Belief is more Powerful than Pragmatism

This is the most accurate line of your post.

“This is what I believe is true.” — Lessig

Let me tell you what I believe.

Pragmatism alone will not fix a damn thing. Pragmatism is what committees love. We know how great committees are at making cultural change.

It’s often impossible to imagine any massive change or revolution happening before it does. When we focus too much on the thing, it becomes an immovable object. We fail.

Take a look at any issue facing us today — Guns, Immigration, Taxes, Education, Health, and yes, Inequality.

We can’t seem to make decisions that get us unstuck. The pragmatist sees a quagmire. To get out of most quagmires, you need to focus.

I worked in a kitchen, as a line cook, for a number of years. Sometimes, during a really busy night, one of us on the line would start failing, getting lost and ruining orders because the stress and order count was rising.

We had a name for this. The lost cook was IN THE WEEDS.

In other words, the cook couldn’t see how to get back on track because they were stuck in a quagmire of orders. The only way out of this situation, as with so many operational things, was to take all the orders off the wall and work on one order at a time until you broke through. One order at a time focused cooking gets you out of the weeds.

I think this same approach, when applied to cultural change, has fail written all over it. When you focus on one thing at a time or a suite of things that have clear boundaries — the opposing side also focuses on these things.

In cultural change the opposing side is not just the left or the right, but scared people in the middle. People in general, because change.

As much as I admire your intellectual prowess on the subject of politics, and you are incredible in this regard, I disagree with the analytical approach you propose for what is essentially cultural change.

If anything, Obama has shown us the limits of pragmatism.

We need a leader that will change beliefs over time, not just laws.

I want a leader who will take the fight to the people. And keep taking it to the people. When we talk about inside the beltway and outside the beltway in the USA — this is what we mean, with people or without people.

No one goes outside the beltway, because they are approaching the quagmire as a pragmatist. In the UK, we call this leadership by focus group. A focus group of ordinary people help you form what you think are democratic ideas — but, the process to implement these ideas still follows the same broken system of making deals and treading the treacle of a corrupt bureaucracy.

What happens if the President works with the people directly? What if the campaign never ends? What if the President tried to affect cultural change, not just legislative change?

Your one of the good guys Lessig — and your ideas are helpful, even necessary. But, we need you shovelling chips into our millennial biomass burner of beliefs — not throwing cold water on the fire.

The revolution is not practical. It is a wildfire.

Yes, we need strategists to implement the ideas of the revolution. Without a clear idea of the practical side of making a revolution work, once society achieves it, it will just be another flat coke — sweet, but not entirely worth drinking.

A great revolution has a practical ideology sitting in the shadows until the perfect moment — exposed only when it’s clear the revolution is going to be successful.

That’s where you come in. Back the revolution by believing in the bigger picture, while working on the details of implementation.

We aren’t in the weeds, yet.

Peace.