Final paper

Note that Moyers says that Booker angered both liberals and conservatives. Pissing off both sides is a sure sign there is a new kind of politics in the offing. In then Mayor Booker's interview with Bill Moyers he discusses social change in race and politics, both what has been achieved and what still needs work. See especially that Mayor Booker strikes themes from all 4 dimensions of ideology: freedom right (individual responsibility and initiative, involving business) order right (the importance of faith and the role of community), order left (the need for equality) and freedom left (free expression and protest).

Below is the text from Mayor Booker's acclaimed 2012 graduation address at Stanford.

My dad would touch me almost like he was trying to feel my very spirit. He would look at me and he would say in ways that are eloquent, he would impart to me this truth, he would say to me, "Boy, you need to understand that who you are now, you are the physical manifestation of a conspiracy of love. That people whose names you don't even know, who struggled for you, who fought for you, who sweat for you, who volunteered for you – you are here because of them. Do not forget that."

My father said those words on a graduation day and he knew that I would not forget that because this was his consistent theme to me all of my life. He wanted me to know where I came from.

Now, my father, in his own charismatic way, would always talk about his own journey being one that was a result of a conspiracy of love. And I listened to those stories year after year. By the time I was 40, I would start arguing with him because the scenes would get so much more dramatic with time and change. And I'd be like, "Dad, I can't believe this, you were born a poor boy." He goes, "poor? I wasn't poor, shut up, man." I said, "Dad." He goes, "No, I wasn't poor, I was just p-o. I couldn't afford the other two letters. Don't exaggerate my, my material well-being, son."

I'd have to argue with him and try to convince him that he was not telling the full truth when the weather patterns began to shift over the years from, you know, raining in the mountains of North Carolina, then the thunder storms started, then the hail period began, where it went from hail the size of golf balls, then footballs, then soccer balls, then small Cadillacs.

This last year I argued with him because he tried to tell me, and I couldn't accept it, I had to be respectful of my dad, but I could not accept it – "There's no way, dad, you were in the mountains of North Carolina, you could not have had a tsunami in your childhood."

But as much as my dad seemed to exaggerate aspects of his childhood over the years, the truth is he was born very poor. He was born to a single mother who could not take care of him. He then was raised by his grandparents, like many children in my community, but then his grandma could not take care of him. And then he was out in the community but it was that conspiracy of love –people whose names I do not know in a small, segregated, North Carolina town – that rallied around this boy, would not let him fail, got him to school, put a roof over his head, put food on the table, taught him discipline and respect, and he made his way. And then when it was time for him to graduate high school, he was not going to go to college. He thought his destiny was to go to work, get a job. But it was that conspiracy of love that would not let him turn his back on higher education.

I couldn't believe it; this last Thanksgiving as my family was going around talking about what we were thankful for, here is my father that begins to cry because he could not remember all of those people in the town. He could not say their names, who put dollar bills in envelopes so that he could afford his first semester's tuition at North Carolina Central University and then get a job and stay in school. But they are a part of that conspiracy of love.

And then, in college, my mom and dad would not let me forget the truth of that time – it was the early '60s. And I had this privilege last year being the Commencement Speaker for my mom's university, Fisk University, on her 50th reunion. And she reminded me about what happened at her university.

At the night before dinner, she took me around to table after table, stopping and saying, Cory, this is the young lady that led our voter registration movement at a time that it was dangerous in the South to go out and register people to vote – you all remember Goodwin and Chaney and Schwerner.

She would take me to another table and say, this is a young lady that led our boycott of a downtown store that would not serve African-Americans. At every table, it was almost like she was talking to me again as boy, snapping her fingers and saying, "Pay attention! This person marched for you. This person protested for you. This person sacrificed and risked expulsion for you."

The conspiracy continued.

My parents would tell me about landing in Washington, D.C. – that's where they met, two college graduates, African-Americans that confronted the reality that many companies would not hire blacks. But it was this conspiracy of love – black folks and white folks and Latinos, in Washington, D.C. and elsewhere in America – that were forming organizations that were challenging companies and working with them to hire blacks.

My dad soon became one of the first blacks hired by an oil company, then one of the first black professionals hired by a department store. Then, he and my mom became part of a wave of the first blacks hired from this small tech start-up you all out here in Silicon Valley may not have heard of called IBM.

The conspiracy continued.

When my parents got promotions after doing so well at IBM, they got moved to the New York City area. They were looking for towns to move into and, immediately, found out that many of the nicest towns with the best schools would not show the homes to black families.

