The Ten Commandments for Business Failure - Don Keough [51]
In fact, even early television news was relatively short and fairly easy to digest. Not so now. We are bombarded into a mood of extreme despair over even the most inconsequential issues.
We are thrill seekers obsessed with safety.
There are warning signs explaining that this toaster is not a bath toy. Warning signs in hotels saying THE CALIFORNIA DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH HAS DETERMINED THAT THIS BUILDING WAS CONSTRUCTED WITH MATERIALS THAT COULD BE HAZARDOUS TO YOUR HEALTH. WELCOME TO THE MARRIOTT.
In the 2007 Wacky Warning Label Contest first prize was earned by the warning label on a small tractor: DANGER: AVOID DEATH!
Just look at children these days. It’s almost as though they wear helmets to get out of bed. They are knee protected, elbow protected, car-seat enshrouded, so cocooned that they can’t even look up at the sky.
In his book State of Fear, Michael Crichton said he was confronted with a terrible dilemma when on the same day he read that beer was a preservative of heart muscle and a carcinogen.
To top it all off, Chris Goodall, the British author of How to Live a Low-Carbon Life and a prominent member of the Green Party, brings us the bleak news that if we walk to the store three miles away we create more CO2 than if we drive because we have to eat in order to walk and raising the food consumes so much energy that—the point is, the only solution to global warming is that we all sit in dark rooms, with the TV and refrigerator unplugged and the air-conditioning off, doing nothing and eating nothing.
Pessimism: The Tyranny of the Past
John Bogle, founder of the Vanguard Funds, pointed out that many of us have a “rowboat” mentality. We move forward into the future the way we row a boat—facing backward, looking only at the past.
Everyone engages in a little nostalgia now and then. There’s nothing like time to put a shine on even some of the most tarnished moments in history. It’s human nature to remember the good and forget the bad, and we should be thankful for our memory lapses.
It’s also human nature to look askance at the younger generation. Saint Augustine, Aristotle, Homer, even the ancient Assyrians, have in their time condemned young people for not respecting their elders, for being lazy, for being unruly and behaving not like people did “in the good old days.”
It is alarming to read, “More than eleven-twelfths of the children in our schools do not understand the meaning of the words they read.” That could have been written yesterday, but in fact it was written by Horace Mann in 1838. As Will Rogers said more than fifty years ago, “The schools are not as good as they used to be, but they never were.”
A little nostalgia is harmless. Unfortunately, there are some people who truly love Bogle’s rowboat and they never get past the past. The past is more or less known, more or less vaguely understood, and, therefore, for some, it is a much more comfortable place to live than the present and certainly more comfortable than the future. For such people their pessimism is truly a burden because they believe, deep down, that progress is really impossible—nothing is better than it was and nothing is going to get better. There is example after example of fear of the future leading to failure and the viruses of fear hover around business every day.
Obviously, I believe fervently in the modern philosophical idea of progress itself. We are definitely not doomed to repeat the lives of our peasant ancestors. Just look what’s happened in the last century.
Around 1900 the average life expectancy in the United States was forty-seven. At that time everything we consumed was organic. The average workingman made four hundred dollars a year. We’d had a president, McKinley, assassinated in 1901. American society was then, as it always has been, in a tumultuous state. Yet people kept pouring into the country from all