The rise of the amoral compass ...

Some believe that each of us has a moral compass of sorts.

In broadest terms, it supposedly determines how we perceive right and wrong, what’s ethical behavior and what isn’t, and how we conduct ourselves. Also how we see and judge others.     

No one is certain where this moral compass comes from.  It may be from how our parents raised us, what we were taught in school, religion, the life stories of those we admire, and real-world experience, among other influences.

Or it may be something some of us are born with or without. Sociopaths are said to lack a moral compass, not necessarily as learned behavior, but some seem to have been born that way; the concept of right or wrong or the effect on others simply has no bearing on their actions. It’s not that they don’t recognize right and wrong – they just don’t care. 

They are driven by an amoral compass in the extreme. They do what they want because it pleases them alone. They have no interest in the feelings of others, the pain they might inflict, or how they may be perceived by society.  They don’t care about anyone but themselves.

It seems more and more people in our country are using an amoral compass.  I’m not saying they’re immoral; that requires a subjective interpretation of morality. No, I’m saying that they don’t really accept conventional and traditional concepts of right or wrong.

Their moral compass has no fixed points, in other words. 

I’m not sure they’ve dispensed with a moral compass intentionally; more likely it’s because an amoral compass is more fun, and easier to follow, because it doesn’t have any rules.

Life can be so much simpler if there aren’t any rules.  If you want something you just take it.  If a law or rule gets in the way of your enjoyment, you just ignore it. If you make a promise and break it, so what?  You don’t have to tell the truth, honor your debts, pay your bills, be faithful or loyal to anyone, support yourself, protect your own children, or anything else if you don’t want to. 

You can take selfies in a store licking donuts or ice cream and putting them back on the shelf.  You can jeopardize the lives of others with a stunt. You can flash-mob a store to loot it. You can even physically assault someone you don’t like, sucker-punch people you don’t know, or destroy public or private property, if you wish. If someone else gets harmed in the process, who cares?

You don’t. And that’s all that matters.    

Following the rules is for chumps, to those with an amoral compass. 

In the past, people like this would be pariahs.  Outcasts.

Today, however, they’re often praised. For the life of me, I don’t know why.  But I do know it encourages more to join in.  Copycats of bad behavior abound. 

I constantly find myself wondering WTF is wrong with some people these days. 

Part of it may be the desire to be a social media star, however fleeting. How else can you explain people posting videos online showing them clearly committing disgusting acts? Mind you, these aren’t acts secretly caught on surveillance cams, but intentionally staged, recorded, and posted online by the perpetrators themselves. They aren’t trying to hide; they want everyone to see.   

If anything, it’s getting worse. People are making videos of themselves gleefully destroying public monuments. Spraying graffiti on memorials to fallen veterans of WWII and Vietnam.  There’s camera-phone footage of people attacking an ICE detention facility, tearing down the American flag and replacing it with a Mexican flag, then flying a defaced American flag upside down.  You’ll also find online videos of black-clad people severely beating journalists covering Antifa protests – they are obviously enjoying themselves in the process. 

They celebrate lawlessness.  They embrace anarchy.   

Recently some Antifa nutjob attacked another ICE detention facility in Tacoma, Washington with firebombs, and then tried to shoot a commercial-size propane tank there with his AR-15 before he was shot and killed. He could have murdered hundreds – Federal agents and detainees alike, if he’d been successful in igniting the propane tank. 

Maybe you missed all that.  Probably because the media somewhat ignored this clear act of domestic terrorism. There’s no other way to describe what this was.

Yet the media by and large didn’t call it that.

Did the people who continually accuse ICE of not protecting detainees denounce this terrorist’s actions? Nope. They tacitly gave him a pass. They didn't even comment on his use of an AR-15 or bring up the need to ban "assault weapons," which frankly surprised me.  Nobody on the left was willing to speak out on this. Well, except for the Seattle chapter of Antifa which praised his act of terrorism and declared him a martyr “who gave his life to the struggle against fascism.”  

This is nuts, and scary. And it’s spreading. 

