Thought You Should See This

December 19, 2011

A while ago, I linked to an interview in which Harvard Law professor Larry Lessig outlined some of the thinking that went into his latest book, Republic Lost. Now, here’s a slick talk (with eye-catching slides) Lessig gave at Google. It’s really well worth taking the time to watch the whole thing, for Lessig’s fantastically thoughtful analysis of where we are, how we got here, and how we might potentially extricate ourselves from the mire. I watched this a week or so ago, and I can’t stop thinking about his story of the pilot of the Exxon Valdez supertanker, which crashed in Alaska in 1989 and caused one of the world’s worst environmental disasters (starts 42:25). As Lessig points out, the ship’s captain, Joseph Hazlewood, had a well-documented problem with alcohol. But, shocking as it is that the man in charge of a supertanker was not legally allowed to drive a car (he had a DUI at the time), that’s not actually Lessig’s point. Instead, his is a starker, bleaker, much more searing conclusion, which cuts right to the heart of our collective passivity and acts as a resounding wake-up call. In his words:

Forget Hazlewood. Instead I want you to think about those around Captain Hazlewood, these other officers, people who could have picked up a phone while a drunk was driving a supertanker. I want you to think about those people who did nothing. All but one of those officers did nothing. What do we think about them? I ask this question because as I think about the problem this nation faces, increasingly I believe we are they. This nation faces critical problems requiring serious attention but we don’t have institutions capable of giving them this attention. They are distracted, unable to focus, and who is to blame for that? Who is responsible? I think it’s too easy to point to the Blagojeviches and hold them responsible, to point to the evil people and hold them responsible. It’s not the evil people, it’s the good people, it’s the decent people, the people who could have picked up a phone. It’s us. It’s we, the most privileged, because the most outrageous part here is that these corruptions were primed by the most privileged but permitted by the passivity of the most privileged as well.

Gulp. Well, it made me think.

2:12pm | URL: https://tmblr.co/ZLv7dxDUFbTM
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(Notes: 14)