Eternal You

The documentary, Eternal You (2024), is one film that zeros in on the use of AI to contact loved ones who have died. As the marketing departments of the tech companies providing these products say, AI can deliver on what religion has only promised: to talk with people beyond the grave. Lest secular potential buyers be left out, AI can provide us with “a new form of transcendence.” Nevermind that the word, transcendence, like divinity and evil, is an inherently religious word. Nevermind, moreover, that the product is actually only a computer simulation of a person, rather than the actual person direct from heaven or hell. The marketing is thus misleading. In the film, a woman asks her dead husband if he is in heaven. “I’m in hell with the other addicts,” he answers. She is hysterical. Even though people who write computer algorithms cannot be expected to anticipate every possible question that AI could be asked and every response that it could give, government regulation keeping the marketing honest and accurate can significantly reduce the risk that is from AI’s use of inference (inductive) and probability that are beyond our control to predict and even understand.

The AI products in question do not include a conscious intelligence; for such to be the case, we would need to understand human consciousness, which lies beyond human cognition. It is important not to go too far in projecting an actual person, especially if one is dead, onto the product. To be sure, the lapse is easy to lapse into, for the product draws on a treasure-trove of archival data; in fact, only a little from the person’s emails, recorded phone calls, and texts is needed for such an algorithm to be able to make incredible inferences based on probability by drawing on all the general data-base. The effect can be stunning to the person using the product, but even if it seems like it really is the dead person speaking and writing, it is crucial to keep remembering that even the most striking likenesses are simulations. Even if neuroscientists figure out consciousness in the human brain and coders can simulate that in algorithms, the emergent AI consciousness of the person is not really of the person.

AI does not in fact deliver on the promises of some religions regarding being united with our loved ones in heaven (or hell). This is crucial to keep in mind when a simulation of a dead spouse writes, “I’m in hell along with the other addicts” because the algorithm has inferred based on probability being applied to the relevant data that drug addicts probably go to hell. None of the data that an algorithm can draw on contains a report of hell or heaven existing and that souls of dead people are in one or the other, so a simulation’s judgment should be taken with a grain of salt (i.e., not taken as a fact of reason).

Therefore, asking about the afterlife should automatically generate a statement from the algorithm’s coder to the effect that the actual person is not in contact. Even though a person who is still living can generate a digital “footprint” that can be used by an AI algorithm by one’s loved ones after the person has died, everything in that footprint is on the living side of a life/afterlife dichotomy.

To be sure, there is value in descendants being able to hear the cadence and vocal tone of a long-deceased parent, grandparent, or great grandparent. That voice could inform on the deceased life, religious beliefs, political positions, and more. Used this way, AI represents a new way of remembering and knowing a person who has died. A religiously devout person like the sister of a dead man covered in the film might still say that there is something not right about recreating the soul of someone whose soul is (presumably) in heaven. But such a critic has lapsed into assuming that the actual person who is dead is talking or writing in the simulation.

Likewise, there is value in using the AI products to help grieving people let go of the dead person and move on. But for this to be effective, the algorithms would need to be such that the grieving person is not stuck in the grieving process as a result. There is thus a need for AI companies offering such a product to consult with psychologists. The experience of a user of the product is of course going to be emotional, even if the user knows intellectually that the product is really just a simulation. At the very least, we would expect the managers to want to reduce any potential liabilities; buyer beware on such a product would not hold up in court, especially if the marketing is promoting being able to speak with a loved one beyond the grave.

Therefore, it is vital that AI companies offering such products are not allowed by law to claim, “You can talk with your deceased loved one!” Perhaps those companies should also be required to send customers a picture of Batman taking a card from a computer in the Batcave to read.

Eyes without a Face

The film, Eyes without a Face (original title: Les Yeux sans Visage) (1960), can be taken as a demonstration of the validity of Kant’s ethical theory. Whether or not viewers have studied Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason, the film is a good representation that it is unethical to treat other people only as a means. Kant claims that people should always be treated also as ends in themselves. In the film, physician Génessier literally goes into innocent young women with his scalpel, using them as means in his obsession to provide his daughter, Christiane, with skin on her face. She has no skin on her face because of an automobile accident in which her father was at fault. For our purposes, the film's message is relevant. Companies literally have  human resource departments and so many states use human beings as expendable soldiers. The very notion of a soldier can be viewed as an oxymoron to the extent that beings having a rational nature are sent out to be killed. It's not like having a flee killed. The film provides us with a great service in bringing Kant’s ethic to us, if only in that we don’t to read the philosopher's recondite ethical treatise (though Hegel's books are even more difficult).

