Tag: Choice

LP and Chill: It’ll Be Just Fine – the Short Version

LP and Chill: It’ll Be Just Fine – the Short Version

by and | Community, God, Government, People

Sometimes we see a pattern, and we try to explain it, and…we end up looking like this crazy conspiracy theory guy. Not because what we’re saying is far-fetched, more because it’s so interconnected and there are so many examples and we care about it so so much that it’s hard to be clear about the points we’re trying to make. More than once, this has pointed us at toward the full explanation of the pattern ending up a longer-form piece of content – like a talk, or “maybe some day a book,” or…we don’t really know. Just..some stuff is too long or too complex for a blog, despite that being where we usually start when we want to talk about something outside of the context of “work stuff.”

Sometimes, though, we find that we can do a summary, or a short(er?) version, of the explanation of the pattern. We’ve been seeing, and writing, more about politics lately, especially the Libertarian Party (LP), because the crazy of the world has led us both to open our eyes about it. And…there are reasons that we think politics might be part of the overall answer, and that is the pattern we want to talk about.

There is a Culture War

Are you happy with the United States political system? This question is not, are you happy in relation to what came before, or are you happy ish, but are you really, truly happy about the people in charge of making, enforcing, and talking about the policies that affect your personal freedoms every day?

If you’re not happy with it, do you feel comfortable talking about that? Do you think that your friends and loved ones and coworkers and various other tribes will still accept you if you’re honest about the problems you see and how those problems make you sad, or hopeless, or angry? Because…we aren’t happy with the current system. And our comfort with talking about that varies, but…most of the people Laine at least interacts with on a daily basis just seem really happy that Not Trump is president.

The fact that the current state is depressing, and frustrating, and that we can’t talk about that without alienating ourselves, is a sign of a large-scale, many-factioned culture war. The Corpo State/Cathedral, the Woke, the Karens, the Conservative Christians, the Antifa’ers, the BLM’ers, the Thin Blue Liners… this isn’t even all of the factions, but all of these groups seem to exist primarily to tell people that saying or feeling something that the group doesn’t approve of makes that person a terrible human being who deserves to be dehumanized and disregarded.

[The factions] seem to exist primarily to tell people that saying or feeling something the group doesn’t approve of makes that person a terrible human being who deserves to be dehumanized and disregarded.

COVID has been a mess, and has added the Masker, Vaxxer, Anti-Vaxxer, Lockdowner, and Anti-Lockdowner factions. What is irrefutable is that the lockdowns that were supposed to keep us all safe have caused mental health crises, increased suicides, increased incidences of abuse, and business closures, with no end in sight because we have no coherent metrics for when it will be “safe enough” to go back, or forward, to some semblance of normal.

It Sucks

The culture war, that is. It sucks to be hopeless, and to be too afraid to talk about it. And with that many factions constantly sniping at each other, sometimes the hopelessness and the fear seem…legit.

It Leads to Actual Life-Threatening Conflict/War

In addition to leading people to live in fear, this culture war leads to actual war, if we use the “life-threatening conflict” definition of war. The government is willing to use force and violence to enforce whatever it thinks is important, mostly in the form of the police, although sometimes with agencies like the ATF. There are historical events, like Waco, and also current events, like insurrection and riots in Minnesota and on the west coast just this week. People think that the police are the bad guys for all the damage they do, and while an argument could be made that they’re choosing to enforce laws that are non-sensical and damaging, it definitely seems true that they’ve been handed an impossible task that will see them also getting hurt in the process.

People think that police are the bad guys for all the damage they do…but it seems true that they’ve been handed an impossible task that will see them also getting hurt in the process.

Some People Love the Culture War…

On the other hand, this culture war is great for some people. It distracts most of the American public from noticing that their freedoms are being slowly leeched away in the name of “safety.” It also helps people in positions of authority further cement those positions because they can position themselves as the saviors of humanity – or, they can use fear and intimidation to get compliance if not support.

The culture war also gives the people who are happily part of those factions a way to convince themselves that they’re right – they can simply be louder, and look around to see the people who are nodding in agreement, and then temporarily feel safety in numbers. The people nodding in agreement, even if they aren’t quite sure, can also find some feeling of safety because they aren’t currently being rejected by the people around them.

