Using a Mirror and Not a Window
How do you view the world?
“People decline in energy as they advance in years. Some make up with experience and wisdom what they have lost in vitality and agility. But at all ages people commonly mistake the mirror for the window.” - Management professor and former editor of the Harvard Business Review Theodore Levitt
It’s easy to mistake the mirror for the window when we associate solely with people who share our world view. I know of people who have a very racially and ethnically diverse set of friends who all think alike.
A common characteristic of those otherwise kind and intelligent people is to assume that anyone with their level of education and exposure to the world must share their opinions on major issues. That narrow scope provides a very distorted view of reality.
Unlike the days when people could have genuinely open discussions on sensitive political issues and still part as friends, the tendency to demonize the opposition produces blow-back on its practitioners.
The result is that they dwell in gated communities of the mind. Pick a political issue and it is disturbingly easy to predict where they fall in the spectrum of Right to Left. That problem has been exacerbated due to social media.
Cancel culture, a social media feature that is still bubbling on college campuses, has infected decision-makers. We can see its most extreme examples in Europe.
The recent 60 Minutes interview with the German police officials who smiled and joked while describing their efforts to squelch unacceptable opinions was chilling enough. The additional stories out of Britain citing cases where people were jailed for their viewpoints are right out of George Orwell’s nightmares.
There is an international “As We All Know” movement in which matters are deemed to be settled and beyond debate, but the United States seems to have a particularly strange version. Whereas the European cancel culture power-mongers operate with a smugness which must be a job requirement for high office in the European Union, their American colleagues view themselves as outsiders, bold rebels who are one step away from oppression despite holding a controlling position in key areas of influence throughout American society.
It reminds me of a 1965 panel at Princeton which featured – and I envy the audience – Realist magazine editor Paul Krassner, German novelist Günter Grass and American journalist and novelist Tom Wolfe. The discussion swerved into the issue of fascism in America and police repression. Tom Wolfe appeared to be the sole dissenting voice until Grass, hardly a conservative, made a memorable contribution:
“For the past hour, I have my eyes fixed on the doors here. You talk about fascism and police repression. In Germany when I was a student, they come through those doors long ago. Here they must be very slow.”
Wolfe later wrote about Grass’s observation: “He sounded like Jean-François Revel, a French socialist writer who talks about one of the great unexplained phenomena of modern astronomy: namely, that the dark night of fascism is always descending in the United States and yet lands only in Europe.”
Those who issue the direst warnings about American society may be looking at our nation through a mirror. The good news is that they are wrong.