MAYBE THE REVOLUTION WILL BE TELEVISED, AFTER ALL

Accountability is heavy.

It is the “heaviest” of the Four Radical Agreements which comprise the New Social Contract that I’m offering to Los Angeles Neighborhood Councils as part of my Leadership Summit webinars.

Accountability is the fourth of the Four Radical Agreements, which are Awareness, Authenticity, Respect, and Accountability. Sometimes people ask me what makes these four pillars “radical.”??These ideas have been essential to our earliest definitions of civilization, but what makes all four of them radical today is that they are rarely realized or practiced, especially in the public square. Of the four, Accountability is the pillar which often seems to vaporize under scrutiny. POOF. Nothing there.

?It’s a common notion that past generations were more noble, more righteous. Granted, a century ago, many people had better manners. But a quick scan of the history books reminds us that being accountable for our actions and words has always been a problem for human beings, especially those in positions of power. Organizations, including governments, often play the role of policeman, holding us accountable to the law, and punishing us when we stray. My hope for us as leaders is that we choose to evolve beyond this transactional model, and instead become willing to hold ourselves accountable, to the highest possible standard.

?Modern technology, namely surveillance and video recording, now leaves fewer and fewer opportunities for us to elude responsibility for our actions. This may push us to take the higher moral ground more often. For example, the cell-phone video of the lynching of George Floyd on May 25, 2020 literally travelled around the world in a matter of seconds. Although centuries of deeply embedded racism can’t be erased with just a few clicks, there is no question that the real-time record of Floyd’s murder, and many others like it, have heightened our global sensitivity to the pervasive danger of tolerated social injustice.

I’ll steer clear of the current accusations of fraud surrounding the American Presidency, and instead remind you of a more restrained televised exchange between two Presidential candidates in 1960,?John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon. Media analysts today blame Nixon’s shifty-seeming on-air presence for his failure to win the Presidency. The still-new, “cool medium” of television seemed to magnify his scowl, his nervous glancing from side-to-side (instead of maintaining eye contact on-camera), his gauntness, and the sardonic curl of his lip while his opponent spoke. By contrast, Kennedy appears relaxed, pleasant, and right at home in the thick of the discourse.?

A couple of years later, television played a role in the conviction of Adolf Eichmann, a high-ranking Nazi German official and war criminal who was instrumental during the Holocaust in the implementation of the “Final Solution.” Eichmann organized the deportation of more than 1.5 million European Jews and tens of thousands of Roma (formerly called Gypsies) to the death camps. After the defeat of the Axis powers, Eichmann was arrested by American authorities, but eluded prosecution for the next 15 years by assuming a false identity and fleeing to Buenos Aires. In 1960, Mossad, the Israeli foreign intelligence service, captured him and brought him to trial, against protests by the Argentinean government.

Eichmann testified from inside a bulletproof glass booth. His defense was, essentially, that he was just following orders, describing himself as “merely a little cog in the machinery.”??The judges rejected this common defense and concluded that Eichmann had been more than a mere soldier, but was a key perpetrator in the genocide of European Jewry. He was convicted of crimes against humanity and hanged in 1962. It is significant to note that the Eichmann Trial, unlike the Nuremberg proceedings, was televised. The televised trial included gut-wrenching testimonies of Holocaust survivors.??Eight years later in 1970, the brilliant Gil Scott-Heron recorded his incendiary poem and song, “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised.” While the song is genius, I’m no longer sure Scott-Heron is right. The once-maligned medium of video emerges as ally, not foe.

But let’s do a real Throwback Thursday, way before television and streaming video, to the Book of Genesis.??No matter whether you’re an atheist, agnostic, a believer or not -- it won’t matter in this secular context. In Book 3, Chapter 9, Adam and Eve have eaten the forbidden fruit. In doing so, they become aware-- Awareness being the first of the Four Radical Agreements of the New Social Contract -- that they have disobeyed God. In the cool of the evening, the Lord walks through the paradise He has created for the first human beings, looking for his children, but Adam and Eve are ashamed, sew together fig-leaves to cover themselves, and hide out.?

God calls out, “Adam! Where are you?” Adam calls back, “I can’t come out because I’m naked.” God responds, “Naked? How do you even know? Who told you you’re naked?” Then God asks rhetorically -- because He already knows the answer-- if Adam he has eaten of the forbidden tree.??Adam’s response: “The woman Eve, that you gave me -- she made me do it.”??In other words, “She started it!”??I can’t help but recall the hilarious Flip Wilson in drag as Geraldine, who justified his actions with “The?devil?made me buy this dress!”??

As a study of human nature, this familiar Bible passage is both wise and tragicomic. I can easily imagine it as a standup comic’s bit. In the context of the Torah, the Old Testament, the Book of Genesis, the Almighty is omniscient. In the scriptural telling, God created the Garden, and the errant human beings in it. Of course God knows where Adam is hiding. And of course, God also knows?why?Adam is hiding (after all, He?IS?God).?

God’s challenge to Adam to come out of hiding is in fact an opportunity for Adam to reveal himself, to man up and make himself accountable. Adam fails at the challenge, and the rest, as they say, is history. The takeaway for me is that most of the time, most of us, from Adam to Eichmann to the present day, know deep-down when we do wrong. Yes, there are shades of gray, but not as many as we might like.

Our intelligence makes it easy to slip-slide our way out of blame, to rationalize and point the finger at someone else. In our lives, rarely is this confrontation with the truth as terrifying as being tried for war-crimes or called on the carpet by the creator of the universe. But in the glare of public life, we’ve all witnessed the house of cards collapsing when someone has passed the buck too often and too far. We see it every night on the national news.

As children, we all tell fibs. We steal a cookie, accidentally-on-purpose forget to do our chores, skip school. We may even call upon that time-honored standard, “The dog ate my homework!” If we’re lucky, we’re caught in those fibs early on, and we learn that it’s so much easier to tell the truth now than to fight our way out of a lie later. This is a fundamental learning experience. The reality is that you can run, but you can’t hide (ask Adam). So don’t blame the dog. Don’t blame the planets, even if Mercury?is?in retrograde again. Don’t blame your partner, or anyone else. You are the sole owner of your actions and words, so own it, all of it, and remember the Buddhist parable: three things always come out eventually, the sun, the moon, and the truth.?