Love Letters, Governance, Business, and (Seriously) Ignore Me
Systems Thinking Fueled by Human Juice (Handle With Care)
Okay, look. You probably shouldn't be reading this. Seriously. Stop. This is some real Doc Hammer-level navel-gazing, maybe mixed with a little Billy Quizboy trivia obsession (think: knows way too much about obscure stuff, the kind of guy who derails meetings with tangents about, like, the strangely interesting history of belt buckles, doesn't matter, just roll with it), and yeah, I'm totally ripping off some of Hammer's words here because, frankly, he nailed the feeling better than I ever could. You've got better things to do. Probably. Look, sometimes the charts and the historical analysis just don't cut it, you know? Sometimes you gotta just scream into the void using whatever language feels right, even if it's stolen.
Yes, I know this is unprofessional, but masks fall off from time to time. I promise to put it back on after this letter.
This whole thing? It's just trying to remind you of something you already know deep down: that all this stuff – Governance, Business, the whole damn show, maybe even the Guild of Calamitous Intent's bureaucracy (picture any vast, shadowy organization drowning in evil paperwork, which probably has its own insane internal logic, a terrible point to its madness, keeping the chaos organized, you know?) – it's not cold machinery. It's run on pure, uncut human juice. Passion, jealousy, love, hate, petty grudges that last for decades, noble sacrifices that usually go wrong... the whole messy cocktail. And forget what they say the purpose is. The purpose of a system is what it does.Remember that. Stafford Beer said it (POSIWID!), and it's the only rule that matters. Even when they try to hide it behind protocols that would make the O.S.I. blush (imagine the most rigid, official good-guy who isn’t good agency you can, the kind obsessed with rules, then add sci-fi). Especially then.
But you won't stop, will you? You're already in. Curiosity, man. It's a killer. Or maybe just... boredom, especially with the lack of interesting studies right now.
It starts like finding some old letters. Dusty box? Under a floorboard? Maybe just... there, next to a broken hover-bike (which, trust me, is funnier if you know the context, but it works either way, right?). And you pick one up. You know you shouldn't. Bad idea. But you do it anyway. You step into this... this fevered world of pitched woo, as Hammer himself might put it (and did, actually, about his cartoon show, which you almost certainly haven't seen, and man, you're missing out, but stick with me here).
And bam. You're drowning.
Someone else's everything. Devotion. Tears. Jealousy. That burning-down-the-house feeling right in your own chest. Napoleon, Napoleon, whining to Josephine, "I have been constantly depressed. My happiness is to be near you." Near her. While he's rearranging the damn map of Europe! Or Bismarck, the Iron Chancellor himself, spilling his guts about God and doubt and needing Johanna von Puttkamer's hand like it's the only thing stopping him from dissolving into mist – "the only security I offer... lies in my prayer for God's blessing." Security! From him! Or LBJ – yeah, Lyndon Bee Johnson himself – needy and cruel, sobbing at The Grapes of Wrath one minute, flaunting affairs the next, utterly dependent on Lady Bird's – sorry, Ladyhawk's – poise and silence to keep his whole damn presidency afloat. Or Roy Disney, the forgotten brother, delaying his own retirement, terrified of Walt's ghost (yeah, that Walt, the one they based Roy Brisby on, giant theme parks and maybe a frozen head, you know the drill) ("if I hadn’t even tried to build that thing, I would really catch hell"), forcing through Walt Disney World purely out of love and obligation to his dead brother's dream. See? It's right there! The personal engine driving the public train, probably fueled by questionable super-science and regret (another deep cut, sorry/not sorry). These guys, maybe they believed it. Maybe their passion, good or bad, was real.
It feels weird, right? Gross? Intrusive? Like you kicked down the door to someone's soul and are now rifling through their underwear drawer while they're downstairs making toast, possibly with Sgt. Hatred (okay, definitely don't worry about that one, he's... complicated, let's just say personal boundaries aren't his strong suit).
But with each successive letter, you begin to feel yourself a part of this... this love affair. Knowing that though you will never quite understand the fever contained in the pages, it's a mirror of your fever. Yes, it feels strangely familiar. Doesn't it? Admit it. That desperate need? That feeling that this – this raw, messy, embarrassing human thing, this Monarch-level obsession (picture a guy in a butterfly suit yelling a lot, the epitome of a passionate, maybe misguided, arch-rival), this tilting at windmills like some kind of bureaucratic Don Quixote convinced his TPS reports are giants – is the only thing that's actually real? The same energy that makes someone fall in love, start a war, build an empire, or dedicate their life to arching a washed-up boy adventurer (long story, involves failure, it's great). Good, bad, ugly – it's all the same fuel.
It mirrors your stuff. Your own stupid, beautiful, terrifying fevers.
And wham! Sudden panic. Pure, ice-cold panic. You stop reading, drop the page to the ground. You jump back as your heart races because the letters no longer feel like revelation; they feel like memories. Like you wrote them. Like they were ripped out of your own head by some mind-control ray (less sci-fi than you'd think in some boardrooms, probably).
