Anti-Social Facebook Managers Addicting Children on Social Media

Rowan Williams, formerly Archbishop of Canterbury, spoke out repeatedly on the innate social nature of human beings. Before we can talk, we are talked to. Social interaction is firmly rooted in human nature as well as how we are constituted in groups and societies. Whereas Williams called for more compassion to emerge out of our social nature, a political realist might point out that we don’t have to look very closely to find a power-dynamic existing in practically any group. Nietzsche argues in Genealogy of Morals that exploitation naturally exists in how we as a social species are constituted because the will for power is the strongest human instinct. This motive can operate stealthily as compassion and even altruism. The Jansenist priest, Pierre Nicole, wrote an essay in 1677 to point out that what we moderns call enlightened self-interest is nonetheless rooted in self-love even when it is extended in acts of compassion that appear to spring solely from other-regard. On August 26, 2026, a landmark settlement was announced to end a trial in which 47 U.S. member states sued Meta, which owns and operates Facebook. Regardless of whether Meta executives agreed to pay $17 billion just to get rid of the bad publicity or because the accusations were true, the dollar figure alone suggests that Facebook’s management had indeed been intending to manipulate children by addicting them to feeds.  In other words, the company had been short on compassion even under the rubric of social media. Nietzsche would not have been at all surprised at such power being played to extract value from human beings under stealth.

Speaking on the settlement, Virginia Attorney General Jay Jones said, “For years, Meta intentionally deceived the public about the addictive and harmful design features that have wreaked havoc on youth mental health.”[1] The design features, such as unlimited “scrolling” and “likes,” were intentionally put in place to addict kids; that did not come about as an unintended by-product. Although Meta was not required to admit guilt formally, it is reasonable to assume that a business would pay such a hefty penalty as $17 billion were there not something to the case against the company in terms of evidence even of intent. So besides protecting “children from online harm,”[2] the settlement has value societally in exposing the intent to addict at the detriment of even children. The operative perspective at Facebook was likely one oriented to viewing humans for our use-value alone.

It is no accident that extracting use-value from human beings was part of a secret seminar at Stanford University. Also in 2026, Theo Baker, a student at Stanford, publicly exposed the seminar, which was being taught by Justin Lewis-Weber, a CEO in Silicon Valley. In his book, How to Rule the World: An Education in Power at Stanford University, Baker reports that the course explicitly taught students how to extract value from people. Gaining utility from people without regard to how they are impacted, whether mentally or physically, stems from self-love manifesting narrowly as selfishness even if under the subterfuge of helping children to be more social with their peers. In other words, the students were learning manipulation tactics that could be used under the subterfuge of altruism. Phoebe Gates, founder of Phia, used the course to recruit employees. In 2026, wire fraud charges were filed against that company.

The upshot from all this is that the public (and elected representatives) knew very little of the sordid mentality underlying Meta’s corporate culture; even just from the $17 billion settlement we can only infer guilt because why else would a company agree to settle at such a cost? Many years earlier, Facebook had been found to have sold user-information to Cambridge Analytic, a political organization, but that was treated as a “one off” rather than as indicative of the way Facebook executives actually did business—and Facebook (or Meta) is a business; it is not social even though its industry is social media.

In terms of business ethics, intentionally or even unintentionally but continuing to addict young users of Facebook and Instagram violates Kant’s “kingdom of ends,” wherein rational beings are (ethically) to be treated not just as means (to one’s own self-interest), but also as ends in themselves. It is by the use of reason, Kant argues, that we assign value to things, so reason itself must have absolute value. A being that has reason thus has absolute value and should not be used merely as a means. This does not exclude using other people for one’s own ends, but this should not be the end of the matter, for other people should also be treated as ends in themselves. Addicting kids does not fall under “ends in themselves,” and so Meta can be held to have acted unethically. As much as business ethics focuses on ethical decision-making, ethical theories provide the real grist for the mill. Furthermore, the continuing negative impact of corporate culture is very relevant, as the case of Enron illustrates (e.g., “burn baby burn.”).  Even a highly squalid (ethically speaking) corporate way of doing business can be hidden from the public and regulators, and managers can dismiss ethical concerns very easily. So as in the case of Facebook (Meta), an episodic approach is typically assumed by external stakeholders; connecting the dots would take more effort and insight into the way corporate decisions are really being made.

Finally, we can pause for a moment to glance at the sheer pathos of distance that exists between Williams’ claim that the inherently social human nature can easily afford being more compassionate and the selfish addicting of kids at Facebook. Religion and business management seem to be disparate domains, and the easy compartmentalization by business managers who identify themselves as Christian renders the separation all too ubiquitous. The distinctively Christian divine command of love as universal benevolence, especially to outsiders and even enemies as selfless (or self-in-abeyance) compassion, runs counter to the firm-centric perspective and profit-centric rubric in business. The contrast is so distinct, even severe, that it is no surprise that business practitioners who self-identify as Christian have resorted to compartmentalizing their work from even themselves as human beings. The statement, “I’m a manager,” supports the construction of a “manager compartment,” but look at the underlying assumption: that a person’s essence is solely a matter of one’s functionality. It is easy to extend from this perspective to viewing social-media users solely in terms of their functionality, and thus use-value, as if value is a function of use.

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1. Barbara Ortutay and Kelvin Chan, “Meta Reaches $17 Billion Settlement with States in Landmark Trial over Teen Social Media Addiction,” APnews.com, August 26, 2026.
2. Ibid.

