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Trump, Fake News, Gonzo Society & a series of Unfortunate Satirical Events.

20 Sunday Dec 2020

Posted by Thin Air Factory in Uncategorized

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"You Brits", 2016 Election, Alinsky, America Today, British Airways, Comedy, Democrat, Doors of Perception, Fake News, Gonzo, Harvard Lampoon, Hogarth, Hunter S Thomson, Intersectionality, Jewish Global Conspiracy, Lakota Sioux, LSD, Matt Monroe, Moliere, Moore's Law, My Favourite Year, National Lampoon, New World, Nixon, Old World, Pentagon Papers, Pizza Paedophile Ring, PJ O Rourke, Radicalism, Relativism, Republican, Ridicule, Rowlandson, Rules For Radicals, Satire, Saturday Night Live, Social Media, Sy Benson, Trump, Watergate, You never cut funny!

AKA Trump, The Gonzo President.

An hour in the company of PJ O Rourke – iconoclast, much lauded author of the seminal Republican Party Reptile, contemporary of Hunter S Thomson, man of letters, polemicist, contrarian – and of course the near mythical voice of some legendary BA adverts that wrote themselves into our cultural mythology with that laconic opening statement: “You Brits!”

The Theme for the gathering – a TortoiseMedia-eye look at America Today in the space between Presidential conceding and inauguration. Rich pickings indeed.

What’s not to like.

PJ O Rourke is a hero, the meeting of which can be a precarious thing at the best of times, as James Harding, Tortoise co-founder and our host rightly pointed out. But we were in safe hands. Mr Harding’s effortless steerage allowed us to hang out in our PJs if you will, consuming PJs warm yet remorseless observations without said meeting popping the heroic balloon.

The hour was spent walking the tightrope between PJ’s ability to infuse Zoom with the smoky,  peaty warmth of an antique Chesterfield chair and the frothy opinion and polemic bubbling up in the chat stream at the expense of the departing POTUS . 

What does the lampooning and highly satirical Republican-ish writer PJ O Rourke think of The Yellow Hair?  [my imagined Lakota Sioux name for said POTUS].

A proponent of Gonzo Journalism, this was the man who famously wrote on “How to Drive Fast on Drugs While Getting Your Wing-Wang Squeezed and Not Spill Your Drink.” He also notably served as Editor-in-Chief of National Lampoon for many years with his imprint on many National Lampoon classics. His room for satirical manoeuvre was vast.  

And then it hit me – the fact that a master of Yan-kee satire and lampooning would be discussing a political culture of shifting-sand sensibilities underwritten by fatuous and sometimes almost wilfully funny untruths struck me as ironic at best, or at worse, a conflict of interest. 

This tension felt like it deserved a little more poking.  

To most people outside the U.S., and a rather large number inside, American Politics feels like it has been hijacked by the writers of National Lampoon and The Onion – with a smattering of H R Puff N Stuff and The King Of Kings screenplay bringing in the wings. At the heart of it all? Fake News – a master class in obfuscation. Everything is Fake, unless the Real President says otherwise, with @realDonaldTrump playing a pungent role in the Real Fake divide. Madonna or Maradonna? You decide.

Fake News – ridiculous flights of factual fictions, fantasies and potential conspiracies –  all liberally doused with the petrol of incensed ‘values-based’ hurt and ‘spiritual’ mortification. As the American master Mark Twain proclaimed:  ‘Why let the truth get in the way of a real story.’ Amen! Each new ‘real’ news story is  another tongue placed firmly in 330 Million or so American cheeks – and all the while POTUS gleefully flicking off the critical flies with pronouncements of ‘Fake News.’

Fake News feels so, well, American.  The right to shape any truth, fact, system, person, group, taste, belief, or data point in your own inimitable and highly subjective image feels more than just human. It feels like a goddam’ amendment in the constitution of all that is American.

Hunter S Thomson summed it up thus in his seminal Gonzo tome, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas:

‘But what was the story?

Nobody had bothered to say.

So we would have to drum it up on our own.

Free enterprise. The American Dream.’

Damn right. The Right to live out a Truman-show life under God & Fake News feels pretty damn good. Throw in a Rifle and I’ll pay the damn sub RIGHT NOW – in dark web crypto-currency of course, so those long-haired, bean-shoot-smokin, pinko sons-of-bitches can’t trace me. Hell yeah. I’m a Boy and Proud of it. Get me?

