Tag: Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

A Review on the Fantastic HBO Miniseries Chernobyl: Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi was never better illustrated

As I watched the fantastic HBO miniseries on Chernobyl I couldn’t help but think of someone I admire quite a lot, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the author of the great pinnacle work on human psychology called ‘Flow.’ I finally was able to watch the five part series after many people kept recommending it to me and I have to say at every level of that experience, from the writer by Craig Mazin to the direction of Johan Renck—and everyone in between from the great acting to the executives who put the deal together ‘Chernobyl’ was a bold undertaking on an epic scale. These are not the filmmakers of the 80s and 90s where The Hollywood Reporter measured success by the size of their pay checks, and overall box office, but this trend we have now of streaming projects on the scale of Chernobyl are bringing forth creative filmmakers who are functioning from Csikszentmihalyi’s ‘Flow’ on several projects that are giving the world so many new entertainment options, from projects like Stranger Things to The Mandalorian. But this Chernobyl effort was on a scale of Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List, which is one of my all time favorite films. But there won’t be big Academy Awards for this labor of love, or big Hollywood contracts. I don’t know what the makers of Chernobyl made as far as a paycheck, but its obvious they made this series out of pure love of the content, and the hard truths that come from it.

I don’t think Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi meant to reveal why communism doesn’t work in his own studies, but he did and that footprint of human effort was stamped all over Chernobyl. The film series brilliantly walked the line between the heroics of every day “working” people as Karl Marx fantasized to represent and cast a very bright light into every aspect and social level of Soviet society. The apartments were small and dingy, even the offices of the chief coordinators were skanky and shrill. No wonder everyone was so willing to lie about the status of things because nobody wanted to jeopardize a promotion into something improved. Conditions were so terrible for everyday people in Russia during this period of Chernobyl, which for those who don’t know was the site of the worst nuclear accident in the history of the world and continues to be a blight on Ukrainian politics. Even to this day, Ukraine is in the news and is at the center of an impeachment attempt by modern Democrats in America. For everyday people around the world who don’t know history or geography, the kind of corruption that these old Soviet regions bred is unfathomable.

Comparing lifestyles from the same period such as in the film Wall Street it becomes quite clear that the Soviet Union was so terrified of their people learning about the great gifts that the West might inspire into their society that they put all their efforts into publicity of the state for the purposes of the state robbing people of their natural free will so what the entire country ended up with was a massive economy filled with the Parkinson’s Law. Not the disease but the trend in human beings to fill schedule targets with procrastination when loose parameters to fulfillment are allowed and lazy ambitions fill the void. Where Chernobyl told the stories of many brave people it was only when the tragedy of the moment was able to tap into people’s natural Flow as Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi often discussed. When left to their own devices into service to the “state” people took their sweet time, did only what they had to in order not to be shot by the KGB, and the result was a society of peeling paint, small apartments, boxy cars that all looked a like and very little retail options to speak of. Because the entire society was only doing what it had to because their Flow and love of life itself was so micromanaged.

The Chernobyl story could be told in any communist or socialist country and it is ironic that the American left is so enchanted with these efforts and want that for our own society. It is an unfathomably stupid idea unless people just don’t understand the concepts behind the work of very serious modern phycologists such as Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. Modern China is suffering through exactly the same trials and tribulations as the Soviet Union was during this period of Chernobyl. It is the perception of power that they have and only that. That is the reason the state must control information flow so vigorously. The same in modern day Iran. Any society where people live in sloppy conditions and there are economic struggles we will find the elements of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s observations, once you take away the flow of ambition from people and force them to serve institutionalism, you get from them a natural Parkinson’s Law. I use that term to abbreviate Csikszentmihalyi’s teachings, which of course does the trick. This was precisely why the test at the Chernobyl plant was done in spite of the need to shut down for 12 hours to meet the output quotas for the end of the month needs. That Soviet society needed to push quotas on people in such a way says everything about their society, people weren’t naturally inclined to produce, or even motivated to “over produce” as we might see in Western cultures, but they had to be coaxed a gunpoint to do so and there is all the problem with Chernobyl or any communist society.

