It's Time For Uncle Sam To Fess Up

Next to the promulgation of the truth, the best thing I can conceive that a man can do is the public recantation of an error.

Joseph Lister (1827–1912)

As a collective society, we’re not fully owning up to our country’s past and present shortcomings, and this not only makes it more difficult for us to make progress, but also erodes international trust in America, and perhaps most important is encouraging our citizens to become increasingly divided in their views.

Organizations?—?schools, businesses and sovereign countries?—?are nothing more than the people that constitute them and the things they agree to do together. We are America. We, the people are therefore collectively “Uncle Sam”.?

It’s time for Uncle Sam to fess up.

When I was a college athlete my head coach Grant Teaff would gather all the players around him after an early season practice and tell us we needed to find a way to improve during the course of the long season ahead. As you might imagine?—?he had a suggestion handy.

He would tell us one of his favorite musical hits from childhood was “Ac-Cent-Tchu-Ate the Positive” (first recorded by Johnny Mercer in 1944, and later that same year by Bing Crosby) and the song’s refrain summed up the philosophy my coach wanted us to adopt.

At some point during his talk, he would burst out in song…

“Ac-Cent-Tchu-Ate the positive.

Elim-min-nate the negative.

Don’t mess with Mr. In-Between.”

The idea he was promoting wasn’t complicated?—?capitalize on what you already do well, and improve upon what you do not. As with most physically demanding sports, as the season wears on in college football there are a lot of opportunities to backslide?—?fatigue, injuries, unexpected losses (and in my case… organic chemistry). The “don’t mess with Mr. In-Between” part refers to the notion if you aren’t making progress, you aren’t actually standing still either as others are improving. Simply put, you are either moving forward, or back.

Almost 80 years on, the song may sound hokey, but the approach has a great deal to recommend. However, while the concept is simple, it’s one surprisingly hard for us to actuate. The biggest challenge? We can go on and on about what we do well, but struggle at times to elaborate on where we need improvement, or have fallen short in the past. As an evolutionary mechanism likely needed to protect the human ego and shore up confidence amidst innumerable threats, we are hard-wired to focus on our positives. This is true for both individuals, and organizations (such as sovereign countries) as well.

The problem, of course, is acknowledging and intermittent revisiting past transgressions is necessary to make it less likely they will be repeated, and acknowledging present shortcomings always precedes our ability to “elim-min-nate the negative”.

Unfortunately; however, in this particular moment in America many politicians, state legislatures and school boards have changed the refrain of Bing Crosby’s song to something more akin to this:

Ex-xag-ger-rate the positive.

Re-pu-diate the negative.

No matter what, just don’t come clean.

While we may have “sort of” acknowledged the country’s many past transgressions a number of Americans in positions of authority are either denying these episodes happened, or revising historical facts and downplaying their significance (e.g. “slavery was good for many of its victims as it taught them marketable skills”). Likewise, current societal shortcomings such as systemic and structural racism toward minority populations are either now often denied, dismissed or avoided out of concern some in the (largely white) majority might experience guilt and shame.

As it turns out, psychologists tell us there are indeed relative “benefits” to not owning up to failures, errors or deficiencies. These include a sense of greater self-esteem as well as increased feelings of power/control and value integrity (value integrity paradoxically is a personal sense of accountability and responsibility). However, there are a number of negatives that can result as well, and we are now experiencing many of them.

First, as noted earlier, failing to acknowledge our negatives in the present unavoidably makes it less likely they will be improved upon, and failing to revisit those from the past makes it more likely they will be repeated. While we may “feel better” in the moment by avoiding admitting failures, errors or deficiencies, we are missing out on vital constructive criticism as a result.

Second, while we may feel more empowered when we don’t admit failures, errors or deficiencies?—?many around us will know they exist, and this has an incredibly negative impact on the absolutely vital human and organizational concept of trust.

