Ep49 -- Learning the Wrong Lesson

 When I was a kid, like in elementary or middle school, I was always in the quote unquote gifted academic track. I'm not saying that to brag. I don't think I was actually particularly special academically. If anything, I was a creative thinker. I maybe had a talent for seeing connections between things that might not be so obvious, and I had a quirky sense of humor.

Two things, which by the way, signify this podcast.  So there I was in this program with other quote unquote gifted kids taking advanced classes and otherwise feeling pretty good about ourselves. So far, so good.  In fact. Everything worked out according to plan. I got pretty good grades, did a decent amount of extracurricular activities, did pretty well in the SATs, and got into an Ivy League school. 

Full disclosure, it was the University of Pennsylvania, which at the time wasn't even a top 20 school in the country, and in all likelihood, I got in because my father went there. But again, so far so good.  I did well enough in college, but certainly didn't have many professional ambitions at that time.  One thing that I began to notice during those years was an emerging fear of taking intellectual risks.

I didn't really want to challenge myself too much because I had this deep, dark fear that if I failed, I would be a failure, and it wasn't for another 10 or 15 years that I was able to put a name to the type of student I was. I found it in the title of a book called Excellent Sheep by William Deresiewicz. 

That's exactly what I was, although to be perfectly honest, I was a very good sheep, not an excellent sheep. I was smart and savvy enough to do just enough to get good enough grades to achieve what I was supposed to achieve, but nothing more, and certainly nothing that took advantage of my penchant for creative thinking. 

And it was about that same time that my own kids were getting to the later years of elementary school or starting middle school, and I started thinking about how I wanted to sort of help them in their academic journeys. And I was lucky enough to learn about psychologist Carol Dweck's ideas of the fixed mindset versus the growth mindset, which she laid out in her 2006 book called Mindset.  And it was then that I realized that I'd learned the exact wrong lesson from being called Gifted and Smart when I was a kid. I learned that my smartness was a fundamental part of who I was and therefore any challenge to that claim was a challenge to my very being.

So if I failed at something, I was a failure.   So I better not fail, and what better way to not fail than to not take risks? So that's what I did.  This is a textbook example of a fixed mindset. It's much better, and this is what I tried to do with my own kids, to have been praised for my hard work in achieving academic success.

In that case, if you work hard and things don't work out, it's not a personal failing, it's just an opportunity to learn and improve. That's the growth mindset.  So this week I wanna talk a little bit about learning the wrong lessons and one institution in particular that has elevated learning the wrong lessons to a veritable art form.

Stay tuned. 

I'm Craig Boreth, and this is The Great Ungaslighting, a podcast about how we all get conned into accepting our manmade culture, which is so often out of sync with our human nature. And how we can begin to change course by putting the kind back into humankind.  

But first, a word about a non-sponsor.  This episode of The Great Ungaslighting is not brought to you by multi-brand automaker Stellantis, the world's fifth-largest car company and 61st-largest public company with revenue of about $160 billion a year. 

In early April, Stellantis announced what they're calling temporary layoffs of about 900 employees across five US plants, as well as layoffs of thousands of workers in assembly plants in Canada and Mexico.  They'll also be pausing production at an assembly plant in Michigan, which will put another thousand people out of work. 

Now, Stellantis blames tariffs for the layoffs because of course they do.   There might be a grain of truth to that. Tariffs raise production costs, which leads to increased prices. Then sales go down and you've got excess production that you don't need, so you shut it down.

Okay, I get it. It's unfortunate for those workers and their families, but hey, that's business. But it's not the Stellantis layoffs that have earned them a shoutout from yours truly. It's what they did not two weeks after announcing those layoffs. In mid-April at their annual shareholders meeting, Stellantis announced that their shareholders had approved a dividend that will pay those shareholders $2.26 billion.  And it's not just that they announced a massive payoff to shareholders right after laying off a few thousand workers. It's another thing that they didn't do.

