Cut through
I don’t know about you, but I’d pay attention if an elderly woman walked into a room wearing a t-shirt with this on the front: “Prejudice is an emotional commitment to ignorance”.
Meet Jane Elliott. She’s 90 soon, and still famed for her ‘blue eyes, brown eyes’ social experiment of the 1960s.
If you don’t know it, you should. Elliott was a school teacher who, the day after Martin Luther King’s assassination in 1968, asked her (all white) 3rd grade class whether they understood what it felt like to be a black boy or girl. The kids said, “No”, and she asked them whether they’d be curious to find out.
They said, “Yeah”, so she devised the following experiment.
She divided her class into brown and blue eyed children, and told them all that brown eyed children were superior in intelligence and learning ability, because of the melanin in their eyes. Guess what happened? Those deemed ‘superior’ became bossy but also performed better than they had previously in tests. The ‘inferior’ group became meek, and under-performed in tests.
Of course, the following Monday, Elliot invented a pretext in which the blue-eyed children were now superior. The cycle reversed, although with less strength, which Elliott attributed to the blue eyed group having experienced subservience first-hand.
Now, Elliott’s genius was her ability to cut through to direct experience via a social experiment. She does a much shorter version of ‘cut through’ by asking an audience of all-white people a confronting question. It’s sheer brilliance, so click the link below.
Question: What simple questions can you use to cut through and get people to engage with an issue emotionally, not just intellectually?
Reasons to not work
The ancient Egyptians built their pyramids thousands of years ago, so their culture seems very distant from ours. But, this tablet, from 1200BCE, lists absences from work which are remarkably relatable.
It contains the date, the name of the worker, and the reason for being absent. For example, on Month 4 of Winter, Day 24, a worker by the name of Pennub was absent from work because his mother was sick, and he had to take care of her.
But, here’s a select list of the others on this tablet:
Drinking with Khonsu
His daughter was bleeding
Brewing beer
Building his house
With Khons making remedies
Suffering with his eye
Embalming his brother
His wife is bleeding
The scorpion bit him
Making offerings to the gods
What strikes me is two things. Firstly, that these are pretty typical reasons people today don’t want to go to work: injury or illness, supervising home renovations, looking after a family member, or recovering from a hangover.
But, secondly and more importantly, it shows us that on a strategic level, we should recognise that we don’t employ workers, we employ people. People who live full lives when they’re not at work. People for whom that life takes precedence over work, regardless of their salary level or seniority.
Question: What accommodations does your company make for people’s full lives, outside of work?
How much equality is enough?
Recently I read - slowly - Thomas Picketty’s “A Brief History of Equality”: 244 pages of jam-packed insight. Both his earlier tomes are on my bookshelves (unread: they defeated me).
This, however, is brilliant and highly recommended to anyone who wants to understand not just how, but why, we’ve become more equal over time.
Picketty’s major point is that the march towards equality, in Western countries, has stalled. Back in the 1980s in fact. That’s when equality peaked (the richest 10% in the USA generated “only” 35% of all income in 1980; today it’s close to 50%; in Europe, the numbers are 26% in 1980 and 38% in 2020).
But, why does equality matter?
Let me quote Picketty: “The idea that there might be only winners is a dangerous and anaesthetising illusion that must be abandoned immediately”.
Like the board game Monopoly, any economic system that is, effectively, a zero-sum game (“What I gain, you lost”) is destined to political failure (upheaval by those disenfranchised), environmental catastrophe (because of disproportionate resource use) and censorship (because of dominant media systems that can be bought by commercial interests).
Question: How do you think we should build conditions for equality while incentivising merit and effort?
Let me know you’re out there reading — and taking something useful away. Just click the heart and the algorithms — and I — will be deliriously happy.
Until next Friday, pay attention to the real life conditions around you, and focus on how you can do your bit to make things better, for yourself and others around you.
Andrew
Hi Andrew,
Things that run deep we say are in our DNA, what a shame prejudice is one of them