James F. Richardson's Blog

America's 'Simon Sinek' Problem

The world’s leading leadership guru has a new company - The Optimism Company. And it should concern us for who it leaves out, how it raises the bar on interpersonal skills to elitist new heights, and what it distracts us from.

Simon Sinek, if you have not heard of him, exploded onto the leadership industry scene in 2009 when a Seattle TEDx1 talk went viral in the true sense of the word, meaning no paid promotion was involved. It spread fast via digital ‘word of mouth.’ Ironically, the live audience at this event was tiny (100-200) compared to a modern TED talk (several thousand).

I encourage you to watch his breakout speech before reading onward. Hint: the fact that it is a verbal performance matters a lot.

You just listened to a naturally gifted presenter, possessing a rare charism. Almost none of us are this good, even with an outline and extensive rehearsal. Some of us could get there eventually, with hundreds or thousands of hours of practice and tough feedback swallowed with a smile. Most of us could never be this good. Ever.

Sinek makes it look easy because, for him, it IS easier. For the rest of us, especially those with verbal tics like me (e.g., tongue clicking, mumbling, tonal drops, etc.), it’s excruciating to meet this standard. Probably impossible. I may have done it only once or twice.

I’ll return to the interpersonal skills of today’s most admired business leaders in a bit, but first I need to dive into Sinek’s historical commentary on why some companies are wildly more innovative than others.

In Sinek’s viral 2009 talk, he shares what has now become a truism in American business - highly successful brands sell a movement or values system, not products or features or even just ‘outcomes.’ This, in part, is what drove the rapid growth of Whole Foods Market in the 2000s and 2010s—pitching a food movement, a massive cause. It’s the modus operandi of brands like Patagonia, Apple and Tesla in their respective heydays.

It is not a coincidence that the baby boomers’ takeover of corporate boards and C-suites coincided with the rise of a leadership guru named Simon Sinek. As this generation took over control of consumer-facing brands, those among them who had had the ‘social change’ or ‘movement’ bug inside them since their youth in the 1960s, such as Steve Jobs, unconsciously transferred this into their organizations as the new face of marketing and corporate leadership.

Companies that exude a passionate, world-changing ‘why’ make direct competitors seem like soulless bean counters. These ‘visionary’ companies also excel at attracting young talent.

It’s not that those less compelling competitors are unsuccessful; it’s that they don't garner pop culture attention because they simply sell products or services, without offering anything more to their consumers OR their employees. And their work cultures are also different, because this mysterious visionary ‘why’ is often lacking. Their work cultures are utilitarian, average, and stable. Not necessarily bad, just not inspiring; not ‘cool’ in the classic Baby Boomer sense of that phrase (think the Fonz, not the post-modern, sexualized “vibe cool” of Megan Thee Stallion). [If you’re over 50, I’d advise not clicking on the second link.]

The other thing that Sinek’s theory of leadership points to is the corporate culture that attracts the most ambitious talent in today’s corporate world. They want to be part of a ‘movement’ and achieve the cultural status of being employable within such a company.

If you look at the companies that Simon refers to, you’ll notice that they tend to be high-growth companies with enormous ambitions. In their rapid growth phases, they lent cultural status to one’s resume. This is in part, because the media covers high-growth companies the most. It’s a sad feature of a poorly regulated capitalist economy. Employees from high-growth innovators can often command above-market salaries when they leave, due mainly to the ‘innovation’ halo of their employers’ brands. It’s not the worst career strategy I’ve heard of.

Here’s a walk-through of some examples of high-growth innovators with visionary, ‘Sinek’ style leaders…by decade:

2000s - Whole Foods, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, Netflix

2010s - Airbnb, Uber, Tesla, SpaceX, YouTube, WeWork, Spotify

2020s - Spotify, Liquid Death, Open AI, NVIDIA

But are these high growth, media darling growth companies necessarily the companies the average person will enjoy working for, in reality? Are these companies with killer growth, compelling vision, AND great to work for?

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Pitting Company Vision Against Great Work Culture

As Sinek matured and gained more prominence, his thematic emphasis shifted away from the power of vision to the power of leadership that builds thriving, happy workplaces.

These are NOT the same thing, behaviorally.

One way to see if we need a visionary company to provide a great place to work is for us to look into the most rigorous worker satisfaction ratings we have available for large companies. And the one most business people recognize is Fortune’s 100 Best Companies to Work For, published every year since 1998.

Do the high-growth, innovative companies with visionary leaders make these lists? Do they stay on them, if they do? Or is it possible that there is no correlation between big, hairy, audacious vision talk and employee satisfaction?

To be eligible for the Fortune 100 Best Companies to Work For list, employers must have 1,000 or more employees in the U.S. and cannot be a government agency. 1/10th of 1% of companies in the U.S. have this many employees.2 Simon’s business and this essay, therefore, focus on a rare group of admittedly very successful companies (consider starting one and growing it to 1000 employees). 3

Fortune evaluates companies along 29 behavioral criteria under the buckets of : Leadership, Experience, Culture and Performance.4 While most of the Fortune 100 offer paid leave benefits beyond what is guaranteed by FLMA, some do not. The evaluation is directly performed with employees. Management does not get involved.

Hilton is the number one company on their lists for the last few years. Here is how much ‘better’ Hilton is compared to the average US-based company.

The popularity of Fortune’s annual list with corporate management and Wall Street rests in their analysis of stock performance and its correlation to positive work culture environments. Board members have fallen in love with the idea of a great place to work for. They seem to like it far more than being a visionary innovator. And the data you see below is a major reason for their infatuation with ‘great workplaces.’

The implication is that large companies with high employee trust (peer-to-peer and peer-to-manager) offer a substantial productivity advantage. Increased productivity is what tends to make large companies more profitable over time, not rapid growth. Rapid growth usually requires spending net profits (and more) on more growth. Moreover, there are very. very few high-growth multi-billion-dollar revenue companies with more than 1,000 employees, despite the constant media appearances of a few like Nvidia, Amazon, and Apple during their respective heydays.5

But there’s another thing that high growthm innovative companies tend to do very poorly: train and develop their talent. They don’t have time to do this. It’s often managed chaos, one highly suited to narcissistic CEO-guru visionary types full of Sinek ‘why.’

In fact, institutional sociology since Emil Durkheim would basically predict this without any data. Many large, private institutions begin as small, guru-led movements. The ones that thrive transition into well-led bureaucracies without the paralysis the latter word implies. And they do not simply become scaled-up cults like WeWork became before it imploded due to its own incompetence and lack of ethics.

The Best Places to Work For Are Not Necessarily Led by CEO-Gurus

To explore the questions I posed earlier, let’s look at another list. Here are some of the companies that appear in Fortune’s Best Companies to Work For List every single year!6

Wegman’s Food Markets (northeastern grocery chain)

American Express

Marriott Hotels

Edward Jones Financial

Intuit (think TurboTax)

Salesforce

Deloitte (management consulting)

Carmax

Publix (southern grocery chain)

Adobe

Scripps (San Diego-based healthcare clinics)

I could not afford to hire a computer programmer to produce an exhaustive list, but this seems like a relatively small proportion of the companies that have made the list annually since 2010.

Some of these companies are well loved and routinely covered in the media (e.g. Intuit, Adobe, and Salesforce). But a lot of these companies are not ‘cool’ and do not have guru-like Steve Jobs leaders. I mean, do you know the CEOs of any of the companies I just listed?

OK. Now let’s go back to my list from earlier. You know, the list of super innovative, high-ambition, guru-led companies. I crossed out the ones that have NEVER been on Fortune’s lists…ever.7

2000s - Whole Foods, Amazon, Apple, Google, Netflix

2010s - Airbnb, Uber, Tesla, SpaceX, YouTube, WeWork, Spotify

2020s - Spotify, Liquid Death, Open AI, NVIDIA

Well, that’s awfully revealing, even for a qualitative analysis. Remember, I made this list BEFORE analyzing the Fortune 100 lists from 2010-2025. If you doubt my analysis, here’s an independent list of 2010 innovators we can also cross-check for status as Great Places To Work For.

None of these companies are on the Fortune 100 lists. None. The absence of so many, well-advertised, often guru-led visionary innovators does not mean working there is like a Soviet Gulag. But still. Makes you wonder.

Is there a fundamental tension between visionary high growth businesses and the broader definition workers have of a great place to work for (which seems to focus on treating them respectfully and caring about them as individuals).

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Whether Visionary or High-Trust, You Won’t Be Working At Them

Only 15M adults work in the large corporations that Fortune surveys every year. That’s only 12% of the working population. Honestly, it’s a larger number than I guessed before using BLS data to confirm it. Still, 88% of us work at small or medium sized organizations. And most of the latter really work in small businesses, including me. [Note: don’t become self-employed, if you do not trust yourself!]

So, the struggle to work at a visionary innovator, a “great place to work for” or both is really a problem for a rare group of post-grads in America. Most of us will probably never find this kind of company willing to hire us.

This raises the question of who Simon Sinek’s addressable market really is?

Here’s the “why” behind Sinek’s Optimism Company -

We imagine a world in which the vast majority of people wake up every single morning inspired, feel safe wherever they are, and end the day fulfilled by the work they do.

Sinek’s optimism is clearly tied to his company’s revenue growth ambitions. He is going for the masses, most of whom work in not very profitable, low-growth, small businesses without a lot of resources for training. And the work may honestly be pretty dull. I’m sure Sinek sees his books and online offerings as the solution for this horde of businesses where most of us work. They will not have huge HR departments developing customized professional development processes.

In one sense, Sinek has codified the rules by which you create a super-elite company with highly competitive, engaged employees. A few of them are my business clients.

But, most of us will never work at this kind of company. In fact, the lines formed for every open position at these kinds of ambitious innovators and great places to work for is often so long, these elite companies can afford to be extremely picky.

They can easily filter out anyone with pink flags, let alone those withg red flags, during the interview process.

That’s fantastic for them, honestly.

But none of this ‘great place to work for’ elitism helps the average employee or ever will.

I was trapped in a company I could not stand for 15 years before I had a way out. And that exit required taking the psychological and financial risk of becoming self-employed. I did not have a resume that maded me employable at the kind of companies I’ve been discussing. Not at all.

So, I chose, out of necessity, working for myself. I gave up trying to find a great place to work for and made my own.

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Is Simon Sinek Just Codifying A New White Collar Elitism?

Obviously, I believe he is. And it’s not realistic for millions of us to latch on to the dream he sells.

Sinek claims to want to make companies super-engaged and well-led, yet the standard he sets depends on rare personal gifts from company leaders, tons of coaching, lots of high-trust leaders and also excess staffing that permits things like paid maternity leave, bereavement leave, etc. I only have one fast-growing client who set his company up to be like this - Once Upon A Farm.8

In fact, a lot of the traits Fortune evaluates are expensive to offer and administer. Professional development is not cheap. It requires internal and external resources AND it requires overstaffing so that each employee has time (not overtime) to take advantage of these resources.

Small businesses and startups simply can’t be this generous and communally supportive to their employees. There’s just no way. The local Teriyaki or Boba shop can’t offer these elite employee benefits either. They’re just trying to survive.

The sad reality is that Simon even has an audience at all. Because, a lot of what makes a company Great To Work For should be paid for and guaranteed by federal law.

Instead, companies get to compete with each other by offering a better workplace environment, thus excluding the majority of workers by definition.

This makes me sick to my stomach, because it’s so American.

Social progress becomes reduced to a private sector competition that yields progress only for an elite few.

I’m so tired of this. And it contributes to the sense of abandonment and grievance among MAGA extremists as well. I’m willing to bet that you won’t find hard core MAGA supporters at all among the Great Places to Work For.

We let our country turn into this bifurcated reality.

1

TEDx is a brand associated with the TED Conference, held annually in Vancouver. Local professionals can organize a TEDx event, receive training from the TED organization to meet its standards, and provide speaking opportunities for local experts to share their work and popularize their ideas.

2

https://www.naics.com/business-lists/...

3

The list includes public and private companies, presumably absorbing most of the ‘unicorns’ prior to their IPOs as public firms later on.

