The Power of the Herd (36 page)

As Jon Meacham contends in his intricate biography of Jackson,
American Lion,
“Andrew Jackson is in many ways the most like us,” an observation that, while compelling, is anything but complimentary:

In the saga of the Jackson presidency
, one marked by both democratic triumphs and racist tragedies, we can see the American character in formation and action. To understand him and his time helps us to understand America's perennially competing impulses. Jackson's life and work — and the nation he protected and preserved — were shaped by the struggle between grace and rage, generosity and violence, justice and cruelty…. The America of Andrew Jackson was a country that professed a love of democracy but was willing to live with inequality, that aimed for social justice but was prone to racism and intolerance, that believed itself one nation but was narrowly divided and fought close elections, and that occasionally acted arrogantly toward other countries while craving respect from them at the same time….A champion of extending freedom and democracy to even the poorest whites, Jackson was an unrepentant slaveholder. A sentimental man who rescued an Indian orphan on a battlefield to raise in his home, Jackson was responsible for the removal of Indian tribes from their ancestral lands. An enemy of Eastern financial elites and a relentless opponent of the Bank of the United States, which he believed to be a bastion of corruption, Jackson also promised to die, if necessary, to preserve the power and prestige of the central government. Like us and our America, Jackson and his America achieved great things while committing grievous sins.

The Cherokee Trail of Tears was not only Jackson's most grievous sin; it was a blatantly unethical, if not illegal, maneuver by a president powerful enough to ignore the law if he saw fit. To placate gold-mining interests in Georgia, Jackson refused to support a federal judge's ruling that the Cherokee tribe could
not
be driven from its mineral-rich lands. However, since no one proved influential or strong-willed enough to compel the president to enforce the decision, an anti-Indian movement gathered force with Jackson's blessing, eventually resulting in the eviction of several southern tribes. Sixteen thousand people were subsequently rounded up at gunpoint and ordered to move west; four thousand men, women, and children died along the way. (To this day, some Native Americans refuse to use the twenty-dollar bill, with Jackson's portrait on the front.)

Jackson is sometimes referred to as the American Hitler for his involvement in this tragic episode, but he wasn't a true sociopath. History suggests that he was instead an impulsive, hotheaded man with a chip on his shoulder and an addiction to winning at all cost. Normally these character flaws would have hindered his ascent to the highest public office. Jackson, however, had a good portion of that “other 90 percent” on his side.

An accomplished rider from an early age, he spent years in the saddle honing a powerful leadership presence. Two qualities in particular — Jackson's well-known ability to stand his ground intractably, despite public opinion (or even the law itself), and his marked talent for herding large groups of people toward a common goal (whether they liked it or not) — were no doubt enhanced immeasurably by his penchant for spirited stallions and high-strung Thoroughbreds. Unlike some of the gentler, naturally cooperative workhorse breeds, racehorses can be alternately aggressive, flighty, and obstinate in the early stages of training. Jackson learned how to nurture their stellar athletic qualities — without letting these intimidating animals bully him with their incredible energy, size, and strength, giving him the confidence to wrangle willful, feisty people.

But this particular set of skills — which would have served him well as dictator, king, or conqueror — could take him only so far in the more sophisticated interpersonal context of democracy. The citizens he proposed to lead were not high-performance horses, slaves, or women with socially sanctioned limitations. A significant portion of the population actually had rights and opinions that Jackson didn't know how to manage. What's more, free men liberally, and legally, used words as weapons, engaging in constant verbal duels that stirred up Jackson's most contentious, competitive qualities. He was incapable of turning this counterproductive trend around among members of his own species. After all, while his favorite Thoroughbreds might rear and strike
in the early stages of training, they responded well to firm yet fair treatment — and they had no hidden agenda. They didn't grudgingly comply with Jackson's wishes while engaging in underhanded power plays, secretly organizing other herd members against him. They didn't spread malicious gossip, and they really didn't care that Rachel had been married before. The Old Lion was truly kinder, more affectionate, and more protective of these animals as a result.