Lastly, when individuals or organizations fail to admit to past and present transgressions, it can create cognitive dissonance. Cognitive dissonance is the discomfort a person feels when their own behavior or that of a leader or organization does not align with their values or beliefs about themselves, those leaders or an organization. As John Lennon once described it…

“Part of me suspects that I’m a loser, and the other part of me thinks I’m God Almighty.”

The danger of cognitive dissonance is it frequently impairs decision-making. If you truly believe you are a God, then being confronted with the factyou may actually be a mortal like the rest of us groveling and scratching it out down here can be… well… disconcerting. When we feel cognitive dissonance?—?as we compare, for example a belief you are an immortal God with the realities you seem to have to eliminate solid waste in the same way others do and cannot seem to be able to fly?—?you begin to more aggressively seek examples and explanations that prove the former, and disprove the latter. In the process you are prone to ignore or discount completely examples and explanations that refute your preferred position, such as “I actually can fly… the injury I sustained when I leapt off of the garage yesterday was due solely to a transient increase in the earth’s gravitational force.”?

Likewise, when as a soceity we contemplate the “shining city on a hill” we zealously believe the United States has stood for historically and currently stands for in the world and are confronted with concepts such as slavery, colonialism and racism past and present we may resort to proclaiming “slavery wasn’t all that bad, because slaves learned marketable skills that benefitted them later”, or perhaps “racism no longer exists because I know a black person who came from nothing and is now a CEO”.

When decision making is altered in this way, we work extra hard at confirming our biases and ignoring any truth to the contrary?—?seeking out information to do so no matter how apochryphal or isolated the example or obscure the source. In the process, those with opposite views do the same, and we become increasingly polarized and divided as individuals and groups?—?sound familiar?

Here are representative examples of fact-based transgressions, errors and mistakes America has made in its past (this is by no means a comprehensive list):

Here are representatlive examples of the economic and social justice (imprisonment and policing) fallout from shortcomings that exist in America in the form of structural racism:

So there. By revisiting these past issues, and pointing out the contemporary ones?—?as has been suggested politicians and media personalities?—?I must hate America, right? I assure you nothing could be further from the truth. Do you hate your children when you remind them when they stayed out late past curfew and wrecked the car, didn’t do their homework, cheated on a test or denigrated a classmate that it didn’t go well in the past, and that one or more of these things should be avoided in the future? Do you hate yourself when you realize you’ve made a mistake at work, and decide to admit it to your boss and find a way to repair the damage?

Of course not.

But is it uncomfortable to revisit past mistakes, or admit to present ones?

Of course.

This, as it turns out is one of the reasons parents, politicians, media personalities and school boards don’t want some of the foregoing items included in school curricula. They don’t want students to feel guilt or be ashamed for mistakes or shortcomings where they played no direct role, with sentiment such as… “My child shouldn’t feel ashamed about slavery?—?sure, he’s white but he didn’t enslave anyone”… “Why should my student feel guilty about systemic racism?—?she’s nice to everyone.”

There are a lot of words in the English language we attempt to use interchangeably that actually have very different meanings, such as pride and vanity, or liberty and freedom, and another pair of words we often use this way are guilt and shame. Psychologists suggest a good framework to use for these two different terms is to consider shame is about “the self” and guilt is about “things in the real world for which one bears responsibility”.?

Another way to think about it is you can feel both guilt and shame as a result of a transgression, mistake or error. However, guilt can often simply be acknowledgement and assumption of responsibility, while shame implies you feel there is something fundamentally wrong with you as a person due to the fact you are complicit. While they can occur together, by no means is it necessary to feel both guilt and shame, and psychologists also largely agree while guilt is a response that can encourage someone to improve or repair a situation, shame often is not. The problem with the latter is if you feel you have a fundamental flaw you are incapable of fixing, you might actually avoid trying to do anything at all about a transgression, error or mistake that resulted from it.

So maybe it isn’t so bad to feel some level of guilt about our past and present failings in America, but why should any single individual feel anything, if not personally involved? This question begs another, and this is the difference between individual and societal guilt.

