I came here to say something pretty similar to what Duncan said, but I had a different focus in mind.
It seems like it’s easier for organizations to coordinate around PR than it is for them to coordinate around honor. People can have really deep intractable, or maybe even fundamental and faultless, disagreements about what is honorable, because what is honorable is a function of what normative principles you endorse. It’s much easier to resolve disagreements about what counts as good PR. You could probably settle most disagreements about what counts as good PR using polls.
Maybe for this reason we should expect being into PR to be a relatively stable property of organizations, while being into honor is a fragile and precious thing for an organization.
As a counterpoint, one writer thinks that it’s psychologically harder for organizations to think about PR:
A famous investigative reporter once asked me why my corporate clients were so terrible at defending themselves during controversy. I explained, “It’s not what they do. Companies make and sell stuff. They don’t fight critics for a living. And they dread the very idea of a fight. Critics criticize; it’s their entire purpose for existing; it’s what they do.”
“But the companies have all that money!” he said, exasperated.
“But their critics have you,” I said.
The conversation ended.
My point was that companies are so psychologically traumatized by the very prospect of controversy that many of the battles they may face are over before they begin. This mindset has four pillars: denial, avoidance, surrender, and expedience. It also has a basis in functional reality. In addition to the drain on financial resources, companies don’t have all day to sit around fighting issue-warriors and the “bathrobe brigade,” the diffuse army of millions who wage war on the world from their kitchen table laptops at no cost. Their critics are able to make decisions about prosecuting attacks in a fraction of the time it takes big organizations to figure out how to respond or whether to respond at all.
Companies are simply not set up to manage crises either mechanically or constitutionally, whereas their adversaries are. Corporate and institutional critics have passion, will, and the cloak of virtue. They want the attack to remain in perpetuity. Their targets, conversely, have a different mindset: They are motivated by institutional tranquility—they want the enterprise to keep humming along, quietly paying dividends and maintaining job security.
Despite the prevalence of corporate sales meetings that traffic in the conceit that executives are barrier-busting rebels, most corporate people find fights with issue-warriors to be distressing on a personal level and resist participating. This can be because of a basic sympathy with the critics’ positions, concern about doing anything that could escalate tensions, or a fear of the career consequences of being in the line of fire. I have been in hundreds of meetings and on phone calls with large organizations under siege, and the prevailing theme of these sessions is JUST MAKE IT STOP. Put differently, it is in no one’s self-interest to make a broader organizational challenge one’s own personal jihad, to try to preserve the organization more than it cares to preserve itself.
When it is under attack, an institution is little more than a collection of individuals angling for self-preservation. No one’s mental framework includes a career arc that places them in the middle of a Fiasco Vortex during a climate when there are dozens of data points that will be leaked or otherwise surface in discovery or depositions. One corporate client likened being on a crisis management team to being a character in William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, never knowing which of his colleagues may end up killing him. His corporate enemies were gently nudging him into the spotlight hoping that if he became the face of the crisis, he, not they, would take the fall.
This is very interesting; I am going to add this to the list, but just from the quoted section I am reminded of the position that companies are too risk-averse when it comes to lawsuits, which leads to the baroque CYA verbiage which covers everything, and hospitals overpaying for malpractice insurance. The law is also a case where the company relies on experts unrelated to their core competency with an overwhelming focus on just making the bad thing go away.
a fear of the career consequences of being in the line of fire
this sounds like people who are in the middle of an Immoral Maze. That’s probably statistically true, because any corporation large enough to be worth attacking is probably large enough to have three layers of middle-management.
Assuming that, doing ‘honour’ requires having goals other than power-seeking which, according to that sequence, makes one untrustworthy for the modal middle-manager, who has sacrificed everything else to it, and professionally doomed.
It’s much easier to resolve disagreements about what counts as good PR.