They didn't continue with a stock buyback program begun last year, which would line stockholder pockets to the tune of $3.3 billion.  It is almost as if they tried to figure out which move would look the least shitty and go with that one. And since stock buybacks have gotten lots of well-deserved bad press lately, it's possible they figured a dividend just sounds more old-timey and wholesome, but it's a weird choice, which kind of validates my guess as to why they did it.  Historically, dividends are usually paid when times are good and profits are large. Whereas stock buybacks are often used to bump up a faltering stock price.  Stellantis' stock price is hovering right around its 52-week low, and they just posted a 12% drop in US sales for the first quarter of 2025 after a 15% drop for all of 2024, which resulted in a 70% drop in net profits for the year.

So it seems like a weird time to issue a dividend equal to 40% of your entire profit for the previous year. And while you may struggle to try and figure out why with the American public pondering the possibility of imminent extreme insecurity, would a struggling company decide to hand over a massive bundle of cash to society's least insecure people, allow me to offer a simple, four-word answer.  Why the hell not?  

And we are back.  

As I was researching this episode, I found a few excellent examples of learning the wrong lesson. The first is a quote from Mark Twain who said, "We should be careful to get out of an experience only the wisdom that is in it and stop there lest we be like the cat that sits down on a hot stove lid. She will never sit down on a hot stove lid again. And that is well but also she will never sit down on a cold one anymore."  

And then there's this little gem from the Godfather of Wrong Lesson Learning one, Homer J. Simpson:

[SIMPSONS CLIP]

 Now, one of my favorite real-world examples of learning the wrong lesson comes from the game Monopoly!, which was originally intended to serve as a warning of the dangers of capitalism.

It was created in the early 1900s by a leftist and feminist named Elizabeth Maggie. Who called it The Landlord's Game. But of course, over time the game became a celebration of rapacious capitalism as we all learned how to mercilessly drive our cousins into bankruptcy in the mere seven hours that it takes to play a full game. Not exactly the lesson that Maggie was trying to teach us.  

The game actually has a bizarrely ironic history.  About 30 years after its invention. Before it was very widely known, the idea for the game was stolen by Charles Darrow, who then sold it for a bundle to Parker Brothers. Then about 30 years after that, a man named Ralph Anspach, who was pissed off about the impact of real life monopolies in the 1970s created a game called Anti-Monopoly.

He was promptly sued by General Mills, which had swallowed up Parker Brothers before then. Anspach eventually won the case, although, and this is irony number one, he had to take out three mortgages on his house to fight Monopoly!.  Then, when General Mills found out that the person they thought invented the game had actually stolen it from someone else, they tried to buy up all the other variations of the game that had sprung up independently since the landlord's game first appeared.

And this is irony number two. General Mills was essentially trying to monopolize the game Monopoly!.  And all that led to this brilliant Steven Wright line. 

So I've been thinking about this phenomenon of learning the wrong lessons off and on since late last year, when we all witnessed the inevitable outcome of one American institution having learned the wrong lesson from a previous experience.  In my lifetime, I can't think of another organization that has so consistently and predictably learned the wrong lesson.

They're so good at it that they can learn the wrong lesson from both successes and failures. And at least so far, they haven't shown sign of realization that they keep making the same mistakes over and over again.  I'm talking of course, about the Democratic party.  Now other organizations and institutions make similar mistakes, but there's no other entity that learns as broad a swath of wrong lessons so repeatedly and without any awareness that it's doing so like the Democratic Party.  As I mentioned before, not only do the Democrats learn the wrong lessons from their losses, but they also manage to learn the wrong lessons from their victories, which I really think isn't all that easy to do. 

 Okay, so let's take a quick look at the two main types of wrong lessons that Democrats learn.

The first, which I'll call the "losers double down", is actually pretty common in politics and other endeavors that are driven by so-called strategic experts. So these political strategists tell their candidates that there's only one way for them to win, and of course, they have to pay up a tidy sum of money to learn this strategy.

