To my fellow graduates your family, your friends, the faculty and leadership of The New School, first of all thank you immensely for this honor. I'm sorry that Mr. Acconci could not make it today. And I wish him a speedy recovery. But I do like a challenge I must say. And I discovered something quite interesting in the last hour. I discovered that preparing a major speech in an hour can be a lot better in some respects than having a month to prepare. I didn't have a month to agonize over every comma and every word. So, you'll have to deal with it as it comes. But, I have to add something else that I think is quite important. Being a Canadian I'm quite comfortable in front of a big crowd. Being Canadian I'm quite comfortable in front of a crowd in Madison Square Garden we're used to it. I just don't see the Rangers anywhere.
Where are the Rangers?
But being Canadian is not incidental in the comments that I want to make today. In some ways you could say I had an hour to prepare this, in another way you could say I had a lifetime to prepare this, because it really draws on a lot of things. I'm not a New Yorker by adoption; I'm a New Yorker by inheritance. My mother was born in 1910 in Harlem, met my father in the early 30's and moved to Montreal. But she never outgrew New York. And in that sense she passed New York on to me so in a sense this is in some ways my second city. If she-- I can imagine how she would respond if she saw me standing here today under these circumstances. So, there is something quite touching about how things come together.
I want to talk about America and I want to talk about it from the outside in. Canadian's are your biggest critics and your greatest admirers. Maybe that's because we know you best. We're so close. I live about 40 miles from the New York border, so maybe we know you best. Sometimes I think we know you better than you know yourself, because America is not the most introspective country on earth. So we're troubled, we're deeply troubled by some of the things we've seen in the recent past and I don't mean just the last seven years. I mean more than that. And we are inspired, deeply inspired by what's happening in America right now. And I refer to all three candidates. I refer to the whole election process and I refer to what's going on what a welcome and lovely change. I will not talk about which candidate I favor, but we'll leave that to another time.
I'm troubled by long-term trends that are not only American, they are worldwide, but I think they've been led by America. And let me explain. When the communist regimes started to collapse one-by-one in the late 80's, there was a quick explanation for that, particularly in this country but in many quarters of the world; captured in the phrase that capitalism had triumphed. I think that was dead wrong. Now I think that missed the phenomenon completely. Balanced triumphed, capitalism didn't not triumph. The countries of Eastern Europe were totally out of balance on the side of state power. We in the west whether its Canada or Europe or America or other counties were balanced across three sectors. We had strong market economies then. We had strong governments, much stronger than we do now. And we had a stronger what I prefer to call, social sector, you might want to call it civil society or NGO's call it what you like. But we were balanced. And ever since then under the belief that communism-- that capitalism has triumphed we've been going out of balance on the other side. And my perception is that ultimately that will prove no better than being out of balance as the Eastern European countries were on the different side.
Four, I didn't have a chance to prepare my PowerPoint's which I never would have done anyway, but imagine-- this isn't going to be terribly hard. Imagine a straight line and that's how we perceive politics for a century or more. Left, right, Marx, Smith, nationalization, privatization, government controls, markets; you could go on and on and on and on. So if one side is bad the other side must be good. I think that's the wrong way to view society. If you take that line and fold it around into a horseshoe, then you start to see what society, I think, should probably look like, which is a stool that has three points of balance and not two. One is government and the public sector; one is market and the private sector and the third is the social sector. And a balance and healthy society is a society that balances all three sectors. That's what critcally important in our society. That's why the New School is so important, it seems to me, because the New School represents in some important way that kind of balance and that's why I cherish my relationship particularly with the Management Milano School here.
There must be some graduates from that school. I think we are losing our way as a society. I think we are losing our way because we're going out of balance. I think this is happening all over the world, but I think its happening faster and more dangerously in the United States. And that's what is so exciting about the current election.
America and the world are at a crossroads. We are at a crossroads and we will either deal with these issues or we'll suffer the consequences of not dealing with these issues. And let me make something clear, I am not asking for American leadership in the world. We've had enough of that.
In my own field of management we've had too much leadership, too much what I call heroic leadership. Organizations need good leaders, no question about it. But the emphasis the obsession with heroic leadership is driving our organizations absolutely crazy. Every time an organization has a problem, the solution is to bring in a better leader. We are like drug addicts who always need a bigger fix. So if the last leader didn't work we've got to bring in a better new leader. There is a line in a Bertolt Brecht play that says, "Unhappy is the land that has no leaders"-- sorry, "unhappy is the land that has no heroes". And the other character remarks, "No unhappy is the land that needs heroes".
We don't need so much heroic leadership, what we need is what I like to call community-ship. What we need to do is build up a sense of community in America and around the world. We need to work towards a balance that recognizes the importance of community alongside markets, alongside governments. Societies tend to get the governments they deserve. If they think government is incapable, then they'll get governments that are incapable. If they think governments are good and can do good things, then they'll get governments that are good and do good things. In this country there is a tendency to replace the top layers of the public sector administration with political appointments. Quite far deep including FEMA and lots of other place. While we appoint these people in all departments of government or you appoint these people in all departments of government, but one. Why not replace all the generals with political appointments? After all what is the difference? You want the Army and Navy and the Air Force to run well. And you want Congress to run well and you want the Homeland Security to run well, so if you are changing all the appointments in all of those other departments, why not in the military too? Well there's an obvious answer, the military is too important. Is Congress less important, is Homeland Security less important. So there is a need to achieve some kind of balance and that is critical, I think, in our society.
Our problems in this world will not be solved by America. But our problems in this world will not be solved without America. So what we need is community-ship within countries and across countries and we need to work together on that.
The New School graduates it seems to me have been trained in that balance. That's your great benefit going out. That is what makes me hopeful. The future depends on you. Don't forget it. But don't forget that the future does not depend on you alone. The future depends on all of us. The future does not depend just on you as a New School graduates or as American's. The future depends on you as citizens of the world. And the future depends on all of us as citizens of the world. And that's the message I'd like you to take home with you today.
Thank you.
