The Cult of Personal Loyalty: A Moral Ponzi Scheme

Once Upon A Time, there was The Mission: Preach the Gospel (the church). Educate Pennsylvanians (Penn State). Run an investment house (Bernie Madoff). Win the Tour de France (Lance Armstrong).

Sometimes the Organization loses sight of the Mission. Politics and money provide incentives to drift. Short-term goals provide seductive motivation. While the mission statement plaque is still hanging in the lobby, now the organization is really about maintaining power; it has been corrupted.

One way of maintaining power in a human system is developing a cult of personal loyalty, in which the individual's loyalty to the (CEO, Coach, Manager, Bishop) is prized more than accomplishing the Mission.

Feb. 2 1943, The Christian Science Monitor   link

"Many of President (Franklin D.) Roosevelt's best friends and well-wishers have often asked why he is so seemingly obtuse to unethical or improper appointments, business or lobbying activities, etc.. when they come from his own immediate circle, and so vigilant on numerous other far less important matters? What is this Achilles heel, anyway?

"The answer, it always seemed to me, lies in Mr. Roosevelt's continual and deep demand for personal loyalty. I would almost call his political faith the 'cult of personal loyalty.' From his friends, associates and staff he expects and returns a feudal bond. Manifestations of personal loyalty have marked his whole political career . . . Labour Secretary Perkins, Harold L. Ickes, Harry L. Hopkins. Thomas G. Corcoran, and many another.. . as long as these people continued to give fervent loyalty, as long as they kept their faith of their feudal bond, they could, in effect, do no wrong. Loyalty was enough for the President.       Edwin D. Canhom

A cult of personal loyalty requires perceived power, the promise of future benefits, and a claim to special insight. As the cult grows beyond a few participants, it can permit indulgences to the select few. Subsequent arrivals to the loyalty cult suspend their moral judgement for the promise of (and the proximity to) power; the early arrivals enjoy the most direct benefits of conspiracy. It's a moral Ponzi scheme.

When you have a situation where people are loyal to you personally and are invested in your success (as opposed to the original Mission) you can get away with a few things, and with time the scope of what you choose to get away with becomes larger. Eventually, you might be charged with a crime but the judge setting your bail will be tied to the cult of personal loyalty.

The corrupt monster takes on a momentum of its own. In any incremental moment ΔT the tendency is to keep the momentum moving - nobody wants to stand in front of the Machine. Go along and get along. I'm just doing my job. I got kids to feed. You can't beat {PennState, the Feds, Wall Street, the Church}.

Over time, the cult grows in numbers and the indulgences become more extreme. As the Ponzi scheme tolerates ongoing injustice it becomes less legitimate and increasingly hollow. No system is without constraints; there's a tipping point at which the vulgar indulgences for the core beneficiaries start to become unacceptable to the outer participants, at least at the current benefit level.

When protecting the {Firm, Facility, Program, Coach, Boss, Bishop} perversely morphs into tolerance, acceptance, and then protecting the unacceptable; when maintenance of power takes precedence over basic justice and operational effectiveness, the moral legitimacy of the institution is lost and the consent of the people will be withdrawn.


There is a great thing about Americans that is too often forgotten: we will tolerate authority and power only as long as it enjoys the consent of the people.

Without the consent of the people, power will not last.

When the corrupt organization goes too far and loses the consent of the people, it crashes like a wave moving across a shoal; the peak is no longer supported by the base, the moral Ponzi scheme crashes, and we see that the Emperor-manqué has no clothes and that something is rotten in Podunk. Sometimes we imprison the ringleaders, if only to assuage the dissonance of the collaborators.

The most grieviously injured are the innocent victims of the terrible wrong-doing; the boys of Happy Valley, the families foreclosed and evicted, etc.

Cults of personal loyalty and moral Ponzi schemes promise more than they can deliver. You can't swindle an honest man, and the people that buy into the scheme generally have themselves to blame. The only winners in a Ponzi scheme are the people who get in and get out early enough to leave the wreckage to the suckers.

The small tragedies, generally self-imposed, include the newcomers to the Ponzi scheme who think that they can delay the crash by defending the perpetrators; the naive True Believers who invested their identities in the sham; and the unfortunate last participant who didn't get the memo, still actively jawboning for a cold, dead mafia.


Perhaps the most twisted charade is the charismatic salesman who creates the Cult of Loyalty, blends his own identity with the moral Ponzi scheme, and then believes his own hype.

