Note: The following is not strictly tech related, but it is business/startup related, and moreover, it concerns human thriving and what it is to reach the fullness of existence as a man. For tech to serve human thriving, one must have clarity about what human thriving is. For this reason, we offer this here as something which falls squarely within the subject matter of the Journal of Human Centered Tech, albeit in a different vein from most of what has come here before it.
I recently bought a thrift store copy of Staff Sergeant Barry Sadler’s classic record, Ballads of the Green Berets. My young boys love it, and have been listening to it over and over, singing the lyrics as they walk around the house.
I love it too, but one thing in particular struck me about the way this Vietnam war era album praises the great men of the Green Beret in its title track, Ballad of the Green Berets, written by SSgt Sadler. The song weaves a series of descriptive phrases in honor of the Green Berets into a brief story about a soldier whose dying wish is that his son, too, may one day wear the Green Beret. The song begins:
Fighting soldiers from the sky
Fearless men who jump and die
Men who mean just what they say
The brave men of the Green Beret
Silver wings upon their chest
These are men, America’s best
One hundred men, will test today
But only three win the Green BeretFearless. Brave. Competitively selected. America’s best. But at the highpoint in the gradually ascending melody, in the very first verse: “Men who mean just what they say.”
SSgt Sadler wrote these words over 50 years ago now, and a lot has changed since then. At first blush, the modern ear might almost be inclined to pass over this line, to ignore its prominent placing in the song. It seems almost a little innocuous, a little gentlemanly, a little highbrow, for the nation’s most potent, the killers at the frontlines, the deadliest greatest manliest men alive.
What is our highest praise of man now? We love brawn, and we love brain. Everyone knows of the grueling BUD/S and the incredible feats of strength and endurance achieved by the unit that has arguably replaced the Green Berets in the popular mind today, the Navy SEALs. Meanwhile, high IQ hardcore engineers and entrepreneurs are the darlings of Silicon Valley and consequently of much of the world, collecting million and even billion dollar salaries. Brawn and brain, willpower and insight, and perhaps the courage which enables one to really reach the peak with these things, are the virtues of popular admiration today. But drop-dead honesty? Not as much. No doubt many of the men we admire are in fact deeply honest, but this doesn’t seem to be the feature which captures the public imagination.
My last two years launching a startup, though, have led me to think that maybe SSgt Sadler wasn’t so far off. Maybe being among the men who mean just what they say is in fact the surest mark of a man, and the hardest to achieve.
I was blessed with parents who taught me the importance of honesty from an early age. It was never OK to lie in our house growing up, for any reason, even what some might consider “good” reasons. So I knew that I should avoid lying, and fancied myself a pretty honest person. Business, though (and marriage too, for that matter) has shone a harsh light on just how far that honesty really extended.
That pitch where you told an optimistic story and omitted just a couple of rather important details. That timeline you gave a client that you hoped you could make but when push comes to shove was still quite optimistic, and in point of fact slipped by several weeks. That hard conversation that you let slide for a while, leaving the other guy thinking he was in different standing than he actually was as you continued to engage in the usual pleasantries. That business arrangement that you knew you were leaving just a little foggy, thinking that “we’ll figure it out” not because of real unknowns but actually because of difficult issues you weren’t sure you were ready to face.
Startups are tricky, because you are straining, pushing to bring something about that didn’t exist before, striving to do more than you’ve hitherto been able to do. There is risk inherent here, even for those who do business with a startup, to say nothing of those actually running it. So you have to convince people to believe in you, to take a risk with you, to trust in your convictions and your instincts and your grit and goodwill. But the temptation is omnipresent to downplay this just a little, to let people think they are taking just a little less risk than they actually are, to just “fake it till you make it” as the popular saying goes.
When things go wrong, too, when others fall short or are even perhaps outright malicious, there is always the temptation to just cover it over, to not rock the boat, to keep it always first and foremost, “amicable”.