Génessier tells Christiane that everything that he is doing, all the (as he later admits) terrible things, he is doing for her good. He also says that if he succeeds, the benefit would be “beyond a price.” Whereas for Kant, reason, or beings having a rational nature (such as us), has absolute value because we use reason to assign value to other things, the devious physician treats his daughter’s good as being absolute. This difference is crucial in terms of ethics. For Kant, rational beings deserve to be treated not just as means to someone’s goal (or interest), but also as ends in themselves precisely because being rational is of absolute value. What about when we don’t think (or behave) rationally? Kant would say that we still have a rational nature, and thus are worthy of being respected by other rational beings not just as means to another’s desire.

Does Génessier use reason—does he think rationally—in removing skin from two young women’s faces and grafting the skin on his daughter’s skinless face? I contend that the father does so because he has a strategy by which to achieve the good, which for him his daughter having a pleasant life. At one point in the film, it looks like the latest skin transplant will work. He tells his daughter that he would pay for her to take a vacation so she could enjoy life after having lived so isolated for so long. He uses the young women and potentially a vacation as means to his daughter’s good, and in this way he is using reason. It is quite another question whether he is being ethical. It is easy to see that he is not an ethical man.

In short, he uses people. Besides the two young women whom he kidnaps and operates on to give their skin to his daughter, he is using Gabrielle as an accomplice and nurse; he had fixed her face, so she feels obligated to do unethical things for him. Interestingly, the police also use someone in the film. Specifically, the police inspector uses a shoplifter as bait to catch Génessier. The inspector is not very concerned about treating the woman as an end in herself, hence he puts her at risk, as if the misdemeanor justifies doing so.

Christiane is the protagonist, and even the heroine, in the film, in resisting her father’s strategy. Whereas he admits that he has done terrible things but they are justified because they serve his daughter’s good, Christiane feels guilty in her new skin during the weeks when it lasts. Génessier remarks that her face looks angelic, but she disagrees. Interestingly, she says that it seems like the experience seems from the beyond. This allusion to religion seems at first out of place, especially given her father’s horrors. But her true, internal angelic nature comes through at the end when she kills the nurse to free the shoplifter. In fact, she goes on to free the dogs and white birds. Like them, she has felt as if she were in a cage. Her father hadn’t bothered to ask her whether she consented to his sordid strategy of abducting young women for their facial skin. In the end, she walks outside, past her dead father whom the dogs have attacked. One of the white birds sits comfortably on one of her arms. She is as though an angel come to liberate the oppressed, which includes herself, and in so doing see that the wicked are punished. Divine retribution. Indeed, Kant’s formulation of his categorical imperative in which the means/ends dichotomy is salient resembles the neighbor-love of Christianity. In other words, the Golden Rule involves treating other people not just as means to one’s own designs, but, rather, how one would want to be treated. Presumably no one wants to be treated only as someone else’s means to their goals. Of course, the difference between Kant’s imperative in this formulation and the Golden Rule is that rational nature is the grounding of the former whereas the soul, and ultimately God, is the basis of the latter. Benevolentia universalis, which Augustine imparts as he emphasizes having a good will (benevolentia), is essentially love, which transcends ethics. The bad doctor Génessier does not love the young women whose skin he flays as a means to providing his daughter with a face. His love suffers for want of universalis.

In Kantian language, which relates to the Golden Rule but is not itself religious, we might say that those who have a rational nature but do not treat others of the same nature as ends in themselves, but only as means, do not themselves deserve to inhabit a rational nature. We could even suppose that it is not rational enough to devise unethical (i.e., means only) means involving beings having a rational nature, so  Génessier can be seen as not reasoning well—not partaking sufficiently in his innate rational nature—in devising his strategy; even his notion of the good fall short in being confined to his daughter’s happiness. To evoke another of Kant’s formulations of his ethical imperative, a person’s maxim or policy for action should be universalized without falling apart in absurdity. The (theory of the) good that the ethic serves should also be universal, as in the good of humanity, or, more precisely, beings having a rational nature.

But such abstractions are not necessary for film to be an excellent medium for conveying ethical dilemmas and even relating them to religious themes that transcend ethics. It is enough that the viewer sees Génessier use other human beings so atrociously and then sees Christiane reject her father’s unethical conduct even though she herself stood (potentially) to gain from it. In the rejection and the demise both of Génessier and his assistant, we see the value in Kant’s ethical dictum that we should respect other people as ends in themselves even while we are using them for our own purposes.

