Should Companies Be Apolitical?
On Brian Armstrong, Leo Strauss, and Alexandre Kojeve
Obviously, it depends on what it meant by “apolitical.” For a certain crowd, influenced directly or indirectly by Carl Schmitt, everything is political. Such a crowd tends to see agitation and conflict as ends in themselves.
For classical liberals, by contrast, politics is one domain amongst many. There’s a time to do a politics and a time to do other things, like maximize profits, or fulfill an organizational mission, pray, or enjoy dinner with friends.
I returned to the question of politics and the workplace when reading Tyler Cowen’s interview with Brian Armstrong. Here’s the relevant snippet:
COWEN: You’ve been critical of other companies for going beyond their mission statements and doing, for instance, politics. But if it is the case that other values stand above the mission statement in any case in every company, what’s wrong with that? Why can’t that be part of their meta mission statement?
ARMSTRONG: I think every company could do that on their own, so I don’t have any issue with other companies choosing to do that. They might actually clarify that in their mission statement, which is that their mission is to serve the ultimate human good or something more broad which could include activism or politics or something like that.
In our case, my view is that the mission, which was to create an open financial system for the world — that might involve interacting with governments in the sense of if we need to go lobby for cryptocurrency policy or something like that, but it didn’t involve necessarily trying to solve every problem out there in the world.
Armstrong doesn’t think politics are always bad; his point is that not all companies ought to be “activist.” I agree.
Armstrong’s reasoning follows that of Leo Strauss, who writes in his dialogue with Kojeve (collected in on On Tyranny), that philosophers must choose between the art of wisdom and the art of ruling or power-grabbing. If you substitute in builders, creators, inventors, and company founders, for philosophers, the dynamic doesn’t change.
Kojeve argued the opposite—the best world will be one in which the rulers are intellectuals, where wisdom and power no longer stand in conflict with each other. To translate his idea—where CEOs of companies are as comfortable building a perfect product as they are trying to perfect the world.
The debate—it seems to me—comes down to perfectionism. Strauss was skeptical the world could become perfect and rational, so he thought of philosophy as a kind of consolation in and for a harsh reality. His view is tragic. Kojeve was more optimistic, following Hegel’s belief that the “real is rational and the rational is real.”
Perhaps the meta-question companies should ask themselves is whether their products are intended to make life in an unperfectable world a little bit better, or whether their products are intended to bring the world closer to a redemptive state?
For the optimists, it makes more sense to politicize the workspace. For the cautionary ones, it makes sense to focus on micro-problems and avoid those questions that might call the company itself, along with everything else, into question.
What do you think? Why am I wrong?
What is Called Thinking? is a practice of asking a daily question on the belief that self-reflection brings awe, joy, and enrichment to one’s life. Consider becoming a subscriber to support this project and access subscriber-only content.
You can read my weekly Torah commentary here.