Fear, Courage and Cults

The Foster Change Newsletter. Support for your ethical organization and purpose driven life.

This week:

Your Wake Up Call: Courage, independence, and confidence

Your Culture Hack: Don’t do what cults do

Your Real World Insight: On bullshit

Your Wake Up Call: Courage, Independence and Confidence

Understanding your own values, assessing facts, and developing independent opinions is the best defense against the onslaught of marketing, gaslighting, and “bullshit” (don’t worry, it’s a technical term), that the world is serving up to control your attention and keep you in a state of fear.

Last week I talked about getting past fear; I shared Aristotle’s observation that fear does not dictate choice. I recommended getting your prefrontal cortex back online when your brain is “on fear”— before you do anything. This is hard. It requires a pause — not comfortable. Avoiding reactivity, just functioning with your brain online, takes discipline and work. Now let’s take it a step further.

The goal isn’t just to avoid reactive behavior but to make your own decision — your best and wisest decision. This is even harder! Wisdom requires thoughful reflection — even independence. And there is social pressure on you not to be thoughtful. The pressure isn’t just coming from a few people anymore, it is coming from the algorithm, which is this funny — bizarre not laughable — group-think (everyone you know, and ever knew, plus strangers) pressure loop.

Never before have humans been subjected to such extraordinary, social and para-social pressure. The force of what others want you to think (and notice, they don’t even know why they think as they do) is operating on you each day. And you feel better when you experience the warm comfort of agreement. Being right feels good. “Belonging” feels good, even when it is cheap, shallow, and undermining. Developing your independent, thoughtful self, as you grow through life, requires understanding, effort, and discipline.

To understand better why independent thought is so rare and difficult, consider that polarized (“Us”/”Them”) thinking satisfies a basic human needs for control, belonging, and meaning. In The Psychology Behind Us vs. Them, Soren Kaplan, PhD explains that we are cognitively prone to resist thinking independently, favoring polarization. Why, when polarization seems so wrong? Because it feels good to be right, and “among friends.”

The bottom line — “Us vs. Them” thinking is easier, faster, and less stressful, short-term, than independence; it is the junk food of thinking — not good. In fact, over time, “thinking fast” does to the mind what processed junk does to the body… it destroys healthy functioning. Don’t believe me, listen to Daniel Kanheman in Thinking Fast and Slow.

Did you read that? We have an almost unlimited capacity for ignorance. That’s the baseline. We are experts at self-deception. That’s what we’re dealing with here. If we want to be independent and thoughtful, we must commit to living with complexity, paradox, and ambivalence. And we’ll probably lose some relationships along the way.

The happy news — developing your capacity for independent, clear, thinking is a (moral!) achievement. Your ego’s favorite fairytale of perfect knowledge, control and comfort must fall away for you to develop the independence necessary to be wise. Practicing staying in that challenging space is the only way. It is very painful at first, and gets less painful as you practice.

Once examination of your own beliefs becomes habitual, alignment with what is more real, and virtuous action, becomes possible. (Courage, patience, and excellence are not possible without thinking, reflection, and the rejection of self-certainty.) People don’t learn to think for themselves unless they are up for a challenge. It is far easier to slip into contagious, reactive “Us/Them” thinking.

The good news is that if you work on yourself, you make the world better. Recognizing fear, and facing it, is courageous, and courage is contagious. We mirror the behavior of others. We become like the people we spend time with. Your courage is not just for you. It helps others become better versions of themselves, too.

I love this Economist short read, even though it is really cynical on its face: Executive coaching is useful therapy that you can expense. In truth, the expense is not the biggest pain point, the vulnerability and truth telling is. The loss of your own status in the eyes of your ego driven self, is the hard part. But notice that this “status” is, and was always, a lie. By changing, you get closer to understanding the world for what it is. Coaching is the most effective way for adults to cut through their own bullshit, (this is a technical term -- please read on), to become a better version of themselves.

By the way, the people you think have this all figured out probably do not; we often mistake confidence for wisdom. Competence, especially moral competence — wisdom — is not the same as confidence. Confidence is the way a person appears to others. Wise is what a person really is. Very often confidence is just a con. It is worth remembering what the research shows, as summarized in this quick read from the Economist, The Magic and the Mindfield of Confidence. To paraphrase, “Overconfident people need guardrails, and self-doubters need encouragement to fulfill their potential.” Put that on your refrigerator. Many people who “lack confidence” are very thoughtful and able to see the real complexity in the world — and they mistake that discernment for confusion.

Your Culture Hack: On Cults, Gaslighting, and Sick Organizations

I write a lot about organizations, what makes them healthy, what makes them dysfunctional, and what can make them better. The hallmarks of healthy organizations are clear — transparency, accountability, and progress toward established goals, with U.S. public companies showing the highest standards and disciplines. Unhealthy organizations — let’s call them red flag cities — lack these basic disciplines. The upshot? In unhealthy organizations, individuals can’t work collaboratively toward established goals. If you see a parallel between individual health and healthy organizations, I do too.

The challenge for organizations is the same as the challenge for individuals; since self-deception is the norm, independence requires discipline, but within organizations, problems happen at scale. Unhealthy people are attracted by the drama and discord within unhealthy organizations, and healthy people are repelled. “Self-deception” extends to companies.