Even if a person stands to benefit, such as a stockholder benefitting from a higher dividend, as managers use employees without taking into account that they have lives outside of work, the ethical obligation is to oppose such unethical business conduct and favor lower dividends. I refused a doctorate in business ethics because there were no ethics courses in philosophy in the program. At the very least, a seminar on Kant should be required of anyone who claims to be a scholar of business ethics. Bentham’s utilitarianism and Rawls' theory of justice also warrant coursework. I stood to benefit from that doctorate, but I could not regard myself as a scholar of business ethics (i.e., business, government, and society). Fortunately, I switched to the humanities—to historical moral, political, and ethical thought—but I did so in their own right—treating such thought as an end in itself rather than as means to understanding business (even though I still have a BS and MBA).

The value in going beyond rational nature to treat things as having value in themselves rather than merely functionally or in line with one’s self-interest goes beyond Kant’s theory of ethics, and yet the dynamic is consistent with Kant’s theory in broad outlines. Christiane kills the nurse and thereby consciously ends any chance of getting skin because like Luther at the Imperial Diet of Worms, she finally says, in effect, Here I stand; I can do no other. I submit that even a principle can be treated as an end in itself, as partaking in absolute value, relative to egoist desire. But is it reason that assigns such value, or might feeling also be involved? Luther was probably acting on feeling, and Christiane has clearly had enough. Kant’s theory relies solely on reason; Hume’s ethic and even Adam’s Smith’s economic theory do not. 

The Challenger Disaster

Roger Boisjoly was a booster rocket engineer at a NASA contractor, Morton Thiokol. Boisjoly blew the whistle both within the company and to NASA regarding the danger of the rubber in the o-rings, which seal the connections in the shuttle’s rockets, being insufficiently elastic in cold weather. Although The Challenger Disaster (2019) is not a documentary, the film’s narrative, which centers on Roger, or "Adam," is oriented to understanding why the Challenger space shuttle exploded after being launched on January 28, 1986. In other words, although some names are different and the conversations are not verbatim in the film, the factors that contributed to the actual explosion are presented. In fact, the film leans too much on technical details before the disaster and legal arguments afterwards without adequate entertaining elements to make the film enjoyable. However, the film's political function in informing a mass market of why part of the government-business system was broken is valuable. In fact, this mission demonstrates that the medium of motion pictures is capable of aiding in social, political, economic, and religious awareness and education, and thus development.

Although some individuals can rightly be blamed for the explosion, the problem extended to the relationship that NASA had with its contractors, the encroachment, based solely on power, of management both at NASA and Mortan Thiokol, over experts (i.e., the engineers) on a technical problem requiring expertise, and the internal culture at Mortan Thiokol. In general terms, the problem extended to business-government relations, managerial presumption, and the expedient profit motive in business. 

On the individual level, immaturity played a substantial role in the disaster. Throughout most of the film, Adam, the outspoken advocate of delaying the launch, is yelling either at his superiors at Mortan Thiokol or at the launch engineer at NASA. Adam’s harsh demeanor, a lawyer points out, partly explains why Adam’s warnings did not have sufficient traction especially within the company. In spite of being right about the explosion, Adam has very little credibility inside the company because of his immaturity. In other words, he does not play well with the other children and this impedes his technical credibility. Human nature being what it is, it is susceptible to the fallacy that immaturity undercuts technical expertise. To be sure, Adam was not the only problem-child at the company. Its in-house inspector, Frank, perpetually shouts at Adam from the time he warns that the shuttle could explode. At one point, Frank even lunges violently at Adam. Similarly, NASA's flight engineer's harsh tone and shouting on the conference call with Mortan Thiokol exacerbated the problem. Why so much anger? It clearly impedes a solution whereby nine astronauts would not have died. 

All the shouting also makes the film difficult to endure. The bland office settings also do nothing to make the film enticing to watch. Almost all of the scenes are set in drab offices and a conference room in which grey is the basic color. To the extent that the arguments over technical details, which dominate the film, and legal arguments are boring, they are not adequately countered by entertaining devices. For example, scant attention is given to Adam's family life, other than to show him strangely well-adapted as a family man. His pathology apparently only shows up at work. His wife is a cut-board figure of an adoring wife, which is also strange. In short, the film’s value to American society in explaining to a mass audience what went wrong both at NASA and it having private-sector contractors could have been greater were the film more entertaining. 

