Process thinking has goals, of course, but they’re all interpersonal. The outcomes, small-o, of Process thinking all have to do with relationships within the group. Why are there blacks in ads for camping gear, despite no black person ever having gone camping in the history of the human race? Because the set designer assumes the writer wants it, and the writer assumes that the creative director wants it, and the creative director assumes the client wants it … which he does, but only because he in turn assumes that the creative director wants it, and etc. To return it to politics, it’s all Narrative.
Combining them, consider the Ukraine Narrative as one giant ad campaign. The lack of Outcome-thinking hit all of us from the very moment it became The Current Thing. What, exactly, are we doing in Ukraine?
Note that there is a case to be made. I don’t agree with it, obviously, but I can make one, and of course it’s ruthlessly Outcome-driven: In a world where States have no friends, only interests, it is consistent with Realpolitik to weaken your rivals when it can be done at low cost and minimal risk. We’re doing to Russia what Russia (and China) did to us in Vietnam — they were quite open about aiding their fraternal socialist brothers in the struggle against Capitalism and Western Imperialism.
One can — and of course in this case would — argue that fucking around in Ukraine is neither low-cost nor low-risk, but that too is Outcome-thinking. You can persuade me, an Outcome thinker, with facts and reason. Steve Sailer is almost a caricature of an Outcome thinker at this point, and he’d be just super at demolishing my hypothetical Realpolitik argument for US aid to Ukraine.
But not only do the Process-“thinkers” in [Washington, DC] not have an Outcome in mind, it never crossed their minds to have one in the first place. This is why I keep coming back to Jaynes [Wiki]. We — normal people — keep trying to assign goals to people like Victoria Nuland. The only goals we can come up with, though, are bugfuck insane — she seems to really believe that not only can Ukraine win the current conflict, but that they’ll march all the way to Moscow, Regime-Change everyone, and invite all the Western parasites in to carve up the country …
… nothing else makes sense, but “sense” left the building with Elvis. There is no Outcome. Which is likelier:
- that she has some top secret Master Plan in a manila folder in a safe somewhere, that reads “Ukraine captures Moscow; Exxon CEO is on the first flight in”; or
- Her behavior seems purposive the way the eerily coordinated gyrations of a school of fish or a flock of birds seems purposive? It looks coordinated, but it can’t actually BE coordinated — it happens too fast for all the individual members to process the signals.
I’ve done a lot of Ukraine shit in the stoyak roundups, and I have never once seen a Victory scenario. The closest even the wildest-eyed optimist comes is very clearly Underpants Gnome shit:
- Send Wunderwaffen to Zelensky
- ???
- Victory!!!
And the third term — the crucial one, Victory — is never ever defined. Let’s assume the Wunderwaffen work and the Big Spring Counteroffensive that they’ve almost literally been advertising, Mad Men-style, goes off flawlessly. What then? At what point do we call off the dogs? Again, unless you seriously believe in Victoria Nuland’s Master Plan — a real document in a real safe, that she got Brandon’s puppeteers to forge his signature on — there simply IS no answer. Their “plan” for “victory” on the battlefield is exactly the same as Bud Light’s “plan” for “victory” with the [Dylan Mulvaney] ads.
It’s all Narrative, all Process. The only outcomes anyone involved considers are all small-o, and they’re all interpersonal. Nobody thinks about battlefield victory — the actual movement of lines on a map, let alone the reality of fighting and dying. But they obsess over being seen to believe in victory. To return to Geo. Orwell‘s commentary:
Creatives spend perhaps half their time in protracted meetings where the primary activity is herding cats, making sure everyone agrees on the current direction of things … until the direction changes, a couple of hours later.
And everyone is fine with this, because everything of importance happens interpersonally.
I’m going to reuse this quote, but this time quote it in full. Two paragraphs, and they’re long, but extremely important. Here’s the first:
The art directors and copywriters who dream up what you see in commercials tend to have a few things in common. The copywriters imagine themselves future screenwriters or novelists, the art directors imagine themselves movie directors eventually. For them, every commercial is a little self-contained movie with a plot and characters, even though no one in the real world gives fifty milliseconds of thought to the character of the TV housewife using that new dustbuster. They very seldom discuss sales, in the sense of “Will this sell more widgets?” In fact they mostly loathe “hard sell” advertising, where you emphasize price.
