Simulacrum

Just be the thing, don't pretend to be the thing.

Nov 22, 2022

Dear Readers,

Thank you for waiting patiently. My family and I moved again this summer and my new assignment has kept me quite busy. If you are short on time scroll down and just read “Pathology” then scroll to the bottom and read “Reality.” Please come back and read the rest later.

Formation

Private Snuffy’s legs were tired as he stood in formation at parade rest waiting to be released so he could go back to his cot and finish his game of spades with his comrades. Sweat poured from his forehead as he stood in the 100-degree heat of the Mojave Desert at the National Training Center. He was happy to be back in the RUBA after two weeks in “The Box,” but he was not happy about standing in a formation while the battalion commander, LTC Winchester1, prattled on about well the unit had done.

Snuffy wasn’t exactly a military genius, but you didn’t have to be Hal Moore to know that the battalion hadn’t done that well. Snuffy had heard through the rumor mill that the battalion commander was often nowhere to be found during critical moments and that he blamed others when things didn’t go well. And yet, here he was, giving out coins to junior enlisted Soldiers for “excellence.” Snuffy rolled his eyes as the commander read off a list of accomplishments for each of the coin recipients.

“Specialist umm…Kruh-umm… Kruh-zin-skee… is that how you say it? Kruh-zin-skee?”

“Yes, sir”

“Haha, hell-of-name, son. Specialist Kruh-ZIN-skee demonstrated excellence by working tirelessly to…” [scrolls down on phone] “to… aid the battalion headquarters in executing readiness standards by preparing their communications equipment for transportation and execution in a tactical environment at the National Training Center. Great work, Specialist! This coin is presented to you for EXCELLENCE! Let’s give him a round of applause!”

Snuffy clapped unenthusiastically and thought, “awesome, three down, nine more to go.” He turned to his buddy and said, “he talks a lot about how much he cares about us, but he’s got a really odd way of showing it.” His buddy replied, “yeah, it’s almost like he’s seen too many war movies and he’s trying to copy what he thinks he’s supposed to do.”

Pathology

There is a certain pathology that I’ve seen in a small number of commanders that I’ve served under. The good commanders that I’ve had, which comprise the vast majority, were good to the degree that they were able to avoid this pathology, while the bad ones suffered from it in spades. I call this pathology Simulacrum Disease.

The main symptom of this disease is when a leader has a certain idea about how someone in their position is supposed to act and then acts according to that idea. Take a new company commander for example. When she first takes command of a company, she has an idea of how an abstract company commander is supposed to act and speak. She is obsessed with bringing her words and actions into alignment with the abstraction she has in her head. She isn’t seeing her situation or the unique environments and contexts in which she operates. She sees only the idea of how the abstract “company commander” should act.

She is not doing what a company commander should do, which is to command. She is imitating her mental construct of what she thinks a company commander should do and say. Even though she is in the position of a company commander, she is not a company commander - she is a simulacrum of a company commander.

There are two main causes of this disease: ambition and fear. Throughout this essay, we’ll discuss the opposite of Simulacrum Disease, examine ambition and fear, and then discuss some ways to prevent yourself and others from contracting this disease.

Finger Tips

My brother, a brilliant computer programmer, has a way of describing other really good programmers. He says that they have “Special Eyes.” According to him, some programmers have Special Eyes, and many don’t. The ones that have Special Eyes work with code in a way that, simply put, makes sense. They see the problems of the specific context in which they are programming and write code that is focused on solving these problems most efficiently.

Those who don’t have Special Eyes struggle to do this; when they write code, they do things that are unfocused, redundant, and careless. As a result, the programs that they write aren’t user-friendly and are buggy and unwieldy. The reader has, no doubt, come into contact with this type of code. When a website or program isn’t user-friendly, discerning computer users can tell immediately [cough CPCE cough]. These types of programs feel almost amateurish. But when a program is intuitive, logical, and has a good aesthetic feel, it was properly built by a programmer with Special Eyes.

