Tag: Only One Safe

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.

Two Kinds of Assholes

Two Kinds of Assholes

by and | God, Leadership, People

We’re going to use the word “asshole” a lot in this post. We both actually really love to swear, but if it offends you, feel free to skip. Sometimes that’s the most accurate word, though.

We work in a lot of different cultures with a lot of different strong-willed people. We are also both, as you may have noticed, extremely strong-willed.

Within these different cultures, we have individually and also together been accused of being arrogant and overbearing. We’ve found that in order to make change, it takes being willing to ignore people telling you to stop making change, and that often leads to this conclusion of arrogance or overbearingness. We’ve talked before about the ways that people try to stop you from doing what you think is right, about the ways they attempt to control. Some additional are, they’ll say you’re going to fail, or that you’re wasting your time, or that change is impossible. They’ll say it’s more complicated than you think, and unless you check and double-check all of the boxes and track down a million threads and make sure we’re all safe oh no panic eyes, you’re doomed to failure.

We have made a career out of transforming culture and bringing new perspectives by ignoring doubters, pushing forward, and taking risks that other people said were stupid. We ignored them after we tried to figure out if they were right, but often when we’d ask why they said what they said, they weren’t even sure themselves. So… we paid attention and we considered, but in general, we’ve had to learn how to ignore…a lot. At great personal and professional cost, although it always worked out really well over time.

The people we ignored, in addition to saying that we were arrogant and overbearing, also said that we were self-centered, and cruel. Based on their summaries of our actions, it might be fair to say that we are, both of us, assholes. Based on that, we came up with the following definition in an attempt to understand what people would say about us, and people like us:

Asshole: (n) a person who cares less about you and what you think than you would like.

But that definition was incomplete, and, honestly, kind of perplexing to both of us. As is often the case, the concept behind “asshole” seemed to mean (at least) two very different things – and one of them was accurate about us, and one of them very much was not.

Hot Take of the Day: There are Really Two Kinds of Assholes

As far as we’ve been able to puzzle out, there are (at least) two primary kinds of assholes – or two categories of people who are called assholes.

Type 1: A person who doesn’t care about anyone other than themselves

This is the worst kind of asshole. There are a lot of other names for this kind of person, but one of the most accurate is “selfish” – they use people. They think that people owe them…something, and they get angry and mean when the world, and the people within, don’t deliver on that …something. They hurt people, and abuse them, and ignore them. They’re controlling, and manipulative, and unkind. They often ignore feedback, and they proceed, blind and numb, toward their own end goals.

They may be good people, and they may have objectively good motives for what they do. But they also generally are quick to dismiss people as people – they do not see other people as inherently worthy of some amount of consideration and humanization.

Treating people as somehow less than human is awful, and it’s been the source of immeasurable amounts of damage from people with some kind of power over the people they see as “less human.”

Type 2: A person who does what they believe to be right, despite what other people think about them

I’m tired and angry, but somebody should be.
– Halsey, Nightmare

This is the kind of person who believes that there are more important things that people’s opinions of them.

They are often confused with Type 1 Assholes, but the key difference is how they actually feel about other people. They care about other people, deeply, and they see inherent value in literally everyone. However, they have bigger concerns than other people’s approval. Typically, this kind of asshole is actually a reformed, scarred former people-pleaser.

people-pleaser: (n) a person who has an emotional need to please others often at the expense of his or her own needs or desires

This kind of asshole has probably spent time trying really hard to take care of, or make happy, someone else – maybe multiple someone elses – and has had a series of events happen to them that broke their ability to do it. Probably they too suffered personal or professional losses when the ability to try to make everyone else happy fell down. Somewhere along the way, they learned that being themselves, and doing what they think is right, is more important than the (conditional) approval of other people.

With all of the resources they get back from actually taking care of themselves, these people also tend to have causes. Things that they care deeply about, a Big Important Purpose, probably related to the battles they won along the way to being free.  that they care about more than Type 1s: they care about people, and aren’t selfish – they are just concerned about more than other people’s approval. Things like, Solving World Hunger, or Actual Digital Transformation, or Helping People Who Have Big Sad Scars. Or Soul Repair.

