Team Identity & Loyalty: Redrawing The Line Between Unethical And Criminal

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Bill, last time we had an amazing discussion. I still am high from it. We talked about a campaign rally type of situation and a heckler and what you would do as a candidate in that heckler situation. It got to this interesting discussion about different kinds of loyalty.

What we said before we started this, you were saying American values and purchasing truth. It’s an interesting discussion that we can have and share with our readers. 

The main thing is that how do we embrace conflict? One of the American values that we have is embracing conflict and not demonizing conflict or running from conflict. What is happening in our environment is as soon as somebody makes a mistake, everybody’s on it. Everybody’s on the mistake and it’s going to amplify the mistake. You did this, you got this and therefore you’re wrong and bad for it. Wrong and bad for it? Why? Because you’re on the other team. My team gets to do it, but your team does not. I get to claim that because my team is standing for the right and your team is standing for the wrong. Therefore, what that means is that if I do the wrong, I’m still in the right. I’ve done the wrong, but I’m still on the right because my team is right, your team is not right. If I were a Democrat and made a deal with the Russians because you’re not on my team, that behavior is wrong.

If you are on my team and I’m a Republican and I say the sentence, “Me and Russia would get along well together. I have run a beauty pageant in Russia and everything worked out great with the beauty pageant and therefore I can have a relationship with Russia.” While you’re on my team, so you’re right. I can now do that because I’m right. It doesn’t matter what other agreements you’re making with Russia whether they’re not in American values or not, it doesn’t matter their human rights because my team is good at making a relationship with that. I’ve already had an emotional buy-in to my team. It works great in sports. It doesn’t work well in politics.

There does seem to be a parallel with what we see in our political discourse nowadays of our elected leaders in Congress where it does seem very much like arguing more for your sports team. Trash talking the other guys, your team is the best and right even if they’re not, and it does feel that way.

Politics is not a sports team at all. There is one team, America, and there are these two groups that look to make that team win nationally and internationally. Not do things to make that team to make one side of the political aisle win versus the other side at the expense of the team we’re playing for. What winds up happening, and you’re going to see this through the impeachment piece and everything like that, there’s got to be a relationship between it’s not criminal, therefore it’s okay. Instead of it’s not a criminal goal, but it is clearly not ethical. Therefore, that is not American because it’s not ethical. America stands its standards on the ethical line. It’s not on the criminal line.

We’re already seeing a lot of those arguments take place where at first it was, “What the president did and the Ukraine phone call was not a quid pro quo.” It’s come out that it was a quid pro quo. You hear it being argued by Trump surrogates that it may be a quid pro quo, but it’s not illegal or it doesn’t rise to the level of impeachment. I’d still don’t think it’s an impeachable offense. I wish he hadn’t said that. I don’t agree with what he said, but it’s not impeachable. You can see the team arguments lining up trying to support the team because for whatever reason they think if they get on board with holding the president accountable, it’s going to hurt their team in the big picture. 

The problem is that people think 100% capitalism is an American value; it isn't.

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The biggest challenge has to do with this relationship and why America has been successful up to this point is especially through the 1950s and into the 1960s. It had a greater relationship between the balance of capitalism and the social safety net. Notice I didn’t say socialism. Socialism is something different. The social safety net is that here are some things that we agree as a nation that is a part of our social safety net. Number one, in the social safety net is the military. We pay for that first. It is $0.47 or $0.53 out of every dollar of tax money goes to pay for the military. What does that social safety net mean? It means that we have enough military for people not to attack our country. We scare the crap out of everybody because they can do it.



It will even save or rattle our own save or rattle where it’s like, “What are you doing over there?” The problem is that people mixed up and they think 100% capitalism is an American value. It isn’t. It’s a good part of American value because it allows certain people who want to participate in that level of competition to compete regarding ideas, products, services that allows me to go shopping. I go shopping for the cheapest place to buy a T-shirt that they put a logo on it and then I resell it in a retail marketplace. I compete with other people making T-shirts. That is a capitalist mind. None of that has to deal with the social safety net until you tax that action. Taxing that action says capitalism.

