An earnest response

A lot of people have been bemoaning my cynicism recently.  My typical, overused retort is that “I’m not cynical, I’m realistic.”  I say “realistic” because I believe people will act consistently over time, and furthermore, that in an inconceivably complex but still comprehensible world, people’s choices – and thus their tendency to make similar choices in the future – can be extrapolated from a sufficiently large set of observations of their current state.  But I’m also willing to learn, to change, and to be disproven.  That to me is realism – or pragmatism, to use the word favored by Charles Pierce and William James.  But it consists of two parts; which I think is misunderstood, at least with me.  That is, both the observations which lead to a given set to expectations about future behavior, and the separate but just as important willingness to continue to observe, make adjustments, and throw away prior expectations, are equally important.  Viewing me through the light of one without the other misses the point.

Since I am called cynical at work most often, I’ll use a workplace hypothetical to parse this out.  Let’s say you join a large regional bank based not in a major financial center, say in Denver, and are informed that you’ll be regularly dealing with two senior leaders in the company, both members of the company’s executive committee.  One is a man named Joe, in his mid forties.  The other is a woman named Sally, in her early fifties.  You look them up on LinkedIn or ask casually about their background.  Joe has worked at two other banks in his career, both smaller banks in smaller cities, and joined the company about seven years ago, while Sally joined roughly three years ago from a large New York bank where she had a senior but non-executive role.  Both have graduate degrees, Joe from a regional college, Sally from MIT Sloan.  Both have a reputation of being ambitious, hard-charging, and extremely talented.

From this, I’d be ready for the following:

• • Joe is looking to get promoted – rapidly – as he probably was not senior enough in his prior roles to collect a big change in control payout, and he desperately wants to be minted. He’s landed in the regional large bank expecting it to either acquire other banks or be acquired, and he’s at the point where he’s senior enough to get options.  He’s not going to rock the boat but he will fiercely defend his role as he’s not brave enough to test out whether he can make it in New York or London or Toronto money center banking.
  • Sally may be looking for a promotion but she may also be looking to get back to New York. She probably felt capped out in her prior role and thus took a “sideways promotion” – that is, a bigger title at a smaller institution – in the hope of burnishing her resume to get back in the running in big leagues.
  • Both are probably desperately insecure, although for different reasons – Joe because by evidence he’s at least subconsciously aware that he’s not really top-tier talent (or else he’d have tried his luck in New York or the like), and Sally because she effectively topped out in New York. Also Sally is a bit older, and is probably conscious that she has one, maybe two upticks in her career before she’ll either be board material or retirement material.  And she’s a woman in finance and thus has been forced to be insecure because men in the industry have treated her poorly for the past twenty five or thirty years – finance is brutal to women, and that effectively trains them to be insecure.
  • Because they are insecure and have been in their respective executive roles for at least several years, they have probably assembled teams of what might be called “B-grade performers”. A-grade performers would threaten them; B-grade will get the job done but without active challenge.
  • Both are likely at best cautious allies on corporate issues which are peripheral to each, but more likely they are on coldly formal terms. Why?  Because Sally – older and with experience at more complex firms – ends up slighting Joe from time to time by a casual name drop, or a reference to an international banking issue that Joe would have no familiarity with, or the like.  This isn’t to say it’s intentional – it might be if Sally has a mean streak, but even if she’s incredibly nice, it’ll happen unintentionally and Joe will feel blood drawn.  Similarly, Joe is younger, has a longer career trajectory ahead of him, and he’s a man in a deeply biased industry – Sally might like Joe personally but he nevertheless is at the same level in a company with less time in his career.

If you made these observations to one of your new colleagues, you’d probably get the same thing I get – “That’s so cynical, Joe and Sally are both really good people, hard-working, talented” – but your reply should be the same as mine.  It’s realistic to expect all of the above characteristics because of the fact that both individuals have by observation (a) worked in financial services for a decent chunk of their lives and (b) have specific circumstances that can be mapped to the norms of that system.  You’d point out that you’re not saying that they are bad people, that they are lazy or unintelligent – indeed you’d need direct knowledge to make any personal observations – but it’s not cynical to map your own knowledge of how a certain type of person in a certain industry with which you’re intimately familiar will behave with respect to corporate politics, career management, and interpersonal relationships.

