That Which We Are, We’ve Forgotten
dbking, CC BY-SA 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
Back when I was designing trading-card products for a living and all the world was fresh and new, I worked with a product manager named Sherry Wallace. Sherry was whip-smart, funny and honest, and we hit it off right away.
Time passed in the lightning way time does, and we went our separate ways – Sherry into academia, working in high-level positions with the business school at the University of North Carolina, and me into that phase of my career that resembled a pinball game with a fine furniture top. From a distance it looked like a coffee table, but underneath it was a fury of bells and flashing lights and being propelled from comic-book character to college student without a lot of planning or forethought.
We reconnected a couple of weeks ago, and it was a fine thing. But as we were catching up and talking about current events – because we’re the type of friends who can talk about current events fearlessly and cogently – Sherry said something that really cut to the heart of it.
“I grew up in the ‘60s,” she said, “and I thought we had moved past all this.”
Not a day earlier, I had said the same thing to my wife. I grew up in the ‘60s, and it feels like we’re going through it all over again, like we hadn’t learned a thing.
I can’t think of a sadder, more damning thing to say than that: We went through all that anger, anguish and pain so we could make ourselves better, and we forgot it all, and we didn’t advance one bloody inch.
The George Santayana School of Marketing
One of my favorite marketing tropes is the George Santayana School of Marketing – you know, those who don’t remember the past are condemned to repeat it. We see it a lot in marketing, and it’s simultaneously funny and stupid, and we laugh about it and promptly forget we laughed about it, all so we can do it again and laugh about it again and forget all about it and so on.
You can get away with having a short memory in marketing because it’s just a new batch of some company’s money you’re throwing down the same old hole.
But it quits being fun when you hurt someone. And it becomes frightening and dangerous when you hurt millions, the way we have in America.
America has forgotten the basic lessons of its past.
All people have value.
All lives are precious.
All souls deserve to be nurtured.
Fascism is bad.
Democracy is a precious right.
The earth is finite.
Our time is limited.
We have a moral obligation to leave our children a better world then the one we inherited.
These seem unforgettable, hardwired into our DNA. But apparently all it took was a couple generations of something masking as evolution (indolence, probably) for us to forget the core principles of the world’s greatest democracy.
The Four Freedoms
We’re in the midst of a multilevel crisis the likes of which we haven’t seen since World War II, and because that war has somehow become part of that huge chunk of the past we seem to have forgotten, let me set the scene.
It’s January 1941. The United States has not yet entered the war, but everyone, pacifists and warmongers alike, can see it’s not far off. America is still trying to shake the lingering effects of the Great Depression. Neofascists like the America First movement have been gaining traction and some high-profile converts, like celebrity aviator Charles Lindbergh.
President Franklin Roosevelt, in his State of the Union message, outlines four fundamental freedoms everyone in the world should enjoy:
Freedom of speech;
Freedom of worship;
Freedom from want; and
Freedom from fear.
Roosevelt goes on to say, “That is no vision of a distant millennium. It is a definite basis for a kind of world attainable in our own time and generation. That kind of world is the very antithesis of the so-called new order of tyranny which the dictators seek to create.”
The Four Freedoms were almost universally accepted. They were even turned into Norman Rockwell paintings (which were the olden-days version of memes, but with lower kitten usage) and once the United States entered the war they became a sort of shorthand for why we were fighting.
The Four Freedoms were created in an imperfect country where people of color were routinely denied the right to vote, and other forms of intolerance were commonplace. But as a country, we believed we could be better, more just, more tolerant, more benevolent, and kinder – and it was our duty to move in that direction.
In fact, if we had to fight and die for it, in a distant jungle or on faraway mountains, we were willing to do it.
So where are we now with those universally accepted pillars of what it means to be a human being in the United States?
The Trump Administration is trying to impose censorship restrictions on social media through modification of Section 230 of the Communications Act.
Muslims and other non-Christians are being attacked and vilified, right here in the United States, for their religious beliefs.
The gap between the haves and the have-nots has never been greater, and the current administration seeks to make it greater still.
People of color live in fear of police brutality, families coming to country looking for a better life live in fear of being separated and placed in concentration camps, and a citizenry lives in fear of not being able to exercise its most basic right in a democracy – the right to vote.
I thought we had moved past this.
I thought we had some basic agreements on the Four Freedoms, on our willingness and our obligation to move, like the old hymn says, from light into light.
I guess not. I guess that the George Santayana School of Marketing has a public-policy counterpart.
If that is really (and sadly) the case, then let this be your reminder.
Fascism is still evil and pernicious.
Intolerance destroys societies.
Democracy needs to be defended, from external and internal threats.
Vote suppression is alive and well, and still illegal.
The Four Freedoms are still an ideal worth striving for.
A free press is truly the defender of a just society.
(To that end, I have a plan to revive local journalism. It’s profitable, it’s sustainable, and it can work. Watch this space for more.)
I thought we had moved past this but we haven’t, and those of us who remember now have to take up the old armor. Like Tennyson’s Ulysses, “We are not now that strength which in old days/Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are/One equal temper of heroic hearts/Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will/To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.”
In marketing and in life, those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it. So take a moment in these next couple of days and remember. Remember that all people are created equal, that fascism is the enemy, that this land is your land, and that we once agreed on these things.
Then go vote.
And if you think this has nothing to do with marketing … well, that’s one more thing that’s been forgotten and needs to be remembered.