4

Here is their full methodology statement “

Our Methodology for:

Fortune 100 Best Companies to Work For® 2025

Great Place To Work® has been surveying employees around the world about their workplace experiences for 30 years. We have developed a set of themes and metrics that not only predict whether employees feel their workplace is great, but predict retention, agility, and overall business success.  

Using our proprietary Trust Index™ survey, we measure the core of what we know creates great workplaces — key behaviors that drive trust in management, connection with colleagues, and loyalty to the company.  

The survey enables employees to share confidential quantitative and qualitative feedback about their organization’s culture by responding to 60 statements on a five-point scale and answering two open-ended questions.

Employees tell us whether leaders are accessible, communicate honestly and clearly, and if their actions match their words. They tell us whether they feel respected as individuals, if they receive training benefits, appreciation, support for their well-being and opportunities to contribute. They tell us whether they believe their company is fair related to pay, profits, promotions, recognition, favoritism and opportunities. They tell us if they are proud of their work, their team, and their company and if they feel they make a difference, and their work is meaningful. And they tell us whether they enjoy the people they work with, feel cared for and can be themselves.  

List rankings are based on this employee feedback, which we analyze to determine the extent to which this experience is shared by the full workforce. Great Place To Work measures the differences in survey responses across demographic groups and roles within each organization to assess both the quality and consistency of the employee experience. Statements are weighted according to their relevance in describing the most important aspects of an equitable workplace. 

Companies with the broadest sets of employees who report positive workplace experiences receive the highest rankings on lists.

In addition to analyzing employee feedback for the Fortune 100 Best Companies to Work For® list we also consider what a company can tell us about their programs and workplace strategy. Each company also answers six essay questions that provide greater insight into how, and why the organization is great for all people. Responses are rigorously evaluated and cross-reviewed according to Great Place To Work’s research-driven criteria. From what companies share in datapoints and essays, we identify the organizations that offer the most generous, caring and innovative programs reflecting a genuine commitment to meet their people’s needs inside and outside the workplace as validated by what employees themselves report in survey results.

Surveys must meet strict requirements for how they are distributed and the percentage of employees who respond to ensure they accurately represent honest feedback from the company’s full population. While essay responses provide important context for rankings, only survey data can garner a list placement. To be eligible for the Fortune 100 Best Companies to Work For list, employers must have 1,000 or more employees in the U.S. and cannot be a government agency. In the last year, Great Place To Work surveyed companies employing more than 8.4 million people in the US and received more than 1.3 million responses. Of those, over 670,000 responses were received from employees at companies who were eligible for the 2025 100 Best and this list is based on their feedback.”

5

Note that the media love to label a company a ‘billion-dollar’ unicorn by using valuation or market capitalization as the metric, when almost none of these companies produce a billion or more in annual recurring revenue. America has approximately 1,500 billion-dollar revenue-generating companies. Source: https://companiesmarketcap.com/

6

This is not a comprehensive list, but it has most of them after checking a 30-40 of the companies that appear in multiple years. I could not get AI or Excel programmed to do a perfect analysis.

7

It’s possible that a few of these large corps refused to participate in Fortune’s survey process…but this itself would be an odd posture in a competitive labor market, certainly an arrogant one.

8

OFARM was #64 on Fortune’s 100 Best Small Companies to Work For (2024).

Modern Flood Deaths Are A Failure of Imagination

We all understand the difference between outdoor temperatures in the 70s, 80s and 90s. Our species probably evolved to notice these small differences with our skin because we have no fur and are warm-blooded, sensitive apes. Regardless of how, we’re sensitive to small air temperature fluctuations.

But how many of us can immediately envision the difference between standing in rain falling at 1/10th of an inch per hour, 1/2 an inch per hour or 1.5 inches and hour?

Did your eyes glaze over? Probably. These distinctions don’t click.

How many of you know that dozens of major metros in the United States have experienced a slow creep in average rainfall intensity in the past half century, including my current home town of Tucson?

How could any of us have noticed without a chart like the one above? We do recognize the increase in frequency of deadly flash floods, though. We notice the extreme outcome of the trend, not its root cause.

As the frequency of deadly flash flooding spreads across the country, even in unlikely places like rural Vermont and hurricane-smacked Asheville, NC, we have a choice as a nation.

Focus on imagining a difficult, unfolding future where nature has more authority

OR walk facing backwards as we dismiss the doomsayers

This choice comes down to our willingness to imagine our climate risks differently than we want to and differently than our personal memories support.

As American consumers, we are superb at living in the near future of the next new thing to consume, imagining all sorts of new, convenient technologies to acquire. Our consumer imaginations take us decades into the future with both excitement and ease.

So, why…is it so damn hard to imagine new risks in the near future?

Our test as a species in the 21st century will be to get over this pan-cultural, probably evolutionary, bias toward analyzing risk in the rear-view mirror but imagining opportunity we can not even see.

The government has a role in helping smack us out of our complacency, but, ultimately, as the Texas Floods just showed, we have to add this responsibility to our list of what it takes to be a modern adult.

Tucson: A Place Where Most of the Rain is Extreme

I have lived in Tucson, Arizona, for five years now. Anyone who has lived there for this long has likely experienced the Sonoran monsoon enough to alter their behavior around thunderstorms permanently.

I grew up in northern New England in the 1970s and 1980s and we had summer storms. The goal then was primarily to avoid getting wet. But, in a land of near endless, undulating young forests, we also learned not to stand next to trees during a storm. Anyone who hikes in New England has seen a blackened tree split open by a lightning strike. Ouch.

But, we New Englanders never once feared being carried away in our cars if we didn’t pay attention during a storm. And the roads never really flooded. Not all monsoon storms here in Tucson will deliver flash flood-inducing inundation, but most do, especially after the first two weeks of storms saturate the soil.

A monsoon storm owes its name to the unusually high moisture levels and extreme electrical energy in these thunderstorm cloud formations. The very strong downdrafts also create 40-60mph winds reliably. Patio furniture dances in the fresh mud.

Two weeks ago, our 2025 monsoon season kicked off at my home with a direct strike from a storm that dumped 3/4 inch of rain in about 20-25 minutes (!) That’s an hourly rainfall rate of 1.5-2 inches per hour. Fast.

This is what that rainfall rate looks like:

This is a common rainfall rate when a monsoon storm hits your location here in Tucson. However, since these storms often move quickly and the storm cells are very localized, you only have rain falling this hard for 20-30 minutes; sometimes less, if the storm’s edge is just grazing your location.

But we also occasionally have cells that shed 6-8 inches per hour inside their narrow cores. That looks more like this clip taken nearby - click image to watch.

Monsoon rain is micro-localized, intense thunderstorm activity.1 On an active day, Tucson may experience dozens of storms moving across the valley in waves. Many locations in the valley will receive only a few drops or nothing at all, as other small areas get hammered. This is what makes the monsoon particularly challenging for most Americans to comprehend. Summer storms in most of the country do not have as much moisture as these monsoon cells.

You don’t have to live in Tucson to experience this kind of intense rainfall rate, but the micro-localization of rainfall is very peculiar to a desert like ours. We do not get the enormous frontal lines of storms experienced in the Midwest that drench territory like someone pulling a squeegee across a massive windshield.

Tucson, specifically, lies in the heavy rain zone of the Southwestern monsoon, where 60% or more of our annual rainfall happens in just three months. Despite this climactic fact, micro-localization means that your property may only receive one direct hit a week at most. In other words, most of our rain is extreme rain by the rainfall rate standards of a typical US location.

“Did you get hit?” is a common text message question among friends and family spread around the valley. The question is highly relevant. A half mile distance could mean you are dry while your friend is getting hammered.

Look below at this cumulative rainfall map for the early 2025 Monsoon to understand what I mean by micro-localized rainfall. This map shows the total rainfall from our first three storm days of the 2025 monsoon season. The map is only 20 miles wide!

Here’s another way to imagine micro-localized rainfall - look how defined the rainfall spout is in the picture belwo. In fact, “spout” is a word you only hear in Tornado alley or here in the southwest.

Chasing the Monsoon YouTube Vlog by Chasing Ed

Over the monsoon season, micro-localization of rainfall leads to very different seasonal totals from neighborhood to neighborhood. In 2021, for example, Tucson had a near-record-breaking monsoon with 12.79 inches (measured at the airport). However, at our home, 15 miles from the airport near the foothills, we received 17.5 inches! This rain all fell in three months…in a parade of thunderstorms that made for lots of child excitement.

The extreme seasonality of the desert monsoon means that we not only wait and wait and pray for rain, when it finally comes, it arrives dramatically and commands enormous respect. When scarcity and intensity combine, they tend to command anyone’s attention. Like the boys/girls dance at gender-segregated YMCA summer camps in the 1980s ( I pity the counselors who had to supervise that event).

What I’m pointing to is the fact that, for the average Tucsonan, summer rain is intense and dangerous, and it’s just a matter of when it hits your property—every year.

Imagine if you could guarantee experiencing greater than hurricane-level rain intensity once a week for two months every single year.2 Would you have a different orientation to “rain?” I think you would. And so we do in southern Arizona.

For us, “rain” isn’t banal, as in Seattle. It’s deadly business.

Most rainfall in the United States is far less intense and more evenly distributed throughout the year. It doesn’t come mostly in thunderstorms.

From 1959-2019, Arizona experienced 1/10th the flooding deaths of Texas, yet experienced almost twice as much population growth during this period and, today has almost 1/3 the population of Texas?3 We seem to be better at avoiding flash flood deaths with far worse public education.

On a related note, why did only a dozen people die in the Great Tucson Flood of 1983, our worst ever recorded urban flood in which thousands were displaced?

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Our Choice Is an Imaginative One

Perhaps America needs to learn what Tucsonans have known since the first humans inhabited this valley.

We have to learn to imagine heavy rainfall as life-threatening, not just annoying. The opposite of complacency is not paralyzing fear. There is a middle-ground I’ll call a “healthy respect” for Mother Nature.

As so many of us have become ensconced in digitally interconnected, urban worlds, staring most of the day at screens (like I’m doing right now), we have learned slowly to discount nature’s power. We dismiss it and demote it.

Unlike atheism, though, this disrespect for supra-human power is a deadly trend that continues in America. It’s a bizarre form of willful ignorance and hedonic arrogance.

Sorry, too busy in the American funhouse to get worried!

When I researched a list of major flash flood incidents in the Tucson area, the vast majority involved people hiking into flood zones during the summer time or most likely homeless people living in washes.4

“Morons,” some of us would easily say. But, these deaths involve the extreme end of our broader disrespect for nature. If you’re high, young or both, your disrespect for nature is more likely.

The growing reality for Americans is that we need to view heavy rainfall forecasts more seriously than ever before. We need to have evacuation plans in place and practice them. We need to respect the need to shelter in place and not treat sheets of rain like an “adventure.” Not everything should be reduced to “fun.”

We have done this before. We now take hurricanes far more seriously than we used to. Katrina was a wakeup call.

In espionage, firefighting and law enforcement, they call the crucial skill required here - “situational awareness.” This concept came unconsciously to premodern humans living in a survival state. Situational unawareness got punished severely.

Situational awareness is a deeply personal responsibility for all of us, even if we also need government supplied weather data and alerts as an input. It is no longer just a professional ‘skill.’ Learn the decision-making cycle in the link above.

Lost in the current fingerpointing in Kerr county is the fact, released early on last weekend, that one camp - Mo-Ranch - evacuated before nightfall on July 3. They had an adult with strong situational awareness. They had a plan. It involved seeking higher ground even thought it would mean getting totally cut off (not a natural instinct for many). She wasn’t flipping through TikTok vids. She also appeared to have professional training in large conference planning.

There is no need for most flash flooding deaths when you look into the circumstances. They are not caused by dam breaks or unknown storms.

Lack of preparation is caused by mediocre imagination.

We simply have to imagine rain differently.

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1

For a meterological deep dive, check out this article - https://extension.arizona.edu/sites/e...