According to Brands,
“Nothing angered Jackson more than mismanagement of the horses.”
He went out of his way to ensure that his colts and fillies were given the best possible start in life, taking care not to push them too hard too soon. But his increasingly harsh and resentful treatment of people suggests that, for all his hard-won horse sense, he failed to absorb the collaborative, nonpredatory wisdom that these powerful animals also embody. As a result, Jackson never achieved the balance of a mature alpha-style male, and he had absolutely no idea how to relate effectively to peers. In this sense, he had more in common with Alexander the Great, another aggressive, eternally adolescent, charismatic leader-horseman who had an addiction to winning, than with equally talented yet immensely more compassionate and adaptable innovators like George Washington — and the man who had become the Buddha two thousand years earlier.

To be fair, however, it's important to realize that Jackson was operating from a serious developmental disadvantage. The son of a destitute pioneer family, he didn't experience anything close to the stable, near-idyllic childhood that Washington, Siddhartha, and later Jackson's own horses enjoyed. Jackson's father died several months before he was born, reportedly from a backwoods accident combined with sheer exhaustion. To make matters worse, young Andrew endured unimaginably brutal treatment in a British prison camp at age fourteen, becoming an orphan as a result of the Revolutionary War. That he transcended this tragic upbringing is a credit to his intelligence and spirit. But Jackson was a serious wartime trauma survivor, plain and simple, and his erratic behavior, while understandable, caused significant widespread suffering as he came to power.

F
rom command-and-control leadership models
and predatory business practices to the current ways people misuse their much-valued freedoms of speech, religion, and the press, destructive behavior abounds in twenty-first-century life. It's notoriously difficult for any species to change instinctual or deeply ingrained habits without a strong outside force acting as a catalyst. Modern, well-educated human beings are no different in this regard, which is why any effort to change unproductive attitudes and reactive patterns initially feels as if we're pulling ourselves up by our own bootstraps. Despite our best intentions and proven brilliance in solving technical challenges, we keep making the same grossly inefficient interpersonal mistakes over and over again.

And yet, if we approach social-intelligence issues with the curious, problemsolving stance innovators routinely adopt in addressing computer design flaws, missile-building conundrums, and home construction dilemmas, we find that the
sequence
involved is similar: Most people, in recognizing they've hit a block, get stuck in the inevitable first stage of fruitlessly trying all possible variations on the same habitual themes. Frustration builds, eventually resulting in rage or powerlessness. Experienced artists and inventors, on the other hand, do something different after hitting the same wall a half dozen times. They surrender — without giving up — entering a constructive phase of “not doing” that Lao-tzu called wu-wei. In this limbo between letting go of the old and imagining the new, innovative thinkers notice previously ignored or hidden factors standing in their way. They ask for help and/or do some research outside their field. The breakthrough that follows represents a leap of consciousness, but there's still
much work to be done. From that moment on, anyone with a pioneering insight is catapulted into the multifaceted realm of visionary leadership.

Drawing culturally significant solutions from the amorphous world of ideas involves much more than imagination, genius, or sheer chutzpah. Adventurous souls must activate some serious people skills. To succeed, even shy, introverted, tongue-tied inventors must learn to communicate the vision effectively; inspire, motivate, and collaborate with others; and, most important, convince a wider public to give up their own deeply entrenched, ineffective habits in order to try something new.

Take the relatively benign yet still challenging process of building a better mop. In his controversial 2012 book
Imagine: How Creativity Works,
Jonah Lehrer describes the surprisingly intricate
, perception-altering journey Procter and Gamble undertook to wrestle buckets and lemon-scented detergents from the chapped hands of billions of disgruntled homeowners. Over the years, the company had spent millions of dollars trying to develop better floor-cleaning products, yet their most brilliant chemists couldn't solve an age-old dilemma: Soaps strong enough to dissolve dirt had a similar effect on wood varnish and human skin. Nearly fifty years after astronauts first walked on the moon, people were still fighting with the same unwieldy, medusa-headed device their great-great-great grandparents used. (An American patented the first mop
holder
in 1837; references to the mop itself go back to fifteenth-century Europe.)

