Authors: Thomas L. Friedman
Unfortunately, Candace took the American Airlines Flight 11 that departed from Boston's Logan Airport on the morning of September 11, 2001, at 8:02 a.m. The plane was hijacked at 8:14 a.m. by five men, including Mohammed Atta, who was in seat 8D. With Atta at the controls, the Boeing 767-223ER was diverted to Manhattan and slammed Candace Lee Williams right back into the very same World Trade Center tower-between floors 94 and 98-where she had worked as an intern.
Airline records show that she was seated next to an eighty-year-old grandmother-two people at opposites ends of life: one full of memories, one full of dreams.
What does this story say to me? It says this: When Candace Lee Williams boarded Flight 11 she could not have imagined how it would end. But in the wake of 9/11, none of us can now board an airplane without imagining how it could end-that what happened to Candace Lee Williams could also happen to us. We all are now so much more conscious that a person's life can be wiped out by the arbitrary will of a madman in a cave in Afghanistan. But the fact is, the chances of our plane being hijacked by terrorists today are still infinitesimal. We are more likely to be killed hitting a deer with our car or being struck by lightning. So even though we can now imagine what could happen when we get on an airplane, we have to get on the plane anyway. Because the alternative to not getting on that plane is putting ourselves in our own cave. Imagination can't just be about reruns. It also has to be about writing our own new script. From what I read about Candace Lee Williams, she was an optimist. I'd bet anything she'd still be getting on planes today if she had the chance. And so must we all.
America's role in the world, from its inception, has been to be the country that looks forward, not back. One of the most dangerous things that has happened to America since 9/11, under the Bush administration, is that we have gone from exporting hope to exporting fear. We have gone from trying to coax the best out of the world to snarling at it way too often. And when you export fear, you end up importing everyone else's fears. Yes, we need people who can imagine the worst, because the worst did happen on 9/11 and it could happen again. But, as I said, there is a fine line between precaution and paranoia, and at times we have crossed it. Europeans and others often love to make fun of American optimism and naivete-our crazy notion that every problem has a solution, that tomorrow can be better than yesterday, that the future can always bury the past. But I have always believed that deep down the rest of the world envies that American optimism and naivete, it needs it. It is one of the things that help keep the world spinning on its axis. If we go dark as a society, if we stop being the world's “dream factory,” we will make the world not only a darker place but also a poorer place.
Analysts have always tended to measure a society by classical economic and social statistics: its deficit-to-GDP ratio, or its unemployment rate, or the rate of literacy among its adult women. Such statistics are important and revealing. But there is another statistic, much harder to measure, that I think is even more important and revealing: Does your society have more memories than dreams or more dreams than memories?
By dreams I mean the positive, life-affirming variety. The business organization consultant Michael Hammer once remarked, “One thing that tells me a company is in trouble is when they tell me how good they were in the past. Same with countries. You don't want to forget your identity. I am glad you were great in the fourteenth century, but that was then and this is now. When memories exceed dreams, the end is near. The hallmark of a truly successful organization is the willingness to abandon what made it successful and start fresh.”
In societies that have more memories than dreams, too many people are spending too many days looking backward. They see dignity, affirmation, and self-worth not by mining the present but by chewing on the past. And even that is usually not a real past but an imagined and adorned past. Indeed, such societies focus all their imagination on making that imagined past even more beautiful than it ever was, and then they cling to it like a rosary or a strand of worry beads, rather than imagining a better future and acting on that. It is dangerous enough when other countries go down that route; it would be disastrous for America to lose its bearings and move in that direction. I think my friend David Rothkopf, the former Commerce Department official and now a fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said it best: “The answer for us lies not in what has changed, but in recognizing what has not changed. Because only through this recognition will we begin to focus on the truly critical issues-an effective multilateral response to weapons of mass destruction proliferation, the creation of real stakeholders in globalization among the world's poor, the need for reform in the Arab world and a style of U.S. leadership that seeks to build our base of support worldwide by getting more people to voluntarily sign onto our values. We need to remember that those values are the real foundation for our security and the real source of our strength. And we need to recognize that our enemies can never defeat us. Only we can defeat ourselves, by throwing out the rule book that has worked for us for a long, long time.”
I believe that history will make very clear that President Bush shamelessly exploited the emotions around 9/11 for political purposes. He used those 9/11 emotions to take a far-right Republican domestic agenda on taxes, the environment, and social issues from 9/10-an agenda for which he had no popular mandate-and drive it into a 9/12 world. In doing so, Mr.
Bush not only drove a wedge between Americans, and between Americans and the world, he drove a wedge between America and its own history and identity. His administration transformed the United States into “the United States of Fighting Terrorism.” This is the real reason, in my view, that so many people in the world dislike President Bush so intensely. They feel that he has taken away something very dear to them-an America that exports hope, not fear.
We need our president to restore September 11 to its rightful place on the calendar-as the day after September 10 and before September 12. We must never let it become a day that defines us. Because ultimately September 11 is about them-the bad guys-not about us.
We're about the Fourth of July. We're about 11/9.
Beyond trying to retain the best of our own imaginations, what else can we do as Americans and as a global society to try to nurture the same in others? One has to approach this question with great humility. What leads one person to the joy of destruction and what leads another to the joy of creation, what leads one to imagine 11/9 and another to imagine 9/11, is surely one of the great mysteries of contemporary life. Moreover, while most of us might have some clue about how to nurture a more positive imagination for our own kids, and maybe-maybe-for our fellow citizens, it is presumptuous to think that we can do it for others, particularly those of a different culture, speaking different languages, and living half a world away. Yet 9/11, the flattening of the world, and the continuing threat of world-disrupting terrorism suggest that not thinking about this is its own kind of dangerous naivete. So I insist on trying to do so, but I approach this issue with a keen awareness of the limits of what any outsider can know or do.