These people often get their approval from something other than the people around them – they have to, because they know that that doesn’t last. They aren’t success- or fame- or money-driven, and maybe they just…rest in the Jesus Cheat and God’s love, and they know and work to accept that they were made Just Right and for an important reason.

This one is us.

Maybe “Asshole” isn’t All Bad…

In conclusion…

Don’t be a Type 1 Asshole. Care about people. Figure out your hurt and your strife enough to be able to see the people around you, and know that they are not responsible for making you happy.

But also…maybe don’t try so hard not to be a Type 2 Asshole. Don’t worry about being perceived as “nice,” or about modifying your soul to fit what might make other people happy. Care about people, and love them deeply, but care more about you and what you bring to the world and what you know is right. People, the right people who love actual you, will show up in your life when you are self-consistent (and you let them).

Our Favorite Villains: Joker (from The Dark Knight)

Our Favorite Villains: Joker (from The Dark Knight)

by and | Community, God, People

We have continued to talk between the two of us about how much we love “villains” of pop culture. We wrote a post about why Thanos is the best Avenger a long time ago, and decided to start a series. We recently watched The Dark Knight again (…again again, it’s a classic for a reason..) and we enjoyed Heath Ledger’s Joker so much that he got the kick-off spot for the series.

It’s an amazing movie, and ultimately it centers around the conflict between two moral codes: The Joker as an agent, or engine, of chaos, and Christian Bale’s Batman, who fights for justice, fairness, order, and self-sacrifice.

… at least it appears that way at first.

There are going to be spoilers for The Dark Knight in this post, but given that it’s about 13 years old, we figured that was probably fine…

Ledger won an Oscar posthumously for his work, and to be honest the character was a spectacular piece of acting. If you haven’t seen it recently enough that it’s fresh in your memory, stop reading this blog and just go enjoy it. Or, if you want just a vignette, watch this scene:

It sums up the character nicely.

So here’s the thing – a lot of people really loved the character of The Joker in this film. It’s one of the most iconic villain characters ever, and was arguably the best portrayal of The Joker until Joaquin Phoenix gave it a go (whose version of The Joker we will likely talk about in another Our Favorite Villains post). But…why? What’s so interesting and appealing about this character who could be described as a madman and a terrorist? What about The Joker in general – why is he an iconic villain, and a foil for Batman? What makes the Batman universe such a good fit for this kind of character?

Things We Love About The Dark Knight’s Joker

“Plans, everybody has plans.”

The Joker says some interesting things about planning, strategy, and execution – all reasons that we loved Thanos as much as we did. It’s clear from the opening scene of the movie (below!) that he’s thought out this heist step by step.

The arc of the movie follows his strategy to take over the finances of the mob, and use the control that having their money affords him to seize the reins of the battle between Batman and the criminal element of Gotham City. Interestingly, while the strategy is sound and he executes it well, the plan to manipulate and control is not one of our favorite pieces.

One key piece of this arc, and probably our very favorite scene, is The Joker trying to build a relationship with Batman in the jail scene. Basically, just like The Joker in The Lego Batman movie, this Joker needs Batman in order to be a supervillain. In a world without Batman, the Joker is just…bored.

Our conclusion from this is that despite The Joker saying he doesn’t make any plans to Two-Face, he does in fact make and execute plans. He outsmarts everyone, with plans that flex and build until the real end of the movie (more on that later).

The Joker stays committed to his stated goal: to bring clarity to people about who and what they are.

He’s playing a game, the real game, by real rules, when everyone else is playing a false game with made-up rules.

He’s clear – and clarity is success.

A lot of people in this movie hide who they really are. Bruce Wayne pretends to be Batman – or maybe more accurately, Batman pretends to be a playboy billionaire named Bruce Wayne. Batman also pretends to be an agent of law and order, when actually he’s an agent of chaos and his vision of justice, which is by definition outside of the law. The mob pretends to be invincible, but are actually paper tigers. The mayor pretends to be brave, but actually is full of fear. Gordon pretends to be dead, breaking his family’s hopes and hearts. Batman also pretends to be a guy who doesn’t do murder – but it’s a little hard to believe that all of the violence he does doesn’t kill anybody. Shooting high caliber autocannon rounds off the batbike in an urban environment is, we’re sure, totally safe. (</sarcasm>)

There’s also a whole subplot about who the real Batman is – in fact, it’s part of The Joker’s plan to force Batman to “come out,” as Bruce tries to wrestle with his default stance of hiding.

