The Fine Line Between Ethical Awareness And Criminal Awareness
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In America, certain things are missing right now. The lines between ethical awareness and criminal awareness are getting blurry. What is ethical and criminal greatly depends on who perceives it. Now, if truth has been purchased and is manipulated, where can we draw the line? In this, join hosts, Bill Stierle and Tom, as they talk about ethical awareness and how it can be differentiated from a criminal mindset. They put it in terms of the current impeachment process going on and where bribery and the value of empathy are concerned. They further explain how society can restore its view on ethics and create great clarity in the United States.
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Bill, some things are missing in America right now. It’s more of an awareness of ethics. I think that ethics, its truth has been purchased or it’s being manipulated or the lines of ethics and legality are getting blurred. I thought it’d be good to check in on that now. What do you think?
I appreciate that, Tom. One of the main things that we’re struggling with is the collapse between what something is criminality and what something is ethical. The ethical piece is something that is over here and then the criminal piece is here. If you only have one line, it’s not criminal. It makes it difficult for freedom to take place because this ethical piece is different people can use the word respected differently. Different people could use the word loyalty differently. People can use the word truth differently, then is it criminal? Do we want to make a law about that ethical value or not? One of the things that’s great about America is it has a range of things that are ethical that you could put rules around and you could hold to a different stand rather than having the criminal line be crossed.
Once the criminal line gets crossed, then it’s jail time. Once the ethical line is crossed, it’s money in civil court. You can say if one company has a database and they have some salespeople working for them and then they come from that company and they bring the database from that company into the new company that they’re hiring at. Is it criminal? It’s ethical more than they’ve stolen this person’s data. Instead of trying to prosecute a white-collar crime on criminality, they try it as an ethical piece and say, “Give me a crap-load of money or else it can move to that if you don’t do that.” The person goes, “Yeah, that was ethically wrong. Our guy should not have done that,” and they pay it out.
Meanwhile, we have this impeachment process going on where there’s a lot of argument going on that it wasn’t the right thing to do or that act is troubling. It causes me concern. He shouldn’t have said that. He shouldn’t have done that. There’s a big but that it doesn’t rise to the level of impeachment. The implication being it has to be criminal to be impeachable, which I don’t think is the case.
That part is not true. It doesn’t have to be criminal. It’s because the Nixon piece was more centered around the word break-in and this one is initially centered around the phrase quid pro quo that now has shifted to the word bribery.
Have you seen that? I’ve seen that. They finally got that memo.
This is a bribery piece. The word bribery has an energetic value that’s higher than the phrase quid pro quo because it’s Latin, it’s a legal term, it’s written a certain way. It’s a college-level phrase and the general public is not living in the quid pro quo place and that there’s a problem with that. They’re bribing their children all the time and they’re making quid pro quos all the time. For a footnote, Tom, we have no deals in our family and no bribery allowed in my family.
I’ve been impressed that I’ve seen you parent your children. It’s hard sometimes as a parent when you need your child to do something and they want whether it be ice cream or to stay up a little later or to watch a show on a streaming device. I may be happy to let you do that if you can do this other thing that you need to do and there you go. It’s easy for a parent to slip into that.
With the impeachment, the problem is that many parents, when they were raised were brought up with parents that would bribe them all the time when they would use distraction qualities when they would do these things. We’re seeing that happening at the presidential executive level is the shiny lure. We got distracted because we’re not following along with what you’re doing to us and regrettably because much of America has a part of that mindset. There’s this book called Punished by Rewards by a guy named Alfie Kohn. He’s a great writer. I’ve read all of his stuff. The Punished by Rewards: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A’s, Praise and Other Bribes. That’s the bribe that’s sitting on the backend of it. The problem with incentive plans is if an incentive plan is you get one person to go to Hawaii for selling the most cars, now you’ve got ten other salespeople that are not going to Hawaii.
The theory is that you’re demotivating them so much more.
