My approach to “grooming” (yes I’ll use that word, sounds equestrian) a next generation of social engineer (like we see at Meta, Google and so on) is to start with personal scheduling and time management as an engineering challenge, but also a social one, as we’re talking about engagement with others, sometimes in groups, sometimes one-on-one, sometimes synchronously, but usually asynchronously (like when you “get the memo”).
To ascend to higher management in terms of awareness (while staying on the shop floor if that’s your choice) you have to “empathize” (in quotes because over-used), meaning go through the experience of “sonder” (check YouTube for that one) or call it “self awareness 101” (self- and otherness-awareness evolve in tandem).
Quakerism has been good for developing self awareness in my own case, allowing me to jump in and out of various roles on and off the various committees, many of which dealt with life and death issues (birth, marriage, caregiving, memorials). The Centers Network (a mind dynamics company) also gave me structured access to the wheels-spinning world.
An important awareness to develop is that of “parallelism” over “serial” or “linear” mental models. Remember no one is waiting for you in particular to “get it” in the sense that insights will come to anyone with an open mind, and if yours if firmly shut, then rest assured the Zeitgeist will find other people as torch bearers.
And by the way, there’s nothing wrong with having “a full plate” and enjoying the insights you might’ve had through the experience of others having them. Think of the discovery of DNA’s structure for example.
At this point, it’s useful to think of a Control Room (we’re in the blog by that name after all), as many of us have seen countless times both in fictional and nonfictional works. “Houston” has been used, as in the Apollo Program, as in “Houston, we have a problem”.
That’s what I mean by politics merging with social engineering: Texans, not just Floridians, not just Cape Canaveralites, got to feel “pride of place” in addition to getting to play a role (for real — I think it happened, the moon landing) in NASA’s theater.
I say “play a role” advisedly as the complex engineering required for an OMR requires critical path parallel planning against a serial backdrop, a timeline.
Time keeps on ticking, ticking, ticking, into the future. Pegged to those ticks: actors with their lines, hitting their marks (or not) and directors getting action, reaction, results for their editing rooms and post production, where creative censorship happens (we can’t show it all, obviously), in service of messaging.
Politics gets added, in other words. Spin doctoring occurs. Usually with engineers manning (a gender-neutral term) the controls if not designing the actual psyops (PR and propaganda).
So yes, we do see social engineering happening everywhere we look, including in the tawdry halls of the NeoRomans who still plan to rule over us per their own brand of social engineering. But we don’t need to accept their PR as legit given what we now know about their ways and means.
We’ll no doubt keep accommodating them on some level however. They love to swill in scandal, like the Brits. Theater is their forte. Let’s encourage their brand of cosplay by letting them continue to make The District look like Ancient Rome (lotsa columns).
Mussolini was good at that with his EUR, investing in fascist symbolism. Ditto DC.
Going forward, I’ll plan to think of Washington DC as our North American version of the EUR (I used to live in the EUR, ditto near DuPont Circle): a gleaming “city on a hill” (atop a swamp), a city-state in its own right (not in any state).
Lots of tourists (already the case). Lots of monuments to the dear departed, many on horseback or of high military rank, commanders, chiefs (so kinda like London in that respect: believers in that Aryan mythos, eugenicists a lotta of em, of Eurasian extraction — important subcultures for sure).