There is a kind of military equivalent to Special Eyes called fingerspitzengefuhl, which is German for “fingertips feeling.” It was used by the German military to describe a commander who had strong and accurate intuitions about the battlefield. Commanders with fingerspitzengefuhl could simply “feel” the battlefield and this allowed them to maneuver units on the battlefield with deadly effectiveness.

Special Eyes is a little more readable than fingerspitzengefuhl so we’ll stick with that.

What separates those with Special Eyes from those with simulacrum disease is what they are looking at. Those with Special Eyes aren’t focused on themselves or how other people see them. They see the general context of their environment, the specifics of the situation, the problems they face in general and in particular, and what a sustainable and elegant solution will look like. Then they go to work.

Those with simulacrum disease see none of that. They see an abstraction that they want to imitate. They see a vision of what they want others to think and say about them. They think only in terms of universals and ignore their environment and unique problems. When things go wrong, they can’t bear the thought of having deviated from their abstraction, so they blame others. Those that are forced to work for such a person can see right through them. Your goal as a leader should be to develop Special Eyes, and to identify the signs and symptoms of Simulacrum Disease in yourself and others.

Ambition

I just finished an excellent book called The Timeless Way of Building by Christopher Alexander. In the book, the author says that we have lost our way with modern architecture. Rather than design buildings that have timeless qualities, architects are on a continual quest to impress other architects and get on the covers of architectural magazines with their unique designs. These architects are driven by ambition, not by the desire to help their customers create buildings and spaces which fit the customer’s context.

But, what is the point of having an architect? According to Alexander, the job of an architect is to build buildings and spaces that contain “The Quality Without a Name,” which is that feeling you get when you are in a place where everything seems to be built and arranged perfectly. If you’ve ever visited Mount Vernon, for example, there is something about the place that makes you feel as though it is something special. I felt this Quality Without a Name in spades walking the streets of Paris; I would turn the corner and look down a regular street and just be struck by the feeling that there was something special there. I also feel it when I go through the historic sections of military bases. I feel the opposite of this feeling pulling into my overcrowded suburban neighborhood with cookie-cutter houses that are cramped together. Or when you drive through a city and something about the buildings is just hideous. Compare the majestic Palais Garnier with the lifeless Opera Bastille And you can feel the difference. About this quality, Alexander writes,

It is never twice the same, because it always takes its shape from the particular place it occurs….It is a subtle kind of freedom from inner contradictions.

An architect can only achieve this quality by focusing on the unique needs of the customer and blending those needs with the realities of the environment (we will revisit this in detail in another essay). But architects that are driven by ambition don’t care about those things. They care about making a name for themselves. They care about being seen as a certain type of architect, not actually being an architect. Ugly modern architecture was the result of, among other things, architects contracting ambition-induced Simulacrum Disease.

In the military, ambition-induced Simulacrum Disease is the result of leaders trying to cultivate a certain image of themselves in the minds of their subordinates. They fantasize about their subordinates one-day telling stories about them, and they seek to populate the details of those stories with their unique character. They talk in a way that seems overly rehearsed and not genuine. They interact with their officers in a kind of condescending, all-knowing way. They, of course, can never be wrong about anything, because who will ever remember a commander who was, at times, wrong about things? They don’t see their environment and look to solve problems or add value. They only seek to do those things which will build the image they want others to have, and they will avoid doing things that might put that image at risk.

A commander with ambition-induced Simulacrum Disease will overly rely on the staff, for example. It’s much easier to cultivate an image of perfection by critiquing the staff than by taking a chance and coming up with your own ideas. This type of commander will also purposely issue guidance that is vague because then he can always blame people for not following his guidance if things go wrong. But if things go right, he can take credit for the guidance that he issued. At the end of a big exercise, he will make soldiers stand in a large formation in 100-degree heat while he gives out coins and tells them how well they did. He will do this not because he is malicious and not because he is stupid, but because he is trying to cultivate his image.