And so my parents worked with this group of conspirators who formed something called "The Fair Housing Council" and every time my parents would go look at a house and were told it was sold, they would send a white couple there to see if that was the truth. I was told that white couple's name was Mr. and Mrs. Brown but they were not brown.

My parents fell in love with a home. They were told it was sold. The Browns were there next; told it was still for sale. They put a bid on the house. On the day of the closing, my father went instead of the Browns with a young lawyer whose name I don't know, walked into the real estate agent's office and said, "You are in violation of New Jersey Fair Housing Law." And before he could finish his piece, this young lawyer, bright and ready to confront injustice, the real estate agent stands up and punches the lawyer in the face. He sics a dog on my dad. Now, the size of the dog has changed over the years. My father now insists it was spawn from Hell, it was Cujo. My mom will whisper to me it was just Toto, Cory, it was really a small thing.

And so, there I was, 1970, a baby growing up in this town. My father and my mother, my brother and me – as my father referred to us "four raisins in a tub of vanilla ice cream."

And in this amazing town, in this nurturing community, I grew strong and had my share of success – high school All-American football player; I was in the Honor Society, president of my class. But, if my parents saw me gettin' too big for my britches, if they saw me lookin' proud, my father would be right there. He would say to me, "Boy, don't you dare walk around this house like you hit a triple, when you were born on third base!" He would say to me, "You need to understand something, you drink deeply from wells of freedom and liberty and opportunity that you did not dig. You eat lavishly from banquet tables prepared for you by your ancestors. You sit under the shade of trees that you did not plant or cultivate or care for. You have a choice in life, you can just sit back, getting fat, dumb, and happy, consuming all the blessings put before you, or it can metabolize inside of you, become fuel to get you into the fight, to make this democracy real, to make it true to its words that we can be a nation of liberty and justice for all."

And so, in answer to my father's call, when I had exhausted most of the degrees available to any bright student, I moved to Newark, New Jersey. And I tell you, it was not some great altruism. I was looking to be the man that my father raised me to be. I was in search of myself and I found a community of heroes that embraced me and brought me back full circle to family.

When I first arrived in Newark, I decided to answer that call from that great American philosopher, Chris Rock, who said "Why is the most violent street in every city is named for the man that stood for non-violence?"

Newark had so many strong neighborhoods but I sought out one that was in struggle and found it on Martin Luther King Boulevard. It looked spectacularly troublesome to me. My eyes saw abandoned homes being used for drugs. My eyes saw violence. My eyes saw graffiti. But the first person I met, the tenant leader in high-rise projects that I would eventually move into, Miss Jones, she said to me, "Tell me again what you see. Describe what you see around you." And I described what I saw.

And she looked at me and she said, "Boy, if that's all you see, you can never help me." And I go, "What do you mean?" And she goes, "You need to understand something, that the world you see outside of you is a reflection of what you have inside of you. And, if you see only problems and darkness and despair, that's all there's ever gonna be. But, if you're one of those stubborn people who every time you open your eyes, you see hope, opportunity, possibility, love – even the face of God – then you can help me make a change." And I remember, after she said that, looking at her, scratching my head, and thinking to myself – OK, grasshopper, thus endeth the lesson.

I worked with this woman, this tenant leader, and I would sit at her kitchen table and watch these other African-American women sit around that table in these projects being run by a slumlord and they would sit there and strategize about how to take care of the kids in the community, how to keep a family in their housing when they missed a rental payment. I stood there and I watched them thinking about how to support that community and I found it, I found conspirators.

I found people coming together and they weren't just in those projects – all over Newark I saw more and more people who had a courage, who had a spirit, who had a love.

And so, for my father's sake, I want to explain to you the three things that these conspirators all had in common. One was they embraced discomfort. They did not seek comfort and convenience. They went to where the challenges were.

Here were people around me in Newark doing extraordinary things outside of their comfort zones. Like the man who was a retired state worker that got his stimulus check in the mail and, instead of just spending it on himself, he went out and got a lawn mower, marched into one of our troubled drug lots – there was this big grassy, overgrown, field with trash and debris – and he started cleaning it. He made it look like the White House lawn. Never confronting a drug dealer but, eventually, they left.

Like the woman who came to me in my office hours, an 80-year-old woman, complaining to me about how dirty her street was. And the next day, I go out there and here's this 80-year-old woman outside of her comfort zone on that street, sweeping the entire block showing that, he who has a heart to help, definitely does have a right to complain.