2

Some very smart scientists calculated the mean rainfall intensity for landfall hurricanes as 0.37 inches per hour. The flooding caused by hurricanes therefore happens slowly over many hours or days of sustained rainfall, not in 20 minutes. Source: DIFFERENCE OF RAINFALL DISTRIBUTION FOR TROPICAL CYCLONES OVER LAND AND OCEAN AND RAINFALL POTENTIAL DERIVED FROM SATELLITE OBSERVATIONS AND ITS IMPLICATION ON HURRICANE LANDFALL FLOODING PREDICTION Haiyan Jiang1 *, Jeffrey B. Halverson1 , and Joanne Simpson2 1 Joint Center for Earth Systems Technology, University of Maryland Baltimore County, Baltimore, MD, and Mesoscale Atmospheric Process Branch, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD 2 Laboratory for Atmospheres, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD - file:///C:/Users/pgs10/Downloads/1087...

3

https://www.mdpi.com/2073-4441/13/13/... Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis - https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/AZPOP, https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/TXPOP

4

https://www.library.pima.gov/content/...

Hitting AM Radio with the Problems of an Individualistic Way of Life

Sending this blast out a day early due to the Holiday weekend. Happy 4th of July!

I recently gave an AM radio interview about my book with Marianne Pestana, a former talk show producer. This is the good kind of AM talk show. I added captions to this mobile phone-optimized version of our discussion. So, you can listen to it quietly anywhere!

I’m working on two new in-depth pieces for everyone…

America's 'Simon Sinek' Problem

Living Alone in Your 20s: Who Does This and Why Is It Growing in Popularity Since the Pandemic?

If you need something substantial to read this weekend, don’t forget to grab a Kindle copy of my new book for only $6.99!

Greater Corruption, Not Tyranny, Is America's Past and Its Possible Future

The symbol of the LIbertarian Party, one of our oldest extremist groups

An otherwise placid, 2022 life history interview with “Sam” took a sharp turn into cinematic territory when he started discussing his early career as a bank manager in Youngstown Ohio in the early 1970s.

Sam had found himself the arbiter of “clean money” in a notoriously corrupt, dying steel town. It was routinely awkward, but the privately held bank expected him to refuse service to the “wrong” folks.

When he refused to open an account for an unsavory, well-known mobster, this individual drove by his house the next day while he was at work and threatened his wife (who had two preschool-age kids at home).

When Sam mentioned the threat to another Italian customer of his, Vitto, the mobster who threatened his wife, appeared dead in a nearby river a few days later. Honestly, Sam and his zero B.S. wife thought it was funny and “just” in a morbid sort of way.

I knew we had to leave Youngstown when Vitto then stood up at a charity event I was attending as a bank representative and said, ‘I’d like to let everyone know that Sam Parker is my banker! Wonderful guy! You should take your business to the ____ branch.’

I wanted to become invisible.

We packed up and left for California not long after.

This was the early 1970s in Youngstown, Ohio. In this former steel town, Irish and Italian clans still battled for control over illicit drugs, gambling rackets, money laundering sites, and legitimate business interests. Italian and Irish clan loyalty remained a strong feature in everyday life, a lingering vestige of pre-World War II America, when clan-based corruption was endemic throughout the United States at the local level (including among Anglo-Saxons who incorrectly remember themselves as more pure than others). A local Sheriff and former U.S. Representative, Jim Traficant, was the last gasp perhaps of this corrupt world of ethnic patronage and corruption.1

Youngstown in the 1970s was simply a vestige. Very few Americans today seem to understand the extent of organized crime and political corruption in America during the 19thCenturyy particularly during the period of rapid industrialization from 1880 to 1930. This was an era when family and ethnic connections to police, judges, and businesspeople afforded numerous social privileges and employment opportunities unavailable to the majority of the local population (without kin or ethnic connections). And when organized crime families could offer similar privileges to any ‘loyal’ recipient.

Most educated Americans today navigate their lives under the assumption that you have to follow the law, earn a straight living, can not bribe your way around local laws, or deploy a family name or ethnic identity to create a loophole. While the wealthy and highly educated still have all sorts of unfair social advantages, deploying clan or ethnic affiliations to undermine law and order is generally not one of them. America’s plague continues to be corporate corruption at the highest levels of federal government (e.g., unfair bidding, corporate lobbying, contracts for buddies, dark money via 501c (4) nonprofits, etc.).

The idea that an uneducated or working-class person could avoid a fine or eviction notice or jail time based purely on their last name is a lost form of social advantage whose loss we under-estimate at our own peril as a nation.

Why?

Because there are millions of Americans today who would very much like those sources of social advantage to return. I’ll explain more in a bit.

An Ultra-Brief History of Corruption in America

NOTE: If you do not want to read this section, please watch Gangs of New York for a more entertaining, R-rated explanation of 19th-century corruption in America.

In the 17th century, the colonists who settled the East Coast arrived one boatload at a time. Each boat contained extended families leaving one of many Motherlands, often fleeing poverty, war, famine, ethnic harassment, religious persecution, or disease outbreaks. In this era, Europe and America featured family-based social networks as the focus of everyday life in villages and towns. Industrialization had not begun. Life was rural. Much of the world operated based on kin networks and deployed kinship as the currency of social advantage, or even just basic employment. “Nepotism” was not a source of public debate (or one that inflamed hearts).

This was also a time before mass social mobility could create enormous changes in individual circumstances within one lifetime. Maintaining family connections was more about survival than having scintillating conversations and ‘liking’ everyone. You put up with a lot of family nonsense because you had to. And, I suspect, you did not inject unnecessary nonsense nearly as much as we do today for the same reasons.

When family is the primary locus of control and social mobility is rare, you have ideal conditions for rampant political corruption:

The United States, in both the pre-Civil War 1850s and the post-Civil War 1870s, looked a lot like many modern developing and transition countries in terms of the extent to which corruption was both systemic and intertwined with the operation of the political system.2

By the turn of the 20th century, muckraking journalists and accumulated public outcry over the sins of industrialization (e.g., child labor in factories, steel factory abuses, and egregious pollution of rivers near slaughterhouses) had built an early popular audience resentful of government and private sector moral corruption.

After all, the “masses” in the Gilded Age did not participate in social mobility aside from that obtained by shifting from field to factory line (i.e., minimal). So, the rapid wealth creation they witnessed in the cities among the robber barons was not spreading to them. And there was no large-scale federal taxation and entitlements system to redistribute that concentrated wealth either. In this way, 19th-century America was far more primitive than contemporary India (where entitlements abound, especially in the civil service).

The turn of the 20th century is when political currents in America started shifting away from open corruption. Teddy Roosevelt, of all people, does not get enough schoolbook credit for his anti-corruption leadership. In his 1903 Address to Congress, he dropped a historic line for an American public official- “There can be no crime more serious than bribery.”3 It’s sad that this even needed to be said, but it did.

America passed progressive legislation at the federal and state levels from the 1890s onward, most notably introducing the secret ballot and transforming the federal civil service from a patronage-based system to one that was 90% merit-based. This ended the “spoils system” that originally spread under President Andrew Jackson (probably the closest approximation to “Trump” in our early Presidential line-up).

Campaign finance laws also went into effect in many states to track who was getting what.

The media and publishing industry spread muckraking investigations into public corruption that astonished and infuriated the public, often involving private companies in the oil, railroad, and other lucrative industries.

Congress began to investigate corrupt Congresspeople and published their crimes:

The most infamous of these scandals was the so-called Teapot Dome affair of 1922, in which Interior Secretary Albert Fall took bribes from oil company executives to arrange for leases that gave those companies drilling rights in the U.S. Navy’s oil reserves in Teapot Dome, Wyoming and Elk Hill, California.

The advent of the FBI in 1908 also coincided with this Progressive era and enabled the U.S. federal government to continually investigate and prosecute state and local corruption cases as a continued deterrent.

Yet, some other crucial social changes would happen after WWII that legal historians too easily dismiss as major reinforcements of our now standard expectation of low corruption in American public life.

Cultural shift from Family Life to Individualism - Youth culture, permanently low birth rates (compared to the 19th century), and highly willful romantic marriages were subtly splitting families apart. The plausibility and attractiveness of pulling up your stakes and pursuing personal dreams not to your family's liking became a mass, middle-class reality in large part because family had lost its financial grip on individuals’ fate, especially their chances of social mobility. Here is a chart of the explosion of the word “nepotism” in printed English after WWII (source: Google’s ngram service)

A

Steep Rise in Educated, White-Collar Work - American culture underwent significant changes at the grassroots level due to shifts in labor markets, labor market incentives, and a mass reprioritization of culture away from family toward individual careers. By the end of World War II, returning GIs had far less incentive than their parents to utilize kin networks and patronage to secure blue-collar employment. They had strong counter-incentives. The normalization of high school diplomas and the acceleration of the bachelor’s degree led to the rapid expansion of white-collar deskwork, which paid better and was safer. This led to the explosion of the merit-based private sector workforce. Family and kin became a last resort for employment, not the ideal choice of the upwardly mobile. Upward mobility was significantly more possible in the post-World War II period due to a rapidly growing economy. The rise of modern hyper-individualism, combined with merit-based white-collar employment, made “merit” the new sign of elite status, fueled by higher education.

Mass Taxation Begins in 1942 - The Victory Tax Act during World War II was crucial to funding eventual victory and established federal income taxes as a mass, social reality for all but the poorest Americans.4 When you pay federal taxes, eventually, at some point, you develop strong opinions about what the federal government should do with that money. You vote more actively. You have skin in the wealth re-distribution game. You have an incentive to minimize corruption and waste with “your” money.

Anti-corruption as a politically activated, mass belief is more likely to spread when a society provides a) merit-based social mobility opportunities to the historically ignored (e.g., the working classes), b) taxes their wages, and c) weakens the kind of family and ethnic ties that make nepotistic corruption likely and attractive.

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The Real Source of Mass Corruption is A Lack of Private Sector Social Mobility

In most of human urban history, your social position did not change during your lifetime. Only perhaps in the wake of epidemics, famine, or invasion could you fall or rise due to temporary circumstances. Low to no economic growth was the ultimate root cause of this immobility. Wealth in pre-modern times was hoarded and concentrated. That hoarding required a lot of violence and corruption to occur in the first place and to maintain it over time (as well as corrupt use of legitimate means of violence).5 A tiny elite became easily tempted to dispense patronage and favors, because so many were asking for them both; you had to ask for favors to get ahead. This sets in motion the wheels of corruption by creating demand for patronage below and concentration of power above. Change either, and the corruption dynamic weakens.

Wealth concentration, combined with an underdeveloped and low-growth private sector, makes the state the primary vehicle for the underprivileged to achieve social mobility. Those in government positions that regulate the public, especially, become tempted by this demand and their sense of financial stagnation, to offer favors to those they like or could gain something in the future from helping them today (e.g., votes for elected officials and private favors later for the unelected). This was the reality most Indians lived with until economic liberalization in the 1990s (and per capita GDP did not accelerate much until the 2000s). And this is also what happens in failed economies with totalitarian governments like Russia, Iran, Venezuela, and so forth.

When I was living in southern India in the late 1990s, not a week went by without the gossip streams feeding me some new anecdote of petty corruption related to obtaining local government employment (e.g., police, bus drivers, etc.). In low-growth, socialist economies like India’s at the time, the Government and its millions of jobs formed the primary avenue for social mobility among those who did not have mone, or come from landed or merchant families. A good government job - working somewhere in India’s vast civil, police, or military ranks. - was also the objective of most upwardly mobile working-class adults I met. Why? Almost every job came with a lifetime pension, guaranteeing a quick transition from peasant misery to financial security in a country with no social security safety net for the elderly.

One of the more common “corruption tales” I heard related to someone trying to obtain a job as a city bus driver. At the time in Madurai, this involved long shifts in un-airconditioned vehicles, inhaling leaded fumes, dust, and aerosolized cow dung. This may not sound glamorous to you and me, but chests swelled with pride back then when a working-class Tamil husband could finally secure this kind of job. The problem is that many others had the same idea. The government, therefore, established numerous hurdles and exams to secure a position as a simple bus driver. And, you had to wait for a position to open up. In the late 90s, once you finished waiting for a slot to open up, you then had to fork over a cash bribe to secure a position. The bribe back then was as high as Rs. 50,000, or say five months’ salary for a high school teacher; feasible, but painful for a working-class family. This is a sum you have to spend years accumulating and guarding.

