It's Time to Upgrade Our Operating System

“It behooves us to remember that men can never escape being governed. Either they must govern themselves or they must submit to being governed by others. If from lawlessness or fickleness, from folly or self-indulgence, they refuse to govern themselves, then most assuredly in the end they will have to be governed from the outside. They can prevent the need of government from without only by showing that they possess the power of government from within. ”

— THEODORE ROOSEVELT 1907 JAMESTOWN EXPOSITION

Friends!

I hope this final stretch of summer, culminating in labor day weekend, is indeed representing the end of more things than summer. Ends are perhaps not, at first, so much fun. But to me, they always represent new beginnings as well. That’s why I love them. Like the New Year for instance. Not because of what we leave behind but because of the unwritten potential ahead. I am hoping (really hard) that we are experiencing the early end of the pandemic, intolerance and division in our public conversation, and the beginning of a much better future.

It’s easy to get disillusioned about politics and the institutional (or lack thereof) leadership all around us. And it’s equally tempting to believe that it’s all about the people who are in power. In some cases, it is that simple. Like in any organization. Not everyone is a good fit for the job. But I believe proudly and passionately that most people are good. Even politicians! It’s just that they are operating within a system that’s bad.

So this week, I’d like to raise something that is difficult for me to address. I both lack the professional training (law) and the cultural understanding (didn’t grow up here) to properly unpack this complicated topic. Fortunately, as readers of this newsletter already have experienced, I have good friends and teachers. Philip Howard has taught me most things I know around the legal concrete we are currently stuck in and I will quote and lean on him heavily below. But also Dov Seidman who has spent his career “inspiring” principled performance and is an important contributor to awakening our own moral convictions. I will go so far as to say that I increasingly believe this might be our BIGGEST problem, (or at least barrier to solving them) in the United States for sure. I know, that’s a big statement. The biggest? Really. Bare with me. 

The rule of law is obviously incredibly important for a well-functioning society. Perhaps, some would say, even the essence of it. But the rule of law is an “enabler” and hence a system designed to make life work better for all. But over time, for reasons I don’t fully understand, we have stopped trusting each other and instead started writing contracts, longer and longer, more and more complicated, designed to “protect” the parties of any transaction from future harm. Contributors to this development are most likely the erosion of religion and the role it played for more people in providing moral guardrails. Another is the role of technology and how it has enabled the fragmentation of truth (fake news) and an ever dizzying echo-chamber of narrowcasted reality. Whatever the reasons are, we have replaced trust with the idea of introducing more and more rules and lines of legal code.

In doing so we have created 3 very nasty side effects that I believe today are truly catastrophic.

First, in our desire to protect people, organizations and, just about any relationship, we have effectively erected walls of distrust. Not intentionally. But still. The first thing you are welcomed by at the doctor’s office, the gym, even entertainment venues or simple downloads of trivial apps, are lengthy releases which basically tells you that you are NOT to be trusted. While we might not take any of these actions that seriously, we pay the price in the form of an accumulated erosion of the collective trust any society must have between its people in order to function well. I think of it as “trust death by a thousand cuts”. Philip Howard writes in his excellent book Life without Lawyers:

The pursuit of ever more perfect accountability,” philosopher Onora O’Neill observes, “builds a culture of suspicion…. Plants don’t flourish when we pull them up too often to check how their roots are growing. Americans increasingly go through the day looking over their shoulders instead of where they want to go.

Second, it’s a huge tax. It’s like adding sand not oil to any machinery. The proportion of lawyers in the workforce has doubled in the last 30 years. The majority in both houses are lawyers. Our health care system, which is economically bankrupt by a wide margin is a good case in point. It is estimated that about 30% of health care spending or around $1 trillion is spent on administration which is about $1m per doctor. That is multiples higher than in any other country. Schools have more non-instructional personnel than ever before. Furthermore, it is also estimated that “defensive medicine” is contributing to massive costs in the health care system. These are procedures, tests, prescriptions that doctors (when asked) don’t deem to be effective or necessary but they order them ONLY because they are afraid of getting sued. You get the point. To feed this insatiable appetite to write, regulate, control and, govern a system of “behavior surveillance” we have to spend more on the foxes than we can on the hens. And it just keeps getting worse. More rules to regulate more rules.