COP30: Is Symbolism Enough Amid Climate-Change?

With the U.S. fed up and only 100 governments left willing to attend COP30 in Brazil on combatting carbon-emissions and the related global warming, the question of whether the basis of the annual conference, voluntary compliance, is sufficient and thus should be enabled by the staged meetings. Even to continue to have the conferences annually can be viewed as part of a broader state of denial, given that the 1.5C degree maximum for the planet’s warming set at the Paris conference a decade earlier was by 2025 universally acknowledged by scientists to no longer be realistic; the target would almost certainly be surpassed. It is in this context that any progress from COP30 should be placed.

At the end of the pre-COP30 meetings, the “European Union and Brazil launched an appeal calling on other nations to recognize carbon pricing as a pragmatic way to cut emissions and fun the green transition.”[1] Crucially, the “declaration . . . is a symbolic way to encourage world nations to develop strategies and establish markets akin to the EU’s emissions trading scheme, ETS, in place since 2005. Under the ETS, the EU makes companies pay for the emissions they produce.”[2] Below the nice headline of the declaration and assurances of “partnerships” lies the key word, symbolic. To characterize countries as partners is already a red flag, for that is weaker than even alliances, which can be broken at a moment’s notice with impunity.

Immediately after the “declaration” was made public, critics were saying “that putting the spotlight on carbon pricing could divert attention from real emissions-cutting, like investing in restoring natural carbon sinks, like forests and oceans.”[3] Even in putting “real emissions-cutting” in terms of restoring forests and oceans—COP30 ironically being held near the increasingly deforested Amazon rain-forest—minimizes the urgency in staving off warming from greatly exceeding 1.5C degrees. Real decreases in carbon-emissions were needed, and yet only 100 national governments were meeting in Brazil to consider voluntary action at the country-level.

The elephant in the living room, invisible to almost everyone, is the assumption that voluntary decisions by national governments in the face of economic and political immediate costs can be relied upon to solve the problem, even when it was clear in 2025 that the 1.5C degree maximum “decided” at the COP15 in Paris would be surpassed. Like the tremendous risk of destruction to the species from nuclear war, which the belligerence of the Russian and Israeli governments for two years as of 2025 means that the irrational decision to unleash nuclear weapons is not at all unrealistic, the risk to the species’ very survival from climate change justifies the establishment of a world federation with just enough governmental sovereignty, backed up militarily, to push back against wayward national governments in order to keep the worst of human nature from being unleashed with hitherto unimaginable ferocity and mass destructiveness. Anyone with the irrational fear that such a world federation, which Kant recommends in his writings, would produce the Anti-Christ might want to look at the Russians in Ukraine and the Israelis in Gaza as of 2025 for a clue as to where in the tiered system evil has already been manifest. Stalin and Hitler provide easy examples from the twentieth century.

In short, symbolic international conferences and absolute national-sovereignty should no longer be relied on so much by our species if it hopes not to go extinct. If that does happen, the wound would almost certainly be self-inflicted. Yet even then, with blood dripping from the knife being held by our species, still word of the deed will not have reached us. As Nietzsche writes of the unconscious discrediting of God (which Nietzsche opposed, for he was not an atheist), word of the deed did not reach the culprits, as in light from a far star not having reached Earth yet and yet the explosion has already happened. So too, our species has been oblivious concerning what is sufficient to stave off the destruction even of the species itself. The human mind discounts even mass-destructive possibilities that are thought to be low-probability and far off in the future, and thus flinches from agreeing to set up adequate safeguards.

In issuing the warning here with an acknowledgement of utter futility, I may be writing only to future descendants who are already dead. I am time, the destroyer of worlds, Lord Krishna tells Arjuna in the Hinduism’s Bhagavad-Gita. Left to its own devices by a feckless, stubborn, and greedy species, time may indeed see the extinction of homo sapiens, the “wise” species of Man, while the gods laugh at our primped-up seriousness as if we had been children pretending to be adults. Pathetically, we even take ourselves to be adults as we marvel at our own symbolic feats.

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1. Marta Pacheco, “COP30: EU Back Global Carbon Market Alliance to Crack Down on CO2 Emissions,” Euronews.com, 10 November, 2025.
2. Ibid., italics added for emphasis.
3. Ibid.

Political religion: Hitler Youth

In 2025 at Harvard, Madeline Levy presented her dissertation in progress in a graduate-student research workshop, which I was privileged to attend in my capacity as a research scholar at Harvard. She was presenting how the Hitler Youth program in Nazi Germany appropriated from religion politically, thus in a secular context yet with the aura of a religious cult. Interestingly, most of the kids in the program had been in church groups. Almost two decades earlier, I had audited a course on Nazi Cinema at another university; the course was taught by an 81-year-old German man who had been forced into Hitler Youth. Unlike Stalin’s cinema, which was blatant Soviet propaganda, Nazi cinema was escapist (not counting the anti-Jew propaganda “documentaries”). In contrast, Hitler Youth was hardly escapist, as the program was steeped in Nazi ideology. Although that ideology was secular, casting even Catholic Europe as an enemy, Levy was making the case that religious paraphernalia was incorporated in the program nonetheless. She brought up the element on ontology, or being, which in turn led me to draw on philosophy to explain the kids as becoming moral agents in a Kantian sense. Although philosophy and theology are distinct, both can be applied to political theory in a historical context.