You’re a great system but you need to sit on top of it is the foundation of the social safety net is underneath that. If you don’t have enough social safety net, the people are going to be starving for food or starving for shelter and not have enough money to do this whole capitalism thing that we’ve made up. Here’s where it goes dark, south and tragic quickly is what’s the easiest way for me to spend the least amount of marketing dollars and not have to do so much work because the customers are sitting there. One of the easiest ways is that if I prioritize medicine, then I can get the medicine folks to capitalize. To use capitalism in medicine, that’s not a strong strategy because even though there are a lot of customers there and everybody needs medicine. You don’t want to compete over a Band-Aid or a drug. You don’t want to do that.

If you’re not doing that, how are we going to make money at this thing that everybody needs? The whole reason why there’s a movement from all of these different social things that was a net is, how do I privatize those and drag it over to the capitalism line is causing all kinds of problems over the last many years. It’s been a 40-year swing away from the social safety net mindset to how can I capitalize prisons? The capitalists will take this customer called a criminal and house them for as long as possible with no sense or no interest in rehabilitating them. It’s not in their best interest to rebuild them. It’s their best interest to poke them with a stick as long as I can get away with it.

You could say that’s true of the entire medical system in the United States as well. It’s not in their best interest to have medical care around prevention as much as it is to have medical care around treating symptoms.

I’d rather treat symptoms for a long time than to cure somebody. We could see the tragic part of this if you go into a drug store. An over the counter drug has a low percentage of the active chemical in it. For example, if you buy something, let’s say for athlete’s foot. It’ll have 1% or 2% or 3% of the active substance. If you’d like a prescription of it, then you’ve got to go to the doctor. It’s going to give you permission to get the 5%, 7%, or 10% of the thing that will cure you. Do people know that game? No. They don’t know the game.

They don’t know that what they’re buying off the shelf is going to provide temporary comfort, but just enough so you have to keep buying that thing at that low percentage.

Some of the things in marketing and sales are unethical because some of them are not fully true.

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The high crimes and misdemeanors. The misdemeanors are particular things because in comparison and I’m surprised the Democrats are not hitting this hard is what he has done is ten times worse than what Richard Nixon did. Ten times worse, easy because a break-in, it hits this criminal piece pretty hard. I’m not a crook but there is an ethical piece to it too like, “You’re the number one person that’s fit to fight for the law and you’re also an attorney as well as we extended all kinds of trust to you.” The way the spin is going in and the way the saturation of the media is going is it’s all about activating the molecules of the emotion of doubt and skepticism about not whether he did it or not. It’s about whether or not it is allowed as a part of this office. It’s weird to see the CEO of McDonald’s resign because of unethical and a company policy issue. The board holding him to the standard isn’t going to go that way that businesses are going to rein it in tight with their ethics and values. They’re going to eclipse the American values to what the American values stand for. They’re going to become more ethical than the general population. Is that the way this is working? It’s a little strange but that seems to show it.

That seems to be the way it’s going. We see people in Corporate America being held to a much higher standard than our system. I don’t know if the right word is allowing us to because I don’t know if that’s the right word. Our government system is making it a lot harder to hold our elected officials, some of them anyway, and certainly the president accountable for similar actions.

That’s the challenge that we’re going to be facing moving forward is the redrawing and the reclarification of the line between criminal and ethical. How ethical needs to gain more weight because what has been done is it’s been reduced. The ethical standards are like, “You can pay for and sleep with a porn star at a golf event. You can do X, Y, Z during the campaign. You can elicit foreign help in the campaign. You can’t do it as your president. While you’re here as president, you can enlist support for a foreign country to help.” This is problematic because the lines are moving away from ethics. It’s unclear how the Republicans are going to restore ethics as a value underneath the word Republican moving forward.

