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Editor’s Note: The Great Con II has left no corner untouched; the economy, immigration, public health, and the whole concept of community. All have been damaged by a kakistocracy, a government run by the least qualified and most inept people. The latest push is to pass the SAVE Act and lock in the clown show by throwing up a thicket of barriers to voting them out. That move only works on a population stripped of its civic instincts.
Don’t fall for it.
In normal home talk, my sons and I were discussing how all of us have gone through trainings for our positions. Most of the training is spent watching videos, reading policies, and not being able to skip ahead through things you’ve known for years but have to prove you know again.
We do a lot of activities like this in our lives. I’m not sure if such procedures are a sign of a mature culture or the culmination of decades of tradeoffs. This person did this, so we need to train everyone not to do it. This other person didn’t do this, so we need to ensure that everyone does do it next time.
It never ends.
Everywhere we turn, we run into policies and legalese that seek to constrain what makes us human and put up artificial conditions in their place. There have been very limited winners with this. Beefed up legal and HR departments, and all kinds of unnecessary procedures to cover asses. Being honest becomes the wrong kind of characteristic to have. Being malleable and compliant is the most preferable.
Much of it is not by design but more by happenstance from decades of acceptance. Legal or HR says we have to do it, so we do it. It’s easier to check boxes off than routinely updating the necessity, and now whole industries are built off of ensuring those boxes get checked.
Imagine a mindset where working isn’t treated as a chore or a potential liability. Where learning is fun and makes sense. Working is not only about paying the bills but personal growth, places where people genuinely want to show up and are treated as investments. Picture a hospital where the first instinct of every person in the building is simply to help; not filling out paperwork or checking that you have the right insurance or any insurance at all. Or schools where teachers are treated as champions and not buried under a myriad of paperwork.
None of this is fantasy. The pursuit of happiness is in the initial declaration. Somewhere between that intention and today, fear and greed moved in and rearranged the furniture. What we built instead was a series of choices more focused on compliance than happy citizens.
Walk into most American hospitals today and the bureaucratic machinery hits you before the compassion does. The ratio of patients to nurses is an “industry standard”, though it was not created by patients or nurses. Prior authorizations, insurance algorithms that deny claims by design, and billing codes that require a translator are part of the experience. A place built to focus on healing is instead focused on costs. Citizens become cases, and cases become costs.
In 2024 alone, pharmaceutical, health insurers, and health product companies spent over a quarter of a billion lobbying Congress. Hospitals and nursing homes added another $100 million on top of that. Meanwhile, health insurance CEOs take home $20 to $30 million annually while patients are rationing insulin and searching for affordable prescriptions. We have become conditioned to accept it, that it’s okay to create profit and big payouts instead of healthy human beings.
The same corrosive logic appears in most workplaces. Think about your own recent trainings. What was the focus? Was it necessary? If so, for whom? We have spent decades engineering jobs around compliance and monitoring and liability rather than around equity, purpose, and meaning. There’s no buy-in or ownership in the overall business. That’s how you turn citizens with ability into employees who simply comply. The ones who make bank don’t ask questions.
A study published in late 2024 found that intrinsic motivation is a primary driver of not just performance but innovation in the workplace. The conditions that cultivate it, things like servant leadership and a supportive team culture, are available to any organization willing to prioritize them. The problem is that control-driven management is cheaper to implement. You can roll out video trainings and monitoring dashboards faster than you can build a culture of equity and trust. So most organizations choose the dashboard, pay the long-term price in turnover and disengagement, and never worry about connecting the two.
The most consequential version of this can be seen in schools. The current regime would have never gained credence if our system was sound. Public education is where the foundation of democracy really takes root. It’s where you learn things you didn’t know, get your preconceived notions challenged, and interact with people who look, sound, or even think different than you. If you don’t get that type of experience, you are more prone to getting played or playing others.
This is how the concept of civic duty has been crowded out. We’re not modeling it anywhere in our structures. We’ve turned a lot of human interaction over to testing companies and supported systems that are focused on numbers and cash instead of people. Generations are now in civic deficiency, more vulnerable to misinformation, more likely to disengage from the larger community, and less equipped to recognize when institutions have been manipulated to fail them.
When we stop teaching how power works, we stop teaching people how to be citizens at all.
Every one of these problems, the hospital that treats patients like liabilities, the workplace that treats workers like cogs, and the school that treats students and teachers like things to manage, shares the same root logic. When you optimize a human system entirely around managing costs and liabilities, you eventually forget the citizens it was meant to serve.
Medical debt now burdens over 100 million Americans, a uniquely American problem in the advanced world. There is no national effort to ensure AI is purposeful for humans and that students know how to use it wisely. The workplace strips away autonomous thinking and hires HR and attorneys to keep it that way, never mind the increased turnover and disengagement.
Our settling for less has matured at the worst possible time. We spent decades conditioning people to follow scripts, check boxes, and avoid asking why, and now we're surprised that machines can do our work for us. I was on the phone with Xfinity recently and the chatbot on the other end did a damn good job. It sounded and responded almost 100% human, with the pauses and the quirks and everything that makes one “alive”.
But it wasn’t human. And we built the template for it.
AI is a reflection of us, just better at doing human in a non-human oriented economy. And now it is here to finish the job. It will be much easier for schools, hospitals and workplaces to manage algorithms than to manage people already buried in paperwork and already treated as disposable.
Ready yourselves. There will be no help coming from the current regime. We’ve made doing the wrong thing the easy thing, even rewarded it. We accepted a model that serves the wants of a few over the needs of the many.
It didn’t come by force. It happened because we stopped expecting that our systems serve us as citizens instead of managing us as potential problems.
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WHAT I READ THIS WEEK
Yet another reminder: while humans continue to struggle to live together in peace, we still don’t know all the species the world holds. Here’s a bee…with horns.
This one is a listen. On Mr. Roger’s birthday, a discussion on his role and legacy with public broadcasting. Leadership does not need to be loud.
The Nature Record was abolished by the Trump Regime. The scientists and biologists involved took it to the private sector to finish what was started. Here’s the work in progress.
As a lover of history, I’ve come to believe that the 1960’s had a tremendous influence on our present-day culture: all of the assassinations, Vietnam, Civil Rights, and Woodstock. How much of that time period of fear, anxiety, and promise has impacted our DNA. My friend Chuck Hobbs posted this on Facebook. It’s archival footage out of Augusta, Georgia that captures white residents, Bible verses, and hysterics at the prospect of Black children attending “their” schools. The hypocrisy is almost too on the nose with what we are experiencing today. Despite a generation passing, this misguided attempt at mixing religion and racism still exists. Quite obviously work remains to be done not to prey upon people’s fears, but to lift up their commonalities. To experience how little has changed, do what MLK, Jr., said. Go to church on Sunday and look around.
This is one of those articles that reminds me of what should be obvious: we still know very little of all there is to know. When I was with Fish & Wildlife I supported the creation of a bat box that could be loaned to groups. The Jacksonville Zoo regularly checked it out. The kit included a device that would allow users to hear bats when they do their echo-location.
You cannot help but read this article and be profoundly moved. The planet has been communicating in ways we simply weren't built to hear, whether glaciers, ocean currents, or in the woods. All have sounds at levels not meant for human ears. New technology is finally translating it for us, a world that happens without our knowledge. It’s both humbling and beautifully mysterious.
And Now….
One last cold spell is upon us, but don’t tell all the plants that are blooming and throwing a mess of pollen in the air.
Keep up your reading habit. Continue to practice your gratefulness.