In using the term, political religion, Levy related another expression, that of the “sacralization of politics,” which can include the appropriation of religious language, rituals, and symbols to the exclusion of traditional religions, and tying of these artifacts to secularization narratives.  That affect and motive are salient, according to Levy, is interesting because belief (a type of cognition) has been so salient in the Abrahamic religions. Even in Hitler Youth, there was a creed, and perhaps a “confirmation” event at which the kids, assuming agency, formally assented to the set of beliefs.

In thinking more generally of religious appropriation by the Nazi Party, I raised the question of whether Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will evinces religious-like ritual, as, for example, in showing the torch march, in which neo-pagan/druidic elements may be present. In showing an event—the annual Nazi party meeting—the film can be said to have a narrative structure, as does myth. Furthermore, regarding the Nazi flag with blood stains from the brief Nazi uprising in Munich in 1923, Hitler touching other flags with that flag in order to “sacralize” them treats that flag as a sacred object having a distinct, set-apart, ontological status powerful enough to “turn on” those other battle-flags. Images of Jews in a synagogue touching a wrapped Torah as it is led down an aisle may come to mind, to which Levy brought up the sacral object consecrated in the Christian Eucharistic liturgy and even processed.

Levy also claimed that Hitler was held up as a prophet in the sense of being an intermediary, and even as truth to power before 1933. In the Old Testament, the prophets tended to be thorns in the side of rulers, such as Nathan is to King David, whereas even before assuming power in Germany, Hitler’s role within the party, and later, Deutschland, was that of power. Therefore, it seems to be that Hitler’s intermediary role can be better labeled in terms of the divine right of kings, by which God sanctions absolute political (not divine!) power to human kings, who in turn can be thought of as partaking in a finite means of the divine attribute of omnipotence, without being divinized.

Unlike the practice of the ancient Romans, Hitler did not claim to be, and was not, divinized. Instead, after the failed assassination attempt in 1944, Hitler claimed on the radio that he had been narrowly spared by divine providence to complete his mission; President Trump would make the same claim in after having narrowly missed a bullet at a campaign event in 2024. In the case of Hitler, the irony in implicitly invoking the Abrahamic deity as sparing Hitler so he could finish the Final Solution reflects Hitler’s distinction of the Jews from Judaism, which in turn made it possible for him to appropriate from religion, including in the Hitler Youth program.

Levy’s thought on appropriation of religious symbol, myth, and ritual in the Hitler Youth program centered on ontology (i.e., reality) as the nature of being, as in holy blood being related as Germanic spirit to the human soul. Here, the sacred is a marking out of being, whereas the profane is non-being. In this sense, Leibniz’s notion of God as perfect being is relevant. In setting apart a special race, which itself may remind us of God having a “chosen people” in Judaism, the “setting apart” feature of the process of sacralization is evinced even in terms of sacred objects, such as a flag, that are ritually and mythically set apart ontologically in going beyond mere symbol. Even though the Aryan race is “set apart” in Nazi ideology, individual Germans, even the young people in Hitler Youth, knew that the individual can and even should be expendable for the collective. That is to say, a young person in Hitler Youth reached the point of being a moral agent in being able to realize the moral duty of sacrifice as binding even as the agent thereby knows oneself to have freedom (of choice). This is basic Kantianism applied here not to critique the Nazi ideology, but to understand moral agency within it.

Kant argues that the moral law applies to finite rational beings (i.e. us), and that the recognition of being a moral agent (i.e., in realizing that I ought to have a certain motive or do something) must be premised on being free to do otherwise. I ought to do X means that I have the freedom not to do X. Kant’s theory maintains that such freedom is ontological, or noumenal, rather than being merely in the realm of appearance. Paradoxically, the necessitation of the moral law is conditioned on the reality of freedom of moral agents.

Whether Hitler Youth had a “confirmation” ceremony or not, at some point, a participant would have realized that the freedom of the individual includes the moral law’s necessity as the duty to sacrifice oneself for the collective. Because reason has absolute value as the means by which value is assigned to things (and other rational beings), and individuals are finite rational beings, however, the duty of an individual rational being to be sacrificed for a collective, which is not a rational being, is ethically problematic. Even Hobbes insists that individuals have the right to act to extend their self-preservation even when the political sovereign is trying to kill them. Even so, that Kant’s moral theory can be used to critique the deontological or deontic, duty-based, moral dimension of Hitler Youth is not to say that the participants were not intended to become moral, duty-based (rather than utilitarian) agents. Perhaps this gets at Levy’s interest in the role of agency in Hitler Youth.

In short, the secularization of religious symbol, myth, and ritual played a political role in Nazi Germany, including in Hitler Youth. This is not to say that Hitler was divinized or that any religion was adopted as the state religion, as in a theocracy. In terms of the duty-based ethics that ironically discounted to ontology of the individual in favor of that of the collective, the Germanic people, the political “religion” could only play a supporting, or background, role because theology and philosophical ethics are distinct domains even though they intersect. Levy’s notion of ontology as existentialist (i.e., of being) can be bifurcated between that of a distinctly religious transcendent ontology and an ethical ontology, such as Kant’s claim that the freedom of the will is “a fact of reason” that has a noumenal rather than merely phenomenological basis. The difference is that a distinctly religious transcendent referent is inherently beyond the limits of human cognition, perception, and sensibility (Pseudo-Dionysius), whereas Kant’s fact of reason is, well, of reason, and is thus not transcendent in the sense that a religious object is. Therefore, although capable of being related, theology, philosophy (i.e., ontology and ethics) and political theory should not be conflated. Perhaps this too is a fact of reason.