I mostly disagree. I mean, maybe this applies in comparison to “honor” (not sure), but I don’t think it applies in comparison to “reputation” in many of the relevant senses. A person or company could reasonably wish to maintain a reputation as a maker of solid products that don’t break, or as a reliable fact-checker, or some other such specific standard. And can reasonably resolve internal disagreements about what is and isn’t likely to maintain this reputation.
If it was actually easy to resolve disagreements about PR, I suspect we wouldn’t be so spooked by it, or so prone to deferring to outside “PR consultants”.
I… my thoughts aren’t coherent enough here to let me know how to write a short comment, so I’m gonna write a long one, while noting aloud that this is a bad sign about my models here.
But: it isn’t just a matter of deferring to polls. Partly because with “bad PR” or scandals, there’s a dynamicness to the mob. It isn’t about peoples’ fixed standards or comparisons, that you could get by consulting polls. (Or just by consulting a friend or two, the way you probably do when you are faced with normal ethical questions and you want help remembering what the usual standards are.) It’s some spooky other thing, involving dynamics that evolve, and experts that you pay to be a bit distanced somehow from your not-knowing and to be able to tell other people that of course you consulted an expert so that they won’t shun you after the whole thing explodes.
It seems like it’s easier for organizations to coordinate around PR
So, that does seem true, at least in the sense that lots of organizations and groups talk about “PR”; so there’s some tautological sense in which it’s gotta be easier for organizations to somehow end up talking about that. (Lately. It wasn’t so in past centuries, FWIW. Possibly they just didn’t know how.)
But I am a bit unclear on why.
One hypothesis that matches my own introspection, at least for small- to medium-sized organizations of the sort I’ve been involved in, is that we attend to PR because it’s somehow part of the received “everyone knows you should pay attention to PR” morality that was imparted to us, right next to “don’t drink and drive” and “get a college degree” and “remember to feel a sense of ‘wow’ if somebody mentions Harvard”. And not because of inside-view/directly-perceivable advantages to attending to PR (vs reputation/brand/honor).
Of course, this just kicks the can down the road — why would this morality have been imparted to us? I’m honestly not sure. I don’t trust it. I do not personally notice myself or others making any worse decisions when we instead attend to “reputation”.
Modernity has made people quite averse to talking about and dealing with spirituality. I think maybe a big part of what’s going on is that while PR is a material concept, honor is a spiritual concept. It deals with meaning directly rather than only indirectly. Honor matters for its own sake (or can), matters to your soul. Whereas PR can only ever matter indirectly, only as a consequence of other things. No one has PR in their soul.
That would mean that people end up avoiding thinking about and relating to things like honor and reputation because it just feels weird. It feel like the sort of thing that you’re not supposed to deal with. It feels like something that science and technology have vaguely disproven.
I get how honor is a spiritual concept but don’t really get how reputation is. It seems like reputation is precisely the thing PR is concerned with while it ignores honor.
This is very confusing to me when Anna in the original post talks about “reputation” “honor” and “brand” as equivalent. Reputation and brand are precisely worrying about how others think of you (PR), whereas Honor is about how you think of yourself.
Yeah, I’m confused about this too. I feel like the real distinction is three-way:
Trying to embody specific virtues; vs.
Trying to convince others that you embody those virtues; vs.
Trying to make others approve of you.
Anna’s original post sort of sounds like it was distinguishing 3 from 2 -- “PR” and “defending your reputation/brand” are both about optimizing what others think of you, but 2 is less corruptible because it has more content (assuming you care about the specific content of your brand/reputation, and your goal isn’t just “have a positive brand/reputation”!).
Duncan’s reply feels more to me like it’s distinguishing 3 from 1 (while noting that 2 can sometimes emerge from 1 as a side-effect, because truly possessing a virtue can help convince others that you have that virtue).
I think the word “honor” encourages some sliding between 1 and 2: Anna’s focus was on defending your honor, which is more of a reputation-y category-2 thing, whereas Duncan spoke of “trying to be honorable”, which is a category-1 thing.
