I recently co-authored an article with Professor Jennifer Crocker of the University of Michigan on Barack Obama’s campaign for Presidency. It was published in Harvard’s Du Bois Review.
http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&aid=5884360
Fault Lines: Journeys into the New South Africa is a disturbing chronicle of the world of apartheid South Africa. Author David Goodman profiles eight people who engaged in and against the repressive regime. Barely part way through the second profile, I was deeply struck by how alcohol and addiction help us suppress our humanity.
We first meet Rev. Frank Chikane, a black anti-apartheid activist for decades and now a high level player in the post-apartheid government. He faces unthinkable atrocities with undaunted determination. I was humbled by his commitment and subsequent courage. Many willing white South Africans torture and attempt to kill Chikane over the years. One of them is Paul Erasmus.
Erasmus is the second person profiled by Goodman, and his story as perpetrator is far more disturbing than Chikane’s. An innocent young man progressively becomes an inhumane monster. If him, why not any one of us? I found myself cringing at every other page, and yet hearing Erasmus’ view of the world pushed me to empathize and identify with him. I’m curious, nauseous and moved to contemptuous judgment all at once. He’s not like me, I want to insist. He’s an aberration with no heart, no sense of humanity. How could anyone commit such atrocities?
Alcohol, that mundane indulgence so many of us enjoy, is the lubricant of his cruelty.
He and his comrades get drunk while they interrogate, because it helps them feel less inhibited; in the evenings, when their dirty work is done, they begin drinking in earnest, to wash away the guilt and remorse; the next morning, they are too hungover to know what they are feeling besides a pasty mouth and pounding head. And then the cycle starts again. They are completely disconnected emotionally from what they are doing — and without their emotions, they lose their humanity. They denigrate and rationalize. Apartheid was morally fortified with outrageous rationalization.
I am not on an anti-alcohol soapbox, but I am searching for the ingredients to a context for humanity. Studies have shown that ethical behavior does not come from intellectual values, because our human brain is so sophisticated and intelligent that we can justify and relabel almost any action we undertake. It is our emotional connection to other people that leads us to treat them humanely. Milgram showed us that the more distant the ‘learner’ was from the ‘teacher’, the more voltage the teacher would apply because s/he was not confronted with the emotional awareness of his/her actions.
Each of us does this every day, in different ways. We take the edge off the pain, the remorse, the failure, the conflict through our coping mechanism of choice. For years I drank and drugged to make the pain go away, to make life tolerable. It helped me to survive, but it also allowed me to not change — and not to confront the consequences I was having on others. When we eat, shop, smoke to excess, we numb ourselves, forgetting what has happened, how we feel about it, and what we might have done to contribute to it.
The founder of the company I work for, Claire Nuer, was a Holocaust survivor and was constantly challenging those of us around her to confront the little ways in our lives in which we contributed to or mirrored the greatest dramas in humanity. If she had been born German in Berlin in 1923 instead of Jewish in Paris in 1933, would she have been a Nazi? I complain about the intransigence of the Palestinians and the Israelis, but I too can be unbendingly righteous more often than I care to admit.
Well, the victimizers of South Africa buried their horror at what they did by drinking, and it allowed them to continue, until they went crazy or committed suicide. My actions are never egregious like theirs, but when I hurt others — my colleagues, my kids, my wife — I don’t want to feel the pain or face the shame of admitting it out loud. I want to make it go away, just like Paul Erasmus did.
So let your emotions rise, however painful or uncomfortable them way be. In them lies the very roots of your humanity.
I was privileged to spend a weekend last month in a conference with a small group of folks from all over the US exploring our dilemmas around race and gender relations. The seminar loosely followed the Nag’s Heart framework and participant backgrounds included African-American, Latino, bi-racial, foreign national, and a few caucasians (like myself, for example). I’d like to offer two takeaways that were significant for me.
Honoring Mistakes
We each presented a ‘dilemma’ — an issue or discomfort that we were facing in our relationships with people of other races, gender or sexual orientation. My line of work involves helping people identify the patterns of thought that hold them back in their lives. This can often take the form of challenging clients to question their views of other people and the world. When a situation involving race comes up, it is a delicate proposition for me as a white man to support, for example, African Americans to question how they are interpreting or reacting to the problem — not because they are closed to such reflections, but because it is more ambiguous coming from someone with my background (with all the historical and cultural meaning the color of my skin connotes).
I can fear in these moments (and I heard this concern echoed in different ways by other caucasians throughout the weekend) that I’ll inadvertently say something offensive (or be perceived as racist). We all internalize our cultural norms differently, but for me, being seen as a racist or an ignorant white person by an African American is on par with being morally wrong — and it would do irreparable harm to the relationship. There seems to be no room for a mistake in this arena. Simply look at how violent the reactions are in the media when an incident with racial overtones is exposed.
