Ever since last year, when I watched the film Inequality for All (2013), Robert Reich has been on my radar, and I have been a fan of his. I typically don’t take a huge vested interest in the details of politics (though I do keep myself informed), let alone economics, but in that film, Robert Reich was speaking a language that I could really get behind. Even in that film he was discussing topics relating to a common good, most notably the enormous and unjust income gap. In The Common Good, Reich distills his beliefs into one comprehensive, intelligent, and digestible package containing ideas that everyone should be able to get behind.
However, as good as the books ideas may be, I have serious trouble relating it to any of our other texts other than those about leadership. The last section in the book sees Reich explain why we must demand more trust and truth from our leaders, ideas that remind me strongly of those that we read about in Radical Candor and Leadership Jazz.
Other than that, I am well acquainted with the idea that “the common good” is a popular theme in horror (especially when it comes to this week’s theme of body stealing), but that is usually used as a device to show the importance of individuality. This week I read The Shadow Out of Time by H.P. Lovecraft, which sees a race of aliens conduct research about planets and species by switching bodies with the planet’s inhabitants. They then often switch places with an entire race en masse in order to preserve themselves from perishing with a dying planet. One of my all-time favorite movies, Hot Fuzz (2007), sees a star London police officer transferred to a small town in the country because he makes the rest of the London police force look bad. There he finds that the town regularly murders those that even slightly make the town look bad, in an effort to keep up their winning streak in the village of the year competition. All the while, the cult-like town chants: “the greater good.”
But the use of the greater good in these stories is either simply to elicit a feeling of unease in the first case, or to elicit laughter and stress the importance of going against a corrupt grain in the second. In a way, I suppose Robert Reich also promotes the idea of going against those in power who have a ton of money in order to service the greater good. The real difference here is that what is good in horror is usually going against what is “the greater good” of a malevolent force, whereas what is good in The Common Good is to unite behind the idea of a common good as a society so that we don’t lose ourselves in corruption. Both, I think, are important to keep in mind in the Trump era…