The assault on Truth

One of the most astonishing factors about the Trump presidency is his complete lack of respect for truth. This has spawned many articles, some books, and much hand wringing. Sadly, until now it has not seemed to damage the president, and few of these articles or books seem to have workable ideas as to how to respond.

We need truth to operate, because without truth there cannot be trust. It starts with our parents. I am not a big fan of the Santa Claus myth, and my reason is the potential rift in trust that follows once kids find out the truth. I lost a lot of respect for my mum the day I caught her cheating at a card game. As kids, we need things to hold onto as reliable.

Truth is vital in human relationships. In the dating game, there are some rules, and some exaggerations and omissions permitted. It is sort of OK to post a picture from a few years ago. There are even some untruths expected, about former partners for example. But within that framework there is no faster way to kill a relationship than to lie persistently.

It is also true in business. Shell suffered many scandals during my tenure there, but by far the most traumatic was when our CEO was discovered to have been systematically exaggerating our oil reserves, a public number shared with investors. Think about it. In Nigeria, it is possible that poor decisions may have cost lives, or at least ruined an environment. In South Africa, questionable business decisions helped to prolong an evil regime. But, internally, we were able to reconcile these things, because we understood the trade offs that are required in a complex world, some of which might not look so smart in hindsight.

The oil reserves crisis was not like that, even though it just involved numbers in a report and could physically hurt nobody. The reason it was so painful was that it involved lying. And we could understand that to perpetuate the lying meant that several executives would have had to collude or be bullied into the lie. We understood that could have been us. And it destroyed the whole basis on which our relationship with the company had been built. As the replacement CEO said at the time, trust arrives on foot and departs in a Mercedes. The cleansing required much longer and was much more painful, even though on the surface it could be solved by a single firing. As an example, it involved a major initiative about bullying, because a culture that accepts lying will almost always involve some bullying, as indeed this one did.

I believe most businesses value trust and truth highly, despite the reputation for dishonesty that comes from shows like The Apprentice and various scandals. I was horrified in the UK Apprentice show when Alan Sugar discovered a blatant lie on the resumé of a candidate and then promptly hired him! What sort of message does that send? Maybe it is also true that business in the US is somehow less scrupulous. If that is so, it must be partly because consumer protection is so weak here, starting with my old gripe about a stated price being a real price not just something to add fees to. 

Our relationship with key institutions, either national or international, is more nuanced, but cannot really function without the trust that comes from truth. Churches are built around faith, which is belief in something that cannot be proven. But we sort of accept that Church leaders are fallible humans, even if sometimes they pretend otherwise, and we can also accept some failings, even something as abhorrent as child abuse, recognizing the sorts of people that gravitate to priesthood and the situations they tend to face. We don’t accept it, but we understand it, and we maintain some trust. What we cannot accept is institutional lying in the form of cover-ups. That is much harder for a Church to recover from, as recent events demonstrate.

Societies break down when basic trust is lost. In the US, our police are not always courteous, and some can be quick to rush to judgement or reach for weapons. But at least I don’t live in Honduras, where the police and gangs could be different divisions of the same organisation. Where justice breaks down, little else can function well.  Imagine being in an abusive employment situation or relationship there, there can be no recourse beyond violence.

Which brings me to politics. I used to think it quaint that in the House of Commons in the UK, you could get away with almost anything, starting with blatant incompetence, but you could not survive being caught in a lie to the House. It felt rather old school to me, and it drove a lot of strange behaviour, notably a focus in parliamentary questions on catching lies rather than policy. But now I think I understand the tradition better and respect it more. You cannot have trust with truth, and any claim to any values is fatally undermined by untruth. I was impressed that the tradition seems to be still alive, evidenced by the resignation of Amber Rudd over being caught in a lie over Windrush.

What the British tradition does not do very well is accept that there may be different types of lie. “We don’t pay ransom to terrorists” may well be a lie, but is surely a justified one, as might be other statements relating to security services. Then they may be lies that might be needed to avoid unravelling decades of policy, though Rudd paid for something of that type. You can lies simply from being ill-informed or uninformed, which might be OK if speedily corrected.

