Edward Bernays, the father of modern public relations, was still going into the office several times a week when he died in his sleep… at 103. Broadway producer/director George Abbott was working on a revival of his hit musical Damn Yankees when he passed away in his sleep. He was 107.
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Both men had lived through and adapted to countless numbers of technological, cultural, and political changes. When Bernays and Abbott both died in 1995, information had evolved from print to digital, distribution shifted from postal mail to faxes and then email, live events morphed into film, radio, television, and online presentations, musical tastes shifted from ragtime to jazz to big bands to rock ’n’ roll, and the world shifted the balance of power to the United States.

Mailing lists for news releases went online. Lighting and sound cues for stage productions were being programmed with software. Sexual content was no longer forbidden. 

Hire people smarter than you are... and get out of their way
Bernays and Abbott (and the organizations they led) adapted. In the tradition of great management, they relied on people who knew more about certain things than they did… and let them do it. 

Today, however, people like that are looked at as anomalies. Oddities. Relics. They weren’t. The “don’t trust anybody over 30” mantra of the 1960s seems back in style. Yet the underlying principles of business and the techniques of marketing, sales, operations, and finance haven’t changed; just the ways they’re implemented. It’s easier to learn those new ways than it is to grasp the foundational concepts, but the people running the latest wave of business ventures don’t seem to believe that. 

AI -- the old new thing
In 1991, the benefits of AI were very clear. Implementing AI/expert systems, however, involved months of interviewing domain experts and then months or years of transforming that knowledge into applications using a programming language called LISP. Unless you were a Fortune 100 corporation like American Express, Dun & Bradstreet, General Electric, American Airlines, Chemical Bank, Nippon Steel, and similar firms, the cost was prohibitive. Yet Chemical Bank’s application for fraud and error detection in international currency transactions paid for itself the first night it ran. 

Who worked on those applications? People who were in their 40s, 50s, and even 60s. Some of the domain experts at those Fortune-ranked firms were on the high side of that, having gathered institutional knowledge over decades. That’s considered unimportant, it seems, in the era of machine learning and AI agents.

Fading futures
Companies are already considering eliminating junior positions and replacing them with AI. People with years of experience are no longer considered valuable once their knowhow is turned into code. 

That should force people to wonder: “What’s my best-by date?” When will employers decide they can replace you with software? How long can you survive when AI isn’t offered as a tool to improve your productivity but as a replacement for you? 

Most of all, what will be sacrificed? If technology undermines the workforce and eliminates workers’ income, who will have any money to buy what the robots and AI produce? Not many. That raises another question: “If no one has the income to buy essentials, let alone discretionary purchases, what will be an industry’s best-by date?" It could be the time when it unintentionally plans its own demise.

​Peter Thiel lecturing on the antichrist (and suggesting Greta Thunberg as a prototype) is like Machiavelli expounding on democracy.

Thiel, like his PayPal colleague Elon Musk, uses wealth and the high profile it brings to commandeer public attention and espouse a world view that demonizes altruism and repositions the detrimental actions of the rich as beneficial and, in Thiel’s case, somehow Christian. He is himself a good candidate for antichrist.

The new goodness of bad
It is, in New Testament terms, incompatible to equate Donald Trump, as Thiel seems to do, with anything Christ-like. The current President lacks understanding, compassion, charity, forgiveness, gratitude, and morality… unless it’s toward sycophants who, despite his violations of nearly all of the Ten Commandments, praise him as the Second Coming. Yet Thiel supports him, and Thiel’s conservatism mirrors those same self-serving attitudes. 

The Bible itself is a cesspit of contradictions. If it were clear on every point, there wouldn’t be more than a thousand denominations of Christianity, each claiming to be the true interpreter of the Testaments. To selectively choose an interpretation that supports one claim — while ignoring other parts of the Bible that contradict that explanation — is disingenuous. 

The write way
The accounts of the creation vary depending on whether they were written by Aaronids or Levites. The gospels of the New Testament, none of which was written less than 100 years after the crucifixion, have their own unique stories and viewpoints on the events they have in common. Each one emphasizes a particular viewpoint. Each can be used to support assertions that contradict someone else’s. 

