The Reality Principle

Unlike the arrogant ideological man and his illusions of how things should be, the man who lives by the reality principle humbles himself before such a force, and even fears it out of respect.

Hi all,

A belated Happy New Year to you all. I hope you enjoyed the holidays. We had a nice time with family — too much baking and eating though.

I wish the New Year had begun on a better note.

Los Angeles has been burning for the past several days. Last night, the Palisades Fire made its way up Mandeville Canyon from the Pacific Palisades toward Encino and we could see the flames from my home in Sherman Oaks. The smoke is heavy today and evacuation orders keep coming through the phone. However, we have been spared the horrors that others have not. On the first night of the fires, my daughter’s friend lost her house. My sister has colleagues who have lost theirs as well. Several more friends have evacuated.

I lived through the 1989 Bay Area earthquake and the 1994 Northridge earthquake and this fire has the same feeling of helplessness against a merciless nature. I used to work at a Starbucks in Brentwood way-back-when and we would sometimes drive over to the Pacific Palisades Starbucks to make extra money. They tipped good there. In the below video, the very first building, a shell of its former self, was where the Starbucks was. The building was over 100 years old. It is quite devastating to see the damage done to a charming village full of families that sits on the cliffs overlooking the Pacific Ocean.

What made this ongoing tragedy worse was how political it quickly became. There were advance warnings that a fire might break out in the Los Angeles region — after an exceedingly long hot summer followed by extended dryness. The U.S. Forest Service & National Weather Service predicted a week ago that the high speed Santa Ana winds were on their way and all it would take was for a spark among millions of people to start a fire. Despite receiving this warning, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass left for a trip to Ghana to witness the inauguration of its new president — on taxpayer dime. Why would the mayor make such a trip that provides no tangible benefits for her city ravaged by homelessness? Why would she ignore the danger of these winds? You can see their power in this video:

These winds which are capable of exceeding 100 mph knocked over a healthy tree in the complex where I live:

When Mayor Bass rushed back to Los Angeles a reporter met her in the jetway as she came off the plane. Rather than offer sympathy, condolences or updates, the mayor stood stone silent instead, as the below video shows. It was a bad move that infuriated Angelenos, especially those directly impacted.

At a later press conference, Mayor Bass read from a script instead of speaking from the heart and even read out loud “URL” instead of the website address for resources.

The first time I saw her show real and genuine emotion was on Thursday night when she attempted to refute the charge that she cut $17 million from the fire department budget.

Her incompetent leadership was matched by California Governor Gavin Newsom. When CNN’s Anderson Cooper stopped Newsom in front a burning building he asked, “What is the situation with the water? Palisades ran out last night.” Newsom threw his hands up and said, “Local folks are gonna figure that out.”

That’s cold, man.

These people — the Mayor and the Governor — proclaim themselves during times of peace to be people of compassion. They promote themselves as such through websites, pamphlets, parades, etc., and exalt us to be like them, to be diverse, equitable, and inclusive. They even have a shorthand for it: DEI. They believe in these values — more accurately, ideological principles — so much that they institutionalized them throughout all city and state government agencies, including fire.

But where was the compassion during the time of fire of epic proportions?

There are those who will accuse me of bringing politics into this tragedy and I gave thought to this relevant criticism before writing this piece. However, it was the government officials that brought the politics, especially the politics of identity, into this fray in the first place. Identity grounded in immutable characteristics — from race to gender — has nothing to do with merit, character, or any other human variable. It is simply the identity that you were born into.

The problem is that when our government officials add value to certain immutable characteristics it requires the devaluing of others. White supremacy valued white and devalued black. Nazis valued Aryan and devalued Jew. And on.

They then used these politics of identity as a consideration in hiring people for jobs and this compromised merit. There are many minorities who are qualified but this compromise raises questions on whether the best person got the job or not, which is why I’ve never checked the race box myself. We have been stuck in this quagmire since the 1970s.

There is another relevant wrinkle to this. When one compromises merit in favor of engineering diversity, one attempts nothing short of creating one’s own reality — more accurately, one’s own social justice world of how things should be. Within this world, this group must be valued over that group in the name of making up for past injustices done to the former group.

But can one ever truly create one’s own social justice reality without consequences?

The other day I was talking with my mother about the fires and she — a retired psychologist — said the reality principle was hard at play here. This principle grounds man by forcing him to assess the empirical evidence at hand and to allow the resulting facts to inform his decision. The wrathful fire burning homes, buildings, chaparral, and life around Los Angeles was reality.

