between two teams of finely-tune probabilities working through the contingencies of chance brought about the interactions of those probabilities. This, I think, not only explains the strange cruelties of the game for both players and fans, but it is also a pretty plausible description of the human condition. Once again, even from the cold dispassionate perspective of data, baseball looks like a pretty useful metaphor for life.

If my version of the history of professional baseball is (within the ballpark of being) correct, data, analytics and the people who effectively evaluate them have played a revolutionary role in baseball not because they revealed and reveal previously unseen truths. Instead, they are revolutionary because they broadened the scope of the kinds of people involved in baseball’s decision-making processes and, in doing so, changed how those decisions are made. By creating a more sophisticated, systematic and coherent methodology to measure and evaluate the contributions of players, the data nerds created a tool with which to challenge the tactical and strategic decisions of the old guard, which too often relied on appeals to custom, individual intuition, and authority. In this way, the data nerds earned themselves a place at the decision-making table. Crucially, baseball’s analytics revolution reminds us that people are the true catalyst and vehicle for change and innovation. It doesn’t matter if some new tool unearths previously unseen truths. If the people in charge aren’t willing to act on them, for all intents and purposes, the earth will remain at the centre of the universe.

The history of baseball also reminds us that a group of individuals working together to achieve some shared goal is much more likely to achieve their goal if they relinquish some of their decision-making autonomy in order to effectively coordinate their efforts. This is as true for hunters and gatherers working together to collect life-sustaining berries as it is for disciplined armies fighting undisciplined hordes. Communities, armies and sports teams that rely on an “invisible hand” to coordinate the actions of their individual members simply aren’t as effective as those that consciously and effectively coordinate their actions. We shouldn’t have to look to baseball’s history to be reminded of this simple truth. Unfortunately, western culture’s misplaced faith in the hope that individuals doing pretty much as they please will accidentally lead to the best outcome has created a culture in which we too too often organize ourselves along feudal lines, ceding absolute authority to individuals over some piece of work or part of a larger project, creating silos of silos within more silos. Yes, some leaders have made terrible decisions on behalf of the group, but that is an indication that we need better approaches to leadership not less coordination.

Baseball’s analytics revolution also reminds us that the coordination of individuals will be most effective when it takes into consideration the actual contributions made by each individual and that this assessment requires a systematic and coherent methodology to be effective. Quick judgements about a person’s contribution based on a small or irrelevant dataset is not an effective way to manage a team for success. An individual’s contribution to their team needs to be assessed based on a significant amount of meaningful, relevant and consistent data, which often needs to be collected over a significant period of time. Additionally, the tactical and strategic decisions based on those evaluations must also be subject to regular assessment and that assessment must be made in terms of the ultimate aim of the shared endeavour. Effective team management requires time, a historical frame of reference, and a long-term vision of success. In other words, there is much more to the successful coordination of a team than a rousing locker room speech or a clever presentation at an annual off-site meeting.

Baseball’s increased interest in data-driven player development also reminds us that the bedrock of long-term success for any team is an ability to recruit and nurture talent, where talent is largely understood to be a willingness to learn and evolve and a willingness to mentor and train. On the one hand, people who are set in their ways are unlikely to adapt to the culture of their new team; additionally, as the team and the work evolves, they won’t evolve with it. On the other hand, if they aren’t willing to mentor and train others, whatever knowledge and skills they have and develop won’t be shared. Yes, data and analytics, like any new tool, can create a competitive advantage in the short-term, but the bedrock of enduring success is people who are committed to learning and developing, and a culture and leadership team that supports and rewards their development.

