Now, below is a cross post from my political blog which first appeared at . Before reading it, I would like to suggest considering another scenario here: people who invest all their self worth into a characteristic. As an example, I knew someone decades ago who was extremely proud of their ability to differentiate between colours (to the extent of being patronising and paternalistic - a characteristic she showed on other matters as well [such as the best way to count to measure the passing of seconds, or that a smart traveller .com site was the same as the .gov site - which it isn't]), but she was, we found, blue-purple colour blind - and devastated to find out, as she had built her entire self esteem on. That is the sort of flawed approach to life that I am also addressing here.
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I have added a new book to my wishlist: Anne Applebaum's "Twilight of Democracy". I never thought I would find a good explanation of what I have been looking for in terms of why people become such flawed humans as to support current fascist and managerially incompetent views coming from the right of politics, but I have.
There's a good review of this book at https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/jul/12/anne-applebaum-how-my-old-friends-paved-the-way-for-trump-and-brexit, but the comments I've read that resonated with me are those around an "authoritarian predisposition" (attributed by the author to Karen Stenner - see here, and book here) - people who "cannot tolerate complexity . . . It is anti-pluralist".
That's it - that's what I've been looking for: it is having fear of complexity (FoC - yes, another acronym) that needs to be noticed, acknowledged and remedied - both in children one is raising, and in organisations of all stripes and types.
I'd been thinking of a post that boils down to "obsession is not professionalism" - which was going to be about the simplistic and rigid thinking which, combined with lack of life experience, winds up putting people in charge of engineering who think - wrongly - that the only way one can be "professional" is by being obsessed with something. In actual fact, being obsessed about one's job (and that is what professions are - jobs) makes one more likely to be prickly about change, defensive, intolerant of challenge, and out of touch with other matters - such as the world becoming more inclusive (I sometimes wonder if some of the dinosaurs know women have the vote). For more on such problems see here, here, here, and, above all else, here.
I am now considering whether that fear of complexity is actually a better way to approach this - that is, the dinosaurs are afraid of the complexity of a normal life, and of the fact that there is no single, clear cut, "best" solution to a problem.
That FoC may well also be an effective way to approach problem parenting - where children are raised to be "mini me's", rather than capable of achieving their full potential.
This may also help address such problems as conspiracy nut jobs and resistance to wearing face masks.