When the fact that the greatest political satire is real life – when everything is Fake, up is down, black is white, left is right, sex isn’t gender, fixed is fluid, everything’s a meme and the question of ‘how did we get here?’ gets begged – my tuppence-worth of an observation is this.

In the old courtly world, high satire was exactly that: the rarified and vaunted art of the rapier strike – of barbed projectiles of intelligent drollery fired against the pustular buffooning of royals, aristocrats and their petite bourgeoisie henchmen, with a liberal dose of mockery reserved for the sprawling, brawling plebiscite. 

But in the New World – the land of opportunity –  where every man was equal under God [though not the women – and…uhm…oh, yes, those dark skinned folks and any Native Indians we haven’t killed or filed under D for Destitution – just saying] – everyone should be allowed to play. Why just let the nobs of Nob Hill have all of the fun. 

Cue the heady days of the 60s and 70s. American polemicists took the spirit of free speech and the people’s right to voice their disdains, loathings, suspicions and truths to a whole new level. In the social splintering of the politicised Beat Generation and with the late Sixties agitprop movements came a new wave of satirists and lampooners with a much more audacious and ambitious sense of their audience. Hell, if a washing powder can change the behaviours [and underwear colour] of millions of Americans through television – just think what we might achieve. 

Mid West college kids, East Coast ingenues and West Coast dilettantes, growing up on the mass-market all you-can-eat-buffet of the American Dream, got busy. And they got tooled up. They armed themselves with Satire. What’s more, they got populist. [For the people by the people. How could they not. The whole point of propaganda, whether to stop a war, a politician, or a bunch of racists, is to inflame a reaction in the hearts and minds of as many people as possible as often as possible for as long as possible. Ridicule became the power tool of their populist propaganda.. 

Serious political discourse and posturing was already in full flight across most US college campuses. Over arch and deeply myopic, radicalism, was the order of the day and it had ‘rules’ as Saul Alinsky so clearly set out. This modern radical agenda and its propagandas cut deeply into the fresh-faced self-serving idealism of the existing New World elites. But it would always be a throw-back from the old world that would cut deepest. And that throw back was Ridicule. 

Ridicule, an art practised slavishly and to a higher order in the Old World of the 17th and 18th Centuries was, once again, to threaten the power elites of the New World. The using of formal and informal fallacies and fakeries to undermine someone or their argument – to make a mockery of their position or beliefs and in that way disavow them of any credibility, credulity or integrity – was to have a U.S. make-over.

As a weapon, Ridcule, designed to wither and erode the very foundations upon which someone stood, was remorseless and relentless. Ridicule is engineered to destroy the essence of the thing it targets. Forensic. Calculated. Cruel. 

The new satirical U.S. version was simply the old Ridicule dressed up in a goofy Matt Monroe jumper.

In playground terms, National Lampoon magazine could be said to have ‘started it’. Originally the Harvard Lampoon, NL parodied, mocked and ridiculed everything and everyone. In that way it was VERY egalitarian.

In it we can find perhaps a ground zero – a crucible moment – in a Gonzo to Fake News trajectory theory.

True Facts, one of the magazine’s cornerstone pieces and in fact the only factual part of the whole rag, used such bizarre obtuse and ridiculous pieces of real news from around the world that reality, even when it was in evidence, was barely distinguishable from ridiculous madness and satirical surreality.

It is at this point that the connection between Gonzo Journalism and Fake News becomes clearer for me. In that moment, where reality and the ridiculous were purposefully blurred beyond comprehension, the possibility of a Gonzo society became an unsettling reality.

In that effect, I believe that for all the good they did, and for all the rotten edifices they collapsed, the arch lampooners and satirists have at least a little to answer for in regard to to the polluting and toxic nature of what we now call Fake News.

The multiplier in all of this? The steroid of mass media – the exponential reach and influence of Television and the Movies.

Hot on its heels of National Lampoon came the fire-starter of Saturday Night Live. From its inauguration in 1975, SNL packed and wrapped ridicule for mass American consumption. By the mid-to-late seventies it was a seed-bed of cultish satirical showmanship. 

