Читать книгу The Power of the Herd - Linda Kohanov - Страница 16
ОглавлениеOn an otherwise sunny Saturday morning in January 2011, Arizona congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords was shot during an informal meeting with her constituents. Eighteen innocent bystanders were also injured or killed by a single, deeply disturbed gunman.
The tragedy hit home — literally. Giffords and astronaut Mark Kelly had gotten married a few miles down the road from my latest home base, a small, wildly scenic horse property that my husband and I had recently purchased for a downsized version of our equine program. Among many other benefits this charming little ranching community afforded, I had been pleased to learn, our new Amado, Arizona, location put us squarely in Giffords’s district.
I had long appreciated the congresswoman’s intelligence, courage, and willingness to respectfully listen to people with opposing views. Giffords, not surprisingly, was also a lifelong horsewoman. In a brief career overview aired on National Public Radio’s All Things Considered shortly after the attack, producers emphasized that working at a local boarding stable, cleaning stalls in exchange for riding lessons, had been her favorite childhood summer job. “I learned a lot from horses and the stable people,” she told NPR. “There was a unique culture out there, and I think it provided good training, all of that manure-shoveling, for my days in politics ahead.”
Political humor aside, Giffords’s commitment and adaptability, her empathy, strength, patience, and poise under pressure echoed the skills of previously mentioned rider-leaders who had the nerve to take on difficult yet socially significant positions, putting their lives on the line, if necessary, for the chance to make a difference.
In the first confusing hours after the shooting at a Tucson supermarket, reporters were madly trying to determine if Giffords’s wounds had been fatal. With CNN blaring on television and satellite radio throughout the house, I was feeling, like so many people that day, a combination of shock, sadness, and outrage. Yet somehow, the horses and the land outside seemed to temper these tumultuous emotions with an undercurrent of compassion and trust, as if the earth itself were vibrating long, subsonic chords of assurance that the world was not, in fact, coming to an end.
My upstairs writing office overlooks several corrals leading toward miles of open range, with Baboquivari, the sacred mountain of the Tohono O’odham tribe, rising up from the western horizon. On the opposite side of the house, much closer and to the east, a towering rock formation known as Elephant Head serves as a gateway to the Santa Rita Mountains. Only from a considerable driving distance does the trunk of the pachyderm appear, created by an elongated series of hills visible from Tucson, thirty minutes away on one side, and Tubac, fifteen minutes away on the other.
In Amado, the small rural town closest to the formation, Elephant Head looks nothing like an elephant. It’s a massive, vaguely pyramid-shaped, cathedral-like structure that suddenly rises twenty-five hundred feet from its base. At first glance, you might think some ancient civilization carved it out of solid stone — except that the Empire State Building is only about half that tall and it took a good five thousand years of human ingenuity to reach that height.
Around five o’clock I turned off the television, convinced that Giffords would survive that first day and grow stronger with time. As I fed the horses in a melancholy yet appreciative silence, I watched the sun slowly melt behind Baboquivari, setting the elephant’s head and the rest of the Santa Ritas ablaze in outlandish hues of crimson, gold, and lavender. And I wondered: What if scientists, politicians, and religious leaders stopped assuming that evolution and/or creation had already reached its culmination with the innovation of mankind? What if we realized that civilization was neither advanced nor terminally defective but a massive, worthwhile work in progress? That as visionaries in training, creatures designed to create, we might be on the edge of a quantum leap in our development — if only we would stop underestimating and overestimating ourselves and embrace our true collective potential?
In the days following the tragedy, local and national news reporters joined countless Internet bloggers and rabid radio callers in debating whether our society was becoming more violent. Every special-interest group seemed to have a different reason to stir up shame, fear, and self-righteousness. Advocates for and against gun control joined a much wider chorus of discussions on free speech, responsible journalism, and political rhetoric. As time went on, the anger and panic wandered further off topic with Christian televangelists waving the book of Revelation in concert (though certainly not intentionally) with psychics and spiritualists citing Nostradamus’s prediction and Mayan calendar interpretations that the earth would experience some sort of savage devastation and divine reorganization in 2012.
If you happened to be researching human history from a cathedral-thinking point of view, however, you might be surprised, as I was, to find good reason to be optimistic. While we may never be able to eradicate isolated incidents of violence by people suffering from mental illness, we do have the tools to dramatically reduce trauma, terror, hate, arrogance, shame, and blame, grossly destructive by-products of civilization’s dominance-submission stage of social development.
And we can learn to work together as equal, authentic, empowered beings — not by treating this ambitious task as a vague, hit-or-miss, extracredit project, but through a thoughtful, widespread educational movement to help humanity master the emotional and social intelligence, verbal and nonverbal communication, leadership, and visionary skills that will, finally, allow us to function effectively as free men and women.