Even if as individuals we do not feel responsible for slavery or ongoing structural racism in America, we should be willing to accept our shared society has been and is currently responsible. To push the blame off entirely on those “directly responsible” risks creating an environment where there is insufficient collective will to avoid future problems, or to deal with those in the present. It’s impossible for an entire society to make progress on a problem if a large percentage of the individuals who make up that society either don’t believe it exists or feel so far removed from it individually they aren’t willing to participate in rectifying it.

In some ways, this harkens back to Hannah Arendt’s concept of “the banality of evil”. Arendt was a German-American philosopher who studied authority and its abuses coincident with WWII and The Holocaust. One of the concepts she promoted was reasonable people could do bad things, or go along with them if they were felt to be “following orders”, or if individually not responsible for the ultimate outcome. Her key subject was Adolf Eichmann, who was the mastermind behind the logistics of the Final Solution. Right up to the time he was executed after being convicted of war crimes in Nuremburg, he simply said he was doing what he was asked to do and while he had planned and fostered the logistical machinery to move Jews into and out of ghettos and into death camps, he had not killed anyone himself. Many other German citizens, aware to varying degrees of the horrors associated with the Holocaust but not “directly involved”, felt similarly.

If we are willing to accept some degree of societal guilt for America past and present transgressions can be constructive, then we must also understand this is not the same as shame and we therefore have no need to be ashamed as a collective society. The politicians and media personalities that tell you you hate America if you focus on past and present transgressions are assuming you also feel ashamed of America, but you need not be. As it turns out, what America stands for and strives to do in the world, even though it has fallen short, and continues to do so at times, is absolutely something to believe in and America is by no means fundamentally flawed as a result of its shortcomings?—?despite the efforts of our foes to promote that concept.

It’s worth revisiting a final time the dangers I referred to at the beginning of this essay?—?ones we might avoid if we are able to agree some degree of societal guilt and the overt acceptance of responsibility that can follow for past and present transgressions, mistakes and errors.

First, we simply put ourselves in a situation where we are more likely to repeat past errors, and deal insufficiently with those in the present. We simply are incapable of accentuating the positive and eliminating the negative unless we fully admit the negatives exist.

Second, we erode trust in America around the world. While some may have become comfortable with exaggerating America’s positives and repudiating its negatives, our flaws?—?as the flaws of all other countries?—?are self-evident and well-documented. Our foes and at times even our friends tell the world we are a nation of hypocrites?—?that our proclamations and actions do not correlate. They say we stand for human rights, for example, while we fail to fully acknowledge slavery and genocide and continue to more or less ignore the vagaries of structural racism. They say we criticize other countries for violence and unrest while we have the highest rate of gun violence in the developed world. Perhaps we should wonder a bit less about why some refuse to align with us on important issues such as sanctions against Russia for its war crimes against the people of Ukraine, or work with us on economic ones. Power alone gets you something, but it gets you much less in personal and international relationships than power and trust combined.

Third, we foment the national chaos of cognitive dissonance we are currently experiencing, as many have decided it is not possible to hold simultaneously in their minds the belief of America as a “shining city on a hill” and the acknowledgement it is also a country that has made and continues to make significant mistakes. A narcissist does not believe he has any flaws, and when confronted with proof he does, his cognitive dissonance will encourage him do everything in his power to either avoid that information or refute it. The problem of course, is all human beings and the societies they create have flaws. A healthy mindset is to have a set of goals and to move constantly toward them, all along recognizing our shortcomings and failures… working to avoid repeating those from the past, and repairing the damage done when they occur in the present.

Everything starts with acknowledgement. The goal of a shining city on a hill is actually an incredibly good one, and we should all collectively strive diligently for that. However, admitting to ourselves this goal remains just out of our reach, and that this country's past transgressions must be avoided, and present ones admitted to and fixed is the only way America will ever build, grow, and keep that city standing.