Between National Lampoon, SNL and all the subsequent mischief makers they spawned [The Onion being a notable example], the intelligent populist, comedic contrarian and anarcho-satirist had the opportunity to fire their ire into millions of homes via both printed piece and the cathode ray. What’s not to like?  

The small flaw in the blessed trajectory?

If everything is ridiculous, then nothing is serious – and more importantly, nothing is sacrosanct. There are no safe places or secure vaults of immutable truths and irreversible facts. Relativistic trick-cycling allowed anyone to present even the most rigorously tested or peer reviewed truth or fact as open to disdainful disregard or suspicion. Nothing can be fixed. Everything is fluid. Everything suffers a Borderline Personality Disorder. 

In a culture still mostly raised on the biblical trope of Let him that is without sin cast the first stone, the idea that any flaw whatsoever disavows you of being able to stand in serious and sometimes punitive judgement of a belief, moral code or political position, satire is more than just an intellectual foil, it is an instrument of faith. When that happens, you’re effectively fucked.

Everything is flawed – ergo – it does not have the untainted status, permission or the credibility to ever take higher ground or present an unassailable position, framing fact or truth.  In that instance, everything is relative and nothing is what it seems, to the person or persons ‘seeming’ it at least. So any and every thing can be ridiculed, undermined and summarily dismissed with no right to reply. Sound familiar?

The satirist and the lampooners power to pull down edifices of bullshit, self interest, political filibustering, outright deception and lying changed the face of massed political debate and its accompanying sophistry, in some cases irrevocably, removing its cloak or invisibility and invincibility completely. 

More recently, Social Media has simply accelerated the whole kit and caboodle – leaving us with Radical Pamphleteering to the power of Moore’s Law.

People under the cosh of power elites have always seen potential witchery and devilry in those above and beyond them. Unknown darkness and debauch in the big houses and the strange ways of those who Have have always been with us. And elites have always attracted suspicion, with wild stories of their excesses and self interest [often true] used as propaganda to bring them down. Put that sensibility into the New World and the land of Salem Witch Trials and the Pilgrim suspicions of the excesses of Mammon and, well – light blue touch paper and stand well back.  Conspiracy theories have always existed. But as with any fact or ‘truth’ generally, pop a conspiracy theory into the super-fly, deep-fat-frier of investigative gonzo journalism to the power of social media and shazaam, Bob’s your slightly unnerving and sexually ambivalent Pizza Delivering Paeodophile Uncle of the Jewish Global Conspiracy variety. 

Suddenly, It feels like a very short walk 

from 

everything is underwritten

to 

everything is undermined

How does one sustain a shift of that scale and nature? 

Comedy of course. Great comedy. Crazy comedy. Off-beat comedy. Free-form rough-edged comedy shit. Funny shit. People love to laugh, especially at things that would otherwise make them cry – like the state of their wallet, their world or the nature and idiosyncrasies of the people tasked with running it – elected or otherwise.

Funny is what we do when all else fails. Humour is how we navigate the madness. Funny is sacrosanct; a human right. We don’t like people telling us what to laugh and not laugh at. If you need proof, look no further than the belief that the the inauguration of Donald J Trump was in part powered by people reacting against being told what not to laugh at. Don’t mess with funny. Even it if is offensive or potentially dangerous. 

‘Sy Benson’ discusses comedy and Coffee with ‘Benjy Stone’ [AKA Benjamin Steinberg].

As Sy Benson, head-writer on King Kaiser’s Comedy Cavalcade in the movie My Favourite Year proclaims when challenged to remove his ‘Boss Hijack’ sketch, a bitingly satirical yet potentially libellous piece on a Mobster thug:

“You never cut funny.”   

The relationship been truth, satire, journalism and dangerous living are ancient. Telling powerful people, or massed tribes and types of people exactly what you think of them and their shibboleths has been getting satirists into trouble since Aristophenes in Ancient Greece first thought to poke fun at both Socrates and the Athenian Court System. The golden age of Satire was no different – Moliere, Voltaire and Boileau-Desperaux in France and Swift, Pope, Dryden and Hogarth in the U.K. walked a perilous line with the potential for censure, prison and death threats as the reward for their caustic, parodical exclamations.

This whiff of danger has lurked in the wings of Gonzo since its inception. The counter culture and its harrying of state instruments and bodies in the era of the Pentagon Papers, Nixon and Watergate bought investigative journalists, cultural commentators and bold satirists closer to the flame again. To be seen to be distributing a truth that did not align with the ‘confected’ truth of the governing elites was a very dangerous pastime. 

