The Cookie Starts to Crumble
In wrapping up my ethics course, I have just gone over my final lecture where I will review all the fundamental concepts we have discussed and debated during the semester. I really think I have, over two semesters of teaching this course, pulled together an excellent set of almost universal topics that would be worthwhile for almost anyone to spend some time considering or studying. Obviously, it is geared to business students as a required course in Law, Policy & Ethics, but I am reasonably certain that everyone who has to get through the day of modern life is encountering these things on a regular basis. In fact, I can’t think of one of the topics that isn’t applicable to anyone I know whether they are in business, science, teaching, the arts or any other vocational endeavor.
As a run up to finishing the course, I have sent out reminders to students who still have outstanding assignments, which in this course consist of essays. Everyone has submitted two and about half have submitted their third. One of my favorite students just sent me his third essay. He is not one of my favorites because he is brilliant or because he will rise to be a powerful CEO necessarily. I like him because he is so average and ordinary. He lives somewhere up here in Escondido. He is a confident guy, but far from cocky. I would say he’s the sort, not unlike my older sister, Kathy, who doesn’t give a shit what other people think and just is who he is and is comfortable with that. I am used to seeing that in Kathy and I admire it even if I do occasionally like to poke fun at the determined nature of that attitude. This guy is also my A/V guy whenever I need help and that is hard not to like.
His name is Frank and he just submitted his essay on the topic of the movie, The Social Network. The topic is technically supposed to be on free markets, but Frank just wrote about the movie, which is fine. The bottom line is that he thought that Zuckerberg, in his business dealings with the Winklevoss twins and Eduardo Saverin, was being “shady but legal”. That is a perfect set-up for a learning opportunity as far as I’m concerned. The juxtapositioning of legal, policy and ethical sides to issues goes right to heart of this course. This is neither a law course nor a business policy course. It is more of an ethics course, but even there it is not the philosophy of ethics as debated by Emmanuel Kant and his pals in the ivory tower. This course is supposed to be about those tough intersections at ground level where you have to decide what to do when something is technically legal, certainly prone to being more corporately profitable (i.e. policy-driven) and yet questionably ethical. There are more of those situations out there than you can shake a stick at and I consider it my job to force students in the safety of a course and case environment to make these hard calls and debate them (especially listening to their fellow students’ perspectives). The idea is that if they stumble around here, they are less likely to stumble around in the real business world where real people’s lives and their careers may be on the line.
While this is all going on, of course, we are also witnessing the comeuppance of Donald Trump, his family, his company, and his followers, as well as those who might not even like him but have enabled him by standing by and staying silent about his wrongdoings. No matter what your political leanings, it is impossible to deny that for five+ years our country has been partially under the spell of a megalomaniac who had spent a lifetime working to undermine the whole concept of meritocracy and fair business dealing. Even friends of mine who kinda like the guy are quick to admit that in business he has been both a financial disaster time and time again and that as a counterparty he is about as unreliable as any in the marketplace. I could spend pages postulating why he and his family have been able to get away with this for so long and, indeed, climb higher and higher in the ranks of influential and powerful people, but that would be a wasted effort because so many have already done that to negligible effect and the world that likes getting behind him has just kept on keeping on.
Let us consider the Trump legacy in the context of the ethical topics I will review tonight with my class. The first is the concept of stakeholders and the importance of considering the needs of employees, clients, suppliers and regulators, not just shareholders. Trump goes one step farther and sees the interests of only one shareholder, himself. He is the king of conflicts of interest and believes he has never met a conflict he cannot ignore. Then there is the proper use of social media. What can I say that Twitter hasn’t already said in its pre-Musk form and that gets published on Truth Social every day in shocking black and white? The importance of reputation in today’s world is an important topic for debate. There are many examples to challenge whether it matters anymore, but Trump has taken that to an extreme that was unimaginable a few years ago. Trump has actually shown us that in the right (or perhaps wrong) environment, a bad reputation can actually be an asset. But my favorite topic, on which there is ample evidence in the public record to validate my point, the boundaries between truth and lies, the very essence of credibility that allows for trust and fair dealing has been shattered by Trump. Kelly Anne Conway’s coining of the term “alternative facts” will go down in the annals of public relations as one of the most outrageous spins ever put on the issuance of bold-faced lies.
How many times have any one of us said something like, “well, this time he is going to pay the price…” only to find that his teflon persona propped up by his bullying base and the sheepishness of the conservatives that have knuckled under to him have let him off the hook, over and over again.
I am having my students read a piece I found in the New York Times Op/Ed pages penned by Tim Kreider called Its Time to Stop Living the American Scam. The piece puts a pin in what we have been living. It’s starts by reminding us that the concept that business is a virtue has gone out the window with the Gen X, Millennial and Gen Z generations. Millennial downward mobility has been punctuated by pandemic Darwinism and the emperor of capitalism has been unrobed. Kreider did not have benefit of the more recent Chinese COVID lockdown anti-government protests, which just reinforce and globalize this notion to the extreme. The Great Resignation, as we are calling it, and the “C- lifestyle” that the younger generations are espousing should concern us all. The quote made by Kreider that rocks my world is that American conservatism has become demographically terminal (I have been saying a version of this for years). The dystopian view of the future has put retirement for young people also into the terminal category. Why bother?
As a student of modern revolutions, I am always looking for signs of the impending spark. Kreider explains what we need succinctly, “a republic to salvage, a civilization to reimagine and its infrastructure to reinvent, innumerable species to save, a world to restore and millions who are impoverished, imprisoned, illiterate, sick or starving. All while we waste our time at work.” That is as much a manifesto as any written by Marx and Engels.
But the one sign that there may still be salvation is that the Trump machine has started to lose its wheels. The Manhattan DA has succeeded in a criminal conviction of the Trump Organization. Trump and the family are not far behind. Fulton County will indict and convict him in plain sight, just as he did his deeds in plain sight. And I think we all sense that we are days away from a criminal referral on Trump et al by the January 6th Committee while Jim Jordan stands by fuming in the wings…because he knows he may not be far behind once the DOJ wheels start to turn. The cookie always crumbles but we will see it start to crumble right before our national eyes and then watch, as the rats start scurrying for cover like never before, ignoring the sweet bits of cookie that lay at their feet.