Will HP's accusation that Autonomy cooked its books stand?

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This past November Hewlett Packard (HP,) a $130 billion company, and the largest manufacturer of PCs in the world, announced that it was writing down $8 billion of the $10.3 billion it paid to purchase Autonomy, a British software company. HP’s spokesperson argued that Autonomy had engaged in "serious accounting improprieties" and "outright misrepresentations” that created an unrealistic picture of the company’s worth. It linked these accounting improprieties to $5 billion of the $8 billion write-down. Michael Lynch, Autonomy’s co-founder and CEO, disputed the charge, and noted that HP had not provided any details justifying the accusation, or the size of the write down. As one report notes, “Mr. Lynch has come out swinging, denouncing HP's assertions as ‘completely and utterly wrong.’” Moreover, Autonomy’s British auditors, who had earlier investigated an employee’s charge of such improprieties, found no evidence for them.

While it is difficult at this point to surmise which party is telling the truth, or more realistically, where parts of the truth may lie, it is clear that Autonomy is a going concern with a thriving business. It produces software that enables companies to search structured and unstructured data, for example data from videos, radio programs, voicemails and text. The company is part of the emerging world of “big data” through which companies and government agencies can “scrape” and analyze very large data sets, for example in tracking the online behavior of millions of consumers. At the time of its acquisition, Autonomy had over 400 OEM partners, more than 400 vendors and integrators, and over 20,000 customers, including BP, Halliburton, Royal Dutch Shell, BAE Systems, AstraZeneca, United States Department of Defense, United States Department of Homeland Security, Citigroup and Symantec. Moreover, in January of this year, HP announced “a significant customer win” when NASCAR, the premier stock car auto racing organization in the United States, agreed to use Autonomy’s software “to power a Fan and Media Engagement Center. The software will be used to monitor print, radio, video, Web and social network sources and analyze fan sentiments on races, drivers, sponsors and all NASCAR activities.”

I believe that Autonomy did not perpetrate fraud as did Enron or WorldCom, but I think it is clear that Autonomy did engage in aggressive accounting practices. As one report notes, “The firm recognized revenue upfront that under U.S. accounting rules would have been deferred.” It also struck "round-trip transactions”—deals where Autonomy agreed to buy a client's products or services, while at the same time the client purchased Autonomy software. If for example, Autonomy sold company X, $1 million worth of software, by promising to buy $.5 million of services in return from X, the net impact on HP's revenue should be positive $.5 million. Yet in one round trip transaction, with a software company called VMS, Autonomy booked the cost of the VMS software it purchased, as a marketing expense -- it used the software to make marketing presentations --rather than as the cost of the software that Autonomy originally sold to VMS. But when analysts look at the intrinsic profitability of a business, they focus on the direct expenses of producing a service, “the cost of goods sold,” while ignoring overhead items such as marketing expenses. HP's accounting tactic exaggerated the profitability of its original sale of software to VMS. 

An alternative hypothesis for explaining the write-down is that HP overpaid for its purchase. It is common knowledge for example, that when a company announces its intent to acquire another firm, the stock price of the latter goes up while the stock price of the former goes down. Overpaying is expected. It is also likely, as so often happens, that HP found it difficult to integrate Autonomy into its operations. Discussing the latter’s performance some 18 months after its purchase, HP’s CFO told analysts, "License revenue was disappointing, sales execution was a challenge, and big deals were taking longer to close."

One reason for this disappointing performance may be that the co-founder and CEO of Autonomy, Mike Lynch, described as a “domineering” figure, was very hard driving and had created a great deal of pressure for sales. As one sales person reported to a newspaper, “Autonomy (prior to its acquisition) used a homegrown computer program, called SMS, to record salespeople's contacts with potential clients and calculate their rates of closing sales. Executives would sometimes use the data to craft broadly distributed emails calling out under-performing salespeople,  Those whose rates fell below a standard deviation  would be criticized or fired, the former salesperson says.”

Another news report noted that at one point, “Autonomy stocked piranhas for a while in the office fish tank.” Of course, this may be folklore, but even as folklore it highlights peoples’ perception of the setting as ruthless.  It makes sense, in this context, that once HP bought the company, and Lynch became a divisional executive with delimited power, the pressure for performance he stimulated, diminished as well. This is a common problem when large companies buy owner or founder-led businesses. Entrepreneurs are motivated by both the prospects of great success and the fear of catastrophic failure. Once the prospect of “hunger” is banished through access to the acquiring company’s resources, people feel less hungry to succeed.