What happens after the person goes to Hawaii once? What are you going to bribe them with next year? They could say to themselves, “I don’t want to go to Bali. It’s too hard.” All of a sudden, they have no incentive to become the number one salesperson anywhere other than to challenge/win against their other colleagues, which is, “I’m going to step on your hand, wrist, foot, throat to get there.” The problem is in the bribery mindset. It’s more than a twist. It’s literally a handcuff. “If you don’t do this thing, you will not get this military aid that is going to save your people’s lives.” That’s problematic because all of a sudden, you’re fourteen days from the time that they held it up and it would have been longer and they were going to do it until the whole thing broke.
Until it came out. I find that to be a hollow argument where they say, “They got the aid.” They got the aid because the story broke. Did you see all the news about how President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine was supposed to be interviewed on CNN by Fareed Zakaria? That got canceled because it came out and so he didn’t need to go on TV. They say, “We’re starting these investigations because it was out there.”
Even if he would have done it, these are two leaders dealing with each other. You don’t bribe people because you’re powerful versus a weak nation. You’re going to pay for it if you do it. There are short-term gains and long-term costs. The long-term cost depends on is the Trump empire going to last several years after he’s out. How long before the signs come down? He’s associated with a company ethic that bribes people. It’s got a short-term boost. His funding is great until he loses and then everything goes away because he spent his ethics and integrity on the bribe.
Once the criminal line gets crossed, then it's jail time. Once the ethical line is crossed, it's money in civil court.
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You know this with teenagers. If they are not in a relationship, they will either crash you or crash themselves. They crash themselves in drugs. They’ll crash you in anger and withdraw. They never want to talk to you again because you bribed them the whole time. You never trusted them and you don’t respect them because you had to bribe them. The challenge is that if somebody is and has the mindset that they are ethical and then being accused of not being ethical. If a rich person is saying, “I’m not one of those crook rich guys. I’m one of those ethical rich guys.” What happens is it’s like, “I don’t want to be in this group.” They can play their ethics card right there rather than being in the demonized groups, but they don’t want to turn on their fellow rich guys.
All of a sudden they’re sad and torn. We have one business billionaire guy, he was crying on the news because, “I’m one of the good guys.” The answer is, “Go ahead and turn on your other guys then.” We do have trouble with ethics in America. He could have taken the high road right there and said, “We do have ethics and from time to time, certain rich people choose to use their money at the expense of others. I’m not one of them, but there are many that do or some that do.” He could try to minimalize it. It’s the same thing for regulations time. You can proportionalize and you can change the perception and the perspective on regulations. It will sound like this. In businesses, there’s that one bad apple.
It’s like, “No, there’s not one bad apple in the barrel. There are 100 apples and there are 30 bad apples that are siphoning off the system that needs to be regulated. Your industry is not regulating themselves and those 30 bad apples are punishing the people for getting their profits up, to get their bonuses, to get their incentives. The narrative of they don’t use that one apple anymore, but for many years, anytime there was a regulation breach where there was something bad that happened to people and people died. This was one instance. This was one bad apple. This is the one bad apple of the thing. That’s what’s happening here. The proportion is that the industry is not self-regulating and not caring for itself. It’s not standing to ethics and it’s literally allowing people to be poisoned.
I saw something that may relate to this ethics discussion. I saw it on social media, but part of it we’ve heard in our news media. Do you remember hearing in the last few months how Republicans all circled this memo of talking points for this impeachment battle and things that they thought were good messages to be putting out there? Somebody was posting a response list for Nixon Backers in the Watergate hearing. It reads the same. It plays into this ethics discussion. This person Art Buchwald put this in the newspaper in 1973 or ‘74, “As a public service, I’m printing instant responses for loyal Nixonites when they’re attacked at a party.” One is, “Everyone does it,” and then there’s the misdirection one, “What about Chappaquiddick?”
I don’t know how Chappaquiddick came into the whole Watergate thing, but that seems like an interesting misdirection. The whole what-aboutism that we’ve seen happen a lot in arguments, “A President can’t keep track of everything his staff does.” You could see Donald Trump already throwing under the bus some of his staff and although we have the transcript of the phone call and people who heard the phone call with Volodymyr Zelensky and so there are first-time accounts. It’s interesting when you see things and I’m waiting for this one, “Nixon made a mistake. He’s only human.” When is that one going to come out for Donald Trump? It’s interesting when we’ve talked about loyalty in the past. All these ethics and where is the line and how long do you have to be loyal and the expensive truth.