And so Procter and Gamble, which employed more PhDs than several major university faculties combined, did something outrageous; it suspended research and asked for help. The company hired the Boston- and Los Angeles-based design firm Continuum, urging researcher Harry West and his team to “think crazy, to try to come up with something that all those chemists couldn't.” West, who later became Continuum's CEO, didn't hire more scientists, however. After realizing that Procter and Gamble had already tried every molecular combination known to humankind, West spearheaded one of the strangest and certainly most boring periods of high-tech wu-wei in modern history: He sat down, pen in hand, and watched people sweep, vacuum, and mop their floors. West's team took voluminous notes on the most tedious, mundane cleaning activities that the average person endures, even setting up video cameras in homes, capturing hundreds of hours of housework.
“I wanted to forget everything I knew about mops
and soaps and brooms,” he told Lehrer. “I wanted to look at the problem as if I'd just stepped off a spaceship from Mars.”

After several months of observation, West's team realized that the mop itself was one of the most inefficient tools imaginable, that people spent more
time rinsing out their mops than they did cleaning their floors.
“You've got this unwieldy pole,”
he explains. “And you are splashing around this filthy water trying to get the dirt out of a mop head that's been expressly designed to
attract
dirt. It's an extremely unpleasant activity….Once I realized how bad mopping was, I became quite passionate about floor cleaning…. I became convinced that the world didn't need an improved version of the mop. Instead, it needed a total
replacement
for the mop. It's a hopeless piece of technology.”

Coming up with an alternative, however, stumped the design team, which, as Lehrer reports,
“returned to making house visits, hoping for
some errant inspiration. One day, the designers were watching an elderly woman sweep some coffee grounds off the kitchen floor. She got out her hand broom and carefully brushed the grounds into the dustpan. But then something interesting happened. After the woman was done sweeping, she wet a paper towel and wiped it over the linoleum, picking up the last bits of spilled coffee. Although everyone on the Continuum team had done the same thing countless times before, this particular piece of dirty paper led to a revelation.”

That now-obvious insight resulted in the Swiffer, a disposable dirt magnet attached to a pole, blending the efficiency of the paper towel with the back-saving technology of the mop. Still, it took nearly five years for this seemingly simple innovation to hit the market. Procter and Gamble initially nixed the idea. The company, after all, had created a massive market selling mops and floor-cleaning detergents. When showed sketches of the Swiffer, early focus groups exhibited a similar reluctance to sacrifice their mops. After “a year of pleading,” however, Continuum persuaded Procter and Gamble to let another focus group play with a prototype, and as a result
“the product scored higher in focus-group sessions
than any other cleaning device Procter and Gamble had ever tested.” When the Swiffer was launched in 1999, it generated more than $500 million in sales the first year.

The resistance West and his team faced is minor compared to the emotionally charged, sometimes violent reactions we face in urging people to change their outmoded approaches to leadership and interpersonal challenges. Everyone, regardless of culture, religion, nationality, or social status, is essentially grappling with the same antiquated “power tools” their distant ancestors were using millennia ago. These social-intelligence faux pas are like grimy, smelly old mops, incredibly inefficient,
attracting
dirt we must clean up later, in the form of resistance, resentment, and trauma (personal and multigenerational).

In this chapter, I briefly outline the four most destructive tactics we commonly, and stubbornly, employ to influence others' behavior. Call these moldy old habits whatever you like. My only recommendation is that you pick something humorous or absurd to further diffuse their power. We don't need any more commandments or deadly sins. (The devil, above all, hates to look ridiculous, as does the average dictator.) How about the Four Sacred Mops, Stone Age Power Tools, Interpersonal Sink Holes, or Behavioral Mud Slides?