The Bride and the Curfew

Our species is capable of horrific cruelty that defies any claim of having a conscience, and yet we can be willing to override our otherwise intractable instinctual urge for self-preservation for an ethical principle; that is to say, a person can choose to lay down one’s life for another person. Our biological nature—how we are hardwired—includes both vicious aggressiveness resembling that of chimps and yet the ability to “act on principle” in selfless love. In the Albanian film, The Bride and the Curfew (1978), these two facets of human nature are on display, in direct contact as it were, such that the sheer breadth in human nature is made transparent. The two poles are personified by the Nazi military commander and Shpresa, the young Albanian woman living who assassinates a Nazi solder in her Nazi-occupied village.

From the very start of the film, it is clear that the Nazis place no value on human life per se. Hitler’s second priority in coming to power was to clear Eastern Europe of the Slavs to make room for Germans to spread out from Germany. It follows that the lives of the Albanian inhabitants have no value to the Nazi commander in the film. That Nazi soldiers are shooting down the street at whomever is using chalk to draw a partisan resistance symbol—a star—on buildings makes the point clear enough that human life means nothing. The stress daily on the villagers must be tremendous. The filmmaker’s use of lighting to build tension and sound to magnify the hard claps of shoes on cement provide the audience with the sense that life under such a totalitarian German occupation is indeed harsh. The literal translation of the film, “The Bride and the State Siege,” alludes to the severity of the onslaught.

The combination of a totalitarian regime and a wholesale disvaluing of human life by the oppressors is indeed a toxic cocktail. That the Nazi’s extermination of 20 million Slavs in Eastern Europe (not counting those killed on the battlefield) and the 6 million Jews in the Holocaust—not exactly Kantian facts of reason—came after the European Enlightenment (of reason) does not bode well for human civilization. Moreover, that the twentieth century included two world wars does not bode well for Hegel’s theory of a trajectory through history of an increasing spirit of freedom. Two world wars seem like more than a momentary regression, and the regimes of Hitler and Stalin should not be left out in making the claim that the sordid twentieth century was not just a regression. Perhaps it is not God that is dead, as Nietzsche has been interpreted as claiming, but, rather, Hegel’s optimistic theory, given the statis of human nature even given the gradual process of natural selection.  

The Enlightenment should not have been taken as a panacea. Reason, even cleverness, can be employed in evil designs. Hannah Arendt, who wrote from her experience as an observer of the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem in 1961, claimed that the Nazi bureaucrat simply didn’t think; he was simply working out train routes and schedules so as to maximize a commodity that had to be transported. Yet Eichmann did think for himself when he violated Himmler’s order not to make the Jews in Hungary march to a death-camp in Poland, and this is what got him convicted by the Israeli judges. The thought that many of the Jews would very efficiently die of attrition en route appealed to the value that he put on business-like efficiency. Given the goal of exterminating Judaism in Europe, it was reasonable to violate an order so a more efficient option could be taken. So it is not the benching of reason that accounts for the mass murder; quite the opposite. Bureaucracy, it should be pointed out, is based on reason rendered as structure and procedure, and it is not contrary to reason to suspend a procedure in order to put in place a more efficient remedy.

Lest it be concluded that Nazi Germany was the fulfilment of the Enlightenment, the passions were also involved. Eichmann hated Jews, and his strong emotion was backed up by the Nazi social reality in which Jews were portrayed as sub-human, even akin to rodents. This message was clear in the Nazi propaganda films in which Jews are likened to the rats that spread the plague over Europe in the fourteenth century from China. Both Hume and Adam Smith posited the imagination as playing a role in the social realities we come up with to order the world. “Confronted with the vast and seemingly chaotic complexity of the world in which we live,” one scholar on Adams explains, “we feel an instinctive need to impose some sense of order on our perceptions, and it is our imagination that enables us to do so.”[1] The social reality evinced in a leader’s vision and propagated through speeches and film can satisfy what for Victor Frankl is our innate need for meaning. Although he showed at even the victims in the concentration camps had that need even as they were starving, it is no less true that the Germans, and indeed, any human being, seeks the order that a social reality can provide. The role of the imagination in the crafting of a social reality means that subjectivity is salient. Hence Eichmann was not a mere, unthinking bureaucrat; he was a warm-blooded human being whose subjective emotions were nestled in the Nazi social reality in which Jews were vermin. This likeness is made explicit in the film, Inglorious Basterds, when the SS officer explains how he approaches hunting Jews by thinking like a rat does.

