Michael Lewis is my friend.

Not really, of course, I’ve never met or talked with him, but he’s taught me a lot with his writing and for that I feel very friendly towards Michael Lewis.

I found some time this winter to spend with his book, The Big Short. He promised, right up front and on the cover to show me the inside of (cue ominous music) THE DOOMSDAY MACHINE.

I can’t believe I waited so long to take him up on that.

Wall Street had created a glorious profit-manufacturing black box, a sort of magician’s cabinet where something goes in and some other thing comes out, spewing coins. No one but the magicians and some of their assistants knew how it worked, but everyone applauded.

On the outside of every in-group is at least one out-group of misfits, and Lewis introduces a few and shows what they found when they peeked into Wall Street’s little manufacturing shop of mortgage bonds.

The investments were complicated by design, creating lots of smoke. Inside the investments, bonds mirrored each other to give an illusion of endless profits.

Endless! Profits!

Entire industries had been puffed up on the belief that there were endless profits. The money flowed in. Wall Street was sucking up money.

The misfits discovered the mirrors and saw through the complicated structure and realized it would implode. They found a way to trick the tricksters into giving them lots of the money too.

That’s about as simple as I can make it.

There are actually no magicians in Lewis’ book. It’s better than that. It’s a tale of greed and betrayal and we’re all still living in the aftermath. Wall Street is still blowing smoke to cover their tracks and the same people who helped blow smoke all along are still helping them now.

Anyone who still believes that it was all too complicated to understand should read this book.

Image by Flickr profile GlenBledsoe

The pipes in the house were bumping and thumping and making all kinds of scary noise. It sounded like a monster was chained in the basement, trying to escape. That turned out to be a fairly apt metaphor too.

I spent hours trying to bleed the air out of my boiler heating system. The air wasn’t even supposed to be in there. I’d had a special bleeder valve added to the system awhile back so that air would automatically escape. Yet there the air was.

More alarming than the noise was the monster’s breath. Sporadically, steam hissed out of the bleeder valve in a menacing blast.

It puzzled my furnace guy. He never saw the steam but he didn’t doubt me. He thought that the air in the boiler water was a sign that the bleeder valve wasn’t working anymore but he couldn’t explain how it still allowed steam to escape.

He showed me how to bleed the system manually. It was a time consuming process involving water trickling through a hose into a bucket, watching bubbles of air escape. The procedure was complete when there were no more bubbles.

The noise you’re hearing is just air in the system, he told me. Get the air out and you’ll be fine.

He promised to check on the cost of replacing the bleeder valve. It was solid brass. The metal had become very costly lately.

I trickled out bucket after bucket, watching air bubbles rise. They were endless.

The noise continued. Once or twice a day I caught the monster breathing steam again. I’d been warned that the boiler could crack if there was too much steam. That would mean a whole new furnace. I cut the power to the boiler and kept on bleeding it.

The bubbles were endless.

The house got cold.

I turned the boiler power back on. I kept burping the monster.

The bubbles were endless.

At one point the controller box began to hum loudly, so loudly that I was afraid it was some kind of alarm. I swatted it with my hand. It stopped humming.

Ah, percussion maintenance works again, I thought.

The next morning I found that the boiler no longer responded to the thermostat.

I told all of this to the furnace guy.

Keep bleeding, he said.

It was getting cold out and he was handling a lot of calls from his customers, working into the evening day after day. I’d always known him to work this hard. He’d been born into the business that his father had started in 1950 and he’d been running it himself for over a decade.

That night the boiler steamed and thumped with reckless fury.

Turn off the boiler, he said. It could crack. Do you have another heat source? Can you stay warm? You must need a new controller. I can’t get one until the morning.

The controller would be about as expensive to replace as the bleeder valve.

And the furnace guy’s labor and expertise were appropriately costly too.

The next day he showed up with a new pump.

I was talking with some of the guys, he said, and we decided the real problem is that the pump is failing. The heated water isn’t being distributed well through the system. The boiler water is overheating because it doesn’t get far so sits and cooks. That puts air into the system and makes steam.

He swapped out the pump. This part was about half as costly as either of the previously proposed solutions.

The house began to warm again. And it was quiet. The banging stopped. There was no more steam. The controller worked again. The monster morphed back into a quiet house helper.

I’m grateful that my furnace guy listened to my description of what was happening. The boiler neither thumped nor steamed while he was present, just meekly kicked in. Except for the bubbles in the system, everything had seemed to be working.

His listening skills had paid off.

I’m grateful that he kept thinking and didn’t just charge into the first solution that presented itself, or the second.

Both solutions would have been expensive and neither would have fixed the problem.

His years of experience with problem solving had paid off.

I’m grateful that he’d shared the problem with others in his field and considered their ideas.

His professional network had paid off.

The most valuable component of the service he’d provided wasn’t a new pump, it was himself.

Over the past year I’ve been saddened to hear many people devalue the labor and experience of other workers with no real understanding of the requirements of the fields they deride as overpaid. I pray this type of mass derision and contempt never falls on my furnace guy or the others in his field.

Because as expensive as the labor was for my boiler service, it could have been much worse. There is no basis for expecting omniscience from a problem solver, ever. Human beings are often inventive and clever but no one can truthfully call any of them perfect.