On the Ethics of AI

In June, 2024 at the international political meeting of the G7, a group of seven industrial nations, the head of the Roman Catholic Church, Pope Francis, spoke on the ethical dimension of artificial intelligence, or machine-learning. Regarding what the Pope called the “techno-human condition,” machines capable of AI are yet another manifestation of human propensity, which our species has had since its inception, to use tools to mediate with the environment. Although tools can be thought of as an extension of our arms ad legs, it is important to distinguish the human from the machine, even as we posit human characteristics onto some advanced machines, such as computers. In the film, 2001, the computer Hal sounds human, and may even seem to have human motivations, but any such attributions come to an abrupt end when Hal is shut down. To say that Hal dies is to commit a basic category mistake. It would be absurd, for example, to claim that Hal has an after-life. So too, I submit, is there a category mistake in taking the Pope’s talk on the ethics of AI as being religious in nature. Just as it is easy to imprint the human mind on a machine-learning computer, it can be tempting to superimpose the religious domain onto another. The Pope overreached in arbitrarily bringing in religious garb on what is actually an ethical matter in the “techno-human” world.

The full essay is at "The Pope on AI."

Bucking Starbucks’ Star

Common sense would perhaps dictate that a company sporting a managerial culture of pathological lying as the default way of dealing with stakeholders must inevitably go under at some point. Kant’s categorical imperative insists that mendacity is unethical, for it violates the non-contradictory law of reason. What would the Prussian Kant say, however, to the good Germans who lied to NAZI Jew-hunters about hiding the enemies of the state? As laudable as such lies are, unsavory business managers seem instinctually wired to take advantage of the slippery slope by ignoring the rationale of avoiding extreme harm. What begins as a trickle can become a deluge. Perhaps that is what happened at Starbucks.

In late October, 2022, the director of the U.S. National Labor Relations Board “accused Starbucks of threatening to withhold benefits and wage increases from workers if they unionized; selectively enforcing work policies against union supporters; disciplining or firing workers who were activists; and failing to bargain in good faith.”[1] Starbucks had closed a store in Ithaca, New York. The lack of good faith can be seen in the Congressional testimony of Howard Schultz, Starbucks’ CEO, in 2023. He sanctimoniously “admitted” that people he had spoken with could erroneously infer intimidation. In other words, it’s on the other guy. Such toxic pomposity easily belies a mere patina of portrayed honesty.  

NLRB officials claimed in 2022, The “company has repeatedly broken the law by firing pro-union employees, cutting their hours and offering pay hikes and other benefits to those who decline to unionize.”[2] Least the company’s management’s denials of these claims be believed, fast-forward to April, 2023, when it was revealed that the company had lied that negative publicity and a related strike played no role in the company’s decision to permanently close another store in Ithaca.

The story begins back in April, 2022, when Starbucks’ public-relations firm notified its client that employees “went on strike due to repeated grease trap spills that caused an unsafe environment and lack of action from management.”[3] The lack of action regarding a known safety hazard at a store that the company had written had the “strongest real estate trade position in this area” such that “any relocation would be inferior” points to a single-minded and expedient orientation to money.[4] Such a mentality is ripe for pro-union votes. A managerial culture of mendacity just adds fuel to the flames.

Andrew Trull, a company spokesman, claimed, “Media attention had no bearing on our decision to close the store.”[5] In an internal email, however, Denise Nelsen, senior vice president of U.S. operations, wrote, “We have to solve these condition issues because we also keep getting media on the store condition there.”[6] A direct contradiction! In symbolic logic, A and not-A cannot both be true. A barista at the store at the time said regarding the closing of the lucrative store, “It was retaliation for the strike we went on because we were being forced to work in unsafe conditions. They didn’t care [before]. They cared all of a sudden now when we’re making national news.”[7] Admittedly, negative publicity can hurt the bottom-line. I venture to say nonetheless that the instinctual urge to retaliate, which Nietzsche claimed is out of control in the weak who seek to dominate, trumps the otherwise-hegemonic money-orientation in Starbucks’ managerial culture. The propensity to fabricate rather than tell the truth serves both the power-aggrandizing and economizing motives, especially when they are extreme urges out of control (i.e., not mastered, or channeled by the individual).  

The culture of mendacity in Starbucks’ managerial cadre reaches even the store-manager level. I know this from personal experience. At a Starbucks’ store in April, 2023, a store manager pointed to the last remaining seat. “It’s right below an air-duct that blows cold air.” I had been there in January. “We can adjust that for you,” the manager lied. “I though the temperature of stores is centrally controlled,” I countered. “Yes, it is; it reduces our carbon footprint.” He gave no outward sign that he had just contradicted himself, which can be construed as a lie on top of a lie. Perhaps he was assuming that customers are idiots and would not be likely to put two and two together. Well, I did, but I was polite enough not to tell him that I knew that he had just lied to me. Instead, I went after the accuracy of his claim that centralized control is environmentally friendly. “Well, I have lived in Phoenix, Arizona, where your stores are generally known to feel like refrigerators even when it is 116F degrees. I’d say that’s a pretty big footprint, wouldn’t you?” He stood there silent, like an idiot. The dumb shoes were on a different foot.

Meanwhile, employees of that store kept to their script—that they like their store manager so they would not vote to unionize. When on one occasion I overheard a shift-manager say that the company’s management had lied about giving the employees an additional day off, he was silent when I asked him if he still liked the management so much he would not vote to strike. He pretended like I had not overheard him, which itself is a kind of a lie. Even the employees, who are in no sense of the word “partners” as the company’s head management pretends and publicizes, lie to customers.

