America’s Psychosis (and the Corporate Cure)
I wrote this. And if you don’t agree with me, you’re wrong.
As the son of a lifelong politician, I never wanted to enter the field. Politics had a seat at our dinner table every night; monopolizing the conversation with an endless litany of urgent issues being obstructed by partisan gamesmanship, attacks and counter attacks.
So for me, politics has always elicited a weird mix of interest and disdain.
Which explains why I’ve consciously avoided creating or reacting to political posts during this presidential campaign.
Until now.
Because America is such a shit show.
And this article has deep roots, going back eight years.
Covid19 isn’t the only pandemic.
In the America of 2020, it is impossible to separate our economic health from our societal health. We are physically sick from the coronavirus, but we are also psychologically ill. This is empirically evident in our polarized discourse, rigid dogma and unbridled vitriol. Conspiracy theories are gaining traction across an alarming swath of the population, stealing our focus and energy from mission critical issues like employment, healthcare and the environment.
If that list makes me sound like a Democrat, it just shows how simplistic our narratives have become. I am not a Democrat or a Republican. And we have a bipartisan problem.
We’ve become a polarized society with a binary world view.
Binary thinking is, by nature, black-and-white thinking. Which is why we have fallen into a tribalism as pronounced as any division we experienced during the Civil Rights of the 1960s, The Civil War and the American Revolution.
Take the subject of Covid 19 as an example:
- You believe in social distancing. Or in free assembly.
- You believe in wearing masks. Or not wearing masks.
- You believe in closing businesses. Or keeping them open.
- You believe the virus is real. Or it’s a hoax.
Do you see where this is going? The pandemic has been distorted into a binary world view that’s become politicized because our politics is binary:
- Democrats social distance. Republicans do not.
- Democrats wear masks. Republicans do not.
- Democrats want to close the economy. Republicans want to keep it open.
- Democrats are socialists. Republicans are patriots.
Painting America with such a broad, binary paintbrush is cynical and paranoid. It’s also psychotic.
I don’t use that last term lightly. According to NIMH, a psychosis is a “severe mental disorder that causes abnormal thinking and perceptions that are out of touch with reality.” A psychotic person “has difficulty understanding what is real and what is not.”
Aside from being tragic, our psychotic thinking is counterproductive because the prudent approach to any issue is certainly going to be a balanced one. Even with a vaccine, we will still be well advised to wear a mask in public. If we close retail businesses then we need to balance that with payroll funding. It’s not an either or. As the President-Elect’s Covid Taskforce states: “Social distancing should be seen as a dial. Not a light switch.”
But dials don’t exist in a binary world.
We have a Reality Crisis.
This pissing match can trace its roots back to The Enlightenment, which spawned two world views that inform our culture today: Humanism and Relativism. For the purpose of this article, I’m going to focus on Relativism because it has led us into a Post-Truth world where no one’s concept of reality is universally shared.
Ralph Keyes captures the outworking of this mindset in his book The Post-Truth Era: Dishonesty and Deception in Contemporary Life:
“In the post-truth era, borders blur between truth and lies, honesty and dishonesty, fiction and nonfiction. Deceiving others becomes a challenge, a game, and ultimately a habit.”
Ouch. (That feeling you’re having is called “conviction.”)
This is why our society is so litigious — we need to arbitrate our disagreements… and when we don’t like the verdict, we fight to change the laws. Civil discourse and debate are anomalies, if they exist at all.
As a result, we’ve splintered into tribes that validate our world view, subscribing only to news feeds that reinforce our opinions. This personalization of content is actually harmful because, to quote a preacher, “We are being discipled by an algorithm.”
(Ever hear of Allan Bloom?)
The impact of such tribalism and binary thinking has been devastating. It’s given rise to fringe ideology like Antifa and QAnon… and hijacked the integrity of Black Lives Matter. Instead of the good trouble of John Lewis, we have anarchists smashing windows and attacking police.
When every cause is wrapped in a simplistic mindset, everything becomes politically charged.
