Public Interest

In 1950s and 1960s America, television had transformed from a fledgling industry into one of the most significant cultural forces in the 20th century, and as it began to prioritize airing lowbrow, mindless, and crass entertainment to maximize viewership, it inevitably garnered significant criticism from those concerned with its long term impact on the culture. In 1961, in response to these concerns, Newton Minow, former chairman of the FCC, broadcasted his speech “Television and the Public Interest.”

Here is a notable excerpt from that speech:

“Your industry possesses the most powerful voice in America. It has an inescapable duty to make that voice ring with intelligence and with leadership. In a few years, this exciting industry has grown from a novelty to an instrument of overwhelming impact on the American people. It should be making ready for the kind of leadership that newspapers and magazines assumed years ago, to make our people aware of their world.

Ours has been called the jet age, the atomic age, the space age. It is also, I submit, the television age. And just as history will decide whether the leaders of today's world employed the atom to destroy the world or rebuild it for mankind's benefit, so will history decide whether today's broadcasters employed their powerful voice to enrich the people or to debase them.”

As Seth Godin would argue, culture is not meant to serve capitalism; capitalism is meant to serve culture. But television was far from the only significant industry that would flip this dynamic to service the shortsighted, selfish, and profligate ambitions of corporate America. As time would tell, other core aspects of American life would degenerate into vast wastelands alongside television.

The restaurant and fast food industry did not serve the public interest. They have worked to surround us with cheap, available, and addictive products that were designed for the very purpose of exploiting our desire for convenience while simultaneously preying on our impulses for fatty, sugary, and processed food. It is certainly no mystery how obesity—and all its related health conditions and diseases—ended up ravaging this country for decades.

The pornographic and adult entertainment industry did not serve the public interest. They have no issue perpetuating the abuse and exploitation of young women. They have no issue propagating media that significantly contributes to anxiety, isolation, and depression among young men. They have no issue warping our perceptions on sex and relationships by surrounding us with cheap, instant gratification that desensitizes us. And with the advent of the internet, this industry has never been more prolific, and thus never more pernicious. 

The tobacco industry, the alcohol industry, and Big Tech did not serve the public interest. They will not hesitate to addict us to our death if it means making the extra dime. They feed on our frenzied obsession to stay glued to our devices to stay up to date on what everyone else is doing, our compulsion to reach for the box of cigarettes on our work break, and our yearning to go to the bar when we want to vent or unwind. We are compelled by these sensations to take our minds away from the chaos of reality and numb our seemingly endless plight. And as mental health as a whole continues to deteriorate in our societies, more and more individuals will fall victim to these devices to merely cope with life.

But the severity of these addictions are as much of a cultural phenomenon as they are a neurobiological one. The restaurant and fast food industry couldn’t have survived without shifting our perceptions of what types of foods and what types of diets are acceptable or normal. The pornographic industry couldn’t have survived without the kind of cultural apathy and negligence to directly confront and teach what constitutes positive relationships and a healthy love and sex life. The alcohol, tobacco, and technology conglomerates can not survive without our continued refusal to educate our populace on healthy coping strategies for the hardships of their life—the incredibly stress and anxiety-inducing social structures that we ourselves perpetuate. When this is all that we’ve known for generations, we inevitably become inured to these ways of life, so much so that it becomes normal, justified, and upheld by generations that don’t know that there’s anything better. 

Because we live in a society that accommodates entities with the sole intent of preying on our impulses and primal desires, our modern life is characterized by a fight against ourselves. We are forced to learn to starve our dopaminergic habits because, left unbridled, they will inexorably rot our brain. Self-restraint—this process of building the mental fortitude to resist temptation and instant gratification in pursuit of a better life—is increasingly seen as a virtue, in fact, a necessity, to triumph over the malignant forces in our modern capitalistic world. As someone who was fortunate enough to break free of their vices, it’s easy to claim that self-restraint is the answer to our plight. It’s easy to lecture others and blame them for being mentally weak and hedonistic. 