What was remarkable about the HBO miniseries on Chernobyl is it was done by very creative people functioning from Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s Flow ideas reporting on why communism was a massive failure because it robbed Russian society of their Flow. Whether or not this was intentional we may never know. It could just be a happy accident as events provided these filmmakers with the opportunity of a lifetime. But one thing is for sure, they seized on it and created one of the most magnificent narratives about a global tragedy that anybody has ever seen. And the work left in their wake is worth serious scientific study. Terms like Parkinson’s Law have not been around until fairly recently, certainly not as long as the peasant ambitions of Karl Marx over a hundred and fifty years ago. There are still a lot of discoveries that we need to make as a society as to what works and what doesn’t. For now we know that Western ideas do better economically, where these notions of collectivism tend to create Parkinson’s Law when Flow is robbed from individual people. We see it in manufacturing all the time no matter where in the world we are conducting it. Tight, micromanaged establishments tend to get a lot of Parkinson’s Law whereas free flowing creative efforts like at Pixar or Apple generate massive intellectual output. The results are unmistakable.

Chernobyl is the kind of program that every human being should watch once. That something like that is available to HBO subscribers or those with Amazon Prime accounts to me is a modern miracle. Such a great history lesson is available from the comfort of our living rooms any time of day in any length of time that you may wish to view it. We live in a modern world that has always craved Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s Flow. He didn’t invent the desire, he simply observed it and noted conditions when Flow was restricted in people. But seldom is there ever a film series that shows not only what caused a tragedy on an epic scale because of Flow problems created by a government that is more relevant today than even when the event occurred. That’s what we have with Chernobyl. A massive undertaking created by wonderful Flow by the filmmakers about a society that had terrible Flow and ultimately why it’s important without being preachy. Chernobyl is ultimately about the gifts that come from a free society, the ability to look at ourselves and improve to get the desired results, something we all take for granted way too often. And we do so because of Parkinson’s Law, because we always fill the work to fill the comforts of a schedule, we see no horizon on, and think we have all the time in the world to fix it. But we don’t.

Rich Hoffman

Why Socialism Fails: The science of political and economic structures is completely dependent on autonomy

I’ve been writing about the coming of socialism in America for a very long time. In some ways, many ways its been with us since just before the presidency of FDR. But it has been a bad word in our capitalist economy, and for good reason. Yet many people really don’t understand why. It’s not enough any more to say that socialism doesn’t work, look at Venezuela. Now that it is essentially the platform of the Democrat party and so many kids have been taught socialism openly in public schools over the last couple of decades its time to explain exactly why socialism doesn’t work and why all countries should avoid it, especially these days because the world is actually growing more independent not more collectivist. Socialism is an old fantasy that took over a 100 years for the political left to spring into the light of day in the most powerful country on earth but they are about 20 years too late. Here’s why:

I was driving next to a person the other day who could not get off his cell phone. My first thought was that he could and should wait at least until he came to a stop light to do so much texting, but he was really engaged in his phone which reminded me of the question many have these days, why do people like their phones more than they enjoy talking to a person who is right in front of them. The answer is simple really and can best be understood in the great book on psychology called Flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. The reason people spend more time on their cell phones than with real people is purely because of autonomy, the ability people have to control their own destiny on a moment to moment basis. Often in direct contacts with other people individuals do not control all aspects of the conversation, and often the people present represent varying degrees of less personal autonomy including subject matter, the pace of a conversation, and even how the other people smell as their breath enters into your own lungs by inadvertent biological necessity just by being in close proximity with them. Whereas a smart phone puts the whole world and everything that has been learned in it literally in the palm of your hand and allows you to control the pace of a conversation. If someone sends you a text, you decide how long to answer if at all and it gives the user great autonomy and unlimited creativity which is the primary motivator of all human beings. Four main things have ignited in modern human beings a great revolution in the need for more personal autonomy, the smart phone, the explosion of the video game industry as a means of personal recreation, smart televisions and the decentralization in general of all entertainment options, and the use of personal transportation such as cars, motorcycles and even airplanes. Because of these four factors, and I’m sure we could break down even further, but socialism will never take hold again in an industrialized country.
Socialism in the modern sense, at least the way governments try to sell it to people is that essentially free pay checks not connected to any kind of real performance is attractive because it allows people not to worry about how they pay their bills so that they can think with more autonomy what they really enjoy in life. But the ways ultimately that people actually receive those paychecks is to essentially give up great autonomy in the factors that truly generate wealth so every nation that has tried socialism fails due to this condition. People may get a pay check but the work that is performed that generates wealth lacks the creative need for humans to contribute to it, and is missing making those workers much less effective than people who are performing those tasks with great autonomy. The key to all future economic growth in all nations isn’t to just give a pay check to workers who go through the motions of a job title with the same mundanity that they communicate with other people when a smart phone gives them freedom of autonomy to do and say what they want to other people when they want to. Those same traits need to be brought into the marketplace of employment in order to continue with efforts at nationwide economic expansion.

