NPR vs. DOGE

 Today, we’re taking a look at a predecessor to DOGE: The Reinventing Government project (officially known as the NPR, for National Partnership for Reinventing Government). The NPR ran for almost the full duration of President Bill Clinton’s two terms, and led to the elimination of over 100 programs and over 250,000 federal jobs.

Both NPR and DOGE are case studies in a long history of government reform efforts — some more successful than others. Our guest is John Kamensky, who served as Vice President Al Gore's deputy for the National Performance Review (NPR) for eight years. Kamensky was colloquially known as “Mr. Checklist” for his work organizing the Reinventing Government initiative.

We discuss:

Did the NPR actually work?
What was the Board of Tea Experts?
Why was the federal government subsidizing mohair?
NPR made the federal workforce older. Was that bad?
What doesn’t Elon understand about the federal government?

As I understand it, the Reinventing Government initiative was the longest-running government reform project in American history.

Yeah, that's how I understand it. I’ve researched previous reform efforts from the past century and haven't seen anything that had that kind of endurance.

In broad strokes, would you call the initiative a success?

I would say yes, it was a success. It changed what government employees understood their jobs to be. The goal was to empower them to be able to get results, and they felt that in many cases. We conducted a survey and found that after eight years, 40% of the civil service understood what we were trying to get at — that’s enough to create some momentum.

Even in future administrations, people still talked about some of the initiative’s outcomes. There were about 100 different statutes that included bits and pieces of our recommendations, and a number of administrative changes, like designating the deputy secretaries for various departments as chief operating officers and having them meet government-wide as the President's Management Council. I believe that has continued until today, although I don't know what the current administration's approach has been.

You’ve flagged that government reform efforts like NPR and DOGE are a recurring feature of American policy. Can you place the NPR in the context of the history of government reform efforts?

.... There’s a long history of approaches to government reform: there were efforts under Johnson and Nixon, and the Grace Commission under Reagan. Typically, advisers outside of government came in to advise on best practices from the private sector, but the Reinventing Government initiative was different. We turned to civil servants and asked them what needed to be done to fix government operations, focusing on the “how” and not so much on what the government should be doing.

What was the policy conversation like in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, before the Reinventing Government initiative?

This was toward the tail end of Reagan’s Reform ‘88, which were largely administrative reforms. In the late ‘80s under President George H.W. Bush, the focus shifted to improving government performance and financial management, which led to the passage of the Chief Financial Officers Act (CFO Act) in 1990. I was at the GAO at the time, and I was tapped to look at how to measure and improve government performance. I wound up looking at what was going on in other countries as examples. (...)

So you're at the GAO in the late ‘80s. How did you end up at the Reinventing Government initiative?

David Osborne and I had an ongoing conversation — he was fascinated by what other countries were doing, and I was fascinated by what he was finding in the states. In a previous book called Laboratories of Democracy, he did a case study of Bill Clinton’s governorship of Arkansas, so he was in the Clinton circle. During Clinton’s presidential campaign, David Osborne drafted a speech on how Clinton could reinvent the federal government. That speech was never made, but the ideas stuck.

When they organized the transition team, Al From of the Progressive Policy Institute was leading the government reform piece. They brought in John Sharp, who was running the Texas Performance Review, and it was more like DOGE. They went into the agencies and terrorized them to find savings. On David Osborne’s suggestion, they came to me to get the international perspective.

Then in early March of 1993, Clinton gave a press conference, and said the administration would create a National Performance Review. I called my counterpart at the OMB to ask what was going on, and he said, “Well, this is the Clinton administration. This is live and unrehearsed. We don't know what's going on.”

A few days later, I get a call from Elaine Kamarck, and she says, “I just started working for Vice President Gore. He was asked to do this reinventing government thing, and David Osborne says that I need to talk to you.” They called me, Bob Stone, who was doing the reinvention of the Defense Department, and Bob Knisely, who was over in the Department of Transportation.

I told them what was going on in other countries. Bob Stone was a sort of renegade in the Defense Department, a civilian in charge of the Department’s military installations. He oversaw a large team and was trying to delegate authority; rather than having them ask whether to repave a parking lot in San Diego, he said, “No, you know whether you need to repave it, don't ask me.” So he talked about how the DoD had screwed up. Bob Knisely had worked in a lot of different civilian agencies and saw parallels there.