This example is entirely hypothetical – this isn’t an “only the names have changed” example.  Rather, Joe and Sally are just archetypes for “financial industry executives”.  I chose the example because the industry retains a nice hierarchy of firms – big, global complex ones; medium-sized regional ones in cities without an opera; and small, friendly ones that still exist in their thousands (in the US and Germany, anyway) which are slowly being consumed by the medium sized and big firms – and that hierarchy makes for a lively dramatic play, akin to the characters in Greek tragedy being marked by whether they come from Thebes (sophisticated) or the Peloponese (virtuous bumpkins).  I’ve worked at big and medium firms, and tried to work at small firms but they get intimidated by my resume or else I can’t find a way to make the commute to my son’s neighborhood in Seattle to work, so I have enough familiarity to draw from a rich stock of characteristic traits.

As I’ve written about before, I love the industry because it manages the system which transmits our collective concept of absolute exchange value across time, space, and individuals.  Each of us has a unique value concept (or a value “function”, which is a more math-y way of saying it and how it works in my brain), which at its core is not susceptible to language and indeed is described far more by our actions than by our speech, but we come together as a society only by building systems which exchange those concepts as we pursue goods greater than can be achieved individually or by family clans in which knowledge can be shared from birth.  Money is the purest such abstraction which embodies the collective expression of all our individual value concepts, in a society which values more basically the individual’s potential to express and feel a unique identity, and banking runs the plumbing that enables money to move around.

What everyone forgets, though, is that bankers are individuals who have unique value functions themselves.  I shouldn’t say “everyone” – but I would argue that almost everyone does forget, especially we bankers ourselves.  The system supposedly operates as a simple plumbing works which allows the users – customers all, because no one really just “has money” except central banks, and they only “have money” as kind of reservoir to keep things moving during monetary droughts – but the system is created and maintained by a subset of the individuals whom it serves.  We don’t assign roles in society to children at birth; we select our roles based on a variety of factors, some beyond our choosing (access to education as children, genetics), and some of our own volition (what is interesting to us, our values and what we find worthwhile).  So if the people who become bankers and collectively run the banking system plumbing have certain dominant traits or biases, then it’s natural to assume that the giant, collective banking system itself will bear the traces of those biases.

Collectively, individuals self-select into banking in a number of ways.  You have to at least both enjoy and thrive in complex environments; craving simplicity is a surefire way to go mad when you’re trying to help billions of individuals collectively express and exchange material value over time and space.  So that attracts relatively smarter people in aggregate than, say, are attracted to woodworking and art – and because the complexity of banking is inherently incorporeal, is inherently abstract, it also attracts fewer people who are naturally drawn to working with their hands and in the creation of physical beauty.

There is a popular mythology that bankers are greedier than most, but I find this not to be the case.  Rather, while the concept of piles of money does tend to attract a certain criminal element – much as the drug trade and politics does – the pure intellectual complexity of it means it attracts a small subset of the greedy, not the greedy en masse.  No, the greed in banking really comes just from temptation and the ordinary individual’s propensity to succumb.  If you’re around piles of money long enough – much of which is ignored by others or poorly managed or just wasted – then sooner or later most people will think “well, no one’s really noticing, why don’t I just pay myself more and charge the idiots who aren’t paying attention anyway?  Maybe if I do it enough they’ll notice and stop making bad decisions in the first place.”  It takes a huge amount of moral will to avoid that – in any setting – and in my experience not many people have been trained and maintain their own discipline to do so.

The Greek chorus is clamoring, however – indeed Viktoria is their lead and raises the cry: Is this not a cynical observation?  And I’d say no, observations – much like facts, that often-maligned term these days – are neither cynical nor idealistic nor Christian nor pagan.  They are simply observations.  What makes you cynical is the narrative you construct around your observations.

So lets go back to Joe and Sally.  I construct a narrative not to trap them within it, but to help inform my own actions when I meet with real world versions of them – both the executives, the new trainees coming to work at the bank for the first time, and my colleagues at every level in between.  I construct a narrative to initiate interaction – but as a realist, I need to then be ready to drop it in a moments notice when new observations come to light.  Diogenes in Greece and modern day cynics both fail to do this.  Diogenes used his observations as weapons against his fellow citizens, but he did so almost without purpose (or at least, that’s what we’re told – it’s rough being accusatory of anyone’s record after 2300 years).  Modern cynics take their narrative and then insert appropriate facts, and interpret alternative facts away as being minor aberrations at best, more likely outright falsehoods.