Scholars, rabbis, ministers, and priests will never agree on a single meaning for anything in the Bible. It’s human nature to claim evidence, real or imaginary, that supports your own point-of-view. Just as iis now happening with the United States Constitution.

Lost in mutation
Unlike “the good book” (about which Oscar Wilde said, “When I think of all the harm that book has done, I despair of ever writing anything to equal it”), the Constitution used to be considered straightforward and clear in its meaning. Not now. The separation of powers has become undetectable: the Supreme Court has assigned powers to the Executive branch that are not mentioned or implied anywhere in the document, and Congress has allowed its control over financial matters and treaties and international alliances to be usurped.

The Bible and the Constitution have both been appropriated as totems. Donald Trump has used them both: holding up the Bible in front of a church during Black Lives Matter protests in Washington, and displaying his signature-stained executive orders that, one by one, represent claims of Constitutional power that he does not legitimately possess. He qualifies as both antichrist and antipresident, yet his supporters, most of whom want to see a Christian nationalist nation, are happy to ignore both the founding fathers and the father, son, and holy spirit to seize power on earth and, like Crusaders, annihilate the infidels. 

Rallying the dupes
Thiel’s lectures are sold out. Republicans in Congress understand that, having sold out themselves. “It could probably be shown by facts and figures that there is no native American criminal class,” Mark Twain wrote, “except Congress.” Combine that with Blaise Pascal’s assertion that “Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction,” and you have a modern profile of wolves in sheep’s clothing preying on their flocks and their constituents.

Businesses in this country have been boycotted over their support for people their customers don’t like (Target for its DEI initiatives and gay-friendly product displays; Bud Light for featuring a transgender celebrity; Tesla for the anti-personnel mine that is Elon Musk; advertisers’ boycott of Fox News because of Tucker Carlson’s toxicity; South African products during apartheid). Yet American corporations have folded like empty wallets when threatened with financial penalties and operational restrictions by an administration that has no official power to impose them.

Profit over piety, safety over spine, partyotism over patriotism, feudalism over freedom: the drumbeat of defeat against the creep of dictatorship and the unholy veneration of an antichrist.

With each new executive order, each refusal by Congress to assert its Constitutional authority, each administration-friendly misinterpretation of the Constitution by the Supreme Court, the United States moves closer and closer to dictatorship. Yet the government is not solely responsible. Businesses are equally culpable.

Each time a corporation capitulates to threats from the White House, each time a law firm abandons legal principles to avoid penalties, each time a university agrees to modify its curricula, and each time state and local governments collaborate with Washington to threaten individual rights and replace freedom with fear, it becomes easier for the administration to continue to impose its unConstitutional will on the nation.

The new American mafia
The closest equivalent to the administration’s current modus operandi is organized crime. The demand for protection money to be “allowed” to continue in business. The bribes to be permitted to engage in free trade. The taxes (in the form of tariffs) that negatively affect profitability and reduce revenues while raising prices for consumers. All of it is harmful. All of it is based on ignorance of economics and an unwillingness — by business leaders, especially — to make it clear that the emperor, the capo dei capi of the D. C. mob, has no clothes.

By now, it’s clear that Mr. Trump desires to be king. His gold-encrusted office would embarras King Midas. That’s true, in part, because Mr. Trump’s Midas touch turns everything to mufflers.

Government of, by, and for the people may perish
His tendencies are always self-serving and intent on eliminating Americans’ knowledge of the real world. Replacing museum exhibits that trace the truth of history with displays of whitewashed reinterpretations that mirror an uneducated man’s lack of knowledge only serves to make Americans willfully uninformed, unable to face reality, and incapable of dealing with people, institutions, and nations that recognize the facts.

CEOs have paraded through the Oval Office with gifts of gold, as if they were courtiers in the court of Ivan the Terrible, hoping to be rewarded for ignoring that the recipient is not smart enough to know he’s not. They argue or are interpreted to claim that their actions are designed to protect investors and the company itself. They don’t. They only serve to give power to an individual who rules with an iron whim and could, at the mere perception of a slight, take action to inflict greater harm. It is a vicious circle of delusion and deceit.

Now is the time for all good men…
The longer business leaders stay silent, the more they capitulate to unwarranted decrees, the less power they will have to control the destinies of their companies, their employees, and their fortunes. They must take a stand. 

They must refuse to donate to the political campaigns of any candidate who has abnegated their responsibility to their constituents and the Constitution. They must withdraw support from political action committees that endorse the policies of Project 2025 which undermine democracy and the rule of law. They must let their suppliers, distributors, partners, employees, and customers know that they will not follow in the footsteps of Volkswagen, Bayer, Siemens, Bertelsmann, Hugo Boss, and American companies that supplied the Nazi government. 

In 1935, Doubleday published Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here. Ninety years later, it has.

The Bill of Rights contains no amendment granting people the right to be stupid. Unfortunately, millions of Americans are insisting there is.

They want to be stupid about science, medicine, religion, guns, and the restrictions of the Constitution itself. They’re Con artists, attempting to convince those “other” people that the Cons have Constitutional protections you don’t and that you don’t have protections you do. It’s the underbelly of idiocy that drags along the soil of ineptitude.

America is rife with past examples. There’s America’s “peculiar institution” that insisted that the people we enslaved were inferior — mentally if not physically. We’ve made a market in bias against the Irish, Italians, Jews, Asians, and just about anybody born somewhere else. 

In the 20th Century, after running through the usual ethnic victims, there was the vituperative hatred of Father Coughlin. The Catholic “radio priest” couldn’t seem to remember — in the midst of his venomous condemnation of Jews — that Jesus just so happened to be Jewish. 

McCarthyism thrived on willful ignorance. The junior senator from Wisconsin made claims (like today’s) with no basis in fact against people who were guilty of nothing. People whose behavior was permitted. By the Constitution. 

The John Birch Society joined in on the fun of a political kakistocracy. Back then they hated Russians. Today’s heirs-apparent think that Russia has the right idea: no opposition, no dissent, no choice, and no room for intelligent thought.

After having defeated Nazis in Germany, George Lincoln Rockwell still rose his stiff armed salute with a swastika armband and persuaded too many Americans that Adolf was right about the whole master race thing. In a sense, he was the ideological godfather of modern white supremacists. It wasn’t the Klan. That crowd was at least smart enough to wear a mask.

Another George (Wallace) had the sense to understand that racism was, well… stupid. Strom Thurmond did not, at least not until he had to admit he had a daughter whose mother was Black. 

Nixon, who should have had the wiles to work around the perceptions that he knew he should avoid, was almost clinically moronic. What made things worse was that the people he relied on were even less perceptive than he was. It’s too bad he was allowed to resign. It was a “good of the country” maneuver that set a pattern for tolerance of unConstitutional behavior. It was, yes, stupid.

Reagan? Oh, God. He was the best snake oil salesman the White House had ever let in. Nothing that he said or did helped the people that he said he was helping. And they weren’t smart enough to see that his actions helped the wealthy, not them. The “Great Communicator” was, in fact, a great deceiver. 

All the highly vocal men in Congress who went after Bill Clinton for his lies about sex with an intern turned out to have committed far greater sins of the flesh. At least they didn’t have the gall to claim “I wasn’t really that into her.” Just brainless enough to have opened their mouths after previously opening their zippers.

If Cheney was Tweedle Dum, poor Dubya was Tweedle Dumber. Instead of accepting the world’s willing help to eliminate the threat from Al Qaeda and terrorism, he listened to neocon nincompoops and put us even further in harm’s way. Apparently, too many of his cronies swallowed yellow cake.

By the time Mr. Trump stumbled into the Executive Mansion the first time, H. L. Mencken was proved right after nearly a century.

…All the odds are on the man who is, intrinsically, the most devious and mediocre — the man who can most easily adeptly disperse the notion that his mind is a virtual vacuum. The Presidency tends, year by year, to go to such men. As democracy is perfected, the office represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. We move toward a lofty ideal. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.” [Baltimore Sun, July 26, 1920]

Those plain folks are now — thanks to decades of descent in the quality of education, the lack of compromise in politics, the belief that facts are optional, and the assurances that “there are good people on both sides” — the prevailing idiocracy. They all declare the right to be stupid, but the rest of us should never be so stupid that we ever admit that they’re right.

Nothing’s quite as annoying as nagging. If you’ve made a behavioral adjustment to do something (and you actually do it), reminders are like gravel on glass.

If those allegedly helpful notifications are inflexible, and Duolingo’s are, they go beyond annoying to irritating and engender feelings of appicide — the desire to kill software. So, during the week between Christmas and New Year’s when people have more fulfilling ways to fill their time with family and friends, Duolingo never relented in telling me that my streak was at risk. 

Not only did I not care (I’d been going non-stop for the other 51 weeks of the year), I could not be made to care. If I was going to let a piece of software tell me what to do and threaten me with retribution if I didn’t do it, I would be susceptible to Newspeak (which, in 2024, is just as insidious as it was in “1984”).

GROW ACCUSTOMED TO THE PACE
When my firstborn child awakened with inconvenient regularity at 5 am, I became accustomed to finding something to do between the time she went back to bed and the time that I would normally arise. I exercised. It was beneficial to my physical health and, because it gave me time alone with my thoughts, my mental health, as well. Yet, when she began sleeping through the night, I was attuned to rising well before dawn. Sleep became a total waste of time. Except to her.

If there had been consumer-level software and mobile devices and apps then, I might have used that time with Duolingo. Or an industry-specific news site. Or an exercise program. But I wouldn’t need the enticement of a streak. Self-improvement is its own reward and, if you want that reward, you do the work… and you do it without being noodged.

It is, of course, a very individual problem. The idea of accomplishment is often far rosier than the effort required to achieve it. It’s why I label all those people — the ones who show up at the gym in January only to vanish by Valentine’s Day — resolutionaries. They fight one minor battle and abandon the war. 

THE PARTS ARE GREATER THAN THE WHOLE
A psychoanalyst might say I’m a little, well… obsessive/compulsive. I probably am. But it’s helpful, and it’s learnable. 

Set a goal and break it into parts. Don’t look weeks or months or years into the future where the objective resides. Focus on reaching step one at the end of a day or a week. If someone, besides yourself, has to remind you to do it, it will not get done. It didn’t really matter enough. Or you hit a snag and abandoned the quest, admitting deep inside that you can’t solve the problem (you can) or that the goal was unrealistic (only if you quit) or there are other things much better (and easier) to do. 

It’s bad enough that others might think you’re insufficient. It’s worse when you think they might be right. They’re probably not. And neither are you.

If you’re really, truly, actually not succeeding at something for which you’re sure you have (or can acquire) the skills, it might not be a fit for your strengths. If you want to learn French but, no matter how hard you try, merci beaucoups sounds more like murky buckets, try another language. Or study phonics to understand pronunciation; it helps in English, too. So, when you visit Boston, you’ll know how to say “I need t’pahk at the hahbah” when you want to find a garage at the dock.

YOUR THING MIGHT NOT BE “THE” THING
Not everybody’s good at everything. Do what you’re best at, which is usually what you love most.

There are too many challenges that people abandon. I developed asthma in my teens and listened to my doctors and relied on medication. When I did my own research, changed my diet, increased my level of exercise, and abandoned bad habits, the asthma vanished. [Note: doctors do not know everything. They know averages. So if you’re not average (and you’re not), they need to spend the time to understand how you work and why. There’s a difference between “normal” and “normal for you.”]

So the Duolingo effect is only good when a task is a painful duty. If you need to be encouraged, you didn’t want to do it in the first place.

It is not a new year. It is when, for the sake of record-keeping, we change the date. All of human time is designed to do that. 

If we all matter-of-factly change the date each day — “Is today the 3rd?” — and the month every thirty days or so — “Yesterday was February 28th. Is this March 1st or the 29th?” — and we never stop to celebrate that March has arrived (with or without attendant lions) or to reflect on what occurred in February, then why make a fuss about a year?

TRADITION
New years are pagan things. They’re long past having any meaning in a culture that thinks that anything that’s more than twenty minutes old is irrelevant. Or, among more recent generations, that nothing ever happened before they were born when the earth was without form and void and darkness was upon the face of the deep.

