Goat sacrificing starts from some fairly common thinking errors. These create blind spots, and the blind spots allow the sacrificing to begin.
Please note that you will likely have strong feelings about some of the situations I will be giving as examples throughout this book. Yes! Strong feelings is heart thinking in action! This is my point. Please keep this in mind. I will try to give examples from different sides on these various issues, so you can see some from a cool-headed or sympathetic perspective. If one example fires you, and you feel that I have it totally wrong, please see if another example is easier to look at from the cool-headed perspective. I will try, but keep in mind that I have a heart too.
Here are some common thinking errors.
One of the most common sources of blind spot thinking is not understanding the context - the circumstances - within which an action is taking place.
Here is an example from a comedy movie: A man is walking from his cell on death row to face a firing squad. He lights up a cigarette. Someone watching says, “Hey! You shouldn't do that. You'll get cancer.” Will he get cancer? No, his circumstance will not permit it. Did the person making the comment think of that? No. That person was engaged in blind spot thinking - he or she was applying their own circumstance to that of the condemned man.
An experience close to home and experienced by many people involves parking a car. The following experience happened to me as I was writing this book.
I headed for a bi-weekly get-together that I had been attending for about a year at a coffee house. Two doors down from the entrance had been a vacant building with a parking lot. I would park there. It was convenient. In the year that I had been using that lot (with a 20 car capacity), it typically had from two to four cars in it on the evenings I attended the get-together.
Well, congratulations to the owner. He got it rented.
The blind spot thinking incident came about when the new tenant started moving in and started treating the parking lot as “his parking lot” and riffraff were not invited. He shooed me out when I arrived and put up a chain across the lot entrance.
This is a case of dueling blind spot thinking:
• The blind spot thinking of the tenant manager is thinking that those parking spots are his parking spots and only his customers should use them.
• My blind spot thinking is that of being a customer – I don’t care which shop I go into after I park; I just look for a convenient empty space. This guy is cutting me off from convenient parking.
This is the difference between a communal viewpoint of parking versus an ownership viewpoint. It’s a really good example of how circumstance alters how we think about an activity. The other fascinating part is how huffy both sides get on an issue like this. Even though my business side is happy to see a new business on the block, my customer side knows that this tenant guy is 100% jerk (I’m sure he feels the same way about me), and that’s the side that is controlling my feelings about this situation. I am not recommending his business! Note that this particular clash-of-circumstances issue is the basis for the truism “The customer is always right.”
Another contemporary example is horse-drawn carriages that are tourist attractions in city centers. This 23 Mar 14 Wall Street Journal (WSJ) article, “Cities Move to Rein In Horse-Drawn Carriages”, by Mara Gay discusses the issue in a fairly balanced way. But what it doesn't point out is that if these jobs for these horses didn't exist, the horses wouldn't exist.
An older example is taken from Joe South’s 1970 folk song, “Walk a Mile in my Shoes”. Here is the chorus:
Walk a mile in my shoes, walk a mile in my shoes
Hey, before you abuse, criticize and accuse
Walk a mile in my shoes
The song is about how important circumstance is to understanding a situation. A concept South misses in the song - beyond abusing, criticizing and accusing - is aiding. This is important because aiding in the wrong way can become a big waste. An example of this would be giving to a charity run by a con artist: The giver does not understand the circumstances he or she is giving to. Offering help needs to be just as context-sensitive as all these other activities. If not, the good intention will produce results as harmful as ignorant intentions - it will be, in fact, just another ignorant intention.
Circumstance-insensitive blind spot thinking is quite common, and it powers a lot of goat sacrificing.
There's a man standing at the street corner holding up a cardboard sign. The heart of the person in the car says, “He's a poor man. He needs help.” Down goes the window and out goes a dollar bill, maybe even a ten dollar bill.