But this is selfish. When the majority of our fellow citizens have already succumbed to their vices, when they have no one beside them to teach them those lessons of self-restraint and no alternative but to be enticed by the instant gratification that envelops them, things can begin to fall apart. Temptation and addiction will always afflict our society, and self-restraint and vigilance when it comes to our sensual pleasures is something that we always have to put into practice. But blaming others and putting ourselves on a moral pedestal is as detrimental to our society as these destructive industries. 

We can only serve the public interest when, as a nation, we collectively recognize the aspects of our culture that sustain the industries that blatantly capitalize on human weakness for their selfish gain. If we put our minds and our hearts to it, we can build a life for our future generations where the easiest, most available solutions to our hunger, our desire for love or sex, or our need to cope with stress aren’t absolutely horrible for our physical and mental health. 

Oppression

Let’s again continue with the premise that we are the product of our circumstances, that is, the notion that before reaching a certain age at which we possess the degree of self-awareness and emotional maturity to break free of those circumstances, we have no free will in determining who we become. Think about the specific events surrounding our upbringing—our parents, our teachers, our friends, the culture that they instill within us, the values that they impart to us. Think about what seems “right” to you.

They teach us that wealth, status, and hard-earned privilege are at the center of a prosperous life. They teach us that the leaders of our government and the design of capitalism create space for our prosperity. They teach us that there is a set path towards that prosperity—go to school, go to a prestigious college, get a respectable job, have a family, then retire And of course, which schools and colleges are to be considered “prestigious” and which jobs are to be deemed “respectable” will be predetermined by the culture we live in.

They teach us that hard work, perseverance, and diligence is the key to success, which means that, in school, the most optimal course of action is to spend the majority of your waking hours of your youth memorizing the textbook, jotting down only the things that will be on the test, and toiling away at countless standardized exams that are designed to determine your future through a letter or a number grade. It means that, on the job, you follow directions, do your job only as instructed, and understand that if you cease to work as designed, it’s not an issue because you’re an interchangeable part, a replaceable and disposable cog within an industrial system. 

And to psychologically bind us to these norms, they teach us that obedience and conformity is good. They teach us that we should feel inadequate if we don’t have the same wealth, status, and privilege that others have, and that we should strive to have those things at any cost. They teach us that challenging the status quo and deviating from the worn path of life is reckless and dangerous. They teach us that asking too many questions is a form of insubordination. They teach us that quitting is for losers and the undetermined. 

We would never outright urge people to not think for themselves. We would never explicitly tell them that they can’t choose to walk their own path. We perceive that such directives are cruel, unjust, and characteristic of the oppression of the communist and fascist totalitarian regimes of the past century.

But if we understand the implications of these social norms that prod the vast majority of the population to invariably walk a predetermined path, without question of its design or purpose, what is this but oppression of a different design? What is this but psychological oppression? 

What gives us the right, from the onset of personality formation, to indoctrinate our future generations with these values and ideals, when specifically those values and ideals work to hinder their individual freedom? When they blind them from achieving their greatest potential as a human being because they believe that their mere purpose in life is to serve capitalism and serve the societal status quo, to avoid the shame and ridicule that is the consequence of deviating from the norm? When these values cause them to settle for less and believe that just because no one specifically chose them to make any significant change in the world, they should sit back and live a selfish life? When the system seeks to create grave inequality and artificial scarcity for all the “good” jobs and all the “good” schools, allocating undeserved privileges for those that have unwavering dedication to this predetermined path, while the rest are punished?

Indeed, no matter what we choose to teach our children and no matter how we design our society, human beings are wired to emulate. But we have the capacity, each as leaders of our current generation, to change what they emulate. 

Racial oppression—the segregation and discrimination of African-Americans, Asians, and Hispanics—was a problem in our country for centuries before the civil rights movement. More specifically, the cultural norms that defined the attitudes towards race were the problem that enabled those abhorrent institutions. Today, while racism is still an issue, on average the tolerance and appreciation of racial and ethnic diversity is far greater than it has ever been. But this wasn’t because we necessarily did a better job at parenting now versus the parenting of the past. It wasn’t because we offered a racial diversity class to every US citizen born after 1970. It wasn’t because we were able to dissolve the racism from those who were already racists to begin with. 