The Autonomy purchase and its subsequent write-down, while big news, was overshadowed by a more important event that nonetheless gives added meaning to the purchase itself.  When the then HP CEO, Leo Apotheker, announced his company’s purchase of Autonomy, he simultaneously told reporters that HP would be selling its PC division, which on a stand-alone basis would have been the biggest personal computer manufacturer in the world.

This was riveting news, particularly since, when in 2002, HP first bought Compaq Computer to create its PC division, there was considerable bloodletting, leading the HP board to sack Carly Fiorina, the charismatic CEO, who pushed for the purchase. Ten years later, the PC division accounted for one-third of HP’s revenue and one-fifth  of its profits. As a result, the day after Apotheker announced Autonomy’s purchase, and the sale of its PC division, HP’s stock price fell 20%, eliminating some $13 billion in value. The board promptly fired Apotheker.

In retrospect, it appears that Apotheker’s decision to sell the PC division was part of a larger strategy to move from the world of hardware to software, much as IBM had done when it sold its PC division to Lenovo. Autonomy’s purchase, I propose, was an incidental tactic to underline this shift. Strikingly, as the Wall Street Journal reports, Apotheker tried to buy two other software companies both of which the board rejected, before agreeing to his bid to buy Autonomy. As the Journal recounts the story, Apotheker, in advocating for Autonomy’s purchase told Ray Lane, the chairman of the board, "I am running out of software companies to buy.” As this turn of phrase suggests, he was facing time pressure to underline his strategy of moving to software, and needed to buy, as the saying goes, “something, anything.” 

This suggests that one additional reason for the write down was that Apotheker and the board, facing time pressure and scarce opportunities, overpaid for what felt like a “last chance” acquisition.  Autonomy in this sense was valuable, less for the foothold it provided in the world of software, though its technology was certainly sound, and more as an object of desire to signal both to the market and to powerful HP’s executives, that the company was moving irrevocably into the world of software. 

Indeed, the executives of large corporations sometimes face insuperable obstacles when they try to transform companies from within. They face guerrilla warfare, as divisional executives, for example, in the case of HP, the executive team in charge of the powerful printer division, resist the transformation. Sometimes the only recourse is to buy and sell whole divisions, in this way shedding obligations, commitments and the political coalitions associated with them. This may be one reason that Apotheker and the HP board were willing to pay a premium for a company that was already highly valued by the market relative to its actual earnings. As one report notes, “The markup, about a 50% premium over the stock at the time, wasn't unusual for a software deal, but Autonomy's valuation was already on the high side. Its market value of about $6 billion was seven times annual revenue and 15 times operating profit.”

Was Apotheker’s strategy of moving to software sound?  One stimulus for the strategy was the effort, begun before Apotheker became CEO, to build a new hardware ecosystem based on a proprietary tablet computer and an operating system, WebOS, purchased from Palm, the failed tablet company that could not compete with multifunctional smart phones. HP saw this strategy as a way to compete in the emerging “post-PC” world in which tablets rather than desktops took center stage. Yet the tablet, called Touchpad, sold poorly and Apotheker shut it down. At the same time, the margins HP earned on its PCs were small, in the range of 5%, while, as the following table shows, the number of PCs it shipped had been slipping. Indeed, this shrinking market is one reason that Dell Computer is going private. It needs to shield itself from the stock market that is already discounting the future prospects of the PC. 

 

In short, after HP failed to reposition itself as a tablet manufacturer with a proprietary operating system, Apotheker was confronted with the task of selling a low margin product, the PC, in what looked like a shrinking market. It seems reasonable in this context that HP’s next step was to move fully into the world of software. Indeed, when the board fired Apotheker and appointed Meg Whitman in his place, Ray Lane, the board chair, noted that, as the one time head of E-Bay, Whitman had been a buyer of technology on a large scale, and was very familiar with “unstructured data,” the sweet spot for Autonomy’s products and services. The same month she was appointed, Whitman herself said, “That the company under her leadership would stay the course and continue to transition to an enterprise software business.”