We came back to this tension a number of times over the course of the conference, and the last night one of the black members of the group shared a view that opened new space for me around the topic: “The test for me with a white person is how they deal with mistakes. Do they stay engaged? Do they care enough to take responsibility for it?”
Entering into a delicate race conversation with no room for error felt too much like high stakes gambling on impossible odds. Being able to stumble forward, and to stay in dialogue even if the communication derails — that I can do. I’ve made an uncountable number of mistakes in my life and have spent decades working on my ego defensiveness, so although I am certainly not perfect, I feel very grounded in my ability to recognize my responsibility or culpability in a conflict, even if it (gulp) were to involve race. This realization was primarily emotional; afterwards, I was thinking, “of course, that’s obvious.” But emotionally and behaviorally, it felt like a new operating paradigm.
Upon reflection, here’s the rub. What would it look like to acknowledge a misstep? To admit to ignorance or insensitivity — or even inadvertent racism (since we all have it)? Would I really have the courage? Would the other person really be able to stay in the dialogue with me, without throwing me away like a redneck rag? We are in a cultural paradox in which blacks often don’t feel acknowledged regarding the racism they experience, and yet whites would never be willing to admit to it, for fear of being shunned. We’re all miserable and disconnected; healing awaits us in our words.
White Guilt
The words ‘white guilt’ were tossed out in the middle of a sentence by one of the African-American members of the group, while describing an incident at work. I knew right away what it meant. A few minutes later, however, another member of the group asked for a definition — and three different participants offered three different explanations. All very real and personal, yet with divergent angles: historical guilt (eg, centuries of slavery), current day privilege guilt (eg, the majority of white people have fewer barriers to ’success’ in modern America), and micro-interaction guilt (eg, ‘Oh my God, was that insensitive? Did I hurt their feelings? Should I say something? Would that just make it worse?’).
My feelings of white guilt are directly connected to a fear of blame. Like so many of our most pernicious unconscious behaviors, guilt has that great ability to make us feel really bad inside while masking the oh-so-comfortable benefits it provides us. (Depression is another powerful example of this ego mechanism). My white guilt allows me to feel pre-emptively repentant so that if you accuse me, I can defend myself with an “I know, I’m so terrible.”
The problem with guilt is that it allows us to abdicate, in good conscience, all co-responsibility. It supplants my sense of empathy with a black person regarding how difficult some of their experiences have been. I don’t actually engage them or their pain in a meaningful way; it becomes about me, instead of about them. Most of all, I have found that my guilt eventually leads me to lethargy. I may act for change for a while, but my yard stick of how much effort is ‘enough’ is whether or not my guilt has been assuaged — not the end result of racial equality.
I was struck again during this weekend how much potential healing and connection goes to waste in our lives. The painful feelings that we hold in boil and fester; we withdraw from the people, under the duress of a dramatic sense of threat; and yet, when we are able to create a communication space of safety and trust, even the most taboo topics are within reach.
Shayne Hughes
I dislike television. I invariably have a profound feeling of squandering my time when I watch it, so for more than a decade I used mine only to watch movies. I’m embarrassed to admit that I actually paid for cable for years as part of my high-speed internet connection, but couldn’t be bothered to hook up the TV. With the stakes of this election season, however, I emptied my pockets to upgrade my cable so that I could have access to the cable “news” channels (Fox, CNN, MSNBC). With great anticipation, I skipped back and forth between channels, trying to absorb all the information and analysis of the primary season.
I ultimately landed on CNN because they seemed to really try to offer perspectives from both sides of the political divide. I kept an eye on Fox, so that I knew what Karl Rove was telling the right to think. And I avoided MSNBC because Keith Olbermann’s anger at Bush was simply too personal for me to feel like I was watching news (when I want anti-Bush vitriol, I call my mother).
As the weeks passed, though, so did my interest level. Soon, I could only bear to turn on CNN late in the evening of each primary contest, just long enough to catch the preliminary vote counts. I was confused: the hosts and guests all seemed intelligent, educated, “in the know”. Why weren’t they talking about anything useful?
Throughout the spring, for example, the focus was on the Clinton-Obama fight for the Democratic nomination. Each time I tuned in to CNN, they would re-explain the delegate count, with representatives of each side giving their opinion about whether Hilary could catch up; what the reactions and implications were of each new super delegate who endorsed Obama (especially if she or he were a Clinton loyalist); should Hilary stay in, will it hurt the Democrats; did I mention the delegate count… I can understand that we might want to pass over these topics briefly on our way to something meaningful, but I sat there in disbelief as they came back to the same topics after each commercial break with a different set of .
Then I would skip to Fox, where Sean Hannity has an annoying habit of interrupting his guests after he asks them a question. I find it very agitating, because we never actually get a chance to hear what they fully think. When I actually caught myself muttering under my breath “will you stop so he can finish?!” I realized that either I had become an irritable, out of touch old man like my grandfather (but at the tender age of 37) — or there was something terribly wrong with our media outlets.
