I had a chance to listen to a Senior VP at the Boeing Corporation speak this week and it again dawned on me-as it does most every time I hear the song of the Fortune 500-that these guys make no damn sense.
Not a freakin' lick.
And this, perhaps more than anything else around, can explain the sorry state of our economy.
According to their VP, Boeing's corporate mission is "Protecting people and connecting people."
Now, let's be clear. Most of what Boeing builds is built to kill people. Like every other defense contractor, they are in the war business.
And business is good.
On December 31, 2008, while most American companies were going down the toilet, Boeing was awarded 379 million to continue development of the "Ground-based Midcourse Defense program" for the US Missile Defense Agency.
I'm not going to get into missile defense right here, but the short version is: Star Wars doesn't work. It has never worked. But that hasn't stopped the money from flowing into Boeing's pockets.
The whole country was wondering how the hell to pay their rent, and Boeing is living high on the bridge-to-nowhere hog. This is Halliburton overcharging taxpayers by $1 billion for their work in Iraq.
And just like Halliburton-Boeing's windfall is also coming from taxpayers.
Protecting people? This company just took $379M out of our pockets for a system that will never make us safer. Two for the price of one. In fact, by pissing off Russia with our desire to install these missiles in Poland-well, you do the math.
And my real concern here is not Boeing malfeasance, but that the language used by such corporations makes this malfeasance significantly easier.
It's talk stripped of responsibility. The firing of thousands has become "downsizing" or outsourcing." Orwell called this "doublespeak," the Bush administration called it "business as usual." David Bromwich, in the New York Review of Books, dubbed it "revolutionary euphemism."
And revolutionary it is-psychologically transformative really.
Over the past two decades we've worked pretty hard studying attention. We now know there are two main types: exogenous and endogenous, with the former being are ability to detect novelty and change in the environment, and the latter being, as psychologist Laura Sewall puts it in her essay The Skill of Ecological Perception,: "a kind of perceptual readiness. It is the largely unconscious placement of one's focus on internal desires, needs and priorities. It acts as a filter or gate, selecting particular information from the visual field. This process serves to affirm our expectations and help us identify what we are looking for; when I am hungry, restaurant signs ‘pop out' of any long row of commercial buildings."
The process of attention-of caring about what we care about-functionally denies the senses access to conflicting information. We sometimes call this effect "confirmation bias.
It happens because attention strengthens certain synaptic connections while weakening of others. Stronger connections have an easy time firing than weaker ones and once these patterns are laid down, unless we work hard to rework them, what we want to see is usually exactly what we see.
"By filtering the visual world consistent with previous experience or mental states," says Sewall, "attention builds and perpetuates one's view of reality (for a much longer version try Armin Schnider's The Confabulating Mind: How the Brain Creates Reality or William Hirstein: Brain Fiction: Self-Deception and the Riddle of Confabulation)."
And we pay a tremendous amount of attention to language-especially when we're the one's speaking. This means corporate-speak is not only amusingly meaningless. It's dangerous.
The folks who speak this way see the world this way. Their world is literally unhinged from the real world. In theirs, they are free of responsibility because a language of revolutionary euphemism makes it so.
And this fact not only makes "corporate social responsibility" a contradiction in terms, it makes it a near impossibility.