Elaine suggested we tell the Vice President about it. The three of us met at Bob Stone's house to figure out what we would tell the Vice President, because this was our one chance as civil servants to say what needed to be done to fix the government. Clinton had actually done total quality management when he was the governor of Arkansas and wanted the Reinventing Government initiative to consist of civil servants, rather than turning to business executives as Reagan had.

Bob Stone had developed a set of principles for his model installation program and suggested we use those. He made this “gold card,” which had those principles and Clinton and Gore’s names on it. Over the years, we handed out those cards to around 100 civil servants, but the first gold card was made in the middle of a snowstorm at Bob's house to give to Gore at our meeting the next day. Bob Stone is a storyteller at heart, and he said that we really needed to convince him of how screwed up the government is. He had a box of his “toys”: examples of how idiotic things were in the Defense Department. We decided to take it with us to the White House. The vice president has an office over in the corner, which Gore called the Square Office as opposed to the Oval Office.

The next day, we went and sat down with him, Elaine, and the deputy director for management of OMB. After we each told our stories, Bob Stone brought out the box. He took out a can of spray paint and told a story: the Defense Department hired chemists with chemistry degrees and tasked them with making sure that each can of spray paint hadn’t expired. They had to sign a little form that's stuck to the side of each can to say that the paint is still useful.

Then he pulled out a steam trap, which is a metal valve that takes dirt out of steam lines in buildings. These each cost about $100, and when they start leaking steam, they leak about $50 worth of steam a week. But the procurement people wouldn't buy a replacement until they got a bulk order. That let them get them for $90, but it took about a year to get enough orders, and you lost $50 worth of steam a week in the meantime.

Gore found this idiotic, and Bob Stone suggested letting the engineers on the base buy small items using a credit card rather than going through the procurement system. At the end, Gore asked us to come on for six months to help. I’d had no idea this was a job interview. (...)

I knew that getting detailed from the legislative to the executive branch would not go over well at GAO. Sure enough, Senator Roth was on the floor of the Senate a few weeks later, saying that this is a violation of the separation of powers. So I resigned from GAO and was picked up in the executive branch.

A vice president had never been to most of those agencies in person, so it created enormous buzz. He went from the US Department of Agriculture to the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) to the central courtyard at the Pentagon, and huge crowds of enthusiastic employees showed up. The Vice President was on stage with the department secretary to listen to these people, and they would talk about some of the most embarrassing things going on in their departments that the secretary, of course, knew nothing about. And the Vice President was sitting there taking notes. When we finished our draft report, Gore asked us to change it to reflect some of what he had heard and make recommendations based on those stories. (...)

What did you prioritize in those first six months, and what did you leave on the table? That first set of recommendations did not include moving around agencies or consolidating functions.

Gore had very few dictates on what we should or shouldn't do. One of them was, “I don't want any recommendations to study this more. I want recommendations to do something.” Another was, “Don't move boxes. Fix what's inside them.” That was really sage advice, because typical government reformers want to make an org chart look rational by moving things around, even though it’s really hard and costly to do.

The last major department that we created was the Department of Homeland Security, and that was more than 20 years ago. That was really painful to create, and it took years to actually become functional. Gore believed that we had good people trapped in bad systems, which was the total quality management, W. Edwards Deming-type thing. That was sort of the mantra.

Do you think that gave NPR a longer political runway than DOGE has had? DOGE has taken on some reorganization initiatives, which come with a much higher political cost. You engender a lot more opposition.

In the second round of reinvention in ‘96, after Newt Gingrich became Speaker and the House went Republican, the NPR was asked to do a new report and study. That one was focused more on what government should do, rather than how. And much like the second Hoover Commission, it didn't land very well. Agencies were eliminated, the Interstate Commerce Commission was eliminated. My favorite was the elimination of the Board of Tea Experts, which was created in the late 1800s. (...)

With DOGE, Elon Musk has focused on holding up really egregious examples of government spending. They’re often overhyped or taken out of context, but showing millions of Twitter users what they’re cutting has been a huge focus. How much did the Clinton-Gore administration tout those examples of waste in public?