It's about the guy I know who was driving to work in Newark and didn't like the graffiti. And instead of just driving by it and accepting what was, like so many of us who just fall into a state of sedentary agitation when we're upset about what's going on but we don't get up and do something about it, he stopped at a store and began making a routine out of his commute to work where he would stop and take paint and paint over graffiti. In my city I see that conspirators know you do not go through life comfortable.

Democracy is not a spectator sport. It is a difficult, hard, challenging, full-contact, competitive, participatory endeavor. And this, this is critical, people who get comfortable of body get fat. People who get comfortable of mind and intellect get dull. People who get comfortable in their spirit, they miss what they were created for. They were created to magnify the glory of the world, not simply reduce in size and fail to reflect that spirit.

I've come to learn in my life to embrace discomfort because it's a precondition to service. I've come to realize to embrace fear because, if you can move through fear, you find out that fear is a precondition to discovery. I've learned in my life to embrace frustration because, when you get really frustrated, that is a precondition to incredible breakthroughs.

Now, the second thing I've seen amongst conspirators is this idea of faithfulness. Mother Teresa was once asked how she judged success. And she said, "God didn't call me to be successful, he called me to be faithful."

I didn't need to read Mother Teresa, I just simply needed to look at people in my community in Newark. Miss Virginia Jones, that tenant leader, was once telling me a story when I was peppering her with questions about her life. I had lived with her now, in those buildings, for years, and I never knew that she had a son.

She told me about one day somebody knocked on her door, she opened her door and there was this woman crying who could not speak. She dragged her down to the lobby and there, on the lobby floor, was her son, a veteran, who had come back to visit her. There he was on the lobby floor with three gunshots, bleeding that lobby floor red. She sat there and telling me the story that she fell to her knees, crying in her dead son's chest. And when she finished telling me the story, I looked at her and I said, "Miss Jones, I'm sorry but, why do you still live in these buildings where your son was murdered, walking through that lobby every day?"

And she looked at me, almost like she was insulted by the question, but I knew that she and I were two people that paid market rent to live in this housing. She had choices of where to go, and she looks at me and she says, "Why do I still live here?" And I said, "Yes." She goes, "Why do I live in Apartment 5A still? And I said, "Yes." She says, "Why am I still the tenant president for over 40 years?" And I said, "That's electoral longevity, I want you to tell me about that, but, yes, why?" And she crossed her arms looking at me and she said, "Because I'm in charge of homeland security."

Here is a woman that remained faithful. And I want to tell you graduates of all the lessons of conspirators, this is the hardest one for me, personally. To stay faithful in a world that can be so cruel. To stay faithful in a world that justifiably emotes cynicism. I have seen things in my life that have broken me in spirit, have ground me down to the floor.

In 2004, in April, I was walking through one of the neighborhoods of my city and I heard gunshots going off. It sounded like cannon fire between the buildings. I raced towards where the gunshots were fired and I saw kids screaming and yelling. I saw one boy falling backwards off of some steps. I went to catch him and I caught him and I looked over his shoulder and I saw the white T-shirt he was wearing filling up with red blood. I laid him down and put my hand on his chest trying to stop the bleeding but the blood was coming everywhere. I screamed at someone to tell me his name and they did, and yelled at people to call the ambulance. And I start screaming his name. "Don't leave us, don't leave us." Foamy blood was pouring from his mouth.

It was one of the most gruesome things as I sat there trying to stop the blood. But he kept bleeding, and he died right there in front of me.

The ambulance came and pushed me away, opened his chest and I saw the number of bullet holes in him and, I tell you, it was over, I was broken. I was done.

I went back to my apartment and tried to scrub the blood of this boy off my hands but I felt my heart fill up with anger and blackness. All I could think is, what kind of world do we live in where everybody I know knows who Jon Benet Ramsey is or Natalee Holloway but few people I know can name the name of one black child killed in my city today? What is going on with this world?

That we seem to value life so little that dozens of kids, of boys, of men, are murdered every week. I wanted to give up. I was done. And then I left my apartment and walked out to the courtyard and I saw the back of Miss Jones's head. She turned around and she saw my expression. She said, "Come give me a hug." And I hugged this woman and I wept in her arms. She held me and all she said is, "Stay faithful, stay faithful, stay faithful."

I'm telling you right now, courage does not always roar. It's not when you stand up and beat your chest and you're ready for the big game, the big fight, the big speech. That is not real courage in my book anymore. It's not running into a burning building.