Furthermore, it wasn’t always political truths that were being smashed or subverted. This was also the era of brutal self enquiry, identity myth busting and raw revelation – where people mined the underlying flows, fractures and flaws of the human psyche through explorations that sought to break down multiple doors of perception in search of some greater cosmic truth via LSD. A search for absolute truths in whichever shape they came could be cause for concern

Again Thomson, this time in a Rolling Stone Article in 1973 states:

“Absolute truth is a rare and dangerous commodity in the context of professional journalism.” 

If you set out to design, engineer and seed a social movement custom-built to suffocate serious debate and enquiry, undermine universal ethical and moral constructs, and effectively neuter any intellectually-rigorous and profound discourse or enquiry, you couldn’t do better than Gonzo Journalism and National Lampoon’s anything. A stroke of genius. In these two pillars the foundations of a Gonzo Society are born.

To that point, one could posit that Gonzo culture and Gonzo Society both deserve and create Gonzo Politicians. 

Followed to its logical end, one could say that Donald J Trump was the only choice in 2016.

Trump is the ultimate Gonzo Politician. The perfect POTUS to sit in power at the heart of a nation of states suckled on gonzo lampooning and relentless irreverence. In 2016 Hilary was the epitome of a satirical target. Rooted and raised in the self serving circles of political power elites and Washington well-doers, Hilary was never going to have an easy race against Trump in a predominantly Gonzo Society. Gonzo was the pixie dust in Trump’s armoury, the accelerator of his ambition. The 2016 election was far more a realisation of gonzo politics than an assertion of real inalienable political will. 

Is P.J partially responsible for the political mood in 2016? Kinda but not really. No more than for any election since 1969. Should Hunter S Thomson take a bow? Again, it’s a No.

But their legacy does certainly taint the world we now live in, for both good and bad.

If showbiz rules and we’re all Gonzo now, Trump Rules – or at least did for 4 years longer than most of us would have liked. But, careful what you wish for. And perhaps more importantly careful what you laugh it. Because someone might take you seriously.

Inspired by the very real events and conversations [recorded] in an An Evening with PJ O Rourke hosted by Tortoise Media. The topic? America Today.

Human Sorrow, Environmental Joy & the Wisdoms of Danny The Dealer.

26 Sunday Apr 2020

Posted by Thin Air Factory in Uncategorized

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ABBA, Alinsky, Angel Delight, Berni Inns, big data, Cimate Change, CO2 Emissions, COVID 19, Danny The Dealer, Drugs, Enlightenment Now, Environmentalists, Free Market Dynamics, Good vs Evil, Hamsey, Indira Ghandi, Joy, Magpies, Marwood, Ouse, Poverty, Radiohead, Rules For Radicals, Sorrow, St Albans, Stephen Pinker, Susan Shanks, Thanos, The Tudor Tavern, Walter Scheidel, Withnail & I, Yeats

MV5BYWFhZDRlMzQtY2Q3Ni00MDQyLWE5ZGYtZmUxNWEwOTVlMjk1L2ltYWdlL2ltYWdlXkEyXkFqcGdeQXVyNTgwNTk5MDU@._V1_.jpg

Bear with me as I just want to set out the slightly odd logic that got me to here.

While walking along the banks of the Ouse towards Hamsey, mist rising off the sky soaked water, a chattering Magpie swooped and settled on the dewy path in front of me.

Good morning Mr Magpie: 

how are Mrs Magpie 

and all of the other little magpies?

Thats what I should have said at least, if I were a man truly stitched into the natural fabric of Albion’s rolling, rural majesty and the echoes of our medieval ritual and lore. But it was in fact the Magpie theme tune from the 1970s children’s show, with accompanying electric moonage graphic intro that came to me first, through a rose-tinted mist of Angel Delight, It’s a Knockout, Berni Inns [the Tudor Tavern in St Alban’s to be precise], ABBA, and Susan Shanks.

This was closely followed by an passing echo of Radiohead’s:

Good Morning Mr Magpie,

How are we today

Now you’ve stolen all the magic 

And took my memory

At which point I settled back into the familiar One for Sorrow, Two for Joy, Three for a Girl and four for a Boy refrain. And it was the word Sorrow that finally popped to the top of the pile in my head. 

