Classified documents in Mar-a-Lago and the way that individual decisions about self-preservation can do large harm; and a path towards decision making that makes space for the humanity of those who will be affected by our choices.

Links:

An NPR story regarding the photography of classified documents recovered from Mar-a-Lago.

Wikipedia article about Tank Man and CNN footage of most, but not all, of the encounter (this video was chosen because of the available options it contains the original ambient audio, even though it does not show the end of the encounter when the man was rushed out of the road by other people.) Content Warning for threats of violence and gunshot sounds in the background.

Wikipedia article about Arthur Miller's play The Crucible

Hi, everyone. Thanks for tuning in. I usually

like to talk in generalities on here. And I usually like to make

things as broadly applicable as possible. But given that this is

a podcast about power, and its location, and its sharing or not

sharing and the ethical use thereof, I don't think I can

continue to ignore the situation with the classified documents at

Mar-a-Lago, any longer. Last night, the Department of Justice

made a filing that included photographs of the documents

that they found. Some of them. They all clearly have a

classified document cover sheet. And as one of my military

colleagues explained, those cover sheets are only present

when the materials underneath them are still classified. And

they're unique in a number of ways. You don't fake those

easily. So every single person who touched those documents knew

that they were classified, still classified. Still contained

sensitive information, still could endanger people's lives.

There's this funny thing that happens when self preservation

comes to the fore. And while I don't think it's the only thing

at play, I think it is becoming increasingly significant. When

we hold power in a particular arena, and we really know we're

in power, and we're not worried, and we're not insecure, and

we're not fretting about it, it's very easy for us to be

generous, magnanimous, and honest. The minute that our own

integrity is shaken, it becomes harder to be those things, it

becomes harder to be an exemplary leader, it becomes

harder to be a person that people would want to follow. And

it becomes harder to do the right thing because, because

that sense of self-preservation, which most people have, starts

to drive the bus. So instead of making the correct decision,

what we know is the right decision, we are deeply tempted,

and sometimes almost feel compelled, to make the decision

that will preserve us, that will keep us from harm. This is not a

new impulse in humans or animals or the natural world. This is as

old as survival. In the end, almost always, people will

preserve themselves. That's why scenes like the death scene in

The Crucible, the play by Arthur Miller, are so striking. Because

when he makes his choice, he is making that choice against self

preservation of the bodily variety. But even then, he

explains it by saying that he is preserving his soul by not

lying. And so there are at least two kinds of self-preservation

available. Integrity, preservation of integrity, and

body. Most of us have learned at some point in some way that

there are kinds of bodily harm that cannot be recovered from

and that we have a better chance of recovering our integrity if

we're alive to do it. Sometimes, the world goes upside down

enough or the moment goes upside down enough that it's no longer

clear that that's the case. That it's no longer clear that the

integrity that we are about to lose is recoverable. In which

case, preserving that integrity starts to feel like a reasonable

thing to balance against one's own life. I think of the Tank

Man in that incredibly famous photograph from Tiananmen

Square. I think of various other kinds of bodily harm-risking

protest, resistance, or as in The Crucible, simply refusing to

confess to something he didn't do.

So how do we, as leaders as people with power, most of us

with a lot less power over many fewer lives, but still with

power, power to cause harm, power to restore, how, how do we

determine what kind of preservation what kind of

engagement or withdrawal is the best choice in a given

situation? Because there are a lot of people who touched those

documents at Mar-a-Lago, a lot of people who had to have

interacted with them, who had to have moved boxes, who had to

have denied that those boxes were there who had to have

opened and closed them. And every single person who knew

that they were there, who denied that they were there, who did

not report, who denied by omission, that they were there.

Every one of those people committed a crime. A crime that

could potentially compromise other people's lives. And every

one of those people decided that whatever their self-preservation

stakes were, in that moment, they were more important than

the lives of the people on the other end of those pages. I

don't know the whole map. None of us do right now. But it is

clear that some people decided that they were more important

than some other people. Now, to be fair, we make those decisions

all the time. All the time. When we hurry to get in line before

somebody else, because we're both approaching the line at the

same time. We're making a decision about whose priority is

more important. When we choose to spend money, in one way, when

somebody else needs money for survival, which is always the

case in our world, we're making a priority decision about

ourselves, our own comfort. It's everywhere. And so I'm not

condemning it, I think making a different decision requires a

different kind of interconnected relationship that we don't

generally have with strangers. And often, we don't even have

with friends. But how do we decide? How do we decide? How do

we get out of that survival instinct far enough to solve our

own trolley problem? To look at the trolley, and the two sets of

tracks and decide do I save myself? Or do I save a bunch of

other people? Or maybe just one other person? What are the

consequences in each case?

Who can recover better? What does recovery look like? What

will the moral injury be? What will the damage to my integrity

be in each case? What does survival actually mean?

Because that's the key is we have to get outside our own

survival panic. It's one of the hardest things for intensives to

do because we tend to work on gut and we tend to work rapidly.

We tend to feel like we know what the answer is almost

immediately. And then we want to just do it and move on.

Especially if it's painful to sit with, we would just want to

do it and move on. And those are the moments where, unless the

danger is imminent, those are the moments where it's best to

take an extra moment, an extra breath, sit, to sit quietly with

it.

If you're a praying sort, to pray on it. If you're a

meditating sort perhaps allow it to be informed by your

meditation. If you're a list-making sort to make some

lists, to take a walk, to eat dinner, to stop thinking about

it, stop spinning in, it stop stewing in it, to consult with

some people who are enough outside the situation, that they

will give you an honest evaluation of your

circumstances, an honest evaluation of the thing you're

probably leaning toward already, because it doesn't take long for

an intensive to form an opinion, to tell you if your own sense of

self-preservation is going to do outsized harm somewhere else.

And ultimately, if you are going to do some kind of harm, if

perhaps it's a situation where there is no escape without harm,

to come to terms with that, and to see what you can do to

mitigate it ahead of time. Hopefully, most of our choices

are not life and death. Hopefully most of the people

that we are connected to are not connected only to us. And

hopefully, we have people of integrity, people of fierceness,

other intensives who get what we're doing, who get our

passion, who get how badly we want to do the right thing, and

are willing to help us find that thing. The least damaging thing,

the best possible choice, even in a hard situation.

We can do better with power. It doesn't have to be like this. We

can make decisions that make space for the humanity of

everyone involved. And decisions that move us forward. Thanks for