Lastly, when I was living in Arizona, I went to a Starbucks in area of Tempe north of the Salt River, which the city of Tempe lies is a lake even though it looks like any other river. Six police employees on their break on the 4^th of July will wandering around the customer area between tables. I approached a Starbucks employee to complain, as I was not used to looking up from my laptop and seeing so many guns passing by at close-range. She refused to act. Then when the group of guns were blocking the counter where drinks are available, I reapproached her and she finally decided to do something. She politely asked the police to hang out away from the bar. She was met with bloated egos, one of which, with his back to the customer area, kept turning his head to give us suspicious looks.

My thought was: if the guy feels such distrust for the public, perhaps he and his coworkers would feel more comfortable spending their breaks somewhere more comfortable. Somewhere more out of the way rather than front and center. This would also spare us, the taxpayers, from being subject to even the tacit intimidation of seeing bullet-proof vests and guns at such close range as we enjoy our coffee. No, I was not over-caffeinated, though maybe the police were, given all their pacing around the tables. Not that the police employees would have recognized their hyperactive state; after all, fish cannot see the water that they breathe, for they are always in it. I contend that such a blindness is conducive to literally and figuratively taking liberties, whether through intimidation or outright lashing out. 

I do contend that liberty includes freedom of the innocent from intimidation. It can be quite difficult to perceive, yet unconsciously it is surely felt. Notice, for instance, the policeman intently looking at me as I took the picture shown here. Is taking a picture suspicious enough to warrant such rapt attention as a hunting dog might have upon seeing a rabbit? As the youth of today would say, the guy needs to chill. Not that I would have walked over to him after taking the photo and say, Hey dude, just chill out a bit, huh? You're on your break. He would have sternly dismissed such an accusation and turned on me (hence proving my point for me) even though it was, after all, a holiday. July 4th, Freedom from Intimidation Day in the U.S.A. By the twenty-first century, the British Red Coats had all but been forgotten, even, I suspect, in Boston Massachusetts. In Arizona, the Red Coats are homegrown.

Fortunately for all concerned, the police huddle-formation soon broke up and the disgruntled cops left the store. I discovered only days later that the head of their local union had been broadcasting that Starbucks had demanded that the police leave the store, which was a lie. The egos were two degrees of separation from realizing that my complaint had some validity, and they felt the need to retaliate against the company just for being asked to move out of the way. Interestingly, the barista had refused to ask the police to stop wandering through the tight-knit customer area yet decided to act when the police were near her.

Laura Ingram of Fox News had decided that I must be a criminal. For its part, Starbucks sent in a vice president, who directly or indirectly told The New York Times that I must be “anxious” and that police of any number whatsoever are welcome in any Starbucks store. Considering the retaliation against employees, or “partners,” who have held strikes or sought to unionize, it is interesting that the vice president capitulated to the local police union—even scapegoating a customer in doing so. I wonder how many customers trust the company and its management; any such trust would surely not be deserved.

The esteemed Starbucks experience, which the company advertised at the time, apparently includes being thrown under the bus (i.e., sacrificed) for making a request that might upset the company’s cosy relationship with fellow power-aggrandizers. Mendacious birds of prey often fly together, for they understand each other, just as alcoholics and drug addicts do. Using people, whether for retaliation or more money, violates Kant’s moral imperative that rational beings (including us, even as we irrationally over-populate and, in doing so, risk even our own extinction) treat other such beings not just as means, but also as ends in themselves. Kant was insistent and adamant: Telling lies violates this moral requirement of what it means ultimately to be human—to partake in rational nature.

Furthermore, as Nietzsche emphasizes in his Genealogy of Morals, an unmastered and excessive instinctual urge of resentment, especially of the strong, and indeed of the ensuing retaliation too, is a mark of being weak. The strong are advised to keep their distance from the new birds of prey. Hence, job-seekers should avoid toxic managerial cultures if possible, and at the very least be on the lookout for the telltale signs—the red flags. A pattern of telling lies is such a flag, hence it is significant when a direct contradiction can be exposed. (Potential) customers should take notice too, though the want of local alternatives can make it difficult, practically speaking, to avoid the chain. Unfettered choices require a competitive market, which as the activities of companies such as Standard Oil, Walmart, and Facebook demonstrate, can be difficult to be maintained even in a republic.

See the booklet: "Bucking Starbucks' Star."

See the essay: "Starbucks Capitulates to an Overzealous Police Union in Spite of In-Store Intimidation."

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 1. Dave Jamieson, “Starbucks Broke Law By Closing Unionized Store In Ithaca, Labor Officials Say,” Huffington Post, November 1, 2022.
 2. Ibid.
 3. Dave Jamieson, “A Starbucks Closed Abruptly—And Its Workers Say It Was Retaliation,” The Huffington Post, April 29, 2023.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid.
7. Ibid.

A Managerial Society of Carrots and Sticks

In a society of managerialism, a particular value-set is salient; it can be characterized overtly or tacitly by technique as a functional means of manipulating resources (human or material). This orientation issues in an instrumentalism wherein even other human beings are viewed as means rather than as ends in themselves. Furthermore, an assumption of incrementalism rather than real change tends to accompany the orientation because the status quo is the default where the focus is on instruments. The managerial orientation can be so ingrained in generally accepted “organization speak” that the modern herd hardly recognizes the penetration in modern society itself.