Is this where most of America is getting its news and forming its opinions? Where is the average American supposed to go in this country to find a useful analysis of each candidate’s positions on the issues facing us today? I realized with a start that not only was I not learning anything useful about what each candidate might do about the Iraq War, the economy, the environment, education… I’d actually forgotten that these problems even existed. I was lost in a world of political soap opera distraction.
They couldn’t possibly be doing it deliberately, could they? A few months back on CNN, Larry King and Anderson Cooper did back to back hours on Christie Brinkley’s public condemnation of her husband’s infidelities. I was speechless. I couldn’t care less. I had to work very hard to resist the conclusion that there was somebody upstairs in CNN’s corporate headquarters with a master plan of public distraction.
If I don’t have the time to read whatever policy papers each candidate has outlined, I can’t listen to NPR during the day because I work for a living, and I lack the mental horsepower to get my news from the more intellectual publications like The Economist or the Atlantic Monthly, how am I supposed to make a thoughtful decision in this high stakes election? What choice do I have besides defaulting to my political affiliation or voting my gut instinct?
I want something different; I want an opportunity for a transparent, honest reflection that educates me on the problems and each candidate’s solutions. I want a far more thoughtful and in-depth discussion of what each candidate is really planning to do, when president, about all the major dilemmas we face. I recall listening to an analysis of one of the early Clinton-Obama debates, and the commentators were remarking with disapproval that we had spent too much time on healthcare (something like 15-20 minutes). The healthcare crisis is complex, outrageously expensive, dragging our economy down, ruining the lives of millions of people, only going to get worse – and 15 minutes seems like an unusually long amount of time to devote to it? I want a debate devoted just to healthcare, with non-partisan subject matter experts to critique the strategies of each candidate! Then maybe I’d understand why the system is so broken and who has the best chance of fixing it.
We need a forum that brings the candidates (or their vetted representatives) together in a vigorous, more detailed examination of our challenges. Every night, for an hour of primetime television, put the key elements of a given issue on the table and make the candidates come clean about what they really plan to do. Critique the ideas. Give me a chance to see how thoroughly each of them can back up their speech sound bites. And most of all, educate me, the average American voter.
The short list of pressing topics:
– The state of the economy. How would they regulate or not Wall Street? What are the short and long term fiscal implications of their tax proposals? What do they think about the current national debt and the weak dollar and how would they address it?
– The quagmire in Iraq. I know McCain wants to stay 100 years and Obama wants to get out. Hmm, can I have some more details? I think the war is a complete disaster and that every life (US and Iraqi) lost there is a tragedy. We need to end it. But if we just pull out, it’ll become like Afghanistan in the 90’s. So I’m not in either camp. I don’t know what these candidates are really planning to do.
– The destitute state of our international reputation. The US has fallen from the city on the hill to the overweight bully-buffoon. How do we restore our moral authority as a country?
– Dealing with Terrorism and the Middle-East. Obama proposes diplomacy, and talking to rogue nations (e.g., Syria, Iran). Bush and McCain call that pandering to terrorists — but their approach has clearly failed miserably. We can’t solve all our disagreements with the Mid-East/Islamic world with a gun; they obviously think very differently than we do about the world and our/their role in it. Is Obama too soft? Can McCain provide any diplomatic leadership? What is the alternative to either isolating or killing people (both techniques, by the way, if they fail, create more alienated terrorists)?
– The complete drought of funds and support for US veterans of Iraq (and other conflicts). The waiting lists for psychological treatment are years long and more veterans commit suicide upon return than die in combat. This is a drama! It’s unacceptable. There should be a national uproar! Whether I think the war is noble or a sham, these soldiers deserve to be healed and reintegrated into our society. I want a detailed proposal for how to help them.
– US Education. The immense amounts of money going into arms and the war, as our state governments (at least here in California) cut their education budgets, is maddening. This is not soft liberalism, this is hard-nosed business! We are gutting our ability to compete on the global marketplace by under-educating our children. If we don’t reverse this immediately we’ll join England in the club of ‘has been’ empires. Does either of our two candidates really have a plan behind their rhetoric?
– Oil dependence. It’s not just that we are inconveniently dependent on a very unstable area of the world, it’s that we are careening towards a global energy and food crisis — and we’re not talking about it.
– Re-establishing the lost integrity of agencies such as EPA, FDA, CIA, DOJ. They have been so corrupted by the political cronyism of the Bush Administration that they have suffered a cultural change as organizations. It’s not enough to just put a well-qualified leader at the top after inauguration. We actually need to reassert their right to be independent, to act in the best interests of the public welfare — to restrengthen their individual and collective commitment to the laws of the land. The baseline of what is “normal” needs to be methodically and radically raised by the next president or we’re going to become like all those corrupt 3rd world governments we read about in the newspapers.