The fact that government workers felt they needed to extract bribes from bus driver applicants (!) to upgrade their income and lifestyle reveals the inherent limits of any government bureaucracy to fuel social mobility without inviting the demon of corruption. Government salary scales are NOT designed to reward tenure or performance as fast as the private sector (or a criminal gang) can. And they certainly did not in India at that time. So, government jobs had long-term benefits, but could not satisfy a ‘modern’ consumer lifestyle very easily. Desire for consumption outpaced salary growth. This was a constant grievance I witnessed back then.

I participated directly in the other form of petty corruption in societies like this - government employees using their authority to illegally extract surplus cash or “end of the month cash.” One common practice involved city traffic police who controlled the four highway “gates” into and out of the city limits. I lived in a suburb just beyond one of these gates and went through it multiple times a week. At the end of the month, when government employees’ cash at home was running low (they were paid monthly), it was not uncommon for a bunch of traffic cops to set up barricades at one of the gates and stop every single vehicle to look for proper registration and a driver’s license.

The ‘narrative’ given at these sudden traffic roadblocks was often something about looking for smugglers, terrorists, or the criminal-of-the-month. In reality, they were about collecting bribes for minor infractions, such as driving without registration, a license, or a current license. At these traffic stops, the goal was not enforcement. The goal was to acquire numerous small bribes. 50 Rs. 60Rs. Whatever. When I got stopped once, I realized what was happening a bit late. I did not have a licence to drive my moped. The cop yelled at me, expecting me to slide him some cash. Instead, I started speaking English extremely fast, he got confused, then angry and frustrated, and waved me on using the rude verb form of “Go!” Others around quietly slipped cash and drove onward. Locals treated these roadblocks less like ‘corruption’ than a pop-up tollbooth, more or less. The difference being that these bribes were used to fund family ear-piercing ceremonies, a new refrigerator, or repairs to a policeman’s personal motorbike.

When I conducted an informal focus group with a middle-class Tamil youth clique I had networked into, my first question was: How many of you have a parent with a Government salary? 3/4 of their hands went up. Government was the vehicle for social mobility. The private sector was reserved for high-caste adults who had centuries of socioeconomic privilege, social skills, and wealth to become entrepreneurs or corporate employees in the global multinational sector.

The allure of government employment remains strong in India as a means to initial social mobility for less privileged castes and the urban working class who can access higher education. Employment and education reservations for less privileged castes continue and ensure this utilization of government as “a step up.”

Across the world, however, multiple generations of Americans have grown up under the magical spell of private sector-fueled social mobility as if this is normal everywhere else. Which it isn’t. We led the way on the global stage in the late 20th century.

But…what if this democratization of social mobility in America started to reverse itself? What if social mobility continues to decelerate and corruption becomes more and more attractive to those left behind and to those occupying government positions?

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America is Slipping…

India’s economic growth in the past twenty-five years has been unprecedented in the country’s history. The size of its Westernized, English-speaking middle class has also grown in parallel. Poverty and illiteracy have dramatically reduced since my fieldwork there in the late 1990s.6

Yet, India remains highly corrupt, according to internationally trusted metrics from Transparency International, scoring 38 out of a possible 100. It could be a counterfactual case for my thesis above, but I also think that the state remains too useful a path of social mobility for the majority of Indians who lack the connections to access loans, set up businesses, and achieve higher education. They remain a large audience seeking favors and government positions to join the global middle class. In addition, lifestyle expectations have most likely risen beyond the capacity of the average wage (even with high GDP per capita growth). This process began during my time there.

India has never exorcised its demon of corruption in government or business.

America’s recent, steady decline in its score, however, is far more concerning, because we have done better. We know better. This decline in integrity coincides interestingly with acceleration in wealth concentration in the 2010s AND the rise of MAGA, not to mention an openly corrupt political machine run by the Trump family (though this does not imply correlation). Since World War II, Americans have generally sought high moral character in their elected politicians. However, this has changed rapidly for the worse.

Where are we headed?

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How Ideological Tribes Could Replace Clan-Based Corruption In The Future

In the 21st century, we have a steady decline in the middle class as a proportion of the working population (no matter how you define it) and ever-concentrating wealth and opportunities for advancement. Even the advantaged status markers of my father’s generation - an Ivy League degree stopped opening doors automatically in my generation.

Our current oversupply of educated, meritorious workers means that access to enhanced power and income through education is no longer guaranteed, as it was in the 1950s and 1960s. When you preach intergenerational social mobility to everyone and suddenly it slows down or stops, it does not matter that most people are still far better off than their grandparents. If you aren’t moving upwards in America, you feel something is wrong. This immobility frustration may be culturally arbitrary, but it fuels modern forms of elite corruption in business and government by creating demand ‘to skip the line.’ It also encourages those at the top to become corrupt in order to maintain their social status (e.g., the 2019 college admissions scandal).

But, in most corrupt societies historically, it is lines of caste or ethnicity or just family affiliation that get deployed to spin the wheels of corrupt reciprocity. Americans have, for the most part, destroyed or deprioritized those bonds.

Instead, we have replaced kin and clan with an explosion of lifestyles in the past fifty years. As I discuss at length in my book, this has fragmented the country in unprecedented ways, erasing any clear sense of social norms or even an ability to mark the boundaries of shame. During this post-family period, extreme ideological belief systems have taken advantage of this collapse of norms and normative groupings to allow the formation of extremist subcultures on the left and the right. Friendship circles now more easily observe lifestyle criteria for admittance, including lifestyles driven by extremist ideologies that do not allow for any center (e.g., QANON, white supremacy, climate change doomsaying, anarchistic libertarianism, charismatic Christian apocalypticism, etc.) Family relationships that survive are more easily discarded for ideological reasons.

Rather than deploying family connections or cash to curry favor and patronage, today, activist groups representing any lifestyle can deploy extremist ideologies not only to seize control of local, state or national party organizations through sheer bullying of centrists in those organizations but we can also use extremist ideological affiliation to extract favors and patronage from elected officials (e.g. Steve Bannon, My Pillow guy, Andrew Cuomo).

This is the anti-merit backlash we unwittingly invited by not policing social norms effectively since the 1960s. We thought economic growth would continue forever and that all this lifestyle diversity was academic, apolitical, and incidental to our individualistic pursuit of social mobility.

What we failed to see is that individualism, as a belief system, almost inexorably leads to an equivocation of all lifestyles and moral systems, a sort of moral relativism by sheer passivity. This effectively erodes the stability of the public sphere or civic commons, which is necessary to minimize corruption in business and government, when the engine of social mobility starts winding down and mobility frustration grows.

Alienation of our specific variety in America easily lulls voters into disinterest until ‘my kinda guy’ is running, a lifestyle-affiliate who we would feel comfortable asking favors from and ‘skipping the democratic line’ to our advantage.

It’s an evolving hypothesis, but I conclude with the idea that extreme lifestyle affiliation can serve as an effective replacement for clan-based social identity as a fuel for corruption.

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1

https://www.nytimes.com/2002/02/28/op... AND https://www.washingtonpost.com/archiv...

2

“TAMING SYSTEMIC CORRUPTION: THE AMERICAN EXPERIENCE AND ITS IMPLICATIONS FOR CONTEMPORARY DEBATES”, MARIANO-FLORENTINO CUELLAR* & MATTHEW C. STEPHENSON**

3

Ibid

4

In 1939, only about five percent of American workers paid income tax. The United States' entrance into World War II changed that figure. The demands of war production put almost every American back to work, but the expense of the war still exceeded tax-generated revenue. President Roosevelt's proposed Revenue Act of 1942 introduced the broadest and most progressive tax in American history, the Victory Tax. Now, about 75 percent of American workers would pay income taxes. Because so many citizens paid the tax, it was considered a mass tax. To ease workers' burden of paying a large sum once a year, and to create a regular flow of revenue into the U.S. Treasury, the government required employers to withhold money from employees' paychecks. Additional taxes were put in place in 1943. By war's end in 1945, about 90 percent of American workers submitted income tax forms, and 60 percent paid taxes on their income. The federal government covered more than half its expenses with new income tax revenue. Source: https://apps.irs.gov/app/understandin....

5

Readers interested in the global history of macro-economics should read Thomas Piketty’s famous book - Capital in the 21stCenturyy. In it, he first published the first attempt at an accurate timeline of economic growth from antiquity through the 2000s. The most shocking discovery for me is how recent a high growth economy capable of mass social mobility really is. Most of us have little idea of how lucky our birth timing has been.

6

Sources: https://www.statista.com/statistics/2... https://www.indiatoday.in/diu/story/i...

The Infotainment Disaster Cable TV Made Possible

We’ve all done it - barfed up an impulsive opinion about something we don’t know that much about. Usually, this embarrassing behavior occurs at home in front of a limited live audience, mainly composed of pets. They weren’t listening, don’t worry.

Something triggered us. A politician’s soundbite. A TV character’s punchline. It doesn’t matter the source.

Before internet-enabled social media and apps like Substack, though, these fairly worthless thoughts and opinions evaporated quickly; they were not recorded. And they certainly didn’t spread. Dumb opinions tended to have no reach unless you owned a newspaper.

A lot of our worst opinions as human adults erupt quickly as we encounter ‘facts’ or ‘data’ that trigger some eruption of fear or laughter. We rashly apply some context to a stray comment or fact, and off we go.

It’s hard for Gen Z to imagine a society where random opining did not spread quickly to 10-25 people in your offline social network because of what you typed into your online device. Oops.

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From Professional News to Infotainment

It’s not trivial when a podcaster or podcast guest catches a stray fact, such as the percentage of women in the military, and then interprets spastically this as a problem for military readiness. Huh?

How do you know this?

And who let this idiot in front of the mike?

Without context, research, and deep experience, a flippant opinion about a specialized domain has one basic source every journalist and academic learns about early in their training: flawed assumptions. And those flawed assumptions generally have two social sources in my experience: transmitted ideology or folk misunderstanding (i.e., stereotyping).

Before the advent of internet-enabled mobile devices, most thoughts based on flawed assumptions spread the farthest primarily via offline channels, undercutting the producer of the stupid comment as the comment spread, effectively neutering its power. This is village ‘censorship’ at its best. Bottom-up. Not from the top down.

“Oh, Sam is always saying stupid shit about economics. No one listens to him.”

In this long-gone world, the village idiot did not influence anyone beyond the village, so to speak. He could not magically find 1,257 like-minded village idiots from around the globe to applaud his inappropriate or inane comments. Gate-keeping of whose thoughts got broadcast was much stronger than today.

Today, the only thing that limits your ability to achieve reach beyond the village is the blandness of your content. Neither village gossip nor platform moderation does anything to stop the forward movement of extremely marginal thoughts and opinions that used to require pamphleteering, real face time, or the mail to spread slowly. While most self-published authors and podcasters fail to generate any reach beyond family and friends, thousands do succeed along a continuum, each step of which would not be possible without the internet. My business book is one such example.

It is easier than before the internet, but not at all easy, to generate reach at the level of thousands, tens of thousands, and hundreds of thousands. The latter is just under the reach of low-level broadcast networks operating in specific regions and the most popular podcasts. Information is being broadcast constantly through a much larger number of pipes than in the 1970s, when I was born.

What we often forget is that we used to consume ‘news’ or ‘learn new information’ in highly discrete ritual moments (e.g., class, newspapers, or the evening news). The most popular ritual was reading a newspaper. It is a dirty physical object that requires both hands and mental focus to hold and peruse. You may skim articles, yes, but not compulsively like a newsfeed. In the early decades of newspapers, the illiterate would gather for readings. A great cinematic depiction of this behavior can be found in News of the World, starring Tom Hanks.

Acquiring knowledge in the modern, internet-enabled world has now become a form of hyper-casual, deritualized entertainment. We consume news out of boredom, not a pent-up, conscious desire for serious news. We watch DIY home renovation shows for fun, not to mimic techniques and execute them. When we view content like this, there is no preparation. No training. No ritual required. We gorge on information like candy. We consume “news channels” that are now primarily a series of op-ed talk shows, all day long.