Then there are lies about intent or the intent of others, which could be construed as regular political cut and thrust. “In power, my opponents would reduce allowances” is somewhat harmless, as it is an opinion, and indeed one where any sensible person should judge based on statements from the opponents. But that it is short distance from there to “I have evidence that…” or “They reduced allowances before” or “We would increase allowances”, all of which could be straight lies. Most common nowadays are misleading truths, like “this measures would support small businesses”, which often is a poor excuse for “it will destroy fair employee rights, damage competition and is designed for the express purpose of benefiting my donors”. Even then, I guess it is not a direct lie, and it should be up to us (and journalists) to expose the hypocrisy, unless, of course, the same donors dominate newsprint and advertising budgets. This is the situation in an increasing number of countries.

All these lies might be debateable. But then there are other lies that are not. “I had no affair with that woman” became “She was not paid off”, then “Someone else paid her without my knowledge” and then “I reimbursed him”, all within a couple of days, from the lips or tweets of the man currently swinging a wrecking ball at our world. This is one of many examples; indeed there are examples almost weekly. Oh that the British tradition protected us in this situation. Instead, he just doubles down, issues threats, and brazenly marches on, while Republican lawmakers are too cowed and unprincipled to speak out.

The consequence of an organisation led by a compulsive liar is the same as I saw in Shell. Those underneath cannot send out a consistent message because one does not exist. Bullying becomes normal behaviour. And, values having been discarded, it becomes possible to promote policies so abhorrent that previously sound individuals would have deemed unconscionable before, such as the current disgrace at the border.

This assault on truth is a real poison, a poison perhaps more damaging than any individual policy act, and one whose sting will pervade. What I find saddest is how this is happening in the open, with little attempt at disguise, yet lawmakers remain cowards and somehow, 40 million people or so continue to support the man. I can’t envisage supporting such a person, irrespective of any other positive attributes or intentions.

Usually in a blog, I try to finish with solutions and reasons to hope. A lot has been written about social media controls, fact checking apps and so on. These won’t help. And part of me thinks we just have to learn our way through this. After all, I grew up in awe of BBC, which had its own censorship and establishment lies, lies which deferred acceptance of homosexuals, prolonged apartheid, and led to Suez, just to give three examples. We must celebrate the abundance of sources these days, even if, for the time being it is through gritted teeth. Celebrate, and trust the next generation, with better education and fewer prejudices, can rise up in support of truth as a value to treasure almost beyond all other values.    

Concerts and Closures

I have just finished a run of four weekends with seven choir concerts for five choirs. Add in singing at maybe eight masses, many rehearsals and dress rehearsals, two auditions and two voice lessons over the same period and you can get a feel for how much singing a get to do nowadays. And I am so lucky – I show up to most rehearsals fresh, and when I look around the room I see people exhausted after their day of work and struggling to enjoy themselves.

This is the end of concert season, and now most groups have a break until September. The other busy time is November, and then a smaller peak in March.  One opportunity the choirs have to learn from each other is that they could increase their audiences by performing when others don’t. I have long thought there is a market for a summer choir in NYC. Another one could perform in, say, October, January and April with a cabaret at the end of June. The October concert could use works they knew already or were simpler to learn, to compensate for a shorter rehearsal cycle. Instead, everyone seems to follow the obvious pattern.

I am someone who enjoys rehearsal nights almost as much as concerts. Concert days tend to be long and involve a lot of sitting about. The day I always hate most is the one following a concert, because the day always feels empty, somehow lacking direction. So today could be called by black Monday, the first after the season end. Black Monday for most is the last Monday in January before pay day, when the weather is awful, the work is piling up and the credit card bills have landed with a thud. But I did wonder if others had the same feeling immediately after an adrenaline rush, and that such times make people susceptible to depression or even suicide – that could be helpful to know.

My groups are all different from each other. They are large and small, semi-professional and amateur, joyous and serious, groups where I am one of the best singers and ones where I am just a journeyman, groups where I am one of the youngest to almost the oldest. I can learn from all of them and take enjoyment from all of them in different ways. I could characterize the five groups as specialist, community, friends, fresh and eclectic.

I was thinking today about what the choirs might be able to learn from each other, and how that might apply in business or other endeavours. The most important lesson is that each group finds a success in its own way, with its own guiding principles. It seems that having a core purpose and values, written down or not, offers a way to sustain. Then each group emphasises its strengths rather than trying to address its weaknesses. They don’t try to become something they are not, but to become even better at what they already are.