Real courage is that when life has beaten you down so low, when you are broken, when you have wounds that you wonder if they could ever heal. Courage is when you've done something wrong and you feel the weight of shame on your chest so heavy that you can barely breathe. Courage is when you're curled up in a ball on your bed sleepless throughout the night and when the sun comes up, courage isn't the roar, courage is that small voice in your mind that says, get up, get out of bed, put your feet on the floor, brush your teeth, wash your face, comb your hair – God, if you have it – put your hand on that door knob and go outside for another day of loving and stand with all of your might and look up into the heavens. And courage has you say in a defiant spirit, you can take everything from me, you could cut me deep, you could render me in shame, but you will never, ever, stop me from loving. From loving those who mock me, from loving those who hate me, from loving those who don't forgive me, from loving the cynics, from loving the darkness so much that I myself, through my small acts of consistent, unyielding love, will bring on the light.

And this brings me to the final point of conspirators that my dad and my community have shown me is that conspirators are the ones that show up. They just show up. And what do I mean by that? I mean that, we go through life all the time but we don't always show up. We may be there in body but we're not there in spirit. And we begin to erode the truth of who we are, we fail to live our authenticity.

A great president, Lincoln, said that "everyone is born an original but, sadly, most die copies" because they don't show up.

I've learned that what you think about the world says less about the world than it does about you. And when you show up in this world and have the courage to tell your truth in moments big but more importantly, in moments small, then you are the architect, not only of your own destiny but you're the architect of transformational change.

And now the second man, my grandfather, who was with my father in spirit.

It's one simple thing that he would say to me at graduations. He would say to me, "Boy, understand that you have a role in this world and that's to get along with others, to join your spirit with them."

I tell you this is one that I struggle with. You see, conspirators need to embody those things I mentioned before but they also need to join together.

My grandfather, this amazing man, his life was all about the joining together of disparate elements of our society. He was born, also, to a single mother. But he was born in a difficult circumstance because he was born with red hair and much lighter skin than his siblings. It was obvious that he was born to a white man at a time that it was illegal for blacks and whites to marry.

He grew up feeling that he had, inside of his spirit, so many different parts of his country. He ended up becoming a person that did everything he could to unite people. He was a union organizer bringing people together for justice. He was a Democratic activist working within the party to support FDR. He was an entrepreneur, bringing people together for business endeavor. And he wanted his children and then his grandchildren to understand that what makes this country great is how united it is.

He used to load us onto an RV and drive us around the country to show us how great this nation is. He would tell us history of our country even if he didn't know it.

We would ask him questions when we were driving through Arizona. "Grand-dad, why do they call this town Yuma, Arizona?" And he would say, "Well, let me see, that's because when this town was founded, there was a gun fight and one guy shot the other and he grabbed his heart and said, 'You ma' and then died."

I talked to my grandfather all the time about this country. He tells me that, son, this country, we forget we talk always about the Declaration of Independence. But really, this nation was founded on a Declaration of Interdependence – this recognition that we need each other.

When I talk to my grandfather now, I anguish to him that we are a nation that has become so polarized, where people are so quick to identify themselves as Democrat or Republican before they say, first and foremost, that I am an American.

They're so focused on left and right that they forget that this nation must go forward. I anguish to my grand-dad when I talk to him now, how can we have come so far as a nation that the word compromise is a curse and the word patriotism is not used to unite us all but it's used to demean others and to esteem yourself? Like I am the true patriot and because of you and what you believe, you're not. This is not the America that my grandfather believed in.

He said we were formed to come together and make a more perfect Union. And, to me, this is what I found in my work. That the change we make really comes about when we come together across party lines, come together across religious lines and racial lines.

When President Hennessy introduced me he talked about a hunger strike. The great feeling that I got from that experience was how the city came together to deal with a problem and that's what we need in America today.

My grandfather would love that every nation that makes up this nation, every heritage has this ideal of unity.

It's like the old African saying that says if you want to go fast, go alone but if you want to go far, go together. It's like another saying that he loved, it said, when spider webs unite, they can tie up a lion.

It's like what Golda Meir said, that when Jews come together, they're strong, but Jews with other people, are invincible. It's like the Islamic faith, that one of the Pillars of Islam is that word Tawheed, which means we all share one God, one spirit, one soul.

It's like this wonderful man in a jail cell in Birmingham who wrote the truth of our nation in 1963 when he said we were all caught in an "inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a common garment of destiny that injustice, anywhere, is a threat to justice everywhere."

