Posted by Joe P in Questions for the Candidates - How To Never Be President Again In An Apathetic Club

Posted by Adam W. in Questions for the Candidates - How To Never Be President Again In An Apathetic Club
This is a question for Joe.

Usually it seems, during our elections you will post a question scathing some or all of the candidates for their apparent apathy during the election process. This in turn causes you to question whether the apathetic candidate will turn into an apathetic exec. You would express your concerns that they, if elected, will not end up meeting the standards you have for the execs. In a variety of other contexts, including during this election, you expressed how several of our Presidents have been unacceptably inactive.

Here’s an excerpt from the first of those election ship questions that I was around for way back in 2015.

“I think the club has a serious problem with apathy. I’m not usually one of the people who believes this, but I think recently we’ve seen a lot of senior people not doing very much, for whatever reason, good or bad. I think other people who have a history of being productive have seen this and gotten demoralized because of it, because they feel like they can’t do anything to help out. Or, they know that they could be helping out, but are too burnt out from carrying a disproportionate burden of the work required to keep the club going. I think this attitude is very prevalent, but it’s not being expressed in public because people don’t see a point in doing it; it’s not going to change anything. So, people are now wondering if they should stop caring because it feels like a lot of other people have, and it may not be worth the effort anymore.”

I’m going to answer inline, but I want to say up front that I love these questions and this introduction to them.

In your view, does the club have a serious problem with apathy currently?

Perhaps. I am tempted to say “Yes,” but we should make sure we’re very clear what “a serious problem with apathy” actually means.

I do not believe that apathy is something that just sorta happens out of nowhere. It’s not like apathy descends upon us like a rainstorm, inexplicably and beyond our control. If people start feeling apathetic, it is not because some apathy virus broke out and made us feel that way. Despite your characterization of my long-standing opinions, I do not think the club is normally apathetic, either. If the club were actually apathetic all of the time in the 7 years between when I wrote that post in 2015 and today, we wouldn’t have a club today.

I think apathy is one of several natural human reactions when people feel like their actions don’t matter. Around here, people feel like their actions don’t matter because leadership has been absent or weak. When I talk about “weak leadership”, I mean leadership that doesn’t accomplish much, doesn’t hold other people accountable, and is not responsive to concerns or issues. When I say “leadership”, I mean more than just the President, but I think there is a definite trickle-down effect; if the President is absent or doesn’t hold the cabinet accountable, then those people stop holding the people beneath them accountable also. It gets to the point where people don’t even post in character because nobody seems to care if they do or they don’t. Nobody says anything because there’s not going to be any action taken on what they say, so there’s no point.

I’ll ask my follow up in another post so I can ask all the candidates.

I also think that apathy is not the only emotional reaction to what I’ve described above, it’s just the only one that is polite to discuss publicly. Take a look at some of the questions that Rob is getting right now; do all of those people really seem apathetic to you? They’re bothering to post questions, which isn’t really an apathetic behavior. There’s a frustration there, that is probably being expressed here and now because this is probably the only forum where it might result in something different happening. Quite a few of those people have described interactions they’ve had with Rob before asking the question, and how those interactions didn’t result in action being taken in an effective way. But it’s typically considered rude and confrontational to say that so plainly, so people don’t. Instead they talk about “apathy” in a de-personalized fashion, so as not to be accusatory.

If the club has a serious problem with apathy, and the people who try to run it usually are too apathetic for your liking, and the people who end up running it are often too inactive for your liking, how are you going to change the club and the people in it so much this term that you will be comfortable not needing to run for President in the future?

Adam W.

I dispute the characterization that “the people who try to run [the club] usually are too apathetic for my liking, and the people who end up running it are often too inactive for my liking.” Most of the people who ended up getting elected after I wrote that post were sufficiently present; the exceptions were the people who were not. I will not name every case where I thought people were too inactive; I’ve focused specifically on Daniel Lerner’s third term and Robert Archer’s second term as ones in which there is insufficient activity, because those are directly relevant to our current set of problems. Since you dredged up the post from 2015, I will say now that I wrote that post in the election after Jack Dipper’s third term, and he was an absent President during his term also (I think he was deployed to Afghanistan? I don’t remember if it was that year or country), so the similarities between this moment and that one are relevant.

I think that’s a fair point you didn’t think the people running were usually too apathetic for your liking. I can think of a couple of times when you probably were satisfied enough with people’s responses that you concluded there was an acceptable reason that was not apathy.

It’s interesting that you don’t think you often find our Presidents too inactive. How exactly does one define often? I recall another term you made similar comments about and there might have been another one. But maybe it seems like more than it really is because when you do find our Presidents inactive you do you frequently and publicly express it. Do you talk more frequently than anyone else about inactive Presidents? I think, perhaps, that you might.

As for how to change the club so that I don’t need to run again, what I wrote in 2015 still applies today:

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What I think would be useful is having someone who actually wants to do things be in charge of the club and try to find other people who actually want to do things to help out. Not any with any grand plans or policies or projects or reviews or any of that; I mean “help out” just to keep the lights on and the trains running on time. And I think what would help most with that are people who actually want to be President and Vice President, look like they want it, and act such that other competent people end up wanting to do it too. Preferably younger, competent people, so those of us who have been pitching in consistently for the last five years or so can take a vacation from STF-work without having to worry about the club falling apart while we do it.

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I actually want to be the President of the club, to fix this exact problem in this exact way. That’s what all of this stuff I keep prefixing with Re- is supposed to do in a structured fashion.

More importantly, I know Steve and I can do this, because Steve actually already did it once. Steve became the President in 2019, in an uncontested election. Uncontested elections are blazing red flags for high levels of club apathy; they don’t happen often. Steve did a good job, and then after Steve, we had a hotly contested election between Sarah and Jerome; those of you who saw it know there were no problems with apathy there! Sarah got elected, did a good job as President, and then we had a race between three different tickets who were all rather polite to each other the entire time. Daniel won that election, had a decent start, and… then proceeded to be absent. Then all of the problems I’m talking about started again.

It’s interesting to hear you talk about Presidents who you think did a good job. I only recall you saying something like that about a President in regards to Daniel’s role in the Exodus transition.

So I think if the club elects Steve and I, and we get people feeling like contributing here matters again, we’ll break the cycle. I think we will succeed and people will start stepping forward. Part of my master plan to do that is to say up front that I’m not going to run for a re-election, and to mention in the realignment posts at strategic points in the term how to run for President effectively and win. Because I think there is very much a right way to do that, it’s a bit of a lost art, and it’s an important part of how the club is supposed to work.

I would love to expand upon all of this in any direction you or anyone else would like.

Joe

I understand you expect you will break this cycle. What I am wondering is if it will last. And for how long. You didn’t say you would turn around the club forever. Just that you had a goal. It sounds like an unattainable goal to me.

Adam W.