A note of caution: I think the analytic-philosophy thing I’m doing, of trying to carve things up into a precise and exhaustive set of buckets, risks picking the wrong carving and missing subtleties in the thing Anna was gesturing at in the OP.
E.g., Anna said:
If I am safeguarding my “honor” (or my “reputation”, “brand”, or “good name”), there are some fixed standards that I try to be known as adhering to. For example, in Game of Thrones, the Lannisters are safeguarding their “honor” by adhering to the principle “A Lannister always pays his debts.” They take pains to adhere to a certain standard, and to be known to adhere to that standard. Many examples are more complicated than this; a gentleman of 1800 who took up a duel to defend his “honor” was usually not defending his known adherence to a single simple principle a la the Lannisters. But it was still about his visible adherence to a fixed (though not explicit) societal standard.
I feel like this is a deep-ish paragraph that’s getting at some attitude shifts that haven’t yet been fully brought to consciousness in this discussion. Like, I feel like there’s a sense in which US-circa-2021 PR culture and “defend my good name” culture both have fixed standards, at any given moment in time. But there’s something different about the attitude toward those standards?
It’s like virtue and reputation (“honor”) were one thing at the time, and now they’re two things. So the very word “PR” has become a thing that feels manipulative, amoral—no one thinks it’s virtuous to do PR, it’s just what’s done.
I almost wonder if the problem is less “people stopped caring about being truly-intrinsically-virtuous” and more: People stopped rationalizing their reputation-management as virtuous; which fed into a “it’s impractical and uncouth to care about virtue” cycle; which resulted in people having too many degrees of freedom, because it’s easier to rationalize arbitrary actions as practical than to rationalize arbitrary actions as virtuous.
It’s like virtue and reputation (“honor”) were one thing at the time, and now they’re two things.
I almost wonder if the problem is less “people stopped caring about being truly-intrinsically-virtuous” and more: People stopped rationalizing their reputation-management as virtuous; which fed into a “it’s impractical and uncouth to care about virtue” cycle; which resulted in people having too many degrees of freedom, because it’s easier to rationalize arbitrary actions as practical than to rationalize arbitrary actions as virtuous.
It’s like virtue and reputation (“honor”) were one thing at the time
When I read this, I thought (with my feelings, not my words) “It sounds like Rob thinks honor is a combination of virtue and reputation, but I do not think that honor is a combination of virtue and reputation.”
So before I go and try to write a bunch about what I think honor might be, I’d like to check: Do you think that honor is a combination of virtue and reputation? Do you think that’s basically right but incomplete description of honor? Do you think that honor is some other thing entirely, which you could state? Do you not know what honor is in a way that you could state without a lot of time and effort?
I’d be interested to hear what you think honor is. :) I think the word ‘honor’ is used to point at some ‘inherently good things about a person’ (things related to integrity, promise-keeping, fairness, respect, grace) and also to point at some things about how others perceive you (that you’re seen as having honesty, principle, dignity, etc.). I wasn’t trying to precisely define ‘honor’, just saying that honor seemed to involve both internal-virtue-like things and reputation-like things.
That’s a good point. Reputation is less naturally spiritual. I think you can experience it both ways. Imagine someone who thinks about reputation as painted on their heart. Versus someone who is is fine with trying to manipulate their reputation.
I like this distinction. At the cost of generalising from fiction, in “A Civil Campaign”, Lois McMaster Bujold phrased it as: “Reputation is what other people know about you. Honour is what you know about yourself.” Quoted here:
I came here to say something pretty similar to what Duncan said, but I had a different focus in mind.
It seems like it’s easier for organizations to coordinate around PR than it is for them to coordinate around honor. People can have really deep intractable, or maybe even fundamental and faultless, disagreements about what is honorable, because what is honorable is a function of what normative principles you endorse. It’s much easier to resolve disagreements about what counts as good PR. You could probably settle most disagreements about what counts as good PR using polls.