And when I stand in a conspiracy in Newark, I feel that connection to conspirators who understood this truth of coming together like those people who came together – scientists and engineers that turned the moon from a dream into a destiny, like those conspirators on the Underground Railroad, black and white, who came together saying that we must overcome this slavery, like the conspirators who took us as a nation from child labor to public education, from sweatshops to workers' rights.

They were all conspirators who came together to exult our highest ideals, to celebrate our common aspirations, to live the truth of our founding which is that this nation is nothing if it stands apart but everything if it stands together. That, ultimately, we must live our hallmark – those three words from a dead language – e Pluribus Unum.

[10:18 PM, 7/25/2020] +965 9882 6981: Where Mayor Booker is a Democrat who blends freedom and order left and right, Whole foods CEO John Mackey is someone who starts from a position of being influenced by a number of freedom right icons (Ayn Rand, Milton Friedman etc.) to blend all 4 perspectives in his call for a "conscious capitalism" based on voluntary associations that works for the common good for stakeholders, society and environment, and makes a profit by putting values ahead of profits..

This interview with John Mackey took place before the acquisition of Whole Foods by Amazon which doesn’t have the best reputation for fair treatment of workers. Last year I visited wth a former student who works at Whole Foods and it was his hope then that Amazon could introduce tech and efficiency while leaving Whole Foods unique employee culture alone. It will be interesting to see what happens. Here is a 2018 article from CNBC describing some recent conflicts and Mackey’s perpective.

Mackey and Booker are both boundary crossers. There are both similarities and differences in their approaches, but note that both stress pursuing the common good over naked self-interest, individual responsibility, free thought and the importance of community (which would resonate with order right).

For Mackey's boundary crossing ideas see excerpts from an online interview below.

SUNNI: Glad to hear it! I have a lot of things I’d like to touch on with you, and I don’t want to take too much of your time, so let’s jump right in. In doing some research, I found you being referred to as an “ex-leftist libertarian”. I thought that a very odd phrase, since many individuals come to the freedom philosophy from a left perspective — and lots of pro-freedom people are more concerned with personal and social issues than economic ones; that’s generally considered to be a “leftist” slant. What do you think of that phrase? Does it fit you?

JOHN: I think that depends upon how “leftist” is defined. Usually people who define themselves as “leftists” are opposed to capitalism, economic freedom, and believe that the coercive power of government should be used to create more equality and social justice in society. Usually people on the left have sympathy for democratic socialism. When I was in my very early 20’s I believed that democratic socialism was a more “just” economic system than democratic capitalism was. However, soon after I opened my first small natural food store back in 1978 with my girlfriend when I was 25, my political opinions began to shift. Operating a business was a real education for me. There were bills to pay and a payroll to be met and we had trouble doing either because we lost half of our initial $45,000 of capital in our first year. Our customers thought our prices were too high and our employees thought they were being underpaid, and we were losing money. Renee and I were only being paid about $200 a month and the business was a real struggle. Nobody was very happy and Renee and I were now seen as capitalistic exploiters by friends on the left who believed we were overcharging our customers and exploiting our workers — all because we were apparently selfish and greedy.

I didn’t think the charge of capitalist exploiters fit Renee and myself very well. In a nutshell the economic system of democratic socialism was no longer intellectually satisfying to me and I began to look around for more robust theories which would better explain business, economics, and society. Somehow or another I stumbled on to the works of Mises, Hayek, and Friedman, and had a complete revolution in my world view. The more I read, studied, and thought about economics and capitalism, the more I came to realize that capitalism had been misunderstood and unfairly attacked by the left. In fact, democratic capitalism remains by far the best way to organize society to create prosperity, growth, freedom, self-actualization, and even equality.

I no longer think of myself as a leftist, but I definitely don’t think of myself as from the right either. For the past 25 years I’ve thought of myself as a libertarian, but I’m now beginning to move away from that label as well. I have a number of intellectual problems with libertarianism as a political philosophy as it currently exists. I believe we need a new social/political/economical/environmental movement in the world today and I’ve got some definite ideas what this movement should look like.

SUNNI: You sure seem to be popular in the libertarian community, despite having arrived here through a side door, so to speak. How do you account for that? [laughs]

JOHN: I’m not aware that I’m popular in the libertarian community. On the contrary, I’ve frequently found myself criticized for lacking sufficient doctrinal purity by many in this movement.

SUNNI: Perhaps it’s the celebrity element at work, then, John … In doing background research for this interview, I came across mentions of you at several libertarian sites — Advocates for Self-Government and several blogs. I don’t recall seeing any critical comments. But I’m sure that you’d get them after a speech — the movement doesn’t suffer a lack of critics. [laughs]

JOHN: It could be the celebrity element. I’m not shy about telling the media or anyone else that I’m a libertarian. I suppose I’ve brought some favorable publicity to the libertarian movement. I hope so anyway.