The final insight from baseball’s analytics revolution might be more difficult to tease out because it challenges a habit that is so perennial that it is probably difficult to see it as anything but natural and given. I said earlier that a data-driven evaluation of all aspects of baseball’s operations is bringing into focus the idea that the action on the field is an outcome of a very complex process and that the success of that process is the fundamental cause of success on the field. If every aspect of a baseball team’s operations is designed and coordinated to ensure that the best players can play as effectively as possible during a game, that team is much more likely to succeed against the competition. An essential feature of this model is the important distinction between the activities undertaken to prepare and train for execution and the execution itself. Crucially, there is substantially more preparation than execution, and it is the quality and effectiveness of the preparation that determines the effectiveness of the execution. With that observation in mind, I’m willing to bet that in work, life and play, you and your team (however you conceive it) spend most of your time executing, very little time preparing, and a whole lot of time not living up to your full potential either as an individual or as a team. In theory, it is possible to approach execution in such a way that it becomes a kind of preparation and training opportunity, but, in practice, it will never be as effective as regularly setting aside time for dedicated and focused periods of training, planning and preparation. Essentially, whatever it is you do and whomever you do it with, if you aren’t taking time to train, practice, and prepare, you aren’t going to be as effective as you otherwise might be.

Ultimately, professional baseball is, I think, a useful case study with which to better understand the potential of the broader data-driven revolution taking place today  because of its unique gameplay, specific history, and the financial incentives which rule its day-to-day operations. Because of these factors, the ecosystem of baseball has embraced data, analytics and the people who effectively evaluate them in a way that lets us more easily see the big picture. Because of baseball, it is easy to see that the data-driven revolution is very real but that its potential can only be fully realized if it is the catalyst for welcoming new people and new forms of decision-making into the fold. There are no silver bullets. There are, however, when we are lucky, new people testing new ideas that sometimes work out and insiders who recognize — by choice or by necessity — the value of the new people and their ideas. Unfortunately, this also means that the very people, communities, and organizations who are most likely to benefit from the data-driven revolution and other forms of innovation — those that are ruled by superstition, custom, and arbitrary acts of authority — are the least likely to embrace the people and ideas most likely to make the most of it. And that, I think, is one more important insight into the the human condition brought neatly into focus thanks to baseball.

* If enough people express interest, I can put together a bibliography/reading list. However, any good local library should get you headed in the right direction.

Losing my religion: the unknowable self and the myth of a well-ordered society

I suspect that you and I don’t really know anything.

Today, thanks to a lot of trial and error, we humans have a pretty good understanding of what we need to do to distinguish between plausible and implausible beliefs. If we run controlled double-blind and repeatable experiments that generate a sufficient amount of data of sufficient quality, we can use statistical methods to confidently identify those beliefs that are false and those that are plausibly true but still in need of further testing. Considered from this perspective, it seems pretty obvious to me that you and I don’t really know anything. Most of our beliefs have not been tested in this way. 

To start, almost all of our beliefs about the universe are taken on faith that the people doing the work of understanding the universe are doing it correctly. To be sure, this is probably a sensible approach for you and I to take. It certainly seems much more efficient to rely on a specialized community of inquirers to undertake this work, but it doesn’t change the fact that you and I don’t really know what the scientific community knows. Their well-tested beliefs are, for us, articles of faith, even if we can expect them to be much more reliable than the articles of faith generated by theologians interpreting ancient texts. And if this is true, it is true whenever we rely on others to formulate and test beliefs on our behalf. Beliefs that we don’t test ourselves are, for us, articles of faith. 

With that conclusion in mind, take a few minutes to catalogue all the beliefs that you have and rely on each day that are formulated for you and/or tested by others. If you are honest with yourself, I am pretty sure the list will be quite long. And while it is tempting to believe that we have good reason to rely on others for all of these beliefs, I’m willing to bet that you have not tested that belief either. I, for one, can admit that I have not tested it — and most of my other beliefs. I also feel pretty comfortable guessing that you and I are in the same boat. 

And this, I think, is the crucial consideration. We might be able to shrug off the fact that particle physics is for us a matter of faith, but I suspect it will be much more unsettling to realize that you and I never properly test a whole range of beliefs that fundamentally shape our sense of self, our identity, and our daily experience of living.