It’s because of the courageous acts of a minority of the population that caused the entire culture to shift, and thus, over time, what future generations observed about the world ultimately changed. It’s because those future generations observed that sharing bathrooms, classrooms, and restaurants with non-white people was normal. It was normal to see them in positions of authority as individuals equally as capable of making a positive difference in our world. It was normal to see them as our friends, classmates, and coworkers with whom we could share the joys of life with. 

If we can swallow our pride and muster the courage, we can—united as human beings and undivided by our tribal tendencies—collectively determine which parts of our culture are holding us back and which parts are spurring us forward. We can decide to break free of our oppressors and spurn the profligate way of life of industrialism, the narrow-mindedness and irrationality characteristic of most of our arguments, and the complacency that looms over a banalized and trivialized existence brought upon us by a negligence and refusal to ask, let alone answer, what truly matters for humanity. 

This is how we change the world.

The Cost of a Human Life

It was estimated that over $20 million was spent extracting the 33 miners that were trapped in the 2010 Copiapó mining accident. That's over $600,000 per life. How many millions of dollars were spent trying to devise ways to save three astronauts in the Apollo 13 mission? How many millions were spent trying to save the 47 lives that were aboard the FV Alaska Ranger? To rescue the 24 hostages held in the Iranian embassy in 1980?

If you have any semblance of a moral compass, you'll have likely told yourself by now, "there is no price for a human life."

Ostensibly, we have no problem spending an enormous sum of money to save human lives. We tell ourselves that putting a price tag on human lives is immoral. But I want us to consider this notion from another perspective.

If tomorrow we decided to start taking all the vehicles that aren't public transportation and commercial vehicles off the road, in an instant we have the opportunity to save over one million people that die from automobile accidents each year.

But we tell ourselves, "that's too much."

We ask ourselves, "How will people get to work? How many billions of dollars will we lose?"

We tell ourselves, "We can't just shut down the entirety of human civilization for the sake of a couple thousand people per day."

But when will we say enough is enough? Where do we draw the line?

Can we define one million deaths as negligible? Do we convince ourselves that those are “unavoidable” losses, as the necessary cost to run an industrialized society?

What about ten million deaths—now is it too much?

Whether we want to admit it or not, that in order to strike a balance between maintaining convenience within society and not inflicting an egregious degree of mass murder, we put a price tag on human lives.

The truth is, we do have the resources to change things if we really wanted to. If we have the capacity to produce nine million cars in a year, enough gas to fuel a hundred million of them each day, and the labor and resources needed to pave and maintain hundreds of thousands of square miles of roads and parking lots, we also have the capacity to redesign cities where people aren’t forced to drive cars to go about their life; we have the capacity to accommodate safe walking and biking, to provide convenient access to daily necessities without the need to drive, to greatly improve the efficiency of public transport in those cities, and to invest in the development and implementation of self-driving vehicles, which are infinitely safer.

But we don’t believe it’s possible, and, like many other glaring problems in our society, we turn a blind eye when we’re asked to change.

What about the countless individuals that take their own lives every day?

that are unjustly murdered each day from homicide, gang violence, and wars?

that perish from lung cancer, heart disease, diabetes, and other life-threatening conditions?

When will we together, as a society, admit that we're doing an abysmal job at looking after each other's mental health?

at ensuring every neighborhood in our nation is free of poverty, crime, and injustice?

at organizing healthcare and disseminating knowledge about what a healthy life looks like?

Instead, we like to look for cheap solutions.

Here, have a useless suicide hotline number that we'll advertise en masse to people that have already lost their faith in society because we're too lazy to actually tackle the leading root causes of suicide, to call out the bad actors among us that are responsible for deteriorating our mental health and cluttering our lives with backwards, oppressive social conventions regarding personal responsibility, work, and happiness.