When the tipping point is reached and the cult of personal loyalty is breached, many sordid details will come to light. Those who are not caught will stay low and hope to retain influence; No, not me, I was never a {Sandusky donor, Party Member, Enron trader}. Human nature is to ride the wave.

• Can the Sandusky scandal be the only secret?
  
• Is there an Attorney General who didn't prosecute, who maybe didn't want to be running for Governor as the guy that charged Paterno-Sandusky? Did he become governor, was he placed on the Board of Trustees and did he then fire Paterno, hoping to deflect any attention from himself?
  
• What of the curious case of Ray Gricar, the missing District Attorney?

More than the questions being asked, what's going to be interesting is the level at which they choose to stop asking questions.

Milan Jundera said it: The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.

What High School Football Players Need -- More Brain Damage

When you look for thought-leaders in Pennsylvania football, when you look for the folks who shape young people before they get to the pro teams, you think about the head coaches at Pitt, Penn State, and Temple. When the Roethlisberger scandal brings public focus to the arrogant thuggery of some athletes, and the tendency for athletes to believe that normal rules don't apply to them, I expected these head coaches to exert their leadership among their youthful charges and set the bar for acceptable behavior. Take the initiative, set a new standard, etc; do the "vision thing".



The Pitt and Penn State head coaches got together Wednesday and made a public call for: football practice in the spring time, so that Pennsylvania kids will be able to keep up with athletes from states that already have spring training for football.

From the Post-Gazette: "Penn State coach Joe Paterno and Pitt coach Dave Wannstedt today met with the executive board of the Pennsylvania State Football Coaches Association (PSFCA) and offered their support for the plan, which has not yet been proposed to the PIAA. Temple coach Al Golden also backs the idea, but he could not attend today's meeting at the Lasch Football Building."

When I think about football players, I think about Steeler "Iron Mike" Webster who suffered from amnesia, dementia, depression, and acute bone and muscle pain. At the end he lived out of his pickup truck or train stations until he died at a young age, a victim of all those hits to his head. He had chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE.

Research indicates that head trauma is a cumulative function. From Wikipedia: It has been speculated that Webster's ailments were due to wear and tear sustained over his playing career; some doctors estimated he had been in the equivalent of "25,000 automobile crashes" in over 25 years of playing football at the high school, college and professional levels.

I recommend Malcolm Gladwell's excellent article, Offensive Play, for an interesting read. In one paragraph discussing the football controversy in 1905 (yes, 1905) a professor at the University of Chicago called it a “boy-killing, man-mutilating, money-making, education-prostituting, gladiatorial sport". The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Gladwell talks about a program at the University of North Carolina called the Sports Concussion Research Program. The SCRP uses a program called HITS to put sensors in the helmets of every UNC football player, and measures every g-force impact the player's brain receives. The HITS data suggest that practice — the routine part of the sport — can be as dangerous as the football games themselves.

A football player’s real issue isn’t simply with repetitive concussive trauma. It is, as the concussion specialist Robert Cantu argues, with repetitive subconcussive trauma. It’s not just the handful of big hits that matter. It’s lots of little hits, too.

That’s why so many of the ex-players who have been given a diagnosis of C.T.E. were linemen: line play lends itself to lots of little hits. The HITS data suggest that, in an average football season, a lineman could get struck in the head a thousand times, which means that a ten-year N.F.L. veteran, when you bring in his college and high-school playing days, could well have been hit in the head eighteen thousand times: that’s thousands of jarring blows that shake the brain from front to back and side to side, stretching and weakening and tearing the connections among nerve cells, and making the brain increasingly vulnerable to long-term damage.

Football leagues now hire mobile scanning units to get baseline scans on young players' heads so that years later, comparisons can be made. Here's a nutty thought: any activity that asks high school kids to pose for "before" pictures to measure subsequent brain damage should be considered child abuse.

When I think about what football players need, two things come to mind:

1. they need to be taught that they're not demigods above civil society
2. they need to be protected from the edutainment industry that profits from their smashing their brains against hard objects.

Paterno and Wannstedt might have called for fewer full-contact sessions per year. They could have taken action to improve their student's chances of not ending up like Mike Webster. They should have instituted a zero-tolerance policy for sexual assault or offenses involving drinking.

Instead, they used their positions of responsibility to encourage Pennsylvania high school students to smash their heads more often. Here we go Steelers, here we go...