But a man who means just what he says does none of these things. He delivers what he promised, come hell or high water. If he says he will finish something, he will, or die trying, whether that something is coming to save you from a swarm of enemies or coming to kill you unless you get off of his or his ally’s land. He is a comfort and a source of peace to his friends, and a terror and a motivation to righteousness for his enemies. He can be counted on, because nothing, and nobody, is going to stand between him and the honor of his word. In business, he need not be checked up on or prodded along or feared on account of some unknown gripe. If he’s made a promise, he will keep it, and if he has a problem, he will say it, not pretend it doesn’t exist. This is not to say that he has no tact, or that he simply blurts out every thought on his mind, but rather that he will never ever purposefully mislead, even in small ways.
Perhaps it is also a testament to our incredibly deeply social nature that the highest praise of a man might in fact not be his prowess and ability to survive on an animal level, his ability to kill or run or calculate, but rather his ability to speak, and to do so in a way which accurately reflects the disposition of his soul, even if doing so risks the alienation of the person he speaks to or incurs obligations on himself which might be difficult to fulfill1. One might think of talking and the social life as weak and easy, not as much of a test as enduring physical pain or understanding obscure things.
Today many men in particular (I suspect) routinely feel intense levels of anxiety in social situations, and then perhaps think on some subconscious level that to be afraid as a man is dishonorable enough, but to be afraid of what might be said is even worse. Women of course suffer the same thing, but I’m not sure that the feeling of insult to themselves at experiencing this fear is quite as high2. After all, they are not expected to be physically dominant, at least certainly not of men, and so to feel threatened in a social situation might even be reasonable in some cases. But for a man to feel threatened by what he might have to say or what another might say to him has, for me at least, almost always felt profoundly emasculating. Why am I so afraid if I am not even physically in danger at all?
Here too, I wonder if the brave men of the Green Berets have a lesson for us. It is hard, the province of less than five in one hundred men, to be a man truly unafraid enough to mean just what you say. And if you can do it, you are great, deserving of one of the praises bestowed on America’s very best.
And so, while I cannot say that I have perfectly attained this mark of honor, or that I am even close to it in some ways, I am striving for it, and by the grace of God and the opportunity of the continual challenges one encounters in business, getting a little better day by day3.
Perhaps you will join me in striving to become among the men who mean just what they say. And spare a prayer in gratitude and admiration for SSgt Barry Sadler and all the other brave men of the Green Berets.
It is worth briefly noting here that for all their apparent cleverness, to “mean just what they say” is exactly what our much vaunted LLMs are completely incapable of. They serve to inform but not to enforce, to promise but not to deliver, to sound good but never in any way to mean it. They are, to put it in very crude terms, just like the friend who is “full of crap” – always sounding good but incapable of being there for you when you really really need them. LLMs will no doubt one day be (and indeed already are being) connected to robots and in some sense be capable of being there when you need them, but (article to come on this) they are incapable of breaking paradigm, and consequently incapable of being there when you really need them. LLMs can and should, as Elon Musk says, be set up to be “maximally truth seeking”. But not all truth is objectively observable scientific truth. Some things are true because we make them to be, because we follow through, which LLMs can’t do. So let’s use them for our purposes, but not become like them.
Note that I’m not thinking that it’s any less important for women to be honest than men. But I do think that men provide the space for women to thrive and be who they are. Women surrounded by honest men will likely have little trouble being honest themselves, knowing that they are safe to tell speak the truth.
My readers of Christian faith may object that I have framed honesty as a sort of ultimate virtue, and that this is not the case – Faith, Hope, and Love, (of these, as St. Paul says, the greatest is Love) occupy this coveted position. But I think the case can be made that one cannot really be a man of his word without an abundant endowment of all three. It takes a certain faith to really deeply see what is true, hope to bind oneself to it and speak it with confidence, and love of neighbor to care enough to say it and act on it. Honesty is thus a mark of highest virtue, even if not the thing itself, and I think worth striving for in a central way if one is praying for the requisite virtues to attain it.