During this challenging time, I watched a video by Barack Obama congratulating the HBCUs graduation Class of 2020 (historically black college or university). On the surface, Barack’s message was pleasant and an uplifting gesture until he began to rattle off an appeal for graduates to change the world that made my hair stand up.
Change, dear Barack, does not come from the schools of unchange. Every money-grubbing charlatan is portraying to change the world these days, soiling the waters for those who can. Never mind changing the world requires a new normalization of truth that is not so easy to come by because a new normalization requires a unique comprehension of unprecedented causes. New causality that will rob the cradle prepared for these graduates.
Thank you @BarackObama for your support for HBCUs—and for believing in the Class of 2020 as they set out to change the world. #ShowMeYourWalk pic.twitter.com/dqgqvbmksS
— UNCF (@UNCF) May 16, 2020
I have two significant problems with Barack’s message in this video.
The first problem is the former President’s emphasis on again putting segregation in the spotlight. The second problem is the appeal to participate in an initiative that has been left undefined. So, let’s address them both.
MLK Misinterpreted
Barack has learned little from Martin Luther King, who was deliberately against segregation, but instead in favor of unification.
An agenda of unification garnered MLK the early support of some crucial white leaders to achieve his goals. MLK did not want black schools or black entertainment television; he wanted schools and entertainment for all. Unification requires the opposite of the division of people by the color of their skin or any other segmentation.
People are people, E Pluribus Unum; out of many, one. And the way to get there is to deny any kind of apartheid, negative or positive, systematically. The wrong thing to do is to load black graduates up with the segregational talking points that deflate MLK’s hard-earned mantra and progress.
We cannot simply appeal to morality to ward off injustice as a society. Morality, by definition, is elective, and to each his own. As such, the appeal to individual characters embellishes a vile maxim of pillage and plunder, promoting a more profound contrast between and further segregation of the haves and the have-nots. So, instead of relying on morality, our leaders must be held responsible for building systems that only assign merit to the content of one’s character. And refuse anything but.
It strikes me how Barack’s appeal to these HBCU graduates is as hollow in hope as Al Gore’s appeal is to a paying audience listening to the undesirable consequences of climate change. Both were prime political leaders, admittedly unable to change the systems set before them while in office. In their leaderless capacity, they now bark up the wrong tree.
I ask again, how come the leaders of our society, responsible for the excellence of humanity, cannot reinvent the theory of our systems that determines what can be discovered?
It is not okay to give young people the false hope that watching more bad television will somehow improve television content, a perfect analogy to voting for political bobbleheads in a rigged political “system” and expecting the world to change.
The Last Dance
The second problem with Barack’s message is the appeal to join an undefined cause. That is akin to giving kids a joystick to an empty, disconnected PlayStation and expecting them to entertain themselves.
The serious point I am making here is that as a CEO, I know you cannot hire and inspire the right people all too well without first having developed a well-thought-out business and operating plan your employees can endorse and execute. That is what leadership is; to quote Einstein again, you are responsible for the theory that determines what can be discovered.
You, Barack, during your Presidency, were responsible for the theory that determined what humanity could discover. As the leader of the largest economy, you should have led and inspired the world – by example – with new rigors of excellence we first and successfully applied to ourselves.
Instead, Barack’s video message is like a CEO not knowing what money-losing business he is in and telling his current employees, stuck in a regurgitation of the past, to devise a proposition that breaks the norm. This is the true definition of false hope.
The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them — Albert Einstein
Leadership that breaks the norm can only come from the continual discovery of new and higher normalizations of nature’s truth, to which humanity must adapt to prolong the life of our species. Wealth accumulation, of the rampant kind, for example, is, at best solipsistic masturbation, falling short in producing regenerative adaptability to nature’s entropy.
Worse, the manmade constructs we deploy today are in blatant violation of the evolutionary principles of nature. And as time goes by, those rebels without an evolutionary cause are increasingly responsible for developing human ingenuity and capacity in all the wrong directions causing an accelerated anthropogenic cascade.
Because we are leaderless, we lack the implementation of an operating-system for humanity that adheres to nature’s gameplay allowing us to adapt to nature’s entropy. Because we are fearless, and we, at least, can present one—a crucial prerequisite.
The Last Dance of Humanity must be based on new gameplay to take a cue from Michael Jordan’s excellent documentary—Nature’s Gameplay. I describe the gameplay in my masterclasses, and I am happy to inspire any student, free of charge truly.
P.S.: I care about policies to build a regenerative society; I care less about politics. And I am thankful for former President Obama coming out of hiding and completing discernable sentences with sequiturs worth responding to. Notice how I do not grant all Presidents that honor.
