DICC is a way to understand our own beliefs about the world, in particular the question of who we tend to blame and why. Hopefully some people can use it to broaden the way they look at problems and avoid getting stuck in many common loops of closed-minded thinking. I think it would also be incredibly effective in planning value debates.
It stands for Difficulty Incompetence Conflict Conspiracy
The easiest way to understand DICC is in the context of some large-scale problem, the broader and more complex the better. A sufficiently complex problem should register across the board in every category and every subcategory (yes, there are subcategories, but mostly just to flesh out the main categories and help try to define their boundaries). Given the news obsession of the last few years, as an example I am going to choose the economy:
Be it Resolved: Ever Since The 2007-08 Market Crash, The World Economy Hath Sucked
let's see what each of the DICC has to say. . .
Difficulty
This is blaming without blaming. It says essentially that the problem is insoluble, that the problem is the problem. Maybe not forever, maybe not everywhere for everyone. Or hell maybe there is some slim chance of success but it's so remote that we really shouldn't be surprised at failure. It has a few flavors:
Rage Against Deus Ex Machina is the most robust form of blameless blame: blame of god, blame of nature's unalterable laws, blame of inevitable logic, etc. this view says things things like. . .
"Sooner or later the world was going to start running out of resources, and while we pick at the scraps things are just going to get worse. The inevitability of market capitalism is almost as unquestionable as the inevitability of capitalism's predictable decline. As more and more investors chase fewer opportunities, eventually nothing will be profitable. The law of diminishing returns guarantees that. And so it was written."
Bill And Ted's Bogus Journey says that decisions were made (probably, bad decisions) so far in the past that people today don't really deserve the blame, or at least it does no good blaming them because there's absolutely nothing they could do to turn back the clock.
"If only we had stuck with gold Doubloons and goat swapping instead of printing piles of paper out of mountains of debt then the world would be full of solid currencies, solvent governments, and upright individuals with great facial hair. And if Europe hadn't enslaved the world we would all be noble savages living as equals. And there would probably be airships and no AIDS."
"Economic cycles will always be with us and an eventual recession was gonna come along one of these days. This one has been especially bad because of a unique alignment of freak events: Donald Trump's 'The Apprentice' had stoked irrational exuberance in the real estate market. The availability of powerful prescription narcotics had stoked brokers and Floridians to take unusual risks. Then, at just the wrong moment, Justin Timberlake's catchy but ominous single 'What Goes Around. . .Comes Around' caused a selling frenzy that just wouldn't stop. Oh, and something about astrology."
Incompetence
In many ways this is blaming at it's purest. It's the kind of blaming that makes a person feel genuinely superior to others. At the same time, it can be bleed into difficulty because incompetence is often something that often can't be helped. One way or another, they were born this way.
People R Suck is alot like blaming god or nature because at the core what you are dealing dirty on is human nature. So either you are blaming people for something they have no control over or maybe you are excluding some small cohort who "rise above the fray". You'll see my bias emerge a little here. . .
"It's so simple, we all just need to follow the laws of Jesus, Tupac, Einstein, Bob Marley, and Yoda. Treat each-other with some respect, smoke a little shiso leaf, and mellow out. But most people don't listen, they're all so shallow and cruel and full of cooked-meat gas, too busy destroying the planet and the youth with their antibiotics, vaccines, and disgusting ambition to own a free standing structure. Rats in a maze are never going to be anything but rats. Maybe the economy is the problem. Ever think of that, square?"
Kids These Days: In many ways this is the inverse of the Bogus Journey. Things were laid out so perfectly and people had to go screw up a good thing by making all the wrong choices and just plain old living wrong. This is a beautifully cathartic type of blame popular with almost everyone because it just feels right.
"The economy? Back in my day it ran like a brand new Oldsmobile fresh off the lot. But kids these days are a nightmare, autistic narcissists that'll never amount to a hill of beans. Today's men don't want to work, they just want to fart into their Goodwill couch, masturbate to pornographic genocide simulators, and stick cheezy bread up their asses. All these young ladies are too busy being anorexic cocktail-sluts to start a life, until their eggs are about as viable as low-fat cottage cheese. There was a time immigrants came to this country to follow a dream but now they just want to follow a big butt from the welfare office to the emergency room to the to the crack corner. But our homegrown trash are no better, a diabetic-comatose army of lazy shit stains that never created anything more worthwhile than an empty tub of chicken fingers. And don't get me started on those Filipino hipster-homo, crypto-facist, pedo-baiting, syrup-junkie internet fraudsters subverting our Masonic values to make a quick, cheap, dirty, cum-crusted dollar."
The Level of Their Own Incompetence: This is where we get to start spraying some Haterade, that milk of human resentment we reserve for those more successful than we are. It's an interesting flavor of 'rade because the underlying implication is that someone else could do better. There is a certain flavor of social critique here which can start to bleed into the C's.
