Cyreenik Says
This 29 Aug 10 WSJ article, Pyongyang's New Leader for the Old Guard by Andrei Lankov, reports that North Korea is calling a Korean Workers Party conference in September, most likely to ceremoniously anoint Kim Jong Il's youngest son, Kim Jong Eun, as his successor.
So, the question becomes: Will the North Korean Anomaly continue?
The anomaly is the succession of totalitarian rulers that North Korea has experienced. Since the Industrial Revolution started taking hold in the late 1700's when a developed nation experienced crisis and submitted to an era ruthless leadership, (of which totalitarian is the most modern version) it was a phase that usually lasted for just one ruler. (See my article On Ruthless Leadership) That ruler is then replaced with a more conventional, business-as-usual, form of leadership.
The Kim Il Sung to Kim Jong Il transition in 1994 did not follow that pattern. If it had been true to pattern, Kim Jong Il would have ruled for one or two unsettled years, then been displaced by a more democratic movement such as happened in The Philippines following Marcos, or a lower profile, more reform-oriented, centralized leadership such as happened in Vietnam and China following Ho Chi Min and Mao Ze Dong.
Why didn't North Korea follow suit?
My speculation is that the North Korean anomaly is happening because the North Korean leadership has been successful at maintaining the crisis atmosphere. That success is built on xenophobia -- the North Koreans as a country truly believe that conquest, colonization, and being forced into some impure and corrupted system is a clear and present threat. They look upon what has happened in South Korea since World War Two not as a wonderful miracle but as selling out to The Man.
So, the question that will be foremost in North Koreans' minds as this next succession unfolds is:
o Are we going to continue to believe in this crisis?
o Or is it time to move on to some form of business-as-usual?
This 16 Aug 10 WSJ editorial, The End of American Optimism by Mortimer Zuckerman, is representative of America's post-2000's Boom angst. He points out that unemployment is high and economic growth is low.
What is happening is conventional solutions to the economic problems aren't working, and this means that the American community will be open to experimenting with ideas that have historically been too extreme to be taken seriously.
Add to this economic distress the political distress indicated by polls which say Americans have less and less faith in Congress and other governmental organizations (also indicated by the rise in enthusiasm for the Tea Party movement), and we have the makings for a Time of Nutcases.
If Congress changes it composition dramatically this fall, and lots of freshmen representatives are brought in to both Congress and state legislative houses, expect the beginning of a serious Time of Nutcases in the US.
We are experiencing the early time in a social revolution. By 2012 we may not be at end of the world, but we may be well into an era talked about in the famous Chinese Curse, "May you live in interesting times."
Update: An example of this Era of Nutcases is the surprising amount of attention Donald Trump is getting as a presidential candidate in April 2011. Suddenly he's all over the news, and it's not for being coolly analytical. Here's a 29 Apr 11 Christian Science Monitor article on it, Is Donald Trump really the GOP frontrunner? by Peter Grier.
On Monday 9 Aug 10 Steve Slater spewed a string of curses over the public address system of a JetBlue airliner after it had landed and was at the gate, then made a daring getaway from whatever was aggravating him by unleashing one of the plane's emergency chutes and sliding onto the tarmac with one or two beers in hand. (the growing legend strongly supports two) By Saturday 14 Aug 10 he was an Internet folk hero, and little else about the incident is clear.
The wake up call to the people running the commercial airline industry -- the companies, government regulators, unions, airport operators, and all others -- is that this man became a folk hero. This incident says that the current relation Americans have with the commercial flying process is love-hate, and the emotion is deep and powerful. This means that instinctive thinking is ready to take over dictating the proper flying process even more than it already does, and that means that the expense to fly is going to skyrocket because the cost of flying will include even more ritual than it already does.
The waking up is important to keeping the flying process from becoming even more marginalized than it already is.
Here are the key steps needed to bring more rationality back to the commercial flying process:
o Recognize that the commercial flying process suffers deeply from The Curse of Being Important. This means that too many people are involved, and that is making the process expensive and also killing small scale viable solutions.
o Recognize that many passengers have an instinctive fear of flying, and the best way to deal with that fear is to give them a high technology religion to comfort them. This means giving those passengers who worry a way to gain faith through ritual and sacrifice. But since this is a religion, religious tolerance should be practiced and not everyone should be compelled to go through the ritual and sacrifice. In the current system the TSA's passenger screening techniques are providing the faith-ritual-sacrifice framework, and it's an ugly solution.
o Recognize that passengers need to directly pay a higher percentage for their service. Under the current system taxpayers are footing much of the commercial flying bill through various government agencies such as the FAA. This means that the people who make choices about how to run the commercial flying process are distracted -- passengers are important... but so are government officials, congressmen, union representatives and many others. The less passengers directly pay of the total bill, the more they become "ticket punches" that let the industry collect money from the other paying sources. (And, yes, this is the same problem that faces the education and health care industries.)