But the problem is not political. It’s deeper…
America’s UX Problem
The American Dream is essentially a value proposition. One that has not delivered for millions of people. And I’m not referring to the obvious, like people of color or women. I’m also referring to middle class whites and middle-aged males — those people buying all the MAGA paraphernalia. These people feel they’ve worked their ass off and have nothing to show for it. We’re talking about a Middle Class that’s grown so expansive it’s lost its definition. When you earn $100K but need government credits to afford marketplace health insurance, something’s wrong. When the insulation against a Biden-Harris tax increase goes all the way up to a household income of $400K, something’s wrong. And in this socio-economic shift, where millions of people are desperately clinging onto a lifestyle they feel they’ve earned, we have a solvency pandemic. An alarming and growing majority of Americans cannot afford things like a mortgage, healthcare and college. Nearly half of Americans could not come up with $500 cash if they needed to.
This economic problem isn’t only in the low income households, it’s in the homes earning six figures.
In short, a lot of people in this country feel duped. They bought into The American Dream and it hasn’t panned out. A classic value proposition that over-promised and under-delivered.
Which means disappointment is the core problem in our country. And the feeling of disenfranchisement that comes with it.
Who’s to blame?
This is where we get into human psychology. Specifically, the need for a scapegoat when things go sideways. Finger pointing.
So, depending on your subjective view, the culprit is an immigrant, a person of color, male chauvinists, gays, Democrats, the government, corporate greed, the 1%. Psychiatrists label this a “victim mentality” because it transfers blame away to avoid owning any responsibility in the state of things. A coping mechanism to avert looking squarely at a broken dream.
The truth is, immigrants coming across our southern border are not taking away your middle class job. You didn’t get laid off because of racial or gender quotas.
Your job vanished or your salary froze because of one thing: automation.
Automation is the biggest catalyst for change.
35% of all working Americans are self-employed. And about 23 million of those “entrepreneurs” are doing so because they have no choice. When you consider the implications for health insurance, mortgages and retirement, this should sound alarms for policy makers. But instead, we obsess over Trump tweets and regurgitative new cycles, with no one attending to these societal tsunamis that are heading our way.
This brings me to a story about the 2012 Presidential race.
It’s not working.
Eight years ago, I was in that unsettling place between having a salaried job and finding freelance. A former colleague, who was a veteran of several Republican presidential campaigns, asked me if I wanted to work on the Romney effort. I said yes, even though I wasn’t a Romney fan or an Obama hater. (In fact, I voted for Obama in 2008, despite having a couple policy disagreements.)
I got involved because it got me in the game. And I wanted to do a campaign against the status quo which was making the American Dream unattainable for so many people, especially Millennials (of which I have four).
Explaining my political agnosticism, I said “I won’t do a red campaign or a blue campaign. I’ll do a purple campaign.”
I’m not sure my friend understood, or agreed with me if he did, but he introduced me to Romney’s campaign manager, who asked to see some of my writing. I didn’t bother to clarify that I was an art director and wrote some scripts over the weekend. It was a heartfelt campaign that touched on the disappointment I felt a majority of Americans were experiencing, captured in the mantra: “It’s not working.”
The art director in me used the Obama logo as the letter o in “working.” It was a little nasty. But not personal. Obama had his four years… and income inequality was growing, healthcare premiums were increasing 3X more than income, mortgages were in default, and college tuition was bankrupting households while banks used record profits to pay off their 2009 bailouts. Millennials were graduating with a ton of debt and few jobs.
Truly, things were not working for most people.
So I channeled that zeitgeist into scripts that portrayed voter archetypes: a small business owner, a working single mom, a retiree who has to help his unemployed son pay the mortgage, a first-time voter. In each case, the person articulates their disappointment and that if there was a candidate who would address what wasn’t working, they would vote for that person. Each spot ended with a button that read “Mitt is it.” Aside from the playful homage to “I like Ike”, I avoided names or political affiliation so the focus was on the issues and not candidates. It was really an indictment of the system rather than a party. And, truth be told, I held a very thin hope that the businessman Romney would figure any of it out. But I felt it was important to give this popular frustration a voice.
Unfortunately, Romney and America never saw the work. It got lost in the campaign team’s frantic shuffle of ad hoc ideas that were arbitrarily produced then polled, then rinsed and repeated. They missed the idea and the moment with a conventional approach that ultimately failed.