…because Control and “Safety”

All of these reasons to love the culture war are about control, and “safety.” People in positions of authority are trying to control everyone else into either being safe or making them feel safe, if they get some personal value out of being “in charge.” The loudest members of the factions are trying to control the people around them into making them feel like their opinions are right, and that those opinions will keep that group safe even if everyone else is screwed. And the people nodding in agreement are hiding – trying to control the people around them into not rejecting them, or kicking them out of the tribe.

But…we know, because of a lot of science, that control doesn’t work. Not at all, and definitely not long term. The problem is that people are terrified of the potential consequences of both not controlling and not being controlled.

But…You Have a Choice

The thing is…you don’t have to control other people. And you don’t have to accept being controlled. You have a choice. It may not be an easy choice, and it may lead to some of your relationships altering, or ending. But actually, you can just…process the fear of the potential consequences without changing anything. Processing the fear allows you to see reality more clearly, and to see that trying to control other people is never okay – which means that it isn’t okay for someone to try to control you, either.

You can just choose to process the fear instead of grabbing for control.

If, once you process your fear, you want to change something, then…comes the hard part. Learning how to give up control isn’t easy, and it’s scary, and it requires trust in something outside of yourself.

People

You actually can have some amount of faith in people, or in humanity as a whole. People do wonderful, beautiful things, and their capacity for good is often staggering. We said at the beginning on this post, “there are reasons that we think politics might be part of the overall answer, and that is the pattern we want to talk about.” The Libertarian party has seen an upswing this past year, for…reasons that may at this point be kind of obvious. And it’s not perfect, and actually we’re both more Anarchist than Libertarian by the strictest definition – but the Libertarian party has several voices who are saying, loudly and clearly and well, that personal freedom matters. That people matter. More than the government, more than rules, more than checkboxes and false safety. And they’re building communities and actively trying to make change to reflect that people matter at all levels.

God

…but faith in people alone isn’t enough. Both Josh and Laine genuinely have no idea how people learn to give up control without faith in something outside of themselves and outside of other people. We can very clearly see that all of this weirdness, and all of this unrest, and even the culture war itself, is God doin’ stuff. We have no idea what he’s doing, but if he’s doing stuff, he has a plan, and if he has a plan, it’s going to be awesome. 

There are no end states in life, which means that while things can never be completely safe, they also can never be completely broken and hopeless. And while the culture war sucks, it’s actually…okay. It’s growing pains, toward the next thing.

DevOps = Libertarianism = DevOps = …

DevOps = Libertarianism = DevOps = …

by and | Government, Human Architecture, Organizations, People

We are both very interested in DevOps and good development culture, and more recently, freedom and Libertarian principles.

We found some interesting similarities between the two. Both focus on individual responsibility and accountability, both have been compared to “self-organizing anarchy” or “chaos that works.” Both favor empowered, informed distributed decision-making over centralized decision-making – essentially, both advocate for moving the authority to make decisions as close to the data, as close to the situation, as possible.

An Introduction to DevOps

There is no perfect definition of DevOps, and there are a lot of debates about what is and what is not DevOps. However, here’s a definition that covers the major elements and purposes:

“DevOps is the combination of cultural philosophies, practices, and tools that increases an organization’s ability to deliver applications and services at high velocity: evolving and improving products at a faster pace than organizations using traditional software development and infrastructure management processes.” – AWS

DevOps is a reaction to what came before it. [needs a connection to:] In Big Design Up Front software development, every requirement and element of software was designed, then it was all built, then it was all tested, then someone else had to run it, in a one-way process that was brittle, slow, and had massive lacks in communication – and led to a lot of software failure. There were a lot of fingers being pointed. Central planners created plans, others had to live with them, even if they made no sense. Everybody had good intentions (mostly?), but they weren’t a team, they didn’t communicate, and they all worked towards their own goals that were not always the same.

In a DevOps model, there is shared understanding and two-way communication in a community of people tasked with the fruition of a shared goal: building working software. They each have some amount of the responsibility to design, create, validate, secure, and run that software.

DevOps seeks to maximize the ability of the team to execute on their goals in the way they see fit.

DevOps incorporates manufacturing cultural and process revolutions that occurred in the 1980s: a focus on products being produced that deliver value, rather than making individual steps in the journey efficient. Instead of localized success, the focus was shared, whole-team success, with success being defined as delivering a valuable product.