It’s hard how they’re going to do that because either you’re criminal or you’re breaking a crime, but anything other than that we don’t care because the law is not there. What winds up happening because that happens, the laws start getting written more conservatively. That’s what’s happening now because the new judges are going to start moving the criminal line up into the ethical line and then more people get to go to jail because the criminal line has moved up. It’s something all of us don’t want. The criminal line to move up, I don’t want that. That means that you and I could say something or do something that’s less than ethical. We get to go to jail for that thing that we said was a little unethical. It is scary.

It seems that every day in the Donald Trump administration, there’s an attempt to move the goalpost. First it’s, “He didn’t do the thing. He did the thing, but that’s not bad.” They keep moving the goalposts. We’ve talked about that a little bit in the past but I also think that there’s a new definition of loyalty here. Is there loyalty to the American people, loyalty to party or loyalty to the president or some might say, “King Donald Trump,” to label him? 

King Donald Trump is the one that was looking to get the need for respect or recognition at the expense of others. I am going to say things that are going to pull respect and recognition in my direction. This language that you and I are talking about is those are small grabs for respect. In other words, you’re grabbing for respect but there’s no reality behind the respect or a limited reality behind what you think. You were in charge while this thing was taking place but did you have any knowledge or say so before your special forces killed the terrorist that you were looking to kill without due process. When a person takes and tries to get respect for that, it’s trying to push up some respect here because it was under my watch, it’s here. Meanwhile, when they were after Osama Bin Laden, everybody was in the war room. They were all dialed in. They were all participatory. If I’m betting big money, I would say that Donald Trump didn’t know anything about this thing going on because they knew that he would blabber it and say it and try to get credit too early before the thing was taking place. That’s the difference between large R or capital R Respect versus small R respect. Capital L Loyalty is when you’re standing for American values. Small L loyalty is when you’re standing for individual or party loyalty.

The challenge that we're going to be facing moving forward is the redrawing of the line between criminal and ethical.

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It was frustrating to me too. I remember somewhere in 2010 or 2011, Mitch McConnell standing at the Capitol in front of all the cameras and the mics proudly professing that it was the Republican’s mission to deny Barack Obama a second term. Do you remember that? He wore that like a badge of honor. It’s like, “Is that why you were sent to Washington to represent your people, to deny a president a second term?” I don’t think that was what people thought when they voted for you. They were thinking about their needs, desires, desires for their state and all that. There’s always a little bit of politics. This is my team that’s yours and I want you to support my team, but not at the expense of others. That was disappointing.

The expense of others, it’s disappointing and disheartening because we are a country that was built mostly on collaboration and cooperation especially at the beginning. How can we work together and create a mutual benefit? If we see a country in need like Ukraine and parts of their country are being taken over unethically by another foreign country, Russia in this case because they want that level of security and the political will is not there to fight back. Barack Obama could have been tougher on Russia if the United States was wary of being in war. We’re weary that by the time it got to Syria, people in the United States are going to like, “There are too many getting killed. Why are we there? What are we holding together?” There was no energy to do anything around Syria politically other than the things they did. The money has some depleted qualities to it because we used up all our used stuff and we threw a bunch of equipment at it and some bombs and stuff like that. It needed to be rebuilt because we dumped it all onto other countries. There’s not enough in the stockpiles to build that back up again.

Americans had no appetite for another war at that point. Everybody was weary and tired of it. 

We’re still tired of it too but clearly not at the expense of the courage because the push back has been solid against that experience.



To what it does too in the region and maybe hurts us in other ways in the future that we’re going to regret someday in terms of ISIS and all that. We could go on to another big rabbit hole on that one. 

What we do next time, Tom, is we do identity and truth. The reason why this one came to me at the end regarding identity and truth is that if our identity is not on the values of human rights anymore, if our identity is not on the value of the difference between ethical and criminal. What is our identity? Let’s look at the democratic and Republican identities. Let’s pull those apart because it’s time for us to do some truth-telling about those two different identities. That can be helpful.