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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 3, 2023

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One of the points made by the book Moral Mazes (also community discussion) is that Moral Mazes (the book is about the management hierarchy at large non-financial companies in the pre-shareholder value era, but the general principles apply to any sufficiently unethical bureaucratic hierarchy) are total institutions, and that anyone who has built a career in one loses the ability to understand people who are motivated by things other than office politics.

(Incidentally, once you understand the concept of a Moral Maze, the term Swamp as used by anti-establishment politicians clearly refers to the coalition of corporate, governmental, and machine-politics Moral Mazes that work well together because they understand each other in a way they don't understand startup founders, family-owned businesses, or charismatic non-machine politicians like Sanders and Trump).

Donald Trump has been a GC in his father's real estate empire, a real estate developer in his own right, a reality TV star, and a charismatic outsider politician. None of these careers involve working in a Moral Maze. If he is ethically compromised (and he probably is), it is about money and/or sex, not office politics. I can absolutely believe that a career bureaucrat or career machine politician would struggle to grok him.