If the commercial flying industry doesn't pay attention to these wake up calls, the industry's future is likely to track that of the intra city bus and trolley industry -- it will be taken over by government and become even more marginalized.
One of the industries that is recovering this year is scapegoat spending -- spending that has no value other than assuaging guilt. This 10 Aug 10 WSJ editorial, The Truth About Blood Diamonds by Jack Jolis, talks about how unrelated to the real-world the aspiration of unlinking diamonds from African violence is. As the article points out, "The parallel occurrences of diamonds and internecine mayhem in Africa are in no way causative -- certainly no more than by any other commercial commodity found in the continent. When was the last time we heard of 'blood manganese', or 'blood copper', or, for that matter, 'blood bananas' or 'blood cut flowers'?"
We live in a prosperous society which means we have the luxury of spending our resources in many ways and on many things. One of those ways can be on losing guilt. But, if we are going to spend money on losing guilt, let's be clear and open about that being the objective.
We should be teaching ourselves and our children not to link guilt spending with worthy cause spending. We should do this because it will save the worthy cause. This is so because when guilt is the primary motivator in spending, cost/benefit analysis of the spending gets tossed out the window. If there is a worthy cause linked to the guilt spending, the spending will be directed towards guilt-satisfying ritual, and the worthy cause will be perverted by the spending, not helped by it.
The Blood Diamond issue is a textbook example of this happening.
This month Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and India have announced that they are concerned and going to take action because they can't monitor the encrypted messages sent over Research In Motion (Blackberry) servers. This privacy has been an important selling point for RIM with its business customers, but the governments concerned feel its also useful to terrorists. This 3 Aug 10 WSJ article, RIM, India Seek to Resolve Security Concerns, by Romit Guha and R. Jai Krishna, talks about the RIM-Indian situation specifically.
This is another incarnation of the classic issue of how much privacy to give up in the interests of security.
I'm in favor of more privacy:
o This is a Curse of Being Important topic. This means that too many people are interested. The consequence of that is that good, but small, ideas are abandoned early because The Curse is adding too much overhead. Only big ideas are pursued when The Curse is strong.
In an advanced society, one that is complex, it is important that many, many ideas, big and small, be explored. Many will prove unproductive, but a few will be successful, and a very few will be wildly successful. In an advanced society exploring ideas is how progress is made, and progress is made in direct proportion to how many ideas get explored.
If people have to clam up and not talk because they are worried about who else will hear, then ideas are not being explored and progress is being slowed. This slowing of progress is the biggest expense of letting The Curse of Being Important be strong.
o Terrorism is a needle-in-a-haystack issue. Governments may get the right to monitor for terrorism, but they won't have the resources to do it properly. Plus, it's seriously boring, which is why TSA employees have such a hard time with public image and get so much grief. This means that resources devoted to monitoring for terrorists suffer a strong and constant temptation to be used for other more interesting activities, such as monitoring for averse politics and juicy scandals, or conducting pranks. In a nutshell, the monitoring won't work well, but it will still be expensive.
This is not a security versus privacy issue, it's a security versus progress issue. This is expensive thinking!
This 30 Jul 10 LA Times article, Congress tightens requirements for airline pilots, by Julia Love, inspired this comment.
The article points out that this bill mandates how much training pilots must have to carry passengers (1500 hours, up from 250 hours), creates a national database for pilots, and tells the FAA to update its pilot duty regulations. The law passed in both chambers without objection.
Eh? Why is Congress doing this as law making? This kind of micromanaging detail is clearly what the government agency designed to regulate flying, the FAA, should be handling.
This is another example of The Curse of Being Important in action. Many people feel strongly about flying, and as a result, too many people feel empowered to kibitz about the flying process. The result is the love-hate mess that is today's domestic flying industry.
As I have pointed out earlier, because of the power of its Curse, the lines of authority in the flying industry are mish-mashed between dozens of agencies, dozens of companies... and now Congress. The result is that passengers are less and less customers, and more and more tickets to be punched so that other authorities are satisfied.
In this case, Congress is taking the place of customers, the airlines, and the FAA in deciding what is adequate pilot training. Umm... this is something Congress knows well about, and is going to keep an eye on so it will update this provision as needed when things change in the future.
Right!
And this is a wonderful example of The Curse of Being Important.
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