Generally speaking, imagination is the product of two shaping forces. One is the narratives that people are nurtured on-the stories and myths they and their religious and national leaders tell themselves-and how those narratives feed their imaginations one way or another. The other is the context in which people grow up, which has a huge impact on shaping how they see the world and others. Outsiders cannot get inside and adjust the Mexican or Arab or Chinese narrative any more than they can get inside the American one. Only they can reinterpret their narrative, make it more tolerant or forward looking, and adapt it to modernity. No one can do that for them or even with them. But one can think about how to collaborate with others to change their context-the context within which people grow up and live their daily lives-to help nurture more people with the imagination of 11/9 than 9/11. Let me offer a few examples.
eBay
Meg Whitman, the CEO of eBay, once told me a wonderful story that went like this: “We took eBay public in September 1998, in the middle of the dot-com boom. And in September and October our stock would go up eighty points and down fifty in a single day. I thought, 'This is insane.' Anyway, one day I am minding my own business, sitting in my own cubicle, and my secretary runs over and says to me, 'Meg, it's Arthur Levitt [chairman] of the SEC on the phone.'” The Securities and Exchange Commission oversees the stock market and is always concerned about issues of volatility in a stock and whether there is manipulation behind it. In those days, for a CEO to hear that “Arthur Levitt is on the line” was not a good way to start the day.
“So I called my general counsel,” said Whitman, “who came over from his cubicle, and he was white like a sheet. We called Levitt back together and we put him on the speakerphone, and I said, 'Hi, it's Meg Whitman of eBay.' And he said, 'Hi, it's Arthur Levitt of the SEC. I don't know you and have never met you but I know that you just went public and I want to know: How did it go? Were we [the SEC] customer-friendly?' And so we breathed a sigh of relief, and we talked about that a little bit. And then [Levitt] said, 'Well, actually, another reason that I am calling is that I just got my tenth positive feedback on eBay and have earned my yellow star. And I am so proud.' And then he said, 'I am actually a collector of Depression-era glass, post-1929, and so I have bought and sold on eBay and you get feedback as a buyer and seller. And I thought you would just like to know.'”
Every eBay user has a feedback profile made up of comments from other eBay users who have done transactions with him or her, relating to whether the goods bought or sold were as expected and the transaction went off smoothly. This constitutes your official “eBay reputation.” You get +1 point for each positive comment, 0 points for each neutral comment, and -1 for each negative comment. A colored star icon is attached to your user ID on eBay for ten or more feedback points. My user ID on eBay might be TOMF (50) and a blue star, which means that I have received positive feedback comments from fifty other eBay users. Next to that is a box that will tell you whether the seller has had 100 percent positive feedback comments or less, and also give you the chance to click and read all the buyers' comments about that seller.
The point, said Whitman, is that “I think every human being, Arthur Levitt or the janitor or the waitress or the doctor or the professor, needs and craves validation and positive feedback.” And the big misconception is to think that it has to be money. “It can be really small things,” said Whitman, “telling someone, 'You did a really great job, you were recognized as doing a great history paper.' Our users say to us [about eBay's star system], 'Where else can you wake up in the morning and see how much people like you?'”
But what is so striking, said Whitman, is that the overwhelming majority of feedback on eBay is positive. That's interesting. People don't usually write Wal-Mart managers to compliment them on a fabulous purchase. But when you are part of a community that you feel ownership in, it is different. You have a stake. “The highest number of feedback we have is well over 250,000 positive comments, and you can see each one,” said Whitman. “You can see the entire history of each buyer and seller, and we have introduced the ability to rebut... You cannot be anonymous on eBay. If you are not willing to say who you are, you should not be saying it. And it became the norm of the community really fast... We are not running an exchange-we are running a community.” Indeed, with 105 million registered users from 190 countries trading more than $35 billion in products annually, eBay is actually a self-governing nation-state-the V.R.e., the Virtual Republic of eBay.
And how is it governed? EBay's philosophy, said Whitman, is, “Let's make a small number of rules, really enforce them, and then create an environment in which people can fulfill their own potential. There is something going on here besides buying and selling goods.” Even allowing for corporate boosterism, Whitman's essential message is really worth contemplating: “People will say that 'eBay restored my faith in humanity'- contrary to the world where people are cheating and don't give people the benefit of the doubt. I hear that twice a week... EBay offers the little guy, who's disenfranchised, an opportunity to compete on a totally level playing field. We have a disproportionate share of wheelchairs and disabled and minorities, [because] on eBay people don't know who you are. You are only as good as your product and feedback.”
Whitman recalled that one day she got an e-mail from a couple in Orlando who were coming to an “eBay Live” event at which she was speaking. These are big revival meeting-conventions of eBay sellers. They asked if they could come backstage to meet Whitman after her speech. “So after the keynote,” she recalled, “they come back to my green room, and in comes mom and dad and a seventeen-year-old boy in a wheelchair-very disabled with cerebral palsy. They tell me, 'Kyle is very disabled and can't go to school, [but] he built an eBay business and last year my husband and I quit our jobs, and now we help him—we have made more money on eBay than we ever made on our jobs.' And then they added the most incredible thing. They said, 'On eBay, Kyle is not disabled.'”
Whitman told me that at another eBay Live event a young man came up to her, a big power seller on eBay, and said that thanks to his eBay business he had been able to buy a house and a car, hire people, and be his own boss. But the best part, said Whitman, was that the young man added, “I am so excited about eBay, because I did not graduate from college and was sort of disowned by my family, and I am now the hit of my family. I am a successful entrepreneur.”
“It's this blend of economic opportunity and validation” that makes eBay tick, concluded Whitman. Those validated become transparent as good partners, because bad validation is an option for the whole community.