The most common losing strategy that Dems have employed in recent decades is trying to portray themselves as centrist in the hopes of peeling off just enough moderate voters to win in battleground states. It seems like a reasonable strategy. The problem is, as Eddie Glaude Jr, has pointed out, if you give people the choice between a duck and something that looks and sounds like a duck, but isn't quite a duck, they're gonna choose the duck and they're gonna see that that other thing is just a sad duck wannabe.  

Now I'm not really arguing about the substance of the strategy. So you may think that's the only viable strategy available to the Democrats in swing states. So they have to do it. I tend to disagree. I think real leadership involves convincing people who like ducks that there are better alternatives.

But my point is, when that strategy failed, and it has repeatedly failed, the lesson the Dems learn is. They just need to be more duck-like, more conservative. They just weren't quite Republican enough to win.  And that makes sense, right? After all, the political strategist who suggested the campaign strategy still believes it was the right plan. The candidate just didn't take it far enough.  It's sort of like supply siders saying the reason why tax cuts never seem to pay for themselves is that they just haven't been cut far enough.  Possible? Sure. Likely? Not really.  I would suggest that, rather than doubling down on a losing strategy, it might make better sense to rethink the strategy altogether. 



 On the other side, and this is where Democrats really distinguish themselves as wrong lesson learners extraordinaire,  is what they learned from victories, most notably for our purposes, the victories of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. And what they learned from those victories is pretty much what has provided them so many opportunities to learn from defeats.  They think that it was the specific substance and style of Bill Clinton that won in 1992 in 96, and the specific substance and style of Barack Obama that won in 2008 and 2012.

And you saw this clearly in Vice President Harris's 2024 campaign. It was equal parts Clintonian triangulation and Obama-esque hope and joy.  The problem is, I believe, it was not the specifics of their style or their substance that won those campaigns. I believe it was because those substances and styles were the right ones for those times.

In other words, read the room.  You have to first and foremost match the vibe of the country during any particular campaign season if you're gonna have a chance to win.  And I think Joe Biden's experience supports this theory. In 2020, he was the right person at the right time, but during his tenure, the vibe of the country changed dramatically. 

Now, people can argue why it changed, but it's hard to argue that it didn't change and people wanted something very different.  Honestly, I think one of the reasons Biden won was because he gave off the impression that he wouldn't run for reelection. The country just wanted a steadying force in 2020, but by 2024, people were screaming for change.

So what did the Democrats offer? More of the same.  I think I can pinpoint the precise moment when Vice President Harris lost the election. It was when she was asked what should change from the Biden administration to her own, and her answer was nothing much that I can think of. That's an example of not reading the room.  

Maybe I'm wrong but all this seems pretty obvious to me, and yet I don't think establishment Democrats have figured it out yet. Case in point, a week or so ago, Illinois Governor JB Pritzker gave a highly lauded speech calling out the dangers of the current administration in no uncertain terms.

It was a very well-written speech, but there was one line that jumped out to me and told me, Nope, Pritzker is still learning the wrong lessons.  He said, Democrats must be bold and our ideas are fearless, and we must deliver on that agenda for working families and for the real people who truly make America great. 

Now, those are lovely words and they are also completely meaningless. It's like Vice President Harris saying that if she's elected president, she'll crack down on price gouging. Well, price gouging was going on for years while she was vice president. She didn't do anything about it then. So why should we believe her now?

I mean, seriously, when was the last time any Democratic candidate was bold and presented fearless ideas? But Pritzker is half right. That is exactly what people want right now from their politicians. What they definitely do not want is politicians talking about it and then doing the same old thing. 

 Well, that's it for this week. If you like this episode, please right now forward it to any and all friends who you think might also like it. And until next time, be kind to yourself, cut each other some slack, and if you absolutely, positively have to use your car to get around, use your damn turn signal.