Just Ask Questions!

Young Abraham Lincoln was bumping along a muddy, rutted road in a carriage. Lincoln was a guest of future U.S. senator Edward Baker (when young Lincoln was with the landed gentry, it was always as guest.) In conversation, Lincoln remarked that all men are motivated by selfishness. They saw an old sow squealing in agony. Her piglets were mired and drowning in mud. Lincoln startled, “Driver, can’t you stop?” Lincoln ran back, trudged through the mud, muck, and slop to and ferry the piglets to their mother. When he returned an amused Baker prodded a muddy Lincoln, “now Abe, where does selfishness come in on this little episode?” Lincoln spoke to the Ages, “Why, bless your soul, Ed, that was the very essence of selfishness. I should have had no peace of mind had I left that suffering old sow crying over her piglets. I did it for peace of mind, don’t you see?” ”No person shall… be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself,” — Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution

I connected the dots on something today! I should have done it earlier. You’ll have to excuse me, I’m a little slow.

I ask questions. I want to know big things and seemingly small details about the packaging materials we use. A lot of customer wellbeing is in the small, unseen chemistry of a product. Before bringing a product to you we will know if it contains chemical compounds that are harmful to you, your natural world, or profitable recycling. Remember, profitable recycling is the only reliable recycling.

As a general rule ninety percent of what happens to a product after use is in the hands of the manufacturer. By the time a product is in the customer's hands the course is set. The customer cannot alter material realities. No amount of customer washing and sorting will make plastic recyclable in meaningful amounts. No washing or wishing will remove persistent industrial pollutants.

To set good outcomes in motion you must first know. That means you must be A) all-seeing, or B) ask questions. Being all-seeing would be easier. Company reps usually don’t like to field questions. I get snippy replies. Mostly, I just get silence. My questions hit topics for which companies are commercially and, perhaps in time, legally liable. No wonder there is a culture of carefully guarded and willful silence.

For my peace of mind I must ask the difficult questions and hold the line for better outcomes. I wrote this to a supplier the other day- “To advocate people compost this I must know. People grow their food in compost. I need this to be okay with me. It doesn't matter if the customer knows. I know. And that is enough.”

What are the reasons for this culture of silence? In my experience you stand to lose things–friends, partners, advocates, professional stature. You could lose employment. People face painful consequences for doing the right thing. Worse, corporate organizations compartmentalize truth. Scientists know. But they are thwarted and cordoned off from salespeople. Salespeople eagerly sell persistent industrial pollutants for single-use applications. To borrow from Upton Sinclair, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”

The Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution reads, “No person shall be… compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself,” Basically, refusal to answer questions cannot be used as evidence of guilt. There is no Fifth Amendment in packaging. Given the culture of sly dishonesty, if you refuse to answer a question I presume the premise of my question is substantially true. It’s a prudent assumption.

The funny thing that enables bad packaging is that the harms are inscrutable. Medical science cannot trace the origins of cellular damage and the courses it takes. Our diagnostic ability is not that precise. So keep silent. If these compounds are a problem the customer will never know our part of the problem.

In defense of people who just play it cool, the sanctions are real. They are hard on a soul to endure. I endured because I have the grace of a bee and the financial independence she affords. She kept body and soul together. I have the soul sustenance of a loving family.

There is another possibility for the dominance of the culture of silence–the ascendence of amoralism. To some people money is the goal. How money is earned is not important. The flaunting, the bling, the exclusion of the other is important. That ethic, or no ethic at all, seems ascendant in our land.

I don't have the right to choose known harms for you. Assuming that right tramples on you. It runs afoul of the Golden Rule–to treat the other person as I’d have them treat me. I have no right to harm you or your world. I have no right to contribute a small amount to a big problem. Plastic is that.

In Power of the Powerless, Czech playwright, dissent and elder statesman Vaclav Havel tells a story of how authoritarianism turns all but a few into agents of its perpetuation. “[They adapt] to the conditions in which they live, but in doing so, they help to create those conditions. They do what is done, what is to be done, what must be done, but at the same time—by that very token—they confirm that it must be done… They conform to a particular requirement and in so doing they themselves perpetuate that requirement… Quite simply, each helps the other to be obedient… They are both victims of the system and its instruments.”

I think Havel’s insight applies broader, to culture. In affirming culture, we perpetuate culture.

I dissent for better, healthier innovation. Capitalists always prattle on about how good they are at innovating. Do what you say you are good at doing! Don’t get beat by someone who has answered for the whole of his life’s decades to “the dumb kid/beekeeper.” That would be embarrassing.

Let’s end with an aside.

People sometimes make fun of me for trying to anchor my actions in high principles. But why not try to anchor conduct in high principles? What are the downsides? I can be a butthead but that is my failing, not a failure of principle. We delivered something good and scalable without any of the privileges common to big business. Imagine how much a nobody gets chewed up, spit out, and booed off stage for asking meaningful but uncomfortable questions. I do not get back up without the peace of mind of high principles and the example of the people who lived them.