Few Noble Men
A beginners guide to hope
There are few noble men, so few that we should not count on them. There are few evil men, so few that we should not account for them.
Nearly all men and women are driven by incentives. It’s our human nature, it’s our animal nature. We do things we know bring rewards in the forms of wealth, power, happiness or sex. Some men and women are consistently noble, they put themselves second to the needs of all others, but their numbers are few and they rarely obtain positions of power. The same is true for the converse, inherently evil men and women, their numbers too are few.
Most of the problems and progress are made by everyday humans of the fallible variety. Humans who, despite the best of intentions and morals, will eventually be corrupted or elevated by the systems in which they live. We are the product of our environments, the rewards we get and the punishments we receive throughout our entire lives train us to act a certain way. We are not reflections of some inherent, fixed, moral compass. Rather, in each of us is the capacity for true good and true evil, it’s all about the incentives that we are surrounded by.
Hollywood has been overrun by the Superhero genre; a consequence, I believe, of our own distorted image of good and evil. In the Western (which shares much of its form with with mythology), protagonists fought for an idea and then disappeared into the crowd or back into the wilderness when their goals were achieved. Virtue was personified in a human just long enough to do some good, before evaporating back into collective consciousness.
Today every good and every evil are personified in a Hero or a Villain. Bystanders are collateral damage. They die when building fall down and frankly just get in the way of the real action. They never take a stand. They never move the plot. Heroes spend the entire movie trying to save millions of them, but the whole time you’re asking yourself “why? they don’t even have laser vision”. When we let ourselves and our children believe that progress and problems are only made by Heroes and Villains, we become the bystanders in the world we live in.
So Called Villains
Businesses do bad things to their workers, the environment and their customers because the market rewards them for that behavior. If you are a fiduciary of a company either in the C-Suite or the boardroom you are legally required to maximize shareholder returns. Deciding to cut back growth for a few years to be more sustainable won’t just get you fired, it can bankrupt or jail you.
Do something bad by society that enriches your shareholders? The system showers you in millions. No matter how ‘good’ you think you might be, if you were in their shoes, would you really act any differently? Maybe once, perhaps twice, but certainly not every time. And why should you? If you leave they’ll just find someone else to play the game. We all like to think we’d be different, that we’d never do the same thing, but you’re reading this to yourself, you can be honest with yourself and with me.
It’s the system not the people
Politicians suck. They will say or do anything to get ahead and rarely represent their constituents. They lie, cheat, and change the rules to make future lying and cheating even easier. They sell access for money and close the door to common sense. If the last election is any indication, Americans hate politicians.
They too, are just responding to their incentives. Many principled people go to Washington with the best of intentions and get spit back years later as corrupt as anyone else. Why? Because The way you get ahead in a room full of 500 lawyers is by playing politics and the way you get reelected is by selling out to lobbyists so they fund your campaign. If MMA fights rewarded knitting skills, grandmothers everywhere would have golden belts over their mantles. If government rewarded our old concepts of statesmanship every politician would be a statesman. In reality MMA fighting rewards aggression and government rewards politics so the best MMA fighters are strong and the best politicians are conniving. There’s just no other way to get ahead when the rules are against you.
It’s the system not the people
Speaking of things that suck: the media. It’s biased, sensational, and ultimately erodes the level of discourse. They too respond to incentives. As much as we all like to pretend to be informed, few of us are, and even fewer of us are willing to read and pay for quality journalism. We don’t want unbiased coverage or deep dives because both of those things require us to expend effort.
The media is exactly what we want it to be, they respond to the cues their audience gives them. The cues we give them. We make it the way it is not through our stated preferences but through our actions.
It’s the system not the people
It may not be clear what changes should be made in the above systems, but it is crystal clear that the problems in these systems have nothing to do with the players and everything to do with the board. There are people who know which rules to change. We should absolutely change them.
The Greatest Trick The Devil Ever Played
The salvation of this human world lies nowhere else than in the human heart, in the human power to reflect, in human meekness and human responsibility. — Václav Havel
You’ve been tricked. We’ve all been tricked. The real evil in this world does not come from man or some original sin, it comes from outside, from depressingly poor systems of incentives and it infects the minds of men and women.
When we personify evil within the likes of [Insert from list] we have chosen the wrong enemy and destroy any hope we have for solving a real problem. Seeing to the downfall of a villain is like cutting a weed instead of pulling it up by the roots — something will grow back in its place.
List: Martin Shkreli, Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Mitch McConnell, Ted Cruz, [Anyone] at Goldman Sachs, the 1%, the welfare state, radical islam, radical christians, the KKK, etc………………………
No. No. Shkreli may be a douchebag, yes, but his original sin was greed. Greed at the expense of others which his company’s investors demanded. And guess what? He STILL WON. He has tens of millions of dollars. Activism and public opinion knocked him down a peg, but he still left the casino a winner in the one table game he cared about: greed. There’s a reason he’s smirking, he gets how the system really works, most of us don’t.
Villains distract us, they’re meant to. It’s ok if the citizenry comes to hate a politician, they’re expendable. Just run someone else next year and 3 months in they’ll be as corrupt as the last one. But if the people come out against the system? If they try to fix the broken incentives that lead parties to steal supreme court nominees and gerrymander districts, well, well then that…that might just might work.
Pay no attention to the Villains. Well pay attention, but see them as what they are: smoke; indicators of a fire nearby, but not the fire itself. Focus on incentives, on creating systems around people that give them incentives to do what’s right, even if they aren’t a noble man or woman.
Make good profitable.
Make right worthwhile.
Make honest fair.
Who are the Heroes?
You’re not a Hero and there are no real Villains. There are just poor systems that need fixing. Don’t get distracted by the noise and the big red targets. Those are there to distract us from the real problems, and there are real problems.
Your fellow man is just like you, fallible, and driven by his or her nature to seek rewards and minimize pain. There’s no nobility or righteousness in denying this or trying to overcome the condition.
There’s real work to be done. The only adversaries are poor systems, let’s work together, heroes and villains, to fix them. Now that’s a Marvel movie I’d love to see.