Let’s go ahead and practice those. Let me provide a communication empathy experience for those. You gave me four of those. Let’s do a little role play for people to see how empathy can be taken out for a spin here. Stay with me in dialogue. We’ll call the end of the scene and then go to the next one. Give me the first one there.
“A quid pro quo, so what? Everybody does it.”
“You feel confident that it’s okay for a President to make a deal and create a situation where someone has to do something to get a reward. It’s okay to do it in this way that’s not in alignment with the constitution. Is that correct?”
That’s hard. I’m sorry I dropped out of character already. That’s not good.
I painted you in the corner too quickly. Let me walk the plank with you a little bit here. “You’d like me to hear that it’s okay because everybody does it, the President gets to do it too. Is that correct?”
“Yes.”
“You would like me also to hear that you want me to trust the President, give him a break and let him govern. You want me to accept it because most of the Americans voted or at least through the electoral voted for him. Because he played by the rules there, you would like him to be able to do whatever you’d like. Is that correct?”
“Yes.”
Now I got you at the edge of the plank. The plank is the metaphor I’m using like the pirates having people walk the plank on the ship and there are sharks down there. Their anchors are tied and their arms are tied. They can’t swim. They got to float somehow but clearly, they’re going to tire out and drown. Here’s the drowning sentence then. It would be, “I feel torn. I’m not sure how we’re going to be able to honor the constitution at the same time is allowing what the President did to stand. Should we allow what the President did to be okay from now on for presidents?”
“Yes.”
“Is it okay for the next president to bribe a foreign leader, especially one that we are going to take advantage of that’s in dire straits, but we’d like them to do something on our behalf? Are we going to allow that to be a part of our constitution at this time?”
“I don’t think what he did rises to the level of bribery.”
“Should we then vote to change the constitution to get rid of this thing about foreign intervention? Should we go down that path? Should we do that?”
They’re going to be twisted into a pretzel. Few people have the presence of mind to construct that empathetic exchange like you do, Bill. That’s unfortunate because I do think if they’re prepared and skilled with some use of language and they cannot get painted into a corner themselves and paint the other side into a corner but in a compassionate way. When you think about it, that would be the pushback, “This isn’t bribery. This doesn’t rise to bribery,” but then shall we fix this other thing if you don’t want to call it bribery? Should we make it so that it’s illegal to request the help of a foreign entity? It’s already illegal.
I asked them, “Do you want to change the rule then or make it a constitutional issue? Are we going to make this the new rule then? If we give your guy a pass, are we going to make this a rule then?” Maybe what you’re advocating for is to change the rules so that we can do this because what we’re hearing is this thing has been done. Let’s change the rule to meet your new ethical standard. All of a sudden, they are on the plank. Do you want to go down that plank? That’s where your road ends. Your road ends by changing this. Your road doesn’t end by giving your guy a pass and not giving the next guy a pass for whatever, for sexual scandal or for a thing.
It’s important.
Let’s change, “What about Chappaquiddick?” to, “What about Burisma?” What about the Bidens and corruption? That’s been an argument that I’ve seen some try to make. Rand Paul, in an interview on Meet the Press, tried to make it the same thing that what Joe Biden did as Vice President of the United States was the same thing as what Donald Trump’s trying to do with Volodymyr Zelensky.
That’s a false equivalency. Let’s go ahead down that path and watch what empathy does to shift that.
What about what Vice President Joe Biden did with investigating corruption? What about Hunter Biden and Burisma? That’s the same as what Donald Trump is trying to do.
It sounds like you’re feeling some confidence that there are some things that the Bidens did that need to be investigated. Is that correct?
Yes.
You’d like some truth to be told about what happened with the Bidens in Ukraine. Is that correct?
Yes.
You would like those things to be equal to what Donald Trump has done. Is that correct?
Yes, it’s the same.
The truth for you is these two things are equal?
Yes.
It sounds like you’re requesting then that it’s okay for the President to do something even though we don’t have the evidence for what the Bidens did. In fact, that thing has been investigated. You would like to open it up again to see if anything is there because someone said so. Is that what your thought is? You want to re-open the investigation.