So why fire Apotheker? One fact is clear, HP’s customers were very upset with Apotheker’s announcement that HP would sell its PC division. This was one reason for the drastic drop in the stock price the next day. Many customers were wholly vested in HP’s products and services, buying PC’s, printers, servers, and networking equipment from the company. HP’s PC product line, it turns out, was a strategic asset stimulating the sale of other equipment as customers bought what are called “end-to end,” or more proverbially, “soup-to-nuts” solutions.  Indeed, after the announcement, a reporter got hold of a leaked memo from Cisco, an HP competitor that sells networking equipment, in which Cisco executives viewed Apotheker’s announcement with relish. The Cisco memo writer anticipates a big pickup in business, suggesting that, by “divesting the PC business, HP removes the bond between its other hardware, software and services groups, resulting in a disjointed company.”

Similarly, one trade website, Information Week Now, notes that after the PC decision was announced, “our polling of IT buyers showed that even though HP hasn't said a peep about printers, 32% of respondents said they were less likely to buy HP imaging technology now.” The website goes on to note, “On stage at Information Week's conference early last week, Lane, (HP’s board chair), acknowledged that 99% of HP's core infrastructure business was servers, storage, networking--the hardware that runs today's businesses. And yet everything HP has talked about for the past year--unstructured data, mobile, cloud--while important trends for the future, isn't where its customers look to HP today. It's fine to paint a vision of the future, but it's not fine to leave your customers behind.”

This last phrase, “leave your customers behind” is telling. If HP is to become an enterprise software company it will indeed leave some of their current customers behind and perhaps many of them in the lurch. In this sense HP’s customers are a drag on its evolution, and their current claims on HP’s resources could undermine HP’s future prospects. To be sure, by selling its PC division, HP would certainly lose a lot of revenue, but it would also accrue the capital it needed to purchase more profitable software businesses with their own new revenue streams. I suggest that Apotheker was fired because the board believed he could not manage this transition. 

This perspective sheds some new light on HP’s claim that Autonomy engaged in fraudulent accounting. The concept of market exchange highlights the idea of reciprocity. Money is offered for value proffered. But from a psychodynamic perspective exchange entails dependency and it is not uncommon for providers to resent the customers on whom they depend. For example, academics have an old saying, “if it were not for the students the teaching would be great.” These feelings highlight, that while exchange entails reciprocity, it may also mimic war or conflict. Customers always want more than the provider can profitably give. This is also why the phrase, “buyer beware” (in Latin, “caveat emptor”), has such an ancient lineage. 

This perspective also sheds some light on an interesting turn of phrase Meg Whitman used in describing HP’s strategy to its customers. “HP's strategy is quite simple; to provide the solutions for the new style of IT. We'd like to engage with you to provide the business outcomes you need and frankly require in the coming years." I find the use of the word “frankly” suggestive. As the term suggests, Whitman is telling her customers something they may not want to hear, an aggressive act, hence her need to be frank. And as she suggests, she can tell customers what they need, not the other way around.

The idea that one’s customers are one’s antagonists is to some degree a forbidden idea. So much business lingo is organized around the concept of serving customers and becoming their partners. Psychoanalysis suggests that while forbidden ideas may be repressed or displaced, they never disappear. This suggests that HP’s war against Autonomy- charging it with fraud, is a displacement of HP’s attack on its own customers. In effect, Autonomy is a scapegoat for the very difficult strategic challenge that HP faces. This is consistent with the idea that Autonomy was also once a stand-in, so to speak, for the new world of enterprise software, when it was first purchased. After all, looking at the purchase practically, it was Apotheker’s third choice. In both cases as stand-in and scapegoat, it was not just a company with real assets, but a symbol of HP’s prospects as well as difficulties. Indeed, it is common that people, who at one point are seen as heroes, are later seen as laughingstocks. As the song says, “the bigger they are, the harder they fall.” The deflation is the flip side of the inflation.

It may seem strange that a symbol can stimulate fundamental business decisions such as charging a company with fraud. But we have only to remember the passions that are stimulated when for example a citizen burns his country’s flag in protest.  Materially, the flag is simply piece of cloth, a rag, but symbolically it represents a panoply of thoughts and feelings. The ways in which we symbolize settings, objects and people shapes the concrete ways through which we relate to them. When Autonomy became a symbol of HP’s entry into the world of software it also became a symbol for the frustrations and difficulties of entering that world.

My prediction is that HP’s charge of fraud will not stand, but that its strategic challenges will persist.

