Management: Delphi Politics (Updated)

Good evening, readers. Tonight’s lesson falls under the headings of Organizational Theory and Systems Analysis. (I offer a Christian spiritual version of this same material on my other blog. Edit: that blog has been shut down.)

Every collection of humans involves politics. Politics can be defined as the leverage to persuade others toward an objective. That objective invariably means power and/or wealth for some favored person or group within the larger body. Fundamental to human nature is every group will always manifest certain trends, in that a tiny minority will be leaders, with a coterie of supporters, then a larger group of followers, and a few outliers on the fringe.

This is immutable. It makes no difference what personality types are involved under any other frame of reference. Bring a bunch of bridge engineers together and they will manifest that structure after a short time.

The Delphi Method builds on this basic principle of human social interaction. It is designed to leverage whatever constitutes political power in any given setting to reach a predetermined end. That end inevitably means power and wealth for whomever is pulling this lever.

Absolutely essential is the secrecy of the group. All politics is conspiracy, and every government is by definition a conspiracy to rule. In all cases, the Delphi Method is a conspiracy, even in the more popular sense. The objective is to hijack something before the others involved realize it.

The second most essential ingredient is training for the members of the conspiracy. This is the most expensive part of the whole thing. Even when the knowledge is free, the investment of man hours is necessarily high. We assume the members are committed, as is usually the case with socialist/communist activists. The primary figure in pressing this agenda is called a facilitator in current manifestations.

The methods vary with the leverage sought. The original Delphi method was aimed at leading a panel of experts to consensus in a foregone conclusion. Essential was keeping them isolated so that no one of them felt strong enough to object against the threat of marginalization. Where the subjects actually know the issues involved, it’s essential to make them dependent on the false sense of inclusion. Only a tiny minority of this panel is likely to stand firm in resisting, and they can be discounted by weight of numbers.

If the target is any broader population, there is a strong reliance on the same principle that only a few really understand what’s going on, and the rest are fodder for manipulation. The political momentum of majority rule shuts down the handful of experts. Critical to the effort is identifying them first. Most people can be cajoled into revealing entirely too much about themselves in the presence of a skilled facilitator.

From here, there are two tracks. If the conspiracy is small, herd the resistors into a single group and marginalize them as a whole. This is risky, but can be done. Less risky is a method requiring more trained facilitators. Then the larger group is broken into committees, with each being led by a facilitator, and opponents scattered out thinly among the small groups. Each one becomes isolated and marginalized by the facilitator manipulating the small group.

Within any small group, the method is a mix various ways of disabling and discrediting the strong opposition leader. The facilitator does their best to make the opposing leader seem flaky, weird, an outsider. Everything of substance is challenged according to a prepared script of talking points. There is a heavy reliance on drawing false distinctions, using loaded phrases and emotional appeals. If at all possible, the opposing leader will be forced into any number of impossible corners using semantic games, false dichotomies which exclude real answers, and hopefully getting the opposition flustered or otherwise agitated.

It’s a rare leader who can withstand this sort of thing. It requires the opponent be smarter and better trained than the facilitator. It also requires a powerful sense of structure regarding the agenda under discussion and some debate experience to prevent letting the facilitator dodge any critical items. It requires pointing out the head games, yet remaining clearly in charge, so the rest of the group realizes what’s happening.

But if only one small group is rescued, the whole thing is lost. When the forum is a large town hall type setting, you’ll need near parity of leadership in opposition to the facilitators, carefully working together in secret with even better planning to counter a good Delphi operation. You’ll need several very astute and reasonable sounding leaders each seeming to rise individually in opposition with their own particular issue, not accepting any form of dodging the question. Each one has to be a debate champion and a good actor, with a pleasant voice and demeanor. In other words, effective opposition is pretty rare.

The best defense is mysticism. That is, never have anything which can be hijacked in the first place. This is why leaderless resistance is encouraged, because all it needs for effectiveness is a unity of purpose and commitment. There is no objective or target, per se, but something rooted in human nature itself. Everything else is left to the individual, as to tactics and methods. Even the target of opposition is soft and conceptual, so that there is never a repeating pattern which can be analyzed for infiltration and interdiction. When what you care about most is something fundamental to life itself, no one can stop you. Resistance to evil must be organic in the self.

Mysticism does not require ignoring all the tactics of politics, but requires not being trapped by politics and political concerns. Indeed, I highly encourage a full course of study in logic, rhetoric, history, and all the social sciences. We should know what makes other people tick because that’s the only way we can set them free to pursue things which really matter.

Addenda: I left out the bare bones outline of Delphi procedure:

1. Identify strong opposition to the agenda. (Hint: This is where you play reserved and avoid self-disclosure.)

2. Dilute their leverage by isolating and marginalizing them.

3. Overwhelm residual resistance in others by incrementally creating a wholly, fundamentally different perspective on the questions at hand. Create in their minds an entirely new narrative and background using propaganda methods. (Hint: If working alone, and you see this coming, here is the best point to shut down a Delphi maneuver by pointing out unspoken assumptions, what the propaganda hides, particularly in terms of philosophical shift. They’ll probably escort you out under some pretense of being unruly and disruptive, and you’ll be marked forever afterward.)

4. Once the majority have embraced the new understanding of things, play the two sides off against each other, where the opposition can’t get a fair hearing. (Hint: If you have a good organized resistance, this is where you all rip it to shreds.)