Consider: Am I happy or unhappy today? Am I happier or less happy than I was yesterday? Last week? Last year? Am I better off now than I was three years ago? Am I consistently making choices that support my well-being? Did I go to the right university? Was I right not to go to university? Am I in the right career? Are my goals for the future the right goals? Am I with the right partner? Would I have been happier with no children or more children? Am I the person I wanted to become? Who was I? Which of my memories are accurate? How accurate? And so on. For all of these questions and many more, there are objective and measurable answers. I’m also willing to bet that your answers to these kinds of questions are a mix of educated guesses, received wisdom, and Magic 8-Ball proclamations. 

To further complicate matters, it is very likely that some of these questions can’t ever be properly answered. We could, for example, carefully track our self-reported experiences of happiness over a long enough period of time to come up with some plausible theories about what makes us happy and then test those theories with more data. However, we probably will never be able to adequately test whether any particular life choice was the right one to make. There are no do-overs in life. As a result, we can’t even generate the data that would put us in a position to make a valid assessment. Furthermore, in the face of this certain uncertainty, it seems likely that we can’t even reliably assess these choices in the here and now because we don’t have the well-tested beliefs upon which to assess the expected outcomes. So, even if we want to evaluate our life choices before we make them (overlooking the important consideration that many people don’t), we don’t even have the correct data for that evaluation. 

One plausible way to sidestep these concerns is to simply stipulate a lower burden of proof for these kinds of beliefs. Perhaps, it doesn’t really matter if we have properly tested beliefs about our happiness, our favourite foods, or our career path. One might be happy to claim that the good life requires only that we can tell ourselves a convincing story in the here and now that we are happy, well-off and that the events of our lives brought us here. All’s well that we can describe as ending well! And while I suspect that this tactic might actually be the best explanation for our species’ reproductive success up to this point (i.e. that we have a curious ability to reimagine suffering as a net benefit), I remain suspicious of the notion that we should lower the burden of proof for these kinds of beliefs. A delusion is a delusion is a delusion, even if we can convince ourselves that we are happy about it. 

In the face of this uncertainty, however, I suspect the only appropriate conclusion is to give up on the notion that we can ever definitively know ourselves. We are constantly evolving animals that are bound in the flow of time and, as a result, there are beliefs about ourselves of which we can never properly test. We have to rely on hunches, received wisdom and wild guesses because we have no other option. It isn’t because we are inherently mystical or otherworldly. It is because we are constrained  by our temporal existence. The much larger and crucial delusion, I think, is the belief that we could know with certainty who we are and what we value. Once we give up on that idea, the notion that we don’t know ourselves with God-like certainty seems much less unsettling and becomes just another mundane limitation of human existence. 

And while this conclusion might be well and good on the personal level, it creates one teensy-weensy little issue when we turn our attention to society and its organization: the fundamental and essential assumption of a liberal democracy and a market economy is that you and I can know our own well-being and happiness, know it better than anyone else, and reason effectively about it. Thanks to research in neuroscience and behavioural psychology, we now know with some certainty that these assumptions are false. We are poor reasoners in general but especially about what we value. Additionally, many of our beliefs about our own well-being are demonstrably false (i.e. people remember happiness that they did not experience and forget pain that they did). So, if it is true that most of our beliefs are inadequately tested and that we can’t even make accurate judgments about what we value or think to be good, democracies and markets are, at best, arbitrarily organizing society and, at worst, guaranteed to do it poorly. Garbage in, garbage out, as the saying goes. And to be clear, this is also true for authoritarian strong men, councils of nerds, and any other social-political system that depends on anyone looking deep within themselves to figure out who they are, what they value, or what they want to become. The root problem is the practical constraints of inquiry. There is no social architecture that will solve that problem for us.  

What then of politics, society, and its organization, if we can’t count on people knowing themselves with any certainty? 