This is not to say that the extent of arguing, like that of the technical details and even the drabness do not contribute to the film's ability to explain why the disaster occurred. The incessant arguments give the audience a good dose of the role of pathology in the disaster. Also, the extent of technical details, even repeated throughout the film, help the audience to understand why the o-rings failed. Even the drabness of the offices give the viewers a sense of the company's finances, which in turn play a major role in why the company's managers overrule the engineers on economic grounds (over technical objections). 

As for the technical explanation of the disaster, the expected temperature on the Cape at launch the next morning was 30 degrees F. The shuttle’s o-rings, which the contractor put into the rockets to seal connection points, were made out of rubber, which is less elastic, and thus effective, as the temperature decreases. The company’s data, however, only went down to 53 degrees, the previous lowest temperature on a launch. Also, the lower the temperature, the more exhaust passes by the o-rings, causing erosion. This is enough for Adam, who repeatedly says, “It’s too cold to launch!” He put his findings in a memo, but not even the company’s inspection person, Frank, bothered to read it. “The shuttle is made up of millions of parts,” Frank shouts at Adam, adding “The o-ring is just one of them.”  Adam shouts back, “Cold rubber doesn’t work well!” Notably, Frank does not spend as much time reminding Adam that the company needs the contract as reminding Adam and the others that they need their jobs. So much for loyalty to the company; what really counts is the employees’ personal affairs.

Frank takes the matter to his boss, Kurt. He wants a launch-delay because time is needed to get boats out to retrieve the rockets when they fall into the ocean. Adam argues that the company’s recommendation to NASA should turn on an engineering reason rather than a company-specific economic one. In essentially dismissing the consensus of the engineers regarding the technical problems, Kurt, a manager, disagrees. “We might lose our rockets. Besides, the DOD pays NASA’s bills. If they don’t get what they paid for, DOD and NASA might replace us. It is an economic problem.” Relative to this problem, a higher manager will later say before giving NASA the go-ahead on the launch, the safety of the astronauts “is not our concern” even though the astronauts have been relying on NASA and the contractors.

In the film, the company’s organizational culture is highly dysfunctional. The company’s upper management is focused only on keeping its contract with NASA even though the result is far worse for the company. The management has allowed the company to become too financially dependent on NASA. As a result, the upper management lied to NASA, telling the flight engineer that the company would be fine with the launch as set. Faced with an enquiry by the presidential commission on the disaster, the company’s management claims that Adam was a malcontent employee wanting to cause trouble. The extent of lying is itself a red flag concerning the lack of business ethics in the company’s management.

The relationship between NASA and the contract is also a contributing cause of the disaster. This is evident from the conference call that includes NASA and the contractor the day before the launch. NASA’s flight engineer, who is openly hostile toward the contractor from the start, begins by pointing out that the contractor (Frank in particular) is at fault for having taking the temperature problem off the reports submitted to NASA.  The company is so dependent on its rocket contract with NASA that the employee tasked with keeping NASA informed has removed a potentially dangerous problem from NASA’s radar screen.

The lack of communication is compounded by the adversarial relationship. On the call, for instance, Adam and the flight engineer at NASA reach the point of shouting at each other. The engineer orders Adam to “quantify.” Adam replies, ”I can’t.” In public policy as in business, not everything can be given a number. Sometimes when one is given, it brings with it false accuracy. With data only going down to 53 degrees, Adam cannot put a number on the percentage risk. Furthermore, how high of a percentage risk that the o-rings will fail on launch at 30 degrees could the flight engineer accept? The flight engineer wants a number to protect himself. Just as the managers at the contractor don’t want to lose their jobs, neither does the flight engineer. Meanwhile, no one is looking out for the human beings who will blast off the next day.

 NASA cannot go against the contractor’s recommendation to stop the launch. The flight engineer knows this, so he puts pressure on the contractor’s managers, who capitulate because the company cannot lose the contract. In bending NASA’s policy by pushing for a reversal from the contractor—and by the company’s management overruling the engineers on an engineering problem—the flight engineer is reckless (even as he tries to protect himself by demanding quantification).

In response, the contractor’s managers huddle. “NASA might find another contractor if we recommend delaying launch,” one manager says. “NASA might lay off people.  15,000 jobs here are on the line; we need this contract.” The manager then says to the entire group, “We need to make a management decision.” One of the engineers then shouts, “We cannot guarantee a good seal!” The manager appeals to the personal financial interests of all the engineers in the room.  “Don’t you have a mortgage? Don’t you want your jobs?” Adam chimes in, “There are nine astronauts; their lives are in our hands. The manager coldly replies, “they know the risks; that’s not our concern.” This brings Adam to a rage, “How dare you play with human lives like that. . . . You won’t give these poor souls a chance so we can make a buck or two. . . . This is not a management decision.”  That manager ignores this point and tells NASA it’s a go.