We now have mayors and governors openly defying Federal laws and refusing to cooperate with Federal agents trying to remove illegal immigrants with criminal convictions, including at times convictions for rape and murder. We have sitting members of Congress publicly advising illegal immigrants how to lie their way into our country.  And how to avoid deportation even after these same illegal immigrants have had their day in court and been issued valid court orders to leave.

I’m not sure where this all ends.  I fear we are reaching a tipping point that will cause a radical swing the other direction. We’re getting dangerously close to that every day.  

I worry that at some point enough people here will start to believe law enforcement and the courts can’t protect them, their loved ones, and their property anymore. When that happens, some may start taking the law into their own hands because they feel they have no alternative.

The overwhelming majority of those people won’t be neo-Nazis, white nationalists or white supremacists, racists, bigots, ignorant rednecks, or fascists. They’ll probably be pretty normal Americans.  Most will be as vehemently opposed to all those groups as much as anyone else.

It’s a grave mistake to underestimate how many American citizens are nearing the breaking point about the growing trend toward social and political anarchy, lawlessness, and the rise in senseless violence. Or how far they can be pushed before they start pushing back. They’ve been largely silent to this point, giving the mistaken impression they don’t care. 

I think they do, driven largely by their own moral compass. Like me, they watch the news at night and wonder what the hell is going on.

Why would someone lick a tub of ice cream and puts it back in the freezer in a supermarket? And then why would this encourage other people do the same? WTF is that? How could a state governor calmly admit that infanticide may be permitted under a law he signed if the woman decides she doesn’t want her just-born baby. Huh? When did that become okay?    

Many of us are already baffled why our laws aren’t being enforced. Why are some local police told to do nothing when they see certain crimes in progress? Why are police forces in some big cities – and even some entire states – forbidden to ask someone they stop if they’re a US citizen? Why are law enforcement officers ordered to stand down while rioters burn down whole city blocks, pummel those officers with bottles and bricks, and attack innocent bystanders? 

When did all that become acceptable?  It makes no sense. 

Most Americans don’t like what they see.  And nobody in power seems to care.   

Right now they may feel helpless. Confused. They are also becoming increasingly angry.     

I suspect their numbers are growing every day. It’s just not being reported. 

At some point ordinary Americans will have had enough.  At best, they'll vote irresponsible politicians out of office.  At worst, it's anybody's guess.    

Too big to succeed ...

Size matters. Especially in terms of organizational efficiency. 

After a certain point, the larger an organization grows the more inefficient it becomes.

A perfect example is our own government and the myriad programs it supposedly manages.  Spending keeps going up and up as it gets more and more inefficient. Nobody is really managing it because it’s now essentially unmanageable. 

There are untold layers upon layers of departments and agencies that exist in a virtual vacuum, fully staffed with well-paid government employees, chugging along day after day, doing only God knows what perhaps for reasons that may have long passed. They thrive, nonetheless.

Nobody really knows what they’re doing. Or even why they still exist.

Congress always seems to be making more of them. More agencies. More special offices.  More committees with additional support staff.  More “boards” of this or that, like the one charged with insuring that goods claiming to be made by Native Americans really are.  Congress and regulators always think adding more people and spending more will make things better. 

Of course it doesn’t.  It’s only making things worse, and government more inefficient and less accountable at every level.     

Just about anybody who has ever worked in a large corporation knows that bulking up doesn’t always make an organization better.  Quite the contrary, most often.

As the workforce expands, nobody wants to share resources with any other group. They want their own accounting people, their own IT folks, their own tech-support personnel, their own customer-facing reps. Before long, they’ve brought redundancy and spending to new heights.

The bigger issue is that many group leaders start seeing their most important role as protecting the resources and headcount they’ve built.

Resources and headcount must be constantly justified to avoid cuts.  Everybody must appear so busy they can’t possibly be cut.  In the absence of real meaningful work, meetings proliferate, task forces are created, work is subdivided so much that individual workers are increasingly distanced from the organization’s customers.

Everybody is “overwhelmed.” Too busy to take on anything else. The solution? Increase budgets to add more people to lighten the load. That’s how organizational bloat and fat come about.      

With more people and departments in the mix, there are more potential turf wars to overcome. More butts to cover. With more people involved there’s more potential for serious mistakes though ignorance, ineptitude, indifference, laziness, or even sabotage.