The end result is the removal of huge pain points in the software delivery process, leading to a massive improvement in software delivery efficiency. Many companies that build software are attempting to convert their processes and teams to DevOps, with some big successes, and also many lessons learned along the way.

“Culture change is hard.”
– everyone who’s ever done it, or lived through it

There are a lot of tools, technology, and architecture that make all of this easier to do now as compared to 20 years ago when we started doing software development. However, Josh’s first software project way back in the day was made out of 4 people who were empowered to make their own implementation decisions, and they had shared responsibility from design to running the software – so software development was really fast and efficient. This model pre-dates the technology innovations that have helped DevOps explode, but it worked even then.

An Introduction to Libertarianism

There are many definitions of Libertarianism (the first of many similarities to DevOps…), but here’s one that’s pretty solid:

“As Libertarians, we seek a world of liberty: a world in which all individuals are sovereign over their own lives and are not forced to sacrifice their values for the benefit of others.

We believe that respect for individual rights is the essential precondition for a free and prosperous world, that force and fraud must be banished from human relationships, and that only through freedom can peace and prosperity be realized.

Consequently, we defend each person’s right to engage in any activity that is peaceful and honest, and welcome the diversity that freedom brings. The world we seek to build is one where individuals are free to follow their own dreams in their own ways, without interference from government or any authoritarian power.”

– Libertarian Party

Libertarianism has a lot of deep roots. The US Libertarian Party is pretty new as US political parties go, created only in 1971. It was created as people reacted to the government increasing its control over peoples lives, and the desire to remove that control. Libertarians are opposed to legal restrictions on marriage, legal restrictions on who can associate, legal restrictions on drug usage, and legal restrictions on individual property.

A tongue-in-cheek-but-not-really summary of Libertarianism is, “my political philosophy can be summarized thusly: I want gay married couples to be able to protect their marijuana plants with machine guns they bought with Bitcoin.” This is another, funny variation:
Is that too much to ask for? : Anarcho_Capitalism

The basic idea is that individuals are better at deciding about their lives than the government – that centralized control is not the optimal way to decide how people should behave, and, given this, the government causes more problems than it solves.

Examples of this include legalized slavery, legally requiring racist or discriminatory behavior, prohibitions on moral behavior such as drug use or usage of restricted medicines, wars of imperialism, police brutality, and putting businesses and their staff out of business with taxation. Generally, the government gets in peoples lives and makes a mess of things.

Said differently, Libertarians believe that governmental control backed by the threat of violence is fundamentally immoral. If you don’t pay your taxes or avoid smoking the wrong plant, the government will attempt to take you away from your family, life, and friends, and throw you in jail. If you resist going to jail, they can and may well shoot you. This is morally repugnant.

Libertarians believe that governmental control backed by the threat of violence is fundamentally immoral.

Libertarianism values individual consent over societal control.

Wouldn’t it be nice not to have to pay all of the taxes that fund foreign wars? To choose NOT to give the money that you earn for something that you don’t believe in? Think about what you could do with all that money. Wouldn’t it be nice not to fund corporate bailouts? That’s also a whole lot of money. And…that’s just the taxes you pay from your paycheck. Imagine if there were fewer restrictions (created by bureaucrats and lawyers) on every single product you buy – how many legal loopholes have to be navigated to set up those restrictions, and to maintain them. Guess who pays for all of that navigation? Spoiler alert, it’s you. Have you ever looked up what the price of a bottle of fine scotch as if there were no taxes? Talk about depressing…

There is no perfect Libertarian system in place, but Libertarians have been working for years to legalize drugs, improve property rights, reduce government control, and reduce policing policies that harm individuals.

Similarities

Both philosophies believe that there is no perfect environment, and there is no control structure perfect and wise and knowledgable enough to control things from afar. For a removed human control structure to be work, people in control have to consistently and constantly behave selflessly and efficiently on behalf of everyone they represent, which…isn’t a thing humans are capable of. The expectation of that sets even the best people up for failure. There is no perfect world, but both systems believe that the right answer comes from individuals with the ability to choose for themselves, and communities who voluntarily agree to move towards a shared purpose.

Both systems believe that control should be pushed down to the individual.