The broadcaster controls the ‘pipe’ to its audience. The broadcaster, therefore, shoulders the responsibility for vetting content, excluding low-quality content, and ensuring that the context is sufficient for lay understanding or the understanding of its least well-educated viewers or listeners. The broadcaster must ensure that their channels are not simply propaganda machines. Or do they?

With highly concentrated media outlets prior to the Internet and Cable TV, this vetting process worked pretty well. Yes, this gatekeeping had an elitist function, but primarily insofar as someone needs to be the responsible adult thinking of the broader community.

With the advent of cable TV, however, this all started to break down. Irresponsible content began to spread on right-wing Christian televangelist channels and elsewhere. Pat Buchanan pretending to stop hurricanes with live, intercessory prayer? This was egotism masquerading as Christianity to most Christians.

However, the real problem with cable was the proliferation of 24/7 news channels. This led to a desperate need for ‘content’ to fill slots and shows. Inevitably, this devolved into a competitive infotainment model under the guise of ‘news.’ While the major broadcasters (NBC, ABC, and CBS) continued with their daily news shows in limited time slots, the cable news channels began to serve up infotainment and opinionated commentary.

As these channels chased ratings and ad monies, the temptation grew to sensationalize anything the executives would allow. The Rodney King riots and the O.J. Simpson trial became the first multi-week, 24/7 infotainment binges that would soon define how Americans thought about ‘news.’

News as infotainment. Gorging on news like you might gorge on beer.

The idea that consuming news about the world would devolve into toilet newsfeed scrolling seems funny at first until we think about what it means to be so casual in our approach to information acquisition.

Ironically, certain aspects of journalism have undergone significant improvements since the advent of cable TV news channels. Investigative journalism, although still a niche, has seen its creators become more proficient in demographics, social science, and overall research methods that journalists or newsfeed content creators do not commonly use.

However, today, only the motivated few will consciously select those more serious, well-researched sources. We aren’t forced to consume serious, carefully investigated news through the logic of editorial gatekeeping and media concentration in a tiny, committed professional tribe. Or just ignore the news if we’re indifferent. Those days are over.

We are bombarded with low-quality infotainment on multiple screens throughout the day.

Try ‘avoiding’ news-like content for a week. It won’t be easy.

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Why Context Matters When We Consume News - Illegal Immigration

One topic that illustrates the damage done by decentralizing media into a thousand pundit-driven pipes focused on the most dramatic and controversial ‘angle’ is the federal tragedy of mass illegal immigration.

The large number of illegal immigrants living in the United States is not a fact many debate. I have yet to encounter anyone who believes the whole phenomenon is fabricated. Roughly 10.9M to 12.8M unauthorized immigrants live in the country right now (some are asylum seekers generating much of the current political firestorm).1 It is not easy to nail down the precise number of illegal immigrants living here, because this is a stigmatized identity that most will work hard to conceal even from Census takers (at all costs).

NOTE: When I say “illegal,” it’s important to note that this is a civil offense under U.S. law. Being ‘illegal’ is not a felony like murder, and having a pending asylum claim should neutralize any illegal status per federal law.

Until Trump’s first campaign in 2016, most of the media chatter about illegal immigration focused on how to treat illegal immigrants along a continuum of mass amnesty to aggressive deportation.

When border encounters surged after the pandemic, the media became more or less obsessed with the dramatic visual of ‘hungry hordes’ at the border, families crossing the desert filmed by drones. Large crowds did form at entry ports in El Paso and elsewhere, providing confirmation that our collective obsession was warranted, somewhat. In turn, we witnessed intense debates about border control as if the primary cause of illegal immigration is illegal border crossing at U.S. ports of entry.

I have yet to encounter a single, widely disseminated investigative piece that examines all known causes of illegal immigration and cites the available data on the phenomenon. And I read pretty obsessively.

Instead, this data and discussion have remained within policy institute blogs, congressional testimony, and Homeland Security reports. While the context has remained under-discussed and under-broadcast, a highly skewed discussion of causes for illegal immigration remains dominant everywhere. For example, this chart shows how the population of migrants without legal status surged after the pandemic, in large part because the Biden administration favored a humanitarian policy of releasing migrants with valid asylum or immigration claims to pursue legal status in the courts (rather than wait at the Mexico border or elsewhere).2

The framing of the problem as purely a ‘border control’ issue is, however, incredibly misleading and buries a long-term problem that most likely contributes to the simple majority of current illegal immigrants in the country.

Let me share what a little digging could reveal to a broader audience, if news channels did not focus primarily on infotainment as the primary filter for ‘news.’

Discovery #1 - Illegal immigration mainly accelerated in the 1990s.

Even with the post-pandemic surge in internal asylum releases, we do not appear to have exceeded the illegal immigrant peak right before the 2008 recession.

What happened in the 1990s?

Discovery #2 - Visa Overstays Are A Substantial Cause of Illegal Immigration

The United States has one of the most active borders in the world, as it is the second-largest economy globally and is heavily dependent on cross-border ground transport for the functioning of its economy.

The chart above from Customs and Border Protection indicates the total annual number of individuals who crossed into the United States legally. As you can see, we experience a yearly influx of people that is slightly over half of the entire U.S. population (maybe this is why our roads are so bad?). Most of these individuals are tourists, businesspeople, and commercial truck drivers staying for a matter of days or weeks at most.

In 2023, federal visa data on nonimmigrants (those without legal resident status, green cards, asylum, pending asylum cases, etc.) suggested that 39,005,712 non-immigrants were expected to depart the country in 2023. Approximately 39 million legal visitors held visas that were set to expire in 2023, including many short-term visitors who were expected to leave in a matter of days or weeks.3

“Of this number, CBP calculated a total overstay rate of 1.45 percent, or 565,155 overstay events. In other words, 98.55 percent of the in-scope nonimmigrant visitors departed the United States on-time and in accordance with the terms of their admission.”4

This appears to be a great track record until you perform some simple math.

If the 2023 rate has been occurring since roughly 2000 (when illegal immigration peaked before the pandemic), then we would see the accumulation of nearly 8 million illegal residents.

1.11 % overstay

35 million expected annual departures

= 7.7 million adults who overstayed their visas could accumulate if they all stayed indefinitely.

In fact, given the opportunities in our economy and the intense sacredness we place on individual privacy, this is an excellent, working assumption, despite lacking complex data to confirm it.

The lack of a nationwide exit system has made direct, complete measurement of overstays challenging. U.S. transportation hubs and ports of entry were not constructed with exit processing in mind. Given the historical lack of a comprehensive exit-tracking system, the U.S. government and nongovernmental researchers have used estimation techniques over the years to study the number and characteristics of the overstay population.5

What percentage of overstays ever get discovered? We do not know. The government focuses on estimating those who do not leave, not tracking them down. I highly suspect they have little idea where most of these people live after 1-2 years into their visa overstay.

I looked and looked and even delayed publishing this essay as I looked for any federal, cumulative estimate of the number of illegal immigrants in the country today who are likely to be visa overstays. No such rolling, cumulative estimate exists, nor does the law require it. All I could find are rough Congressional estimates in 1996 (41%)6 and 2014 (31-57%).7

While the current administration is pursuing those with court hearings and other easy-to-find illegals, there is still no discussion of the millions of people who have lived here for years (or even decades) without legal status because they overstayed a visa.

Why?

“Visa overstay” is not a phenomenon conducive to infotainment or simple analytics. It is not conducive to dramatic drone footage either, since the individuals work quietly among us. It is not tangible like the midnight border crossing family.

When I was a junior at Harvard in the early 1990s, my Nepali roommate informed me one day that the managers of a bustling Harvard Square fast-food joint were college visa overstays from Nepal. And he also had several other related tales of overstays.

Instead of discussing this significant, long-term ‘cause’, everyone focuses on border release policies as the primary cause. Yet, visa overstays continue to occur every year, quietly, out of sight and out of mind. This is how our modern infotainment complex approaches very sensitive topics, letting the “news” skew to the juiciest controversy, to the most cinematic angle possible without doing basic research on government websites to provide a balanced picture.

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1

Sources: low estimate - https://cmsny.org/correcting-record-f... and high estimate: https://budget.house.gov/imo/media/do...

2

https://www.migrationpolicy.org/artic...

3

https://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/fil... FY 2023 non-VWP total overstay rate,3.04 percent of the non-VWP expected departures.&text=The total overstay rate is 3.5 percent,3.91 percent for the J visa category.

4

Since this is a mathematical estimate, not a direct measurement, it was revised in May 2024 by a slight amount; 98.98% departed as scheduled.

5

https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/...

6

https://tracreports.org/tracker/dynad...

7

https://tracreports.org/tracker/dynad...

Our Worst Strength Wins a Nautilus Award!

Nonfiction authors without institutional affiliations in academia or media struggle to break through. This may not surprise you, but it's why I’m excited to see reviewers at Nautilus pit indie authors against trade nonfiction in an open contest not biased by the PR machines of Malcolm Gladwell and Jonathan Haidt.

Reader Highlights (from Kindle):

“The single most important freedom in the modern world is the freedom to ignore the past.”

“Chasing consumer trends is a critical behavior we all use to maintain our escape velocity from the past.”

American individualism has fragmented us into thousands of different lifestyles with a fragile civic glue. We are even free to reinvent ‘traditions’ and pretend we didn’t completely refashion them.

Here is a great podcast interview with a reader fan, if you need a taste of its contents before committing:

One of the roots of American cultural anthropology was a profound despair at the consequences of industrialization and modern life in general. At the loss of community, rootedness, and traditions that bound us together.

What I call the “rights-enabled consumer,” is a seductive notion that has spread across the world. It builds large middle-class cohorts where only poverty and despair once existed.

I wrote this book not to demand a return to some romantic past where we had little to buy, poor health and nonstop family interference but rather to make us aware that we still have a lot of work to do to make highly individualistic societies function for 99% of us, not just 70-80%. We can do better.

A healthy nation protects AND nurtures. And this begins with rebuilding local communities.

If you enjoy Homo Imaginari, please consider grabbing a copy and supporting its production. I’ve put all formats on sale for two weeks.

OR…you can become a paid subscriber and listen to my ‘highly entertaining’ audio narration of the entire oeuvre!

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Why Practicing Cultural Anthropology Still Has Value for Any Student

One of the weddings I documented for a poor local family… This was an arranged marriage with a very unhappy bride. 1998. I was 26.

In November of 2000, I traveled to the American Anthropological Association’s national conference in San Francisco, trying half-heartedly to network while writing my dissertation. The conference experience was miserable, making me question my commitment to the career I had chosen years ago. “Oh, the job boards!… Oh, valley of despond!” one tenured professor blurted out to a colleague with a condescending smile as he passed me on the down escalator. Asshole.

With prompting from a relative before flying into town, I connected with a much older cousin once removed who lived in the Bay Area back then. She was curious about my recent experiences in India and invited me to dinner with her family downtown.

Of course, this meant that her husband would come. We’ll call him Ralph, because he is definitely the sort who sues for defamation.

Ralph is an insufferable narcissist blowhard. He wields his PhD in Physics like a phallic extension (e.g. a highland Papua New Guinea penis gourd). When you first meet him, you’ll learn about the PhD quickly. That’s your first red flag, first of many. After we finished ordering our food, Ralph leaned in aggressively from across the table and said,

“James, tell one practical thing that cultural anthropology contributes to society.”

His tone was NOT curious. He already had his answer. It was technically not a question, either. It was a challenge to a phallic duel. In front of his wife and kids (?!)

Had I been ten years older, I probably would have faked an emergency bowel obstruction and left that dinner before it started. Instead, I paused and mumbled something equivocal in response. I honestly didn’t care at the time if the external world thought my field was worthwhile, yet I was incredulous that a dinner host would challenge the worthiness of the last five years of their guest’s life, including the fieldwork that nearly got him killed three times.

Since that dinner, off and on, I chewed on the idea of issuing a searing retort to Lord Ralph, the ‘under-appreciated’ douchecanoeist of San Francisco Bay. Not that it would change his mind.

Instead of returning fire years later, I have repeatedly talked with college and high school students about my experiences in Tamil-speaking southern India and about applying anthropological sensibilities in business. These discussions helped me synthesize the enormous practical value students can obtain from my old field if they throw themselves into the deep end at least once.