That’s why most successful businesses every now and then purge as much redundancy and non-essential personnel as possible. They try to flatten their org charts, reduce superfluous headcount, and at the same time increase accountability at every level.  The goal is to boost efficiency and improve productivity, and, of course, reduce unnecessary cost.

Done properly it’s not just rearranging things – like the deck chairs on the Titanic.  That accomplishes nothing; the bloat is simply reconfigured and moved around while the organization continues to flounder and sink under its own weight. Changing who reports to whom, where offices are located, and designing a new floor plan doesn’t address the underlying problem.   

Objectively reassessing what’s really needed for the organization to succeed and thrive, not just now, but in the future, is what’s needed.  Making the hard decisions on what and who are essential, and then acting on those decisions, is the only way to start solving systemic problems.

Jobs get cut.  Departments eliminated and consolidated. Redundancy is lessened.  The media complain it’s unfair to cut the jobs of so many people who’ve worked there so long. There’s almost never a discussion of whether those employees should have been gone long ago.    

To be candid, streamlining also enables organizations to get rid of troublesome employees, habitual blame shifters, idea killers, slackers, back stabbers, empire builders, and those who spend more time playing office politics than doing their jobs.

Which is also a healthy thing to do. 

That lesson is lost on our government. 

It’s become too big, too complex, to succeed. It employs too many people doing too little, for too much, simply because they are protected by their unions and friends in Congress.  There’s little to no accountability for bad behavior; there’s almost never a consequence for doing their job badly, or even breaking the law – something they’d get fired for anywhere else.

Consequently, our government no longer serves us as much as it serves itself and those employed within it.  Nobody in government worries about losing their job; that feeds their arrogance that no one can touch them, no matter what they do.  That explains why they feel they hold the real keys to power, not elected representatives or even a President. 

Government employees feel protected by the size of government itself. To increase their personal job security, they want government to grow even more. To be more complex. To insulate themselves with more layers. The bigger it gets, the more complex it becomes, the more areas they can hide in. And the less visible – and less accountable – every employee within it becomes.

It shouldn’t surprise anyone that most government employees are Democrats; Democrats are always in favor of expanding the size of government.  As are government employee unions.  

But an ever-expanding government bureaucracy is truly dangerous.         

It will only get worse unless someone starts cutting the fat, the bureaucracies, and the non-essential agencies and personnel bogging it down.   

I’m convinced the current government employee base – not counting the military – can easily be reduced by 10-15%, if anyone has the guts to do it. There’s so much unnecessary redundancy, so many superfluous departments, agencies, and “boards” designed to solve problems already solved or problems that aren’t really problems, it wouldn’t be rocket science.

The Federal employee base is just the start. We could also cut the bloated number of contractors – most of whom exist to do the same work current Federal employees should be doing.

If we’re really worried about threats to our security and protecting sensitive classified information, why are we outsourcing so much of that work to contractors to manage our most confidential information? We already have enough security issues with full-time government employees and members of Congress leaking sensitive data to damage those with whom they disagree. Do we really need to add even more vulnerabilities through outside contractors? 

Of course not. Can you say Eric Snowden? 

The easiest way to have better security is to have fewer people in the loop. The easiest way to reduce inefficiency is to have less deadwood and fewer schlagers clogging up the works. 

The easiest way to get a more responsive and manageable government is to make it smaller.

That way there’s more accountability at every level. Fewer places to hide.  And less bureaucratic infighting that drags everything down and stalls decision execution. 

Every top business executive knows this. I’m sure Trump does, too. 

I hope if he gets reelected, he’ll take this on.  

If you don't like the accommodations, don't come ...

Long ago I ran out of patience for illegal immigrants. 

I’m serious – who the hell do they think they are?  What makes them think we owe them one damned thing?  More to the point, since when did it become our responsibility to make them comfortable when they illegally enter our country?

The height of chutzpah is for illegal immigrants to complain about how they are treated when they’re detained here.  On their long journey to our border they probably slept outdoors on the ground, crapped on the side of the road, ate whatever they could beg or steal, and drank from streams. They probably didn’t shower or bathe for weeks.  If they got sick on the way, there were likely few if any doctors to treat them.

