Searching for the American Spirit
Some years ago I wrote book called American Spirit – Visions of a New Corporate Culture. It offered nine principles to guide the development of healthy and competitive cultures based on principles that I thought were distinctly American. These included the Purpose, Consensus, and Unity Principles, among others. It was adopted by Honda America Manufacturing as a foundation of their culture. One principle that they sought to live by was the Unity Principle. Accordingly they eliminated all class distinctions in dress, offices, titles, etc. Mr. Yoshino (who became President of all Honda) told me “we are all Associates, nothing more.”
Why did I think this was a principle in which American’s believed? It is simple: cultures that are growing, emerging, are integrating or unifying other people into their fold. Cultures in decline are disintegrating, breaking down into increasingly less significant parts. There is power in unity and weakness in disunity. Every general and every football coach understands that simple truth. Every effective corporate executive should be striving to create unity of people and processes within and unity with customers. The bonds of unity are the social capital of the organization and that capital is of greater value than anything found on the balance sheet.
George Washington and the Spirit of Unity
I am a student of history and value the lessons to be found in the words and lives of our Founding Fathers. George Washington was less a man of passion than a man of reason and insight. Every American should study, and I mean really study, his Farewell Address at the end of his second term as President.
The unity of Government, which constitutes you one people, is also now dear to you. It is justly so; for it is a main pillar in the edifice of your real independence, the support of your tranquility at home, your peace abroad; of your safety; of your prosperity; of that very Liberty, which you so highly prize. But as it is easy to foresee, that, from different causes and from different quarters, much pains will be taken, many artifices employed, to weaken in your minds the conviction of this truth; as this is the point in your political fortress against which the batteries of internal and external enemies will be most constantly and actively (though often covertly and insidiously) directed, it is of infinite moment, that you should properly estimate the immense value of your national Union to your collective and individual happiness; that you should cherish a cordial, habitual, and immovable attachment to it; accustoming yourselves to think and speak of it as of the Palladium of your political safety and prosperity; watching for its preservation with jealous anxiety; discountenancing whatever may suggest even a suspicion, that it can in any event be abandoned; and indignantly frowning upon the first dawning of every attempt to alienate any portion of our country from the rest, or to enfeeble the sacred ties which now link together the various parts.
Washington was passionate about this one principle of unity and he could see that the greatest threat to our country was not external forces, but internal division. He could see that division would lead to “parties” and those parties would develop a spirit that would be a cancer to the country.
One of the expedients of party to acquire influence, within particular districts, is to misrepresent the opinions and aims of other districts. You cannot shield yourselves too much against the jealousies and heart-burnings, which spring from these misrepresentations; they tend to render alien to each other those, who ought to be bound together by fraternal affection.
I have already intimated to you the danger of parties in the state, with particular reference to the founding of them on geographical discriminations. Let me now take a more comprehensive view, and warn you in the most solemn manner against the baneful effects of the spirit of party, generally.
This spirit, unfortunately, is inseparable from our nature, having its root in the strongest passions of the human mind. It exists under different shapes in all governments, more or less stifled, controlled, or repressed; but, in those of the popular form, it is seen in its greatest rankness, and is truly their worst enemy.
The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge, natural to party dissension, which in different ages and countries has perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is itself a frightful despotism.
This spirit is all too dominant in our politics and media. It has reached the point of pushing some to near insanity. One television evangelist said that he was praying for a military coup like that in Egypt to save us from what he viewed as the current despotism. Imagine the deranged mind of someone praying for a dictatorship to save us from the possibility of dictatorship!
I try to stay away from politics on this blog so I will try not to reveal bias, but we better get our heads out of the sand and think clearly about our condition. We have become insane and disloyal to our Founding Fathers when we can seriously believe that money equals free speech; or that corporations are people, both ideas that were never even imagined by our Founders and can be found nowhere in our Constitution and undermine the very meaning of democracy.
When the society is increasingly divided between the haves and the have-nots; when money buys the machines of propaganda or influence; the few will rule the many and our democracy will be lost. Democracy is not functioning when a majority of people have been led to believe in the evil nature of “Obamacare” but support something they think is good – the Affordable Care Act.
We need to have a serious conversation, not simply about the budget or the healthcare law, all of which can be improved, but about the unity of the country and the spirit of party about which we were well warned in the infancy of this nation.
Thank you for the history lesson. I have been growing more anxious about the self centeredness of our political leaders, parties, lobbyists and corporations and have been looking for a way to make the point that George Washington made.
Larry,
I agree that a conversation should be had about country unity, but we elected people to do that for us. Washington’s Farewell Address warned of “the dangers of parties in the state.” With all due respect to President Washington, I believe he omitted speaking of the root cause. Parties, in and of themselves, are not the cause of our problems today. Since we have had a party system for over two hundred years, my question is, “What has changed?” I think the real answer is “nothing much” but occasionally we experience a “perfect storm” where the pressure groups become powerful enough to threaten the principle of unity. That happened once before in the 1860’s, but we were lucky enough to have a president who believed as Washington did that unity was the highest priority. In order to have a leader, you need followers and without them the result is anarchy. Until a few years ago, when one party lost, it would allow the winning party to make some changes – knowing they would have their turn again. That hasn’t happened in the last few elections.
When Obama was elected in 2008, the Republicans said they would not compromise on anything. After the 2012 election, their strategy hasn’t changed even though Obama could no longer be a one-term president. We’re approaching a mid-term election and hopefully the people will speak and vote to remove the obstructionists. However, I do not have a lot of faith in the American people. I read some poll results that said that significantly more people are against Obamacare than are against the Affordable Care Act. In another pol, 70% (don’t quote the actual # – it was a majority) were against Obamacare and of those 80% (again, a guess) did not know what affect it would have on them or the policies it included. How can you be for or against something you don’t understand? And why don’t you find out about it?
I think the only solution lies in education, although I don’t know if we have enough time for that. An article that appeared in USA Today (10-8-13) said that the U.S. Department of Education found “that Americans ages 16-65 fall below international averages in basic problem-solving, reading, and math skills with gaps between the more- and less- educated in the USA larger than those in many other countries.”
These are the times that try men’s souls.
Larry, I agree with you wholeheartedly. This is why I am not a registered Democrat or Republican—they are equally wrong and equally corrupt. When part-time legislators become career politicians focused primarily on their re-election, when single-issue voters bring formidable pressure on those politicians, demanding, “vote my way or we will see to it that you are oustedâ€, when career politicians with enough seniority can leave congress and trade their $180k per year salaries with multi-million dollar a year payoffs as lobbyists or corporate executives, when ½ of the elected officials promise unsustainable life-time benefits to the unions in exchange for their votes while the other half trade the integrity of the financial systems with votes and money from the wall street vultures, when the free press is no longer free and operates under the shackles of ideology and shareholder demands for profits, when all of this happens, the republic is lost. Last I checked, all of this has already happened. What we need, aside from the dialogue and soul-searching you so correctly suggest, are constitutional changes that would bring about: term limits, removal of private money from politics, and mandated fiscal discipline. What are the chances of that ever happening? Zero would be an optimistic exaggeration. Frankly, this is not the country I emigrated to 40 years ago and regrettably I cannot see how it will get any better in my lifetime. I hate to be so pessimistic because it is not in my nature to be so. But I cannot see any lights at the end of this dark tunnel of disunity we have been barreling down for the past 25 years.