The best and closest substitute for troubleshooting perfection that we can have is a process that includes patience, knowledge, thought and respect.

Those attributes carry a necessary cost but such a process is what the best troubleshooters must rely on if problems are to be actually solved.

Image from Flickr : “fallrod”

Scientific American: Transcranial Stimulation Shows Promise in Speeding Up Learning

The researchers credit awareness, prevention, and prosecution. People and organizations are more vigilant than they used to be.

Vigilance creates real and significant results, a 61% decrease from 1992 to 2009.

That means fewer victims. Less pain. Less trauma. Fewer ruined lives and ruined careers.

All because victims and their families/advocates/witnesses/supporters have stepped forward and said, “This is what happened to me” or “this is what I saw/heard.”

Cases of abuse have plunged because people spoke up. By speaking up, they helped prevent others from becoming victims.

In spite of the pressure to stay silent, some people stepped up. In spite of knowing that others would call them liars, question their character or say that they were asking for it somehow, would judge the way they’ve lived their lives, would slander them and their families, criticize them for making noise about it, criticize them for waiting so long to say something, or for not saying enough, or for saying too much. In spite of knowing that speaking up would have negative effects on their lives in the short-run and in the long. In spite of knowing that they would be accused of having ulterior motives for speaking up, would be accused of trying to hurt the abuser for their own gain. In spite of knowing that everything would change.

That’s Courage.

Think about the grown men in the Penn State case who were faced with this kind of discomfort and backed off. They decided that the victims didn’t need help. They decided that it couldn’t have been so bad, that the abuser was one of them and so they “had his back” and would keep it between themselves. They decided to tell the abuser not to make them uncomfortable by doing it in their own territory and they decided to look away and pretend that if they didn’t see it then it meant that he had stopped.

Think about how easy and normal it is to have that response when faced with something so personally uncomfortable. Think about how easy it is to identify with the nice but authoritative abuser and be sympathetic and maybe even forgiving because he’s so darn human and just made a mistake.

Abusers can be so nice! If they are in a position of authority people look up to them. They can be charismatic, jovial, funny, generous, gregarious, and friendly. They can look so innocent, yet assertive. They are likable, empathetic, and kind. They might even have candy but that would be the least of their offerings. Praise, sympathy, belonging and approval can be so much sweeter than candy.

Serial abusers are usually surrounded by people who have experienced all of these things and think the abuser is wonderful.

Sometimes people step forward and speak up. It might make you uncomfortable but remember that where there is one victim there may be many more, both in the past and in the future. Remember that the friendlier you feel toward the accused the more you need to guard against refusing to hear the witness. Remember how hard it is to speak up. Remember how easy it is to disbelieve the speaker.

Remember that turning away may mean future victims.

But the other young men who were seated at the table with him were unanimous. And they had, all of them, chosen the wrong line.

Pressed for an answer the young man went along with the group, knowing their answer was wrong.

To him, agreeing with the group was more important than the truth, was more right than fact.

Soloman Asch, the psychologist that led the experiment, found similar results in group after group. With nothing tangible at risk and no persuasion at all most subjects were willing to let a group of unarmed, nonthreatening strangers prevail at least once.

Questioned later, many of the subjects indicated that they’d feared the ridicule of the group. Some seemed to have even convinced themselves that the group must be right and they themselves wrong.

Conformity studies such as this one seek to observe the level of need of the individual to fit in with a group, but what about the group? What is there to fear from a group and why?

The answer is that groups do have the power to enforce their collective will on an individual, through punishment if necessary, regardless of the rationality, or lack of rationality, of the demand.

Don’t Ask Don’t Tell (DADT), the United States military policy formally repealed today, represents nothing so much as the power of a group to force its own version of reality upon dissenting individuals. Non-conforming service members faced the threat of losing their jobs and their homes, the companionship of their local friends, and were vulnerable to blackmail, perpetuating a threat to national security.

LGBT U.S. military personnel have now gained the right to claim their own thoughts and feelings about sexuality.

The unspoken and well supported fear of the group by individuals is another matter.

From the looks of this interview, the book doesn’t go far enough. The theft of retirement savings is bigger than this, as the entire credit and mortgage scheme that collapsed the global economy was about siphoning pensions and global savings from their protected pools through fraudulently overrated and priced investments. Now politicians want to sell the idea that Social Security earned benefits are just another promise that must be broken. Don’t believe it!

Everyone you know is represented in your mind as a construction that you created through your perceptions and thoughts about them. They connect to many things: your memories of their name, face, shape, style.

But your loved ones are special. They are wrapped in your memories and dreams, awash in emotions and meaning. It’s an impossible stew to undo.

Faced with their loss, your mind must inform all of those connections. Pools of emotion are released. Sometimes they flood you, sometimes they trickle or steam, but they won’t be held back completely once the barriers that hold them are punctured.

Pain comes as your mind severs connections to your dreams. The lost one’s part in all the dreams evaporates. The connections that once reached out to them lie exposed and raw, stinging like any physical nerve would. They ARE nerves. Feelings and perceptions flowed through them. Now they bathe in anguish.

Blessed are you if you still have other connections to other loved ones who can offer you comfort, extending lifelines that lift you up from drowning in the rushing tide of your loss. Blessed are you if you have nurtured loving connections to God.