Karma and Long-Shadows

Late in 1981, I rode the escalator from the second floor to the main floor of the engineering building where I worked. The building was almost deserted as it was late in the afternoon.

At the bottom of the escalator, I hooked to the right to one of the east/west hallways of the building. I saw Art Weideman walking east and he was clearly unaware of my existence.

Art was a middle-managers and managed the "Transmission Engineers" for our product lines. In my mind he was at least seventy-years-old (although, in retrospect he might have only been in his fifties). He was about 5'-7" tall, bald with a few remaining wisps of gray hair, his face was lined with wrinkles and he was portly (by the standards of the day).

Art was wearing a dark-brown suit that looked like a "loaner" from a funeral parlor but had probably been chosen due to the color's ability to absorb random splashes of Dexon and 85-140W lubricating fluids and not show.

I saw Art bend over and pick up a random bit of trash...maybe a gum wrapper or a paperclip...from the industrial-grade carpet. He put it in his pocket and kept walking.

He didn't do it because he thought anybody was watching.

He didn't do it because it was his job or because somebody told him to do it.

As near as I could tell, he did it because he was proud of where he worked and it hurt him to see the place be less that what it could be. The stray trash, even as small as it was, made it seem like people didn't care. Art cared. It was within his power to make it better and so he did.

Clearly, that casual (but not trivial) action by Mr Weideman made an impression on me that was out-of-proportion its physical dimensions.

Men like Art Weideman kept the lamp of Western Civilization lit, doing-the-right-thing without stopping to perform economic calculations.

What is in it for me?

I am old-fashioned. I find that term very offensive.

It reduces human interactions into a single dimension as if it were possible to roll all of the benefits into a single, quantifiable number.

How do you quantify Art's bending over to pick up the gum wrapper? Here it is, almost 45 years later and I still remember it. It still informs my actions.

There is also a laziness to the question "What is in it for me?". Isn't it the job of the person who is asking that question to answer it? How can I possibly know what your internal value system is? Maybe the benefit I consider to be the most trivial is actually the benefit that is the most important to you.

The question has the feel of a demand "You dance until I am happy" when the path to happiness is for the person making the demand to dance. It is not a task that lends itself to out-sourcing.

Hayek

Hayek and the economists of the Austrian School contend that Western Civilization is the distillation of "What is in it for me".

It is paralyzing to attempt to calculate all of the secondary and tertiary effects. They height the farmer mows his alfalfa field impacts the number of grasshoppers which impacts the number of Sandhill Cranes which impacts the avian fecal content of the hay which impacts the likelihood of a milch cow getting avian flu which impacts a community's likelihood of being exposed to a novel strain of the flu which impacts it resilience in the face of threats of invasion by outside forces which....

The wisdom gained through hundreds of billions of lived experiences is passed down to us through the miracle of Survivor Bias. That wisdom is captured like a spider captured in amber.

We implement the wisdom of Western Civilization when we do-the-right-thing, even when there is no visible payoff.