We didn't do that during the first six months. Then we issued the main report and there was a big event on the South Lawn. After that, there were 38 accompanying collateral reports for each of the agencies and systems on how to implement the recommendations in the main report. Promoting the things that were screwed up wasn’t such a big deal, and the GAO was finding a lot of them. Like, there were about seven agricultural field offices in every county in the United States.

Really?

Yeah, five to seven Department of Agriculture field offices in each of approximately 3,000 counties, including Brooklyn. There were all of these different agencies, and the Department never co-located field offices. We found closing the offices really hard because members of Congress wanted to keep them. The story that we got was that there were so many field offices because President Lincoln had said that no field office should be further than one day’s horse ride from any farmer, so field offices were about 20 miles apart. (...)

Let me ask you about some of the more difficult parts of NPR. The initiative famously cut upwards of 400,000 civil servants over those eight years; it wasn't until the last five years or so that the number of full-time federal government employees approached that 1993 peak again. How did you figure out where to cut headcount and implement it?

One later criticism of NPR was that as the number of federal employees dropped, a lot of outside contractors and what you might call Beltway Bandits ended up doing a lot of that work instead. You had this kind of dark matter version of the federal workforce: it just wasn't on the books full-time.

This goes back to empowering employees, which was one of Bob Stone’s mantras for the project. There were too many overseers and people in mission support functions — one in three civil servants were middle managers in what we called “management controls” — procurement, budget, personnel, legal. There was a 1:7 employee-to-manager ratio. Bob Stone was inspired by the business writer Tom Peters, who said that the average in the private sector is 1:15. That overhead is closer to 15% rather than 30%, so we set those two metrics as targets.

We wanted to go from 700,000 employees down to 350,000: moving 100,000 to the front line for service and returning the savings for the other 250,000 to the government. We had an initial target of 252,000, but agencies wound up cutting even more, in part because of the downsizing in the Defense Department after the end of the Cold War. We were looking at transferring some functions, like cooks, groundskeepers, and security guards at Veterans Affairs (VA) hospitals, to the private sector so that the government doesn't have to manage this enormous workforce. We saw how other countries implemented new public management theory to let agencies focus on delivering their core service and not managing police and groundskeepers, so that was the concept.

It didn't pan out that way because when we asked the agencies to cut headquarters, headquarters cut the field. And OMB wasn't really bought into what we were doing to reshape the workforce, so they let the agencies do whatever they wanted to.

Why wasn’t OMB bought in? That seems like a classically OMB thing to focus on.

Part of it was that they didn't think that the Reinventing Government people were rational. We were not traditional.

Because you were head-in-the-clouds folks?

A bit of that, but also that we were trying to empower employees, and that wasn't their shtick. OMB was more into top-down control. They have changed over the years — in fact, one of NPR’s outcomes was changing OMB, so that instead of being just budget analysts, they became resource managers. It wasn't just about money, but about how agencies function, and looking at their management and regulations.

But this didn't roll out the way we had envisioned it. There were some cases where it did, like when Jim King, who was the head of OPM at the time, cut down HR regulations and got rid of the 10,000-page personnel manual that agencies were expected to abide by.

He also worked with the agencies to downsize their staffs. That resulted in some hiring freezes, so you wouldn’t have new cohorts fall in over the years. Because of that, a gap of experience emerged, especially in procurement, which cascaded over the next 20 years.

Is that the gap the Beltway Bandits grew to fill?

In some cases, they did, but there are some functions that you just can’t delegate, like signing authority on contracts or coming up with contract strategy. We were hoping agencies would simplify HR and the procurement rules, which would let them do with fewer staff. But Congress ate dessert first and cut the number of people without simplifying the rules.

Is that what we're seeing with DOGE, where they start with the headcount cuts and hope that the regulatory cuts come later?

No, they think AI will fix it all, but it will be hard to have AI in the national parks to help someone who sprained their ankle. But they should have engaged Congress on the changes to the systems. In this current administration, we're not seeing any interaction that I can see with Congress of changing the rules of the game.

With those hiring freezes, there was a shift in the demographic composition. Federal employees started to skew older, and the share of federal workers under 35 fell by about 10% over the eight years of the NPR.

When you combine that with the median GS grade, the median place on the pay scale in the federal government is higher now than it was 20 years ago. That makes it a lot harder to fill roles with junior talent, or bring people through the ranks from a young age.

What do you make of that effect of the NPR?