We don’t know what went on there. We need to know.
You have the thought to take some time to create the idea of something happening when we already know that something happened with Donald Trump. You want to create the idea and the stir that something bad happened even though we already know that something’s bad happened here. How about if we deal with Donald Trump on his thing and then let’s see what happens with Joe Biden and not make those two things equal. Would that be okay with you too? Let’s do one at a time. Ethically, what Donald Trump did is not in alignment and whether or not Joe Biden and his son did something unethical, we don’t particularly have any good evidence about that. We have a lot of stories that were created.
We do have some evidence and some situations about what President Donald Trump did out of the line of ethics. How about if we finish the ethical thing on Donald Trump first before we go into the thing that might have happened with the Bidens? The thing is it’s not about them accepting. It’s about them. It’s about ending the argument push that’s not real. It’s stifling the topic talking point.
Empathy robs the oxygen from false narratives. You could try to argue with somebody that’s empathizing with you, but you literally will run out somewhere between 3 to 5 sentences. They can’t keep going because they’re taking the oxygen away from it. It’s following a non-truth until it becomes so much a non-truth. You don’t want to say anymore.
I would argue that most politicians would stick with repeating that non-truth over and over again hoping that’s the message that sticks, even though it’s quite obvious to people observing this that their argument is hollow.
The press is making a mistake here. This is exactly where the press makes a mistake.
What are they doing?
They’re chasing facts instead of discharging with empathy, “How about this?” Those are easy, especially for somebody that’s marketing and branding, to ball back. All of a sudden, you don’t have anything.
It also sounds like a juvenile argument. “I know you are but what am I?” type of thing. That doesn’t resonate.
With skilled marketing and salesperson, that is a master of distraction. He is a master of, “Look over here. What about this?” An empathy sentence they don’t know what to do with including Donald Trump. It’s funny a colleague of mine says, “Yeah, but he’s not going to.” I’m like, “I’m not interested in what he’s doing. I am interested in starving the oxygen from his words in a compassionate and parenting way.” I am not interested in taking my kids out of ice cream. I’m interested in them having a healthy meal and finding the value in that before getting dosed up on sugar.
That’s what I’m interested in. I’m interested in Donald Trump finding the value of ethics through empathy. You could say he’s not empathetic. He’s not empathetic. He is a person that was brought up in tragic deal-making and bribery. That’s what he was brought up. When he says it’s the perfect phone call, he’s literally telling the truth from his mindset and from his upbringing. I did that all the time in business. I want you to do a favor though. It sounds like I’m talking to the mob bosses that are going to pour concrete for my hotel. I’m making something up.
It does sound like that, no question. I’m sure Donald Trump did that all the time in business, no question.
There’s a difference between business ethics and corruption. Ethics and criminality, do those two lines. This is a good thing to take for example. Is it criminal for wanting to build houses for the homeless? Let’s start there. I want to build a shelter for the homeless and I’m going to run it through the city. I’m going to pass a bill to build things for the homeless. Is it criminal for all the different people to add their price on it so that thing that could be built for $7,000 now costs $240,000 with all the consultants, the unions, the different people that are adding their price onto the unit? Material-wise, it costs me $7,000 to $13,000 to build a set of shelters. You can’t grift off of that small number, but you can start this. All of a sudden, it changes from not $240,000, it changes to $540,000. How does it get so big?
This is the difference between it’s not ethical but it’s not illegal. It’s not criminal, but the answer is it is criminal because it is literally stealing from the taxpayer and taking advantage of a situation. What are they putting into those condos for homeless people for $540,000? We’re going to put them in there now and then they’re going to price out and then go back into the system out there eventually. We then came to resell these units and still have a profit piece in this rather than we’re doing this and then we’re doing this and we’re keeping it as cost-effective as possible. Now we’re not doing as cost-effective as possible. What we’re doing is how everyone can get paid along the line. That’s not a Trump thing. That’s a system problem, a scam and unethical behavior.