Contrast all that with The Joker. He shows up, he lays his cards on the table (…pun absolutely intended), and he tells everyone from the get-go that he’s here to bring clarity to the world. He’s here to show people that the rules they think they live by are moral forgeries. He also habitually lies about how he got his scars, which is a fascinating element of hiding in his personality. Generally, though, he is clear and he deals with the people around him in transparent, if off-putting, ways.

He’s committed.

Image result for joker not about the money

Commitment was one of the things that we loved about Thanos, in the previous post that we mentioned. That theme holds true here, too. A climax of the “Joker controls the mob” subplot of the movie is when we see that The Joker has “recovered” all of the mob’s money. He had previously negotiated with them that if he could recover their funds, he’d get half – and when we see him with the literal pile of money, he proceeds to light it on fire.

“Some men just want to watch the world burn.”
– Alfred, trying to explain The Joker to Bruce

The Joker is committed to his plan, which is, again, clarity. He enjoys bringing clarity to the world. He doesn’t care about the same things other people care about – in this case, money – and that causes confusion and fear in its wake. The Joker pretty much only cares about the joy of being himself and helping others see clearly.

He’s crazy, but…not wrong.

There’s an interesting question here, underlying The Joker as a character – is he completely insane, or…is he just living by different rules than everyone else?

At first glance, it definitely appears that he is erratic or just crazy. But we think there’s a deeper truth, that he is in fact just living by different rules than everyone else. This makes a person appear crazy, but it’s actually something more like a strong cultural difference. To him, not living in a fake world is more important than obeying laws, or being seen as a “nice person.”

That’s an interesting lesson, because laws, and perception of “niceness,” are not morality. Also, what is moral is not always what is legal, or what is nice. Slavery was legal. Racism was enforced by law. Many victimless crimes are currently illegal, such as growing particular species of plants.

As always, we love Reality quite a lot, and it was refreshing to see people have to think hard about what they really believe as the result of a chaotic person’s actions. Not that we’d know anything about that…

The RULES, and “all it takes is a little push…”

One key piece of this arc, and probably our very favorite scene, is The Joker trying to build a relationship with Batman in the jail scene…
– us, earlier in this post

In particular, we love this part of the jail scene:

The Joker: …their morals, their code… it’s a bad joke. Dropped at the first sign of trouble. They’re only as good as the world allows them to be. I’ll show you, when the chips are down, these… these “civilized people?” They’ll eat each other. See? I’m not a monster, I’m just…ahead of the curve.

Batman : [grabs Joker] Where’s Dent?

The Joker : You have all these rules and you think they’ll save you!

Lt. James Gordon : [as Batman slams Joker into the wall] He’s in control.

Batman : I have one rule.

The Joker : Oh, then that’s the rule you’ll have to break to know the truth.

Batman : [getting impatient] Which is?

The Joker : The only sensible way to live in this world is without rules.

Generally speaking, we are not fans of rules, which is probably why this appealed to both of us. We’ve also both been the targets of people who valued the rules over us, or over other people, which…hasn’t changed our opinions about rules in general. What The Joker says here is not entirely correct, and…he knows it. The Joker doesn’t follow their rules, but he does follow his own. He’s…consistent. But he points out a legitimate thing – it makes sense, it should make sense, to look at the rules that one follows and ask oneself…okay, but why?

What is my motivation for following the rules? Do I even understand that I’m choosing to follow the rules? What happens if I stop?

The Joker pushes the Batman, the mob, the police, and society as a whole, to stop doing what they’ve always done. He pushes them to look at the world in a new light, where old motivations (money, power) are challenged and the old rules of safety and control are broken.

Batman, as a counterpoint, spends the whole movie trying to control things into being safe. He tries beating everyone up. He tries giving up his identity. In the end, he even sacrifices the ideology and the very idea of Batman as a force of good, in an effort to control the perceptions of the people in the city.