The philosopher Kant’s ethical theory can be formulated in terms of treating other rational beings not just as means, but also as ends in themselves. The contractor’s managers treat the astronauts unethically because they are just a means to the company getting paid for its rockets. NASA’s flight engineer does the same thing.  NASA has already delayed the launch, and avoiding the embarrassment of delaying again, even by hours, is motivating the flight engineer at the expense of the astronauts. Both NASA and the contractor’s management have lost perspective with selfish, skewed priorities.

The Founder

Tension between the founder of a business and the managers that eventually assume control is perhaps unavoidable. Such tension can be cut with a knife in the film, The Founder (2016), which tells the story of how McDonalds went from Dick and Mac McDonald’s restaurant in San Bernardino, California to a nationwide corporation headed by Ray Kroc. From an ethical standpoint, I submit that both the McDonald brothers and Kroc come out as less than salubrious.

With regard to Dick McDonald, his incessant “no-saying” to Kroc’s suggestions for improvements and expansion left Kroc in a strangle-hold of sorts. This is most evident when Dick held to the 1.5% going to Kroc in spite of the fact that Ray could not cover his costs. Excessive inflexibility in a contract puts it under severe stress, and few people would blame Kroc for turning to the real estate under the franchised stores for not only needed funds, but also some control. In short, the McDonalds brothers should have renegotiated the contract at Kroc’s request.

By implication, a political leader who clutches at control at the expense of permitting even adjustment in public policy or the governmental system itself to take account of a changing society unknowingly risks losing the control so ardently desired. Even continued refusals to work with other political parties in a legislature can spell defeat at the next election for the party in power. Like gel being squeezed in a hand, the stuff will slip through the fingers if the pressure is too much.

With regard to Ray Kroc, his refusal to act on his oral promise that the McDonalds corporation would pay the brothers a royalty of 1% in perpetuity is unethical. So too is his insistence that the McDonalds name be removed from the brothers’ original McDonalds restaurant. The brothers wanted to retain that particular restaurant so they could give it to their employees. The McDonalds corporation would have had control of that location, so I suspect Kroc’s motive was to be rid of the brothers, given the tension in the relationship when Kroc was under their control. Again we see that the brothers’ tight grip on control, against virtually any changes in the restaurants, worked against even the brothers’ own interests, which included being able to retain their own name in the restaurant they managed in San Bernardino. In short, it pays to work with people in such a way that there is some give and take, even and I would say especially if a contract gives someone the right to rigidly maintain total control.  Smallness has a way of losing, eventually.

The Big Short and Concussion: A System on Sterroids

Watched one after the other or, more realistically, a day or two apart, "The Big Short" and "Concussion" provide an excellent picture of American business and society. As much as the revelations in the films are shocking, I'm more shocked that the American people just take things as they are. "Oh, that's just the way things go in the world," they might say as if this serves as a defense. In other words, we will doubtless get "same old, same old," at the ballot box in November. The disjunction between people's reaction to the substance of the films and the way the people vote is nothing short of astonishing to me. How can people be so shocked at Wall Street and the NFL, and yet continue to vote for the same epigones? We continue to use the same big banks and watch football as if the films were somehow really fictional. I suppose we get what we deserve. 

The key to understanding both films is actually made transparent in another film of the same sort. If you see "Spotlight," pay attention to the chief editor's point that the system, including all the parts..meaning people doing their jobs...was at fault...not just Cardinal Law. Hence, in "The Big Short" and "Concussion," we can reasonably extend the culprits even to the business ethics scholars who said nothing at the societal level about the rating agencies and the conflicts of interests in the big banks, as well as about the NFL. When you have a system wherein everyone is just doing his or her job, and yet is an accomplice, assigning blame to a particular part becomes artificial. It is the system itself--of business, government, and society--that is deeply flawed and thus in need of fundamental change. 

Monsignor

Monsignor, a film made in 1982—in the midst of a very pro-business administration in Washington, D.C.—depicts a Vatican steeped in matters of finance centering around a priest whose degree in finance makes him a prime candidate to be groomed for the Curia. That cleric, Father John Flaherty, helps the Vatican operating budget during World War II by involving the Holy See in the black market through a mafia. In the meantime, he sleeps with a woman who is preparing to be a nun and subsequently keeps from her the matter of his religious vocation. The twist is not that Flaherty is a deeply flawed priest, or that the Vatican he serves is vulnerable to corruption inside, but that those clerics who mercilessly go after him are devoid of the sort of compassion that their savior preaches.

