Immigrants Are the American Dream
By George Templeton
Gazette Blog Columnist
Were we that way?
Here's a thought: when someone is bugging me, it's probably in their interest, not mine. I get many emails and quickly delete them. I don’t have time to read them, so I’ll call them when I want something, not the other way around.
In the old days, you went to the brick-and-mortar store and visited the aisle containing the thing you wanted. You saw the thing, felt it, smelled it, and perhaps even tried it on. Armed with these facts, you then made your decision. It was lateral thinking.
You did not have to parse your way through an algorithm’s assumptions about you and piles of irrelevant information. You decided in your quandary.
It is what the mathematician William Byers called our Blind Spot, and it went round and round like a wheel, creating self-referential ambiguity. We would find McCain’s Character and Destiny, morality, and courage on that wheel. They all depend on each other. They are our dark side and our better angels.
Does force persuade?
In management school, we were taught to focus on overt behaviors. They were concretely objective things that could be measured at a place and time. The great innovation of this idea was that an employee might be able to see how they were doing. Because your job is incomplete and full of surprises, the employee and manager must sit together and make adjustments.
But even after that, important things cannot be measured. Our feelings are proxies, indicators of something deeper that must be considered.
Most human beings want to feel appreciated and make a difference. When we involved the employees who were low in the pyramid of power in the decision-making process, the change in attitude and productivity was palpable.
Do you have free will?
It is lonely when you must make decisions, and there is no higher up you can defer to. You can’t be truly free unless you are also responsible.
Charles Spezzano observed, "The most free person is not the one who is free from anything, but the one who is free for everything.”
We are skeptical of things lacking evidence, but what are those? Can it be found by looking inward instead of outward?
Beliefs
That wheel we described earlier turns round and round because we don’t know precisely what virtue is or why it exists within our consciousness. The “why” comforts us, giving our thinking viral contagion and deep understanding. Why would we want a loose cannon on our ship of state?
What is courage? It seems to depend on circumstances. It could be holding a different opinion than your friends and neighbors and being authentic.
The 23 Psalm explains courage. When we distrust one another and fear immigrants who want to contribute, be appreciated, and build a better life, we miss its message. Those people are the American Dream. They were Hitler’s Jewish scientists, the Irish, the Italians, the WW II Japanese concentration camp Americans, the Chinese California gold rush miners, and the unrecognized minorities who did the hard work to build the railroads and work the plantations. There were millions of them. They were not criminals sent by countries wanting to get rid of them.
Proverbs 26: 18-19 seems to apply to our situation. “Like a madman … is the man who deceives his neighbor and says, “I am only joking!” The thousand-year-old concept of the Anti-Christ viewed him as the ultimate adversary of “goodness,” a persecuting tyrant, and a great deceiver. The GOP has its historical policies, but they do not bind our loose cannon. Like the reality TV apprentice, he will fire those who disagree.
In the 30 years of my work, I have had to move manufacturing apparatus back and forth across the oceans, and I can tell you that those foreign countries were not depositing to our Federal Reserve. The American consumer pays the tariffs. I have also dealt with immigration, but I let the lawyers handle that for me.
Is fairness and justice only about having things turn out your way?
Policies are not about crowd size. They are not games or reality TV. They are about “The Courage to Be”. It is about the joy of saying yes to our true being. It is about principle, not just money.
Some things must be understood from the top down. For example, heat was macroscopic initially, but then microscopic atoms were discovered. Statistics provided the correspondence between the two viewpoints. Consider the things providing the correspondence between the political left and right. Is a rose still a rose from any other view? This should bring us together again.
Understanding from the bottom up works when you can find a simple governing principle, helping to provide direction as you spread your wings to fly in the dusk of our increasingly less civil politics. Unfortunately, we might not understand democracy until it has passed away.
Fear, distrust, and hatred are human emotions that can destroy a nation. We must remember that the future builds upon the past, whether we appreciate it or not. No one in 1960, in the worst nightmare, could have dreamed that we would come to this. The generation who raised me could not vote for Adlai Stevenson in 1956 because he was divorced, and they did not like Eisenhower because they could not like a war general. Today, self-interest is the dominant Republican ethos.
How To Think
Start by thinking laterally. How would you classify your feelings? Which bucket would you put them in? Buckets can overlap and change over time.
Good stories involve intentions that cannot be measured. They might not be accurate, but when they are true, we can sense that.
But what if we think vertically, in threads? That uses big data and is not human. The danger of artificial intelligence is that we let AI think for us in an inhuman way that is easier than thinking for ourselves.
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