Destroyed by Acquiescence
Wendell Berry | Will Business Leaders Protest Trump’s Whims? | The Geography of Work | Portfolio: How Notetaking Becomes Knowledge
Much protest is naïve; it expects quick, visible improvement and despairs and gives up when such improvement does not come. If protest depended on success, there would be little protest of any durability or significance. History simply affords too little evidence that anyone’s individual protest is of any use. Protest that endures, I think, is moved by a hope far more modest than that of public success: namely, the hope of preserving qualities in one’s own heart and spirit that would be destroyed by acquiescence.
| Wendell Berry, A Poem of Difficult Hope
Will Business Leaders Protest Trump’s Whims?
In Memo to the Business Elite: It’s Time to Stand Up, Jeffrey Sonnenfeld and Stephen Henriques string together a time of great unrest for the US business community. First of all, I was surprised to learn that
Federal Election Commission data shows that Mr. Trump was the first Republican presidential candidate to largely not have the support of major business leaders.
I had thought that they were in favor of his goals to deregulate and extend tax cuts. But it seems Trump’s efforts are too extreme, and undermine the stability business leaders crave.
The authors, both affiliated with Yale, recount some of what they are hearing [highlights mine]:
In our hundreds of conversations with top corporate leaders, they tell us some version of, “We invest where there is the rule of law, not the law of rulers.”
Here is a sample of what they are saying to us: Elon Musk and his so-called Department of Government Efficiency are “driving the car off the cliff,” said one. Mr. Musk and Mr. Trump are demolishing the guardrails of government for their own gain, said another. A third anticipated passing along rising costs to customers. The president has lost their confidence. Executives are embarrassed talking to overseas partners. “I can’t keep apologizing with credibility,” said one.
What are the hard-core business realities?
Today, 40 percent of all revenues for S&P 500 companies are earned outside the United States. About $5.4 trillion in foreign direct investment flowed into the country in 2023, with Britain, Canada, Germany and Japan each investing over $600 billion. Over 20 percent of American securities are foreign owned, including one-third of outstanding Treasury debt, more than one-quarter of corporate debt and nearly one-fifth of equities.
Clearly, any negative impacts on these huge flows of revenue and capital could be devastating, and while leaders may hope for an abatement of dangerous policies, hope is not a strategy.
The whiplash of potential tariffs has left business leaders scrambling to rework supply chains to minimize the cost of such levies and put plans on hold. Charged language from the administration toward our allies and its inexplicable preferential treatment of the authoritarian Putin regime in Russia are blowing up decades of strategic relationships.
And what should business executives do? Will they look into their hearts, as Wendell Berry asks, and take action so that they won’t be personally and collectively ‘destroyed by acquiescence’?
The authors are wrong, I think, to say it’s not yet time to revolt:
It is not yet time to revolt against Mr. Trump as in August 2017, when a parade of chief executives resigned from his business advisory councils. But this is the time for urgent, constructive conversation, minus the presumption of imperial fealty. When single voices are shouted down, a chorus breaks through.
It’s clear that automotive executives have come together to get Trump to at least delay tariffs for the North American automotive supply chains that span Canadian, Mexican, and US borders. Similar groups from other industries might make inroads on other dangerous policies. We shall see.
But the authors point out that pulling together may be the US economy’s best hope:
Most chief executives do not support sweeping protectionist tariffs or the haphazard reversal of America’s alignment with Europe. Mr. Trump has no time for alliances, whether with NATO, the G.O.P. establishment or the Business Roundtable, a lobbyist for big companies. Bullies fear collective action and rely on pitting rival parties against one another.
As Benjamin Franklin said of the founding fathers in the Revolutionary War:
We must, indeed, all hang together or, most assuredly, we shall all hang separately.
One last criticism: Sonnenfeld and Henriques never discuss the American workers who might raise their voices, as well, both to directly challenge these policies and the deleterious impact they will have on Americans’ prosperity, and to support their companies’ leaders in whatever resistance they muster to Trump’s deranged economic policies.
For a change, workers and management may wind up on the same side in an existential economic struggle.
The Geography of Work
David Wallace-Wells shares a chart, once again showing the impact of Covid on what he calls ‘the geography of work’:
Compared with 2019, five times as many Americans were working from home in 2021, and, corporate exhortations aside, four times as many still do. Many white-collar workers now routinely encounter colleagues only some days of the week while mostly working as atomized nodes in a distended network.
‘Distended’ might be a too-strong synonym for ‘distributed and decentralized’ network, but Wallace-Wells (and the folks at WFH Research who pulled together the chart’s dataset) are highlighting changes that are ‘probably forever’, despite efforts by some to undo this new order of things.
Elsewhere
Yesterday, I published Portfolio: How Notetaking Becomes Knowledge, first in a series on Portfolio: a comprehensive system for notetaking in Obsidian. An excerpt:
People have used notetaking for centuries to accumulate insights, ideas, quotes, and drawings with the end goal of capturing a body of knowledge in search of consilience: that is, the aspiration that cross-pollination of various — perhaps initially unrelated notes and clippings — can lead to spontaneous and unforeseen breakthroughs. Breakthroughs in both personal understanding and perhaps in the advancement of ongoing explorations in science, art, and social relations, individually and communally.
The rise of digital notetaking systems has amplified these aspirations, and provide means to push notetaking to new levels of sophistication and greater depth of understanding for users. However, the effective use of notetaking systems like Obsidian, Notion, Roam Research and others requires more than reading the manual and jumping in.
Portfolio is a system to accomplish that aspiration in Obsidian.
I chose the name based on the notion of a physical portfolio, ‘a hinged cover or flexible case for carrying loose papers, pictures, or pamphlets’, but in this instance the ‘portfolio’ is metaphorical, since the Obsidian platform does not really involve printed materials, but rather a collection of notes captured in a digital file system.
Portfolio is a consolidation of many aspects of Obsidian's notetaking capabilities, starting with the primitives of its form of Markdown, as well as more complex and sophisticated functionality from core and community plugins. Portfolio is also a set of principles and practices intended to support the development of a deep base of knowledge for whatever domains the user wishes to explore, and to assist the user in generating new insights, personal understanding of these domains, and perhaps the creation of new materials advancing communal understanding as well.
But first and foremost, Portfolio is a system organized around personal management of information, and the management of that information for purposes of work and knowledge management. Said in a simpler way, Portfolio is intended to help users keep track of things, to be able to find them, and to provide the infrastructure to harness that information — whether gathered from the outside, like clipped articles, or notes created solely within Obsidian — to accomplish whatever goals.