Third, it makes the job of well intentioned public servants almost impossible. Worthy projects and initiatives are easily challenged or filibustered using a variety of legal techniques to challenge, delay and distract. Teachers don’t teach. Judges don’t judge. Police don’t police and leaders don’t lead. It’s a giant ping pong match of legal arguments and, at best, the solution is often a watered-down compromise that reminds you why you’ve never seen a statue of a committee.

There’s a lot of talk about the decline of leadership in our society. America lacks leaders not because of a genetic flaw in our generation, at least not one that anyone has discovered. We lack leaders because we’ve basically made leadership unlawful. America doesn’t even allow a teacher to run a classroom, or a judge to dismiss a $54 million claim for a lost pair of pants. Washington is legally dead, unable to breathe any sense into outmoded laws, and unable to prevent special interests from feeding off its carcass. 

Philip K Howard in Life without Lawyers

It’s an interesting paradox in life that we almost never want or get what we pursue directly. We believe that making people agree to something will ensure that they live up to it. But if it was that simple we could just send a memo to every American and give them detailed instructions on what exactly to do. Or try sending an agreement on love to your loved one where you ask them to check some boxes on “loving behavior”. Good luck? It’s a doom loop. Our dependency on writing more rules is like a bad addiction to drugs. When things don’t work we write even more rules and we end up in a bad faith culture where no one trusts anyone. And add COVID and social isolation on top of it and you can imagine why our public discourse feels so divisive, mistrusting and inhuman.

It’s time to upgrade our operating system. Trust our elected leaders. Push as many decisions down to the local level as we can. The principle of subsidiarity is a good one. Only decisions that cannot be made at the most local level should be made more centrally. The closer decisions are made to people the more involved, included and engaged we will be. Finally, think about all things you love and admire. Like our human bodies. They are miracles governed by some clear principles (nutrition, rest, love, etc). But no rules really. Same with music, the arts, your friendships etc. The coral reef doesn’t need instructions. Given the right conditions of clean, salt and not too cold or warm water and rich rays of sunlight they flourish. The internet, this remarkable web of connections, like WikiPedia and many other incredible platforms, grew with very few hard rules and were built by the enthusiastic collaboration and contributions of millions of trusting people.

I think most of us know that our political system is broken. It is not serving us well. But as with all answers they lie within ourselves. We get the society WE deserve. The answers are always in our own hands. Not in someone else’s. So, let’s deregulate our human interactions. Let’s try harder to extend trust in each other. The old handshake might not be back for awhile due to COVID, but can we please re-invent a new handshake that stands for “I TRUST YOU”. I don’t need to sign anywhere. Robert Greenleaf wrote a really important book in the 1970s that later influenced my thinking a great deal. It’s called Servant Leadership. In it he writes about the fact that institutional love and trust is a two way street.

”Having said all of this, I recognize the problem of so much of business not serving well. But the core of the problem, as I see it, is not in business institutions; rather it is in the attitudes, concepts, and expectations regarding business held by the rest of society. People in churches, universities, government, and social agencies do not love business institutions. As a consequence, many inside business do not love them either. Businesses, despite their crassness, occasional corruption, and unloveliness, must be loved if they are to serve us better. They are much too large a presence in the lives of all of us to have them in our midst and not serve us better”.

I could say the same thing today about politics. We have to find it in ourselves to fall back in love with the importance and capability of government. We need a better system. We can do better than this. We must do better than this. And the path to a better system is actually less rules, less laws and more trust and more love.

Extending trust is an act of power.

Let’s be powerful.

I trust you.

Ps. Please click and check out many of the things that inspired me to write this post. And if you don’t think we have a trust problem in society please read this wonderful piece by Irwin Kula and this by David Brooks. Trust is on us! Or as they say: There is no I in TRUST (but there is an US).

This is a list from Dov Seidman’s book HOW on why rules are insufficient as the best way to create a free, prosperous and human society.

Here is Philip Howards not for profit. You can find all sorts of goodies here. PLEASE visit, share and donate funds if you can. You can find donate buttons here.

I found Jacob Blake’s mother’s strong words inspiring and brave. “How dare do we hate who we are”? Worth watching.