That is a good lesson in business and personal development too. I have always found it odd that annual appraisals focus so much on weaknesses. They would be far more effective if they helped us build up our strengths. Businesses also need to choose leaders who fit their values, which may why importing from outside does not always work, despite the obvious benefits of adding new perspectives. One of my choirs will be searching for a new conductor this fall, and it is the one with the least distinct personality. They need to think hard about the appointment.

Staying with the leaders, they are also all motivated by different things, but they also know their strengths and emphasise them. A common factor in arts is that the money is something that barely motivates them at all. So long as they are not insulted and are paid within the expectations of their place in the hierarchy, they are happy to work for very little and indeed spend their own money to improve the performances. Professional pride and development, empathy and friendship, challenge, and service to singers and a community all matter a lot more to them than cash. And, I suspect, that is true for most of us, unless we work in an industry where greed is the whole point like finance.

I also thought about my own performance in all these concerts. Some very strange things happen. If I feel nervous, or exposed, or somehow unworthy, or if the group somehow collectively senses one of those things, then my breathing becomes unreliable, I start making mistakes and I find it hard to do more than get through a piece, relying on technique and tricks. But sometimes the opposite happens. I find breath control I never had during rehearsals, my voice can soar and feel more controlled, and I can somehow feel attuned to everything going on around me, almost out of my own body. I guess that must be adrenaline or something like it. It is wonderful when it happens. I only wish it would happen more often. 

This has obvious parallels in sports and in work generally, especially teamwork. Confidence matters so much, and a good coach or leader knows how to transmit confidence to others. A good conductor knows that almost nothing else matters on a performance day – their role is to send us on stage feeling confident and to maintain that during performance. It also helps to know that we have that magic overdrive gear somewhere inside us, that level of serenity that can produce minor miracles. We need tricks to escape from poor to adequate, then confidence to move from adequate to good, then something special to move beyond good. 

This serenity is more than just confidence – in fact overconfidence can be damaging, for as soon as I shift focus from the present and start thinking about the end of the piece or about the next piece or start preening myself then everything collapses. When I used to play competitive bridge, the same thing happened. When things were going really well, I could make the mistake of imagining winning the tournament – at which point everything immediately went pear-shaped.

The World Cup starts this week. I hope there are good matches on view in the US, despite my only receiving only FOX sports channel and the US failing to qualify. What we will see will be a few individuals and maybe one or two teams who manage to pitch their emotional readiness just right – confident, prepared, serene out of their bodies but still laser focused, never ahead of themselves – and hopefully we can see some miracles. We’ll see some other teams, just as talented, who get it wrong. Coaching matters. And it starts with confidence.

The serenity might also explain another factor I’ve noticed in concerts. Most years, the most memorable concert I attend is performed by amateurs, not professionals. Sure, the pros mess up a lot less and show off their skills, but they rarely scale the heights, perhaps because they are too complacent and giving enough to justify a pay check and no more. There was a TENET Monteverdi concert a couple of years that proved an exception – I wonder how the conductor and the group achieved a passion usually only available to amateurs.

I learned a couple of other things, or maybe learned again a couple of things that were obvious already. I can sing solos, but I am not a soloist. It is great to stretch myself, but also good to know my limits. And audiences love a big finish – all the strongest reactions came from the fortissimo thrilling endings. Those of us who snobbishly think we know better should recall such simple lessons – and reward conductors who know them too.

So, Black Monday is nearly over. Writing a blog about it was a good way to get through the day. And, as so often, one part of life can offer lessons to the other parts. We don’t learn enough. For all their brilliance and abiding strengths, each of my choirs could benefit from observing and learning from all the others. One is fantastic at social media, another programming, a third utilises its community, they all have something can could be easily transferred to the others.   

Keeping Children Alive

One of the scariest charts I ever read was in The Economist in 2012. We had just made the family choice to move to New York from The Netherlands. The chart accompanied an article about child mortality, based on a new report. It showed that teenagers are about 50% more likely to die in the US than in Europe, with The Netherlands having the second lowest child mortality in Europe behind Sweden (as usual).

You won’t be surprised that I never shared this report with my family. I comforted myself that 3.1 deaths per 10,000 kids still did not amount to all that much, and that probably the death rate for white kids in affluent families was closer to Europe’s 2.0 per 10,000. I took a deep breath and moved on to the next article.

Both kids having made it safely to 18, and one of them back in Europe, I can exhale now to an extent. And now I can revisit the statistic from a less involved point of view. For it is a damning statistic to US society. Surely one of the best, most basic measures of a successful civilization is how many of its kids it delivers to maturity?