So what do unhealthy organizations feel like? How do we know when we are in one? Well, the short answer is, unhealthy organizations disable our agency. An extreme example can help us spot what happens to individuals within unhealthy organizations.

A cult is the paradigmatic example of an unhealthy organization. Cults normalize controlling behavior. (Think of the parallel with the individual. You stop yourself from being wise by acting on fear and without independence —you disable your own agency. In an unhealthy organization, you are stopped, your agency is disabled, but by others.)

Cults gaslight members in a way that is controlling and reality bending. People outside see it. People inside do not —- they don’t want to. What are the “culty” mechanisms of control?

• One charismatic, “confident” leader is in charge

• Questioning and criticism are discouraged

• The organization is the only source of truth and safety

• Gaslighting (denying what is obvious to undermine members’ own perceptions, memories, and ability to put the pieces together) reinforces control and keeps members dependent.

• Other mechanisms of control include demanding excessive commitment like long hours of service and work, controlling the flow of information, framing the world in “us” vs. “them” terms, punishing dissent, and rewarding loyalty.

• Identity is redefined by cults. You cannot leave without losing your friends and what matters most to you.

Unhealthy organizations cultivate cult-like behavior, fostering dependence. They do not foster independence, courage, and healthy agency among individuals. (This makes no sense because it is contrary to the goals of getting anything done, but it happens all the time. If you are looking for rationality, pick another world.)

If your organization has any of these signs, it is time to get out — or get to work — by developing your own independence.

If you see control issues in your organization, you have my encouragement to disrupt them. Sometimes you can do this without losing your job. Some ideas — invite people you disagree with to explain what they think. Point out punishments for truthtelling. Notice rewards for compliance. Free discussion and constructive disagreement alone can lay the foundation for organizational health. It starts with seeing what is true.

Your Real World Insight: Cutting Through Bullshit

As Harry Frankfurt writes in his little red book on the subject, originally published in 2015, “One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit.” Bullshitting, defined as “indifference to the truth” is a very specific form of distraction and control.

Frankfurt defines bullshit very precisely, and at great length, as philosophers are prone to doing, as expressions that are “phony.” In short, bullshit is “[speech] produced without concern for the truth.”

Gaslighters do bullshit, but they also lie, and sometimes they tell the truth, but not (ever) on purpose, because they do not care about any of that. Bullshitting is a very specific practice that depends on a complete disregard for the truth. This is hard for people who care about honesty (most of us) to spot, because it confuses us. We generally communicate to exchange information we believe to be true. That’s fairly essential to the social contract. Sometimes we lie. We recognize this as wrong. Lies “work” because most of the time, people tell the truth. This is the whole spectrum of rational behavior for most of us. Bullshitters take it a step farther. They don’t care one bit why we are communicating, they have their own agendas. They are neither concerned with lying nor with telling the truth — they are only concerned with getting what they want.

From my point of view, “bullshit” is hardly a strong enough word for what the bullshitter does. It sounds playful, which bullshitters are not. “Sociopathic communicator” or just “sociopath” is more apt. Bullshitters are either playing a game with other bullshitters, as politicians do when they posture with one another, or they are freeriders on our practices of truth telling, confusing us in order to get what they want.

Since there is nothing more real world than real estate, let me illustrate the concept of “bullshit” with an example from the real estate world. A recent convening of real estate leaders in Washington, DC included an admonition from a public official not to forget that “public officials who support measures to increase affordable housing through rent control are being courageous” in trying new things. There was a collective gasp.

Every developer, investor, and real estate expert I have ever spoken with about rent control shares the strong view that rent control measures do not actually increase affordable housing (not beyond the lucky few that get into rent controlled buildings — and usually stay.) So that is not true. It is well known not to be true. No one is courageous who proposes a false solution. [There is plenty of data showing why it doesn’t work. Our whole system of real property works only on the capitalist premise that capital invested can realize value in the marketplace based on what people will pay for it. Supply and demand. Rent control shortcircuits this free market mechanism. ] Imposing arbitrary price caps reduces the real value of the asset, harming the owner and creating a huge disincentive to investment. If there is no profit (aka no living) to be made, then there will be no investment and no development. Far from being a possible solution, rent control makes things much worse.

 It is hard to believe that any public official really thinks that rent control works when all the evidence shows that it does not. This looks like pure bullshit.

And by the way, since I can’t stand bullshit — as a matter of fact— the only way to increase the stock of affordable housing in our country is through public private partnerships that allow developers to realize enough profit to build housing that people, in turn, actually want to live in. This is not simple, it requires work, will, and change, most notably changes in zoning, permitting, and approval processes, as well as community education. Real solutions are complex. Since this is not what people want to hear, what they get is bullshit.

Bullshit thrives where people do not challenge stories that are too good to be true, or obviously false, ridiculous, or just plain contrary to experience.

If you like reading dense, philosophical texts, this is the shortest one ever! I highly recommend Harry Frankfurt’s wonderful book, On Bullshit, originally published in 2015, with an anniversary edition out this year.