For example, Sally may be ambitious but only to become the CEO of this particular bank, because (for example) she has a personal connection with Denver because she has family there, she likes Coors Banquet Beer, she’s a lifelong Broncos fan, whatever, bless her heart.  With new information, you should change your views on many of the expectations laid out above – assuming you’re trying to be realistic and you’re not, in fact, just a jerk yourself.  She may not have been capped in her prior role; she may have just been waiting for the chance to finally get the role she wanted in Dallas.  But she still will have been a successful woman in New York finance – which means she was on the losing end of countless and frustrating incidents of unconscious and even conscious bias or harassment.  She might not be insecure in herself, therefore, but she’ll still likely have a kind of programmed sensitivity which you might well misinterpret as insecurity.  But since you’re realistic, you’re not a jerk, you’ll be aware of your own biases – whether you’re a woman or a man making the observations – and aware of your own subtle tendencies towards overestimation or underestimation of the importance of certain kinds of factors.  And that awareness will make you pause more and listen more when you encounter the kind of fact that throws off your “median” assessment of a given executive.  You’ll discard the assumptions you used to enter the interaction based on the information which proves those assumptions to be lacking.

I say “you’re a realist, not a jerk” with meaning.  I think not part but most of the incivility and breakdown in social fabric today comes from an unwillingness to adjust our expectations of the future, and instead, a willingness to remap or assume away any observations which don’t fit our expectations.  That is, pragmatism is fading from the landscape in favor of a kind of mapped reality.  We then seek out others who share our reality, instead of trying to remap our own reality to fit the observations we have at hand.  Cynics, then, are simply those whose observations are tinged towards expecting human beings to be self-serving, venal, corrupt; on the flip side are the utopians who believe we can do anything, regardless of our individual or collective histories and customs.  Pick your community based on that dimension, along with whatever identity you choose.

A friend has correctly pointed out that cynics actually start as utopians, but they are trained, beaten down by constant interaction with people who are, in fact, jerks, to the point that they not only lose optimism but they become programmed to expect the negative side of humanity.  But that just proves my point: both cynicism and utopian optimism are, to me, flavors of the same strange kind of fetishism: it raises the human ability to extrapolate patterns above our ability to recognize new patterns, and ignores the human ability to continually and recursively think in new ways.  My dog can adapt and change better than what is implied by this tendency towards an ossified set of predictive expectations – literally, as she just went on a two week training camp and came back with a whole new set of expectations and learning pathways.  She’s a dog.  If she can adapt, and change, then so can we.  But the coalescing of increasingly rigid communities – based on identities as variously described – actually defines that capability to adapt as being a problem.

I try my best not to let my expectations remain static.  I try to apply observations of the past to what happens today, but then observe the world today – both people and the world in general – on its own terms, with the same innocence with which my dog observes me working at the desk, or cooking in the kitchen, or getting dressed.  In a different way, I think that’s why I crave the presence of dogs so much – their gaze brings you back to the innocence of open observation and reminds you of a kind of physical duty to do the same in your own life, albeit with the advantage of greater memory and a more sophisticated cerebral cortex to allow for recursive challenge and temporal extrapolation.  She observes and applies lessons in a very simple, linear way; I get to do so in an expansive, multidimensional, open-ended way.  Why wouldn’t I use that capability?

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You can’t be cynical if you observe others on their own terms.  You can be hypocritical, however, if you resist allowing others to observe you in the same way.  One of the joys of having Mark and Viktoria at my house last month was the opportunity to be observed by learned eyes.  I say “joy” looking back on it; at the time, it was distinctly uncomfortable, but looking back, it’s that experience of having another skeptical but loving human being observe you – with innocence, without the lazy familiarity that can come from seeing one another every day but also without a sense of being judged – that was the best part of having them over.  Having that triangulation as well – three sets of eyes, glancing from one to the other, is much better than the steely but occasionally indifferent stare of two against one another.