Hidden Bias
Critics of our current system often talk about a “glass ceiling” preventing women and minorities from rising to significant leadership positions, an invisible yet palpable obstruction through which the next level of advancement can be seen but not reached. “I know there are still barriers and biases out there, often unconscious,” New York senator Hillary Clinton said as she officially withdrew from the Democratic presidential primary in June 2008. Her loyal supporters were profoundly disappointed, but they eventually took her lead in moving forward constructively with a realistic appreciation for all she had, in fact, achieved. “And although we weren’t able to shatter that highest, hardest glass ceiling,” she emphasized, “this time, thanks to you, it’s got about 18 million cracks in it.”
Shortly after Clinton’s concession speech, Barack Obama issued a statement praising his rival’s “valiant and historic campaign” for helping his own daughters and “women everywhere” realize “there are no limits to their dreams.” And he thanked Clinton for preparing him to break a similar barrier as he became the first African American to win the Democratic nomination. “Our party and our country are stronger because of the work [Clinton] has done throughout her life,” he noted, “and I’m a better candidate for having had the privilege of competing with her in this campaign.”
But there was another glass ceiling no one was paying attention to, one so high most people didn’t know it existed, a hidden, evolutionary bias that the most ruthless alpha males had been bumping up against for centuries without so much as making a dent in the damn, confounding thing. In the fall of 2008, when a bunch of Wall Street executives, financial “geniuses,” and real estate speculators hit this silent, unconscious barrier all at once, they bounced back to the ground so fast the seesaw effect catapulted a man of mixed race and unconventional background right smack into the presidency.
Barack Obama has been mitigating the fallout from this strange turn of events ever since, and, no, even at the start of his second presidential term he doesn’t quite yet have the tools to succeed. No one does — mostly because our twittering, technically advanced, emotionally adolescent minds haven’t fully grasped the core challenge underneath all the political rhetoric, free-floating fear, toxic frustration, and frantic cultural static.
The Higher You Go. . .
In the bestselling leadership book What Got You Here Won’t Get You There, executive coach Marshall Goldsmith outlines twenty common yet troublesome habits that prevent successful people from becoming more successful. These career-stifling pitfalls have nothing to do with intelligence, technical skill, wealth, talent, education, or courage. They have to do with attitudes, interpersonal-communication difficulties, and personality quirks endemic to an incredibly inefficient, grossly outdated dominance-submission system. Quite simply, Goldsmith reveals, “The higher you go, the more your problems are behavioral.”
In reading over the list, I couldn’t help but notice that many of the behaviors in question are blatantly predatory, including the number one challenge: winning too much, which, according to the author, stems “from needlessly trying to be the alpha male (or female) in any situation.” The vast majority of the remaining nineteen habits are related to the first, which he describes as “the need to win at all costs and in all situations — when it matters, when it doesn’t, and when it’s beside the point.” Goldsmith emphasizes that our “obsession with winning rears its noisome head across the spectrum of human endeavor, not just among senior executives,” culminating in a desire to win “even when the issue is clearly to our disadvantage.” The amount of time, talent, and money wasted on this particularly insidious addiction is most obvious in our current political system, though it wreaks havoc in our churches, schools, humanitarian efforts, and family life whenever the need to “be right” is more important than being effective, let alone innovative, in solving the myriad challenges we face.
Humanity is evolving psychologically and socially through a process known as “civilization,” and we’ve reached a collective impasse. What got us here won’t get us there. Like the Fortune 500 executives that Goldsmith coaches, we need to look at our behavior, and we need to embrace some new skills. We are an incredibly powerful, successful species — with the ability to bankrupt the entire planet. Luckily we have some avatars to call upon, historically significant trailblazers who explored new territory while expending no small amount of blood, sweat, and tears. Several of these visionaries went on to become major religious figures (which I’ll get to later). But we do have at least one thoroughly human innovator to consider. And he may very well be the best model to follow at this stage in our development.
Yes, you guessed it; I’m talking about George Washington. Like the well-intentioned general fumbling around the American outback with a ragtag group of ill-equipped troops, we need to reassess our concepts of power, develop fierce sensitivity, exercise emotional heroism, experience the frightening, confusing, thoroughly disorganized death of the old, and have faith that we are capable, simultaneously, of creating something new. Evolution and what Washington called “Divine Providence” appear to be on our side. An impenetrable glass ceiling on unchecked predatory behavior offers consistent historical evidence that some higher intelligence and/or process of natural selection is actively preventing us from moving forward until we can let go of our adolescent dominance fantasies and embrace a more mature form of social organization.