However, once they get here they expect us to put them up in a Holiday Inn-like environment with air conditioning and a cable TV?  Get fed for free three times a day? Get fresh water any time they want? Sleep in their own room with a private bath?  Get expert medical treatment?

They didn’t have any of that at home, did they?  Nor on their journey. 

And they shouldn’t get extra-special treatment here, either. 

I’m not saying we should mistreat them.  But mistreatment, in this case, is a relative term.  Especially when you consider the way they’ve been living getting here.  Or in their home country. 

For people from places where women still beat their laundry on rocks, homes have dirt floors, there’s no indoor plumbing much less air conditioning in their homes, and where the safety of drinking water is often iffy, you’d think they be appreciative of what we are already doing. We’re giving them clean clothes and new shoes for them and their kids, disposable diapers for their babies, sanitary products for the women, medical care, clean bedding, indoor plumbing and safe drinking water, while we’re schooling their kids and feeding everybody every day.  

Granted, it’s not the Ritz. But it’s a hell of a lot better than where they came from. 

They should be grateful we even allowed them to cross our border.  We could have just cuffed them like any other criminal – which is what they are – and frog marched them back into Mexico. Why we didn’t escapes me.  It would have been simpler and cheaper.  And less annoying. 

I’m sorry they aren’t happy with their treatment and temporary living conditions here. 

Too bad. We didn't invite them here.They didn't bother to apply in advance for the legal right to come in. They just showed up at our border, anyway. Now there’s no more room at the inn. We’re all full up. They knew that, and yet they kept coming. What did they expect?  

That they'd be welcomed with open arms? We'd magically make more room for them?      

I’m sorry unaccompanied minors have to share their quarters with other unaccompanied minors.  I’m sorry adult women and men are separated from children that aren’t theirs. I’m sorry our facilities are overcrowded, because we never expected this many illegal immigrants at one time. I’m sorry they feel like they aren’t being treated like guests, rather than people who broke into your house and demanded you clothe, feed, and take care of them and their families forever.     

Which is, in essence, what they've done. And what they really want, I believe.      

Most of all, I’m sorry they came here in the first place.   

They are in detention facilities, which is a fancy euphemism for a jail, because they are criminals. They are criminals because they broke our laws when they entered our country illegally. No one should be surprised we’re housing them like criminals.

But we are still treating them better than that. Much better.         

They’re not noble or something special.  I don’t care if they shed buckets of crocodile tears while requesting asylum on false pretenses.  The only reason most come here is to get our health benefits, free education for their kids, and to make more money than they could back home. 

And the unaccompanied minors? They’re here to rejoin their parents already here illegally. The adult males traveling alone? They just want to make money; money they’ll send back to their native country as remittances to support the families they left behind – at best – but more likely to pay coyotes to bring those families across our borders illegally, too. 

They’re flooding our border because they all believe they’ll be allowed to stay, one way or another.  Which, given our stupid, pandering politicians, especially Democrats, they probably will.

Our only hope is to deter even more would-be illegal immigrants.  We’re stuck with the ones already detained here, barring a radical change in immigration policy.

But we don’t have to make it even more attractive for those who haven’t gotten here yet.  Dramatically expanding and improving our detention facilities to handle more illegals sends the wrong message.  It’s like Field of Dreams: if you build it they will come.  And they will. 

   

That would be even dumber than our politicians insisting we must. 

Again, I’m not saying we mistreat them. That wouldn’t be right. 

But we’re under no obligation to make them more comfortable.  Or to prevent us from sometime firing up a no-vacancy sign at the border when we‘re out of detention space. Like now. 

And for those illegal immigrants complaining about conditions in our detention facilities, too bad. They can always find another place to stay. 

Like maybe back home in Honduras, Guatemala, or El Salvador. Better still, demand that Democrats in Congress let them camp out at their homes.   

But haven’t they traveled all these months to get here? Haven’t they gone through a lot to get here?  Doesn’t that count for something? 

Nope.  They came without a reservation.  Now there’s no room available. 

They should have thought about that grim possibility before they left home.