Oof. That hits me a little more personally than you might expect. I suppose that's true of a lot of people.
But yeah I myself am having a lot of trouble balancing compassion with a deep anger that I can't help. The cynicism is my attempt to shield myself and it's not working so great either.
The brazenness - and visibility - of the hypocrisy and callousness of our leaders has eroded public trust. We no longer have any paragons, really. We just have people who we think aren't quite as bad as the alternative. To use the events of today as an example, everyone knows the people running CrowdStrike are going to continue being fabulously rich, and might not even lose their jobs. Even if, by some miracle, CrowdStrike gets sued out of existence, they'll walk away and still be multimillionaries.
And when this seems so universal, so inevitable, in the people running the world (whether that be in business, politics, or whatever else), you start to wonder if it's even possible to do otherwise.
One of the first things I wrote down when I founded my company was, quote, "do not spin, do not mischaracterize, do not omit, do not grey-pattern." I don't know what the chances that that doomed my company on day 1 were, but they certainly are not zero. I am genuinely not sure it's possible to succeed in the world as it is without being a lying, cheating bastard to some degree. And I'm not the only one.
Have you ever tried just going down a grocery-store aisle and counting every snake oil claim within your line of sight [1]? It's astounding. I looked on the coffee table my laptop is sitting on right now, and sure enough I've got a box of what are effectively Twizzlers claiming to be a health food because the sugar came from apple juice instead of being distilled first. Every room in my house is full of lies. It's desensitizing.
"Quiet quitting" provides a workplace example of what this does to a culture. In a sense, intentionally not doing the work you're being paid to do is a crappy, somewhat immoral thing to do. It's certainly not a sign of good character, at least in my book. But people do it because they perceive (correctly) that their employer would screw them given the slightest chance. The local incentives of each side to be adversarial have fallen into a defect-defect equilibrium (see [2]) that is detrimental to both parties. Both sides are so used to being exploited that they defensively and preemptively spend tons of energy defending themselves against it and failing to find common ground in the many areas that aren't zero-sum. Worse, they even feel bad about things that are positive-value to themselves but might be used against them! [3]
And once you're in that kind of a culture, it's so hard to argue for anything constructive. How can you believe in anything when the representatives, the would-be paragons, of every moral value you'd like to promote are flaunting ignoring them, when so many values are used as paper-thin excuses to hurt people day in and day out?
That's true almost whatever you believe! Are you big on the traditional family? You're probably voting for the cheated-on-his-wife-with-a-porn-star guy. Did you favor invasive pandemic measures in California? You're probably voting for the guy who had a party while you were staying home. Like organized labor? You're voting for the guy who shut down a strike on critical infrastructure. Like law and order? You're voting for a felon. Almost everyone knows this, and for some years now, we've gone "ugh, but have you seen the other guy?". (This isn't a criticism - I do this too.)
But the optimistic take, to quote MLK for a second, is that we might be climbing out of one local minimum into another:
> [Protest] seeks so to dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored...there is a type of constructive nonviolent tension that is necessary for growth. Just as Socrates felt that it was necessary to create a tension in the mind so that individuals could rise from the bondage of myths and half-truths to the unfettered realm of creative analysis and objective appraisal...the purpose of direct action is to create a situation so crisis-packed that it will inevitably open the door to negotiation.
> ...How strange it would be to condemn a physician who, through persistent work and the ingenuity of his medical skills, discovered cancer in a patient. Would anyone be so ignorant as to say he caused the cancer?...We did not cause the cancer; we merely exposed it.
(MLK is, of course, talking about a different issue here. But the observation is valid to others.)
It's only in this moment where we're all so disgusted, where we're all in a world so "crisis-packed", that we act. For better or worse, the people of Earth are wildly destabilizing their societies, whether that's the right in the US or the left in Latin America or protestors in Shanghai. We're "mad as hell, and we're not gonna take it anymore," and while that's unpredictable, it does at least offer the opportunity for the establishment of new, more legitimate institutions built on the disgust of those who make them.
In a more game-theoretic sense, my mental model is that the public and the elite are playing an iterated Ultimatum Game [4]. The elite holds the cards and makes the decisions, but the public can always flip the table over and screw everyone if they feel they're getting a short enough end of the stick. And it's at moments like this, when the public begins to pose a credible threat, that the elite begin to listen - or get replaced by a new elite that will, which is essentially my goal in life.