In the film, The Matrix, Neo is eventually able to see the matrix for what it is: series of green ones and zeros scrolling up or down.  It is only then that he has power to punch through it with complete impunity.  Likewise, it is only when a person sees the allurements and arrows in a company’s customer service that a customer can transcend the vacuous business-speak and thus be able to resist the attempted manipulation.  Rational nature, according to Kant, views itself as an end in itself. Therefore, a natural tension exists between a manipulator and the object, which views itself as an end rather than a means to another’s end. Coming to perceive the attempted manipulation naturally triggers resentment, for it is presumptuous to use another person without any recognition of the other’s inherent nature that intrinsically resists being used. 

For example, an employee representing an organization typically presumes that the potential customer is already under the organization’s policies and procedures.  It is hardly imaginable that a potential customer would use phrases such as “you have to” before any transaction has been agreed to. Furthermore, employees who refuse to deign themselves to negotiate with potential customers presume that the default lies on their side; organizational “policy” or rigidity is merely back up to the operative point that negotiating would be humiliating in that the being of the potential customer would have to be recognized at least in part as an end in itself of equal value to the employee’s company of rational natures.

In other words, modern society, at least in the West, has come to accept the presumptuousness that has come to characterize the attitude of employees who view their role as holding policy up to customers who must either accept it or go away. Policy serves here as a technique by which to dominate. It is used because the organizational herd animal wants to dominate but knows that it is too weak to do so without the aid of policy taken as law. Rather than negotiating with customers, they are told “you must” or “you can’t” even before they agree to a transaction.

Policy is used as a stick instrument. Managerialism also makes use of carrots, or inducements. “You don’t like the product you have purchased?  You can’t return it (policy as domination) but here is a coupon for 10% off your next purchase.” For the other end of a conversation to consist of only carrots and sticks is naturally to be disconcerting, even maddening because the subtext is a refusal to recognize the other as an end in itself. In fact, there is evidence that the carrots and sticks of managerialism have a rather narrow application with human beings. Therefore, much of the effort by people in organizations to induce or threaten may be in vain. 

According to CNN, “In laboratory experiments and field studies, a band of psychologists, sociologists and economists have found that many carrot-and-stick motivators — the elements around which we build most of our businesses and many of our schools — can be effective, but that they work in only a surprisingly narrow band of circumstances. For enduring motivation, the science shows, a different approach is more effective. This approach draws not on our biological drive or our reward-and-punishment drive, but on what we might think of as our third drive: Our innate need to direct our own lives, to learn and create new things, and to do better by ourselves and our world. In particular, high performance — especially for the complex, conceptual tasks we’re increasingly doing on the job— depends far more on intrinsic motivators than on extrinsic ones.” This third drive is that which stems from our rational nature viewing itself as an end in itself (i.e., having absolute value, because rational nature assigns value to things).

So organizational employees and their task-masters may well be selling their fellow human beings short in presuming that they must be buffeted with inducements and threats from the get-go.  Perhaps these organizational creatures are of the lower sort that function only by being manipulated and threatened.  Perhaps they project their own self-centeredness out onto ordinary, free, human beings.

The third drive can lead a potential or actual customer to say, “I am not in your organization so I am not subject to it as you are,” or even more directly, “I do not appreciate being manipulated” or “I feel insulted by being pressured to buy something else as I’m leaving your store after buying one of your products.”  Typically, the employee will feign ignorance of what he or she has been doing, or simply ignore the demurs of the dissatisfied customer. We moderns are bombarded every day with organizational passive-aggression via “organization-speak” consisting of carrots and sticks. We are so used to it in our organizational society that we absorb it without realizing what it is and how it affects us as human beings.

Source:

Daniel H. Pink, “Big Bonuses Don’t Mean Big Results,” CNN, March 2, 2010.

See a related book, available at Amazon: On the Arrogance of False Entitlement

Company Police-States: United Airlines Attacks a Passenger

A manager of United Airlines boarded on the ground in Chicago to have three security employees of the Chicago Department of Aviation bloody and drag a physician off the plane to make room for an employee not on the flight’s crew. Although the airline was technically within its rights to forcibly remove the man for refusing to give up his seat, which he had paid for, removing paid passengers at the last minute to make room for additional, non-essential staff showed a lack of judgment. Accordingly, the police-power of the company is problematic and should be dialed back.  In fact, the power of the industry, including its companies, may need to be reduced.

 A passenger--a physician--being dragged from his paid, reserved seat as a United manager looks on. (Source: Tyler Bridges)

The full essay is in Cases of Unethical Business, available in print and as an ebook at Amazon.com.  

Bad Boy Banks Enabling Inversion: Can a Firm Be Patriotic?

The “corporate citizenship” literature has it that companies in the private sector can indeed be “good citizens.” Even though a company cannot vote or be drafted, citizenship is said to fit as an apt description of what is organizationally speaking a profit-seeking machine. To say that a company is a good or bad citizen is, moreover, to anthropomorphise (i.e., apply human characteristics to a non-human). Furthermore, in their managerial capacities, the people who run companies are duty-bound to act in the financial interest of the stockholders, and only then in the broader societal interest. Even so, an ethical basis does exist on which some of the banks can be viewed as culpable.