The problem in America is obvious because there is a free market system to serve as a backdrop. Socialism that we see in labor unions is much less effective than an industry where the workers have great autonomy in the work they do. The love of work for instance in a unionized school teacher who has a class full of children in kindergarten is much happier and autonomous compared to the history teacher of high school kids who aren’t as bright-eyed and willing to learn as the five-year old’s. With the labor union mandating collective bargaining and taking away incentives for personal performance and all other things being equal what makes a job happy or not for the employee is the degree for which they have autonomy. The kindergarten teacher is likely to spend the night before a class cutting out little pictures and words that might ignite learning in the children because they will react to it positively and feed the autonomy of the teacher whereas the history teacher knowing that the students will be more interested in dating, playing on their cell phones, and what they are going to wear the next day might only manage to make a cup of coffee for themselves in order to get autonomy in their jobs as misery looms over most of their lives due to those conditions.

Socialism fails because jobs are collective based and measured instead of the individualized results of productivity and the joy of creating and doing the task. Socialism robs individuals of their autonomy in performing work so it destroys the actual output of the task. When the only reason a person shows up for work is to just get a paycheck the reason for having a worker there in the first place is lost—employers might as well hire a robot, they’d be better off. People need autonomy in their jobs and where that personal freedom for performing a love in work is lost, productivity is destroyed and a culture dies, since culture is entirely made up of human input. Humans are thinking creatures and they require autonomy to bring about what’s unique about them to a marketplace and they need the ability to figure out what that is so they can get there. Socialism is too rigid of a structure and is entirely too social for autonomy to exist and that is why it has always failed and will always do so.

Autonomy in the world of productivity is the most important ingredient. Where great autonomy exists in workplaces, great productive output is common. Where a loss in autonomy is prevalent, a stagnant workplace will result. It doesn’t matter what industry it’s in or where in the world the work is performed, if autonomy is part of the management, companies and nations do well. If autonomy is controlled, the company and nation fail. It’s not that people in Venezuela conspired to hurt the government by not being as productive. Its that they lost their autonomy for performing work because of the means of instituting socialism even when the nation is sitting on vast resources for creating wealth. When the government took away the incentive to think freely on how to use those resources for the creation of wealth the ability to do so became impossible because humans cannot function well without autonomy, and socialism robbed the entire culture of that essential ingredient. Socialism can’t be made to work under any form of government management, it was an idea created by Karl Marx who clearly was illiterate in these understandings of psychology. But we’ve learned a lot about ourselves over the years. Socialism was pretty attractive to people who still had to hunt for their food and wash their clothes by hand, or couldn’t just go down to McDonald’s to get a hamburger when they were hungry. As people gained more autonomy in their lives through leisure time, they wanted more of it which is why we’ve had such explosive growth intellectually by way of invention in the last century as opposed to every century that came before it. But in the 21st Century autonomy is the expectation and if our jobs don’t factor that into their plans, they will have miserable work forces and therefore much less productivity which is the purpose for doing work. That is why socialism fails, because it destroys personal autonomy and the good work that comes with that invisible ingredient to anything that might be considered successful.

Rich Hoffman

Sign up for Second Call Defense here: http://www.secondcalldefense.org/?affiliate=20707 Use my name to get added benefits.