This feels good to the person in the car, but what actually happened? The person in the car has paid that man to stand on the street corner and hold up a sign. If enough people pay him, he will be joined by a lot of other people holding signs on a lot of other street corners. Are these people poor? Maybe. But maybe they just consider themselves well paid for their time and effort – “Meh. It's a job. And the story I tell, that's part of the job.” The person giving the money has no way of knowing. This is an example of heart thinking taking action without any head thinking engaged to check for waste or deceit.
A quite different example of heart thinking taking control was the Occupy Wall Street protest movement of 2011. In this case a lot of people who were frustrated with the economy blamed their troubles on bankers, financiers, businesspeople and the corrupt government officials who were in cahoots with them. Whether right or wrong in their accusations, some participants occupied Zuccotti Park in New York City, and a lot of others supported them while they did it. One of the curiosities of this movement for me was how much it resembled the Bonus Army, which marched on Washington DC early in the Great Depression cycle in 1932. They too were people frustrated with an economic crash and responding with an occupying, protesting activity. In both cases the goat sacrificing was transforming a business cycle story into a class war story. This transformation was a distraction. In particular it distracted politicians looking for votes. They proposed and passed the wrong kinds of laws, laws that were a knee-jerk reaction to the public protest but did not help solve the economic problems.
Let me give you my definition of panic. This is when a person or community is faced with a scary situation, one that has not happened to them before, and one that calls for immediate action. The unfamiliarity or strangeness of the situation is important. If the situation has happened before then dealing with it becomes a drill instead of a panic. Think fire drills.
The response to this scary situation will more often than not be a blunder. A blunder is an action that feels like the right thing to do at the time by the person making the choice, but in retrospect or from a cool-headed third party point of view, looks very wrong and hugely expensive.
An example: In the middle of the night a house catches fire. The family wakes up and runs out on the front yard. Everyone is out and safe, when suddenly the mother shouts, “MY BABY!” and runs back into the house looking for the child. What she doesn’t notice is the child is in her husband's arms, and he is standing right beside her! She doesn’t notice, because she is panicked, and her action of running into the house is a blunder response to the panic.
Communities can panic as well. The scariness of a surprising economic downturn is a common root cause of a community blunder, and a common blunder is witch hunting in some fashion. The Salem Witch Trials took place in 1692 at a time when Massachusetts Bay Colony was experiencing a lot of political and economic uncertainty. From the Wikipedia article on Massachusetts Bay Colony, “The years from 1689 to 1692 were also difficult ones, since the colony was at the forefront of King William's War, and its frontier communities were ravaged by attacks organized in New France and conducted by French and Indian raiding parties.” It was a scary time, and the scariness was of a new sort. In this case the response was literal witch hunting, and it has become known as a famous blunder in Colonial American history.
Likewise, the Great Depression of the 1930’s was a scary time in the US and around the world. The economies weren’t working; the experts had a thousand different reasons why; but no one could implement solutions sufficient to solve the problems. Dire economic conditions went on for years. US unemployment climbed to 25%, and world trade fell by 50%. And this was during a time with no government social security or unemployment insurance. Scary! Various community responses to the Great Depression provide examples of blunders that grew more and more extreme. Although he is fondly remembered, many programs initiated as part of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal didn’t work out well. Some such as the NRA (National Recovery Administration) were wasteful; others such as the NIRA (National Industrial Recovery Act), the law which created the NRA, were found to be illegal. When the Supreme Court declared the NIRA illegal that started a famous feud between Roosevelt and the Court. But the most vivid and well-remembered blunder from that era was Nazi Germany’s throwing people into concentration camps.
Blunders are spectacular acts of goat sacrificing. They are huge wastes and are eventually identified as such after scariness subsides and cool-headed thinking can resume. At the time, however, they look like someone is finally taking decisive action to end the scary problem.
Goat sacrificing stems from some common root causes: getting the context wrong, blind spot thinking, employing heart thinking without head thinking, and responding to a panic situation with a blunder. If you, the reader, and those around you, can see these situations occurring or coming with your analytical side, then you can take rational, waste-reducing action. The scales will fall from your eyes, and lots of waste can be stopped or avoided in the first place. That is main goal of this book.