– The environment. How are we going to address global warming? What kind of leadership are we going to provide? What is our specific plan? How will we work thru the impacts that it might have on our economy? What is our strategy for addressing the exponentially growing carbon footprints of China and India?
– Healthcare. What are the root causes of these untenable increases? What is the reality of each candidate’s plan? I still can’t figure it out behind all the spin. I would love to hear someone who is really knowledgeable about this complex industry help me understand the pros and cons of their respective plans.
– The immense control that special interest lobbies have in Washington. We are back to a pre-Theodore Roosevelt era of corporate influence of our government officials. Should we pass legislation to eliminate lobbying? Everyone, red and blue, is disappointed and cynical about Congress. Why is that and what do they need to change? We complain about the politicians, but we’d all do the same were we in that system. What are the root cause fixes that could help them lead with America’s best interests front and center?
As these ideas formed in my mind, I became excited about them. I imagined being really engaged in a dialogue about our future, with more fact and less spin. I even thought I could watch it with my children and get them thinking early about where we are going as a country. As luck would have it, I soon thereafter met a TV anchor at ABC news and I floated my plan to him. Surely he would see potential power of such a show, and he was even in a position to act on it!
He let me down gently but firmly: clearly, the public wasn’t interested in such details. No one would watch such a show. They want sound bites and then entertainment. I was a bit crestfallen. It’s true that I’m hardly the type to have an original idea. Someone else must have already thought of, and dismissed, a similar plan. Or perhaps during my decade of television abstinence, that’s even how the current cable news shows started before veering into their current absurdities.
But then I thought of the state of the world, and I offered him the only clarity I had left: if we don’t think we want it, somebody should tell us that we damn well need it.
So I pen this as an invitation and a challenge to our current cable networks: be patriotic, help us as Americans to knowledgeably think about these issues before it’s too late. Otherwise, you can count on one guy for sure cancelling his cable subscription on Wednesday November 5th.
Shayne Hughes
I watched Obama’s speech Tuesday in Philadelphia on race. http://my.barackobama.com/page/content/hisownwords I was very moved by it and was in awe of his ability to name these racial and economic elephants so simply and truthfully. His ability to rise above the petty accusations and stay connected to his goal of leading our country to face our challenges is astounding. He reminds me of what I perceived to be Lincoln’s greatest strength (as described by Doris Goodwin in “Team of Rivals”): instead of defending himself, accusing others, and taking sides he really is able to rise above the fray and see others, the system, the larger purpose with clarity — and then somehow hold all those pieces in his head and communicate in common English.
I have worked incredibly hard on myself (my critical thinking, leadership, and systems analysis skills), for all of my adulthood — just so that I might blindly discern that such a clear vision exists. To challenge my assumptions, to see others behind their fight/flight behaviors, to grasp the system and dynamics behind seemingly random events/conflicts — and to do so when the stakes are so high… it’s not just that Obama is intelligent or brilliant (though true, those words aren’t appropriate); he is evolved, more conscious.
I’m of course putting him on a pedestal of sorts, and I’m sure he has his flaws, or loses his temper and clarity from time to time. But for him to have the insight, courage and eloquence to provide such a personal, powerful, and sweeping “state of race in the nation”, to create an opportunity from crisis, he irrefutably showed that he has the self-awareness, commitment and grasp of human nature needed to lead us.
After watching the speech on Tuesday evening, I turned on the news to see the reaction in the media. Overall, they did a hatchet job. I was outraged. If someone didn’t watch his speech in its entirety, and then simply caught the update on Fox news, they might simply conclude that he did a poor job of damage control. I perceived most of the main media channels to be focused on did he know, should he have known, he was spinning, he was lying, etc.
What Obama aimed to do on Tuesday was to help us heal, help us see each other, black and white, for the vulnerable, well-intended, contradictory creatures that we are — and to work together from that starting point. I don’t know what the media’s goal was. It wasn’t to help us move forward as a nation.
Shayne Hughes
The recent announcement by the National Intelligence Estimate re: the Iranian’s plans (or lack thereof) to build nuclear weapons became, well, predictably partisan and laughable. The left called Bush a liar (or at best incompetent) and demanded his impeachment — again. The right backed Bush’s insistence that Iran might someday build a nuclear bomb, since it once had a program. A few reasonable voices pointed out that the Iranians stopped their program in 2003, perhaps due to the international pressure they were feeling at the time (proving the efficacy of such efforts). Apparently, 2 of the more than dozen US intelligence agencies abstained from endorsing the report, thus undermining the certainty that the information was probably true.
Then there were more amusing stories about how the timing and bluntness of the report were payback against Bush from the intelligence agencies for the humiliation they suffered for their faulty assertions that Saddam Hussein had WMDs. These I enjoyed the most.
