You probably have a person in your life that, against all logic and reason and cosmic fairness, does pretty well for themselves. Or maybe it’s a person clinging to existence by the most tenuous of fingertip threads yet consistently makes the situation worse for themselves despite access to redemptive options, love & support, or some other escape from the self-imposed catastrophe. You know this person is a moving wreck, a blackhole of advice, guidance, and support, and you just have to forge on through life with the existence of this pernicious unfairness hiding in the back of your mind. Occasionally, you will interact with someone who is unfamiliar with Mr. Disaster, and you must sit back and watch this new victim slowly realize the scope of insanity. You may try to step in, to warn them that no matter how much they want, or need, to help, that it will do no good, but they will most likely persist because they think you have become jaded and callous. They will look at you askance, and resolve to be a better friend than you, turning your own compassion into sand in your teeth. And you will do your best to not gloat when they finally understand what you were trying to forestall.
If none of this makes any sense to you, congratulations! You have good friends and limited contact with the Perpetual Failure Layer of modern society! You can move on with your life, blissfully unaware, but be wary, because this Layer is expanding at an alarming rate. Pernicious elements exist within any complex system. It is an unavoidable element of the dynamics of cooperative human society. But different systems, be they geographical or ethnic or cultural or religious or racial, have different capacities for tolerance of failure. Some systems go to pieces the moment it goes over 1 in every 100. Others seem purpose built to maximize the amount of worthless detractors extant within. I am very tempted to name names here, but I shan’t. The point is that certain things may still “work” even if they shouldn’t. They appear to defy physics and good sense, like a car with flat tires winning a road race. There are no lack of these things in the Modern American Experience.
I submit that the reason for this plethora of failure mode case studies is a combination of astounding abundance coupled with industrialized efforts to humiliate, punish, and ruin Real Americans. One perspective on the Current State of Affairs is to presume that the train has gone of the rails and just needs to be put back on. But this makes no sense: if a train goes off the rails, it crashes, as opposed to speeding up and gaining more train cars. Our system went off the rails, most recently, in the 1970s. There were lots of contributory factors that stretch much further back, but it is safe to work with this decade being the point where it all went wrong, at least for the purposes of this analysis. The rampant fails and failures are the purpose, not a mistake; a feature, not the bug. And this system, or system of systems more accurately, requires intentional effort. It requires resources and operators and training and the putting in of woman-hours. You don’t get the City of Baltimore1 by accident. Energy and investment must be organized and applied to make the System of Fail continue to operate without collapsing in on itself.
My favorite2 example of energy and investment poured into making an unworkable idea work is the space shuttle. STS-1 through 4 were basically hair brained schemes to make something work that never should have left the drawing board. With each subsequent launch that didn't end in an explosion, a false belief in the utility of the space shuttle increased. The shuttle goes up, the space stuff happens, the shuttle comes down, and everything is working as it should.
As the Thing That Shouldn’t Be Working continues to “work,” it soon becomes The Only Good and Proper Way It Could Be Done. The reality is that, when you compare what the shuttle was promised to do, how it was sold to everybody, and what it actually was, it is hilariously incongruous. The whole point of an SSTO3 is reusability and fast turnaround4 time. The best turnaround time the space shuttle ever had was ~6 months, and that was a meager handful of times. More often the case, it took almost 2 years to turn around the shuttle.
We can see the same thing when we look at social welfare or affirmative action: a need or necessity is cobbled together by a [{(group with a concerted interest)}]; millions are spent trying to “understand” the made-up issue of fulfilling the need; every segment of the economy and society gets in on it in some way, whether they want to or not; a mechanism/framework, oftentimes something that predates the fabrication of the need5, is introduced to great fanfare; the mechanism perpetuates itself because it is now both problem and solution, and finally, anyone who dissents or questions the validity of the mechanism is shouted down or told that so much investment and time has already been spent that it would be foolish not to try to make the best of it. So the Need is now an eternal given and the Mechanism goes from experimental solution to primary solution then only solution.
In the case of the shuttle, the staggering complexity of a thing that never once even came close to what it promised blew up in people's faces TWICE, but to this day people think it not only worked, but was some kind of pinnacle achievement in space exploration. SSTO was a solution in search of a problem, which is fine when everything else is solved and working perfectly. Few things have done so much damage to the concerted scientific effort of the West as the space shuttle. It introduced a culture of needless complexity, purposeless work, and a massive expansion of who was deemed necessary for the process. It didn't stop when space shuttle was finally retired, as the legacy continues on with the SLS launch system.
We see the same thing with the plethora of social welfare programs. Everyone has forgotten that they were promised to solve a problem, then end. Affirmative Action was billed as temporary necessity to ameliorate a constructed problem (institutional discrimination) that would fix the problem in 10 years. Before it was much more than halfway there, it was “under attack” and being sabotaged be pernicious elements dead set on preventing utopia. So it had to be expanded as much as possible and given more time, which it was on both counts. When anyone suggested an audit of the data to determine efficacy, they were painted as racists and silenced. Now it is unthinkable to even reduce social welfare programs, with the two sides to the political party coin only disagreeing on the amount and scope of expansion.
The only time neutral progress can restart after such an event is for a competing system from external sources to enter the environment and utterly displace the bad idea, root and branch. In the case of the shuttle paradigm and NASA's manned space program in general, that is SpaceX and the already legendary Starship. As we watch starship blast off into the air, larger and more advanced than anything before and with a carrying capacity closer to the theoretical Sea dragon, it behooves us to remember that the dreamers and scientists of the 1950s were right all along: The rocket goes up, then the rocket comes down, and the only thing that gets thrown away are the primitive chains tying us to the polytheism of the dirt bound.
Western society is drowning in legacy institutions that serve no good purpose. They were created to transfer wealth away from middle class Whites, or to retard the growth of competitive markets, or to secure sinecures for allies and clients, or to hide ill gotten gains. If anyone dares recommend even a modest reduction, they are assailed by countless voices crying racism or bigotry or *gasp* backwards thinking. And because we have become a nation of cowards, this onslaught usually works. So the inexorable slide into decay continues, and will do so until external forces introduce concepts and methods that utterly displace the previous paradigm. And it must be understood that this displacement will happen, this is not at all an “If” thing. America is incredibly bloated with so many legacy systems and raw economic power that it is easy to assume it will just keep trucking along. But the mass importation of the brown crowd coupled with the collapse of the Global American Empire as a functioning entity means a whole mess of chickens are coming home to roost. There are just too many opportunities for the slicing of scores of Gordian Knots for the system as it is to keep going.
Or NYC, or Newark, or Memphis, or Atlanta, or Chicago, or DC, or Portland, or…
The one I hate the most, most often
Single Stage To Orbit
period between landing safely and being fully ready and able to be launched again
This is a bit convoluted, but I am asserting that Certain Folks wanted American Cities to be indistinguishable from a Third World Shithole and worked backwards from there.