The turning point involves an unwieldy combination of humility, intelligence, empathy, courage, and transformation. Remember that while standing up to the British, the most powerful military force in the world, Washington had to concede that he would never be able to fight that juggernaut on its own terms. He had to try something new, incorporating, as it turns out, something very, very old: a long-forgotten, incredibly agile, nonpredatory wisdom to enhance the conviction, focus, and endurance he already had in spades.
In the twenty-first century, we are, once again, battling a force that threatens our freedom and survival, one that, unfortunately, has already proven much more powerful and insidious than King George’s arrogant nobles and exquisitely trained soldiers. And yet I believe we’ve reached the point in our collective evolution where we can win this psychological war of independence with compassion, humanity, and perhaps even a certain amount of grace and delight.
Throughout history, we have met the ultimate enemy, over and over again, and he is the rabid carnivore in us. Working together — and only together — we can lure that dark beast out into the open and, not destroy it, but harness its incredible power, gentle it, and civilize it, once and for all.
Enter the Dragon
Here’s the rub: We’re not just taming lions anymore. After five thousand years of conquest, genocide, and slavery, the predatory side of the human psyche has become a force of mythic proportions, a fire-breathing, landscape-destroying, coldhearted, flying reptile that lives for the hunt, goes for the jugular — and gets high from it.
To make matters worse, this dangerous, mutant species can talk. It uses intelligence as a weapon. And it appears to have magical powers, a kind of verbal bait-and-switch tactic that’s little more than a perceptual parlor trick. Postindustrial dragons weave complex webs of pseudologic to mesmerize human prey, baiting them with promises of easy wealth, pretending to hold some innovative new secret to success that mere mortals can’t possibly understand, deftly hiding the fact that these get-rich-quick schemes are filled with nothing more than hot air.
A particularly articulate and seductive beast named Enron offers the ultimate case study. Remnants of this modern dinosaur should be collected and displayed for posterity, perhaps in the Smithsonian museum as a cautionary tale for high school and college students to study, except that his bones are scattered throughout Texas, California, and India, among other unfortunate places, making the cost of such a massive reconstruction project prohibitory, especially in the currently depressed economy that Enron’s demise foreshadowed.
The height of the company’s rise in the 1990s, the speed of its fall in 2001, and the limitless depths of its deception are already legendary. In fact, the sheer audacity of the illusions Enron’s top executives fed to investors, employees, and the public suggests that advanced intelligence and unchecked predatory behavior are a toxic combination, spawning a particularly delusional form of hubris that backfires, ironically, in a most disturbing mutation: a devastating, highly contagious strain of widespread human stupidity. If we want to know what sets us apart from all the “other beasts,” Enron makes a strong case for the idea that our big crafty brains are not necessarily an evolutionary advantage, that when intelligence dissociates from empathy in particular, our very survival becomes questionable.
Up until the moment it declared bankruptcy, the Houston-based energy giant represented the sovereignty of unbridled capitalism. Appearing to increase profits year after year, Enron thrived on competition and deregulation, promoting its aggressive, “survival of the fittest” culture as evolution in action while simultaneously positioning its mutual-exploitation philosophy as a new economic religion.
Behind the scenes, however, the company was losing money at an alarming rate. Through the magic of an accounting system known as “mark to market,” Enron would claim potential future profits on the very day a contract was signed, no matter how little cash came in the door. To make matters worse, deal makers would receive bonuses on speculative profits regardless of how accurate those initial projections turned out to be. For instance, the corporation spent a billion dollars building a power plant in India, realizing much later that the country couldn’t pay for the power Enron’s recently completed plant produced. Executives had already received several million dollars in bonuses based on imaginary profits that never arrived. In another, highly publicized deal, which Enron made with Blockbuster, the companies announced video-on-demand technology when developers were still struggling with the details. The plan collapsed when engineers failed to work out the kinks. Yet through mark-to-market accounting, Enron used future video-on-demand projections to book over $50 million in earnings — on a scheme that never made a cent!
Over time, it became clear that even mark-to-market tricks would be incapable of obscuring a fast-growing behemoth of debt. As a rising number of employees were encouraged to invest their retirement funds in Enron stock, outright fraud became the last resort of executives addicted to the company’s “total domination” of trading in power, communications, and weather securities. CFO Andy Fastow came up with the ultimately fatal idea of creating special companies to hide increasing losses. With names like Raptors and Jedi, these deceptive financial entities symbolized Enron’s adolescent fantasies of supercarnivores and space-age battles in which a supernatural “Force” was “with” executives, allowing them to defy the laws of financial gravity.