In The Bride and the Curfew, the Nazi commander applies his hunting skills to snuffing out the resistance. Although he does not view Shpresa as a rodent, it is clear that he puts no value on the lives of any of the villagers, including hers. In complete contrast, Shpresa provides a light on the human condition. Her message is the following: My life isn’t mine anymore; it no longer belongs to me; it serves the ideal of freedom, which includes a free Albania. Even though she is living in constant danger, she embraces an ideal even to her own detriment. Whereas the Nazis are acting in line with their primitive instinctual urge of aggression, the young woman is willing to override her urge of self-preservation—an instinct that Hobbes claims in Leviathan is primary. Whereas the Nazis can draw on a collective social reality to base their subjectivity, Shpresa is virtually alone in making her decision to place freedom above even her own life.

She has but her own subjectivity on which to base her choice, hence, as Sartre points out, the gravity of her choice is weighty. She does not appeal to God or even to authority or tradition, although there is a hint of the later in her mention of free Albania. Conforming to the Nazis would obviously be more convenient, though she would not thereby make use of their social reality. She embraces the hard responsibility that lies in making a choice that goes against the grain. The story-world of the film, the Nazi-occupied Albanian village, is the antithesis of freedom, and so she stands out in belonging to the ideal. Villagers do come to her aid, specifically in getting her out of town as if she were a bride, but the decision is hers alone, and must ultimately rest on her subjectivity. The film thus evinces the existentialist philosophy.

Perhaps the main question in the film is whether human beings are willing to assume the responsibility of making difficult choices when they have nothing to fall back on but our own individual subjective experience, without even the order-conferring comfort of a societal social reality. In their dependence on a social reality provided by Hitler, the Nazi subjectivity is hardly such a feat. Although it is easy to beat up on the Nazis, the implication that relying on the vision of a leader evinces weakness may not be so convenient. Heidegger, after all, advocates an authentic life over one lived out in conformity. Nietzsche tells his readers not to be Nietzscheans; rather, have your own ideas. These are difficult words for people living in an age in which we are such organizational creatures and we pay such attention to the politics of our leaders.

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[1] Benjamin M. Friedman, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (New York: Vintage Books, 2021), p. 66.

Jobs

Typically as a company transitions from an enterprising, creative new venture to a large organization to be managed, a staid CEO replaces a visionary founder. In the case of Steve Jobs at Apple, the very nature of the man’s vision was not only inherently at odds with the status-quo underpinning of a large organization with a budget, but also essential to the company’s business model. Hence, the company, including its shareholders, paid a price for years for jettisoning Jobs. The film, Jobs (2013), is centered on the distinctiveness of Jobs’ vision. Although the film also hints at why this distinctiveness is such that the company would (and did) lose as a large organization after making the typical founder-to-CEO transition.

On the surface, Steve Jobs’ vision was to create new products that people could use. In fact, Jobs wanted the invented products to play a ubiquitous role in people’s lives—even being a virtual extension of their arms. Considering the Apple phones, laptops, ipads, and ipods that resulted from this vision after its initial desk-top computer manifestation, Jobs turned out to be incredibly successful. Perhaps the lesson we can draw is that it takes a lot of time for a different vision of society to come to fruition. Besides the sheer time it takes to invent and implement a product that is radically different, the tyranny of the status quo in institutions as well as a society itself acts as a solid counter-force that holds the process back—especially from one invented product to the next on the long way to the vision being realized.
The vision was so massive in terms of how much it would change society, including what people do on a daily basis, and so different from the status quo societally that the normal transition from a founder to an organizationally-ensconced CEO threatened the realization of the vision from being accomplished. As if this problem were not enough, the film shows the viewer just how much of an asshole Jobs could be (someone actually calls him that in the film). More typically of a founder, Jobs also tossed out the strictures of budges on a regular basis. In the film, he says that the next product line should risk the whole company, presumably because of the sheer "differentness" of the next invention. In fact, he also says that he wants different, not just better. So rather than assume that the company’s focus should be on an incrementally better version of the Apple II desktop computer, he pushed the untested Macintosh project, to which he had been tasked by the CEO, into front and center for the company even though that project by its very nature as radically new needed more money, staff and time (including a two-year extension on the delivery date) than the board could accept. At the time, seventy percent of the revenue was coming from the Apple II, so why not act like a company in business and focus on the winner rather than an untested product line?
Yet to Steve Jobs, the very point of Apple (and perhaps any company) is not finally to maximize profit, but, rather, to build something that will not only be useful, but will change society. It was the status quo and its sycophants that Jobs pointed to as the societal sickness. The year 1984 would not reflect George Orwell’s book, 1984, which describes an autocratic, totalitarian society. Apple would see to it that a different society would exist—different to not only the status quo prior to 1984, but also a future in which people do not have the ability (and thus freedom) to express themselves as unique (and free) individuals. Jobs wanted employees whom society viewed as crazy for thinking outside the box—even questioning societal assumptions. This included thinking outside the organizational box—even questioning organizational constraints that enforce the status quo. HR departments don’t usually seek out such people to hire. The distinctiveness of Job’s vision thus meant that the company could not be run as other companies—those that are inherently ensconced in the societal and even organizational status quo. In fact, large corporations even unwittingly promote and enforce the societal status quo because they can make a lot of money in it.
How to break the natural law of founder-to-CEO transition in organizational lifecycles by retaining a founder’s power while still giving some heed to financial constraints is the question that the film does not answer; Jobs is simply replaced, then let back in again. The vision gains new force, but what of the running of the large organization viably so it can continue to deliver financial resources for different, rather than just better, projects that are untested and by their very nature long in gestation? In short, what if a founder’s vision is not so easily replaced by an organizational mission that everyone pays lip-service to but in actuality ignores? Apple depended on Jobs not only because of his inventive brilliance, but also the very nature of his distinctive vision.