> "do not spin, do not mischaracterize, do not omit, do not grey-pattern."
I try to effectively add something like: be honest, be open, be compassionate. It seems obvious. But apparently it isn’t, as we get to hear from those we work with, and their experience in other jobs.
I wanted to be more specific than that. A good principle should lay out, clearly, what you will NOT do.
I'm sure I could argue that, say, failing to mention that one of our candidates did poorly on a coding problem could be characterized as "not evil". The company I'm talking to will probably over-weight that observation, they might think themselves out of an otherwise-desirable hire, and the candidate might lose an opportunity! Surely it's right to just tell this one little white lie...
The reason for the phrasing I used is to make it clear that no, we don't do that. And this comes up all the time. I find myself reminding myself of that principle almost daily when those little temptations to just skew things just a little bit pop up.
> The brazenness - and visibility - of the hypocrisy and callousness of our leaders has eroded public trust.
I think this is overly cynical. There are, I think still plenty of politicians who get into politics to make things better for people, I really do. But they are faced with complex, hard-to-fix issues where there is nuance and compromise needed, and people get really pissed off about the nuance and compromise
In a lot of ways, that's worse. If it were just the politicians, we could vote them out.
We can't vote out the people. The people are angry, at each other, in ways disproportionate to the nuance and compromise. It becomes self-reinforcing.
I'll be blunt that I think some people are more at fault than others. But I don't know how to stop that.
I wish it were just the politicians, or even just the media. Then there would be things that I could do. But when the people hate each other -- and I genuinely believe they do -- I can't think of any options.
I think the evidence is that, on the whole (since we’re broadly referring to “people” and obviously there is tremendous diversity contained within), people do not hate each other, they hate the “other” team (whatever that may be). We’re wired for in/out group think to such a high degree that it’s incredibly easy to dial in division and purpose it to some end.
Two individuals in a room are more likely to find common ground than hate until you bring up the right sport they happen to be on opposing teams for.
> There are, I think still plenty of politicians who get into politics to make things better for people, I really do.
Most people aren't ogres in their own story, but that doesn't make them not hypocritical or callous. I've been a jerk many times to people I was in a position of power over in ways that felt justified and correct to me at the time but weren't either of those things in retrospect. The fact that people find justifications that let them sleep at night doesn't mean they're not screwing people over.
> and people get really pissed off about the nuance and compromise
I don't think it's quite so simple as "people don't accept nuance". That is true, especially in the era in which we live, but it isn't the whole story. Because that was true a generation or two ago, too - it might have even been more true then than it is now.
I, and as far as I can tell a large proportion of other people, don't have a problem with nuance and compromise in principle. We're just tired of seeing nuance and compromise used as an excuse exactly when they're convenient and only in ways that favor slowing down or preventing solutions (and not in ways that might ever limit the unlimited pursuit of power and wealth). Selective application of a principle is no principle at all.
As a concrete example, you've probably seen people do this with scientific studies. Study supports their view? Well, obviously it's true! Study supports the opposing point of view? Well, you have to remember it's just one study and bias is possible and there are numerous methodological issues so we shouldn't adjust to much from a small number of data points and hey there's this alternative explanation I just thought of it's probably that and...
Or look at your standard industrial or engineering postmortem. I'm sure whatever developer introduced that CrowdStrike bug is not going to have a job in a week, because pressure from your boss is no excuse to ship something broken, you have to stand up and do what's right! But is the same going to happen to the leadership? Is anyone going to say "being distant from the problem and operating in the fog of war that comes with leadership is no excuse to run a bad ship"? No, they aren't, and everyone knows it. The elite gets to profit off of their lack of concern for building something safe, and be insulated from the consequences when it fails.
That's not being nuanced, that's pretending (perhaps even to yourself) to be nuanced as a rhetorical tool. In isolation, there's no good way to distinguish the two, so once this tactic becomes sufficiently widespread, distrust for nuance is a reasonable response.
But yeah I myself am having a lot of trouble balancing compassion with a deep anger that I can't help. The cynicism is my attempt to shield myself and it's not working so great either.