First, I think we need to recognize and accept that our present-day social and political habits, institutions, and systems are largely the consequence of chance (akin to biological evolution), prone to constant change, and persist only as long we allow them to persist. They are an expression of our need to organize ourselves, they reflect the environment in which they developed, and they emerge like any other natural phenomenon. They can become better or worse (relative to a host of benchmarks), none of them will magically persist over time, and there is no reason to think that solutions from hundreds and even thousands of years ago will work for today’s challenges. We need to accept that society’s organization is an ever-evolving and accidental by-product of the on-going effort to solve many different, discrete and often intertwined problems. 

Second, I think we need to get out of the habit of appealing to any claims that rely on introspection alone, in the same way that we almost got out of the habit of appealing to claims about the one true God. There are a lot of well-tested and plausible beliefs that we can use to guide our efforts to organize ourselves and direct our problem-solving efforts. The challenge, of course, is that even well-tested beliefs don’t all necessarily point to the same conclusion and course of action. In those cases, we must resist the temptation to frame the debate in terms of largely unanswerable questions like “what’s best for me”, “who’s vision of the good life is correct,” or “who worships the right God.” Instead, we need to look to well-tested beliefs, run good experiments, and always account for all the costs and benefits of whatever approach we settle on in the here and now, recognizing that with new evidence we may need to adapt and change.  

Finally, for those of us who think that we should settle our disagreements based on well-tested beliefs rather than dubious claims grounded in introspection, we need to lead by example. I think this will primarily involve asking the right sort of questions when we disagree with others. For example, what well-tested evidence do we have for one conclusion or the other? What kind of evidence do we need to decide the matter? What experiments can we run to get the necessary evidence? We will also need to get in the habit of discounting our own beliefs, especially if they are based on nothing more than introspection or received wisdom. And this might actually be the toughest hurdle to overcome both personally and practically. It is very natural to become attached to our own bright ideas before they are properly tested. Once attached, it becomes much easier to discount the evidence against them. To further complicate matters, humans also seem to be too easily motivated to action by strongly-expressed convictions that align with preconceived notions, whether they are well-tested or not. Asking for evidence before action and expressing doubts about one’s own convictions might not resonate with the very people we need to sway. Unfortunately, but not surprisingly, there is no easy general all-purpose way to solve this problem. People who want to motivate others to action will always need to strike the tricky balance between rhetoric and honest communication. We don’t need to be puritans about honest communication but we also shouldn’t use the human condition as an excuse to spin outright lies — even in the service of thoroughly tested beliefs.            

Descartes is often credited with kicking off modernity when he famously doubted the existence of everything but his own thinking mind. In the very many years since he reached his pithy and highly quotable conclusion, we have learned a lot more about the best methods of inquiry and have developed a well-tested and always evolving understanding of the world. More recently, thanks to those methods of inquiry and their application in neuroscience and behavioural psychology, it is becoming increasingly clear that we can’t know much of anything from introspection alone — including ourselves. There is nothing you, I, or Descartes can know with any certainty by looking inwards for answers. Unfortunately, we continue to rely on habits, institutions, and systems which presuppose that you or I have privileged and certain knowledge about our own well-being, values, and optimal outcomes. This may partly explain — in conjunction with other issues (hello, massive inequality) — why liberal democratic political systems that rely on free markets are in crisis these days.

It was fashionable in the late 20th century to talk as if we had escaped modernism, but postmodernism, I think, only takes Descartes’ modernism to its logical conclusion, while willfully overlooking the fact that we humans have become pretty good at understanding the world around us. To set ourselves on a new path, to really escape the gravity well of modernism, we need to set aside the Cartesian notion that the aim of inquiry is absolute certainty and that such certainly can be found through introspection. Instead, we need to accept that we really don’t know ourselves, whatever our heartfelt convictions might tell us, and look instead to well-tested beliefs to guide and organize our lives, both individually and collectively. 