But what do we really know from all of these reports? What can we be sure of? Shall we take a straw poll? Do they have nukes? They don’t? They have them in hiding and are trying to fake us out? They’re wanting to build nuclear power plants for domestic needs despite their oil richesse because they are deeply concerned about global warming? Hmm. I agree.
Learning from Iraq to Understand Iran
What struck me as profound and unnerving once we discovered that Iraq had no WMDs was the ‘true’ rationale behind Saddam Hussein stonewalling for so long against UN inspections: he was bluffing because he thought it would protect him from imminent invasion from the US and/or his neighbors. Wait, wasn’t his possession of WMDs our rationale for invading? What was he thinking? What was he smoking? Or was he just paranoid?
How is it that this line of thinking, what was really going on in his head, never once surfaced in the press or elsewhere as a possible explanation for his behavior? How could we have so deeply misread him? What can we learn from this costly incomprehension on our part?
The same thing that I would conclude from the recent intelligence report on Iran.
[Keep reading, it’ll come…]
A documentary on former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara toured movie theaters a few years. It was called “Fog of War” and that’s how I feel now about Iran: in a fog. (I hope you do too, or you are seriously deluding yourself.) There are many fascinating threads to this documentary, but one in particular causes me great concern when I look at the world today. McNamara’s discusses his ‘Lessons of War’ and one of them is “Empathize with your Enemy.” Careful, all you hard-hearted, neoconservative war hawks, ‘empathize’ does not mean ’sympathize’. For that matter, all you warm and fuzzy, peace-loving, prius driving liberals should also be sure to look it up in the dictionary. Empathize means to put ourselves in the shoes of the other, and understand the world from their point of view. Walk in their skin, hear their demons, breath in their culture and national myths, see the rest of the world with their eyes.
We utterly failed at this with Saddam — and for the love of God, we are trapped too many years and too many thousands of deaths from the end of that mistake. We can’t win and we can’t leave, all we can do is to continue to pay the piper with human blood for not seeing the world and our enemies for who they were, for not understanding what drove them to act as they did. Shall we try it again with the Iranians? Dick Cheney appears ready.
The one key conclusion that we can draw with absolute certainty from the recent NIE report is that we don’t understand a damn thing about how the Arab-Muslim world thinks. We see the world as it makes sense to us, we interpret others actions as if we were committing them, we play our game of chess thru the prism of our national interests.
I believe everyone on both sides of the political spectrum should take note, because we won’t be able to either create peace or out-maneuver and effectively exploit without this empathy. We will simply be doomed act in ways that will backfire in our face because we had too little understanding of how the other side would respond. This isn’t about being nice, it’s about acting intelligently and wisely. We haven’t done that in years. How much longer do you think we’ll be able to continue and keep the upper hand?
Shayne Hughes
After having viewed the film “The Corporation” when it was in the theaters, I recently decided to read the book of the same name. Although much of the information was similar, I found the tone of the book different than the film (or my memory of it, in any case) and I felt profoundly moved by it.
In brief, the cogent and powerful book summarizes the history of the legal creation of corporations, the nature of their intent, and the subsequent role that they play in current society. Since their one and only legal goal is to generate profit for their shareholders, they cannot legally make decisions to protect the common good, or take care of others/the environment, unless it might some how be financially beneficial to them. In fact, they are compelled to “externalize” their costs as much as possible (meaning, to behave in ways that would cause the surrounding communities, government or environment to absorb/pay for collatoral damage. To do otherwise would be illegal.
Soak on that for a minute. To do otherwise would be illegal. We have created a legal structure that is compelled to do things that many of us abhor.
In particular, I greatly appreciated the author’s distinction between the goal and outcomes of the corporate structures and the intentions of those men and women who direct them.
It never ceases to amaze me how we as a people (myself included) can demonize the directors of a company (say, in the oil, automobile or real estate development industries, to name a few frequent targets), and yet when I meet and work with them, they are fine, well meaning, caring people.
Too often, we as humans fall into a behavior of angry blame or demonization, creating “Us vs. Them” dynamics between people or groups. I see this in every single large organization I come in contact with, as well as in more troubling arenas where the consequences are far-reaching (Democrat vs. Republican, US vs. the Arabic/Muslim world). This also tends to be the analytical frame of most books/films of this genre (what I would call “exposé”): “Sicko” by Michael Moore is a recent example of this, or “Who Killed the Electric Car”. They expose the “evil-doings” of these corporate monsters. These types of films tend to get us (or me, anyway) angry and reproachful, all the while feeling powerless to effect change against these monoliths.
The tremendous value of this book lies in stepping out of this dynamic and reminding us that the CEOs leading corporations committing these (at times, atrocious) acts are for the most part very humane people. They are simply caught in the system, and they divorce themselves emotionally from the costs of their decisions in order to survive. Of course, they could do something different (and they often do), but the structural pressure is very difficult to resist (and it’s illegal, as Bakan points out with tremendous irony).
