This is the thing I’m struggling with personally right now, but I’m starting to see it as a bigger problem that harkens back to motives and origins of motives. Briefly, the Market is the domain of ‘can’; the State is the domain of ‘may’; and the Cloister is the domain of ‘should’. We are, all of us, guilty of letting the Market dictate our ‘mays’ and ‘shoulds’ and that is leading to some really dumb decisions.
Specifically, I’m embroiled, and have been for over a year, in what is increasingly clear to me an intractable problem having to do with scaling the edges of the Internet to support Web traffic. There are mountains of boring little details that aren’t really that important, but the gist of it is that you can’t do what we’re being asked to do within the constraints we’re being asked to do it. So I’ve moved on from trying to understand if it can be done to whether or not it should; “given X+Y+Z should you try to do A?”. And when I ask that question my answer is so obviously “No” that now I’m at a loss to try and explain why I’m the only one coming to that conclusion. And the answer I’m becoming comfortable with is that the pressure to restate the question to “given X+Y+Z can you try to do A?” and subsequently answer “Yes” is immense and irresistible because the Market rewards you for saying “Yes” so dis-proportionally that making foolish choices has become the norm.
That makes me sad.
What is more is that when you ask the right question, and arrive at the obvious “no” answer, it creates room for you do explore whether or not X, Y, or Z are actually legitimate and rational constraints, or whether or not the constraint is actually the problem you should be working. In this case that is precisely what we should be doing. And, in fact we’ve been doing a lot of it, but this phenomenon has fractal characteristics, so when you investigate our “should-assessments” you realize they are mostly “can-assessments” and that our process for fixing poor constraints is just as influenced by the Market as our original process for solving the problem given those flawed constraints, which is why we get the flaws in the first place.
That makes me sad.
And when I peel back the onion so far that I can barely see through the tears, I actually tend to find the correct “shoulds” at the core of these constraints, but the “cans” are so thick that any glimmer of a smart idea is snuffed out because the Market demands “can” outcomes at the expense of “may” or “should” outcomes. And that is tragic, not just because it is systemically cancerous, but because of how much damage it does to the world of people who don’t understand it and just want to float through life without having to be philosophers.
Asking the right questions matters. When you don’t, you cease to be party to the things that control your life and are reduced to flotsam and kipple in the lives of those who do.
Motives matter. Why is usually more important that what, so much so that when it isn’t, that is a good sign that you’re in trouble. When everything you do is motivated by the answer to “Can I make money?”, you are not asking the right questions.