Cultural anthropology’s most lasting contribution is what happens to you when you deploy its core methodology for an extended period - participant observation.

Every intro to anthropology textbook covers “participant observation” up front. I’m sure it has appeared on a thousand college multiple-choice exams.

“What is the primary method of cultural anthropology?” “Participant observation.” Check. Did I get an A?

So, what is this mysterious process?

What Is Participant Observation?

Participant observation is a highly empathetic immersion in an offline social world, a community. It is neither espionage (i.e., arrogant and Machiavellian), nor journalism (i.e., non-immersive), nor a dry survey analysis of anonymous adults (i.e., emotionally uninvolved).

There are many ways to observe a social world in 2025, many of which involve observing from afar. Flippant, remote observations of other groups and communities continue to plague America in poorly contextualized media narratives, charts, etc. The explosion of digital media has made it easier than ever to feed any bigotry with sloppy, de-contextualized observations, thereby stoking the fires of idio-cratic hate (hate on bureaucratic steroids). What is increasingly missing in our voyeuristic world full of surveys and cameras is genuine 1:1 immersion in an alien social world (e.g., moving into and living in a different cultural world). Observing as a participant in a strange social world is what we seldom do in our ordinary lives.

Yet, this kind of immersion is the crucible of extreme empathy, a personal trait badly needed in a multi-cultural America.

It is not easy to initiate participant observation in a community where no one knows you, and you may even need permission to appear. Outside of anthropological fieldwork, the closest thing to it is a simple school-to-school student exchange with family hosts on both ends. At least the exchanges that last for at least a semester.

What cultural anthropologists do, however, involves nation-state permission and far deeper immersion. With this high-level research visa approval, we can drop in like a local ‘student’ living independently as agile lone actors. In most foreign countries, the anthropologist can not work as a way to gain access. Then, we begin networking for stories and information. Additionally, in specific contexts, anthropological networking starts with a highly official, in-person introduction to a local authority - the classic situation in 20th-century research among small, preliterate communities.

But, in an urban field site like mine, there is no ONE authority. Not really. Well, where I did research, there was one powerful local individual, but it took a friendly nudge from a local businessman to get me to realize his power. I had never considered getting the local mayor’s ‘approval’ for my work, and the central government did not require this.

One evening, about six months into my fieldwork, an unusually large man and his buddies from the local Devar community approached me aggressively in the streets. He warned me about running around asking random questions. He wanted to know what the hell I was doing.

I didn’t know him, but his community is known for organized violence in politics and business. It’s not a group you want to piss off. Imagine Italian Brooklyn in the 1930s (minus the guns).

The next morning, I went to see my business friend from the Devar community in a mild panic and asked him, “How can I calm these folks down?” He sipped his morning coffee and smiled. Then, he suggested I have lunch with the mayor. I responded in my usual literal-minded manner (when I’m stressed), “What would that accomplish? Isn’t he a brahmin priest? He’s not one of them.”

“James, if he has lunch with you, you’re in! The Devars love him. They put him in office!”

I smiled. Ah…ancient temple politics at work. My ‘white man’ mistake.

The lunch happened a week or so later (after an initial coffee meetup), and I was never bothered by anyone again from the Devar community. I became quite popular due to my free photography service! This all led eventually to some killer interviews and coffee stall conversations. And it also led to a neighborhood temple donation solicitation at my front doorstep (numbering easily 25 dudes). (Pro tip: When 25 people show up at your front door to request a donation, ‘no’ is not a feasible answer.)

As you can tell from this vignette, participant observation is a bit of a young person’s game. It places the investigator in a position of extreme psycho-social risk. Embedding alone in a real community requires you to establish protective relationships AND maintain your reputation locally. And to apologize a lot.

The cultural anthropologist is wildly exposed in her work. You are one person, easily dismissed or even attacked. Initially, locals have no incentive to help or protect you. Rejection is common. This requires enormous psychological bravery and a willingness to charm. You must find ways to kickstart reciprocity in order to unlock relationships before you even understand local gift-giving nuances. In post-colonial societies like India, even something as simple as your consistent ‘American’ presence at family events could be a ‘gift’ to a local person trying to angle for more social status.

The structural risk in field anthropology is as humbling as Army boot camp. The boot camp inductee has to dissolve his ego to fit in quickly, or his peers will pummel him into alignment (sometimes literally). The Army group quickly tames any lone wolf. The anthropologist, however, often operates alone and has to build relationships deftly to gain deep access and minimal protection for her work. Not all of us are that great at this kind of relationship building, even when our attitude is relatively humble. But fear for personal safety is a powerful motivator!

Participant observation in a vastly alien cultural world is not just humbling, it’s like being a six-year-old in terms of cultural maturity. You either become curious about how to function better or leave in a frenzy of nonstop irritation at all the constant corrections. No one can give you a ‘download’ for a culture. And your Frommer’s guide does not contain the most subtle aspects of local interactions (because tourists never access this level of depth). Tourists exist inside a series of curated retail transactions.

Your reaction to being humbled in the field should be extreme curiosity. If it is, you will start learning more than you would merely observing from afar (i.e., from books or media or a brief tourist jaunt). By participating directly, you can ask questions about what is happening in real time when the answers become easiest to absorb, apply and remember through bodily practice. Most importantly, immersion alone makes it easier to have your bad assumptions challenged (versus occupying a position in an NGO).

But how do you participate as an outsider? What grants you access to ‘accepted’? Well, it starts with one of the most ancient of human behaviors - gift-giving. This could be philanthropy (i.e., cash donations), goods, or something more clever.

In my fieldwork, I used cash on a limited basis when the family/individual was desperately poor. To many middle-class people, this seems corrupt and gross because, perhaps, they have never been cash poor to the extent of not being able to feed everyone at home properly or regularly. Judgment of cash-based research access as illegitimate reciprocity makes little sense in a society that is permeated by urban poverty and low-level malnutrition, as Madurai was in the 1990s.

But I preferred the ‘clever’ approach, honestly. My go-to choice? Free event photography! Photo albums became my go-to gift to jumpstart a relationship (and whenever cash was openly refused). This service was far more popular than I thought it would be. And it only irritated one person - a local event photographer. Of course, he offered video, too, which was the new fad in the 1990s; so he went upmarket more or less, and we rarely conflicted. He was pretty nice about my interference after we spoke about it.

Public gift-giving inside participant observation generates an interference effect, yes, and it is part of the risk of doing this kind of fieldwork. Yet, photography was a perfect gift in an era before camera-equipped smartphones. I spent a couple of thousand dollars putting together physical photo albums for families that let me into their family events. And I got fed! And I got social access I could never have obtained otherwise.

Side note: The higher-status, wealthy families in the community did not avail themselves of my ‘free’ photography. This access trade-off was fine with me because no anthropologist worth their dissertation focuses on networking solely with non-representative elites in a complex urban society. And I already had access to them in a sense. One of these wealthier folks did actually get up in my face one afternoon and demanded to know if I was ‘truly invited’ to all these private events I was taking pictures at. Good grief. What was he so afraid of? I’ll never know.

Creative social reciprocity is the key tool for accessing a local community that otherwise has no incentive to help you. Or care what you’re doing. And in seeking this out, in part for your safety, the field anthropologist has to become more empathetic to local norms and customs. Maybe not perfectly empathetic, but more than the tourist nearby. More than the journalist on a tight deadline.

Here’s how my analytical brain summarizes the process of participant observation.

Structural humility forces adaptive curiosity and creative reciprocity to obtain access and protection. Reciprocity builds empathy the old-fashioned way, by connecting you to local people.

In reality, field anthropologists practice the art of participant observation along a continuum of intimacy. Some are more intimate than others. In complex communities like the one I did fieldwork in, reciprocity takes different forms and may have different effects on access. Access also varies by gender a lot in Asian societies. My access in India was extremely male-limited. Luckily for my research focus, this permitted me to wander and explore public spaces in ways that American women might have been penalized for doing (in terms of local respect). So, other than widows, sisters, and wives of my closer friends, I had limited access to female perceptions of local social life. As in any scientific experiment, acknowledging this limitation helps with analysis later.

And the Value for Students?

You have probably figured it out by now.

Students at any stage from high school onwards benefit enormously from doing field anthropology in a real-life community or institution. The humbling nature alone is a valuable lesson for so many contexts later in life (e.g., joining a new company, starting a new career, etc.) The key is to adopt a social role of local importance that offers you the ability to kickstart reciprocity. Volunteering is one way to do this. Getting a local job is another. Offering freelance services of general applicability also works!

The value of participant observation for a younger student lies in making oneself structurally humble, curious, and giving in a world where you may or may not agree with what is going on. The outcome is empathy across cultural lines, where your initial, superficial moral judgments/assumption get challenged through more profound empathy for the native perspective. All is not what it appears on the surface. Field anthropology grabs you by the neck and shoves your face in this truth like no other methodology. It’s much harder to hide from your bad, or bigoted assumptions, than scrolling Facebook posts.

One of my initial bad assumptions was that ‘adopting a morally superior attitude’ by local Christians has no social benefit. It’s just obnoxious. As I connected with families and learned about their stories of harassment and discrimination for being Dalit (e.g., from stigmatized caste communities), I realized that the performance of moral superiority (as a Christian) offers an immense psychological power to those who wield it. This bravery helps you persist in a world where being ‘outed’ is a constant risk inside your Christian community as much as beyond it.

Cultural anthropology asks an enormous amount of any one individual and delivers unparalleled personal growth as a result.

Lord Ralph would not understand any of this. After all, he is American arrogance personified.

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How Individualism Fuels a Politics of Petty Personal Grievance

Image by Richard Drew, courtesy of AP and WBUR

In my book, Our Worst Strength, near the end, I offer my attempt at a philosophical contribution: America has perfected the concept of the “rights-enabled consumer.” This product-and-service-consuming individual is the primary locus of all thought, action, and policy in America. We grow up feeling entitled to maximum personal autonomy as young adults and to consume more and more as we age (and most of us do).

From this perspective, it becomes clear that the modern civil rights movement has been driven by a desire for better-paying, safer labor conditions that enable a comfortable leisure lifestyle of consumption. Civil rights are about enabling the opportunity to become a content rights-enabled consumer.

This ‘rights-enabled consumer’ in America has not only learned to ignore collective forces shaping her everyday choices, including technological ones, but also to deny their existence actively. The possibility that our 'civil freedom’ simply allows us to be better manipulated by massive market forces and our imaginations is too horrifying to explore, much like we all ignore the low odds of adaptation to the real world encountered by a prison inmate upon their release in old age.1 Many kill themselves without the structure of prison life.

We moderns, in America and abroad, distract ourselves with the fantasy of autonomous consumption and personally fashioned lifestyles. In this churning stew of possibility and excessive choice, many create their miserable disappointments out of thin air. I did this in my failed academic career. No one forced me to dream such a dream. But many encouraged me to do it…

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How Modern Forms of Shame Fuel Mass Grievance

To support our lives as rights-enabled consumers, we have also quietly propagated a callous supporting ideology of personal responsibility defended by a fanatical belief in individual privacy. We are free to curate our own lives, but we are fully responsible when we fail and stumble. Shame has contracted to the shame of personal failure. Our failures often have little impact on our family members or friends because we do our best to conceal them behind the veil of privacy our society encourages us to wear. Many who know us may not even understand the ‘failure’ in question or why it matters. Only those who live with us have to deal with our shame and its emotional consequences.

In America, we allow large, geographically dispersed segments of the population to self-implode (drug addicts, the mentally ill, the poor, the homeless, alcoholics, autistics, etc.) and ignore their misery, relying on the state to provide entitlement assistance. We are not culturally empowered to invade a person’s privacy to get them help or assistance when they stumble. When we try, we get rebuffed. We hang back and wait for the lost individual to raise their hand in a moment of deep self-reflection. We may honestly not understand what they need to expiate their shame and move on. Not when it’s a highly nuanced career or romantic fantasy.