Due to the spectacular power that corporations wield (through lobbying and campaign contributions, etc, especially in the US), it seems unlikely that government will be able to dramatically guide, control or eradicate the externalizing behavior of corporations. Perhaps after the excesses of the past 6 years, the pendulum will swing… In the meantime, I kept asking myself as I read this book what solution there might be at a legal/structural level. If we attempt to limit or regulate the current corporations through government, there will continue to be the same uphill battle. Teddy Roosevelt (the Trust-Buster) and Franklin Roosevelt (with his New Deal) were able to implement changes that brought the system more into balance; but following generations always forget, and we regress again to a state where more rapacious corporate behavior dominates. In any case, it would be a battle fought tooth and nail, with no victory ever really safe.
So I believe that our ability as a human race, within the current structure of the public-private system, to limit the corporation’s pathological behavior is insufficient, especially given the current pace of impact on the planet. We cannot afford to watch the runaway train barrel towards destruction much longer. I do not know a lot about law, but I believe that we need to examine if it is at all possible to create a different legal framework for corporations.
For example, today, the two main non-governmental organizational structures are ‘for profit’, and ‘not-for profit’. We have created a dichotomy with profit as the dominant criterion. Is there no other choice than this duality? Can the legal structure of private corporations be modified or transformed in order to integrate a broader goal, or multiple goals? Can we invent an organization that reflects our whole self (the self that incorporates both our desire for financial abundance, but also relational connection and a sustainable future for our children)? We have many brilliant people on this planet; surely such a legal structure is inventible?
As much as I believe that corporate powers would deride and resist governmental and other attempts to limit their influence (for fear of not succeeding as dramatically as they do without these limitations) perhaps a proposal to abolish the current limited liability structure and to integrate humane and environmental values with financial goals could be more palatable? As I’ve written the idea above, it certainly sounds more radical, but on the other hand, we would be giving something precious back to all the corporate executives currently signing big checks to lobbyists: the legal and social incentive to make a difference. Every one of them wants that deep inside, they’ve simply forgotten or don’t know how given the constraints they work in. If we change the system, their behavior will follow. Perhaps many of them would even be grateful to be able to work in alignment with their aspirations and values…
Problems that I see with my proposal:
– First, I have no idea if it is legally feasible to have a corporation with two goals (or more?). Are we capable of operating without one dominant goal to guide us?
– What would these other values/goals be? I have suggested ‘humane and environmental’ above, but it is not terribly developed. Could we define something universal enough that it would function clearly in all cultures?
– How would we measure the success or failure of these other goals? We can’t account for humane/environmental goals on a spreadsheet, like we do for profit. Money is objective, clearly quantified. Maybe we need to invent a new kind of currency?
I was very grateful to read “The Corporation.” It has helped me more than any other book in recent memory to understand the root causes of our current social and environmental challenges, both thanks to the basic concept it describes, as well as the non-combative mindset Bakan models.
Shayne Hughes
This Dick Cheney video has had a ton of press of late. If you haven’t viewed it, you need to. It’s astounding:
Cheney’s analysis is simple, accurate, thoughtful. And it is exactly what happened, except that it has turned out even worse thanks to the dramatic incompetence of the Bush Administration. (Even Cheney couldn’t predict that).
The real question I have been asking myself is “what happened”? It would be too easy to just mock him and use this as proof that he was wrong to advocate invasion in 2003. The really troubling question is how did he forget, rationalize or convlnce himself that his original intelligent analysis was false? Is it that he and his cohorts operated in such a bubble of group think that they lost touch with their original clarity? Is it that Cheney’s 8 intervening years in the private sector gave him a taste for the corporate boondoggle that could be had at the expense of the Iraqi people and the American taxpayers? That the quagmire that he knew we would fall in was worth all the profit that the US govt would pay out to its corporate sponsors? [Don’t forget that every time the US Congress approves another $80B USD for the war, it is really just more cash we are paying to the US private sector for arms, transportation, security, etc.]
Or could it be that Cheney was just seeing red after 9/11, and he had to make somebody pay? Perhaps Cheney and Bush were simply irrationally angry and unable to contain themselves? That would certainly make them less “ill-intended” or evil. When we want something really bad, we will do anything to convince ourselves and others of good reasons to do it. As an old wise man once said: “First we make up our mind, then we find reasons to back up our decisions.” That’s problematic enough when we are just running our own life, but if we are responsible for a country as powerful as the US, I think the bar needs to be quite a bit higher in terms of self-mastery.
Is that one of the criteria we are taking into account in 2008?
Shayne Hughes
If you haven’t seen this movie, it is a must. I consider myself relatively well-informed, and I had no idea that electric vehicles had been so effectively and broadly produced. When I sat down to watch the movie, I expected to hear about a prototype that had been muzzled before it hit the street, not discover that in fact fully functional electric cars (as big as Ford Rangers and Toyota Ravs) were overjoying their owners. The cars were competitively priced, fun to drive, very economical, convenient to charge and required a fraction of the maintenance of internal combustion engines.