Emphasis mine, because the question “Will this sell more widgets?” is the definition of Outcome thinking. And if you’re trying to herd cats — as anyone who has had to endure this kind of meeting knows — measurable results are the enemy. Because I really want you to consider the answer to the following question: What’s in it for you, personally, if Acme Corp. sells a thousand more widgets?
Unless you’re a salesman on commission, the answer, for all practical purposes, is: Nothing. Maybe a small bump in your end-of-year bonus, if you get a year-end bonus, but that’s the absolute best case scenario: Another hundred bucks on a single paycheck, six months down the line.
And while I’m certainly not going to sneeze at a hundred dollars, consider what that Benjamin cost you. Half the office hates you now, because you were right. You’re smarter than them, you bastard, and now they know it. You showed them up. Oh, and you’ve also alienated the other half of the office, because what should have been a thirty minute meeting stretched for two hours because you stuck to your guns. Thanks, asshole, I got caught in rush hour and didn’t get home until 7:30. I hope you choke on your $100 bonus. (And don’t think you’re going to get any love from the people who agreed with you in the meeting from the get-go, because they’re all jealous they didn’t think of it themselves).
Now consider the second paragraph, that gets to the heart of Process thinking:
They [“creatives”] favor “conceptual” advertising, where instead of telling you why this cellphone is superior to another, they show you an ironic or cute story involving the cellphone, or maybe you merely show exciting, vibrant people dancing with the thing, with bright colors and music video tropes. This goes back to the recent discussion here of cultural conformity and “mood boards”. Mood boards have been a very big thing in advertising, even more so than twenty years ago. “Look and feel” takes precedence over most things, especially in corporate, nationwide campaigns. For example, you will see Lexus nationwide commercials where the car drives heroically through some surreal industrial or desert landscape, with extreme lighting and lots of flashy cinematography. Local dealer ads for Lexus will concentrate on terms and pricing, and art directors hate doing local dealer car ads. Not artsy enough.
“Conceptual” ads are collaborative ads. With Outcomes, you’re either right or wrong; it either sells more widgets or it doesn’t, but everyone contributes to “mood”. No one can be proven right via sales figures, but no one can be proven wrong, either. Jane sucks at Outcome-driven advertising, because none of her ads moved the sales needle. But Jane is great at “mood boards”; Jane’s a real team player; Jane makes everyone in the meeting feel special. When Jane runs the meeting, we achieve consensus in thirty minutes. When you run the meeting, Mr. Will This Sell More Widgets, it goes on for hours, and we never get the answer — IF we get the answer — until the next quarter’s sales figures come in.
Apply that to the Ukraine Narrative, and test it against Nehushtan‘s heuristics:
“We have always been at war with Eurasia”: what you have to support turns on a dime and doesn’t have to be consistent with anything that went before.
Check. What you “believe” changes as the “mood board” changes, and the “mood board” changes as the group consensus changes in the pitch meeting. We’re all susceptible to this to some degree — someone with stronger Google-fu than mine can no doubt find that old psych experiment from the Fifties, with something like Müller-Lyer lines. No doubt you recall hearing about it: They planted some kids in the crowd who insisted that the shorter lines were really longer, and since these kids were absolutely adamant in their “belief”, eventually most of the class “agreed” that the shorter lines were actually longer.
That’s all consensus stuff, Process stuff. What does it really cost me to say that the shorter line is actually the longer? If it’ll get Jane to finally shut the fuck up, ok. If Jane happens to be really popular, and especially if I think agreeing with her will get me closer to her panties, then the faster I’m going to agree. And if Jane happens to hold my entire career in her hands, and can get me kicked out of the Cloud, to wander the Cursed Earth among the Dirt People …
“Two Minutes Hate”: doesn’t matter who or what the target person is, they are always slotted into the same role, given the same attributes, and the same criticisms are made of them.
Severian, “What is Leftism? (and what to call it?)”, Founding Questions, 2023-05-30.