SUNNI: I’m sure you have. One of the Conspirators who blogs with me is a huge fan of Whole Foods Market — she’s a stakeholder in more than one meaning of the term — and I know a number of loyal Whole Foods Market customers in the pro-freedom community. I know that some wouldn’t bat an eye at its Declaration of Interdependence, for example, but others might be surprised to see how often the word “collective” and its variants show up on the Whole Foods Market web site … or to see ideas like “shared fate” and “community citizenship” in its core values statement. How do you square all that with being libertarian?

JOHN: I personally don’t see any contradictions here. Human beings are highly social animals and we evolved over hundreds of thousands of years living in small hunting and gathering tribes. I believe that much of our fulfillment as human beings comes from our participation in the various social organizations that we belong to. Today we are raised in families, live in neighborhoods and communities, and are members of a number of greater collectives. For example, I am a member of the following collectives: Austin, Texas, The United States, Homo sapiens, vertebrates, DNA-based life forms, planet Earth, Milky Way Galaxy, etc. I’m also a voluntary member of a number of organizations including my marriage with Deborah Morin, Whole Foods Market, various long-distance backpacking groups, various animal welfare/animal rights groups, and various libertarian organizations, plus many others. Even my physical body is a collective consisting of many billions of cells working together in various organs to stay alive and pass on its genetic material into the future.

I think the reason why many libertarians object to the words “collective”, “shared fate”, and “community citizenship” is that they associate those words with coercive, involuntary organizations such as the forced collectivization of Soviet agriculture under communism or other totalitarian political organizations. Needless to say I don’t use these words in these contexts. I believe in voluntary cooperation as the key principle for organizing any collective organization. Whole Foods Market is a collective based on voluntary cooperation between all the various stakeholders. No one is forced to cooperate against their will and all are free to withdraw from the collective organization anytime they wish to. A collective without freedom is by nature coercive and is therefore unlikely to lead to human flourishing. However, collectives based on freedom and voluntary cooperation can lead to very high levels of human flourishing. Indeed, I seriously doubt that high levels of human flourishing are even possible without voluntary cooperation from millions of various communities and collectives.

SUNNI: It sounds to me like you aren’t a libertarian of a Randian persuasion — wholly profit-driven and focused on the self; is that accurate?

JOHN: That is correct. I was very inspired by Ayn Rand’s novels like millions of other people have been. However, I don’t agree with some of her philosophies. For example: I don’t think selfishness is a virtue and I don’t believe that business primarily exists to make a profit. Profit is of course essential to any business to fulfill its mission and to be successful and to flourish and I will defend the goodness and appropriateness of profits for business with great passion. However, profit is not the primary purpose of business. Renee and I didn’t begin Whole Foods Market to maximize profits for our shareholders. We began it for three main reasons: we thought it would be fun to create a business; we needed to earn a living; and we wanted to contribute to the well-being of other people.

As the business grew we created our mission statement back in 1985 and have tried to fulfill it ever since. That mission very clearly articulates that we have collective — there’s that word again — responsibilities to all the various constituencies who are voluntarily cooperating with the company. In order of priority these constituencies or stakeholders are: customers; team members; investors; vendors; community; and environment.

We measure our success on how well we meet the needs and desires of all of these various stakeholders. All must flourish or we aren’t succeeding as a business. I’ll email you a graphic that represents how Whole Foods views the voluntary cooperation between the various stakeholders:

We call this a “New Business Paradigm” because it puts the Business Mission and Core Values at the center of the business model — not maximizing profits. Profits aren’t the primary goal of the business. They are an important result of fulfilling the Business Mission and meeting the needs and desires of customers. I’m writing a book on Whole Foods philosophy of business right now so it’s hard for me to do justice to all the ideas and answer all the standard objections in this interview. My more complete

statement on this will need to wait for the publication of the book. I’ll share two ideas as food for thought here though.