There are now many more ways to perceive failure or personal slight than in eras past. Even social status is purely context-dependent, susceptible to sudden reversal in an hour when some troll comments on your post. The casually dressed CEO gets bumped off his flight, and no one cares. The poorly educated tow truck driver can’t charm a local banker into a bridge loan because he has no connections like his father once had. The frustrated, retired couple who overspend their pension income by 30% and file for personal bankruptcy because they refuse to cut down their spending. As you can see from this real-world list, not all of these insults and grievances are even valid, but that won’t stop some individuals from harboring a grievance about them, from hiding these failures from everyone around them.

This grievance behavior operates on a continuum, of course. Some of us are pretty mature, while others are, even temporarily, adrift in every possible basic social measure, including relationships, finances, and contentment. The latter are fodder for every manner of cult, conspiracy theory, clickbait commentary, and addictive substance. The former don’t recognize the country they now live in.

The shame of personal failure, regardless of how superficial or delusional its basis, often leads to grievance and then rage, especially in men. I’ll say it once more. These grievances do not have to be tied to a serious issue to disrupt a person’s emotional state. The grievance could be a self-created problem (e.g., inability to commit to one partner or reduce spending in retirement). In a society like America, we manufacture this kind of personalized rage on a massive scale. Yet, the basis of the original grievance could be any of a hundred different things. We can not reduce it to inflation or divorce. This barely hidden rage fuels a politics of deeply personal grievance in the absence of meaningful group support, strong, highly committed relationships, or effective therapeutic intervention.

In traditional human communities, socially generated rage is either absorbed and expiated by peers (often through intense public rituals) or channeled into more functional group conflict, particularly in eras when the kin group provided 90% of one's sustenance and a significant amount of protection. This may not make the aggrieved individual ‘happy’ but it often neutralizes the antisocial potential of their rage. The local community stands protected.

The Leap to Grievance Harvesting In Politics

As large-scale democratic nations appeared in the 18th century, democratic citizens initially voted in line with their group interests, such as ethnicity, caste, or class. If you had a grievance at the voting booth, it was identical in origin to every member of a group to which you had a strong allegiance (usually an ethnic or occupational group). In a hyper-individualistic consumer society that worships individual achievement and success, however, this is no longer true. A culture of maximal autonomy ironically enables a voting culture of grievance irrespective of group identity and based in bizarre forms of self-created shame that are impenetrable to outsiders.

This is, in part, how we get personally aggrieved blue-collar African-Americans voting for a confirmed racist who has no concern for unions, healthcare access, or middle-class welfare. Dude is pissed because two divorces have left him living a moldy apartment (and he has made effort to explore how this came to be). Voting against one’s many interests is incredibly easy in a culture of personal achievement and equally personal grievance.

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Politics appears to be the struggle between groups, on the surface. The more polarized a nation becomes, the more likely it is to reify the political groups in conflict (Nazis vs. Woke Crazies) and view their ideologies as primordial, almost instinctual.

In America, however, our polarized extremes distract us from the real issue in our uniquely fragmented society: politics has become a frantic, inexact game of attracting hundreds or thousands of personal grievance patterns to your candidate. These grievances do not necessarily share many commonalities, except for a desire to resolve them. Somehow. Anyhow. Including a vote for the most angry, pissed off looking candidate possible. “Anyone who seems as discontent as I.”

Sadly, this has enabled us to elect a President who is a grievance-wielding master. His nonstop externalizing and self-victimization attracts those in the throes of a million disparate grievances. Millions of Americans see in him the apotheosis of their grievances, the most relevant of all possible political surrogates—a mirror to their wounded selves.

Nothing about 21st-century America encourages compromise at the daily level. My favorite snacks, my favorite streaming shows, my favorite YouTube channel, my favorite anything and everything. Until my preferences shift…

Once a party adopts a 'grab bag of all known personal grievances' platform, it uses our own incredibly distorted self-absorption against us. This is the art of sociopathy as a political movement - transferring your serious AND silly grievances onto external enemies (immigrants, federal employees, the opposing party, racial minorities) without any remorse for doing nothing about your original ‘problems’, for not trying to help you in any way, for using your grievance as political fuel.

The darkest irony here is that our culture of unrealistic personal ambition and consumption fuels the intensity of our personal grievances, as well as bizarre dreams lost and unfulfilled, and relationships sabotaged for largely personal reasons.

We don't all succumb to bizarre petty grievances, but tens of millions of us do. We all know someone like this—the person who has become victimized by their unrealized fantasies of life and unattained, frustrated lifestyle consumption.

American culture breeds mass resentment and alienation. And anger.

And, in feeling grievances born of our individual failures to attain even the most superficial of ideals, the aggrieved easily look to a father-figure to avenge them rather than a leader who can re-center them and re-shape the collective forces that divide, seduce, and delude us- most important of us is our unsupervised imagination.

We look to a leader who validates our pettiness and/or irresponsibility, without taking responsibility to become self-aware and mature.

By inventing grievances that our grandparents would not even recognize, we multiply the power of the grievance-wielding politician —the smooth-talking, anger-wrangler.

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https://www.wunc.org/health/2024-03-2...

Why Cruise Ships Function Better Than Your Local City/Town

This essay follows up on last week’s observations on a family cruise experience:

Ask 10,000 social scientists for a definition of community, and you’ll get 5,000 different answers. The other 5,000 will dodge the question entirely because the topic makes them instantly sweaty and nervous. Why? Well, many social scientists are misfits and highly suspicious of anything approaching the concept of ‘normative.’

Sigh. We need a definition to understand why a privately managed cruise ship probably offers a more functional human community than your local town.

“COMMUNITY” DEFINED

Communities exist to a) protect and b) nurture their members. The fuel of communities is shared obligation and sacrifice. Without members sacrificing something for the sake of community norms, communities simply can not function healthily. Communities that ask little of members succumb to various forms of corruption or exist as phantom, easily politicized identity groups (e.g., ethnic identities, MAGA).

I would argue that any group in question is not a real community if you do not feel inconvenienced as a member (or you are NOT a committed member). Constraints on autonomy are critical to a viable community. The constraints shouldn’t feel onerous, but you know they are there.

Individuals in corrupt communities (families with neglectful parents, corrupt municipalities) will often disengage and revert to more minor forms of normative community, such as their ethnic group or residential family group, and, in the worst cases, they survive with a partner or even alone hooking up with a transient parade of transactional allies (i.e., cue The Last of Us).

Communal corruption stems from something my anthropological colleagues often fail to note due to their anarchist bias: bad faith leadership. Regardless of how many selfless members it has, a community will offer neither meaningful protection nor real nurturing without mature leaders who spend most of their time defending community norms (and sacrificing a lot of their time in doing so).

Real leaders interact nonstop with their members; they don’t hide from them.

Real leaders do not have time for much leisure, any more than a busy 19th-century farmer/father managing his family farm.

Leisure does not exist for real community leaders; something we often forget.

Leaders do not issue shock-and-awe directives to their communities, terrify community members, and then fly off to play golf and dine nonstop for three and a half days straight.

THE GANG AS A DESPERATE COMMUNITY

Even gangs can vary based on this variable of mature leadership. The worst possible gang is essentially a criminal cult of weak-minded age peers, led by a narcissist. Not a new thing in the history of urban civilization. On the other hand, La Cosa Nostra had a strong, internal moral code in the 19th and 20th centuries, based on the honor rules of male-dominated Sicilian culture. Yes, there is cruelty inside the mafia, but there is also order. There are rules. There is a strong concept of a good Don versus a corrupt one—a protector versus a psychopath.

Mafias and gangs are violence-based communities that only thrive in times and places overtaken by poverty and civic disorder at higher levels of community formation. In these broken worlds, gangs oversell protection and under-deliver on nurturing. That is the terrible bargain they offer in distressed societies. And that is why people flee such broken places… anyway they can.

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How The Homeless Expose America’s Uniquely Weak Community Bonds

For much of human history, the scope of community has been clan/caste and family. That was it. Some in America would like to return to this era. We are so far from this family-centered world, though, it is beyond impossible to return to it. Almost every basic human need relies on global trade and complicated corporate alliances. Ironically, the individual is our unit of action, analysis, and responsibility for most life decisions. Our market economy prefers the individual as the analytic focus. Most of us like it this way, too, deep down. We crave flexibility, optionality, and a lack of rigid obligations, especially to family.

When you grew up comfortably in America's middle class and then personal problems and a series of bad luck incidents brought you to homelessness, you will fight it hard. You will try to defend your dignity and privacy by gathering resources anywhere you can so you can crawl back alone to where you were.

Yet, our society makes escaping homelessness incredibly hard because, deep down, we are all trained to blame the fallen, whether or not we admit this unconscious bias. And this includes family members. And the fallen believe they should deal with their plight as lone individuals. They live in a cloud of deep shame.

Patrick Fealey’s story in Esquire highlights how individuals, rightly or wrongly, fall out of local communities (municipal, work, and family) and are ignored (or even blamed) for their misfortune. The suddenly homeless individual quickly becomes invisible and morally suspect.

Image Courtesy of Esquire Magazine

Patrick’s story is generalizable for one reason: it shows how tough it is for a middle-class person with little savings, living alone, to get back into housing in this callous country. This simply does not happen in the rural villages of Asia or tribal Amazonia. Help is partly everywhere in those worlds because ‘living’ there is very cheap. On the other hand, living in first-world countries is expensive per capita.

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Enter the Cruise Ship Community

America, we have a problem. A publicly traded, for-profit, foreign-owned leisure company offers more mature leadership, protection, and nurturing within a leisure context than most local governments can in their 24/7 public service context.

Yes, a for-profit community has a much easier time raising money for the required infrastructure it needs. I agree. And, yes, a leisure community is full of people predisposed to happiness as they engage in communal activities. Hence, they are probably easier to satisfy than the jaded citizens of a local town or city who wake up with low expectations about rent and local road conditions.

Nevertheless, exploring any modern community that functions well is worth exploring to see what we can learn, even when profiteering is the ultimate origin of the community. I’m borrowing from the business concept of ‘best practices,’ which remains, sadly, America’s most consistent repository of thought leadership on ideal communities and mature leadership (i.e., capitalism wants healthy businesses).

Let me make the case for cruise ships as the epitome of a healthy community -

PROTECTION- Your first move when you board a modern cruise ship is an obligation. You must head straight to your stateroom’s Muster station and receive a safety briefing. When you cross the gangway, staff will be there to interrupt your forward movement and ask you IF you know your Muster station. On Royal Caribbean, the staff use a customer service tone to nudge you to your mandatory Muster briefing. Remember, you can not enter your stateroom later until you have received this briefing and had a safety officer tag it in their giant database by scanning your Seapass. But rather than use a military tone of command and demand, staff simply smile and ask, “Have you located your Muster Station?” The company then positions enough people at the gangway to contact everyone coming in. They staff appropriately to nudge everyone. There are six muster stations and you need to divide passengers properly or you could never evacuate these ships in an orderly manner.

Royal Caribbean’s Quantum-class megaships have 18 motorized, supply-filled, sealed boats holding 370 passengers each. They drop vertically into the water from the fifth deck. Passengers exit down inflated slides from three muster stations on each side and into the waiting rescue boats below. There IS a plan that forces you to know your muster location upfront. Safety is everything (safety also protects corporate assets from immense passenger litigation!).

Nurturing - I described the incredible hospitality on Royal Caribbean’s big ships last week. I was honestly shocked. I have experienced this level of service only at the Four Seasons, Taj, or Fairmont hotels. You won’t find it at any middle-class hotel in the United States. Or, if you do, it was a fluke. But, daily leadership moments also mattered to tying 6,600 strangers together into a community. Young, ‘Latin-accented’ Cruise Director Anna gave morning and evening calendar announcements over the PA system in a well-trained radio voice sure to pique the attention of all the older men on board. This is a reminder that ‘being attractive’ is an excellent tool in modern leadership! It gathers attention cleverly, not like the ‘leaders’ in The Handmaid’s Tale. The Scandinavian-accented Captain gave morning and evening itinerary and weather updates to prepare and reassure us that everything was on time (or delayed). These announcements reminded us that seasoned professionals were in charge, and ‘on it!’ Cruise leaders do not just make announcements at departure and return (i.e., like lousy faith politicians).

