Vol. 2, Issue 7: The Bear That Wasn't
Ever heard of this book The Bear That Wasn’t?
A bear goes to hibernate and while he’s out cold for the winter, they build a factory around his den. Men toil in that factory all day turning knobs and pushing buttons to create gizmos* that presumably add some level of inherent value to society, otherwise why would they turn the knobs and push the buttons to make them. When the bear opens a door and enters the factory and sees all this knob-turning and button-pushing, he immediately flags down a dude and tells him what’s up. He’s a bear, he says, and he doesn’t belong in a factory. The dude says that can’t be, because you are in a factory. “You’re just a man in a fur coat who needs a shave,” the dude says and brings him to the shift supervisor to talk some sense into him. The supervisor says the same thing and brings him to a mid-level manager of some sort and so on and so on.
*Or doodads or widgets or thingamabobs. You get it.
Over and over, he’s told how ridiculous the idea is that he could be a bear, and not man in a fur coat who needs a shave and that he’s just lazy and trying to get out of working. Executive after executive at this company gets progressively more enraged at the idea that the entity standing before him isn’t a man, but a bear. Eventually, they bring him to a zoo and a circus where he sees other bears and they ask him why he isn’t in the zoo or the circus if he’s a bear.* It’s tough to stomach that these guys have never heard of bears in the wild, but it was the 1940s, so you know, we’ll cut them some slack.
*Never mind that the bear can talk, which itself is far more compelling evidence that he’s not a bear. They never address that.
Eventually, the bear gets convinced that he might be wrong and perhaps he is a man in a fur coat who needs a shave and not a bear. After all, they’ve made compelling points. And in a pretty amazing twist, the bear GOES TO WORK IN THE FACTORY. At the end, the factory closes forever, and the bear gets to go back to the woods and he finds himself wishing that he were a bear and not a man, until he realizes he actually is a bear and he goes off to find a place to hibernate. It’s a pretty wild emotional rollercoaster.
And when I say this is among my, if not my absolute, favorite book that I used to read to my kids, I mean that sincerely. I could turn this story into a lot of things*, but the most obvious point of the book is that no matter how many times people say something is true that doesn’t make it true, no matter how many other people tell you it is true.
*Like a treatise on worker’s rights and the need for strong unions, for example, or a lamentation of the overindustrialization of society, aggressive statement on bear’s rights. The list goes on and on
Ultimately, if you say something over and over again and you look at it from just the right angle, anyone can make anything look the way they want it to. It’s a lot like the card trick scene from My Cousin Vinny.* I mean, hell, the entire advertising industry is built on that very premise - the women who hang out with people who drink that beer are a little prettier, this will make hair grow (or get rid of it), that will make you skinny, this will make you smart - there’s no shortage across everything. Far be it from me to bite the hand that literally feeds me, except well …
*Incidentally, Ralph Macchio is 32 years old in this scene
I took a very interesting training about unconscious bias and psychological safety and one of the very interesting things that was presented were the results of something called the Asch experiments, which have to do with conformity and the likelihood of someone to conform to something that they know is wrong because everyone else is saying it’s right.
There’s a lot to these experiments but long story short, against the control group, 35.7% of respondents answered with the (incorrect) majority. I’m going to say that again: more than a third of the respondents went along with what they knew was incorrect - there was an empirically correct answer to all of the questions - in order to conform to the majority.
And that enormous pressure to conform to the majority means something else: that when multiple people are telling us that something isn’t right or something can’t be done, for many of us, our natural inclination is to believe that. The bear was convinced that he was indeed a man in a fur coat who needed a shave and he worked in the factory*. That’s the power of the majority.
*Presumably for low pay, poor benefits and limited sick days. There may have been a pension through the union
I’m gonna take this in a slightly different direction: it’s really difficult to go against convention. We deal with it all the time, particularly in our offices - “we already tried that and it didn’t work” or “that’s too expensive” or even “that seems too hard.” Practically, the cost of not doing things, or at least trying them, often far outweighs the cost of doing them, however incrementally. We hear this in diversity hiring also - “the talent pool just isn’t there” is a tired old refrain that’s been debunked countless times that we hear far too often. If you look hard enough, you”ll see lots of Asch everywhere*
*Ass pun free of charge
Standing up to the majority in the room takes bravery. Be a bear, not a man in a fur coat who needs a shave.
I’d be doing this newsletter a disservice by not mentioning Matthew Perry, who died this past weekend at 54. Most people who know me know that I’ve been recovering for a long time now (22 years this April 9th). Here’s Perry in his own words:
"The best thing about me, bar none, is that if somebody comes to me and says, 'I can't stop drinking, can you help me?' I can say 'yes' and follow up and do it. When I die, I don't want 'Friends' to be the first thing that's mentioned. I want [helping people] to be the first thing that's mentioned, and I'm gonna live the rest of my life proving that."
Rest in peace. The world is a little worse without you.
That’s all for this week.
Until next week, friends.