As I walked I remembered a passage in Stephen Pinker’s book, Enlightenment Now which alluded to Sorrow and something about pandemics.

For those who might not know him, Stephen Pinker is a Scientist first and foremost, the Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard, and an Elected Member of the Academy of Sciences. He is also an advocate of Eco-modernism or what some call Eco Pragmatism, and actively refutes any attempts to create a morality play around issues concerning the environment and climate change. He dismisses the positioning of these arguments as being those of Good vs Evil and rightly questions all of the incumbent fanatacisms that come with that framing from either side. To some Green Revolutionaries and Climate extremists this places him firmly in the opposition. 

Why had this Sorrow Pandemic thought demanded revisiting? Because recently in the pursuit of seeking out and discussing positive outcomes from our current crises, I’ve been reminded that some, especially those at the bleeding edges of the Environmentalist establishment [and yes, you are as much of the established order now as those you damn], see the crisis unfolding around the world as licence to make unrestrained and slightly gleeful statements and exaltations about the impacts of COVID 19.

There is no doubt that this cloud does contains a multitude of silvery positives. That there is barely a plane in the sky, no travel to speak of, a collapse in oil demand, a shrinking if not collapse of unfettered consumption, the return of certain ecosystems to their purer nature [the canals of Venice’s return to beauty is a much trumpeted benefit of the collapse of its tourism trade], and a general re-engaging with nature in all of its glory are indeed to be somewhat thankful for. But they come at a price.

There is also a sense from some that COVID will act as a great leveller, and that, just perhaps, this crises may lead to a shrinking of inequality in the world; a rebalancing in favour of smaller living and needs and a greater balance between humanity and the natural world. 

The upsides are plain to see. But where my issue lies is that these upsides often seem to be dislocated from the downside price we will have to pay for them – and what’s more, unfettered from whom will pay that price eventually. It is that dislocation that concerns me. And it is the glee present in some of the exhalations that pricked me; the whiff of a misanthropic, Thanos-shaped righteous mania that is in need of checking, in my humble opinion at least.

The piece I remembered was in fact to be found in his chapter on Inequality, and if you’ll bear with me I’ve reproduced it below in its entirety:

‘The historian Walter Schneidel identifies “Four horsemen of Levelling”; mass-mobilisation warfare, transformative revolution, state collapse, and lethal pandemics. In addition to obliterating wealth [and, in the communist revolutions, the people who owned it], the four horseman reduce inequality by killing large numbers of workers, driving up the wages of those who survive. Scheidel concludes, “All of us who prize greater economic equality would do well to remember that with the rarest of exceptions it was only ever bought forth in sorrow*. Be careful what you wish for. ‘

Source: Stephen Pinker, Enlightenment Now, Penguin Random House

*my emphases

There it was – careful what you wish for. In reading this I had mentally added to Sheidel’s prize of greater economic equality those of greater environmental well-being; an equality of possibility for all regardless of gender, colour, creed or background; a reduction in industrial carbon emissions; greater respect and care for the creatures we share the planet with; a return to less nihilist consumer tendencies; and a general rebalancing of humanity and planet.

All of these are eminently desirable, but must exist within a universal order under natural laws, and therefore there are losers and losses to be accounted for with these gains. Positive and negative externalities. We must be cognisant of that.

And this is where I come to my point [at last]. 

I have a simple request to those whom might quietly caw and reel and dance as the old order burns about them – the price for your glee is being carried by human beings who do not necessarily deserve your dance at their despair.

To punk and pimp Yeats:

But I being poor have only my sorrow:

I have spread my sorrow under your feet;

Tread softly because you tread on my sorrow.

Before you say or do anything in celebration of the upsides, just be conscious that there is a bill: the loss of hundreds of thousands of lives; the deaths of precious loved ones, the loss of millions of jobs and the supplementary well-being and progress they bring to individuals, communities and economies – and a severe loss of momentum on the social and technological progress that might just accelerate humanity out of the poverty that fuels so much of what’s wrong on the planet.

In his chapter on The Environment, Pinker quotes Indira Ghandi; ‘Poverty is the greatest polluter.’