Both systems arose from a struggle with the people in control, who want to tell people what to do and how to do it in ways that don’t make a lot of sense. Both systems struggle with the fight to separate from those control structures, and to give people the freedom to make choices.

Both systems struggle with getting people to trust that their model works, because it requires trust, and it also seems impossible.

However, the old systems don’t work, and both movements are growing as more people see that and yearn for something different.

Both systems have realized that while rules and laws don’t actually control behavior, clarity and freedom does help them make good decisions.

DevOps is the acknowledgement that centralized planning and control removes the agility and freedom to make good decisions as situations change, and that centralized control slows things down and gets in the way.

Libertarianism is the acknowledgement that centralized (government) control removes the flexibility and freedom of the individual to live their life and find their own joy and happiness, and that centralized government is a cure worse than the disease.

Differences

There are some critical differences between these two cultural phenomena. Government typically is more overbearing and uses fear much more than practitioners of Big Design Up Front software design. The government will tell you that you need them to be safe, that you need to be controlled because you can’t possibly control yourself – much like an awful, abusive, codependent ex. Government will tell you that they need to drop bombs on people in foreign countries, because violence to others…somehow, keeps you safe. Government will tell you that only they can keep you safe, and if you take measures to defend yourself, you’ll only hurt yourself – but if the government threatens or does violence to you, it’s for your own protection.

…JKLOL, it’s just more similarity.

Culture change is hard.

With DevOps, you affect how people do their jobs. You give responsibility to some people, and take it from others, moving it in general towards the people who are most affected, who are most directly involved in the subject at hand. Some people don’t like having less responsibility, not realizing that the end goal of any leader (and we all should be leaders) is to make yourself redundant, and then take up more valuable pursuits.

With Libertarianism, you affect how people live their lives. You give responsibility to people for how they live their individual lives, by giving them freedom to live as they see fit. You take responsibility away from centralized planners and government agents, who…again, generally, really don’t like having their power taken away.

So, basically, Libertarianism is DevOps writ large, with similar benefits and efficiencies, and similar challenges to overcome. Only…with higher stakes.

A Culture Change Example: Security

DevOps

One of the major concerns about DevOps involves security. If everyone is doing DevOps and design, development, testing, and running is flowing fast and efficiently, then the next bottleneck is often IT Security teams. No one told them the software would be built and delivered 100x faster, and that technology would move at about that rate as well, and that all of their security tests and processes would have to keep up.

However, some teams figured out that if they apply DevOps principles and processes to security, then delivered software can be even more secure, even while moving 100x faster. This revolution, adding security into the DevOps processes or maybe DevOps’ing security, is called “DevSecOps.” It involves even more culture change and even more trust, because security is not something to mess around with. But, for those that could navigate the cultural, process, and tool changes to get there, software was delivered faster, with less effort, and changes were released faster, while finding and fixing security problems equivalently fast. Turns out, doing things this way made security easier and more effective too.

Libertarianism

One of the major concerns about Libertarianism is, “if my abusive ex the government doesn’t protect me, who will?” This matters way more than IT security, because if someone steals your credit card number from a website, you can sort that out – but if you expect the police to come when someone’s robbing you, and they don’t, you could experience serious harm to property and self/family.

An unfortunate reality is that in most situations, the police merely arrive to take a report and perhaps do some investigating after the fact. They have no obligation or duty to protect you.

On the other hand, the criminals that people typically worry about the government keeping them safe from aren’t even in the same ballpark as the governments who kill their own people. For some ballpark numbers, approximately 20,000 people are murdered by individual criminals in the US per year, roughly. Author R.J. Rummel asserted in a 1997 book that government murdered 169,202,000 people in the 20th century – or an average of 169,202 people per year. Lest you say, “yeah but some of those people died as a result of war, ” that number excludes wars. That’s just governments murdering their own people. From R.J. Rummel’s book, “this democide murdered 6 times more people than died in combat in all the foreign and internal wars of the century. Finally, given popular estimates of the dead in a major nuclear war, this total democide is as though such a war did occur, but with its dead spread over a century.”

We would also like to point out that most of this governmental murder occurred in states where the government had a massive monopoly on violence: heavily armed police vs. disarmed citizens. Somethin’ to think about as the current US government massively up-arms its police and passes laws to disarm its citizens.

Also check out The Monopoly on Violence, a fantastic documentary on this subject and also Libertarianism as a whole.