The State Department report on the killing of Ambassador Christopher Stevens in Benghazi, Libya.

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The U.S. State Department recently released a report on the killing of Ambassador Christopher Stevens and four other people by Jihadists in Benghazi, Libya on September 11 of this past year. Briefly, a well-armed militia attacked the U.S. consulate’s Benghazi compound, setting its buildings on fire. Ambassador Stevens and a security officer, who were visiting from Tripoli, the capital city, died of smoke inhalation. An hour-and-a-half later, militia members followed a CIA truck to its secretly located building some distance away, called in State Department documents, “the Annex.” They used RPGs to kill two CIA agents. Everyone now agrees, that the attack was not, as the Obama administration first suggested, a spontaneous demonstration in response to an inflammatory video depicting Islam as corrupt and murderous. Instead, it was planned and executed by well-armed jihadists.

In response to the killing, the State department convened a task force to review why security at the consulate was insufficient. The resulting report, released this past month, is thoughtful and judicious, and is anchored in a discourse of what it means to effectively assess and mitigate threats. The report exemplifies the good practice of “after-action reviews” through which leaders and executives debrief a mission or program and try to learn from their mistakes. Yet the report misses the forest for the trees and is peculiarly off-key. The question is why?

Consider three sensible arguments the report writers make.

·      The consulate's vulnerability was heightened because personnel seconded to it were relatively inexperienced, and often on temporary assignments of less than 40 days. The result was “diminished institutional knowledge, continuity and mission capacity.”

·      Following good practice, consulate officials had well-defined “tripwires,” such as the city’s crime rate, or attacks on westerners, which could alert consulate staff to the possibility of an attack on the consulate compound. But, the report goes on to argue, these, “Tripwires are too often treated only as indicators of threat rather than essential trigger mechanisms for serious risk management decisions.”

·      Communication between Washington, Tripoli, and Benghazi “occurred collegially at the working level,” but it was, “constrained by a lack of transparency, responsiveness, and leadership at senior bureau levels.”

This discourse has all the earmarks of reasonableness and rationality. It applies the lessons of threat assessment and management, and makes recommendations for better results in the future, e.g., better communication at senior levels, better staffing practices, and a more thoughtful use of tripwires. But I want to argue that the report is nonetheless misleading and insufficient because it is focused at the tactical rather than strategic level. It pays no attention to a wider narrative that shaped the Obama administration’s decision making at the level of foreign policy; a policy that colored all tactical decisions. This narrative presumes that the U.S., through the judicious use of military measures and modern “nation-building” practices, can help people in lawless settings evolve democratic and civil societies.  Indeed, this narrative is why the Obama administration at first suggested that the attack on the consulate was spontaneous, in response to an anti-Islam video produced in the U.S. It was not that jihadists, unleashed by a revolutionary situation the U.S. helped create, were out to kill us as well as their Libyan enemies. Rather, we had inadvertently trampled on their religious sensibilities.

I want to argue in this blog post that the purpose of the State Department report was not to improve practices, but to protect decision makers from the psychological burden of wrestling with the contradictions and tensions implicit in this wider narrative. It functioned as what organizational psychodynamics calls, a “social defense;” a collective process of psychological denial.   

Consider how the report fails. It turns out that senior State Department officials gave the Ambassador wide berth to make his own threat assessment decisions. The vision of local officials applying protocols, some acceptable, some not, to secure the consulate’s safety, or of seniors officers collaborating, or not, on consulate safety, is misleading. As the report itself notes, “The ambassador did not see a direct threat of this nature and scale on the U.S. mission in the overall negative trend line of security incidents (in Benghazi) from spring to summer of 2012.” In other words, Steven’s discounted signals of threat. The report goes on to note, “His status as the leading U.S. government advocate on Libya policy, and his expertise on Benghazi in particular, caused Washington to give unusual deference to his judgments.”

This suggests that the State Department after-action review should have been focused on two entirely different questions. First, what compelled State Department officials, perhaps against their better judgment, to defer to Stevens, and second, why did Stevens discount signals of threat?