The pope, exquisitely played by Leonardo Cimino, demonstrates how upper-echelon leadership can transcend the managerial foci that so preoccupy partisans. Put another way, the social distance that tends to come with organizational figure-heads can give “the big picture” characteristic of “having perspective” some role in seeing to it that narrow organizational politics do not have the last say even in terms of what the criteria are to be. I suspect that too many CEOs go with the advice from their subordinates, and thus unwittingly buy into the managerial criteria charged with garden-variety one-upmanship. In such cases, organizational politics triumphs over what is really important from the standpoint of organizational mission statements.

In the film, the pope presides over the traditionalist cleric’s castigation of Flaherty . The pope later reads of Flaherty’s sordid deeds, and then speaks with the man presumably condemned. Rather than defend himself, Flaherty says, in effect, “guilty as charged!” Rather than take Flaherty’s misconduct as the most telling facet of the case, the pope observes that the traditionalist’s tone was that of jealousy, without any hint of sympathy for his brother in faith. The traditionalist’s utter lack of brotherly love stands out in retrospect to the pope as further from Christ, hence more serious, than Flaherty’s corruption. This prioritizing of values is made known to the viewer with the sight of Flaherty’s mentor, rather than the head traditionalist, as the next pope. In fact, the mentor reinstalls Flaherty in the Vatican after the contrite yet corrupt priest has spent some years in exile at a monastery. The film ends with the two men embracing, with facial expressions revealing true brotherly love—a real contrast from the cold, stern expressions of the traditionalists who had been so confident that the “prosecution” of Flaherty would result in one of their own as pope.

The message presented by the film is therefore that in a religion in which God is love, hardness in place of brotherly love is without any legitimacy whatsoever; it is worse than unethical conduct. This is one way of saying that religion does not reduce to ethics because more important things are involved. This is not to excuse corruption in the Vatican; the hypocrisy alone is repugnant to anyone who takes the clerics in the Curia at their word that they are following Christ in their living out of the Gospel. Even so, going after such hypocrisy without even sympathy for the human nature, which we all share, evokes the Pharisees whom Jesus goes after in the Gospels. A Church run by Pharisees does more than unethical conduct to undercut the faith espoused by Jesus because matters of the heart are more deeply rooted than conduct as far as Jesus’s preaching is concerned. 

Citizen Kane: A Virtue Hearst Never Had

In Citizen Kane (1941), Charles Kane is not a replica of William Randolph Hearst. As a young, wealthy man running a newspaper, the character embodies a politico-economic ideal in both word and deed that Hearst only used as a campaign slogan. As per Kane's Statement of Principles, the young publisher is willing to diminish his own wealth held in stock in other companies in exposing the exploitive and corrupt money-bags in big corporations and trust who prey on the otherwise-unprotected working poor and presumably consumers too. For his part, Hearst merely published a daily oriented to the poor man.  As Kane's early ideal is a principle recognizable to, and even resonating with, virtually any audience, Welles' inclusion of the ideal in the film contributes to its endurance as a classic.

Hearst papers twice called for someone to put a bullet into William Mckinley.  When the U.S. president was fatally wounded on September 6, 1901, the American people turned on Hearst, even burning him in effigy. He ran for mayor of New York City, Governor of New York, and even for president, and lost all of those races. He did get elected to serve a term in the U.S. House of Representatives, but hardly ever showed up on Capitol Hill. His passions lied elsewhere than in listening to floor speeches, attending roll-call votes, and questioning witnesses at Congressional hearings. He found he had more power using his newspapers to shape public opinion.[1] I suspect he had very little regard for the public good, and thus any true interest in politics as a means.

Even though Hearst advocated the eight-hour work-day and an income tax, his purported intent to be the servant of the immigrants and working poor would be discredited by his vehement opposition to unions, including firing his employees who were members of the guild, and President Franklin D. Roosevelt raising the income tax rate on incomes over half a million. Antipodal to his earlier support for an income tax, he called the income tax system “intrusive, despotic, discriminatory, and perhaps revolutionary.”[2] Repealing the tax would be better for “the honesty, the industry, the wealth, and the welfare of the whole [population] of Americans.”[3] Facing demands from his creditors at the time, Hearst was actually looking out for the wealth, his appeal to the public good being a mere prop, or trope.