The rise and fall of social media: a swift and familiar tale

The rise and fall of social media has been so swift and so familiar that the story of its rise and fall probably says more about us than it does about the tools themselves.

In the early days, social media seemed revolutionary and, at times, it was. Unfortunately, like all revolutionaries who win, social media has come to mirror the status quo it had initially challenged.

Twitter, Facebook, YouTube (et al) now look, feel and act very much like the traditional media many of us were avoiding when we first joined these digital networks.

Advertising, of course, was a key player in the counterrevolution, but social media turned to advertising only because a profit had to be turned and it had to be turned quickly. Old and familiar habits die hard when they boost revenues and profits easily.

Meanwhile, as the masters of the social media universe learned to dance to the tune called by the advertisers, the users themselves (myself included) set about trying to monetize their activities on social media. Socializing for its own sake quickly (d)evolved into network marketing. Eventually, those of us who did not become viral millionaires parlayed our social media cred into paid positions. Others simply walked away from the tools. We all returned to our familiar folds, even as we shook our fists at the masters of the social media universe for doing the same.

The pure-of-heart revolutionary will likely sneer at the bourgeois sell-outs, but they can do so with a clear conscious only if they are not at all concerned about hypocrisy. The revolutionary is a network marketer with a different call-to-action.

Indeed, the revolutionary, the marketer, and the poet are of imagination all compact. Whenever they see a crowd, they imagine an army they can rally to their own cause — a cause that not-coincidentally puts bread on their table too. It’s what we humans seem to do whenever we are given half-a-chance. We always seem to want to turn the lead of our relationships into the gold of wealth and power. Perhaps, it is the natural inverse of the fact that our relationships have always been the surest path to survival, power and wealth.

Social media, it now seems to me, was one more stage upon which we could strut and fret our way through this familiar tale. From time-to-time in human history, the status quo is upset by some unexpected and novel circumstance like social media. In these times of uncertainty, some outsiders move in, some insiders are forced out, and, eventually, the new and novel is normalized, contained, and pacified. As the dust settles, a new status quo consolidates and the longing for the next revolution begins.

With the benefit of hindsight, I suppose, the only remarkable thing is that I (and, perhaps, others) are surprised by this inevitable outcome. Like Charlie Brown, lying flat on his back staring at the sky, we are dumbfounded that we are on our backs again and, at the same time, incredulous that we fooled ourselves once more into believing for one glorious moment that it might end differently this time.

And it is true, if we look only at the abstract narrative arc: we are trapped, like Charlie Brown, Sisyphus, and the pendulum, in a seemingly futile inevitability. The devil and salvation, however, are in the details. With each push of the rock, every missed football, and each swing of the pendulum, we change and, if we are lucky, we learn. Progress, like science, begins and ends with failure. We push, we race, and we swing not to win but to experience. The reward comes when we return to the rock, race once more towards the football, and swing again into the void hoping against hope — believing — that this time it will end differently, even when we know that it won’t. It is in that moment of hope that we seem to escape the inevitable physics of our humanity. Then, the weight of the rock turns against us, the football is missed, and the pendulum begins it inescapable return. Arc after arc, life after life, generation after generation until, if we are lucky, our descendants live and are different enough from us to look back on our efforts to tell a story of progress. We are trapped but it is not necessarily futile. The trap itself begets the idea of escape and with that hope anything is possible.

My last word on political philosophy (hopefully): chase no more

The fundamental question of politics concerns power: is power an end unto itself?

If it is, politics is fundamentally about managing power. It involves creating and managing social practices that determine who wields power and the extent to which they wield it. In principle, power could be exercised with an eye to true, good or best outcomes, but, so long as power is seen as an end unto itself, gaining, maintaining and exercising power will always trump the true, the good, or the best. Inevitably, this kind of politics is or will become authoritarian because any balance of power will always eventually be upset in favour of someone or some group.