Why the deference? After his death, Secretary of State Clinton, President Obama, and others referred to Stevens as the ideal diplomat. Describing Stevens and his colleagues, Obama said, “They knew the danger, and they accepted it. They didn't simply embrace the American ideal. They lived it." There seems little doubt that Stevens’ actions during the uprising against Gaddafi, and this was before he was appointed ambassador, were deservedly considered heroic. As ABC, the news organization, reports, “During the early days of the Libyans' fight to overthrow Moammar Gaddafi, Christopher Stevens, not yet ambassador, wrangled a ride on a Greek cargo ship and sailed into the rebels' stronghold city of Benghazi.” (Benghazi, it should be noted, was the seat of the revolution.) The ABC report goes on to note, “He arrived at a time when the crackle of gunfire could be heard each night. Stevens and his team didn't even have a place to stay, but found space in a hotel briefly, moving out after a car bomb went off in the parking lot.” Stevens and a political officer, “spent their days and nights building up the U.S. government’s first on-the-ground contacts with the Transitional National Council, as well as with members of the emerging civil society and newly freed news media.”

There is also little doubt that Stevens represented and deeply believed in the democratic ideal. Consider for example the video Stevens released, shortly after he was appointed ambassador, through which he addressed the Libyan people. At one point in the video, shot in Washington D.C., he says, “I am in Washington preparing for my assignment. As I walk around the monuments and memorials commemorating courageous men and women who made America what it is, I am reminded that we too went through challenging periods. When America was divided by a bitter civil war 150 years ago, President Abraham Lincoln had the vision and courage to pull the nation together and helped us move forward toward a shared goal of peace and prosperity.” (In the video he is at the Lincoln Memorial). In other words, he is suggesting that the Libyan civil war and the U.S. civil war were cut from the same cloth. This means that Libyans, despite their country’s history of violence, fragmentation and oppression, can aspire to the kind of constitutional and civil order that U.S. citizens, for the most part, have come to enjoy.

The reference to Lincoln is particularly telling, and highlights the strengths and limitations of what is called the “idealist” as opposed to the “realist” strain in U.S. foreign policy.  Lincoln is usefully thought of as the second, or in fact the “true” father of his nation, and his greatness lies partly in his ability to use force in the service of civilization, without losing his own moral compass, humanness and civility. But it takes a distinctive culture to produce such a leader. We could say that Stevens’ analogy, and the strain of idealism he represents, is partly hope, but also partly projection, imagining that the social context that gave rise to Lincoln can be replicated in Libya. This projection of American history and sensibilities onto other cultures and countries reinforces the belief that they can traverse our path to democracy.

We have now one plausible account of the deference,  but can we account for Stevens' judgments about the situation? One thing we can rule out; Stevens was by no means naïve, and understood the risks he was personally facing. His diary, found by a CNN reporter at the burned and now abandoned consulate, shows that he believed Al Qaeda was targeting him for assassination.

In this regard,  while the discourse about risk assessment and mitigation in the report is reasonable, it fails in one elementary way, and on its own terms. The report does not consider the relationship between risks and opportunities. That a setting such as Benghazi is risky, is a given. The question is, what is to be to be gained by having a consulate in Benghazi despite these risks? Or to put the matter differently, what were the risks of not having a consulate in the city?

I think the answer is apparent, and was the basis for Stevens' judgment. For the same reason that Benghazi was the seat of the uprising against Gaddafi, it was thus also a threat to creating a centralized political authority in Tripoli. The tribes in eastern Libya had long been hostile to Tripoli’s power, and resented their subordination to Gaddafi’s army and his associated elites in business and politics. As we have seen elsewhere, a revolutionary situation is just as likely, if not more, to lead to chaos and fragmentation, as to a new political order based on representation and civility. After all, this is one reason the CIA had established a sizeable station in Benghazi to begin with. Its senior personnel understood that the tribes in Eastern Libya, wanted to secure their rightful share of weapons from Gaddafi’s arsenal, and they worried that Al Qaeda inspired jihadists would get them.

This suggests that Stevens established a consulate in Benghazi, described as “lawless town,” in the State Department report, to begin the work of linking the elites of Benghazi to Tripoli. He planned to do this by helping to build what are called “civil society” institutions, such as businesses, schools, government agencies, NGOs, courts and media. For example, one State Department memo, released in a cache of memos to the world- wide-web, refers to U.N. supported initiatives such as;

·      Preparing lawyers for constitution drafting.

·      Engaging lawyers in the Libyan diaspora to train local lawyers.

·      Forming a local chapter of NAPEO, the “North Africa Partnership for Economic Opportunity,” to educate participants about public-private partnerships.