I was reminded of the chart while reading last week’s Economist, which looked at deaths from car accidents, a leading cause of death of young people and especially of young drivers. France has seemingly managed to reduce its car accident death rate by about 30% over the last ten years. Once again the comparators given were Sweden and the US, both places where road deaths have declined only very slowly. 10 years ago France sat about 15% better than the US, and now it is only 15% worse than Sweden. Once again, the US has become an outlier among developed economies.

I witness the difference every time I set forth in my car. There are many contributing factors. The roads are in poor condition with poor lighting. Acceleration lanes often fail to meet European standards. Lane discipline is terrible, with overtaking on either side tolerated. And there are many more reckless drivers on the roads.

Thanks to Vision Zero, the infrastructure related factors seem to have been improved in New York since I’ve lived here. But I believe the dangerous driving has got worse, especially in the last two years, and I can identify two possible causes.

The first is taxis. In most of the world where I have driven, taxis are among the best drivers. They know the roads better and the miles of their clocks have taught them good habits. Here it is the opposite. Most of the clueless driving I observe here is from taxi drivers. My guess is that this is a consequence of Uber and Lyft. There are simply more inexperienced drivers out there, trying too many manoeuvres, getting lost, multi-tasking with GPS and apps, and generally messing things up.

The other reason may be opioids. There have always been a small minority of crazily reckless drivers on the roads in NYC, usually kids, driving over 100mph in heavy traffic, weaving between lanes, often in racing packs. It seems to be a particular bane on Long island. My guess is that the opioid epidemic has increased the prevalence, since now there are more delusional kids out there, sometimes high, always reckless.

I used to think that big cities were less safe than rural areas for driving, due to heavier traffic. But in the US it is different. The bigger cities have lower death rates per mile driven. New York City is one of the safer ones. And, as usual, the south and the red states fair worse than the coasts.

Vehicle deaths account for maybe a third to a half of the difference between the US and Europe in teenage mortality. Most of the rest is about guns.

I can’t really add much to the mountain of print about guns in the US. I confess I simply don’t understand why anyone sane would ever want to be anywhere near a gun, save for recreational hunting. The continuous school shootings are heart breaking, but somehow the prevailing trend in legislation is still to make matters worse rather than better. Perhaps these Parkland kids can somehow change the politics. Something has to.

Of course gun death is much more prevalent in poorer areas, and to a degree I was right to conclude that my kids were not in as much danger as they would have been if we had been moving to the south side of Chicago. But the risks are everywhere, not just deprived areas. As an example, suicide is amount twice as common here as in Europe (except for a few outlying countries). My guess is that the level of suicidal thoughts here is not that different to Europe’s. Actually, it is good to note that teenage suicide is not increasing overall, despite the horror stories about social media. The difference here is probably that more kids have an easier means available to kill themselves when they feel down, namely a gun. Add in all the daft accidents with guns, and you quickly realise that this problem is not limited to fanatic school shooters and gangs.

Playing around on google this afternoon revealed another statistic reflecting poorly on the US, one I really struggle to explain. Infant deaths here, that is deaths before a first birthday, are skewed even higher compared with Europe, so a child is 70% more likely to die before their first birthday here. This is despite all the money spent on healthcare.

Part of the gap must be to do with those without health insurance. But as far as I can tell, that only explains some of the difference. Blacks and Latinos are at greater risk than Whites but not by enough to account for the variation from Europe. Unless there are genetic factors, there must also be worse medical practices here than in Europe, though why that would be I have no idea.

Wouldn’t that be a great, simple, political agenda? Let’s keep our kids alive! And how is it that such a wealthy country has strayed so far away from good practice in this regard. An extended agenda would include not just survival, but offering kids the tools to thrive as adults. That would centre on education, where the US also lags, but not by quite so much.

To be fair, in NYC and other big cities, the agenda is not so far removed from this one. Vision Zero is a laudable program and it is delivering results. Pre-school for all is similarly well envisioned and professionally implemented. Sadly, the rest of the education discussion is swallowed by the politics of teachers unions and charter schools.

But at least locally there is something laudable going on. Nationally, there is nothing. I can’t recall a single comment among the thousands of sound bites from this president that could conceivably move the kids’ death rate closer to Europe’s. Yet the cacophony is so loud that no one seems to call this out, or even notice, or even care. Oh how I wish policymakers and journalists treated these international studies more seriously.