"You Didn't Build it Yourself"

A comment President Obama made during the last Presidential campaign got a lot of attention. It even inspired the slogan used at the Republican Convention. Picking up on a response to a question Elizabeth Warren made early on in her campaign which went viral, the President reiterated her point that to succeed a business needs more than the ingenuity and hard work of an individual businessman but relies also on things provided by the population at large like infrastructure, education of the workforce and the system of governance established and fought for that allows for such success. He ended his comment saying “you didn’t build it yourself”. The conservatives took the last part of the statement out of context and used “you didn’t build it yourself” to attack the President. This attack of the Left by the Right points out a fundamental difference between the Right and Left emphasis on individualism and collectivism. The value of individualism, though an admirable trait, has diminished over time. Early man made his own tools and weapons with which he gathered plants, hunted and fished. Later in his development he also planted seeds and bred livestock. This continued over tens of thousands of years. As families formed tribal units and further expanded their societies, man started to rely more and more upon his neighbors and soon, to improve efficiency, started to specialize until full blown distribution of labor brought about the industrial revolution. So when frontiers were first settled by individual families separated by miles if not tens of miles, as in the prehistoric times, families had to fend for themselves. Today we romanticize about the strong, self-reliant individualist with a pistol in his pocket and rifle over his shoulder relying on no one but his own strength, cunning and courage. We overlook the fact that the pistol in his pocket and the rifle on his shoulder were made by someone else who got their metal from someone who mined it with equipment made by someone else. So even as independent as he is, he still relies on others for his survival. As the population grew and technologies evolved, the skill and efficiency with which we interact with each other as opposed to individual behavior becomes ever more important. As a practical matter, with today’s technological complexity, if all communication and information storage devices broke down we could not survive because we have become so specialized that no individual or small groups of individuals have sufficient skill to make even the most rudimentary item. (OK, OK, the primitive tribes who have not yet embraced any of the modern technologies may be able to survive, but only maybe.) I suspect that there are a number of causes including propaganda, underlying the different value placed on individualism and collectivism. Some of them may even be biological. Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor, a neuroscientist was quoted in the Huffington Post on 1/4/13. “To use a powerful metaphor, we have two magnificent information-processing machines inside our heads. Our right mind focuses on our similarities, the present moment, inflections of voice, and the bigger picture of how we are all connected. Because it focuses on similarities, in my mind she is compassionate, expansive, open and supportive of other. Juxtaposed to that, our left brain thinks linearly, creates and understands language, defines the boundaries of where we begin and where we end, judging what is right and wrong and is a master of details. Because it focuses on our differences and specializes in critical judgment of those unlike ourselves, our left brain character tends to be our source of bigotry, prejudice, and fear or hate of the unfamiliar.” I believe different individuals are more inclined to use the right side of the brain others the left. Artists are right side of the brain people and accountants left. (We may have mislabeled the political right and left.) Getting back to “you didn’t build it yourself”. The left leaning people, using the right side of their brain more, and intuitively recognizing the connectivity of things, may by nature be more predisposed to giving credit more broadly and would have little problem with the notion that a business was built with many inputs by different people and society as a whole, not to mention a touch of luck. Yes, building a business did indeed take an effort of an individual, but it also relied on past and current efforts of others.