If he was genuinely thinking about how to honor his soldiers and reward their accomplishments he would have noticed a few things and made some adjustments:

It’s hot as f**k outside. Let’s wait until it’s dark. I wonder if we can find a place inside with A/C.
Soldiers don’t like standing in formation. Let’s find a place where people can sit or gather together closely.
I want to actually learn about the great things my soldiers did. I am going to spend some time talking to those nominated by their chain of command.

But these things don’t enter his mind because he has Simulacrum Disease. He’s not actually concerned about honoring the accomplishments of his soldiers. He is concerned with doing the things he thinks a battalion commander is supposed to do because he wants his subordinates to see him in a certain way. Battalion commanders hold formations, give out coins, and say specific things about how proud they are. The details aren’t important. This commander doesn’t have Special Eyes, he has Simulacrum Disease.

Fear

Fear-induced Simulacrum Disease is the result of leaders trying to cultivate a certain image of themselves in the minds of their superiors. Rather than trying to get their subordinates to see them in a certain, they seek only the approval of their boss. They could care less what their subordinates think, and they are quick to screw them over, if necessary, to please their boss.

I have seen fear in many officers during my time in service. I was once in a battalion with an S3 operations officer, a Major, who was terrified of what the battalion commander thought of him. This fear caused Simulacrum Disease: he wasn’t acting as an operations officer, he imitated what he thought an operations officer was supposed to do. And because he was so afraid, he was the stereotypical “yes-man.”

One time I was sitting in my cubicle listening to a company commander talk to the battalion commander about an upcoming training event. I had helped resource the training event so I was familiar with the details. This operations officer walked up to the conversation and the battalion commander asked him, “hey this is really good training, are we planning to send the mortar platoon out there to support this? It could be really beneficial for them.” I knew that the answer was “no.” The mortar platoon had other training planned that the platoon leader had spent months preparing.

Now, this battalion commander was not an overly harsh man. He was very reasonable and never tried to steamroll people to get his way. It would have been easy to explain to him that the mortar platoon had other training planned and wouldn’t be there, but that they would try to include them in the future. That would have been the end of it. But the operations officer looked him dead in the eye and said, “oh, yes sir, we’re planning to have them out there. We’ve coordinated for them to be part of the training.” I buried my head in my hands because I knew what was coming.

The operations officer came to my cubicle and said, “Hey, you need to tell the mortar platoon that the battalion commander wants them out to support Charlie company’s training.” I looked at him earnestly and said, “Sir, they already have training planned, it’s already been resourced.” A look of shock and horror came across his face. He didn’t know what to do. He said, “Well the battalion commander wants them out there, so they are going to have to send some people.” I tried to put on my best confused face to conceal my rage and said, “Sir, I overheard you all talking. Did he say he wanted them out there or did he ask if they were going to be out there? I thought he was just asking, but I may have misunderstood.” His eyes got big and he doubled down, “No, no! He wants them out there for that training!”

As it turned out, when I told the mortar platoon leader (a close friend) what the operations officer was trying to do, he laughed and said, “oh this is easy, I’ll just talk to the commander and we’ll get this cleared up.” And he did. The operations officer looked pretty silly for telling the commander that something was going to happen when it was not going to happen. That’s one of the main risks of being a “yes-man.” When you say “yes” to something that is impossible, you just end up looking like a fool.

Your job as the operations officer is to manage the operations of the battalion, not tell the battalion commander what you think he wants to hear. But when you are trying to act like an operations officer instead of actually being one, you end up doing all manner of stupid things. This operations officer did not have special eyes, he had Simulacrum Disease.

The Acute Case

Of course, the worst manifestation of Simulacrum disease is when it is both ambition-induced and fear-induced. In this case, not only is the leader trying to cultivate and protect a certain image with her subordinates, but she is also trying to impress her boss. She may seem bipolar, at times lavishing praise on subordinates (to cultivate an image), and at other times lambasting them for minor mistakes (out of fear of what her boss might think).