If we only look to the negative environmental impact that historic and more recent scale industrialisation brings and discard the fact that the advances inherent in these epochs have in turn raised millions out of poverty, of course we will see a doomsday scenario. 

Pinker’s book reminded me that for all the degradation and diminishments the industrial revolution and subsequent technological advances have bought [and he does not shy away from pointing to the dreadful scale of them, and equally the role of tyrannies of both the extreme left and the extreme right in escalating them], he reminds us that once the leverage of progress has lifted millions out of poverty and away from scratching a daily subsistence, they are able to raise their eyes and minds to higher-order issues and challenges that might face us not just as individuals but as a collective.

In the act of liberating millions from poverty, enlightenment stops being the exclusive preserve of a small cabal of highly-educated and righteous minds exercising the luxury of their conscience above everyone else. Enlightenment becomes democratised across millions, eventually billions, of people – and through that enlightenment comes the responsibility it brings.

The rise out of poverty allows any society to educate and enlighten those liberated millions to the positive and negative impacts of our existence, both on each other, the environment and on the planet as a whole – and it elevates and accelerates that society’s ability and capacity for making and acting upon smarter choices. There has to be some good in that.

And in regards to a point I made earlier, whether Pinker is the opposition or not, here’s a thought in regards to how we might nurture greater consideration and consciousness of others in the machine of all of this. 

Break out of your echo-chamber. Every now and then. Move away from those that celebrate the same beliefs and value systems as you and consume the same feedback loops of ‘suitable’ or relevant data that you consume. Read texts that make you feel uncomfortable; texts that hold the opposite of your belief system; texts that present research findings, insights and correlations that contradict those you usually rely on to support your beliefs – seek out the peta-flip-side to the peta-flop of big data points your echo-chamber usually feeds on.

Big Data and the feedback loops of insight and ‘truth’ it brings are the drug of Now. But this presents us with somewhat of a dichotomy. What makes one ‘truth’ right and the other wrong? Who decides?

What we trust and why is a shaded and complex thing, as Withnail’s provider of Phenodihydrochloride benzelex, Danny the Dealer points out:

Marwood: Give me a Valium, I’m getting the FEAR!

Danny: [very calmly] You have done something to your brain. You have made it high. If I lay 10 mils of diazepam on you, it will do something else to your brain. You will make it low. 

Why trust one drug and not the other? That’s politics, innit?

Why trust one ‘drug’ and not the other? Though the data point itself may be scientifically or statistically immutable and solid, it does not stop the purveyor, distributor and propagator of that data point ‘framing’ it for their own benefit and in such a way as to suit their immediate need. So for balance, and in search of illuminated self-enquiry, it pays us to see and contemplate on all sides. In doing that we might achieve a slightly more universal, humane and less partisan perspective.

You might of course align yourself with Saul D. Alinsky’s Rule for Radicals of polarity and extremity as the only way to drive transformative change. You may choose to remove any of the naturally occurring grey and revert to a black and white absolutism underwritten by the fifth rule of Ridicule and think ‘Fuck your Trumpist orange-man point of view’, in which case, enjoy your radical bully-hole. 

You might be so delighted at the evidences of nature’s ascendency that everything else can go whistle.  That’s also fine. Unlike millions of people who still live under the shadows of poverty, tyranny, ignorance and degradation, you live in a society that treasures and upholds free speech and the application of free will. So you’re free to utilise your educated, enlightened mind to think and say what you like.

And if, given all of that, you quietly and simply don’t care; and see the doomsday scenario of natural reordering and devastation required to deliver your aims as worth cheering for in the face of others sorrow, then crack on.

All I would ask is this – that you and your opposites, those who trumpet and celebrate free-market dynamics and profit while dismissing the destruction and degradation they bring on humanity, our communities and our environment as a fair price for the gain, do us all a favour:

Get a room, and leave the rest of us to try and make the best of this.   

Profit, Purpose, Evil & the realm of journalistic Uh Duh!

30 Wednesday Mar 2016

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Adam Lowry, Alinsky, Be Evil, Big Kahuna Burger, Corporation Tax, Cultural, Duh!, Economic, Environmental, Firms of Endearment, Inc magazine, Infectious Feelgood, Kevin O"Leary, Natural Capital, Passion, purpose, Resilience Strategies, Rules For Radicals, Social, Social Responsibility, Tax Evasion

 

scrooge-mcduck-swimming-in-money.jpg

Headline:  Go ahead. Be Evil.