There are those who believe in climate change, for instance, and that it was the cause of the fire. This includes most current city officials. However, they ignored the empirical evidence that the city and its firefighting force was at a disadvantage. They lived by the ideological principle and that blinded them to the reality before their eyes.

The reality principle forces man to recognize that forces of nature, especially a fire, care nothing for human ideologies or rationalizations. Reality is beyond the control of man. Unlike the arrogant ideological man and his illusions of how things should be, the man who lives by the reality principle humbles himself before such a force, and even fears it out of respect.

I will not accuse the Los Angeles Fire Department Chief Kristin Crowley of ignoring the reality principle completely, but she is guilty of compromising it. According to Newsweek, Crowley was a 22 year veteran — firefighter, paramedic, engineer, fire inspector, caption, battalion chief, assistant chief, fire marshal, and deputy chief — when she was nominated to the top position in 2022. She also placed in the top 50 out of 16,000 applicants when she took her firefighters exam in the late 1990s.

She has also detailed discrimination that she faced as a lesbian and that it took her years before she could make this private matter public.

I don’t know if her identity as a woman or lesbian played a role in her career advancement through the ranks, but the mistake that Crowley made as chief was that she allowed her politics of identity into the forefront of her job. In the below video she talks about how “super inspired” she is to begin her three-year strategic plan to increase diversity through the firefighting ranks. At the time of the video there were 115 women firefighters out of 3,330.

It is my belief that women should be allowed to be firefighters if they meet the rigorous standards set by the reality principle. However, Crowley made no mention of such standards and instead stressed the importance of representation — the hiring of more people like her.

As a leader in a major city, Crowley set the tone among her colleagues and underlings. Her peer at the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, Janisse Quinones, was recently hired to advance the DEI mission. In the below video, the water chief making $750,000 a year said, "It's important to me that everything we do is with an equity lens and social justice and making sure that we right the wrongs that we've done in the past."

It was Quinones who allegedly supervised the emptying of the Santa Ynez Reservoir to “repair a tear” before the Palisades Fire erupted. She also ignored the broken fire hydrants, a human error that played a role in allowing the fire to grow into a beast.

Perhaps the most egregious example came from LAFD Assistant Chief Kristine Larson who took part in the below must-see video. She repeats Chief Crowley’s points about representation and then she drops a doozy. Knowing that she is unqualified for the job she asks rhetorically, "Is she strong enough to do this? Or ‘You couldn’t carry my husband out of a fire.” Her response? “He got himself in the wrong place if I have to carry him out of the fire.”

There you have it: she valued her social justice identity over other identities to the point of ignoring the reality principle to hold onto her illusions. Or put another way, she valued her politics of identity over human beings and where is the compassion in that?

The thing with the reality principle is that it can never be denied, especially a fire. At this time, we lack definitive explanations for the causes of the fires — five as of now — but we know that human failure played a heavy role in the ongoing destruction. When one adds the government’s poisonous politics of identity, or DEI, into the mixture it spreads doubt among the populace that the best efforts were made to prevent this fire. As Angelenos called for the resignations of the Mayor and Fire Chief, they had a choice to make: face reality or not.

Chief Crowley chose to face reality. Yesterday, in an interview that went viral, she blamed Mayor Bass for the fire departments shortcomings. To Crowley’s credit there is a paper trail of documentation that shows her registering protests against the Mayor’s budget cuts and other related matters. Crowley herself is not blameless for DEI is an opportunity cost that requires time, money, and resources. But she deserves credit because at a time when city officials were stonewalling the public, she chose to break rank and speak in reality. That is her job as a public servant.

In the below video, whether you agree with what she says or not, it is refreshing to hear a leader speak without filter — how it should have been all along. When she is asked if the leadership of Los Angeles failed her department an emotional Crowley tries to dodge but then admits, "Yes." Watch for yourself:

As for Mayor Bass, her response? When she saw the above video, she summoned Crowley into her office for what was reported to be a dressing down. The Mayor has shown no signs of embracing the reality principle. Until she does, every action of hers will be a politically calculated one and devoid of true compassion for the people.

Throughout all of this drama among the political elites, it is important to note and pay respect to those who can never abandon the reality principle: the firefighters. They deserve far better from our leaders and that needs to be a leading political point once these fires are stopped.

My best,

Eli