82. Moral Curiosity 🔗
September 22, 2021
In which I distinguish moral curiosity from moral clarity — arguing that genuine leaders experiment at scale with moral questions rather than issuing manifestos, and that the DNA of any top-level leader is a specific ordering of tech, money, and moral curiosities.
🔗
I'll take moral curiosity over moral clarity any day. Moral self-certainty is a sort of willful self-blinding in a complex world.
🔗
Rants are interesting. I think self-righteous rants are an example of self-blinding moral "clarity"
But chaotic ones like Lewis Black's comic rants have a streak of authentic moral curiosity to them.
But chaotic ones like Lewis Black's comic rants have a streak of authentic moral curiosity to them.
🔗
My rule of thumb is -- if a rant is coming from a posture where you clearly see yourself as a morally superior being to whatever you're talking about (even if you do some false-humility moral self-deprecation), your whole rant is suspect.
🔗
Moral curiosity is unmistakeable in the business world. It manifests as people being genuinely more curious about moral questions (what does it mean to be/do good) than financial questions (how does money work at such and such scale).
🔗
It's not that that they're more interested in doing good than making money, but they're more curious about the mysterious of moral mazes than the mysteries of money.
🔗
Both money and morality are endlessly interesting and take on entirely new characters at each new scale. "How does money work" is a different question at $100k/year than at $1B/year. "What does it mean to do good" is a different question at 1:1 scale than at 1:billion scale.
🔗
Most corporate ethics theater reflects a condition where moral questions have been relegated to middle management. They're simply not being really thought about at all above a certain scale. Money though, is usually thought about all scales.
🔗
Truly morally curious leaders tend to run experiments to explore moral dimensions of their orgs at the largest scales they can, in ways that might even cost money -- which they then use their political/charismatic capital to force through.
🔗
By contrast, manifestoes, B-corpism, "percent of profits to this cause"... all that is a sign that there is zero moral curiosity in the C-suite, only moral self-certainty.
🔗
One reason I tend to pretty much entirely ignore moralizing criticism of big companies of the sort I work with is that the criticisms typically come from people who are themselves morally incurious at any scale, and have locked into certainties at a small scale.
🔗
If they have experience with big orgs and large-scale morality dynamics at all (rare), it is as failed mid-level types. Which is not an ad hominem, but not irrelevant data either.
🔗
Their failures may or may not have to do with failure to scale moral curiosity alongside other traits required to wield power and agency at the highest levels of big orgs.
🔗
The usual cope is to conclude that everybody who has more success than them is an immoral sociopath, and that they failed due to their piety. Umm. A little digging usually reveals this to be untrue.
🔗
Definitely a lot of naked sociopathy and adverse selection on the way to the top, but there's enough live player moral curiosity as well that it is a mistake to conclude that all big orgs are entirely run as cynical extraction machines and power trips.
🔗
This is somewhat the case in Wall Street, but not usefully true elsewhere. You'll end up mis-analyzing most large orgs if incentives/profits/power are the only lenses you use. The moral postures, self-awareness, and curiosities C-suite people bring to the party affect outcomes.
🔗
I only recently realized this, but looking back at my consulting history, I've never actually worked for a leader with zero moral curiosity. Which is actually very surprising because my primary lead-gen is from blog posts that are effectively paeans to amoral sociopathy.
🔗
True moral vacuum type people are
a) surprisingly rare at the top
b) typically concentrated in finance or very financialized businesses (PE turnaround cos are snakepits)
c) accumulating a huge psyche toll that blows up at some point like a time bomb
a) surprisingly rare at the top
b) typically concentrated in finance or very financialized businesses (PE turnaround cos are snakepits)
c) accumulating a huge psyche toll that blows up at some point like a time bomb
🔗
I make a distinction between generalized criticism and "defense of the little guy" criticism. The latter is a solid place to put a stake in the ground. Liberal democracies only work if enough people prioritize individual rights and welfare as their moral project.
🔗
It's also an excellent way to tell principled moral curiosity at small scale apart from lazy ressentiment. The defenders of the little guy will go after very specific issues in specific ways. The ressentiment driven ones will punch randomly anywhere they sense an opening.
🔗
Tech companies add a third dimension to the money-curiosity/moral-curiosity design space. There is such a thing as raw tech curiosity, which typically is more fundamental where it exists at all, because it tends to subvert existing moral AND financial notions.
🔗
Elon I think is genuinely in this bucket in a way almost no other highly visible leaders are.
The DNA of any top-level leader is some ordering of curiosities. Elon is tech > money > morality.
The DNA of any top-level leader is some ordering of curiosities. Elon is tech > money > morality.
🔗
Failures happen when you're not smart enough to actually deliver results in your preferred order. If you (costly) signal tech > money > morality, but deliver money > tech > morality, you'll bleed leaderly agency.
🔗
Facebook's existential dilemma is that it costly-signals tech > money > morality, cheap-signals morality > money > tech, but has actually failed to do truly interesting tech in the last decade in proportion with its reputation and costly signals.
Interesting rant, though I don’t agree with it. I think Facebook is a Hanlon’s razor company. Those who leave believe it is malicious. Those who stay (like me), believe it is incompetent. In a specific way — the product side isn’t strong enough to resist capture by the ads side. https://t.co/UgvO4vQUxL
🔗
By contrast, Google, even though it has kinda degenerated into a comfy bureaucracy, and failed to make money outside its core search/ads business, has consistently signaled its tech-powerhouse priorities and capabilities.
🔗
Okay, this is turning into a chaotic rant in its own right, and I should move this to Roam and develop more carefully into a newsletter or blog 🤣