On plutocrats, posturing & hen protection
“It’s the smart, thoughtful people who go along with abusive structures and who should know better who are the real problem”
So Anand Giridharadas, author of bestseller ‘Winners take all — the elite charade of changing the world’ opened his potent arguments at the House of Beautiful Business with this observation on a half hour discussion he’d had with Jared Kushner. Saying ‘he’s smart. You may not like that, but it’s true’. Which I’m guessing is what makes his complicity so depressing.
‘It’s great to see you all gathered here to celebrate and encourage businesses into becoming more beautiful’ Anand continued, ‘I’d be happier seeing businesses being forced to become less abusive, less predatory’.
Preceding Anand on the stage was the extremely impressive Ebele Okobi, Facebook’s Head of Public Policy for Africa, the Middle East and Turkey, who came with a powerfully moving personal story, and a sincere empathy that certainly shifted the room’s assumptions about Facebook. Anand wasn’t pulling any punches however. ‘There’s no hope for Facebook. It’s irredeemable. Beyond repair. Resigning is a moral act…I don’t think someone (Zuckerberg) who invented an app to rate women at college should have this much control over our discourse’. He then revealed that when signing books after events he had had several Facebook Executives say to him ‘Our company is fucked up and Zuckerberg must go’. And not in a private conversation, this was whilst waiting in line to get a book signed! It was regrettable Ebele was given no right to reply.
Asked to describe his label of ‘Market world’ Anand seemd to echo Schopenhauer’s famous philosophical maxim: “the problem is not so much to see what nobody has yet seen, as to think what nobody has yet thought concerning that which everybody sees”. ‘I am trying to redescribe to people things that they are intimately familiar with and to get them to look at things they think they already know in a very different way’.
Deriding the sustainable business mantras of ‘win: win’ and ‘doing well by doing good’, I have to admit I have used these myself repeatedly over the years so I had a bit of dark self-reflection too at this moment, ‘how can we address the negative consequences of monopolies and inequality, how can we lift people up without influencing those with their boots on their throats?’
He described the ‘intellectual boundaries’ that prevent the ‘difficult ideas’ being discussed in organisations. In my work at the Forward Institute one of our Faculty leads Margaret Heffernan calls this the ‘willful blindness’ — that which we choose not to see, indeed stolidly and often actively strive to ignore. In her words ‘The truth won’t set us free until we develop the skills, the habit, the talent, the moral courage to use it’.
The problem in a nutshell, says Anand, is that ‘We have outsourced the leadership of transformation to those with the most to lose from it. This is like asking the foxes to run hen protection’.
He was similarly coruscating about the recent ‘revelations’ in business, that would be ‘obvious to your average eight year old’, that apparently ‘human beings matter’. We should ‘stop expecting them to look after us, and use democracy to look after ourselves. Real change involves loss of power’.
He also argued that oligarch super-yachts like the Black Pearl may actually provide very clear signals for change such is their tangible, visible, gross ostentation. Comparing this mega-consumption to the Sackler family’s philanthropy which plays smoke and mirrors with their responsibility for the opioid genocide (17,000 deaths a year from overdoses in the US). ‘The Sackler’s fund the arts to influence the media in our big cities to buy enough reputational room to prevent change and maintain their monopoly. A little bit of good goes a long way. Worse…’ he continued ‘they are altering our conversation about what change even is’.
‘Trade Unions are a good thing. But now we see them as a problem’. Or on Sheryl Sandberg’s ‘Lean in’: ‘[This] suggests that problems resulting from thousands of years of patriarchy is a posture issue!’.
‘We might be better off with the yachts. We can go after that plutocracy’. Instead so much CSR and sustainability work languishes in the realm of ‘Drive-thru reputational laundromats’. In so many organisations those Sustainability Directors trying to do good work are still being systematically undermined by their lobbyist colleagues who are doing more damage than the positive impacts they create. ‘I’ve travelled around the world a lot and I’ve never seen a second pair of those shoes by the way’
‘I think we need to give CEOs a symbolic opportunity to redeem themselves. We need to publicly render these plutocrats ridiculous amongst their peers. And when they say they will leave the country in the face of higher taxes we should play poker with them. You who threaten us, who more than anyone else reap the benefits of the societies we build together, you threaten to leave? Then Go!’
What a breath of fresh air from an insider who knows. As Anand concluded, in humble acknowledgement of his own privilege ‘the best way to know about a problem is to be part of it’.
Ed Gillespie is the author of ‘Only Planet’