·      Ensuring that the TOEFL English language exam is offered in Libya, and,

·      Training aspiring entrepreneurs in business skills.

These are practical steps, familiar to practitioners of nation-building.  But the reader, unaccustomed to this work, can’t help but wonder if they are off-kilter and potentially irrelevant efforts in the context of a lawless city in a nation of tribes. Indeed, one measure of this irrelevance is a peculiar paragraph in another State Department memo, dated December 2011. It notes that, “Many Libyans have said that the U.S. presence (in Benghazi) has a salutary calming effect (my underlining) on easterners who are fearful that the new focus on Tripoli could once again lead to their neglect and exclusion from reconstruction and wealth distribution, and (therefore) strongly favor a permanent U.S. presence in the form of a full consulate.” In other words, the powerful tribes and families in Benghazi would welcome a U.S. presence to protect them and assure them their fair share of the spoils, rather than depend on their own militias and force of arms. This may be where idealism shades into naiveté.

In addition, the narrative of democratic empowerment protected senior officials in the state department and in the Obama administration from the psychological burden of facing the unfortunate that, that from 2003 on, the U.S. considered Gaddafi to be an ally. As a Wikipedia entry notes, in December of that year,

“Libya renounced its possession of weapons of mass destruction and agreed to decommission its chemical weapons program. Relations with the U.S. improved as a result, while U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair met with Gaddafi in the Libyan desert in March 2004. The following month, Gaddafi travelled to the headquarters of the European Union in Brussels signifying improved relations between Libya and the EU, the latter of whom ended its remaining sanctions in October.

Indeed, as the Wall Street Journal reported, from 2003 to 2011, the CIA had close ties to Gaddafi’s secret services!

 Let us return to the two questions that I suggested the State Department Report should have addressed. What compelled State Department officials, perhaps against their better judgment, to defer to Stevens, and why did Stevens discount signals of threat? The answers are now apparent. First, Stevens was the ideal representative of the idealist strain, yet he had the physical courage, the realistic perspective and the diplomatic skills to operate in a lawless setting. Second, Stevens believed that absent civil society institutions in Benghazi, the country could break apart under the press of tribal warfare. The risks of not having a consulate in Benghazi were greater than the risks of having one. Stevens did not discount signals of threat, he simply saw and responded to a larger one.

It is a common feature of strategies and their associated narratives, that they contain tensions and contradictions. This is the underside of their breadth. The U.S. wants to advance democracy through open means, but it cannot and has not discounted the reality of armed non-state enemies who have no history of living in democratic settings. Indeed, this is why the CIA had its own secret annex in Benghazi, while the State Department had its public consulate. (There is good reason to believe that Jihadists only discovered the Annex when, after the fire at the consulate compound, they followed a CIA truck from the consulate to the CIA’s building). The physical separation of the two, while based on the need for secrecy, also symbolized the tensions of integrating the idealist and the realist orientations.

The U.S., for better or worse, is impelled to represent democracy in the clash of civilizations. But at the same time it has built up a security apparatus that enables it to protect U.S. security, political, and economic interests without regard to who is the “good guy,” or democrat; hence the alliance with Gaddafi prior to his overthrow. I also think Stevens was considered a hero not only because he was a courageous practitioner of what is called “expeditionary diplomacy,” but because he had a realistic understanding of the threats the U.S. faced and an abiding belief in the power of democratic ideals and practices to mitigate these threats. He offered for a moment, a synthesis of the idealist and realist strains, and his murder suggests that he paid with his life for trying to integrate the two.

We can now understand why the State Department report was inadequate and why it focused on tactical issues. Of course, the task force was not authorized to consider issues of strategy. But its focus on tactics also helps deflect attention from the painful realization that the work of integrating the two strains of foreign policy, work that every president has to take up, is difficult, consequential, and can lead to the murder of valued and honored diplomats who represent the “best the country can offer.” This is why I called the report a “social defense.” It deflects attention from what is guilt inducing, painful and has surprised us, to what can be managed and predicted. 

There may be a lesson here as well about "after-action" reviews. They may fail to give us real insight into our failures if we do not consider the strategic context that shaped our decisions.

The Newtown shooting and the NRA

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This blog post does not take a position on whether the National Rifle Association (NRA) or gun control advocates are right or wrong in their responses to the shootings in Newtown. 