The Joker pokes at peoples’ rules, points out the sheer ridiculousness of them, and then…lets them choose. He’s happy with whatever they go with, he just wants to put people in situations in which they can see the world in a new light. That, and he really wants to burn down what they perceive as their safety.

The Joker and the End of the Movie

The last time we watched the movie, we kicked around the real motivation of the movie. This is a Christopher Nolan movie – this is the same director who did Inception, and Memento, and Tenet. He is not what you’d call a traditional thinker. Up until a certain point in the movie, the movie itself is wildly consistent:

This movie is a love story to chaos, and a warning against (and biting satire of) the patterns of institutional and personal control and fear.

And then…that stops. The Joker suddenly cares about a particular outcome, not, as we said above, simply showing people that they aren’t actually bound by their rules. The Joker targets two ferryboats’ worth of people – one boat of prisoners, and one boat of Average Citizens. He tells the boats that they will both be blown up as of a time, unless one boat blows up another. The prisoners decide not to blow up the Average Citizens’ boat. The Average Citizens take a vote, which lands on “yes, blow up the prisoners,” and then ultimately can’t do it. During this time, The Joker and Batman are fighting and The Joker insists that one boat will definitely blow up the other. When that doesn’t happen, The Joker tries to blow up both boats anyway, despite it not being quite the time limit yet.

If The Joker were consistent with himself as per the rest of the movie, he would have accepted that people are not as broken and twisted as he thought, and adapted. Or, at a minimum, he would have waited until the time limit was up to blow up both boats.

The Joker and Purpose, Clarity, and Commitment

As always, we love Reality quite a lot, and it was refreshing to see people have to think hard about what they really believe as the result of a chaotic person’s actions. Not that we’d know anything about that… 
– us, again from earlier in this post…

When we have strong emotional reactions to things, we try to figure out why. Why did it resonate? What does it teach me about myself, or about God, or about other people?

We are both what could be described as chaotic – if you use the D&D alignment definition, chaotic means valuing “freedom, adaptability, and flexibility. On the downside, chaos can include recklessness, resentment toward legitimate authority, arbitrary actions, and irresponsibility. Those who promote chaotic behavior say that only unfettered personal freedom allows people to express themselves fully and lets society benefit from the potential that its individuals have within them.”

We firmly believe that God makes people exactly as he needs them to be. Neither of us tries to be chaotic, or to see the world in different ways than…it seems like most other people. In fact, thanks to the soul scars of trying to live this way, we’ve both tried various things not to be chaotic. This version of The Joker exists, for us, as a form of representation – we aren’t criminals, but we are wildly committed to the things we think are right. We’re good at making and executing plans. And we definitely think that clarity is success, and that people follow rules for reasons that are mostly fears of how they will be hurt if they don’t.

That representation, and the reminder of how God makes people, mattered to us because living your life in a way that’s consistent with who you actually are, how God made you, helps you find and execute your purpose. Also, it’s just…fun. It’s how you find joy in your life, and how you find people who feel joy in the same things, and in you.

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.

…

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Children’s Faith and Houses of Cards

Children’s Faith and Houses of Cards

by and | Community, People

At that time the disciples came to Jesus and asked, “Who, then, is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven?”

He called a little child to him, and placed the child among them. And he said: “Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. Therefore, whoever takes the lowly position of this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven. And whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me.” (Matthew 18:1-5)

Children

lolz

We were talking about this Bible verse, because we do that thanks to the magic of an app that spits out a Bible verse every day. Laine mentioned how this seemed legit, because children really are interesting and uncommon in their faith.

“That’s why kids are curious, and why they accept new information so easily. They don’t assume they’re right about…much.”
– Laine

And…children are pretty flexible. It’s true. They’re very sure about the world, but also they approach it knowing that they probably don’t understand it. Their only job is to learn, for at least the first 14-16 years. And since they change almost daily, they learn how to adapt simply in order to…wake up every day. This has the effect of them being very sure about the world – until something tells them to change.

