Caring-clearance
In this episode we explore why we need to ensure that people in authority over others actually do care
This one started from a thread that I spotted whilst doing my occasional doomscrolling through Twitter:
Can someone please define “wokeism” for me. I only hear it endlessly from the right, and from what I can distill, they are attacking empathy and tolerance?
Yeah, I’d wondered about that too: from what I’d seen, particularly from the US, it always seemed an oddly politicised term. Right-wing politicians and commentators seemed to use it mostly as a pejorative, an insult: I got the impression that people were supposed to be, well, maybe kind of abusive failures if they were ‘woke’? Something like that, anyway. And yet a right-wing government-official defined it in court as "the belief there are systemic injustices in American society and the need to address them" - yet given the real-world evidence about such injustices in the US, I’ll admit I can’t understand why that belief would be supposed to be wrong. Odd…
There were - to me, anyway - a lot of interesting replies to that question, such as “So ‘woke’ = kind? And that is a bad thing? Why are we giving this any energy? Why don't we call ourselves kind instead?”, or the perhaps more emotion-laden “‘Woke’ is what Nazis call anyone who gives a damn about other human beings or the planet”. Yet out of all the replies on that thread, for me this one seemed the most useful:
‘Woke’ means awakened to the needs of others. To be well-informed, thoughtful, compassionate, humble and kind. Eager to make the world a better place for all people.
I say ‘useful’ because it gives us real criteria that we can test. Specifically, to test whether people actually care, about anything or anyone other than themselves.
Why does that matter?
It’s because if they don’t or can’t care, about others, or even about themselves, then they should not be in charge of anything at all.
People who don’t or can’t care are too dangerous to be allowed to be in charge of anything at all.
Too dangerous not just to others, but to themselves as well. Too dangerous to tools, to equipment, to things, to animals, to plants, to our increasingly-scarce resources, to the planet as a whole.
So yeah, we need to test for that. Test whether people can actually care.
There’s a catch, of course. Two catches, actually.
The first is that it takes effort to care. That effort may take many different forms: physical, mental, emotional, spiritual and more. And all of that effort has real costs, not just financial, but in almost every sense as well.
It takes effort to look after oneself. It takes effort to run a household, to do the washing-up, to keep the house clean.
It takes effort to solve a technical problem. It takes even more effort to solve that technical problem in a way that works well across its entire context, its entire lifecycle.
It takes effort to treat others with respect - our neighbours, our colleagues, our community, in customer-service, and so much more. And it takes effort to respect and maintain our tools and resources properly, too.
It takes effort to respect our own and others’ spiritual needs: “a sense of meaning and purpose, a sense of self and of relationship with that which is greater than self”.
And over all of that, it takes effort to respect and work with the world we all live in, from a humble pomegranate growing in the garden, to everything that makes up our planet as a whole.
All of of this is what’s usually called a ‘duty of care’. And all of us are personally responsible for that effort, for playing our part in that overall duty-of-care.
The trap here is that, in our current culture, people can often avoid that effort, that responsibility, that cost. They can either just not do it at all, or attempt to offload it onto others, force others or the wider world to do it for them on their behalf.
Those behaviours cause huge costs, for everyone. If we’re not careful, those behaviours could soon cost us our entire world. Not A Good Idea…
And we have a technical term that describes that type of behaviour: sociopath.
Anyone who evades their duty-of-care is, to some extent or other, yet also in a very literal sense, acting as a sociopath.
The catch here is that at present, our culture often actively rewards people for acting as sociopaths. In many countries, corporate-law actually requires people to act as sociopaths.
Even worse, our culture often penalises or even punishes people for not acting as sociopaths.
And yet, with all of those incentives to do it wrong, and all those disincentives to do it right, we still wonder why things so often get into such a seemingly-irretrievable mess.
Oops…?
Which brings us to the second catch: it takes effort to learn how to care.
In normal human development, this starts to happen naturally around three years old. We’ll see a normal child start to want to help at around that time; and, in any sane human culture, we’ll need to support them in doing so. So the catch there is that it requires effort from us to support them whilst they make a mess of learning how to take care - and if we don’t put in that effort to support them, well, they’ll never learn how to take care.
