Popularity Cowards: We Prefer to Be Around Someone Who Cares

Mother Teresa in Calcutta Orphanage, holding future Tata Dealer

I was rereading the "Cognitive Risk:  EWaste Cell Phone Cancer!" blog from 2011.   I am kind of proud of it, its one that reached pretty high and could have wound up stuck in the weeds (like so many others in my "draft" box).

In this evolutionary brain "thought experiment", I put western civilization on the couch and explore how political movements - such as free trade or anti-globalization - take root.

Today's post is another "thought experiment", about how we have evolved to embrace both justice and mercy, and how that affects the way we hire or fire people.   I think it is good to be compassionate, but cowardly not to terminate when elephant extinction is at stake.

As a business person, I can identify something that is uncomfortable... the need to fire people who are not contributing.

As a parent, I prefer the coach who doesn't cut my kids from the team.

Here's where the rubber meets the road.  My generation was inspired by Jane Goodall, Jacques Cousteau, and Diane Fossey.  They made us feel empathy for weaker species, and to feel in our hearts a passion for earth's environmental diversity. The lure of empathy and critical thought is vital to our movement.

I felt the same heart-wrench when NYT journalist Jeffrey Gettleman wrote last week about the surging, militarized poaching of the African Elephant.  It stirred my passion, and my frustration.

Environmentalists are dropping the ball.  We are chasing e-waste and a war on reuse, and every time a dime of our attention is wasted on the fake story, we lose credibility.  We need to learn from our corporate species, and fire environmentalists who are misdirecting finite attention and money towards bogus hoaxes and myths of the harm and danger of reuse and recycling.

When I say I want to fire someone, I get a strange look from most of my friends who are also inspired by Goodall, Cousteau, and Fossey, and who feel genuine sympathy for the "E-Waste Poster Children".  I'm urged to balance and compromise, I'm told that "we wouldn't be here" if not for Basel Action Network and Greenpeace.   Well... I can say with 100% certainty I WOULD BE HERE.  I got here first, both to the movement for sustainable development of the southern hemisphere, and to recycling, and to reuse and repair, to exports, and to Africa.   And if someone has to tell BAN.org they are fired from the environmental movement, well might as well be me.

What is the balance between cooperation and conflict?  How do we shift a movement from mercy to justice without losing the empathy that brought the people we love to work with us?