Between 2011 and 2014 when Goldman Sachs made nearly $210 million in “inversion fees” for helping companies based in the U.S. shift their headquarters overseas to obviate a relatively high U.S. corporate tax, asking whether the executives at the bank were patriotic is tantamount to making a category mistake. A person can without contradiction be patriotic away from work while focusing on increasing inversion fees in his or her managerial role. Hence, Jamie Dimon could sincerely look at those fees earned by JPMorgan Chase and claim, “I’m just as patriotic as anyone.”[1] Were he to have put his personal patriotism into force at the bank at the expense of the stockholders’ financial interests and the chartered function of the bank, he would have been unethically disregarding his fiduciary duty. From a Kantian standpoint, we can ask what would happen if every manager at every bank had as his or her own “personal project” as a patriotic U.S. citizen trump the duty. Patriotism, after all, is hardly monolithic, but involves interpretation in discerning the applications and the proper choices therein. Banks could hardly function that way, so to say every manager should put patriotism first would not make sense (for the banks would fail under such a mandate). This, by the way, is the first formulation of Kant’s categorical imperative. If universalizing your maxim doesn’t work because of a contradiction in the reasoning or logic, the maxim is unethical.

The argument that banks that had been in trouble in 2008 and subsequently received loaned funds from the U.S. Government are obliged ethically not to turn around and profit by depriving that government of corporate tax revenue presents us with a stronger case, for it rests on an implicit contract, or quid pro quo, rather than patriotism. Social contract theory, of which Kant was an advocate, includes implicit contracts, rather than being limited to the ones where both parties sign on the dotted line. In fact, as regards any historical agreement establishing government and citizens, Kant idealizes the notion to say that such an agreement would be what people would agree to in a state of nature—not that such an agreement was literally made as man first stepped into complex living arrangements. From this interpretation of the theory, it makes sense to say that in return for being bailed out—even from the tailwind of irrational exuberance aided and abetted by a “big short”—a person naturally would expect an obligation not to double-cross the hand that had helped at the time of crisis.

This ethical argument applies to Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and Citigroup, each of which made sizeable profits from inversion fees and had needed the government bailout. JPMorgan Chase, on the other hand, avoided the greedy temptation to get into mortgage-based derivatives and insurance swaps based on the securities, and thus that bank did not face the implicit obligation. Jamie Dimon need not have jumped to defend his patriotism after all, or even an implicit obligation that his bank put the revenue of the U.S. Government before stockholder profits.

Regarding Goldman Sachs and Citigroup, dismissing the implicit obligation was, say we say, par for the course (i.e., in keeping with the banks’ respective cultures), for in both banks clients were lied to regarding what the traders knew were “crap.” I’m referring of course to the bonds based on sub-prime mortgages. Such fraud is also a disregard for an implicit social contract (as well as a very public legal one). Societally, people have a general expectation that people working at a bank will not exploit them through dishonest means. That’s not how business is done, the average Joe would rightly say. So perhaps the utility of this case of inversion fees lies in what it says about the intractability of a mentality in a corporate culture: the dysfunction is very difficult to remove, and thus it is likely to perpetuate itself in a pattern.

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1. Mark Gongloff, “’Patriotic’ Big Banks Profit Helping U.S. Companies Dodge Taxes,” The Huffington Post, July 29, 2014.

Rousseau on Inequalities in Society: An Instance of Kantian Enlightenment?

Kant defines enlightenment as “man's emergence from his inability to use one's own understanding without the guidance of another.”[1] By making public use, Kant means “that use which anyone may make of it as a man of learning addressing the entire reading public.”[2] By sufficient freedom, Kant means that ideas that threaten the power of the guardians of institutional or societal rules are not excluded.

Immanuel Kant, an 18th-century philosopher famous for his duty-based ethics.

For example, an enlightened Roman Catholic priest would publish ideas questioning and even criticizing Church dogma when he is acting as a scholar, even though he would fulfill his duty in his conduct as a priest by defending those very teachings. A priest could thus go public as a heretic as long as he does so on his own time as a scholar and member of society, and an enlightened bishop would tolerate the scholar’s freedom to think and publish outside the box.

Rousseau would object to Kant’s prescription for how to become enlightened and Kant would object in turn to Rousseau's preference for the state of nature over society and the associated expansion of reasoning. Does Rousseau fit Kant's concept of enlightenment even though Kant would object to some of Rousseau's ideas?

Rousseau was a “heretic” of sorts. Writing to people living in societies, he was critical of the very existence of society itself, and thus of the power of its guardians. In his essay on inequality, he contends that the unnecessary, or artificial, sources of inequality stem from humans living in society rather than in the state of nature. “Every inequality of institution must increase the natural inequalities of the human species.”[3] Accordingly, “the origin of society and of the laws, which increased the fetters of the weak, and the strength of the rich; irretrievably destroyed natural liberty, fixed for ever [sic] the laws of property and inequality; changed an artful usurpation into an irrevocable title; and for the benefit of a few ambitious individuals subjected the rest of mankind to perpetual labour, servitude, and misery.”[4] By thinking freely and publishing the results, the citizen of Geneva aimed a lethal arrow at not only human society, but also its guardians. Rather than coming from the guidance of guardians, his ideas on the impact of them, as well as the defended institutions, properties, and laws arose from his own reasoning. He was free thinker, enlightened in Kant’s sense of the word.