A wonderful thing about personal responsibility is if you have the freedom to defend yourself, you are always on the scene when you need defending. The cops may be ten minutes away, but you are always right there.

Security really matters. It can be kind of scary. But pretending that false security is real security, and choosing to abdicate all of your responsibility for your own security, is not the right answer – and it can be shattered when reality arrives.

Toward a more perfect culture

There is no perfect culture. There is only the path by which we pursue perfection, built on personal choice and continually striving to learn and implement better.

There is no perfect DevOps implementation, only people attempting to work together in a clearer, more transparent, agile way, with responsibility for success and decision making pushed to the same shoulders. Or…said another way…there is only the path by which we pursue perfection, built on personal choice and continually striving to learn and implement better. TADA!

There has not been a perfectly Libertarian society, once we realized that tribes could conquer each other. However, the cultural change that made DevOps successful can be applied to the larger culture: reduce centralized planning and control (and the expense thereof), eliminate centralized controls and monopolies on things societies need, and push freedom and responsibility onto the people who can accept it. Reducing laws that restrict important freedoms, such as decriminalizing drug use, and removing restrictions on marriages between consenting adults are examples of baby steps.

Conclusion

Both systems are “self-organized anarchy” and “chaos that works.” Both systems emphasize that the “best decisions are made on the ground,” and therefore we should “move the decision closest to the data.” Both systems emphasize freedom, and individual and community responsibility. We know freedom leads to massive innovation and adaptability and success, and we know centralized control leads to brittle, slow-changing, miserable culture.

There are no perfect systems of software development, or government. We know what doesn’t work (centralized control that requires perfect wisdom and selflessness), and we have some ideas about what does work. We know that the ability of people to choose their own adventure is hugely important, and that it seems to align with the things we’ve learned while trying to understand how to be a person, and a Christian. Seeing patterns like this, especially seeing the model seem to work on a smaller but still important scale, gives us hope that maybe it can work on a larger scale too.

We will continue to consider how these cultural movements compare, and attempt to apply lessons from one system to the other. We’ll keep you posted.

On Bullies

On Bullies

by and | Community, God, Organizations, People

First, some history (and context!) from Laine…

I was overweight as a kid. Actually, I was overweight until I was in my mid-twenties, and then again for a while after I had my kids. But as a kid, in the 90s, it was an offense punishable by social ostracization. I was picked on throughout elementary school, to the point where I started calling myself fat so that other people wouldn’t do it first.

I moved at the end of 6th grade, to a much larger school. They mostly didn’t bully me for being overweight, but they did bully me for making out with my (female) best friend – which I did not, not that that matters aside from pissing me off even MORE about the sheer unfairness of it. I moved again at the end of 8th grade, to a smaller school, and found friends, and slipped into blessed nerd + “I’m in the school musical every year” semi-obscurity.

I dealt with one bully as a young adult, after I started my first job. I can see, looking back on it, that he probably felt threatened because, a) I was good at my job, b) I was on “his” project, and c) he perhaps felt like I was overstepping.

And then…no bullies. For a long time.

And then…more bullies showed up.

We’ve written about pieces of what happened at the church we were both members of. We have not written about what happened where we were formerly employed, out of (probably legitimate) fear of retaliation of some kind. But…suffice it to say that we’ve both run into a lot of bullies over the past few years. People we worked with, people we trusted. People we loved.

We try to explain a lot of patterns here. Patterns about fear and faith and hope and love, and how all of that comes together and applies to being a person. Patterns about how all of that scales to relationships (especially with God), and how it scales to and for organizations. A lot of these patterns, we figured out because…we lived them. We ran into really scared people trying to control what we did – and getting very very angry when we said no. That’s it. Just… no. We didn’t say, “you have to do what I say,” or “I’m going to make your life miserable for trying to tell me what to do.” Mostly we said, “please stop hurting us,” and “why are you trying to make me do something that I am sure is wrong?” and then eventually, just… no.

Sometimes “no” is a revolutionary act.

Decisions must be made…

Laine initially drafted this post in September of 2020. That’s actually the opposite of our usual process, typically we talk about things until it seems draft-able, then Josh does the initial draft. But this post began because Laine ran into a (comparatively mild) bully at work. And it brought back a lot of feelings about the other bullies we’ve recently run into, and a lot of sheer…exhaustion.