If power is not an end unto itself, politics is fundamentally a form of inquiry. It involves creating social practices that have the best chance of identifying true, good, or best outcomes. It is unlikely that any set of social practices will always identify true, good, or best outcomes, but the shared commitment to social practices that aim for these kinds of outcomes can, nevertheless, justify abiding by outcomes even when we or others disagree with them. This kind of politics relies on both the expertise of the individual and the wisdom of the crowd.

In principle, we could empirically determine which of these two approaches to politics works best for human flourishing. In practice, however, people who think power is an end unto itself are little interested in empirical justification. For them, the experience of power is the most important consideration. It trumps all other considerations, including empirical evidence.

The human propensity to treat power as an end unto itself is, I think, the essential challenge of all politics. The authoritarian urge seems to be primordial, in an infantile sort of way, and can manifest itself in anyone and everyone, wherever they happen to fall on the conventional political spectrum. It also seems highly unlikely that there is any particular set of social practices that will exorcise the authoritarian urge from human existence. Instead, we must constantly work to correct, inhibit and contain it whenever and wherever it might emerge.

We must also accept that people who treat power as an end unto itself are not interested in facts, figures, argument or reason unless these are used to buttress their own power. Accordingly, it is appropriate, I think, to use power to contain or dispose of those who treat power as an end unto itself. However, if we are successful, we must be careful to remember that it does not prove that we are right and they are wrong. It only shows that we are sufficiently powerful to contain or dispose of those who would use power to contain or dispose of us, whatever the merits of our beliefs and values may be. A successful exercise of power proves nothing about the truth, value or merit of anyone’s beliefs. Might does not make right, even if it is our right that it serves.

*

At some point in their growth and development, all things being equal, most humans will be able to make effective judgments about most matters that relate to them. No person will always be right but no person will always be wrong either. Furthermore, between right and wrong, there will always be many different judgments a person can reach that, all things being equal, are reasonable even if they are not wholly correct or wholly wrong.

Similarly, when a majority of people who are effective judges independently reach the same conclusion about some state of affairs, all things being equal, the fact of that independently shared judgement is the best evidence we have that the conclusion is correct. We can’t say with absolute certainty that the conclusion is correct but, in most cases and as a general rule, we should tentatively accept that the conclusion is probably correct even if we or others disagree with it. At the same time, we should also accept that we may learn in the future that the conclusion is incorrect. That is simply the nature of inquiry, political or otherwise.

It is the interplay between the effective judgments of individuals and the wisdom of the crowd that drives and shapes any politics conceived as a form of inquiry. The ultimate aim is to develop social practices that make the most of both. Practically-speaking, this means we should expect our social practices to evolve and change over time. We must always be ready to propose and test new ideas, mechanisms, and institutions and we must give up on the idea that any one person or any one group of people can, could have or will ever identify the one and only true form of government for all time. To do otherwise is to simply give up on the hope that our understanding of the world and each other grows and evolves over time.

*

Politics does not only happen at the ballet box or when parliament is in session or between the commercials of the nightly news. It happens wherever we live, work and play. It happens whenever we decide together how we are going to live, work, and play. It happens wherever and whenever we answer in word and deed the question: is power an end unto itself?

Our answers shape our lives, our communities, our society.

*

It takes only a moment of reflection to realize that we live most of our lives in authoritarian communities, organizations and institutions.

We are born into families that are authoritarian. We are educated in institutions that are authoritarian. We work at jobs that are authoritarian. Our political system is run, administered and governed by authoritarian individuals, groups and institutions. Our economy too.

The habits and practices of politics are like any other. We learn from doing and, if authoritarianism is all we do, then, our politics are also authoritarian, whatever we might think of the ribbons and bows of periodic elections. Elections are also an instrument of authoritarianism.

*

I want to tell a noble lie. I want to claim that we need only conceive of politics as a form of inquiry to ensure everything will always work out well for everyone. Unfortunately, inquiry doesn’t work that way. We can make better or worse judgements based on the evidence, but there is nothing in and of itself that can definitively point the way to the best outcomes for all people for all time. There are no guarantees.