Free-market economists have done a major disservice to capitalism and to business by making profit maximization the supposed primary goal of business. The terrible reputation of business in the world today is a direct result of the belief that business has no other purpose besides maximizing profits. The average person believes that business should care about its customers, employees, society, suppliers, the environment — as well as its investors. The fact that business philosophers and economists articulate a philosophy that business should only care about maximizing profits and shareholder value (and has no other compelling ethical responsibilities to any of the other stakeholders) has done incalculable harm to the reputation of business. The “brand of business” in the widest sense is pretty terrible throughout the world. Read David Korten’s book When Corporations Rule the World to get a good perspective on how many intellectuals see corporations and big business today — a threat to the well-being of the entire world. The anti-globalization movement is actually an anti-corporation movement and it is a direct result, in my opinion, of the faulty logic of the shareholder value maximization model. You and I know that business and capitalism are helping increase prosperity throughout the world. Too bad the economists have done such a poor job of intellectually justifying the intrinsic ethical nature of business and the capitalist system. Both business and capitalism have terrible reputations as a result. Socialism, communism, and anti-globalization are all reactions to this philosophy. I sometimes wonder whether any of these horrible philosophies would have had much of a following except for the intellectual failures of our economists to properly understand the real purpose of business.

Second, there is a fundamental paradox that I call the “paradox of shareholder value”. The best way to maximize shareholder value is to not make maximizing shareholder value the primary purpose of the business. Why not? Because it is the business that satisfies customers best that has the most customers, the highest sales, and the most profits. The best way to satisfy customers best is to organize the entire business around satisfying the customer. Every communication the business makes towards its customers, its employees, and the media should be about putting the customer first. Ultimately the best way to satisfy customers’ needs best is to actually put those needs first. If profit is the articulated primary goal of the business then it is unlikely that the employees or management of the business will dedicate themselves to customer satisfaction to the same degree they would if customer happiness was seen as more important than investor profits. In the first case customer happiness is merely a means to an end — maximizing profits. In the customer-centered business, however, customer happiness is an end in itself and because it is it will be pursued with greater interest, passion, attention and empathy than the profit centered business is capable of.

Let me give you an analogy that may make this point better: What is the key to happy marriage? Is my wife’s happiness an end in itself for me or is her happiness merely a means to a different end — my own personal happiness? It has been my experience that I am happiest in my marriage when my love for my wife causes me to place her needs and desires first — ahead of my own. When my wife is happy then I am happy. When she isn’t happy, then I’m not happy. I achieve my personal happiness in marriage best by not focusing directly on it, but by focusing on her happiness as the primary goal for me in the

marriage. That is the way love works, in my opinion. The beloved’s happiness is an end in itself — not a means to some other end. Paradoxically by seeking to maximize my wife’s happiness, I also maximize my own. However, that is a secondary by-product of my desire for her personal happiness. Fortunately for me my wife shares my philosophy of marriage and reciprocates my dedication to her happiness with an equal dedication to my own happiness as well.

Similarly to a happy marriage, the most successful businesses put the customer first — ahead of the shareholders. They really have to have this dedication to the customer to maximize customer happiness. Customers aren’t stupid. They know when they are being misled or merely being used. It is also difficult to impossible to truly inspire the creators of customer happiness, the employees, with the ethic of profit maximization. Maximizing profits may excite shareholders, but I assure you most employees don’t get very excited about it even if they accept the validity of the goal. It is my business experience that employees can get very excited and inspired by a business that has an important business purpose (such as selling the highest quality natural and organic foods) and teaches them to put the needs of the customers first. People enjoy serving others and helping them to be happy — when they know this is their primary goal and are also rewarded for successfully doing so.

The customer-centered business is usually the most successful and the most profitable, while the shareholder centered business usually underperforms over the long-term. I suggest reading Jim Collins’ two books Built to Last and Good to Great for empirical evidence to this viewpoint. The ultimate test of these two business theories, however, is in the marketplace — not in theoretical arguments. My company, Whole Foods Market, is a mission-driven business that puts the customer first, the team members second, and the shareholders third. We are winning competitive battle after competitive battle in the marketplace against businesses which adhere to the philosophy of maximizing profits and shareholder value as their primary goal. Whole Foods has never had a store we open ever fail in the marketplace. We have never lost a competitive battle in 27 years of business! Why not? Because the profit-centered businesses we compete against cannot beat us in the marketplace. Our customer and team member-centered business model beats them every single time.

You may or may not agree with my business philosophy, but it doesn’t really matter. The ideas that I’m articulating result in a more robust business model than the shareholder-maximization model that it competes against. They will triumph over time, not by persuading intellectuals and economists through argument, but by winning the competitive test of the marketplace. Someday businesses such as Whole Foods which adhere to a stakeholder model of customer and employee happiness first will dominate the entire economic landscape simply because it is a more robust business model. The old shareholder model that most economists believe in will not successfully compete over the long-term with the new paradigm that Whole Foods represents and that I’ve tried to articulate here. The better business model will win in the marketplace and it’s the Whole Foods model. Wait and see!

