Amerika

The grindwheel was an old method of honing steel. It removed successive layers of the metal by friction, allowing an operator to sculpt shapes out of a solid block, sharpen a knife, or smooth a surface.

Most people never make it past the grinding of the wheel as a mental concept. If something is wrong with anything in their worlds, they put it to the wheel and keep it there, which forms a handy metaphor for means-over-ends thinking generally.

To them, anything that is personal inconvenience just needs polishing, and if that fails, you are simply not polishing hard enough. Keep doing it! Grind away until there is nothing but the polished object for all to see.

This shows us what people have instead of purity. They want polish. They care about the optics because their friend-group cares about the optics. They are Captain Ahab, in futile pursuit of a symbol despite this destroying all he has, but the white whale is a polished object that they can hold up to others and say, see, my life is successful.

One path to demise of a civilization comes from this process. In an attempt to prove personally successful, people will deny the obvious and keep polishing a ruin in the hopes of making it a bragging right.

They do it to their children, too. The Boomer generation will go down in history as the people who got ahead simply by being inflexible, and they took the same approach to their offspring. If what you were doing was not working, do it harder! Grind the wheel until all is pure.

We as a society do this with failing programs. If the war on drugs, war for diversity, rent control, or war on poverty is failing, just keep grinding! Do it harder, do it bigger, do it longer, and eventually the pure polished object will emerge from the mess you were grinding.

Optics, social groups, and means-over-ends seem to go together as parts of the human pathology of failure. Instead of asking what is real, therefore what goals can we have, and thus what methods reach those goals, we ask what will make the situation “look better.”

How easily we — monkeys all, embedded within, hootin’ and hollerin’ like our hominid ancestors — are fooled.

Tags: baby boomers, grinding the wheel, me generation, means over ends, optics, socializing