Fast forward 4 years…
A lot of people were surprised by Donald Trump’s political rise in 2016. I was not. Because I saw it coming. The work I banged out over a weekend was prescient to the populist wave Trump rode to the White House.
His election was not a vote for Trump himself. It was a vote against the status quo — one that seemed to penalize you for succeeding, disqualified you from help and was increasingly resembling an oligarchy. People were willing to roll a hand grenade into the room just to blow things up.
And boy did we get our wish.
Unfortunately, polarized America is even divided on the results of the 45th President’s term.
Which brings me to the obvious question: Why am I talking about this on LinkedIn?
Corporate America’s Close-up
The American political system is as broken as our society. Perhaps more so. And in the midst of Congress’ dysfunction and ineffectiveness there is a power vacuum. A void to be filled, because power is always appropriated by someone. There is never a void.
The question is “Who will lead?”
As the first wave of Covid spiked in March, Deloitte and Salesforce convened a panel of experts to do scenario planning around the pandemic. One of the four scenarios published is called the “Good Company.” It imagines a situation where “governments around the world struggle to handle the crisis alone, with large companies stepping up as a key part of the solution and an acceleration of trends toward stakeholder capitalism.” The planners envisioned a “prolonged pandemic” that prompts a “collaboration to control the pandemic led by large corporations.”
This scenario was plausible six months ago. In the wake of the presidential election, even more so.
With a dysfunctional government, a reckless and irresponsible President, and a polarized populace, we find ourselves at a moment in time when the role of a corporation may be changing. And not just because we are in crisis, but because the idea of prosperity is evolving from the narrow Shareholder Capitalism of Milton Friedman to something with a wider view.
In a McKinsey Quarterly from 2014 titled “Redefining Capitalism”, Eric Beinhocker and Nick Hanauer write:
“If prosperity is created by solving human problems, a key question for society is what kind of economic system will solve the most problems for the most people most quickly. This is the genius of capitalism: it is an unmatched evolutionary system for finding solutions.”
Innovation is the thing business is best at. And corporate America has the structure, finances and the bright minds to solve our biggest challenges. But before these resources can be marshalled to a cause, stakeholders need to know what cause they are working toward.
This is a problem because, according to Stephen Covey,
• Only 37 percent of employees have a clear understanding of what their organization is trying to achieve and why.
• Only one in five is enthusiastic about their organization’s goals.
• Only one in five has a clear idea how their tasks aligned with their organization’s goals.
• Only 15 percent feel their organization fully enables them to execute key goals.
• Only 20 percent fully trust the organization they work for.
While Covey’s findings are sixteen years old, the numbers are identical in Gallup’s 2017 State of the American Workplace. This year’s Edelman Trust Barometer, 56% of 34,000 people polled believe capitalism is doing more harm than good in the world.
Yet, as sobering as these numbers are, I have hope.
I believe companies will step into the vacuum and lead. Lead in research. Lead in production. Lead in distribution. Lead in communication. Lead in transparency and accountability.
In McKinsey’s recent report “The Case for Stakeholder Capitalism”, it reads:
“As economic players, business people cannot stand offstage, watching the action — and people don’t want them to. 92% of respondents said that companies should be speaking out on issues such as training, automation, and immigration, with 74% pointing to CEOs to take the lead. With the onset of COVID-19 and the wealth of information available, even those who would like to stay out of the action will find that, more and more, their employees and customers are demanding otherwise. The business ecosystem is evolving; those who resist will find themselves not only on the wrong side of history, but also at a competitive disadvantage.”
The coronavirus might just be the catalyst for a fundamental shift in how we see Capitalism.
Will corporate America elevate from the rapacious Industrial Revolution mindset of extracting wealth to a more enlightened paradigm of sharing wealth?
I believe nothing less than a fundamental shift is required if a business is going to thrive in a this new pandemic world. Which is why we ask every prospective client this simple but challenging question:
State the goal of your company, without using numbers or dollar signs.
If prosperity is redefined by something deeper and broader than shareholder dividends, we may see companies leading America on the societal issues we are currently paralyzed by.
After all, at some point we all leave the office and go home.
When it comes to a corporate vision, messaging is key. Our agency helps brands find a meaningful place in the world. Feel free to email me. I’d be happy to start a conversation about what that might look like for you… brian@bemeaningful.co