Adults

“Adults go all hear-no-evil because their houses of cards are confused by new input.”
– Laine again

Adults build houses of cards based on the things they think keep them safe. Layer upon layer of flimsy, and foundations built on shifting sand. These houses of cards, despite being wobbly by nature, are rigid. They have to be held perfectly still, because if you even breathe too hard on a house of cards…the whole thing topples. So adults hold their breath, and they by and large tread lightly. People with house-of-cards models hate hearing things that disagree with their view of the world  – which is unfortunate, because reality, and God, very often throw new information at us. Often this information is beautiful, if only we can manage to avoid running away from it long enough to allow it in.

God is going to force change, and growth. Not a single one of us is perfect or fully formed, and we do stupid things that hurt ourselves in the name of self-protection. God protects us from ourselves, and that means sometimes we have to change even if we don’t want to – and that means that not a single one of us can actually stay perfectly still or hold our breath for any length of time.

We can fight against the wind or we can go where it takes us – but either way, a house of cards won’t survive.

Conflict, too, is necessary for change and growth. It’s necessary for the growth of each of us, and it’s also necessary for the growth of the relationships we try to stumble through while we lug our baggage along behind us. The houses of cards that represent our relationships are even more elaborate – and even more fragile.

Adapt

At some point, children grow up. They start to get their own scars and their own baggage, and they start building models of reality that don’t hurt as much as actual reality. The begin to build the house of cards, and they lose all of the flex that makes them able to have the kind of faith that can bend without collapsing at the slightest breeze.

You gotta’ keep some flex in your models.

Some things are certain. But really, “certain” just means it takes a whole lot to convince someone otherwise. God, for example, exists. He exists, and he is good, and he cares about each of us individually. That’s certain. But…actually, that just means that we’re really really sure, because there’s a lot of evidence and we’ve been over that ground a lot.

Other things, like  “OpenShift is the best Kubernetes platform,” eh. Maybe we should be open to new information about that, and maybe not being certain about it would be beneficial. Maybe it’s the best for some people, or even most people – and maybe it doesn’t work at all sometimes.

You have to have a foundation that’s built on things that are real – not cards precariously stacked. And…on top of that foundation, you gotta’ keep some flex in your models. You gotta’ be open to being wrong. You have to allow for wind, and breath, and change. The alternative is ignoring reality, and ignoring God, and that’s a dangerous path to go down.

All the Problems of the World…

All the Problems of the World…

by and | God, People

As we observe the drama and problems of the world, and also our own drama and problems, we’ve come to the conclusion that most of people’s problems come down to…pretty simple solutions.

All the problems of the world can generally be solved by:

  • have boundaries
  • you can only control you
  • don’t be afraid
  • trust God and each other – but mostly, and first, God
  • enjoy what you have in your life

So…yeah. These are pretty simple. They’re also insanely hard to do. But they seem to be helpful, so we’ll explain what we mean.

…

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Most of Succeeding at Life is About Being Able to Deal with Rejection

Most of Succeeding at Life is About Being Able to Deal with Rejection

by and | Community, God, People

Succeeding at Life

Succeeding at life is being shiny – living, sure and certain, in your purpose that God gave you as best as you currently understand it, and letting your soul shine. Letting the joy of being you flow out of yourself and everything you do. This is hard to do, and it’s hard to maintain. It’s difficult, and it’s complicated, but it really comes down to two things:

  1. Doing what you’re supposed to do
  2. Not being afraid of rejection for being yourself

If you have both of those going on, in our experience, you’ll have a lot of joy, and a lot of fun. You’ll attract people who like your vibe, and you’ll have an impact in the ways you’re supposed to.

Your vibe attracts your tribe.
– Sassy Chocolate

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Disorganized Religion

Disorganized Religion

by and | God, Organizations, People, Religion

A long time ago (comparatively, time moves very oddly these days…), I (Laine) wrote this post about my experience thus far with the first church I’d ever regularly attended. Coming to Christianity as an adult has been…an experience. Especially as a strong, capable, independent, female (I wish it didn’t matter, but I’m not convinced it doesn’t) adult who is as committed to God as I know how to be.

See, the thing is, I came to Christianity as an adult – I did not come to faith as an adult. My faith is independent of any church, and my relationship with God is the oldest, strongest relationship I have.

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