There's also a shift in the mix of work that's done. For example, during NPR, the HR processes and agencies were manual, and they have since become electronic. In many agencies, small-time procurements were manual, and you had triplicate forms that took weeks to complete, and the administrative cost of processing those forms was horrendous, so they moved to credit cards. Interestingly, the current administration has reneged on the use of credit cards, and it's costing the government money. In fact, when there was credit card abuse in some agency late in the Clinton administration, Congressman Pete Sessions put in a bill to stop the use of credit cards, but the Congressional Budget Office came back and said, “That'll cost you $100 million in rebates.”

That's amazing. The rebates were a substantial chunk of money.

Yeah. You have to balance risk with the ability to get stuff done. If you want no risk, it’ll be very expensive.

Right. The current administration wants to centralize procurement at GSA, and we've seen some moves in that direction. As you describe, there's a constant pendulum swing between pushing purchasing and management authority lower into the system, and then realizing the risk and pulling it back. Then, once it's centralized, you realize that you've limited your ability to trust the outer branches of the federal government.

There are pros and cons of centralizing. One of the things that we saw was that, at the time, the US government was the last vestige of Soviet central planning. We needed to devolve that. The government had a choice between different administrative service centers, which we call franchise funds, and those still exist today. There were six or eight different franchise funds created across the government, so the Department of Health and Human Services would be able to service contracts and HR for other agencies, which allowed for transparency about how much an administrative process costs and created some competition between agencies. If an agency head gets fed up with how their procurement contracts are done, they can go to another agency. By recentralizing, you will initially gain some efficiencies, which will turn into inefficiencies over a few years as it becomes a non-responsive monopoly. (..)

If you and I are talking again at the end of this administration, what are we likely to see as the effect of DOGE four years from now?

I think we're going to see agencies lose the capacity to do things that Americans assume just happen, and that they'll see enormous holes in the safety net of what government does and how it delivers. The Clinton-Gore administration was very concerned about losing citizen trust in government, which would make it hard to maintain a democracy. By the end of the administration, it had gone from something like 20% to 40%, and now it's really low again. With DOGE, I think it will fall even further.

Let’s say Elon really is stepping back, and imagine you get installed at DOGE. Everything that’s happened already is already baked in, and there are a bunch of headcount cuts that are not being rolled back, a bunch of attempts to centralize procurement, the implementation of these digital systems, etc.

How would you try to right the ship?

You can't put the toothpaste back in the tube. I don't think you can go back to where we were. The question is, “What will government look like next?” I think we’re going to have a period of huge turmoil in terms of service delivery, like no one answering the phones in the Social Security Administration, and that the current immigration enforcement efforts will lead to loss of trust in the immigration system. Will student loans still work? A lot will get broken down, and I think a lot of people are going to get hurt.

So we need to ask how to develop a new approach or system, and I have not yet come up with that answer. There is a group of people that seems to be trying to develop that, and that is where my hope lies. I think a lot of it will be a matter of using technology. We've broken things so far, but we haven't come up with a plan for how to replace or fix them in a way that makes a difference for people's lives.

by Santi Ruiz, Statecraft |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

[ed. So, in this administration young tech bros not burdened by history (or anything else apparently, including puberty), were put in charge with no clue - and continue to be embedded like viruses, sucking up classified data.]

Ralph Ziman, MIG-21 Project (Boeing Museum of Flight, Seattle, WA)
Images: markk

[ed. South African beadwork on a Large scale. All exhibits including Air Force One, the Space Shuttle program, and more here. Don't miss if you're in Seattle.]

via:
[ed. American terrorists... making their nut and enjoying authority (incognito, of course.) (South Park).] 

Lore of the World: Field Notes for a Child's Codex: Part 2

When you become a new parent, you must re-explain the world, and therefore see it afresh yourself.

A child starts with only ancestral memories of archetypes: mother, air, warmth, danger. But none of the specifics. For them, life is like beginning to read some grand fantasy trilogy, one filled with lore and histories and intricate maps.

Yet the lore of our world is far grander, because everything here is real. Stars are real. Money is real. Brazil is real. And it is a parent’s job to tell the lore of this world, and help the child fill up their codex of reality one entry at a time.

Below are a few of the thousands of entries they must make.

