March 5, 2025
Relax, Rejuvenate with Joy. Reunite through Social Purpose
In today’s swift and severe interconnected world, we need to sharpen our acceptance of diversity, innovation, and inclusion and celebrate what the world has to offer us. Our readers who embody this “Global American” ethos transcend national borders and the politics of hate. Many of us vacation in vibrant precious cities of the world. Many of us have children who studied abroad or who benefit from international medical colleagues and lawyers. The average American is more caring than presented recently.
The warning of the last two months is clear: Being isolated is not making any nation great again. The reliable business newspaper, the Wall Street Journal, warns today, “Stocks Slide as Trade War Escalates.” The major indexes whipsawed after the new U.S. tariffs spark a set of intelligent countermoves from Canada, Mexico, and China. The New York Times posts “Canada and China Hit Back at Trump with Own Tariffs”. Globalization of markets and technologies is more lasting in its momentum than any current minister or president, that is a higher fact.
In this column, we will follow the news but dig deeper than the news of the day into trends in culture that matter and prevail. I will not let this set of newsprint and locker room chatter disturb my faith in the American people, my experiences in 18 other nations, and in the growing power of internet communications and the corrective forces in social history. I will not let this column become riddled with the politics of temporary items. In the next ten entries, we will study world trends and how they influence cultural power. (See World Trends and Cultural Power, a new book on this theme).
We cherish friendships that span continents, as well as direct correspondences with international business and personal friends. Like Ben Franklin taught the early Americans so long ago, in commerce, there is peace and prosperity. Hate isolates the self into a banging echo that, in the end, hurts many (your family, your friends, and your firms), according to the dictates of human history. I am not only speaking about lessons we all learned since the war in Ukraine began 3 years back, nor even the wars of my father, Korean and World War II. These are lessons as ancient as those learned in the fights between the Greeks and the Persians.
Hate is a limited strategy of special limiting interests. Isolation is vulnerable, more vulnerable than exploratory trust in many kinds of peoples.
I am one of the fortunate Americans, born poor, without a father, and an interracial family. This I describe in my new memoir Doing More with One Life. But this set of reflections, encouraged by Mia Funk and others, is well beyond that book or my book on globalization World Inc. Here we reflect on how to advance humanity, not hinder it.
This is my reflection to a world that often wrote to me. This is my shout-out to my dissertation students from thirty years ago who now run universities in the UK and the College of the Ivory Coast. This is my embrace of the principles of competitive frugality that the world needs now. (See www.wealthandclimatecompetitiveness.net for some examples.)
It is crucial to underline that our spoken worldview encourages your response to Bruce@ahcgroup.com-- and to the Letters section of Mia Funk’s newsletter and podcast series.
Our worldview is earned through trial and error. It brought us to a position of humility and faith, not only bluster and anger. We have worked out our fears of other nations and the prejudices we see in our surrounding communities by actually making money in Greece, Italy, Australia, Japan, and England. Humans are tribal animals, that much we know. But we are wired to prosper.
One last point for you to consider and respond: Where we find adaptability and authenticity, we need to build coalitions of the giving, and a society of gratitude instead of simple-minded grievances and revenge.
We will write about the new grounds for hope based on ancient wit and wisdom. We can only declare as an intention this declaration of interdependence. I need your views, as we need each other. I am looking forward to any feedback as we proceed down this path for the next two years.
