Peaceful Wolverine I think a lot of communication would get clearer if we did away with easy abstractions. The kind that feel justified, but fall short of the specifics that really do matter. Because of how our thoughts are experienced by us, simplification is natural. Notice where your thoughts seem to happen. There’s a place — not a real place, but a felt one — where, from our point of view, the mind does its work, and it hands you your ideas as though they were objects you could pick up.
Take “the government.” Or “the economy,” “the hospital,” “the market.” Each one arrives in that mental space with a kind of solidity, as if you could turn it over in your hands, and so we talk about them as if we could: The government builds roads, the market decides, the hospital failed me. These are true sentences. They are also sentences about nothing, literally speaking — because you cannot find a single one of these things. You cannot point to it, photograph it, or meet it for coffee. It exists only as that weighted object in the felt space of your thinking.
These are conceptual compressions. “The government” is a handle, and behind the handle are some hundreds of thousands of specific people, each with specific skills, doing specific things, needing specific tools and hours and training. You cannot hold all of that in mind at once — nobody can — so the mind does the sensible thing and squeezes it down to something you can carry. The handle is necessary. I am not against handles.
But a compression is lossy. Something is always thrown away to make the handle small enough to hold, and what gets thrown away isn’t random. It’s precisely the concrete detail — the individual person, the particular skill, the exact thing they’re short of. Which would be fine, except that the discarded detail is the only part that’s any use when you actually want to change something. The handle is built for thinking about. It is almost worthless for doing something about.
Watch it happen with a road. The “government” did not build the road. A person noticed it needed building and said so to another person, who carried it to another, and somewhere in there an engineer decided how deep the gravel had to go and why, and surveyors mapped it out, and managers assigned crews for each of the pieces. It snowballs — I’ve sat in rooms where the people doing the work describe it as though the project were completing itself, as though the specifications had appeared one morning rather than being the residue of decades of somebody’s hard-won experience.
That feeling, that no one in particular is doing the thing, is the compression happening to you in real time.
“It just has to be done a certain way” is often simply true. The code that fixes the depth of the gravel really is the distilled knowledge of people long retired or dead, and it really does outlast any one of them, thus making it symbolic and institutional. I’m not asking anyone to chase every cause down to the molecules; nothing would ever get built. The question isn’t how far down to go. It’s where to stop — and the place to stop is wherever the answer concretely lives.
Because that’s the claim under all of this: The answer is concrete and specific, and it is almost never at the top. You cannot climb up the handle to find it. The top is where the compression already happened — it is made of the same lossy summary you began with. If you want a better road, “the government” cannot give it to you, and neither can the minister. You have to go the other way, down and outward, and decompress: Find the actual people who know, and find out what they actually need.
When a road is smooth and strong and lasts, that is not the government’s doing and not the minister’s. It’s the doing of specific people who dug deeper than they had to, who spent the hours in real concentration instead of low-effort misery, who decided the details mattered and took some pride in the result. If you want more roads like that one, the move is embarrassingly simple and almost never made: Go and find that crew. Ask them how they did it. Give them what they’re short of, and give them someone to teach. Resourcing the people who already have the answer is, as it happens, usually the most structural thing you can do — though you’d never guess it from up at the handle, where they don’t individually exist.
And this was never really about roads, or governments, or who to thank for your infrastructure. It’s about the handles themselves. The same compression that turns a hundred thousand people into “the government” turns them, in other rooms, into “the customer,” “the elderly,” “the voter,” “the enemy.” The mechanism doesn’t care about the subject. Every time, the specific person is squeezed out to make the handle portable, and every time, the specific person is the part that mattered. We do it because we must. We forget we’ve done it because the handle feels so much like the thing.
So I don’t think the lesson is to stop abstracting — you can’t, and you shouldn’t try. The lesson is smaller and harder: To remember, while you’re holding the handle, that it is a handle. That the weighted object in the felt room of your thinking is a summary of something you have never fully seen, and that everything you’d actually need — the answer, the need, the person — is in the part that got left out to make it fit your hand.