Walmart

Walmart was, growing up, where I didn’t want to be. Whatever life had in store for me, I wanted it to be the opposite of Walmart. Let’s not dissemble: Walmart is, canonically, “lower class.” And so I saw, in Walmart, one possible future for myself. I wanted desperately to not be lower class, to not have to attend boring public school, to get out of my small town. My nightmare was ending up working at a place like Walmart (my father ended up at a similar big-box store). It seemed to me, at least back then, that all of human misery was compressed in that store; not just in the crassness of its capitalistic machinations, but in the very people who shop there. Inevitably, among the aisles some figure would be hunched over in horrific ailment, and I, playing the role of a young Siddhartha seeing the sick and dying for the first time, would recoil and flee to the parking lot in a wave of overwhelming pity. But it was a self-righteous pity, in the end. A pity almost cruel. I would leave Walmart wondering: Why is everyone living their lives half-awake? Why am I the only one who wants something more? Who sees suffering clearly?

Teenagers are funny.

Now, as a new parent, Walmart is a cathedral. It has high ceilings, lots to look at, is always open, and is cheap. Lightsabers (or “laser swords,” for copyright purposes) are stuffed in boxes for the taking. Pick out a blue one, a green one, a red one. We’ll turn off the lights at home and battle in the dark. And the overall shopping experience of Walmart is undeniably kid-friendly. You can run down the aisles. You can sway in the cart. Stakes are low at Walmart. Everyone says hi to you and your sister. They smile at you. They interact. While sometimes patrons and even employees may appear, well, somewhat strange, even bearing the cross of visible ailments, they are scary and friendly. If I visit Walmart now, I leave wondering why this is. Because in comparison, I’ve noticed that at stores more canonically “upper class,” you kids turn invisible. No one laughs at your antics. No one shouts hello. No one talks to you, or asks you questions. At Whole Foods, people don’t notice you. At Stop & Shop, they do. Your visibility, it appears, is inversely proportional to the price tags on the clothes worn around you. Which, by the logical force of modus ponens, means you are most visible at, your very existence most registered at, of all places, Walmart.

Cicadas

The surprise of this summer has been learning we share our property with what biologists call Cicada Brood XIV, who burst forth en masse every 17 years to swarm Cape Cod. Nowhere else in the world do members of this “Bourbon Brood” exist, with their long black bodies and cartoonishly red eyes. Only here, in the eastern half of the US. Writing these words, I can hear their dull and ceaseless motorcycle whine in the woods.

The neighbors we never knew we had, the first 17 years of a cicada’s life are spent underground as a colorless nymph, suckling nutrients from the roots of trees. These vampires (since they live on sap, vampires is what they are, at least to plants) are among the longest living insects. Luckily, they do not bite or sting, and carry no communicable diseases. It’s all sheer biomass. In a fit of paradoxical vitality, they’ve dug up from underneath, like sappers invading a castle, leaving behind coin-sized holes in the ground. If you put a stick in one of these coin slots, it will be swallowed, and its disappearance is accompanied by a dizzying sense that even a humble yard can contain foreign worlds untouched by human hands.

After digging out of their grave, where they live, to reach the world above, where they die, cicadas next molt, then spend a while adjusting to their new winged bodies before taking to the woods to mate. Unfortunately, our house is in the woods. Nor is there escape elsewhere—drive anywhere and cicadas hit your windshield, sometimes rapid-fire; never smearing, they instead careen off almost politely, like an aerial game of bumper cars.

We just have to make it a few more weeks. After laying their eggs on the boughs of trees (so vast are these clusters it breaks the branches) the nymphs drop. The hatched babies squirm into the dirt, and the 17-year-cycle repeats. But right now the saga’s ending seems far away, as their molted carapaces cling by the dozens to our plants and window frames and shed, like hollow miniatures. Even discarded, they grip.

“It’s like leaving behind their clothes,” I tell your sister.

“Their clothes,” she says, in her tiny pipsqueak voice.