Here, let's promote anti-violence demonstrations and protests instead of doing the hard work of dutifully educating each other as citizens and ensuring we all have access basic necessities in life so we don't have to have a reason to kill each other over it.

Here, let's allocate some of our money to fund cancer research programs, diabetes centers, and programs to help alcoholics and smokers because we're too infatuated with capitalism to rebuke the fast food, alcohol, and tobacco corporations that, unbridled, will addict the general populace to its death for an extra penny.

Here, let's legislate a few traffic safety laws here and there and promulgate defensive driving techniques to help drivers anticipate and be prepared for dangerous situations while we simultaneous churn out millions on top of millions more cars every year, pave ever more roads and parking lots for those cars to clog up, destroy the planet in the process, and perpetuate an overly car-centric society that makes it inhospitable and inconvenient for those that don't drive and downright life-threatening for anyone that does drive.

No, I'm not saying any of these solutions are inherently bad or unproductive by design. But all of them are band-aid solutions to treat the problems deeply ingrained in the design of our nation.

Why is it that we have no problem spending millions to rescue a few individuals that were inopportunely caught in the wrong place at the wrong time, but we're not willing to save millions in the act of ceasing to drive cars or protesting against careless urban design and the profligate greed of the automobile industry? It's because a rescue mission doesn't challenge the status quo. It's seen as a noble and brave demonstration of the human spirit.

But radically changing the way we govern our nation and design the fabric of our society? To shift our mindset to learn how to cooperate with each other as citizens? To alter the culture and norms we live and breathe by? To give up the luxuries and privileges we have accrued over decades of progress? Absurd.

We will preserve the status quo at almost any cost, even if the cost we're discussing is the human life.

The Job Interview

“What are your strengths and weaknesses?”

This is a hackneyed question that appears on far too many job interviews, and it exemplifies the utter lack of nuance within the reasoning process to hire someone or not within most organizations.

To any interviewer that regularly uses this crude question in their hiring process, I’d love to ask some questions of my own:

• Why are we using a loaded question that presumes that there are generalized strengths and weaknesses, as if we can only choose between being proud of some part of ourselves or ashamed about others?

• Why are we so inclined to bifurcate our personality traits into strengths and weaknesses when clearly our psychology and our circumstances are infinitely more complex than two lazily defined categories?

• Strengths and weaknesses in regard to what? In regard to our personal lives? Our happiness? Our personal definition of success? Our social relationships? Our previous job, which may have nothing to do with our success in a future one?

• Do we measure it against each and every specific task we’ll be doing on the job, or are we measuring it against an oversimplified, crude narrative of what the job entails, because many interviewers or recruiters don’t actually understand or even care to understand the work itself?

• Do we really expect someone to give an unbiased, honest breakdown of all their personality traits, when a “bad” answer would cost them a potential job offer?

• How will we apply this question when we consider that most people lack the self-awareness, humility, and at least halfway-decent comprehension of human psychology that is required to do so?

• And if someone is honest, let’s take a step back and ask ourselves: why are we probing someone’s ability to monologue coherently and confidently about their personality to a stranger?

• Why should we hire someone based on these skills when it has absolutely nothing to do with most jobs?

• Can we really be convinced that this question is such a great opportunity for people to talk about themselves in a fair and meaningful light?

Having hired dozens of people in my career as a manager, I can tell you first hand how little correlation there is between my impressions during the interview and that new hire’s performance on the job. We have to realize that most jobs are rather complex; while they do have their fair share of outright menial tasks, even seemingly basic jobs—cashiers, receptionists, stockers, janitors, servers— possess a variety of responsibilities that, in order to achieve excellence in that position, require one to independently utilize skills or qualities such as planning, multitasking, task prioritization, effective communication, composure under stress, problem-solving, and decision-making. When we want to make any work into an art—an endeavor that requires constant generosity and commitment—more often than not it isn’t absolute whether certain personality traits would be directly conducive toward someone’s individual ability to contribute within an organization.