(Note to my non-U.S. friends. On December 20, a young man, Adam Lanza, entered a school building in suburban Connecticut and killed twenty school children, kindergartners among them, and six adults, including the principal and the school psychologist.  He used a semi-automatic rifle and first killed his mother at home before entering the school building.  The shooting has revived a debate in the United States about whether or not the federal government should control gun sales). 

Instead, I suggest that there is always value in stepping away from such debates and asking how a particular debate resonates with wider trends and issues. For those who favor more gun control, as I do, it is nonetheless important to understand what the NRA might represent, both for us and against us, as participants in the wider cultural questions that affect us all.  This approach is linked to the hypothesis that, in social systems, we polarize our differences into camps of opinion when we cannot reconcile conflicting goals we face together. 

I was drawn in this regard to the press conference the NRA gave fully a week after the shooting. Its leaders, particular its executive vice president, Wayne LaPierre, came to the press conference, “loaded for bear,” as the hunter’s expression goes. He attacked the media for its anticipated critique of the NRA. He proposed that the best way to protect school children, was not to control the sale of guns and the licensing of gun holders, but instead, to place armed guards in every school building. There was a brutal logic to his argument. 

“How have our nation's priorities gotten so far out of order, he asked, “think about it. We care about our money, so we protect our banks with armed guards. American airports, office buildings, power plants, courthouses -- even sports stadiums -- are all protected by armed security. We care about the President, so we protect him with armed Secret Service agents. Members of Congress work in offices surrounded by armed Capitol Police officers. Yet when it comes to the most beloved, innocent and vulnerable members of the American family -- our children -- we as a society leave them utterly defenseless, and the monsters and predators of this world know it and exploit it. That must change now!”

I can readily imagine how some parents, under the press of fear and anxiety, might feel reassured if an armed officer or civilian volunteer was deployed to protect their children while they were in school. In this sense, the NRA’s position is not as outrageous as some of its critics have suggested.

However, what I found telling was the NRA’s failure to consider what it means to provide children with a psychological sense of safety. Armed guns will protect their physical security, but they threaten to bring into the child’s view and experience the belief and fear that the world is dangerous, filled with bad people who can harm them. Why else have armed guards in the school building in the first place? In other words, what the NRA did not recognize is our shared hope that we can protect a child’s innocence; that is, an experience of the world as a loving place, where strangers are friendly, authority is dependable, optimism is realistic, curiosity is rewarded, and of course armed guards are unnecessary.

But having noted this lapse, I can also ask, whether or not we adults, as bearers of our culture, any longer believe that children are entitled to their innocence. There is a sizeable literature, think of Neal Postman’s prescient, “The Disappearance of Childhood,” published in 1982, which argues that we have created a social world that undermines the experience of childhood innocence. Children are told to be wary of adults who touch them, lest they be abusers, and they are exposed to sexual stimuli as well as fantasies of violence throughout their childhood. In our anxiety for their future we overschedule their lives with programmed activities, and test preparation sessions, so that they experience little spontaneous play. Many children are also exposed to our psychological conflicts when, as parents, we divorce one another and then fight over their custody. The television series, “The Wire,” a story of Baltimore as a decaying postindustrial city, and widely regarded as realistic, highlights how some African-American children are far too soon introduced to the world of adult violence, ineptitude and corruption.

The list could go on, but do we care?  In others word are we committed to sustaining the experience of childhood innocence? One reason we might not be is because as adults we no longer feel psychologically, financially or physically safe ourselves. As a result we are pulled toward protecting ourselves rather than our children.  The psychologist David Bakan, argues in The Slaughter of Innocents,” that throughout history adults abandoned infants when faced with food shortages. Children in other words, potentially distract us from our own struggle for survival.  While in the developed world we have ample food, the anxieties associated with securing an adult role that confers dignity, purpose and a livelihood, have grown substantially. This may be one reason why birth rates are falling throughout much of the West. Perhaps the NRA's conviction that monsters threaten us and our children, represents, in an exaggerated form, a widely held belief that the world has become more dangerous for adults.  