I found the film enlightening, inspiring and frustrating. I don’t want to review it here (other than to reiterate the importance of seeing it for yourself) but reflect on what brought up in me. Like all documentary, news and other publications (like this blog), it is presented thru the eyes of the director and reflect his views on the topic. I would imagine that certain facts are highlighted, others minimized, in order for us to fully buy his story. Wikipedia lists a few of these critiques.
The film details how the auto companies shut down the production of the electric vehicles (EV), and provides its conclusion of who are the perpetrators of the crime. There are the usual suspects (oil companies, auto companies, the Bush Administration…), but then a few that I appreciated being exposed (namely, you and me, the “consumer”). It’s true, the vast majority of us meander along in our self-absorbed way, buying what is sold to us, and lamenting the lack of choices (Hummer or Expedition? Hmmm). We listen to Washington back down yet again from setting mileage standards, and we don’t scream in protest.
I suppose already the difficulty is that we are not a homogenous ‘we’. Many do scream in protest, others scream the contrary, and then there is the we that isn’t paying attention. Perhaps when (not if) we reach a moment of crisis that is acute enough, the percentages of our current mix will evolve.
In the meantime, the big decisions are made by large corporations (or the government they fund). It is at this point that those of the liberal ilk leap to conspiracy theories: the rich, the right wing, the powerful, they are all in cohorts, working together to get rich and oppress the powerless. This is quickly followed by conclusive opinions about their integrity (they have none), intentions (selfish greed and power) and humanity (ignorant and evil).
It would be wonderful if it were that simple.
The People
My work brings me in contact in a fairly personal way with people from all sides of the political spectrum, many many Republicans, a large portion of which are in the oil industry. They are very wonderful people, very caring, warm, and committed to life and people. [In a confession that should be taken with a grain of salt due to its general nature, I have consistently found the right wing Republican business people in the South far more genuine, thoughtful, caring (and sane) than their more liberal (and ‘evolved’) Democratic counterparts in California. The fact that I find this surprising reveals something about which direction I lean politically.] The cold hard fact is that these people are like us, no worse and no better. The people in the oil industry, for the most part, care about the environment, global warming, the future. They also, like us, care about their financial security and career aspirations.
If you look around you in your own work place, and acknowledge how often decisions get made because no one took the time to really think it thru, or no one dared voice certain concerns for fear of being judged/criticized, or the loudest voice won the argument, or this is the way we always do it so why change, or … Need I list more ways in which we all make small and large decisions for the wrong reasons? Do you think it is any different in the oil or auto industry? Why would they be any less dysfunctional than us?
I think we hold onto conspiracy theories because they are actually less frightening than the reality. And they allow us to hold a righteous, powerless position from which we don’t have to challenge our own thinking.
The Corporate Structure
Who Killed the Electric Car brought me careening back to a film I saw several years ago, The Corporation. They explore in this film how the actual legal structure of corporations in America encourages them to act in a socially irresponsible way (and they do).
The fuel of the universe is goals. People, animals, plants, corporations: we behave in accordance with our most fervently held goals (which is why, if you are not behaving in a way that you think you should to achieve your goals (e.g., over-eating, not exercising, getting angry, not doing your work, whatever) you actually have a more dearly held goal that you are not aware of that is in there directing things). Corporations have one clear goal: create profit. There is nothing built in there about taking care of natural resources, employees, the community, etc. So when a corporation does it, it is because the leaders of that company actually directed it to do so in spite of the corporate structure. Think of the inertia, in a multi-billion dollar company, that must be overcome to act in a socially or environmentally responsible way! Even the CEO can’t make that happen unless s/he is superhuman. There is no reason nor reward for them to do so. See the section in Thomas Friedman’s “The World is Flat” in which he discusses Wal-Mart vs. Costco. Nobody on Wall Street cares that Costco takes better care of their employees; the management of that company does it to the detriment of its stock price. We have set up a system that is structurally at odds with the values that we hold dearest.
And so it goes for the auto and oil industries. They need to make money or they will be out on the street (or gobbled up by a bigger competitor). I can have compassion for them — even as I rue their impact on the world — because they are not evil. They are just caught in the system like everyone else. For instance, I couldn’t understand why GM wasn’t making money on these cars; you make them for a cost and you price them at a profit. I realized that it isn’t necessarily at the point of sale that it is a problem: there is little to no maintenance to do on an EV. There is only one moving part! The oil, oil filters, turbo chargers, pistons, etc — all these pieces of metal in constant friction, destined to break at some point… Gone. A whole industry of products and service was threatened, and one upon which the dealers depended for most of their profit. Of course they panicked.
