Friedman, "A Failure of Nerve" Quotes

 Quotes from Edwin H Friedman, "A Failure of Nerve: Leadership in the Age of the Quick Fix" that are relevant to our current situation
-------------------------------------------------------------
“But no one has ever gone from slavery to freedom with the slaveholders cheering them on, nor contributed significantly to the evolution of our species by working a forty-hour week, nor achieved any significant accomplishment by taking refuge in cynicism.”

“dialogue is only possible when we can learn to distinguish feelings from opinions and recognize that the background or personality of a person is totally irrelevant to the validity of what he or she is saying.”

“The great thing to remember is that the mind of man cannot be enlightened permanently by merely teaching him to reject some particular set of superstitions. There is an infinite supply of other superstitions always at hand; and the mind that desires such things, that is, the mind that has not trained itself to the hard discipline of reasonableness and honesty, will, as soon as its devils are cast out, proceed to fill itself with their relations.”

“This chapter will explore the third “equator,” or emotional barrier, that has to be crossed before leadership in America can be free to venture in “harm’s way.” That barrier is the association of self with autocracy and narcissism rather than with integrity and individuality."

“No one ever made a decision because of a number. They need a story.”

“One can only be consistent when one is focused on oneself, not on the random perturbations of the un-self-regulating other. The former is what leadership is about; the latter allows followers to set the agendas. That is why such parents, no matter what techniques they are taught, from being “available” and “understanding” to “tough love,” almost always seem to be worn down by the repetitiveness of the child’s unregulated behavior or their own treadmill efforts to modify their child’s responses.” 

Similarly, there seemed to be three universal laws regarding the children of all families that transcended their cultural and sociological characteristics. ​​The children who work through the natural problems of maturing with the least amount of emotional or physical residue are those whose parents have made them least important to their own salvation. (Throughout this work, maturity will be defined as the willingness to take responsibility for one’s own emotional being and destiny.) ​​Children rarely succeed in rising above the maturity level of their parents, and this principle applies to all mentoring, healing, or administrative relationships. ​​Parents cannot produce change in a troubling child, no matter how caring, savvy, or intelligent they may be, until they become completely and totally fed up with their child’s behavior.” 

“If lack of self-regulation is the essential characteristic of organisms that are destructive, it is the presence of self-regulatory capacity that is critical to the health, survival, and evolution of an organism or an organization...the key to survival is the ability of the “host” to recognize and limit the invasiveness of its viral or malignant components.” ― 

“frequently, the leaders of a church would come to me seeking techniques for dealing with a member of the staff or a member of the congregation who was acting obstreperously, who was ornery, and who intimidated everyone with his gruffness. I might say to them, “This is not a matter of technique; it’s a matter of taking a stand, telling this person he has to shape up or he cannot continue to remain a member of the community.” And the church leaders would respond, “But that’s not the Christian thing to do.” (Synagogue leaders also tolerate abusers for the same reason.)”

“A major criterion for judging the anxiety level of any society is the loss of its capacity to be playful.”

--------------------------------------------------

“Members of highly reactive families, therefore, wind up constantly focused on the latest, most immediate crisis, and they remain almost totally incapable of gaining the distance that would enable them to see the emotional processes in which they are engulfed. The emotionally regressed family will stay fixed on its symptoms, and family thinking processes will become stuck on the content of specific issues rather than on the emotional processes that are driving those matters to become “issues.” The systemic anxiety thus locks everyone into a pessimistic focus on the pathology within the family, and it becomes almost impossible for such systems to reorient themselves to a focus on their inherent strengths. What also contributes to this loss of perspective is the disappearance of playfulness, an attribute that originally evolved with mammals and which is an ingredient in both intimacy and the ability to maintain distance. You can, after all, play with your pet cat, horse, or dog, but it is absolutely impossible to develop a playful relationship with a reptile, whether it is your pet salamander, no matter how cute, or your pet turtle, snake, or alligator. They are deadly serious (that is, purposive) creatures. Chronically anxious families (including institutions and whole societies) tend to mimic the reptilian response: Lacking the capacity to be playful, their perspective is narrow. Lacking perspective, their repertoire of responses is thin. Neither apology nor forgiveness is within their ken. When they try to work things out, their meetings wind up as brain-stem storming sessions. Indeed, in any family or organization, seriousness is so commonly an attribute of the most anxious (read “difficult”) members that they can quite appropriately be considered to be functioning out of a reptilian regression. Broadening the perspective, the relationship between anxiety and seriousness is so predictable that the absence of playfulness in any institution is almost always a clue to the degree of its emotional regression. ”

Republicans: Misplaced Responsibility and Dereliction of Duty

 

Misplaced responsibility. This is what abusers say to their victims: "See what you made me do? You should have known this is how I would react." 

--------

Senate Majority Leader John Thune isn’t endorsing the slash-and-burn campaign White House budget director Russ Vought has planned for the federal government during the pending shutdown.

