The Wall Street Journal reports that the head of the recently collapsed Colonial Bank was always addressed as “Mr.” One commentator opines that this is a sure sign that no one really got up in his grill about what was going on at the bank. Now the bank has failed because employees, board members, etc., were polite. They did not do a sufficient job of keeping the leadership accountable. This dynamic may have been active, but calling someone a motherfucker does not indicate one is holding that person accountable either. It just makes one a jerk.
Cicero decried the lack of backbone in the Senate at the begining of the age of dictators in Rome. No one has been able to rise to the level of public discourse that Pericles upheld in ancient Athens. But somewhere quite recently, probably between Lee Atwater and James Carville, we really have started to equate anything less than yelling with capitulation. We have also accepted that the ends justify the means, or that winning is so important that it must be done at any cost.
The result is beyond a lack of trust in our dialoge, it is a genuine inability to discern whether an opion is rendered honestly and with the intent of entering into dialogue. I start yelling and you reply with a sincere attempt to talk and by the time I discern your sincerity, you’ve started yelling in reaction to my cries. Digital communication helps this tremendously.
From what I understand, the biggest problem in the economy today is this issue of trust. Institutions have no good faith left for their peers not only because of the deceptions perpetrated in the past but also because of the lack of basic ways to communicate today. They don’t know what an apple is much less how to compare it. I think our healthcare debate is in the same place.
Calling someone Mr. does not necessarily mean one has accepted his whole rationale. It does mean that we can talk. We can try to figure out what the apple is and how to get everyone to eat one each day. Which variety is best for what purpose can be a subject of ongoing discussion, but not if we can’t talk about it.