Soon enough, these wily wizards would be accused of black magic: At the end of 2001, tens of thousands of ordinary citizens and trusting employees lost everything. Several key players subsequently went to prison; one committed suicide. And the corporation’s founder, a Baptist minister’s son who mistook Enron’s rapid rise as a sign that God was on the company’s side, died from a heart attack weeks after receiving a guilty verdict that could have sent him to jail for forty-five years.
It’s tempting to blame Enron’s demise on avarice, pride, and deception, reading the entire fiasco as a moralistic passion play. We could just as easily present it as a case study of capitalism’s failure. Or we could take a psychological approach and characterize company executives as sociopathic. Hell, we could even say the devil made them do it. But we’d be missing the point. Enron imploded because of a glass ceiling on predatory behavior that (as mentioned in the previous section and bolstered by research presented at the end of this chapter) seems to be a long-ignored principle of nature itself. This dangerous failure to recognize the profound limitations of predatory power was reinforced in the twentieth century by a gross misreading of Darwin’s sorely incomplete “survival of the fittest” concept and a long-standing, culturewide inability to notice that the founders of three of the world’s major religions, including Christianity, actively promoted nonpredatory wisdom. Until we as a species expand our perceptions, modify our beliefs, and alter our behavior in response to these factors, we will keep breeding dinosaurs like Enron, suffering the dire consequences of our own inability to evolve, despite constant warnings and helpful hints from God and nature.
The Smartest Guys in the Room?
A number of fascinating books on the Enron scandal have been written since the company declared bankruptcy in late 2001, including The Smartest Guys in the Room by Fortune senior writers Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind. Power Failure, by Texas Monthly editor Mimi Swartz, is a collaboration with Sherron Watkins, the Enron global finance executive who was named one of Time magazine’s People of the Year for blowing the whistle on her company’s illegal bookkeeping schemes. But the printed word alone doesn’t do justice to the gestures, attitudes, and interpersonal dramas involved. For a taste of that “other 90 percent,” I highly recommend the DVD documentary version of The Smartest Guys in the Room.
Among numerous standout moments, taped phone conversations documented callous Enron traders cheerfully encouraging California power plant managers to find “creative” excuses for interrupting electrical service. With Fastow’s raptor tricks capable of hiding loss, not making money, Enron eventually felt the need to pirate its own hard-won deregulation of energy at the retail level, secretly causing rolling blackouts, manufacturing a phony California energy crisis to drive up the price of electricity.
As author Bethany McLean observes in an on-camera interview: “The Enron traders never seemed to step back and say, wait a minute, is what we’re doing ethical? Is it in our best long-term interests? Does it help us if we totally rape California? Does that advance our goals of nationwide deregulation? Instead, they sought out every loophole they could to profit from California’s misery,” an incredibly shortsighted move that threatened to bankrupt the entire state, adding further momentum to Enron’s cataclysmic downfall. A particularly pathological desire to manipulate the system for personal gain was at work, echoing Goldsmith’s recognition that “even when the issue is clearly to our disadvantage, we want to win.”
The corporate culture wholeheartedly supporting this mentality was methodically and consciously developed by Jeffrey Skilling, who served as Enron’s president, chief operating officer, and finally chief executive officer during its most profitable years. Filmmakers contrast Skilling’s cool, collected demeanor in court with scenes from daredevil motorcycle and Jeep expeditions he led through Baja California, Mexico, and the Australian outback, where small, all-male groups of executives and customers faced an adrenaline junkie’s ultimate challenge: to risk bodily injury with the same death-defying attitude that informed Enron’s outlandish business practices.
“Survival of the fittest” was Skilling’s motto and religion. Richard Dawkins’s 1976 classic, The Selfish Gene, was one of the CEO’s favorite books, but it’s clear that Skilling and his traders weren’t interested in the nuances of evolutionary theory, acting more like rabid junkyard dogs than those high-functioning, mutually supportive species of masterful group hunters: the lions and the wolves. As McLean and Elkind observe in the book version of The Smartest Guys in the Room, those traders and executives “who stayed and thrived were the ones who were the most ruthless in cutting deals and looking out for themselves.”
The traders eventually lost their jobs too, of course, though Skilling took the biggest hit. He was eventually convicted of nineteen counts of securities and wire fraud, sentenced to twenty-four years in prison, and obliged to pay $630 million to the government, including $180 million in fines. He and his ferocious colleagues subsequently joined a long list of clever, charismatic, unapologetically predatory leaders who’ve illustrated, over and over again for centuries, that this particular combination rarely sustains its perceived advantage in a single lifetime — and never, ever thrives in perpetuity, as so many fallen empires have illustrated throughout history.
