Good morning.
Tuesday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of 76. Sunrise is 5:17 and sunset is 8:37 for 15 hours 20 minutes of daylight. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 66 percent of its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater’s Finance Committee meets at 5 PM and the Aquatic Center at 5:30 PM.
On this day in 1961, the Antarctic Treaty System, which sets aside Antarctica as a scientific preserve and limits military activity on the continent, its islands, and ice shelves, comes into force.
These recent years in Whitewater have seen the use of outcome-driven argumentation, where the goal of every claim against a proposal, however specious, is simply to undermine the proposal. These claims don’t even have to be truthful — they need only advance (in a claimant’s mind) the proposal’s demise. This ilk becomes so attached to a desired outcome that it begins to judge every fact, every person, and every development by whether it helps that outcome.
Old Whitewater was, and what remains of it still is, a status-based culture. It ran on one’s identity and social standing, and these determined the perceived merit of what one believed. Not at all a meritocracy, but something like a shabby, small-town aristocracy.1 One earns only one’s own accomplishments; reliance on the accomplishments of earlier generations is an intergenerational plagiarism. See The End of Familial Legacy as Public Entitlement.
Outcome-based arguments are suitable for these types: they want what they want, and damn it they should have what they want, so they say what they want to get what they want. Three kinds of groups typically rely on outcome-based arguments: the entitled, special-interests, and children. One sometimes finds a concentration of all three types in one: entitled special-interest types who are emotionally childish.
It should not surprise, then, that among the remnants of Old Whitewater, outcome-driven arguments are a ready recourse. For many years the same men who argued for wasteful projects through boosterism now use outcome-driven arguments against projects not to their liking. Then as now, their claims are tailored to the results that they want.
Arguments against new housing options for Whitewater from the city’s tiny, reactionary landlord class have been like this. The effectual purpose is to preserve a small-town oligopoly. All the rest is rhetorical diversion. They (and those few they’ve persuaded as fellow travelers) have shown themselves willing to say anything to kill a proposal: (1) although once supporting tax-incremental financing they now oppose the same; (2) although once falsely claiming to bring growth they now oppose those who bring genuine growth; (3) although once calling for more students within the school district they now say we have too many students; (4) all the while insisting ludicrously that proposals are safety risks or — honest to goodness — even crimes. (These last claims about possible criminality are so absurd that each and every person in this town who has raised them should commit to a multi-year, remedial education program.)
Outcome-driven thinking reveals obvious intellectual deficiencies: it subordinates truth to preference, it depreciates proper reasoning, it deprecates serious study, and it thereby makes evaluation a matter of an entitled man’s poorly justified mood.
What has changed for Whitewater, much to the community’s gain, is that even entitled men now have to explain their views at the lectern. When they do, it becomes clear that their own self-images greatly exceed their actual abilities.
It upsets them when they don’t get their way, and they are lightning quick to blame one municipal official or another. No, and no again: it’s not one or another who stands in their way.
Times have changed across an entire community, from one generation to another. They need only look in their own mirrors to see who hasn’t kept pace with these changes.
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- When I have occasionally mentioned these types as small-town notables or town squires, these references were always applied as terms of light ridicule. Imagining oneself a notable or squire in a small American town is halfway to imagining oneself Napoleon Bonaparte. When I first used these terms so many years ago, someone wrote to me to suggest I was envious of those to whom I applied such descriptions. This greatly surprised me. It had never occurred to me that anyone would be envious of the characters in Sinclair Lewis’s Babbitt. I thought then as I think now: those who believe themselves small-town notables should consult a psychiatrist or a priest. ↩︎
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Upcoming posts (in no decided order): A Whitewater Comparative Analysis, Whitewater’s Workforce, and a New Ethics Ordinance.
Blazing warehouse sends black smoke across Houston sky: