Honest People Built our Nation

“Not Gvt. but honest people built our nation” read the marquee in front of a beauty product wholesaler. I saw this a few weeks ago and assume it is in response to the Republican campaign against President Obama claiming he said that “you didn’t build your business”. That got me thinking about a couple of things. One is; what does it mean to “build” something, the other; what does being “honest” have to do with building anything including a business?

I will use the analogy of building a house for its simplicity. The process can be extended then to building a business or anything else for that matter.
· To begin with, there needs to be a concept of the house in the head of a thinker.
· Then, based on that concept, an architect needs to draw up the plans.
· Typically a bank provides the financing needed to retain the labor and buy the materials.
· A contractor manages the construction; taking the architect’s plan, he gets permits, hires workers, gets the materials and manages the construction.
· Workers with various skills put the materials together following the architect’s plans and the contractor’s instructions.
Beside the very direct activities listed above there are many tangential activities that the primary ones relied on for the finished house. Many of those required societies inputs to accomplish. The President spoke about the roads needed to transport the materials and labor, the education of the workers, and the system of governance that allowed all these things to happen. He stressed that, though individual effort is required, to build “it” there is a collective effort required on the part of society that makes the project possible.

Unfortunately we, and particularly the conservatives, take a simplistic view and pretty much ignore all but the effort of the heroic individual. Thich Nhat Hanh, a Vietnamese Buddhist monk writes about the difference between conventional thinking and “mindful” thinking pointing out that, for example, we think of our pulmonary system as primarily our lungs with other parts of our body participating. He says that in reality the system is much larger and more inclusive, extending well beyond ourselves. He points out that the air we exhale contains CO2 that is scrubbed by the trees returning the oxygen back into the air that we then inhale. So that as a minimum, our pulmonary system includes not only things internal to us but also external elements without which the process would not work.

Getting back to the building of the house. So who built the house? Was it the person with the concept; the architect; the contractor; the laborers or the banker? I think each would claim that they built the house whereas the fact of the matter is that it required all of them. Having approached the question in this fashion all would admit the other’s participation and the ensuing argument then would be their relative importance with each claiming their position at the top. (In the case of the beauty product wholesaler, he did non of the above, his parents having started the business.)

Now where does the notion of honest men come from? None of the interrelated tasks have honesty as a prerequisite for proper accomplishment. My guess is that in the mind of the individual displaying the sign, he may be thinking businessmen when he says people and attributing them with a virtue, which, though irrelevant, some may have while some don’t even know the meaning of the word. But he may be including the laborers in his “honest people”. Well the same can be said about them. There is no correlation between carpentry skills and honesty.

So, did honest people build our great nation? Ultimately most the activities required to build our nation were carried out by mepeople; the visionaries, architects, financiers, managers and not least, the laborers whether paid or as in the case of the slaves, unpaid (had to work the slaves in as a reminder). Those who think they built anything alone are delusional.

Did the government build our nation? We tend to confuse the terms government and society. There is a hierarchy that extends from the individual to family, community and society. At a philosophical level there is a difference between the order and more importantly, the degree of importance between the conservatives and progressives regarding this hierarchy. The conservatives put a strong emphasis on the individual and very little on society whereas progressives put strong emphasis on society and less on the individual. Once you get beyond the individual and family, to a community or society, they need governance. It is a system of setting rules and regulations and the means of enforcing them for the group to function. Gov Romeny wrongly stated that corporations are people. They are not. He should have said that their functions are performed by people and the profits derived accrue to people. In the same sense governments are not people but the functions are performed by people and the consequences of the activities, for better or worse affect people.

Government did not build our nation but people did. People built our great nation whether they worked for the governing bodies directly or for private enterprises. Whether they were writing the constitution, tilling the fields, creating businesses, building railroads and skyscrapers, allocating capital, picking cotton or teaching our youth.

Were the builders of our nation honest men? Were the slave owners honest men? Was taking the Native American’s land in exchange for trinkets or nothing at all an act of honest men? IBM during its early days competing with National Cash Register purchased their competitor’s cash registers, damaged them and then sold them as NCR products causing great damage to the NRC name. Was Thomas J Watson, IBM’s founder, who took the “traveling salesmen” who at that time had a reputation for lying, cheating and womanizing and dressed them in neat suits and ties without changing their behavior making them seem trustworthy, an honest man? Not all businesses succeeded using underhanded methods though many did. Government also had its share of shady characters.

So the marquee was partially right. Our great nation was built by people, some working for the common good of society and some driven by self interest with each including some honest and some not so honest people. And by the way along with a whole bunch of luck along the way.