We observe the cicadas in the yard. They do not do much. They hang, rest, wait. They offer no resistance to being swept away by broom or shoe tip. Even their flights are lazy and ponderous and unskilled. And ultimately, this is what is eerie about cicadas. Yes, they represent the pullulating irrepressible life force, but you can barely call any individual alive. They are life removed from consciousness. Much like a patient for whom irreparable brain damage has left only a cauliflower of functional gray matter left, they are here, but not here. Other bugs will avoid humans, or even just collisions with inanimate objects. Not the cicada. Their stupidity makes their existence even more a nightmare for your mother, who goes armed into the yard with a yellow flyswatter. She knows they cannot hurt her, but has a phobia of moths, due to their mindless flight. Cicadas are even worse in that regard. Much bigger, too. She tries, mightily, to not pass down her phobia. She forces herself to walk slowly, gritting her teeth. Or, on seeing one sunning on the arm of her lawn chair, she pretends there is something urgent needed inside. But I see her through the window, and when alone, she dashes. She dashes to the car or to the shed, and she dashes onto the porch to get an errant toy, waving about her head that yellow flyswatter, eyes squinted so she can’t see the horrors around her.

I, meanwhile, am working on desensitization. Especially with your sister, who has, with the mind-reading abilities she’s renowned for, picked up that something fishy is going on, and screeches when a cicada comes too near. I sense, though, she enjoys the thrill.

“Hello Cicadaaaaaasss!” I get her to croon with me. She waves at their zombie eyes. When she goes inside, shutting the screen door behind her, she says an unreturned goodbye to them.

Despite its idiocy, the cicada possesses a strange mathematical intelligence. Why 17-year cycles? Because 17 is prime. Divisible by no other cycle, it ensures no predator can track them generation to generation. Their evolutionary strategy is to overwhelm, unexpectedly, in a surprise attack. And this gambit of “You can’t eat us all!” is clearly working. The birds here are becoming comically fat, with potbellies; in their lucky bounty, they’ve developed into gourmands who only eat the heads.

Individual cicadas are too dumb to have developed such a smart tactic, so it is evolution who is the mathematician here. But unlike we humans, who can manipulate numbers abstractly, without mortal danger, evolution must always add, subtract, multiply, and divide, solely with lives. Cicadas en masse are a type of bio-numeracy, and each brood is collectively a Sieve of Eratosthenes, sacrificing trillions to arrive at an agreed-upon prime number. In this, the cicada may be, as far as we know, the most horrific way to do math in the entire universe.

Being an embodied temporal calculation, the cicada invasion has forced upon us a new awareness of time itself. I have found your mother crying from this. She says every day now she thinks about the inherent question they pose: What will our lives be like, when the cicadas return?

Against our will the Bourbon Brood has scheduled something in our calendar, 17 years out, shifting the future from abstract to concrete. When the cicadas return, you will be turning 21. Your sister, 19. Myself, already 55. Your mother, 54. Your grandparents will, very possibly, all be dead. This phase of life will have finished. And to mark its end, the cicadas will crawl up through the dirt, triumphant in their true ownership, and the empty nest of our home will buzz again with these long-living, subterranean-dwelling, prime-calculating, calendar-setting, goddamn vampires.

Stubbornness

God, you’re stubborn. You are so stubborn. Stubborn about which water bottle to drink from, stubborn about doing all the fairground rides twice, stubborn about going up slides before going down them, pushing buttons on elevators, being the first to go upstairs, deciding what snack to eat, wearing long-sleeved shirts in summer, wanting to hold hands, wanting not to hold hands; in general, you’re stubborn about all events, and especially about what order they should happen in. You’re stubborn about doing things beyond your ability, only to get angry when you inevitably fail. You’re stubborn in wanting the laws of physics to work the way you personally think they should. You’re stubborn in how much you love, in how determined and fierce your attachment can be.

This is true of many young children, of course, but you seem an archetypal expression of it. Even your losing battles are rarely true losses. You propose some compromise where you can snatch, from the jaws of defeat, a sliver of a draw. Arguments with you are like trading rhetorical pieces in a chess match. While you can eventually accept wearing rain boots because it’s pouring out, that acceptance hinges on putting them on in the most inconvenient spot imaginable.

So when I get frustrated—and yes, I do get frustrated—I remind myself that “stubborn” is a synonym for “willful.” Whatever human will is, you possess it in spades. You want the world to be a certain way, and you’ll do everything in your power to make it so. Luckily, most of your designs are a kind of benevolent dictatorship. And at root, I believe your willfulness comes from loving the world so much, and wanting to, like all creatures vital with life force, act in it, and so bend it to your purposes.

What I don’t think is that this willfulness is because we, as parents, are so especially lenient. Because we’re not. No, your stubbornness has felt baked in from the beginning.

