We Deify What Decimates Us

That quote above, which is from this newsletter, is no doubt a little bit simplistic — lots of things made the “middle class” a harder concept to grasp, including the rise of management consultants — but it’s not entirely wrong either. What’s funny to me is the underpinning of it, though: lots of people deify Jack Welch as some amazing business mind and savior of companies, but in reality, was he? They called him “Neutron Jack” because he laid off so many people. (Neutron bombs kill everything inside, but keep the basic structure intact, or so I understand.) There are entire swaths of people who hate GE because of what he did to their grandfather back in the day. Plus: his business mind wasn’t even that sharp. He was great at short-term-ism, which I suppose is really all you need to be an executive nowadays anyway, but long-term he had no plan. He over-relied on the financial division instead of the old -school “we make stuff still” approach, and then that got exposed during the 2008 crash, and now GE is equivalent to a penny stock relative to where it was. And we laud this guy? Why, exactly?

It reflects a broader trend, especially in America, whereby it seems like we gravitate towards things that decimate us. We love tech. I know women in their 30s who still spend 3+ hours/day on Instagram, and some of these women have very-credible-sounding jobs, up to and including lawyer. I cannot think that much time, within a day, on IG is super helpful for us, but perhaps in many cases it is. (I know some women who vehemently defend IG too, but that’s just one small example.) We love tech, and tech isn’t the problem per se, but has tech writ large been good for notions of social cohesion? I’d argue no.

We tend to love guys like Elon (seems like a frat boy in his 50s most of the time), Jobs (good design guy, horrible human being), et al as well. In reality, this doesn’t help us get better models of leadership — it just reinforces the idea that being an asshole is the only way to get anywhere. Whenever someone pens a new biz article about “the power of empathy,” I want to show them engagement on Elon Musk doing an anti-trans tweet. That shit is through the roof, sadly, and he’s supposed to be some corporate god to us. I doubt he’s chasing much empathy, and it’s done him just fine on the conventional success ladder.

There’s an old trope about battered women and how they can’t see what’s happening and they keep going back to their abuser. It’s not a trope in the sense that it’s often the sheer reality of the situation, but for those of us with limited to no exposure to domestic violence, it’s a helpful framing for how we consider the issue. I wonder sometimes if Americans are like that writ large: we keep going back to the thing that ultimately abuses us, be it Instagram, the Kardashians, tyrant bosses, arguing on Facebook about nothing, circular gun discussions, thinking politicians do anything, etc.

These are trite arguments, but is there a kernel of truth somewhere? You tell me.