Talk about link bait. Gotcha. No, seriously, I do have a point to make. I’ve seen some excellent commentary about how so many people were unwilling to accept even the possibility that Bill Cosby drugged and raped women. He was a symbol to white people that relations with Blacks could be positive. And he was a symbol to fellow African-Americans because he achieved a successful lifestyle, at least on television.
I know exactly how this pattern of disbelief works because it has plagued me for the more than three decades I have been trying to help Americans to understand the emerging competitive challenge from East Asia and how we must respond to it.
People don’t want to believe that Japan remains a powerful, sophisticated nation, so they choose not to. They want to believe it is failing because it doesn’t embrace American ideals. So the Japanese are failing. That takes care of them.
People don’t want to believe that China is an even bigger, although somewhat less sophisticated, competitor. They want to believe that the Chinese will start embracing Western values and allow democracy to take root and the Communist Party will ultimately be dethroned. That’s what they want to believe so they believe it in the face of tremendous evidence to the contrary. It’s particularly shocking that, in percentage terms, so many Chinese are studying or speaking English. We aren’t even trying to learn their language.
People don’t want to believe that we have to improve our elementary-to-high school education system to compete against societies that place a huge emphasis on education. We prefer to believe that Americans deserve economic well-being and that we don’t have to educate ourselves to achieve that. So that’s what we believe.
People also don’t want to believe that we have to examine the relationships among key players in our brand of capitalism. They prefer cowboy-style, John Wayne, go it alone tendencies. I’ve argued that we need to improve coordination between management and labor, between universities and the private sector, between states and regions and start-up companies, and so forth. This smarter brand of capitalism has taken root in some places in the country, and they are experiencing wealth as a result. But taken as a whole, America doesn’t want to believe that we need to change anything to better compete in the world. So we don’t.
The power of collective wishful thinking is enormous and the Bill Cosby affair is only the latest reminder.
