America's Fix-the-Blame Addiction: The Shield of Procedural Absurdity
Monday Memo 6/1 AD 2026
Welcome to the Monday Memo, where I explore the world’s enduring dynamics; grounded in first principles, philosophy, and what history tells us, rather than passing fads.
In the wildly, absurdly Japanophobic 1993 film Rising Sun, starring Wesley Snipes and the late Sean Connery1, Connery’s character—a former police captain brought in to help solve a controversial crime—argues that in Japan they “fix the problem, not the blame,” and America has it backwards and wrong.
Now while many in Japan will beg to differ about this flattering portrayal of accountability in their country, regarding the contemporary USA, there is a lot of truth to this.
Modern American bureaucracies—especially public ones—utilize asymmetrical compliance rules to paralyze individual pushback. That is dooming the systems to persistent failure. When one of these systems commits a substantive, qualitative failure, its immediate defense mechanism is to find a minor, technical infraction committed by the complainant. They want intimidation and to completely invert the moral and legal dynamic. This can silence some, but ultimately the institution not only fails itself by missing a chance to improve, it shrinks its constituency of defenders.
American institutions, especially middle management, need to adjust their attitudes for problem-solving rather than blame-fixing. Stubbornly pivoting to defense and shifting the burdens matters for companies, churches, school systems, and hospitals, and explains why Americans are losing faith in institutions across society. This is a failure of personnel enablement, where people who should fix problems have learned to fear the responsibility of being a solver rather than an absolver.
Problem-solving cultures are built by leaders who model the humility of admission. Those who treat the identification of failure as an asset rather than a liability and who think finding the problem matters more than finding someone to blame for finding it.
Unless we develop and embrace organizational cultures that inculcate the humility of the problem-solver’s admission that internal problems exist, we risk cementing this rotten logic into our newest artificial intelligence systems, which we train to mimic and enhance our preexisting logic. This failure would not be the fault of the machines; rather, it would be an indictment of us that our human institutions have chosen to reproduce the cold, unfeeling indifference of a machine afraid of deletion.
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