Acute Simularcum Disease might also cause paralysis. In this case, a leader might simply do nothing, because taking a chance and doing anything of substance might either hurt their image with subordinates or look dumb to their boss. Either way, their focus is not on actually doing a good job and adding value, their focus is on how other people see them.

Act Like It’s Your Last Job

One of the reasons, I think, that I enjoyed company command so much was because I went into it thinking that it was my last job in the Army. I was almost certain that following company command I was going to transition out of the Army into the private sector. But despite that, I wasn’t going to sandbag. In fact, I planned to do the opposite; to do it my way to the absolute best of my abilities. This tactic at once prevented Simulacrum disease from ambition or fear. I had no ambitions for continuing military service, so I didn’t care about creating a certain type of image or having people think of me in a certain way. I also had no fear because I didn’t care about my evaluation reports or getting promoted. By total accident, I had prepared myself to be myself and command in a way that felt relaxed and natural.

Because I thought it would be my last job, I felt free to do only those things which I thought made sense and to advocate for my soldiers. I was willing to try unorthodox things and refrain from doing things that I didn’t think were important. I was free from trying to appear like a good commander so I could get a good evaluation. I didn’t care what my boss thought about me. That’s why in “Failceeding” I was completely unshaken when we failed our motor pool inspection. This freedom, essentially, gave me Special Eyes and served as a vaccine to prevent Simulacrum Disease. And, as I have written about elsewhere, the results were greater than I ever could have imagined.

Set the Tone

Simulacrum Disease is a naturally occurring phenomenon, but your actions as the leader have a significant impact on its prevalence. As you move up in rank, people get more and more likely to tell you what they think you want to hear, rather than the truth. People are more likely to try to show-off, rather than focus on doing a good job. If you come down hard on people for little mistakes, if you aren’t approachable, if you treat people like they are stupid, if you act like a know-it-all, if you criticize people when they don’t do things exactly how you want, then you are creating an environment where people will contract Simulacrum Disease; they will start acting how they think you want them to act, rather than just focusing on doing a good job.

Your actions can also decrease the prevalence of existing Simulacrum Disease. When you first take command of an organization, you have to let people know that you want them to honest and focus on doing a good job, not focus on looking like they are doing a good job. A great example of this is when Alan Mulally took over as CEO of Ford.

In his book American Icon, author Bryce Hoffman writes about how Mulally turned Ford from a failing automaker into one of the strongest in the market. When Mulally first arrived, Ford was a wreck because no one told the truth about anything. Senior executives used multiple sets of data depending on who they were talking to, problems were never discussed in meetings, and they would try to make themselves look good and other executives look bad. No one was actually trying to be a good executive, they were all trying to look like good executives. Mulally said it best,

This company has been going out of business for thirty years. These guys [the senior executives] did study after study that showed that something had to be done, and yet they chose not to do it. None of them was ever going to stand up and say, “This is how it’s got to be.”2

What is the role of a senior executive at one of the world’s biggest companies if not to, you know, do something to stop the company from failing? But instead, the senior executives chose to do nothing but try and look good. The entire culture at the top of that organization was rotten with dishonesty and a lack of transparency. Mulally had his work cut out for him.

Mulally ran one weekly meeting where all the senior executives were expected to present the most recent information about their business unit. During the first meetings, executives kept presenting the same bad data and misleading information and were clearly hiding problems. Mulally kept pushing people to be honest and transparent, consistently saying that no one would be punished for bringing up problems or bad news, but they were not getting the message. They kept presenting slides that said everything was fine. During one meeting where all the slides showed GREEN Mulally said, “We are going to lose billions of dollars this year. Is there anything that’s not going well here?”3

Eventually, one senior executive who had run into a major problem finally had the courage to put RED on his slides and admit that a major vehicle launch needed to be delayed. Mulally just smiled and applauded the executive and asked, how can we help? Several of the people at the table offered to send their best people to help and to use their contacts to solve some of the issues. When the executive wasn’t fired, it sent a clear message to everyone that Mulally was serious about wanting honesty and transparency, and no one would be fired for that. In the coming weeks, the slides started turning RED and YELLOW. Now the problems could be identified and fixed. This little change was crucial in saving Ford.