Obviously the single most important objective is political fracturing. Recently, with political consensus so hard to gain, the Delphi method has expanded to introducing multiple fractures into numerous small parties in the opposition bloc.

Cascade of Choices

How far do you go chasing truth? One thing leads to another, as the old rock song says.

The title of my blog indicates I want to do what’s right for myself, and I write to give others a chance to consider what it might mean for themselves. Sometimes I can be downright practical, but most of the time it’s not even exactly theoretical, but calling you to reach above your own intellect.

In the land of Linux and Open Source software, one of my primary complaints is too few developers understand users. Part of that disconnect leads to problems when someone feels a need to upgrade one item, which is probably broken, only to discover doing that requires upgrading almost everything else, or adding lots of new stuff which demands more upgrades, on and on into infinite loops of destructive replacement. This happens when the developers so narrowly interpret what is required for this or that package, according to their own whims and damn everyone else with the differing Linux setups. And God forbid they should ever go back and simply fix the previous version. But it seems generic coding is a lost art, an art based on consciously trying to address human need.

If you don’t write code yourself, you are stuck, and they just can’t be made to care about that. The vast majority of people can’t write code because the learning curve is huge, and precious few are willing to teach. The barriers are massive. The saints are those who take a moment to share a bit of code to fix particular mismatches, or who actually rewrite something to be more accommodating to the wide differences in various Linux systems. I rather hope I’m not throwing out spiritual code too difficult to reach from where you are. Writing the code to your daily life is something I honestly believe is already hard-wired into your soul, even as I consciously consider the vast array of human individuality.

When I suggest Western Civilization as a whole is a failure, I’m presuming you are smart enough to realize you can’t just pretend you will walk out of it today. What I’m hoping you’ll do is think about it enough to find ways to get a little closer to something better than the West, even as you are stuck in it. Part of that “something better” should include living a message which confronts the West, at least in some small ways. The underlying issue with truth is not keeping it all to yourself, but a commitment to removing obfuscations. Sometimes I can offer some examples of how that plays out.

For example, I was recently confronted with some really aging and ragged discussions of race relations and sexism. Most of such discussions are handed to us in obfuscated code, set afloat in the world on a giant raft of false assumptions. You aren’t permitted to enter their conversation without climbing on that raft. All I can say is, don’t do it. Your little rowboat of truth is far safer. Don’t engage them until you can draw attention to the junk raft itself. You can go a lot farther toward solutions when you choose a boat designed according to the waters you intend to sail.

Sexism? Yes, by definition I’m a sexist. That is, I assert you cannot sanely create uniform outcomes under any useful measure. The system is already broken, and pushing through something with badly damaged assumptions about what it should look like coming out the other end only breaks more things. So I use Game, clinical observations about human behavior in relation to sexual identity, and the resulting theoretical explanations, to prove sexism is frankly necessary to understand humans and get along in this world. I reject equal outcomes because I reject the whole stinking system in the first place. Use Game and you’ll find far more peace, and ignore the screamers (which tactic is part of Game anyway).

Racism? When someone offers a consistent definition of “race” on which everyone else agrees, we can talk. Is it about certain physical differences? Sure, I can ignore that. I do it all the time. Is it about complex cultural baggage correlated with those physical differences? It is almost with violence I reject the notion I can’t pass judgment on cultural expressions, because I do it with my own native culture. You have a problem with that? Argue with God; I’m using His standards and His chosen culture as the baseline. I refuse to debate whether it’s right. My rejection is not based on pure matters of taste, which is yet another thing I won’t surrender, but for an entirely different reason. That’s not to say I’m going out of my way to make everyone conform to my tastes nor my cultural judgments, but it’s damned (literally) nonsense to suggest I have to swallow and “enjoy” something I find unbearable. So while I won’t destroy your car if your stereo plays rap music loud enough to rattle the windows on my Jeep, I will probably laugh when someone else does, or when random events do it. Meanwhile, I’ll keep my radio tuned to Classical music, thank you.

It’s the same reason I don’t take my own life, though I am longing to leave this world. Not everything we wish for is properly addressed by active pursuit. I assert there is a God in Heaven who steers certain events He claims for Himself as His prerogatives. I didn’t make all these messes, and all I can do with them is what I understand He requires of me.

This world is not what it was designed to be. It’s broken, and from that follows a certain amount of breakage in every human life. Some of our human discomforts are simply par for the course, the random results of bigger things no one here can control. That would be issues such as which sex you are and other physical characteristics. DNA is like that; it doesn’t ask your permission. So is an awful lot of what we experience as human choices. Malice is too easily imputed where it doesn’t exist. Worse, it’s often imputed to individuals who were handed a lot assumptions about life by the same people who gave them their DNA. I believe one of the worst forms of malice is assuming someone close to you in time and space should be blamed for not having chosen some other DNA and heritage. That sort of thinking is itself a matter of heritage, and becomes a sorry excuse for attacking someone in easy reach.

You want justice? I rather think you can’t afford to pay the price for real justice. Too many people have chosen one narrowly defined bit of justice over all others, and that is injustice in itself. Given what we are all up against, perhaps the only hope we have is first discovering what justice means, then work out what it looks like, and try to make it happen in what little you actually can choose. No justice will come from leveraging the current system, because it is inherently unjust from the very roots.

I reject the whole system in the first place, and I’ll do everything I can to escape it’s clutches.