But he says Democrats have no one to blame for it but themselves.

“This is the risk of shutting down the government and handing the keys to Russ Vought,” the Senate majority leader said in an exclusive interview Wednesday in the Capitol, adding that “there should have been an expectation” among Democrats that Vought’s Office of Management and Budget could broadly target government workers and programs in a shutdown.

------------

And then there's dereliction of duty. Republicans only  can plead that they don't control what Vought does if they admit they have handed over all legislative power to the executive branch.

------------

<Thune spoke on the same day that several Republicans aired discomfort with Vought’s moves after the shutdown went into effect. Rep. Mike Lawler of New York spoke out against his decision to hold up major transportation projects in his state, while Reps. Blake Moore of Utah and Brian Babin of Texas spoke up on a private House GOP call with Vought raising qualms about potential mass layoffs.

Vought’s actions also risk being a distraction for Republicans, who have sought to stick to a simple message putting the onus on Democrats to reopen the government. Pressed on whether Vought was muddying the waters, Thune said, “The only thing I would say about that is yes, and we don’t control what he’s going to do.”

https://www.politico.com/live-updates/2025/10/02/congress/john-thune-russ-vought-warning-00591596

 

Umberto Eco’s List of the 14 Common Features of Fascism

 <While Eco is firm in claiming “There was only one Nazism,” he says, “the fascist game can be played in many forms, and the name of the game does not change.” Eco reduces the qualities of what he calls “Ur-Fascism, or Eternal Fascism” down to 14 “typical” features. “These features,” writes the novelist and semiotician, “cannot be organized into a system; many of them contradict each other, and are also typical of other kinds of despotism or fanaticism. But it is enough that one of them be present to allow fascism to coagulate around it.”

1. The cult of tradition. “One has only to look at the syllabus of every fascist movement to find the major traditionalist thinkers. The Nazi gnosis was nourished by traditionalist, syncretistic, occult elements.”
2. The rejection of modernism. “The Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, is seen as the beginning of modern depravity. In this sense Ur-Fascism can be defined as irrationalism.”
3. The cult of action for action’s sake. “Action being beautiful in itself, it must be taken before, or without, any previous reflection. Thinking is a form of emasculation.”
4. Disagreement is treason. “The critical spirit makes distinctions, and to distinguish is a sign of modernism. In modern culture the scientific community praises disagreement as a way to improve knowledge.”
5. Fear of difference. “The first appeal of a fascist or prematurely fascist movement is an appeal against the intruders. Thus Ur-Fascism is racist by definition.”
6. Appeal to social frustration. “One of the most typical features of the historical fascism was the appeal to a frustrated middle class, a class suffering from an economic crisis or feelings of political humiliation, and frightened by the pressure of lower social groups.”
7. The obsession with a plot. “Thus at the root of the Ur-Fascist psychology there is the obsession with a plot, possibly an international one. The followers must feel besieged.”
8. The enemy is both strong and weak. “By a continuous shifting of rhetorical focus, the enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak.”
9. Pacifism is trafficking with the enemy. “For Ur-Fascism there is no struggle for life but, rather, life is lived for struggle.”
10. Contempt for the weak. “Elitism is a typical aspect of any reactionary ideology.”
11. Everybody is educated to become a hero. “In Ur-Fascist ideology, heroism is the norm. This cult of heroism is strictly linked with the cult of death.”
12. Machismo and weaponry. “Machismo implies both disdain for women and intolerance and condemnation of nonstandard sexual habits, from chastity to homosexuality.”
13. Selective populism. “There is in our future a TV or Internet populism, in which the emotional response of a selected group of citizens can be presented and accepted as the Voice of the People.”
14. Ur-Fascism speaks Newspeak. “All the Nazi or Fascist schoolbooks made use of an impoverished vocabulary, and an elementary syntax, in order to limit the instruments for complex and critical reasoning.”

https://www.openculture.com/2024/11/umberto-ecos-list-of-the-14-common-features-of-fascism.html

Name Heat Waves after Fossil Fuel Corporations

 

Let's start naming heat waves after fossil fuel corporations. It might help us all remember what is causing them. Here's a list we can use for starters.

A- Alpha Natural Resources; Abu Dhabi National Oil Co.

B- BP

C-Cococo Phillips; Chevron

D- Devon Energy Group

E- Exxon Mobil

F- First Energy

G- Gazprom

H- Husky Energy Co.

I- Iraq national Oil

J - James River Coal

K- Kuwait Petroleum; Koch Industries

L- Lukoil OAO

M- Marathon Oil; Murray Coal

N- North American Coal Co.; National Iranian Oil Co.

O- Occidental Petroleum

P- PetroChina; Peabody Energy

Q- Qatar Petroleum Corp.