If this is true, one question then is how one makes sense of danger? I want to suggest that the NRA’s philosophy, or perhaps theology, is based on the idea of an evil presence in the world, which, if and when acknowledged, makes innocence seem delusional. Harlon Carter, who helped “overthrow” the NRA’s “old guard” in 1977,  attacked it using the discourse of good and evil. “The latest news release from the NRA,” he said, "embraces a disastrous concept, that evil is imputed to the sale and delivery, the possession of a certain kind of firearm, entirely apart from the good or evil intent of the man who uses it.” This discourse of evil is also why LaPierre referred in the press conference to “predators and monsters,” rather than, for example, to mentally disturbed people. In this sense, the discourse of evil stands in contrast to the discourse of disease and health. The idea that Adam Lanza, was mentally disturbed, in other words, he had a diseased mind, can be usefully challenged by the idea that he, or much more likely, his mother and first victim, was evil.

Does the idea of evil have standing? Scott Peck, the psychiatrist and religious thinker, wrote a widely read book, “The People of the Lie,” based on the idea that evil people are hidden, their impacts insidious, and that through their failure to tolerate imperfection in themselves and others, they often drive others, particularly children, into acts of desperation. The book, published in 1978, in this sense might be read as a précis of the Newtown shooting.

The idea of evil is not compatible with the belief, that if social conditions are right, fair and just, people can be perfected. This belief has been the basis for much modern social policy as well as the foundation for tolerance and for a commitment to pluralism. My own sense however is that idea of evil remains unsettled within us, we are so to speak “bedeviled” by it, as we contemplate not simply the Holocaust, but more recently, the slaughters in Rwanda, in Bosnia, and the attack on women in parts of the Muslim world. Certainly, the psychoanalytic conception of character holds that loving and destructive feelings are comingled in our most intimate relationships. This is one basis for domestic violence. In other words, one hypothesis is that we are dishonest when we project our own struggle with the idea of evil onto people and groups, like the NRA, whose view of it we then label as extreme.

The belief that evil is real and insidious can certainly give rise to the conviction that we must defend ourselves against evil at all costs. But one question is why we can’t rely on the state. the government, to protect us against evil. Certainly, in the NRA’s worldview, the state cannot be counted on, and in fact may become the enemy. This is why its leaders put such great store on one interpretation of the U.S. constitution’s second amendment; namely that it protects the right of people, “to keep and bear arms.”

It is tempting to dismiss this as paranoid thinking, but surely one trend in the wider world is the apparent decline of states and the rise of non-state actors, such as terrorist organizations and criminal networks fully capable of attacking and defeating police forces and armies. In the U.S. we need only look southward to our neighbor, Mexico, to envision a scenario of how criminal gangs, wealthy and armed, might defeat the state. Moreover the conspiratorial idea that the United Nations is the first step toward global domination by hidden powers, an idea that attracts some NRA members, bears a family resemblance to the idea that the global corporation, which under certain conditions can equip private armies, is growing more powerful than the states that regulate them. Truth be told, in the United States, outlaws have often successfully challenged, defeated and corrupted the state. Think of outlaws on the western frontier, the Mafia in Chicago, whose leaders undermined judges and policemen with bribes and threats, or local urban police who, in decaying industrial cities, abandoned high crime areas to criminals.

I am reminded here – of all things! – of J.D. Salinger’s classic novel, “The Catcher in the Rye.”  It shows how young people lose their innocence, and potentially their sanity, when they come to grips with adult hypocrisy, or what Holden Caulfield, its hero, called its “phoniness.” I think the book had such enormous resonance for two reasons,  First,  it raised the question of whether we could sustain the innocence of childhood long enough in the life of each child so that children could become optimistic adults, even as they had to confront, in their adolescence, the dirty secrets of the adult world. Second, it had resonance because, published in 1949, it was anticipatory, foreshadowing young people's loss of trust in the adult world some fifteen years later.  Some thirty years after its publication, Neil Postman argued in his own book that the idea of childhood innocence in the United States, had a hundred year run, from 1850 to 1950, suggesting, once again, that an artist’s antenna, in this case Salinger's, picks up signals from the future.

“The Catcher in the Rye,” is both the book’s title and Holden Caulfield’s fantasy of his life’s work. As he tells his younger sister Phoebe, “Anyway, I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and nobody’s around- nobody big, I mean – except me. And I’m standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff- I mean they’re running and they don’t look where they’re going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That’s all I do all day. I’d just be the catcher in the rye and all. I know it’s crazy, but that’s the only thing I’d really like to be.”

Perhaps the Newtown shooting and the NRA’s response both raise questions we all face. Who, if anyone, will do the work of “child-catching” in a post-industrial world, how should they do it and how do we help them?