And then the election happened, and that brought with it more related feelings, and more exhaustion. And both the minor work bully and the election brought with them some clarity around what happens with bullies.

Bully (n): someone who does willful, targeted damage to other people in an effort to control them.

Because…bullies seem to win. The world actually seems to be structured for bullies – and for the control of other people. If you choose not to control other people, if you don’t play that game, if you flat-out refuse to play that game, then…you are an outlier. You stand out. You seem to invite bullies to take shots at you. But…that isn’t quite what happens.

Simply by existing, by living your life without controlling other people, you show the people around you that they too could choose not to control. You demonstrate, clearly, that another choice, a different choice, exists. This has the effect of forcing the bullies around you to choose if they will continue to bully – because some people behave this way because they don’t know another choice exists.

Bullies also force you to make a choice. Bullies force you to choose if you’re going to a) hide who you are in order to avoid the damage they might do, or b) very deliberately NOT hide, but instead choose that any damage is worth being yourself. As best as we’ve been able to figure out, bullies bully because they’re afraid they’re going to lose something that they think keeps them safe. Bullies need to control what they think keeps them safe so much that the people “in the way” become…dispensable.

So…if you’re the target of a bully, if you feel like your very existence invites bullies to take shots at you, then…that means that you’ve stumbled into the thing that they’re trying to hide away from the world – the thing they’re afraid they’ll lose. And it means that they don’t much like the fact that people exist who can’t be controlled into supporting their fears, and it means that they’re afraid that perhaps none of it was necessary at all.

It’s not your fault.

We’re going to say that one more time. It’s not. your. fault. We are emphasizing this because, again, it took us a long time to understand and accept it.

Mostly, with this post, we wanted to make something very clear – adult bullies exist. They exist anywhere that people exist, because people get scared, and sometimes those scared people end up with some kind of authority – real or imagined – over you and your life. This can be your boss, or your religious leader, or your government, or your significant other. Sometimes these people get SO scared that they forget entirely that you’re a person, and they just…want you to stop whatever you’re doing that seems to be a threat to them.

Regardless of what they say, it isn’t your fault. Bullies will tell you that it is, because they’re trying to convince you to change, and to hide, so that they feel more safe. You don’t have to do that. It’s scary not to, but…it is your choice. You can say no, and you can choose to be who you really are even if the bullies of the world don’t like it.

Sometimes “no” is a revolutionary act.

You won’t be alone.

The more we sort of…lean into this plan, the “be you and have fun” plan, the more we find other people who have figured this out. These people are some of the most truly supportive relationships that we have. So…while saying no to the bullies in your life, and choosing to be yourself, seems scary and like you’ll definitely be alone… you won’t. You will find your tribe, your people, your chosen family, and you will thrive. It’s worth it.

The Human Scar of Exile

The Human Scar of Exile

by and | Community, God, People

In the course of getting ourselves kicked out of church we started to see a pattern of behavior. We referenced it briefly in the All the Problems of the World… post, where we said:

We’ve written about, and will write more about, this topic – but the summary is, people think that if someone near them is doing behavior X, it will cause them pain. They think that if someone near them is misbehaving according to God, then they will feel pain from God as a result.

This is an old, old cultural scar. Homophobia, racism, legalism, basically all kinds of hatred are examples of this. It’s a lie that people believe and respond to: “I need to control you, or something bad will happen to me. I need you to be what I think God wants, or we won’t be safe.”

We’ve gone over and over the ground of how people try to keep themselves safe. We even know part of why people do this – because of the one fear, the fear of being alone because of who you truly are. We do crazy, damaging things trying to keep ourselves and our relationships safe – and we do crazy, damaging things trying to make the people around us into our definition of safe as a result.

…

Read More Read More

Sacrifice Done Well

Sacrifice Done Well

by and | God, People

“I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep.” John 10:11

The Bible talks about sacrifice a lot. Sacrificing for each other, sacrificing to serve God. The Gospel, the most important story arc in the Bible, is in part about Jesus’ ultimate sacrifice – his death, yes, but more his complete and utter separation from God when he needed God the most. Unfortunately, over the past 2000 years, the definition of sacrifice has been broken to the point where it’s used to do more harm than good.

…

Read More Read More

Meta