We also can’t avoid the use of power and there is always — always — a risk that we will abuse it, even when we use it judiciously and cautiously. Nothing can absolve us of the responsibility of the wrongs we may do even when we intend to do right. There are better and worse ways to avoid the abuse of power, but there is nothing in and of itself that will prevent all people for all time from abusing power. Again, there are no guarantees.

And, perhaps, after all these years, that is all political philosophy I need.

I suspect now that I may have wanted much more than that only because I also wanted there to be some kind of secular magic that would guarantee the best outcomes for all people for all time and that would also absolve me of any responsibility to attend to the unintended consequences of my well-intentioned actions. I suspect I also wanted to avoid the messy and uncertain business of winning friends, influencing people, and fighting enemies. I hoped also, I think, that I might bequeath to the world some magical words that would help solve all problems everywhere. I would then be free to enjoy the beauty of the day safe in the comfort that I had done all that I could to do to make the world a better place without ever breaking an egg, pulling a trigger or currying favour. I see now that I was chasing a chimera, a wild goose, and a dragon all in one.

*

I am suddenly reminded that my very first essay in political philosophy was written in grade eleven or, perhaps, grade twelve. It was a short paper that attempted to explain what Marx had meant by the notion that religion is “the opiate of the masses.” I don’t remember if I wrote anything noteworthy, but I do remember struggling to write the paper. I also remember enjoying very much the struggle to write it. I also received a good mark. It’s easy to imagine that the struggle and the reward made me feel important — perhaps, even special. It probably provided a heady rush of meaning, purpose, and distinction at a time of lonely adolescence. Like opiates everywhere, it soothed and it distracted and, like junkies everywhere, I remember that first fix with a mix of fondness, regret, and understanding.

It has been said before and it will be said again: “In my beginning is my end.”

The lottery of life: the not-so-secret to my (sort of) success

Believe it or not, I have spent much of my life not fully aware that fitting-in and ingratiating oneself to a group is the key to success.

I understood, of course, that currying favour was a thing that people did to succeed, but I probably thought (or hoped) that it wasn’t a necessary condition of success. It has finally truly dawned on me that social acceptance is the key driver of everything we humans do or don’t do, whether we are successful or not.

Because this now seems to me to be such an obvious and simple truth, I can’t help but wonder — out loud, of course — why it took me so long to figure it out. The answer to that question also now seems pretty obvious too: privilege.

I was able to overlook the very obvious and essential role of social acceptance in human achievement only because I am a white, able-bodied, cisgendered, heterosexual, settler male who is reasonably tall. Society is pretty much designed to accept people who look and talk like me. It is baked right into the system. To be accepted, I only need to exist. As a result, it was very easy for me to take it for granted. Like fish everywhere, I overlooked the very stuff I was awash in.

It also occurs to me that I have been able to play out my adolescent fantasy of being a L’etranger-philosopher-king-without-a-cause only because of that baked in social acceptance. I can “take risks,” “blaze my own path,” and “speak truth to power” precisely because I’m not really ever putting myself at risk. Society has always got my back.

At this point, I can imagine one totally reasonable response to this “discovery” and my decision to share it: “Well done, Dr. Privilege, you finally figured out what people have been telling you for decades. What do you want? A hero biscuit?”

I hope not. My aim here — I think — is to acknowledge the lottery that I have won simply by being born. I also want to flag the idea of privilege for people who might be similarly naive. If I overlooked the full impact of privilege in my life — and I am a reasonably well-attuned to issues of social justice — I’m sure that I’m not alone. We all have our blind spots, I suppose.

If the concept of privilege is new to you, this is a good introduction:

Privilege 101: A Quick and Dirty Guide

If the concept is familiar to you and you know some good introductory resources, please share them below. I am sure I have more to learn.