Rules and Obligations - All the staff on these ships are empowered to confront passengers breaking the rules. And they do. When I tried to get some coffee at the Solarium lunch buffet without a shirt one day, a uniformed dining room attendant quickly reminded me of the rule and gestured to the door. Oops. It wasn’t obnoxiously delivered, but it was firm. Pants in the white-clothed dining rooms? Not only did people wear pants, but most of us dressed up! Amazing how a small signal not to come in with your bathing suit on leads to semi-formal attire (for some folks). Healthy communities repeatedly advertise their standards and enforce them firmly but politely.

Epilogue - Our Inability to Solve Local Homelessness is A Failure of Leadership

Recently, I was on a podcast where we explored solutions to homelessness that do NOT involve raising an entitlement fund to redistribute cash (i.e., for rental deposits). The non-monetary solution I offered was conceptually simple - mature leadership at the city level that focuses on negotiating with corporate landlords who control local rent costs.

Mature city leaders would sacrifice their political capital to get local corporate landlords into one room for 2-3 days of discussions. Perhaps you might threaten to cancel their business licenses if they did not attend. Like a Quaker meeting, everyone would agree NOT to leave until participants reached a consensus, however painful for all. The objective would be to find alignment on rent ceilings for the struggling working class, the poor, and the homeless (i.e., not a rent cap on high-income renters). This kind of discussion almost never happens, because it is assumed that corporate landlords can not be seduced into such a room. Instead, American cities have politicians fighting with corporate leaders in the press, on social media, and relying on the symbolic violence of elections to ‘resolve’ matters of critical importance. We are seeing the limits of symbolic violence in the current era of intense political polarization.

Healthy communities do not simply replace physical violence with pure symbolic violence of election tit-for-tat. This is the false bargain Americans are making, because it allows us to avoid actual, high-conflict negotiations with community stakeholders. The wealthy hide in gated communities and ‘fund the opposition.’ No one insists that they come into a room and compromise. No one is willing to lose re-election by insisting and then shaming the corporate landlords who refuse to attend. But, mature leaders do insist, enforce, and shame members. They do.

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If the themes in this piece resonate with you, you will enjoy my humor-laced social science critique of American individualism, winner of the 2024 Best Indie Nonfiction Book Award.

And, if you hate Amazon, you can purchase a discounted hardcover directly from Ingramspark (no Amazon involved).

The Modern Cruise Experience Will Exceed Your Snarky Expectations

An essay for normies…not twits…

Harmony of the Seas- AquaTheater -Aft

The modern literary writing corpus on the cruise ship experience is as needlessly voluminous as it is awful in tone. The authors who write these sarcastic, holier-than-thou missives make no attempt to see the experience from the inside. Not the slightest attempt. That would require good faith interviewing. And research. Such bother.

But the real problem with this homogenous genre stems from the fact that the authors are the least predisposed possible cruisers; male individuals who attend as singles against their lifestyle instincts and, then, shockingly, discover the most suspicious of findings: they were right all along in their disgust.

Their predetermined finding, which I also shared for most of my adult life, is that the cruise ship is “Vegas at sea.” Not the gambling so much as the focused desire for maximum hedonic bliss per calendar day. Excessive drinking. Screaming. Whatever a highly introverted, over-educated, misanthropic ‘writer’ can not in any way personally relate to - going alone into a large crowd and ‘working it.’

I have read David Foster Wallace’s piece - a supposedly fun thing I’ll never do again https://g.co/kgs/fQUPwGV. And, more recently, the much more self-indulgent whining in a 2024 “whin-ary” by Gary Shteyngart at the Atlantic (I refuse to cite this disingenuous piece even though I am a subscriber).

There is a truism where I come from in cultural anthropology- with our small sample sizes and limited access, you should favor the insider point of view with minimal critique. You don’t swoop in with elitist criticism resting on bullshit empirical foundations. You take the side of your audience and perceive things as best as possible from their point of view.

So, here are my ‘trenchant’, empathetic and honest observations as a good faith, paying cruise ship attendee on board with my family for a week on Royal Caribbean’s Harmony of the Seas.

We had mediocre expectations but wanted to be surprised.

1) The Bubble Within the Floating Bubble

It’s visually obvious that a cruise ship is a self-contained world. Look at the thing. It’s also a fully resourced social bubble supplied with everything it needs for the entire voyage. Virtually no ships onboard anything at ports of call. Not even water or fuel! Royal Caribbean (RCL) does not set sail and run out of fuel at the second port like your ADHD Uncle ran out of gas on that famous, multi car family vacation in ‘93. Nope. Royal Caribbean and most cruise lines forward buy their diesel using a business process called “hedging.” And they store it at their massive source terminals.

Yet, the most interesting thing about cruising I can ascertain is that most people overwhelmingly book in groups. Singles are a radical minority. And everything on board works towards ending any temporary alienation. In the U.S., only 10% of passengers are traveling solo.https://cruising.org/-/media/clia-media/research/2024/2024-state-of-the-cruise-industry-report_updated-050824_web.ashx

The preponderance of groups involve families, family reunions, grandparents plus kids plus grandkids, college friends, post-college girlfriend groups, you name it.

Cruise ships are ironic vestiges of all ages group fun in a world where youth culture and the labor market have estranged grandparents from their grandchildren, older generations from the youngest.

Yet, the mostly two-person staterooms allow everyone a bubble to retreat to from their de facto group. Your tiniest bubble could be solo or duo.

You can scale up and scale down your group socializing on demand very easily. The ship is designed to allow lots of hiding and lots of manic engagement. And without the cross-town trips a normal urban vacation would require to accomplish this.

This does not happen by accident. I’m sure it was designed this way, though these ships appear to be more simplistic in design than they actually are.

2) Masters of Inclusion

Honestly, as an introvert, I feared most the potential for sensory overwhelm and extroverted suffocation as I boarded. So did my wife. But, Royal Caribbean’s megaships are masters of design for sensory inclusion.

The rooms are so incredibly soundproofed, we could not hear our boisterous teens through the adjoining wall, only when we stood right next to the door. So, the quiet introverts can easily retire to their staterooms for a nap or quiet time and recharge. We do this at home all the time, but intentional ship design is crucial to making this happen. The large ships are also amazingly ADA accessible, far more than your average hotel property.

RCL also manages to have onboard music everywhere at just the right genre and volume to motivate ‘action’ and with omnigenerational music (not easy). But, if you want to walk around with airbuds in, no one will stop you.

In the 18+ Solarium, there is only ethereal instrumental music playing. It’s basically Enya to the max. Perfect for talking and reading. Lots of adults reading here. Young introverted couples also hang out here. It’s never been full except the first afternoon (when no one knew how to make use of the ship).

In the Aft you find loud hip hop and popular music booming to keep those 3-17 year olds moving (and exhausted later!) on water slides, Flowrider venues and in the splash pools.

The two sound zones never mix. At all.

There is also enough culinary diversity inside every dining venue’s menu to satisfy a newer, multicultural, beyond-steak-and-potatoes crowd. The specialty dining charges a steep premium for culinary snobbery, as it should. We did it twice!

See Figure 3 for the bizarre, lushly landscaped row of specialty dining venues on our ship. We even got our kids to wear pants, which is a miracle for any parent who lives in Tucson. Pants?!

Figure 3 - Specialty Dining That Does Not Fail

3) Reliable Hospitality

Prior to boarding, I had assumed that real hospitality from energetic, motivated staff was pretty much dead in my lifetime outside of $500 a person restaurants. My expectations are that low today in the U.S. restaurant world. Management treats these folks so poorly on average that it’s a miracle wait staff can even muster a smile at your average sit down restaurant (I.e. Applebee’s). And the folks that used to provide amazing table service have far more lucrative job opportunities in their 20s and 30s. Usually.

As I correctly hypothesized before boarding, RCL at least operates at the standard of Disneyland when it comes to hospitable staff. Seriously, better than Disneyland.

I realize that the U.S. Cruise ship industry depends heavily on foreign crew and staff. Thank God they do! I would pay double for what we received in terms of service.

For the first few days, I struggled to understand how RCL pulls it off beyond its own incentives and work culture. Then, it hit me, the vast majority of the staff you encounter are from the Philippines, India and SE Asia. These are cultural worlds where hospitality, including faking it well, is an ancient art form and a source of high social status. Being very hospitable is how you perform elite status in the countries. It’s how you distinguish yourself from the ‘rude villagers.’ Rude, obnoxious people can succeed in America because we are hyper-individualistic and reward non-hosting professions so well. Just look at Elon Musk for a prime example.

Modern cruise ships may offer the best behaved staff of any possible vacation scenario for a well-heeled American.

I have seriously seen only one depressed staff person (who may be in the wrong industry?)

This is critical, not because the average guest is an entitled wanker but because you have to interact with so many staff people in a service-dense cruise environment. You would go crazy if they all had the attitude of a local diner waitperson (who should be depressed BTW).

4) Remarkable Attention To Detail

No. Not a throw away header. Let me share but one of many design elements that reflect nuanced thInking. Push button bathroom doors on the top decks (i.e. open to the wind)

On the lower right of Figure 1 - notice the open door button. I’m guessing this is an ADA feature, yet it is NOT marked as such. And, when at sea, you discover how hard it is to open these swing doors with a) AC suction from the inside and b) 20 knot winds outside keeping the door shut. Hard even for an adult who lifts weights. After yanking on the door twice, I converted to push button open (from both sides)! Another example of inclusion as well for the elderly and kids. I did not stand there to count, but I did see kids struggle with these massive metal doors. Until they found the buttons with their Gen Z technophilic vision.

Figure 4 - Exterior Bathroom Doors w/Push button opening

Other examples included: showers preset to a comfortable, not-hot temperature with a simple rotating tab, very high quality beds, stateroom cabinets/shelving that does not bang and clang, carpeted double stairwells with gorgeous art to invite you to walk up/down 2-3 floors instead of clogging elevators, and on-demand soft serve ice cream cone stations for nine hours a day near the kiddie zones!

Cruise ships are probably the most well thought group spaces in modern civilization it would appear. Why can’t our local governments match this standard?

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5) Disney-grade hygiene

The number one stigma of cruise ships among my upper-middle-class set would be - “They must be filthy! Norovirus! Ahhh!”

And yet, nothing could be further from the truth. Not since Disneyland have I seen so many staff constantly, and I mean constantly cleaning…everything. The sun decks. The pool decks. The bathroom floors. The buffet dining areas. The interior carpeting. The everything.

Just when you notice dirt and want to find someone to inform, he-she appears. Feels like magic but it’s just a product of detailed planning and service intervals.

They are so good at just-in-time cleaning on our ship that you can not leave your buffet table for even 10 seconds or your dishes will be collected! Only happened once to us though. Do. Not. Fuck. With. The. Cleaning. Not sorry.

Figure 5- Nonstop Cleaning

The key standard they observe on RCL and similar ships is to train staff to look for filth and jump on it. The use of lithium battery-powered cleaning packs is genius because it has eliminated cord tripping by guests!

And, they have hand washing stations at the entrance to ALL the buffets!

Figure 6- Nurse-approved hand washing stations!

I can’t understate the hygiene joy I experienced when coming onboard with very low expectations (of me hiding in my stateroom out of filth terror).

Epilogue

My wife was the most nervous about the crowds, filth and sensory cuckoo we might find on a ship housing 6,000 plus guests and 2,500 staff. Yet she has converted so hard to cruising, that we spent time in the RCL sales office on board exploring a Japanese itinerary! True to the marketing savvy of cruise ship companies like RCL, the sales office is called Next Cruise, not “Sales.”

For families today where you want to multiple rooms for privacy between you and your kids, the value per person per night of modern cruising is hard to find anywhere else.

Modern travel with individualists is annoying and stressful and prone to argument because every element, every move, must be planned to incorporate divergent preferences. Every day is a battle over meals, destinations, timing.

PITA.

A modern cruise ship allows your group to segment as needed according to its individuals’ preferences and reform when preferences converge. Miracle!

All you do is select from a short list of curated options. It’s called forced choice in survey design. Ironically, it forces productive family coordination and increased group dining, something lost from many households in America today.

Don’t believe the misanthropes.

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