This is not to say that the content of Rousseau’s essay on inequality conforms to Kant’s prescriptions for how more people or a people can become enlightened. For example, Kant laments that the constrained use of reason that had become second nature to the vast majority of people in his day who astonishingly were “virtually incapable for the time being of freeing their use of reason.”[5] According to Rousseau, however, the increased use of reason stimulated by living in a society instead of in the state of nature engenders self-love, and therefore pride, jealousy, and increased as well as technologically more severe warfare. Antipodal to society itself, “it is reason that makes man shrink into himself; it is reason that makes him keep aloof from everything that can trouble or afflict him; it is philosophy that destroys his connections with other men.”[6] Living in society is self-contradictory with respect to the impacts of the expanding and more complex reasoning.[7]

In short, the Prussian professor claims in his essay that a greater use of reason is part of becoming enlightened, whereas the citizen of Geneva advocates in his essay a reduction in the use of reason to that level and simplicity that is natural for human beings (i.e., in the state of nature). That Rousseau's published ideas on reason conflict with the significance of reasoning in becoming enlightened does not mean, however, that Rousseau's reasoning about reason in the state of nature versus in society is not an instance of enlightenment. That is, Rousseau's own use of reason can fit Kant's definition of enlightenment rather than the lesser reasoning that Rousseau prescribes. Put another way, Rousseau was a philosopher who claims in his essay that philosophy destroys a philosopher's social connections.

As a professor of philosophy at a university, Kant undoubtedly defended and protected the discipline institutionally; that is, old Kant was a guardian of some things not present in the state of nature—namely, professorships in philosophy, the discipline of philosophy, and philosophizing itself. Rousseau's published ideas critical of the artificial sort, or excess, of reasoning that is the root, trunk, and branches of philosophizing thus evinces freedom of public thought beyond the guidance of institutional guardians such as Kant; the philosophical establishment (e.g.,  tenured professors) would have been inclined to discredit or even ban Rousseau's threatening ideas. In writing published texts in philosophy, Rousseau was doing the very thing that he argues in his essay should not be done; he was doing Kantian enlightened public thinking.

Furthermore, Kant claims that people “will of their own accord gradually work their way out of barbarism so long as artificial measures are not deliberately adopted to keep them in it.”[8] A society’s guardians determine and defend such measures. Although Rousseau too is critical of the artificial measures and their societally rather than naturally powerful enforcers, he advocates a return to the state of nature (including barbarism) rather than moving toward an enlightened society.

Therefore, Rousseau would oppose Kant’s advocacy of an enlightened prince who considers it his duty in religious matters not to prescribe anything to his people as a means of encouraging more people to become enlightened. Under his rule, “ecclesiastical dignitaries, notwithstanding their official duties, may in their capacity as scholars freely and publicly submit to the judgment of the world their verdicts and opinions, even if these deviate from orthodox doctrine.”[9] To Rousseau, who is less concerned in his essay on inequality about the religious domain than is Kant in his essay on enlightenment, the various forms of government, including monarchy, “owe their origin to the various degrees of inequality between the members, at the time they first coalesced into a political body.”[10] The solution to the increased societally-based inequalities is to return to the state of nature, rather than to count on an “enlightened” prince, who is actually compromised by power and position (i.e., inequality). So Rousseau criticizes a governmental means by which a people can become enlightened in a Kantian sense, but in doing so, he demonstrates that his freedom of public thought was not constrained or guided by a prince.

Therefore, Kant would have to obey his own reason in counting Rousseau among the enlightened as per Kant's own definition, even while rejecting and perhaps even attacking Rousseau's ideas that would detract from such enlightenment if put into effect. To the extent that Kant himself was not enlightened, he would hardly have been able, at least for the time being, to tolerate such ideas even as he would have had to admit that Rousseau was enlightened. Put another way, being both an institutional guardian and a philosopher, Kant would have been in a tight corner. Generally speaking, we can conclude that enlightenment exists uneasily with the lack thereof in a society, especially if the lack pertains to the guardians. Accordingly, I suspect that a society is at ease only if the vast majority of people, including most or even all of the guardians, are enlightened.

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[1] Immanuel Kant, An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment? (World ebook Library).

[2] Ibid.

[3] Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on the Origins of Inequality, Harvard Classics, Charles W. Eliot, ed., Vol. 34 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1910).

[4] Ibid.

[5] Kant, An Answer.

[6] Rousseau, Discourse.

[7] Interestingly, Kant’s first version of his categorical imperative, a criterion useful for assessing whether a given act is ethical, logical contradiction in a maxim being universalized such that it holds for everyone indicates that the act is immoral even if performed by one person rather than everyone. We are rational beings, so a logical contradiction means bad news. Therefore, does the logical contradiction in universalizing an increased use of reason in society to everyone resulting in everyone impeding society itself mean that living in society is unethical? Perhaps Kant would say that society would have to be impossible rather than merely impeded for there to be a logical contraction.

[8] Kant, An Answer.

[9] Ibid.

[10] Rousseau, Discourse.

Conflicts of Interest: A Kantian Explanation

In a conflict of interest, either two duties conflict or a duty conflicts with self-interest—whether the “self” be an individual or an association of individuals (e.g., a department or an organization). Where two duties conflict, that which corresponds with the wider “constituency” is presumed to be ethically superior to that which is relatively narrow. For instance, a duty to society is typically thought (admittedly by the public) to ethically supersede a fiduciary duty to stockholders. This assumption is problematic because property rights are not charged with putting society first. Therefore the question of which duty is superior ethically-speaking may come down to one’s vantage-point. To be sure, the duty that is further from one’s self-interest can be said to be superior in most ethical theories with the notable exception of egoism. That theory defeats the typical ethical take on conflicts of interest even where a duty is pitted against self-interest itself.


The full essay is at Institutional Conflicts of Interest, available in print and as an ebook at Amazon.