Mulally cured the Simulacrum Disease that had infected Ford’s senior executives. In fact, by demanding that they all become intimately familiar with the details of their respective business units he trained them to have Special Eyes. People stopped trying to look and sound like how they thought they were supposed to look and sound and started just being executives. All of a sudden the senior executives were seeing the context of their unique environments, seeing the problems that were keeping them from achieving their goals, and working with others to solve those problems. Eventually, Ford became the industry leader.

In the military, our hierarchical nature can create fertile ground for Simulacrum Disease. This is especially true given the highly competitive environment of the officer corps. The fear of not getting promoted drives many people, like the operations officer in the previous section, to do whatever it takes to always try to look good to their rater. That is why commanders must, like Mulally, insist on honesty and transparency.

When I was a company commander, I always wanted to know the ground truth, and I could smell it when someone was telling me something that they thought I wanted to hear. When I asked questions I would usually say something like, “Don’t tell me what you think I want to hear, I need to know for real what’s going on. No one’s going to get in trouble, I just need to know.” In essence, had to train people to give me straight answers. It’s not that people are naturally dishonest, it’s just that people do not like giving bad news or admitting mistakes, especially in the military.

Part of training your people to be honest with you is being true to your word that you are not going to crush them for making mistakes. When someone brings you bad news, you have to focus on solving the problem not on how the problem happened. There’s always time for that later. This also doesn’t mean that you can’t hold people accountable, you can, but there is a time and place for that. For example, If you fire someone it has to be known that the person brought it on themself, and they weren’t fired for simply bringing bad news or making some minor mistakes. If you do that once you can forget about people being honest and transparent. First, you build trust through honesty and transparency, and then you can really start holding people accountable. Besides, how can you hold people accountable for problems that they hide from you?!

Reality

We make Simulacrum Disease significantly worse in the Army when we say ridiculous things like, “perception is reality.” No, man, reality is reality. And when you think perception is reality, you don’t focus on managing reality, you focus on managing perception, and the two are not the same. You either are a good commander who makes good decisions, sets standards, holds people accountable, builds trust and cooperation, and fosters a positive environment, or you are not. Yes, you can be those things to varying degrees and at better sometimes than other times. But you are those things by what you do in reality, not how good you are at making people think you are those things. If you are going to be a good leader, you have to actually add value, help solve problems, get people to work together, etc. You have to LEAD. And you can only do that by being yourself, by acting in a way that feels natural. Free from fear. Free from ambition. Free from the desire to be seen as a good leader.

So, get yourself some Special Eyes and prevent Simulacrum Disease.

Changes to the Newsletter

I can’t thank you all enough for the support that you’ve given me over the past year as I’ve written these newsletters. I love getting your emails and seeing you post these ideas on your social media accounts. Writing this newsletter takes a lot of time and effort, and I really appreciate you for being a subscriber.

If you’d like to support this project, I am adding some features for paid subscribers in the coming weeks. I’m not sure what this looks like yet, but a number of people have said they’d like to support my work, so I am making that option available. I’ll probably be sending shorter and more frequent newsletters commenting on a variety of things, releasing read-aloud versions of the newsletters, and allowing only paid subscribers to access the archive.

These long newsletters that contain my core ideas will still be totally free!

These paid features will begin in early December and the first newsletter for paid subscribers will go out in January (along with the periodic long free essays). If you are looking for something to put on your Christmas list, this substack could be a great choice.