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. 

The Emperor: Above the Clouds of Petty Protocol

In complex social arrangements, such as exist in governments, business firms, and religious organizations, a person must climb through many levels before reaching persons of sufficient height and occupational breadth that what had been said to be binding requirements suddenly become as though unfettered butterflies. Astoundingly, the mid-level subordinates may even object as the rules are relegated back to their true status as guidelines. Beyond the element of greater authority, a greater perspective in terms of what truly matters is profoundly important in this regard. Having many decades of lived experience, plus a certain maturity in place of pettiness, is also in the mix. A Pope of the Roman Catholic Church, for example, may be more likely to pick up on a sincere heart of the sort Jesus would praise than run through a laundry list of doctrinal requirements. 

In the film Emperor (2012), religion and government are intertwined in the Japanese emperor, who was until shortly after World War II also officially a living god. Although his aides attempt to put General MacArthur into a straightjacket of protocol for the meeting with the emperor at the end of the film, both the general and the emperor are off sufficient maturity and perspective to disabuse themselves of the protocols and focus on the truly important stuff. To discern the petty from the profoundly important is a key feature of upper-echelon leadership.

In the film, Teizaburo Sekiya forewarns General MacArthur before the meeting with the emperor. “there are certain proprieties I’d better make you aware of. You may not shake His Majesty’s hand or touch him. You must never look His Majesty directly in the eyes. You may not step on his shadow. When you sit down with His Majesty, you have to sit on his left. You must never call His Majesty by his name.”

Upon greeting the emperor, General Bonner Fellers obeys the protocol, assiduously avoiding eye contact with the shorter man. General MacArthur begins likewise, looking above the emperor, and says, “It is indeed a pleasure to welcome you here, Your Majesty.” The emperor thanks the general, to which MacArthur thanks the emperor, making eye-contact with a warm-hearted expression and outstretching his hand. The emperor wears a confused look at first, but then gently shakes the general’s hand.

As if the general had not broken enough with protocol, he announces that he has arranged for a picture. The emperor motions to his aide not to object, and moves into position for the picture—the general standing on the emperor’s right.

After the picture is taken, the general announces that the translator is to stay but everyone else in the room is to go to the library while the general and emperor talk. Being excluded, and thus unable to enforce the protocol, Sekiya blurts out, “But that was not part of the plan.” The emperor says “Sekiya” in a way that lets his compatriot know that he is to comply with the general’s wishes. Only the general and the emperor appear aware of the political reality: the general rather than the emperor is running Japan. To the victor goes the task of rebuilding the foe.

The emperor takes his seat, with the general already seated to the left. The emperor then rises, and offers himself as solely responsible and as willing, therefore, to take all the punishment. “This has nothing to do with punishment,” the general replies. Even among two leaders in high places, one can lose sight of the truly important. The general had cut through the morass of thou shalt nots, which the lower and mid-level functionaries hold onto so tightly, to establish a sort of collegial intimacy that renders the two men much more alike than either to his respective subordinates.  Only at that high level can the sun shine above the clouds of minutia, such that eve the gods on Mount Olympus might be jealous of what man can accomplish. “I need your help,” the general beseeches with heart-felt concern for the emperor’s subjects as he looks directly into the man’s eyes. “So let’s see what we can do to get Japan back on its feet.” Both men doubtlessly know that this task lying before them is vitally important, as many Japanese are starving at the time.

The movie thus provides a good snapshot of organizational life being appreciably freer on the top floor and unnecessarily petty on the floors below. How to convince the narrow-minded gate-keepers that their levers are not so vitally important after all is a question in need of an answer. It is telling that Sekiya is so greatly disturbed by the general’s change of plan. MacArthur has used his experience wisely in not having argued with Sekiya as he promulgated the forbidden conduct; the general undoubtedly knew the true pecking order in Japan then, and that he could appeal directly to the emperor as both were unique having responsibility for the whole of Japan and thus would undoubtedly relate.