We should adopt a more nuanced conception of ourselves where we don’t define strengths and weaknesses by the person, but by each trait. More specifically, how each trait potentially contributes or detracts from a specific goal. Only then can we understand how each trait creates a unique dynamic with other traits, and how this on its own has the potential to create yet another unique dynamic with either the work itself or with the people around them. We also have to accept the fact that there is no simple answer when it comes to human personality.

I’m with Seth Godin on this one. Instead of wasting all our time asking pointless, unnatural, and awkward questions and solely probing people’s ability to be confident in job interviews, just have people use that time to do a trial run of the job itself, which also gives them an opportunity to see if the work environment is a good fit for them before commuting to it. If it isn’t a good fit, neither party benefits.

Yes—it’s certainly costly to pay people to do these trial runs, to train and invest in knowledgeable and motivated recruiters to undertake this operation, but what’s even more costly than that is having dead weight in your organization—people that don’t actually contribute anything valuable. And what’s even more costly than that is staff turnover—all the costs of rehiring and retraining new employees, the productivity loss and disruption of business operations, and the cascading effects of declining organizational reputation among employees and customers alike.

The only purpose of this absurd question is to use it to provoke someone who would be repulsed or bewildered by such a blatantly dense conception of personality—someone who dares to challenge the convention and offer nuance in pursuit of truth even when it might undermine their own chances of getting the job. That’s someone that can be truly invaluable to any organization.

On Work

I spent the last five years in the retail and foodservice industry, where I’ve spent the majority of my career as a manager. More importantly, however, I’ve spent over two decades as a consumer, and if you've lived in the US for any extended period of time, you'll likely share at least some of my sentiment of being absolutely appalled at the soullessness, mediocrity, and laziness of the service industry.

When they accidentally mix up your coffee order with one that has almond milk, but you have a nut allergy.

When you want to ask a question about a shirt you want to buy, they ignore you because they're in a rush and there's a line of customers to the door that they have to deal with.

When you spend over an hour on hold to speak with a customer service representative, and that phone call takes yet another hour to finish because they have to go down a checklist of what they have to say as instructed by the manager instead of just helping you get what you want.

When they forget the reservation cake for your five-year-old son's birthday party, but you're already running late, and rudely tell you to wait one hour, and after an hour, they forget to give you candles or a knife. And when you open the box, your son's name is misspelled.

Dealing with these situations is infuriating. Often we can’t expect to receive even decent service, let alone something we might call good or great, so many of us lower our standards and expectations; we're conditioned to think that mistakes on our order is normal, that rude or apathetic staff is normal, that subpar products and services are normal, that being frustrated when you go out to do your daily routine is normal. Something that is as integral to modern society as grocery shopping, eating at a restaurant, getting your morning coffee, or buying clothes is undermined by carelessness and negligence. I think we can all agree that the people that work in these industries are doing important work. So, why then, is it reduced to being the most miserable, lowest paid work in the entire country? Why has it regressed into a robotic, soul-sucking slog that eats away at the welfare of our society?

Unless you're part of the 1%—a high-level executive or a significant stakeholder in a company—the rest of us are playing a zero-sum game.

Mid or low-level managers within a dysfunctional organization become mired in what Zeynep Ton describes as the “vicious cycle of retail.”

It’s incredibly demoralizing to witness high turnover rates, good and bad employees alike leaving your organization left and right, a hapless sense of perpetual disorganization and instability. It is hard to not be distraught when your workers are brought down by low morale, constantly suffering, being disrespected by customers, and working long, grueling hours for a poverty-level wage that you didn’t decide on. These lower-level managers become powerless puppets to upper management, being assigned absurd deadlines and arbitrary targets for sales or productivity. They become scapegoats in corporate’s obsession with P&L's and audits amidst ear-chafing, repulsive buzzwords like the "bottom line" and the "best practices,” which are never characterized by a genuine desire to improve the service or product at hand nor the working experience for those involved. It’s no surprise then, that these managers get burned out themselves, only making the lives of workers and customers worse as they’re not able to properly do their job of leading teams and ensuring smooth operations without losing their own sanity.