Charles “Citizen” Kane, on the other hand, was willing to use his papers to attack corrupt companies even in which he himself held stock. Speaking with his ex-guardian, Walter Thatcher, about the paper’s crusade against the Public Transit Company, in which Kane is one of the largest individual stockholders, the newspaper editor/company stockholder delivers the following as an explanation for his apparent willful disregard for his own financial interests.

“Mr. Thatcher, the trouble is you don't realize you're talking to two people. As Charles Foster Kane, who owns eighty-two thousand three hundred and sixty-four shares of Public Transit prefer, you see, I do have a general idea of my holdings. I sympathize with you. Charles Foster Kane is a scoundrel, his paper should be run out of town and a committee should be formed to boycott him. You may, if you can form such a committee, put me down for a contribution of one thousand dollars.”[4]

In other words, Kane knows that he is doing real damage to his financial position in going after the company. This point is essential, and warrants an explanation. So he continues,

“On the other hand, I am the publisher of the Inquirer. As such, it is my duty, I’ll let you in on a little secret, it is also my pleasure—to see to it that decent, hard-working people of this community aren’t robbed blind by a pack of money-mad pirates just because they haven’t anybody to look after their interests! I’ll let you in on another little secret, Mr. Thatcher. I think I’m the man to do it. You see I have money and property. If I don't look after the interests of the underprivileged, maybe somebody else will, maybe somebody without any money or property and that would be too bad.”[5]

Kane is wearing two hats, one of which he readily admits can indeed work against the other. He appeals to his duty as a journalist (and a wealthy man)—a duty that he enjoys (which is Kant’s ideal)—to, as Sen. Alan Simpson (R-WY) was fond of saying on the floor of the U.S. Senate, “fight for the little guy.” I suspect that the secret behind Kane’s motive here lies in the powerlessness that he had as a boy when his mother made him leave her and his beloved sled, Rosebud. As his dying word attests, Kane never got over being forced to leave his boyhood home; but he could get some vicarious satisfaction exposing commercial cases of exploitation and corruption at the expense of the powerless. The virtue, Nietzsche would say, is actually the instinct to power overcoming obstacles in order to feel the pleasure of power. Poised against the robber barons, Kane thus has a passion for going after corruption at the expense of the innocent even if Kane’s own stock portfolio takes a hit in the process. His passion for justice is greater than his greed. Translated by Nietzsche, the will to power the main human instinct, and thus motive.

To be sure, Kane doubtlessly wants the power in politics; after all, he runs for governor (as Hearst did).  Even so, not many candidates for public office actually go after corrupt fat cats who scrape off even more off hardened sweat off the backs of the hard-working laborer, or knowingly rip off consumers. Precisely for this reason, the practice is not a bad political investment. Had Hearst actually watched the film (he claimed later he had not), he might have learned a valuable political lesson. Sacrificing one’s private interests for the public welfare can reap tremendous political benefits. Not many wealthy individuals are willing to expose injustices by speaking truth to power. Typically, they conclude that they have too much on the line to risk going after the bad guys. Hence, being one of the few to do so—knowingly taking a financial hit in the process—is a valuable political commodity.

In cinematic terms, putting an ideal such as justice above the vice of greed, a feat that even a flawed person like Charlie Kane can accomplish, is a timeless principle audiences through the centuries will be able to appreciate.[4] Hence, like Rick’s willingness in Casablanca to sacrifice personally not only for Elsa, but also for the larger anti-Nazi cause, Kane’s principle can be expected to contribute to Citizen Kane continuing on as a classic.

---

1 For this and the preceding points in the paragraph, see “The Battle Over Citizen Kane,” The American Experience, WGBH Educational Foundation, 1996.

2. Ibid.

3. Ibid.

4. Script of Citizen Kane.

5. Ibid.

6. To be sure, the virtue in a person being willing to diminish one’s overall financial position by using it for a larger cause necessitates having sufficient assets. In this sense, this virtue is like munificence, which differs from liberality in that the amount of money given is much larger. Even though not every viewer of Citizen Kane will not be able to identify with such virtues personally, everyone can value the sacrifice of private interest for public good, and thus have an emotional connection to the movie. 