R- Royal Dutch Shell

S- Saudi Aramco; Sonantech

T- Tatneft OAO

U- Ukraine Coal

V-Vista Energy

W- Westmoreland Coal Co.

X- Xcel Energy; Xstrata

Y- Yukos Oil; YFP SA

Z- Zephyr Energy

N.T. Wright on the Work of Salvation

 

"The work of salvation, in its full sense, is 
(1) about whole human beings, not merely souls; 
(2) about the present, not simply the future; and
 (3) about what God does through us, not merely what God does in and for us."

~ N. T. Wright, from Surprised by Hope

 

How Team Sports Form Americans to Accept MAGA

A friend wrote, "We should be going forward and we're going backwards. This is not a team sport for me, I don't care who the president is at any given time, I don't have a political cult leader that I worship, I just want things to be better in the world."

Yes, politics is not a team sport. But it seems like team sports have played an outsize role in our formation as a society, to the point of even affecting how we understand and practice politics, business, and the media. Team sports form and feed the tendency toward tribalism, as "Us" vs. "Them" is an inherent feature of any game. MAGA shrewdly capitalizes on that underlying impulse.

Fans use chants not only to support their teams, but to bolster their identity. Republicans do the same thing with their own team chants: "LOCK HER UP! LOCK HER UP!" and "USA! USA! USA." When a baseball team wins the World Series, or a football team wins the Superbowl, or a soccer team wins the World Cup, there are parties and parades. Republicans do the same thing, with Trump rallies and the recent DC military parade. Nationalism is just team pride on a sweeping scale.

Yes, team sports like baseball, football, basketball and soccer have been known to cultivate virtues like teamwork, discipline, sportsmanship, and perseverance, but in the end, what gets most celebrated is WINNING, and that goal has reinforced the tribalism that bedevils Americans today. And when winning guarantees profit, UCLA Bruins Coach Red Sanders' dictum becomes law: "Winning isn’t everything; it's the only thing,"

The First Felon and his Republican minions have capitalized on this For example:

DONALD TRUMP, CPAC, 2/24.17: "We inherited a national debt that has doubled in eight years. Think of it - $20 trillion. It's doubled. And we inherited a foreign policy marked by one disaster after another. We don't win anymore. When was the last time we won? Did we win a war? Do we win anything? Do we win anything? We're going to win. We're going to win big, folks. We're going to start winning again, believe me."

SIXTH REPUBLICAN DEBATE, 1/15/2016.
If I'm president, we will win on everything we do.

DR. OZ INTERVIEW, 9/15/16
The people that know me -- I win. I know how to win. You can't win unless you have a great temperament. I know people that can't win. I know people that are very talented at sports, and they never win."

The exclusive focus on winning incites poor sportsmanship, which is increasing on every level, from high schools to the pros. Consider the brawls listed here, over just a few weeks time in 2024: https://uni-watch.com/2024/03/11/sports-culture-is-getting-seriously-ugly-these-days/ There are political parallels. Hardly anyone flinched when Coach Bill Fowler positively praised the Philadelphia Eagles for "total manhandling" the Chiefs in the Superbowl; 47 has told his advisors to "obliterate" Iran if he is assassinated, and recently bragged that his orders to bomb Iran's nuclear sites "obliterated" them. If this is what is happening in sports, it's not surprising to see it happening in politics. January 6 and ICE are the political equivalents of the ugliness that is overtaking sports culture. A people who are ready to cheer their team on the diamond, court or gridiron, no matter what will be a people who are ready to cheer their Dear Leader in DC and Mar-a-Lago, no matter what. 

 

 

Jews, Greeks and the Universals: Truth, Goodness and Beauty

 "Plato formulated what he named the “universals” as the True, the Good, and the Beautiful. He held that if we are to live a whole and mature life, the three had to work together harmoniously in us. The American church has deleted Beauty from that triad. We are vigorous in contending for the True and energetic in insisting on the Good, but Beauty, the forms by which the True and the Good take shape in human life, we pretty much ignore. Plato, and many of our wisest teachers who have followed him, insisted that all three—Truth, Goodness, Beauty—are organically connected. Without Beauty, there is no container for Truth and Goodness, no form, no way of coming to expression in human life. Truth divorced from Beauty becomes abstract and bloodless. Goodness divorced from Beauty becomes loveless and graceless." --Eugene Peterson

So many Christians want to say that Jerusalem has nothing to do with Athens. However, the Beloved Apostle, who was a Jew, uses the Greek concept of the Logos to describe Jesus, as he gives us a second "genesis" story in the first chapter of his Gospel.

So many people think that the Greek idea of God is also only about ineffability and immutability. But Plato's idea of participation is a philosophical way of talking about relationship, and Aristotle's idea of substantial form can be a way of thinking about incarnation. THomas Aquinas saw that, and gave us a remarkable medieval synthesis of Greek philosophy and Christian faith.