Why do I bring up The Corporation in the context of the Electric Car? Because in fact significant change will continue to be incredibly difficult until we change the system. When someone makes a film like “Who Killed the Electric Car” or “Why We Fight” or “Sicko” they are often driven by a sense of outrage at the actions and results that they see. I understand the outrage, and yet the behavior is normal, in light of the system that we have created.
Do we have the courage and the skills and the collective leadership to effect a change at the level of the corporate structural system? A change that could legally embed principles in business that ensure the longevity of natural resources or protect the interests of mankind, a community? So many of us would react to that, decry the negative financial impact that it would have. Yet, in a generation, or even in 5-10 years, it would become the new “normal” frame of reference. We would have forgotten the system that we were so miserably addicted to.
Nothing is written in stone. It must be possible. Perhaps we need to suffer a bit more as a people before we seriously contemplate it.
Shayne Hughes
It has been disheartening to watch the Congressional attempts to rein in the Bush Administration on the Iraq war. As promised, Bush vetoed the Democrats’ bill calling for an imposed troop withdrawl, and he did well to do so. The only thing worse than American troops fighting indefinitely in Iraq (Bush’s current strategy) would be the chaos that would follow any premature US departure, without a deeply rooted stability in place (Democrat’s current strategy). Why is the only debate in town an argument over who is going to enforce their own ill-conceived pseudo-plan? Why are we as the American public forced to choose between two polar opposite, although equally futile, proposals? Are any of our elected officials doing any serious thinking about this awful situation?
Let’s resummarize the essential argument on both sides:
Bush: Whether or not you agree with the decision to go to war, if you leave now you will make it much worse. Power vacuum, civil war, terrorist breeding ground for Al-Queda, another 9/11, etc etc.
Democrats: A surge is not a strategy; the war is already lost; we need to bring the troops home asap to minimize losses; the American people have spoken (”End the war”), so Bush should listen.
Both positions are correct. [Except for the last point in the Democrats argument: the message the American people sent was that they are fed up with the ineffective and incredibly naive decision-making of Bush/Republicans in Iraq; they didn’t tell Democrats to go do something even more short-sighted and destined to fail than the fallacy that got us into the situation in the first place (I’m of course assuming with incredible arrogance that I think I know what the rest of my compatriots were saying; I’m really just projecting my opinion onto the other 100 million voters with unabashed certainty, but give me the benefit of the doubt for the moment).
The problem is that both of these parties are totally missing the point. We cannot get ourselves and the Iraqi people out of this quagmire with the same tunnel vision, posturing and politically-framed thinking that got us into it. I think the American people are starved for something different.
I want to hear substantive debate on Capitol Hill:
– How to engage Iran, Syria, Lebanon and our other Arab allies to help us stem the tide of jihadists streaming into Iraq. What public and private pressure can they bring to calm the insurgency? We’ll need to come off our high horse to do this and actually engage them as human beings with valid perspectives and interests.
– Owning up to the world that we collectively made some very costly mistakes in our decision to invade Iraq, and now we need their help to clean up our mess. I say “collectively” because as much as we all like to blame Bush today, the number of Democrats who voted against authorizing force in 2003 was very small. We all approved this war, so let’s collectively deal w/ the seeds we have sown.
– Dust off the Iraq Study Group’s report. The experienced brainpower of that group produced some very well thought out, bi-partisan suggestions. What happened to them? We were all (very briefly) hopeful that some thoughtful leadership might emerge from their work, but alas, they have been all but forgotten, at least in the public dialogue.
Republicans are complaining that Congress is micromanaging the Commander in Chief, but with all due respect, Bush needs to be micromanaged. Quite frankly, why should we trust Bush to do anything well at this point? Everything he has done leading up to and in this war has lacked: a rigorous fact-based analysis; even a basic understanding of and sense of caring for the people involved; a disciplined and competent implementation. From Hurrican Katrina to tax rates to national debt management to Medicare/Medicaid to Iraq and the War on Terror to managing Iran and the Muslim world to building bi-partisan governance to the environment, he has been a complete failure. We should not be giving him any leeway whatsoever right now. We need to minimize the damage he can do in the world over the next 18 months. Micromanaging this commander in chief sounds like a really smart thing to do.
But we need to be more thoughtful and open-minded than he has been if we are going to do it. Simply replacing his “stay the course” with a Democratic “stop the fight” will have terrible consequences. Start looking for and proposing real solutions. If you are going to put deadlines on him, demand that he implement key provisions of the Iraq Study Group.
And one more question: We keep talking about the impact on soldier morale if we express our doubts about the winnability or validity of the war. Has anyone asked the soldiers their opinion? If I were over in Iraq fighting a war that I have second thoughts about, I’d damn sure want my leaders taking every precaution that we were killing ourselves for the ‘right’ cause, with the best strategy. I’d like to see the Democrats learn to reframe the spin that Republicans put on them vs. stammering defensively…
Shayne Hughes