The pause at the end of each calendar year, as opposed to fiscal year or Chinese year or Hebrew year, is increasingly annoying. People cram into one brief period all the things that they should have been doing over the previous seasons: getting together with family, offering gifts because “I saw this and thought you would like it,” wishing for things like peace and love that were actively scorned during fifty earlier weeks, and eating single meals that could feed all of Mali for a decade.

WHERE TIME IS MEANINGLESS
People in areas of conflict where life is uncertain, food is a blessing, and freedom from disease is a miracle don’t care about what day or week or month or year it is. It’s another day to suffer or to have unexpected relief. It’s a day with equal chances of struggle and calm and the unmeasured time between sunshine and darkness.

So is this a new year or just more of the same? Is it merely a record of order and shipment dates and lease terms and football schedules or is it the start of something actually new — a world that finds a way to agree in spite of different perspectives, that doesn’t seek to have more and more when billions of others have less in a lifetime than we acquire in a season, that works to ensure that total strangers survive without thinking their survival diminishes us, and that faces the realities of life on earth now and makes an effort to improve them for the future?

It won’t be a new year until something changes from the old one.

Mixing politics and business can’t be two things at once… unless you’re a cultural absolutist. 

The millions of dollars that major companies spend on lobbyists — intent on swaying legislators and regulators to pass laws and make decisions that are favorable to business — is considered normal. Every firm from coal mining to crypto mining spends vast sums on influencing Washington, state capitals, and city halls.

Yet when corporations take a stand on social, religious, gender, and racial issues or speak out about armed aggression, someone will issue a call for a protest or boycott. It could be a customer or a senator, an organization or a sect. It will definitely be someone who’s convinced that “I’m right, and you’re not.”
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THE NEW ABNORMAL
This enters the netherworld of the high court’s Citizens United and McCutcheon decisions. As misguided as those rulings may be, they established the idea that a corporation is a person and has the same speech rights as an individual. 

When companies are spending money on PACs or ballot initiatives, some consider it fair play, others interference, but voters, ultimately, are influenced by those efforts. They’re not always accurately informed, but they don’t seem to care… as long as the cause fits their preconceived perceptions and assures them that they won’t be inconvenienced.

However, in the court of cultural conflict, passions flare. Speak up for just about anything that’s thought of as liberal, and voices will shout about wokeness (even though they misrepresent what “woke” really means). Support a conservative issue, and the culture warriors attack, claiming bias against a minority and, these days, implicitly in favor of white-is-right.

YES OR NO, NOT MAYBE
If anyone attempts to strike a balance — to recognize legitimate merits about conflicting points of view — the partisans reject them. Though human behavior reflects an infinite number of shades of gray, not black and white, it’s got to be us vs. them, the good against the bad, the right against the wrong. If someone is for this, they must be against that.

Nothing’s that simple. Unfortunately, politicians will say it is if saying so will earn people’s votes. Corporations will shy away from controversy for fear of losing Wall Street’s or buyers’ support (and the impact on share price and revenue). 

AN OUNCE OF PREVENTION OR EXPOUND THE IMPURE?
Speaking out is not merely brave. It’s essential. Silence gives comfort to demagogues and despots-in-waiting. Or, depending on your viewpoint, to libertines and blasphemers.

If Browning was right to say, “God’s in his heaven, all’s right with the world,” where is God when the world is in turmoil? What makes religious principles right when their adherents defend people whose lives violate those foundational tenets?

Gen Z wants to work for and buy from companies that reflect their goals for career growth, diversity, low or positive impact on the climate, mental health awareness, and economic prosperity. Their parents and grandparents tend to favor the status quo, even if it will have a negative effect on all those concerns.

THE WEIGHTING GAME
Clean energy or fossil fuels? Green careers or outdated ones? Artificial intelligence or only human? A safer tomorrow or a more convenient today? Those are choices that psychologists adore. Do you want one marshmallow now or three in an hour from now? The long-term studies show that those who defer gratification do better in their careers and their lives.

What choice will you make?