Maybe for this reason we should expect being into PR to be a relatively stable property of organizations, while being into honor is a fragile and precious thing for an organization.
As a counterpoint, one writer thinks that it’s psychologically harder for organizations to think about PR:
(Eric Dezenhall—Glass Jaw: A Manifesto for Defending Fragile Reputations in an Age of Instant Scandal)
This is very interesting; I am going to add this to the list, but just from the quoted section I am reminded of the position that companies are too risk-averse when it comes to lawsuits, which leads to the baroque CYA verbiage which covers everything, and hospitals overpaying for malpractice insurance. The law is also a case where the company relies on experts unrelated to their core competency with an overwhelming focus on just making the bad thing go away.
Further to Kaj and Eric,
this sounds like people who are in the middle of an Immoral Maze. That’s probably statistically true, because any corporation large enough to be worth attacking is probably large enough to have three layers of middle-management.
Assuming that, doing ‘honour’ requires having goals other than power-seeking which, according to that sequence, makes one untrustworthy for the modal middle-manager, who has sacrificed everything else to it, and professionally doomed.
I mostly disagree. I mean, maybe this applies in comparison to “honor” (not sure), but I don’t think it applies in comparison to “reputation” in many of the relevant senses. A person or company could reasonably wish to maintain a reputation as a maker of solid products that don’t break, or as a reliable fact-checker, or some other such specific standard. And can reasonably resolve internal disagreements about what is and isn’t likely to maintain this reputation.
If it was actually easy to resolve disagreements about PR, I suspect we wouldn’t be so spooked by it, or so prone to deferring to outside “PR consultants”.
I… my thoughts aren’t coherent enough here to let me know how to write a short comment, so I’m gonna write a long one, while noting aloud that this is a bad sign about my models here.
But: it isn’t just a matter of deferring to polls. Partly because with “bad PR” or scandals, there’s a dynamicness to the mob. It isn’t about peoples’ fixed standards or comparisons, that you could get by consulting polls. (Or just by consulting a friend or two, the way you probably do when you are faced with normal ethical questions and you want help remembering what the usual standards are.) It’s some spooky other thing, involving dynamics that evolve, and experts that you pay to be a bit distanced somehow from your not-knowing and to be able to tell other people that of course you consulted an expert so that they won’t shun you after the whole thing explodes.
So, that does seem true, at least in the sense that lots of organizations and groups talk about “PR”; so there’s some tautological sense in which it’s gotta be easier for organizations to somehow end up talking about that. (Lately. It wasn’t so in past centuries, FWIW. Possibly they just didn’t know how.)
But I am a bit unclear on why.
One hypothesis that matches my own introspection, at least for small- to medium-sized organizations of the sort I’ve been involved in, is that we attend to PR because it’s somehow part of the received “everyone knows you should pay attention to PR” morality that was imparted to us, right next to “don’t drink and drive” and “get a college degree” and “remember to feel a sense of ‘wow’ if somebody mentions Harvard”. And not because of inside-view/directly-perceivable advantages to attending to PR (vs reputation/brand/honor).
Of course, this just kicks the can down the road — why would this morality have been imparted to us? I’m honestly not sure. I don’t trust it. I do not personally notice myself or others making any worse decisions when we instead attend to “reputation”.
Modernity has made people quite averse to talking about and dealing with spirituality. I think maybe a big part of what’s going on is that while PR is a material concept, honor is a spiritual concept. It deals with meaning directly rather than only indirectly. Honor matters for its own sake (or can), matters to your soul. Whereas PR can only ever matter indirectly, only as a consequence of other things. No one has PR in their soul.
That would mean that people end up avoiding thinking about and relating to things like honor and reputation because it just feels weird. It feel like the sort of thing that you’re not supposed to deal with. It feels like something that science and technology have vaguely disproven.