Did you write these letters?
Were they written for you?
This is insane!
Who wrote these?!
Did they steal these lines from someone else?!
Now in a frenzy, you look for a signature at the bottom of the page. Anything! A name, a clue! Maybe you find one. Maybe you just find... this. Right here. Another letter. This one. This rambling mess you're reading now. Trying to make sense of it all. Like some idiot trying to diagram a hurricane with crayons, or Pete White trying to explain Conjectural Technologies (imagine tech-bro nonsense turned up to eleven, then add working lasers and certainly less questionable ethics than what’s going on now). Or maybe, like those other letters, there's no real signature, just some cryptic phrase repeated over and over... "I love you, Venture Bros." What does that even mean here?! Is Doc Hammer haunting this article now? Probably. Along with the ghost of Jonas Venture Sr. (think: charismatic super-scientist dad with massive ego and dark secrets, the ultimate problematic fave, again, trust me). And it hits me sometimes, you know? That maybe only like, five people reading this will get half these references. Which is kinda sad, but also kinda perfect. My own little secret handshake with the void.
Don't listen to it. Seriously. It's a trap. A beautiful, intricate, probably pointless trap, like something Rusty Venture would build in his lab instead of fixing the plumbing (he's the washed-up boy adventurer son of Jonas Sr., perpetually disappointing everyone including himself, keep up!).
See, we're trying (key word: trying, failing, trying again, Go Team Venture! – which is both ironic and sincere, another thing you kinda have to watch the show to get, sigh) to talk about how these things – these raw, bleeding-heart, shouldn't-exist love letters – smash right into the cold, hard, grinding machinery of governing and business. Because underneath the spreadsheets and the laws and the five-year plans, it's usually about someone's passion, someone's fear, someone's desperate personal reason. Yeah, I can write you the detailed breakdown of how Work Simplification actually worked back in the day, how government service wasn't always a punchline, but sometimes you just gotta point at the feeling, right? How the guy drawing up borders (Bismarck!) is the same guy praying for grace and a girl's hand. How the man building a nation from scratch (Lee Kuan Yew!) is leaning on his wife, Kwa Geok Choo, his "tower of strength," his Dr. Mrs. The Monarch (okay, that one's just perfect – powerful, competent, slightly terrifying partner-in-crime/life to the butterfly guy... see?), not just for hugs, but for the actual nuts and bolts – drafting agreements that guarantee water, judging character, keeping the lights on while he plays Big Man Politics. Their whole life together, that was the real constitution, the secret love letter holding the whole damn thing up, fueled by theirspecific energy. How Lyndon Bee needed Ladyhawk's quiet strength and strategic silence, her ability to absorb his cruelty and perform the role of First Lady, even as he trampled all over their private life – that weird, painful codependency was the system that let him operate. How Roy Disney fought marketing to name it Walt Disney World, driven by brotherly love and maybe a little fear for the legacy of his own Roy Brisby. Even Napoleon, Mr. Conqueror-of-Everything, sounds like a lost puppy without Josephine keeping his universe from spinning off its axis. "A thousand kisses, and one even to Fortuna, notwithstanding his spitefulness." Fortuna! Honestly! The man needed an editor. Or maybe just... Josephine. His reason. His drive. His Brock Samson keeping the wolves at bay (hyper-competent, borderline-psychotic bodyguard, you get the idea, even if you don't know). But let's be real. For every one of these guys, pouring their actual soul into the mix (for better or worse), how many are just... phoning it in? How many are like The Sovereign (the ultimate empty suit, a shapeshifting rockstar ghost leading the bad guys but mostly concerned with image and perks... all flash, no real belief, you know the type) – all style, no substance, no real belief underneath? Just playing the game, keeping the seat warm, maybe lining their pockets? That's the other side of the coin, right? Sometimes the hidden driver isn't a grand passion, it's just... emptiness. Or worse. And the system itself? Its real purpose shows up in what it spits out. Forget the mission statement. Look at the results. Look at noble intentions paving the road to... well, you know. Look at the gap between the soaring rhetoric and the messy, often contradictory, fried eggs on the plate. What actually happens tells you the real story, the real purpose, no matter how much they protest otherwise, whether they're driven by love, hate, or just sheer, echoing indifference.
It's all connected, you see? The personal isn't just personal. It's the damn engine room. Or sometimes, it's just an empty room with the lights left on. It's the ghost rattling chains in the machine. It's the shaky foundation everything's built on. The thing that makes the whole damn structure stand up or fall down in a heap of glorious, beautiful failure. (Failure is always an option, remember? It's practically the Venture motto. Seriously, it's cathartic, look it up. Or don't.) It's all driven by that hidden heart, pumping away with love, ambition, spite, hope – or maybe just running on fumes – all of it, all the time, even if you can't see it on the surface. And the system's true purpose? It's written in those outcomes, those fried eggs.
