Humility

Third in a series on Relational Business from our colleague Glenn McMahan in Brazil.

If you have kids you’ve watched this scene play out a hundred times. A fight over a toy emerges because one thinks the other is being unfair. The “victim” aggressively grabs the toy. Now there is another “victim” who feels he must defend himself. This generates a volley of verbal abuse. That evolves into fisticuffs and bloody lips.

Then you, the almighty judge, arrive to see what has happened. The children are bleeding and crying and trembling with anger. You ask, logically, “What happened?” Suddenly, each child proclaims total innocence. A cascade of blame fires like cannon balls between them. The other kid started it. The other kid hit harder. All retaliation was justified. No child assumes responsibility.

Underlying their staunch defense of innocence and moral superiority is the universal presence of human pride. It lurks beneath the surface of every relationship. Like an ocean’s undertow, you can’t see it, but it gets you in its grip and pulls you away from shore.

Pride leads to devastating outcomes in relationships. One of the main consequences is that pride prevents us from learning and growing after mistakes. Casting blame, which is one expression of pride, is a refusal to admit wrong and therefore an unwillingness to learn and grow.

For a good example, look at what transpired between congressional leaders and corporate executives in the immediate fallout from the economic crisis.

Richard Fuld, CEO of the now bankrupt Lehman Brothers, appeared recently before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. I read Mr. Fuld’s written statement to the congressional panel and it is little more than an effort to deflect blame onto other entities and economic factors. Fuld portrayed himself as a victim, caught off guard by unforeseen market forces.

Fuld blamed “a lack of confidence” in the markets (this is a consequence, not a cause), naked short selling, lack of regulation against naked short selling (the fault of Congress), and an antiquated regulatory regime (again, the fault of Congress). He also talked about the lifetime of pain he will feel as a result of the bankruptcy. He did admit that he would have made other decisions, now that he has the benefit of “hindsight.”

On October 7, the chairman of this panel, Henry A. Waxman, returned the favor, placing all the blame on corporate executives, including AIG’s leaders.

“In each case, the companies (AIG and Lehman Brothers) and their executives grew rich by taking on excessive risk. In each case, the companies collapsed when these risks turned bad. And in each case, their executives are walking away with millions of dollars while taxpayers are stuck with billions of dollars in costs,” Waxman said. “The AIG CEOs are like the Lehman CEO in one other key respect: in each case, they refuse to accept any blame for what happened to their companies.”

While we’re at it, I could talk about how many economists now blame former Federal Reserve chief Alan Greenspan because he promoted investments in derivatives (despite warnings over the past 15 years)…or  about Hugo Chavez, who blames the entire Capitalist system (even though most of his nation’s wealth comes from American oil consumption).

All this blaming is, at the core, not much different than a childish fight — only now the toy is worth trillions of dollars. It is nothing more than prideful human nature dressed in sophisticated political and economic garb. Not only does it perpetuate divisions, it increases the difficulty of fixing the problem, and it reduces our ability to learn and grow from our mistakes.

What we need is humility (dare I use the word repentance?). Humility is the cornerstone character trait necessary for all relationships. If our nation and its leaders had been more humble, those leaders would have listened to the warnings, they would have avoided greedy and speculative investment practices, and they would have given better regulatory oversight.

Now that the damage is done, humility will be required to help us all learn from this situation and work together to remedy past errors. It is easy — and sometimes justified — to criticize and cast blame, but this time there is more than enough to go around. The question is: Who will be strong and humble enough to embrace their part of the responsibility.

No one has addressed this more plainly than Alexander Solzhenitsyn in the account of his imprisonment in The Gulag Archipelago:

It was granted to me to carry away from my prison years on my bent back, which nearly broke beneath its load, this essential experience: how a human being becomes evil and how good. In the intoxication of youthful successes I had felt myself to be infallible, and I was therefore cruel. In the surfeit of power I was a murderer, and an oppressor. In my most evil moments I was convinced that I was doing good, and I was well supplied with systematic arguments. And it was only when I lay there on rotting prison straw that I sensed within myself the first stirrings of good. Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either—but right through every human heart—and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained. And even in the best of all hearts, there remains . . . an uprooted small corner of evil. — The Gulag Archipelago, Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2002 edition, page 312

The core problem is pride. The cracks in our world stem from a rift in human character, yours and mine.

Glenn McMahan is a frequent contributor to InsideWork from his home Brazil. Glenn the author, with David Russ and Jim Petersen, of More Than Me: The 4 Essentials of Relational Wholeness.