I get how honor is a spiritual concept but don’t really get how reputation is. It seems like reputation is precisely the thing PR is concerned with while it ignores honor.
This is very confusing to me when Anna in the original post talks about “reputation” “honor” and “brand” as equivalent. Reputation and brand are precisely worrying about how others think of you (PR), whereas Honor is about how you think of yourself.
Yeah, I’m confused about this too. I feel like the real distinction is three-way:
Trying to embody specific virtues; vs.
Trying to convince others that you embody those virtues; vs.
Trying to make others approve of you.
Anna’s original post sort of sounds like it was distinguishing 3 from 2 -- “PR” and “defending your reputation/brand” are both about optimizing what others think of you, but 2 is less corruptible because it has more content (assuming you care about the specific content of your brand/reputation, and your goal isn’t just “have a positive brand/reputation”!).
Duncan’s reply feels more to me like it’s distinguishing 3 from 1 (while noting that 2 can sometimes emerge from 1 as a side-effect, because truly possessing a virtue can help convince others that you have that virtue).
I think the word “honor” encourages some sliding between 1 and 2: Anna’s focus was on defending your honor, which is more of a reputation-y category-2 thing, whereas Duncan spoke of “trying to be honorable”, which is a category-1 thing.
A note of caution: I think the analytic-philosophy thing I’m doing, of trying to carve things up into a precise and exhaustive set of buckets, risks picking the wrong carving and missing subtleties in the thing Anna was gesturing at in the OP.
E.g., Anna said:
I feel like this is a deep-ish paragraph that’s getting at some attitude shifts that haven’t yet been fully brought to consciousness in this discussion. Like, I feel like there’s a sense in which US-circa-2021 PR culture and “defend my good name” culture both have fixed standards, at any given moment in time. But there’s something different about the attitude toward those standards?
It’s like virtue and reputation (“honor”) were one thing at the time, and now they’re two things. So the very word “PR” has become a thing that feels manipulative, amoral—no one thinks it’s virtuous to do PR, it’s just what’s done.
I almost wonder if the problem is less “people stopped caring about being truly-intrinsically-virtuous” and more: People stopped rationalizing their reputation-management as virtuous; which fed into a “it’s impractical and uncouth to care about virtue” cycle; which resulted in people having too many degrees of freedom, because it’s easier to rationalize arbitrary actions as practical than to rationalize arbitrary actions as virtuous.
Yeah, I was having similar thoughts.
When I read this, I thought (with my feelings, not my words) “It sounds like Rob thinks honor is a combination of virtue and reputation, but I do not think that honor is a combination of virtue and reputation.”
So before I go and try to write a bunch about what I think honor might be, I’d like to check: Do you think that honor is a combination of virtue and reputation? Do you think that’s basically right but incomplete description of honor? Do you think that honor is some other thing entirely, which you could state? Do you not know what honor is in a way that you could state without a lot of time and effort?
I’d be interested to hear what you think honor is. :) I think the word ‘honor’ is used to point at some ‘inherently good things about a person’ (things related to integrity, promise-keeping, fairness, respect, grace) and also to point at some things about how others perceive you (that you’re seen as having honesty, principle, dignity, etc.). I wasn’t trying to precisely define ‘honor’, just saying that honor seemed to involve both internal-virtue-like things and reputation-like things.
That’s a good point. Reputation is less naturally spiritual. I think you can experience it both ways. Imagine someone who thinks about reputation as painted on their heart. Versus someone who is is fine with trying to manipulate their reputation.
Furthe to Matt,
I like this distinction. At the cost of generalising from fiction, in “A Civil Campaign”, Lois McMaster Bujold phrased it as: “Reputation is what other people know about you. Honour is what you know about yourself.” Quoted here:
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/WhatYouAreInTheDark/Literature
This seems true to me but also sort of a Moloch-style dynamic? Like “yep, I agree those are the incentives, and it’s too bad that that’s the case.”