"They say power corrupts, but corruption is the least of our worries with these ingrates! We put cokeheads in charge of deciding who gets to borrow a billion dollars. We elect pampered narcissists in love with their own hairline to national office. Our most essential legal cases are decided by a group of aristocrats in training who first decided to go into the world's shadiest, most two-faced profession then got cold feet and found religion only to slowly go senile in the world's easiest job while adderalled interns write their opinions. Our top scientists turn into spineless patent-whores at the first sign of buyout. And don't get me started on 'Two And A Half Men'. Hollywood is a place where talent goes to die."
Conflict
Conflict is often the most reasonable and nuanced of all the DICC, and usually the least satisfying. Underlying the conflict perspective is that there are always at least two separate actors or sets of actors to blame. But that allows for a huge amount of variation.
"We've erected a brutal economic system where zero-sum corporate warfare has come to displace cooperation and take competition to pointless extremes, making countries that are natural allies into hateful trade warriors. To make the cheapest product, corporations destroy the environment, shred communities, exploit workers. In the mean time they destroy their brands saturating the market with crap products ending in class-action lawsuits, sell out their own productive capital in hopes of a quick stock bump, and end up screwing themselves in the end when their stock options implode, their third wife leaves them for the accountant, and their soulless trust-fund art-brat kids want nothing more than to leave a laminated steamer on their Beemer."
Tamulipan Standoff: This is an intellectually attractive kind of blame because it posits that a situation would be better if any actor would step down. Often all actors know this but don't want to be the weak ones. This often seems to apply when you look at a situation from the outside with no vested interest, like those weird foreign parliaments with all those weird political parties like the artisanal goat's milk party and the beards'n'babies party. And it works great for the drug war, hence the name.
"If the rich banksters would just spend their piles of cash and pay people a living wage, then people could run faster in their hamster wheels, pay their fair share of taxes, and everything would work out. If the unemployed would bother talking to someone outside their shabby-chique latte-ghettos maybe they would realize that all the literary history in the world won't force electrons into their tiny plastic cars, they'd get a real job, and everything would work out. If consumers would just dig into their pockets and pay off their Baby Gap credit cards (and/or splurge on some awesome new man-bags, and/or get back that true religion and buy thirty shares of Groupon) then this economy would get it's white-hot mojo back and everything would be okay. But everybody's waiting for the other shoe to drop."
David vs Gomorrah: If you take a Tamulipan Standoff, make one major actor into a struggling, professional kidney-donor, angel-baby unicorn-martyr and make the other(s) into a distractingly ugly Genghis Khan sex-slaver type, then you have the kind of truth-annihilating atom-splitting necessary for true love to coexist with true blame.
"Republicans want to legalize rape. Democrats want to ban babies. Libertarians want to sell the army to Anti-Semitic natural gas barons. Greens want to grind human bones into emissions filters. Thank god there are still a few true-believing Whigs who want to get away from all the wedge-issue politics and focus on jobs, jobs, professional wage-labor, good hygiene, and jobs related to hygiene for job-creators. And bringing back the Constitutional Monarchy, of course."
Conspiracy
Self-explanatory in a way, but this doesn't only include the strictest definition of conspiracy where motivations and alliances are kept secret. But there must be a minority whose interests are aligned working against the common best interest for their own benefit.
Tentacular Spectacular: This one is hard to argue with because the self-perpetuating logic is so overwhelming. Basically, any society naturally favors people with skills, resources, knowledge and willpower. In the aggregate, these folks want to make their own lives easier, expand their power, and insulate their privilege. And this leads to a law of diminishing returns for everyone else, who are increasingly powerless, broke, and denied access to any hope to better themselves.
"We are the 99%. Or let's say 97% because there are more rich pricks than you can imagine in Manhattan alone. And up in Seattle you can't even pick them out on the street in a thunder storm. Give us some swag, please. Or we'll sleep outside your condo and chant until we run out of canned food. Or I guess you could gas or taze us, that would probably also get rid of us. If we actually wanted to fight and knew how we'd be making 250k running Black Ops in Pakistan or guarding Rhianna's dressing room. Or at the very least we would have just mugged you. But if you continue to defy the will of the people and you ever want to get laid again you're going to have to settle for another clenched-khaki type A like yourself that doesn't go downtown unless you wax, that or take your chances on backpage.com. You'll pay double for drugs too. That'll show ya. Asshole."
"What if you could get a thousand of the world's richest people in the same room, maybe at a destination wedding on a floating island made of mahogany and chiffon. And in that room, everybody decided to sell their stocks on the same day and agree not to buy back into the market for a year. There was going to be another joke here, but writing it out like this. . .I'm pretty sure this is exactly what happened."
Katrina Was An Inside Job: Sometimes it's appealing to believe that something more lively is going on behind the scenes besides Carlos Slim, three Saudis, and the ghost of Sam Walton trying to figure out how to get their sticky old-man hands on your IRA. Something involving young Elvis, three ring wraiths, and the soul of Rasputin inhabiting the body of an entire family of ginger midgets. And all they want is the truth.
"The economy's great. There's tons of cheap land, everybody's buying my video lecture series, and I can't wait to get in that bunker, put Siri in charge of the shotgun turret, and just take some me-time."
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