A lot of times in business, which is where Donald Trump’s experience is, you’re going to do what is the most expedient. It’s going to get things done quickly and you want to get things done profitably in business. I’m sure Donald Trump and his organization are one of the best arm twisters to get people to do what he wants them to do. It’s pretty easy to do when you have power and money. You saw the same thing play out on the international stage. The only difference is when you’re using the government system, people, the process to twist an arm of a foreign leader to help you personally try to dig up dirt on a political rival. That crosses quite a few ethical lines, if not criminal or illegal ones.
The damage is done. It’s not digging up dirt.
It’s a brand, isn’t it? It’s a label.
It is. I am going to rebrand this person as a possible person that is an advocate for corruption. How does this person’s son get $50,000 a month to sit on a board when 2/3 of Americans are making $50,000 for a year’s worth of work? It’s pointing the finger at privilege and saying privilege is not fair, therefore he must be corrupt. That’s already a shower that Joe Biden doesn’t know how to rinse off.
Most politicians would stick with repeating non-truths over and over again hoping that's the message that sticks.
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I agree because he’s got some skills and then coaching and training. He could deal with this pretty easily but he’s not equipped to do it. He doesn’t have the experience to do it. He is allowing himself to be put in that box and labeled. He was tainted or smeared. He’s being smeared by it.
He’s been smeared by the box. He’s being smeared by the thing. The response, “No, I’m not,” or “That’s not what happened,” or even, “This has already been investigated.” None of those things is the correct soap and water to be in the shower to get the stickiness off.
In every single news piece that talks about the Bidens, Ukraine and Burisma, they always have the footnote. To be clear, there’s been no evidence of any wrongdoing found by the Bidens, then the news media is covered. The footnote in the writings in the newspapers is there’s been no evidence of any wrongdoing found by the Bidens. That is not helpful. That is another fact that only angers people that are not of the belief that the Bidens are ethical people.
The smear, the challenge also was painted in the direction of the FBI, the doubt and skepticism about the integrity of those people. The State Department, the ethics and integrity of those people. The CIA, although he didn’t go all the way down the rabbit hole with the CIA. He goes after them because that’s not a good thing either. I’m also going to cast doubt and skepticism in the direction of these institutions and not trust leadership because I’m going to take out James Comey. I’m going to take out Robert Mueller. I’m going to take out those people and all of a sudden, he’s not faithfully executing the office of ethics and integrity. He is choosing to execute language narrative that activates doubt and skepticism in the institution and the individuals of that institution and creates the speculation that something’s over there.
The Republicans, the ones that are the defenders, it’s not about truth. It’s about planting the seeds of doubt and skepticism inside the mind of the listener, inside the mind of their voter so they can feel better about voting for their identity, Republican, to get the vote. It’s a short-term process because there’s only so much that can be done to keep that style of bribery going on and that type of illusion to keep going. It was hard to keep that going. I’m not sure how the Joseph McCarthy ending is going to show up because there’s a Nixon-McCarthy ending showing up here.
It feels like what I remember reading about the days of Joseph McCarthy that was labeling and diagnosing people as communists and all this sort of thing. It does feel that way. Thanks for taking us down this discussion about American ethics. It’s helpful to bring awareness anyway to what’s happening.
It starts us down the path of restoration of ethics and creating a great clarity line between what’s something that’s criminal and what’s something that’s ethical. We don’t want to get to a place where a politician or a state leader can say, “I don’t like this person’s message in my direction.” I get to be a person that gets to say who lives or dies by the message that they’re speaking. We don’t want to get to that place. We want to keep ethics and criminality separate because otherwise then you got some of the things you’re seeing in some of these authoritarian places where that person is like, “I’m going to execute or jail my political rivals because I don’t like the thing they’re saying.”
We can’t get to that place and believe me, the things that I’m reading about Donald Trump wanting to fire people within his own White House staff that dare to testify and other things. We’re getting close to that situation. It’s pretty scary.
Tom, we look forward to our next one where we’ll take a look at how can we purchase truth back by doing and taking that action of here is what you’re saying that’s wrong. We’re going to empathize with what the person is saying rather than pointing out. It’s about creating safety and in a discussion of an alternative point of view. We want to create safety in the discussion. That’s what empathy allows us to do.
I think that’s important. Safety in discussions especially around the holidays and people around the dinner table. Safety in discussions is good.
Tom, have a good one.