And yeah, okay, fine. There are people, smart people, systems people like Edward Deming. Or Stafford Beer, the guy who literally wrote the book on Management Cybernetics, drawing feedback loops that look like eldritch horrors trying to contain the uncontainable human spirit. And maybe I sound like I'm mocking them, but here's the kicker: They would agree with this. Oh, they'd probably hate the style, this chaotic mess, but the point? Absolutely. Beer gave us POSIWID – "The Purpose Of a System Is What It Does." Deming's whole "System of Profound Knowledge" had Psychology baked right in! They knew you couldn't understand any system – business, manufacturing, probably even governance – without understanding the people in it and looking at what it actually produced. Their motivations, their fears, their need for dignity, how they learn, how they screw up, how they connect. And crucially, they knew you had to look at what the system produced, the variation, the results. They weren't some cold fish just looking at charts; they knew the human element was critical and that you judge the system by its output. They didn't just see the love letters taped inside the machine – they knew those letters were part of the machine itself. So yeah, Deming and Beer got it. They understood that this messy human stuff wasn't a bug to be fixed, but a fundamental feature of the reality the system operates in. Management Cybernetics, at its core, tries to embrace that messy reality, to understand how it actually works, feedback loops and all, not just how we wish it would work. My beef isn't with acknowledging it – it's with anyone thinking they can perfectly flowchart love or grief or burning ambition or soul-crushing apathy and control it like a thermostat, ignoring the actual results and the inherent mess. Good luck with that, pal. Deming and Beer knew better. They knew you had to understand the psychology and the outcomes, work with the messy reality, not pretend you could eliminate it or solve it with a kill-bot (okay, that one's pure Venture Bros., sorry). You gotta listen, even when the data tells you something inconvenient, or worse, when the data is telling you something too good to be true that doesn’t match up, something the bosses don't want to hear. You gotta be willing to be Semmelweis screaming about washing your damn hands while everyone calls you crazy, because sometimes the simplest human insight about what's actually happening is the one the whole damn system is designed to ignore.
But here’s the thing. Here’s the cosmic joke. Here's the punchline that isn't funny, the one Hammer whispers between the lines.
Knowing all that? Seeing the connections? Even knowing Deming and Beer would nod along about the importance of the human factor and looking at what the system does? Acknowledging the Sovereigns alongside the Bismarcks? Stringing the words together like this, like I'm doing right now, pretending I know something? Pointing out that yes, it's all just human passion (or lack thereof) hiding in plain sight, revealed by the often-absurd results?
It doesn't actually explain anything. Not really. Not the important stuff. You learned jack squat, didn't you? But you felta part of our frenzied love for... whatever this tangled mess is about. You felt that flicker of recognition, that shared human energy. Maybe you even felt the weird hope in the Quixote story – how his misguided actions, his system's output, accidentally inspired Sancho to be a decent governor, accidentally made him fall in love with their shared adventures. Sometimes the fried eggs turn out okay, even if the recipe was insane.
Can you feel Lee Kuan Yew's gut-wrenching grief when he read to his wife night after night, knowing she couldn't respond, just by reading this? Can you understand Bismarck's soul-shaking terror and hope just because he wrote it down 150 years ago? Can you bottle Napoleon's obsessive need? Can you truly grasp the complex calculus of the Johnson marriage – the Lyndon Bee / Ladyhawk dynamic, the power, the pain, the performance, the weird love? Or Roy Disney's quiet, stubborn devotion to his own Roy Brisby's legacy? Can you truly get why any of it matters? Can you map the precise contours of the passion that built or broke something? Can you quantify Quixote's dream or Semmelweis's despair, or why a system supposedly designed for X consistently delivers Y, especially when the person in charge might just be a Sovereign-style poser?
No. Of course not. Don't be an idiot. Thinking you can is the real insanity.
It's like trying to explain a joke – kills it dead. It's like dissecting a kiss – just leaves you with spit and mechanics. You kill the magic. Before you made the mistake of getting this far, references and all, you felt like you, and you alone, understood these hidden connections, these secret histories, the raw feeling behind it all, the gap between the talk and the walk. You felt like they were written for you.
You were right!
They were. They still are.
Don't let this rambling, contradictory explanation tell you differently. Don't believe the lies! Forget the half-remembered anecdotes and cryptic scribbles! (Yeah, stole those lines straight from the man himself. Sue me.) It's still your understanding that counts! Nobody will ever get it but you! You just stumbled upon another one of our love letters. This one. Right here. In your hands. Frantic, scribbled, probably-should-be-burned, definitely influenced by a certain Doc, packed with references maybe three of you will catch (and I love you for it, you magnificent nerds), trying desperately to remind you about the messy, passionate, human chaos (or chilling void) under the surface of everything, and that the only truth is what it does. Who knows? It may even produce the best governors of Barataria!
So, please. For your own sake. Before you get sucked in further. Don't be like Sancho at the end, trying to keep the fantasy going when the knight himself has woken up. Heed the man's advice.
Ignore me!
Yours always (probably),
Someone Trying to Figure It Out (and failing spectacularly)
(Just Like You)
(Now scram! Go Team Venture! Or don't. Whatever.)