Frontline workers have to endure horrible, oppressive working environments—poorly designed, dirty, and disorganized workspaces, a lack of essential tools or supplies, inconsistent schedules, insufficient staffing and training, and absurd, nonsensical workplace rules or conventions created by wholly incompetent or just unmotivated, burnt out managers. Furthermore, there is often a complete lack of investment into the working conditions or benefits for these frontline workers. You know there's a problem when you have to ask permission from someone in corporate to justify the purchase of a $2 countertop dusting brush because it affects "the bottom line." Then try asking for a raise.

However, chances are, if you asked most retail workers what the worst part of their working experience is, they will likely tell you it is having to deal with entitled customers, people that have somehow simultaneously attained moral superiority and the audacity to forego any standards of human decency or respect from the moment they walk through the door. It is this unconscious—though often conscious—bias against minimum wage workers that denigrates your worth and thus your commitment to the job. The social norm is that retail jobs are part-time, throwaway jobs that you use to get some side cash to help you pay for college and get a "real job." And the people that want to do the work full-time often are as underpaid as their disposable brethren, and they still suffer from that same ridicule and social perception that they just aren't smart enough or are just too poor to go to college and pursue a decent career. You're at the lowest rungs of the corporate ladder, and everyone will make sure to remind you of it.

As consumers, we have just as much to lose. It's not fun to interact with soulless zombies on your weekend trip to the mall or cafe. In fact, it's deeply saddening and can kill the vibe of your experience. And it certainly doesn't inspire confidence that your order will be made with care and attention. It's not fun to have to deal with frequent mishaps—wrong items, directions not followed, items not to standard, packaged or shipped poorly, etc. On top of this, the market has fewer and fewer products and services that are exceptionally well-built or meticulously well-executed, because it takes both generous, motivated employees and a company culture that is willing to sacrifice profits to uphold standards. We have a marketplace filled with mediocrity, not excellence. Instead of investing back into the product or service towards making improvements, or back into the employees that made the business possible in the first place, we are lining the pockets of corporate executives and shareholders.

Can we just agree that this is a plague on our society? Why are we accepting this as a fact of life? That this is just the way it's always been? Every day that we choose to live with the status quo, we are perpetuating unkindness and needless suffering to millions of people. Have we lost all compassion, let alone respect, for ourselves and the rest of the society we live in?

We've been tricked our entire lives into thinking that we should hold back—the notion that if you give it your all, the industrial system, solely interested in productivity, is just going to ask you for more. And so evolved this nonsensical notion of “keeping work and life separate,” wherein it is believed that at all costs we should avoid overcommitting ourselves to work to save time for our own happiness and enjoyment of life. This bifurcation of responsibility is a toxic, backwards belief that undermines the value and impact of our work; it makes us complacent, and it distances ourselves from the responsibility we have to take against profligate corporate greed. I’m not saying burn yourself out or think about work constantly; we should know that overworking is not productive or conducive to a sustainable career. I’m saying that regardless of the type of work we do, all work has an impact on the welfare and functioning of society as a whole and the specific communities we are a part of.

We spend half of our waking hours at work; when we consciously suck the humanity out of what we’re doing, when we make what we do soulless and selfish—solely as a means of making money or status for ourselves—we make half of our lives essentially meaningless when we could've contributed towards something greater. We need to stop being afraid. We are afraid of a change to our way of life, afraid to lose our job, afraid to lose our income—the same income the corporatists want us to squander on their mediocre products. We can’t just walk through the office door and decide today that we’re going to shut off part of our brains and forget that we had any responsibility as human beings. Our attempt to draw an invisible boundary with our work doesn’t actually extricate us from this human responsibility—to be kind, to be compassionate, to be understanding, to service one another in our quest to find happiness, fulfillment, meaning, and purpose.