Breaking News: The Wizard of Oz is ONLY in The Matrix

In penning the 1976 iconic film, Network, screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky anticipated Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes, the two founders of the Fox News network, personified in the film as Arthur Jensen—the “man behind the curtain” turning the news department over to programming (i.e., marketing). Chayefsky’s observations in broadcast newsrooms were sufficient to reveal the trajectory, then only in its infancy, that would eventually fuse tabloid “news” and political ideology together at 24/7 news networks. Astonishingly, Chayefsky anticipated even Glenn Beck and Pat O’Reilly of Fox News. In the mid-1970s in which the film takes place, the two media stars are prefigured or personified as Howard Beale, a news anchor who goes crazy.[1] Thirty years later, Beck and O’Reilly (as well as Keith Oberman on MSNBC) would enjoy years proselytizing on air before the American public finally realized that the three men behind the curtain “had issues.” Glenn Beck self-destructed, having hanged himself by the verbal freedom he had given himself to spout his dire apocalyptic predictions, and Keith Oberman had “authority issues” with bosses. Meanwhile, the public allowed O’Reilly to go on as if he were the kooky uncle who raves after a few drinks yet is all too clever and calculating (i.e., self-serving) underneath.

 Generally speaking, Chayefsky saw the future of broadcast “journalism” as something rather more baleful than a Glenn Beck self-remade as a bespectacled pseudo-intellectual in tweed.  The screenwriter had an innate sense of just how news personalities would arouse the silent majority into living vicariously through the 24/7 news-cycle slanted gravitationally by the sheer mass of corporate and political capital.

Similar to how Neal is a threat to the machines who operate the matrix, Beale becomes a threat to the vested powerful interests in business and government as soon as his preachments turn against them. Beale the prophet tells his viewers that they have fallen into a stupefied daze as “programmed humanoids,” creatures who are unknowingly manipulated even as they think they have free-will and are individuals whose lives are not scripted or pre-programmed. Democracy is a fraud perpetuated by corporate interests that really pull the strings, both in terms of what the viewers see on television and what is put into the empty real lives. In other words, we are ensconced in a matrix built and maintained by the real entities—corporations—that manipulate and prostitute us even while telling us that we like it.

No one is to say publically what Wall Street and K Street are doing to America, not to mention the medium by which the citizenry are informed. Beale’s mad vision of restoring true democracy and the intellectual freedom of individualism reveals the “man behind the curtain” (Arthur Jensen, the chairman of the board) to be something less than a wizard. Rather than squeezing the attention-getting “oracle” as if Beale were a distended or bloated melon to be held in a tight vice until he either capitulates or bursts, Jensen coöpts the prophet himself—not by money though; rather, Jensen feeds Beale’s lunacy. Unfortunately for Beale, his new direction loses viewers; he thus becomes a threat to Jensen’s own network. Through all these twists and turns, the news is quietly absent—presumably truncated by the “media circus.”

The core message in Network is not merely that journalistic integrity and quality lose out all-too-easily to sensationalism (i.e., an expansive profit-motive), the business interest, and political advocacy. Rather, the true insight is paradoxical in nature, prefiguring the solipsism (i.e., your brain is really in a vat even as you think you are eating or running) that is illustrated so well in The Matrix trilogy. What we think is real life—the “drama” and edited “news” on television (even “reality television” shows)—is anything but, while absorption in this fake world saps viewers of any real emotive investment in their actual lives. In other words, what t.v. addicts take as the real world is anything but, while what they assume is dull and meaningless is actually real life. One problem with this metaphysical inversion is that commercial and governmental powers can have their way all too easily in the false world of “reality television” primped up as news. The first step out of the closed system of manipulation is to wake up (as in the Buddhist sense, I suppose) and fall from the matrix as if a sludge of entrails going down the tube. Such “waste” is of course premised on the vested interests (and related values) in the Matrix only. Hence, the individuals awakened are not really discarded waste products; rather, the unprogrammed human beings are of infinite value, according to Kant, in exercising reason to assign values to things rather than be assigned a (conditional) value by them (i.e., the machines).

---

1. Jim Edwards, “SPOOKY: The 1976 Movie ‘Network’ Predicted YouTube and ‘Two And A Half Men,’” Business Insider, February 15, 2012.

Hollywood Bribes China

The Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, known as F.C.P.A., “forbids American companies from making illegal payments to government officials or others to ease the way for operations in foreign countries.”[1] The practical difficulty facing American companies doing business around the world is that in some cultures bribes are so ubiquitous they are simply a part of doing business.  For American companies to refuse to participate in what is generally expected can be a competitive disadvantage, particularly if substitutes exist and the practice is widespread.

The full essay is in Cases of Unethical Business: A Malignant Mentality of Mendacity, available in print and as an ebook at Amazon.

1. Edward Wyatt, Michael Cieply, and Brooks Barnes, “S.E.C. Asks if Hollywood Paid Bribes in China,” The New York Times, April 25, 2012.