SUNNI: [laughing] Geez, John, you’re getting ahead of me — answering questions I haven’t asked yet! So, what does it suggest to you about this country that two very different types of retailer — Whole Foods Market and Wal-Mart — are both so profitable?

JOHN: It means that the mass market is segmenting in food — just like it is doing in every other category as well. Some people want the cheapest food and some people want the highest quality food with high levels of customer service. Wal-Mart meets the first group of people and Whole Foods meets the needs of the second group.

SUNNI: You’ve mentioned your management style, and I would like to explore that more. It’s certainly worked very well, but it doesn’t seem to be a very libertarian one. Do you see your management style as paradoxical given your libertarian philosophy?

JOHN: Most corporations in the United States are hardly the epitome of libertarian utopias. In fact, most corporations in the United States are organized as top-down, command & control, hierarchical systems. Very little personal freedom exists in these corporations. Their employees are often managed through either pure financial incentives — greed — or through fear — “my way or the highway”. Whole Foods is very, very different. Our mission at Whole Foods can be summed up by our slogan “Whole Foods, Whole People, Whole Planet”. We put great emphasis at Whole Foods on the “Whole People” part of this mission. We believe in helping support our team members to grow as individuals — to become “Whole People”. We consciously use Maslow’s hierarchy of needs model to help our team members to move up Maslow’s hierarchy. As much as we are able, we attempt to manage through love instead of fear or greed. We allow tremendous individual initiative at Whole Foods and that’s why our company is so innovative and creative. Most retail companies create a prototype retail store format and then cookie-cutter reproduce it across the country. Think McDonalds. Not Whole Foods. We have no prototype store. All our stores are unique. Why? Because our team members are constantly innovating, experimenting, and improving them. Whole Foods is very much committed to a Hayekian discovery process and our team members — both as individuals and as members of teams — are leading this Hayekian discovery process. As our team members learn and grow as individuals, as they become self-actualized, as they become “Whole People”, our company better fulfills its mission to all of its stakeholders.

The seeming paradox that you keep hinting at is no paradox at all. Human beings are both individuals and members of communities (or collectives). We learn and grow best through relationships and our growth will always be limited without them. I haven’t met anyone that I consider to be self-actualizing who did it all by themselves. Freedom as an ideal is a very, very incomplete ideal when it lacks love. Freedom is my highest “political ideal”, but love is my highest “personal ideal”. We need both. There is no paradox and there is no contradiction here. Freedom and love: let us marry these two together!

SUNNI: [laughing] Now that sounds like a marriage made in heaven, John! And thanks for not taking my pushing here too personally; I actually don’t see it as a paradox either, but I imagine that you know of people in the pro-freedom community — I sure do — who seem to have an almost phobic reaction to anything that moves beyond the individual level. I’m an individualist, but I’m no idiot — we’re social

animals, and one of the things that interests me most about libertarians — especially as a psychologist — is how they approach those two aspects of human nature.

JOHN: Some libertarians may be using their political ideology as a psychological defense to avoid the challenge of further personal growth. From a psychological standpoint the challenge for all of us is to simultaneously continue to individuate as individuals while also integrating closer to our communities. In my experience, libertarians are more enthusiastic about the individuation part than the integration part. However, psychologically healthy, self-actualizing people need to be doing both.

SUNNI: A very interesting observation, John … and of course, if the individuals aren’t psychologically healthy, it’s very difficult to create a vibrant, pro-freedom community. This reminds me: I’ve seen people call you an anarchist, but in other places I’ve read others who claim you think some government is necessary, which would make you at the very least a minarchist. Which is it?

JOHN: I’m not an anarchist. Of course government is necessary. Without a monopoly of force by some institution — let’s call it “government” — we will have various violent gangs and private armies struggling for political control and the winner will become the de facto government. While government is necessary the never-ending political challenge is to find ways to keep government in check. “Who guards the guardians?” remains a huge philosophical issue. The United States has done better than most other countries in this regard with the creation of the Constitution and Bill of Rights, and the various governmental checks and balances. Unfortunately, as we both know, government has been steadily gaining in power ever since the United States came into being. What is the solution? There is no simple solution–just the ongoing and continual quest by people who care about freedom and individual rights to work to expand them and lessen governmental power. Progress can be made. For example, there is much more freedom in Eastern Europe than there was 30 years ago.