As a realist, I have to face the eyes of others, as they observe me, and not be offended by their observations.  And I have to be understanding of the fact that they come with a lifetime of observations of their own, which they construct into a narrative with which they face the world, including me.  That duty comes from my own desire to do the same – how can I ask of that for myself if I don’t grant the same to others?  I can challenge their judgments – and we all judge, or to use a less loaded phrasing, we all take our observations and assess how our future interactions with the world should evolve – but I can’t fault the desire, the need to observe.

In that light, I think Viktoria has captured the creative tension between Mark, herself, and me, and captures perhaps the tension in our expression of moral philosophy that fuels our ongoing discussions.  Is there an inherent human nature which is – to be as unloaded as possible – self-interested via evolution?  Or are we evolving slowly but with time and with a clear directionality towards a better state, acknowledging that perfection is not possible in our lifetimes, let alone in this universe?  Can we directly influence society as a whole, or is there no “society” and only a loose yet overlapping landscape of communities, and how are they defined against and between each other?  Or differently again, do we make choices in a complex system which immediately dilutes the direct value of those choices to practically nothing, but adds them to the system and changes and alters all future potential outcomes beyond recognition compared to what came before the change?  How are our choices limited by history, or are they?

I don’t have any answers at hand, thankfully.  But what maybe makes me lack a community, in Viktoria’s phrasing, is just that fact.  I have observations which lead to a set of predictions for how the world will respond given a set of inputs – which is the starting point of any worldview.  But beyond that, I am particularly willing to toss out that set of predictions on the basis of new observations, and then act accordingly – including acknowledging and allowing for accountability for past actions I’ve taken on the basis of bad assumptions.  In fact, it’s more than that – I know my ability to develop a correct understanding of the world or my place in it is nil; my capacity for understanding is too limited given the depth, the richness, the majesty of the complexity of the world.  So I like trying to prove my world wrong.  I want to destroy the foundations of how I view the world today because I know that if I don’t, I’ll start getting complacent.  Thinking that I have it right is a surefire way to get it wrong.

And as a result, I don’t commit to any of my predictions in the way that would enable me to join a community – indeed communities likely sense my lack of commitment and reject me.  But how can I blame them: I do my best to not fall into the trap of belief, as a result losing any of the predictability or perceived control of my life that would come from relying on the predictive logic I’ve been given by the community or have created for myself in the act of joining a community.

There was a movie on HBO when I was a teenager that I watched in the middle of the night, trying to find soft core porn but instead becoming fixated on a random unwatched film.  The premise was that the apocalypse had occurred – the faithful had disappeared in an instant, and the lost and the unfaithful were left to battle for the end.  But there were some who resisted everything – they didn’t believe in the Beast, they rejected the faithful, they accepted that it might mean they would be lost forever.  The main character was an attractive brunette (I’ve always been a sucker for those) who in the pivotal scene told the angel who was sent to save her by her faithful, earnest, honest, pure husband… that she couldn’t believe.  Not that she believed in evil or in the opposite, but that she couldn’t believe.  She knew there was a risk in that, but it felt more honest than thinking that she could make the right decision.

It was late.  I don’t remember her fate.  But HBO in the late 80s took chances, so my guess is she ended up in limbo.  Not hell – why do people choose hell? – and not heaven – for what is heaven?  But limbo.  I can understand that.

Sorry for the aside…  I’d like to close with this: what binds the three writers on this site, I think, is our collective willingness to live in a constant state of questioning and uncertainty (although it was delightful to discover a mutual love of good food, good wine, fine art, beaches, swimming in the ocean, and other Epicurean delights).  Living with a willingness to discard prior, often hard-won, analysis leads inexorably towards finding new ways to challenge yourself, to find new observations that don’t fit well with prior data, to try constantly to disprove yourself.  For my family and those who are close to me, that’s challenging – tiring, even, to watch me go through it year after year, for forty five years now.  But any other way seems like a kind of selfish waste of the potential given by having a human mind.

I have forty five years of observations which give grounds for hope, as well as despair.  I’ve gotten pretty good at predicting behavior within the narrow world of financial services, and even in minor other spheres as well, but I know those predictions will change as new data comes in, as people, and the world, surprise me every new day.  I cherish my ability to hold my own life within me and compare it to what happens next, to expose it to critical view to others, to love and to find another day to observe.  That doesn’t sound like something a cynic would say.  Does it?