Earlier than that, though, a typical one-year-old won’t even know what care is; and whilst a typical two-year-old will know what care is, they’re still at the stage where they’re certain they’re the sole centre of the world, and will only care about themselves and their own transient wants and needs. And will often do so loudly and angrily - hence the common description of that stage as ‘the terrible-twos’.
Which is where this second catch really starts to bite, because some children never grow past that stage of the ‘terrible-twos’, and end up as adults in exactly that same state. In some relatively-rare cases it’s because they actually can’t grow past that point: early-childhood trauma can do that, for example. In others, though, we can actually see them choosing not to grow: they don’t want to let go of that feeling of being ‘the sole centre of the world’, or they simply don’t want ever to put in the effort that’s needed to grow into actual adulthood, into playing a responsible part in a socially-responsive world. That’s where the paediarchs and covert-crybabies come from - the ones who demand all the attention, take everything for themselves, never give anything back. The ones who don’t care about anyone other than themselves, and cause hell for everyone else.
Ouch…
So when we put all of that together, here’s the real catch:
— We need everyone to care, otherwise things won’t work well, and will eventually break down beyond repair. That’s always bad in the everyday world; but once it starts to happen at a truly global scale, we’ll be in real trouble…
— Yet we live in a world that actively rewards those who don’t care, and will often penalise or punish those who do - which means that are massive disincentives to care, about almost anything.
— The unfortunate result is that the ones who are least suited to be in charge of anything - the sociopaths, the paediarchs and other parasites - right now actually are in control of almost everything. And are protected and pandered-to for being there, whilst everything else breaks down all around them.
Which is most definitely Not A Good Idea…
What the heck can we do about that?
There’s no quick answer here: not in our current economics. Which is again, yet another reason why we urgently need to change that economics.
In the meantime, though, we should do what we can to make it harder for the paediarchs and the like to get into those positions of ‘control’, because we know we can’t trust what they’ll do if they’re there.
And one way to tackle that would be to focus on that issue of trust - or lack of it, rather. In short, how would we measure and test for trustworthiness?
Well, there’s already one very close analogy for this: a security-clearance. We have standardised methods to test whether people can be trusted to take care about security. The higher the need or concern, the more intense those tests will become. And we re-test them regularly, to make that they haven’t lapsed, and that they can maintain their trustworthiness relative to the need.
So what we need here is a more generic caring-clearance - a test to ensure that we can trust that people do care, and can prove that they can and do care. To go back to that quote earlier above, that caring-clearance should, for example, test whether the respective person is indeed “awakened to the needs of others”; to test whether they actually are “well-informed, thoughtful, compassionate, humble and kind”, and “eager to make the world a better place for all people”. The higher the level of authority ‘over’ others, or over anything at all, the more intense those tests should become. No-one - certainly no would-be paediarch or the like - should ever be able to become an executive of any organisation, or a politician of any kind at any level, unless they can pass and maintain a high-level caring-clearance.
Yet what would this caring-clearance process look like in practice? One place to start would be the same as with an everyday security-review, namely to ask other people what they knew and had experienced from that person; and, for a higher-level caring-clearance, also cross-check the stories to see whether they match up, to reduce the risk of questionable collusion, evidence-tampering and so on.
But probably better, though, would be to get them to prove in practice that they’re actually capable of caring. You know, practical stuff. Start with cleaning someone else’s house, or all the other things that Scouts do to get their badge. Do proper eldercare for at least a week, and preferably more. Maintain a set of fragile technical equipment without any failures or breakages. Grow a vegetable-plot, keeping it watered and weeded well enough to get good-quality produce coming out at the end. Bring up a puppy until it’s at least a year old. Run a charity well enough to make sure that no-one’s embezzling anything and the end-goals are actually achieved. Things like that would be a start, at least.
If we’re to survive, or even thrive, into the longer-term, we must find a way to keep the parasites and paediarchs at bay, far better than we do at present. Creating and enforcing some kind of caring-clearance would be one way we could begin to make that shift happen.