Sub head: Do you need a social mission? Hell, no. Profit is the mission

How weird. If Inc’s leader piece in its March issue is anything to go by one might think that the jury is still out in business-land about whether profit is the only fundamental Purpose or Mission you need.

I’m thinking that perhaps they were just looking for a headline. And for that you need the polarities. A publisher’s master-class in the application of Alinsky’s Rules For Radicals perhaps. Remove the grey. Black or White. or nothing. Set Kevin O’Leary’s profit purpose against Adam Lowry’s social purpose; light blue touch-paper and see what happens. O’Leary’s blue collar good fella folksy says it the way it is ‘honesty’ versus Lowry’s campus cool, organic jaw-lined post-grad Karmic intensity.

Celebrity Purpose Smack-down. Hoo-haa.

Sadly, post reading, it all felt a little disappointing. I was expecting something incendiary. Perhaps I missed the point. To be fair I thought we’d got beyond this a while back.

Purpose is about founding and rooting a business in something beyond the balance sheet and the share price – creating a north star for it that reaches beyond the pure objective of profit. Its not about Profit OR Purpose. Double Duh! Its simply about developing a healthy and respectful relationship between the two.

Purpose is about developing resilience in a business both in social, cultural and environmental terms as well as economic ones.

Purpose is about passion, determination and belief at work in a company for good – the infectious feel-good of making shit happen both individually and collectively – and the nurturing of a centre of gravity that enables a company to absorb turbulence and short term impacts.

Purpose (social or otherwise) can have a simple premise – for example – to want to build a thriving profitable and resilient business able to relentlessly reinvest in stimulating and securing increasing and sustainable growth to create wealth, jobs and ever-improving communities is an admirable purpose.

The lever word in this is resilient. And resilience comes from not overdrawing or pillaging the sources of capital a business needs and demands to be profitable.

A company’s Social, Cultural and Environmental Capital accounts need to be as healthy as the Economic ones.

A balanced book should show the positive impact column of the business in credit even after you’ve accounted for everything in the negatives impacts column . And Purposeful businesses seem to be far better in achieving this balance.

This is nothing to do with setting up a charitable book on the business. If water depletion or obesity are negative externalities of your chosen business then you need to account for and invest in mitigating them – reductions, off sets, replenishment and prevention programmes become critical and central to your profitability accounting processes. To ignore them is to foster vulnerabilities and turbulence in the fabric of the company and in its ability to thrive.

Any ‘shareholder’ who compels or lobbies a company to ignore the business case for Purpose and the behaviours and actions pursuing it demands is in effect trying to short the company. Between lengthening a business’s odds through the relentless and passionate application of Purpose or shortening them by sustaining a myopic obsession with Pure profit, I know which one I find more ‘evil’.

Why Mr. O’Leary thinks that purposeful companies are missing the point of a business – to be profitable – I am not certain.

A quick rummage in Firms Of Endearment’s most recent stats show that companies driven by purpose and passion outperform the S&P 500 by 14 times over 15 years.

To be clear, I think we’re getting there but still have a way to go. I am certainly not advocating that every company featured on Firms of Endearment’s list of big purpose Kahuna Burgers is some scion of the Gods of Good.

A number of multi-nationals who like to be seen a Purpose driven with a clear sense of the power of Stakeholder over Shareholder modelling still seem to find a way of rationalizing very shifty profit accounting to evade stonking levels of Tax. A number of them sit on Firm’s of Endearments list of the great and the good.

How do they reconcile Endearment with almost criminal levels of tax evasion I am unsure.

Perhaps they’re a little tied up with other things at the moment.

Perhaps they just don’t agree with the simple theory that if your business’s performance, competitive advantage and increasing profitability is rooted in the quality and wellbeing of the indigenous workforce you employ, you should invest in the fiscal infrastructure of the society that creates that workforce – keeps them healthy, safe, secure and living in a stable thriving society. It’s called Corporation Tax.

Or perhaps it’s just that they are too busy passionately pursuing the intelligent, enlightened and relentless re-direction of profits for the purpose of executive redistribution.

or perhaps they’re just Evil!

(cue high fives, whoop de dooping and general chest bump, you d’Man-ing.)

 

 

 

 

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