This might be impossible to explain to you now, in all its details, but in the future you’ll be ready to understand that I really do mean “the beginning.” As in the literal moment of conception. Or the moment before the moment, when you were still split into halves: egg and sperm. There is much prudery around the topic, as you’ll learn, and because of its secrecy people conceptualize the entire process as fundamentally simple, like this: Egg exists (fanning itself coquettishly). Sperm swims hard (muscular and sweaty). Sperm reaches egg. Penetrates and is enveloped. The end. But this is a radical simplification of the true biology, which, like all biology, is actually about selection.

Selection is omnipresent, occurring across scales and systems. For example, the elegance of your DNA is because so many variants of individuals were generated, and of these, only some small number proved fit in the environment (your ancestors). The rest were winnowed away by natural selection. So too, at another scale, your body’s immune system internally works via what’s called “clonal selection.” Many different immune cells with all sorts of configurations are generated at low numbers, waiting as a pool of variability in your bloodstream. In the presence of an invading pathogen, the few immune cells that match (bind to) the pathogen are selected to be cloned in vast numbers, creating an army. And, at another scale and in a different way, human conception works via selection too. Even though scientists understand less about how conception selection works (these remain mysterious and primal things), the evidence indicates the process is full of it.

First, from the perspective of the sperm, they are entered into a win-or-die race inside an acidic maze with three hundred million competitors. If the pH or mucus blockades don’t get them, the fallopian tubes are a labyrinth of currents stirred by cilia. It’s a mortal race in all ways, for the woman’s body has its own protectors: white blood cells, which register the sperm as foreign and other. Non-self. So they patrol and destroy them. Imagining this, I oscillate between the silly and the serious. I picture the white blood cells patrolling like stormtroopers, and meanwhile the sperm (wearing massive helmets) attempt to rush past them. But in reality, what is this like? Did that early half of you see, ahead, some pair of competing brothers getting horrifically eaten, and smartly went the other way? What does a sperm see, exactly? We know they can sense the environment, for of the hundreds of sperm who make it close enough to potentially fertilize the egg, all must enter into a kind of dance with it, responding to the egg’s guidance cues in the form of temperature and chemical gradients (the technical jargon is “sperm chemotaxis”). We know from experiments that eggs single out sperm non-randomly, attracting the ones they like most. But for what reasons, or based on what standards, we don’t know. Regardless of why, the egg zealously protects its choice. Once a particular sperm is allowed to penetrate its outer layer, the egg transforms into a literal battle station, blasting out zinc ions at any approaching runners-up to avoid double inseminations.

Then, on the other side, there’s selection too. For which egg? Women are born with about a million of what are called “follicles.” These follicles all grow candidate eggs, called “oocytes,” but, past puberty, only a single oocyte each month is chosen to be released by the winner and become the waiting egg. In this, the ovary itself is basically a combination of biobank and proving grounds. So the bank depletes over time. Menopause is, basically, when the supply has run out. But where do they all go? Most follicles die in an initial background winnowing, a first round of selection, wherein those not developing properly are destroyed. The majority perish there. Only the strongest and most functional go on to the next stage. Each month, around 20 of these follicles enter a tournament with their sisters to see which of them ovulates, and so releases the winning egg. This competition is enigmatic, and can only be described as a kind of hormonal growth war. The winner must mature faster, but also emit chemicals to suppress the others, starving them. The losers atrophy and die. No wonder it’s hard for siblings to always get along.

Things like this explain why, the older I get, the more I am attracted to one of the first philosophies, by Empedocles. All things are either Love or Strife. Or both.

From that ancient perspective, I can’t help but feel your stubbornness is why you’re here at all. That it’s an imprint left over, etched onto your cells. I suspect you won all those mortal races and competitions, succeeded through all that strife, simply because from the beginning, in some proto-way, you wanted to be here. Out of all that potentiality, willfulness made you a reality.

Can someone be so stubborn they create themselves?

by Erik Hoel, The Intrinsic Perspective |  Read more:

Image: Alexander Naughton

[ed. Lovely. I can see my grandaughter might already have my stubborn gene. Hope it does her more good!]

Image: Alexander Naughton
Image: Alexander Naughton

The Intrinsic Perspective

The Intrinsic Perspective