Doubling Down on Values in a Moment of Crisis, with Lt. Gen. Mark Hertling

My senior year, because I was from a low-income family and did not have a whole lot of money to go to college my guidance counselor suggested at the time potentially applying to West Point. This was in 1971, and the military was not the bedrock that it is today and was not seen in a positive light at the time. There were not a whole lot of people applying to the Military Academy at that time, so I think that is why I got in.

It was interesting, Kevin. I remember distinctly the very first day after an entire day of learning all sorts of things and then raising my hand to take an oath, which at the time I was just repeating after the person that pronounced it, I was standing in formation, shocked as a new cadet, and we watched the flag go down for the first time at retreat ceremony. What I realized was that I had become immediately part of something that was bigger than me as I looked around at the thousand other cadets who were there. That started an inculcation of a different type of belief of being just one small cog in a bigger team.

Then, through my days at the academy we were learning about religion. Believe it or not, I took a course on world religions. We had discussions on values and ethics. We learned the Cadet Prayer, which in itself is a beautiful piece of work that tells you how to live above the common level of life and how to work for the harder right instead of the easier wrong, and we had debates about professionalism.

I will never forget, in one of the classes I had on the military profession an instructor outlined what the elements of a profession are, and the very first one is that professionals, no matter if it’s military, media, the law, ministry, engineering, et cetera, if you are part of a profession you live by a professional ethos and a prescribed set of values. Then we went into a discussion of what that set of values was for the military at the time.

Throughout my career I went back to those touchstones—integrity associated with the honor code, of not lying, cheating, or stealing, the values associated with the profession, the inculcation of ethos that you get as being part of a family that was the military—and they resonated with me. I felt that they made my life different and helped me to keep my eye on the ball and a view toward the future.

KEVIN MALONEY: You have spoken and written a lot about this concept of needing to “train our values” or train your values over your lifetime and over your career. I think this speaks to something that is very important at Carnegie Council in that we are very wary of looking at ethics as this dusty, standard set of principles you just take off a shelf when it is convenient to you. There is an exercise in looking at these principles and looking at these values and pressure-testing them for the moment. Within that framework maybe we can keep talking about how your career in the military reflected on that positioning or that framework.

MARK HERTLING: I think early on in my career I was focused on personal values and how I reacted in different circumstances. I was armor officer, a tanker, and we had this armor and cavalry journal that used to come out—I am not sure how popular it is right now—and on the very last page of every journal when we were young second lieutenants there was a scenario that the authors of the journal put together. It was a one-pager that told you about a situation that occurred geared primarily to lieutenants and captains. At the end there would always be the question after the description of what the scenario was: “What do you do now, lieutenant?”

It would generate conversations among those within the profession. I remember talking to fellow platoon leaders, and we would say, “Okay, did you see that thing in ARMOR magazine this week?”

“Oh, yeah, that was great.”

“What would you do in that situation?” It created that conversation.

What I then learned in the 1990s, the chief of staff of the Army came out with a set of values that he prescribed to the force. It is still in effect today. There were seven Army values: loyalty, duty, respect, selfless service, honor, integrity, and personal courage. If you write those down, you’ll see that the first letter of each one of them spells out the acronym of “leadership.”

When the Chief of Staff of the Army put these out, there was a lot of discussion of why these are important, and he tied it back to the professional element of living true to something, but there were conversations about those as well.

What does “loyalty” mean? What is the definition, and how does it apply? What kinds of things cause it to be questioned, and how do we stand up for what is right in terms of those different values?

It seemed early on to me—at that point I was a major and a lieutenant colonel—we were looking at those things as being touchpoints and shining lights of how to live our profession, but what I realized later on was that this was also a very personal thing, that every individual has to have a set of values to guide them in decision-making, and there are a bunch of great books about values-based decisions that are used in the business community which I think are interesting, but it resonates with military folks.

KEVIN MALONEY: I love the ARMOR magazine example and the open-ended way in which the editors would frame a scenario, putting the onus on the reader to grapple with the issue at hand.

Ethics demands the same of the individual. I view ethics not as a prescription for dealing with a certain dilemma but as more of an overarching framework to reach better, more responsible choices.

With that framing, I want to now turn to how you applied the aforementioned value system during your time as a senior leader in the Army. How did you specifically look to integrate values more deeply into the Army as an institution as a whole but also from the level of the individual soldier?

MARK HERTLING: After I came out of combat as a two-star general I was approached by my good friend General Marty Dempsey, who was also tapped to become the U.S. Training and Doctrine Command commander at Fort Monroe. He told me while I was still in combat: “Hey, I want you to come work for me. I’ve talked to the chief about it, and you are going to get promoted to three stars, and I’m going to put you in charge of a new organization called ‘Initial Military Training.’”

He said: “I want you to go there and figure out what we are doing in basic and advanced training.” This was in 2008 I guess. We had been at war for almost ten years, and he said, “I don’t know if I’m right or not, but my gut tells me that we need a revamp of our skills and our values,” and he specifically said those two things. When I got to the command I realized there were actually three things—skills, values, and physical preparation for combat—which were lacking.

We revamped the program of instruction. I will never forget a conversation I had with a group of drill sergeants about the number of things we were trying to teach in a ten-week period of time as part of the program of instruction. We had X number of hours available to train those topics, but we were training X + Y amount of—we were compressing.

I asked the question, “Well, what’s falling out?”

“Oh, no, we’re getting to everything.”

I said: “Well, that’s impossible, guys. If we’re saying that we’re training this much stuff but don’t have the hours dedicated to it, what are we missing? For example, how are we training values,” because there was a lesson plan on training the seven Army values that consisted of I think 18 hours of values training.

They said: “Well, we don’t really sit down with the new soldiers. We kind of let the drill sergeants just talk about the values as they head to the rifle range.”

I said: “Okay, wait a minute. Let me get this straight. We have hundreds of drill sergeants and each one of them is talking about their view of values, so we don’t have a standardized program to train them. Is that what you’re saying?”

They all shook their heads and said, “Yeah, that’s probably right.”

I said, “Well, let’s rework this and train”—and by the way, at the time we had had several incidents in combat that showed a lack of values by the individual soldiers. There was Abu Ghraib obviously and an incident everyone refers to as the “Black Hearts incident” of the 101st Airborne that raped a killed a bunch of Iraqi citizens, so we were not following our values.

What I asked the teams to do, and we worked together on this, was to take the seven Army values and take scenarios that apply them not just in combat but in non-combat situations, when guys are on base or female soldiers are doing something in the mess hall, and then thirdly apply it to their personal approach to life. We ran a couple of new programs and developed a series of scenarios and exercises, and we even had an application that you could put on a cellphone that talked about values that was put together by the Center for the Army Profession and Ethic up at West Point, and it seemed to generate a new interest in values.

KEVIN MALONEY: It is interesting for you to outline those efforts. I think it is very important to have values or ethics not be seen as something that is a burden or a training to get past but something that allows you to do your job better. At first glance it can seem like a burden, but it actually unlocks the ability to do your job better if you self-select into it in a good-faith way.

Another important thing you underlined is that when you came into the role the values training almost seemed like it was silo-ed off from the other two legs of the stool that were critical for this training, and you integrated that into not “now that you have finished one, go do the other one,” but understanding that these questions, especially in liberal societies and especially in democracies, the ability to reckon with values, question values, and to understand how they align with you personally and professionally is a massive value proposition to have in an open society.

MARK HERTLING: I will go you one further, Kevin. You used the term “silo-ed off.” I would almost say in some cases they were totally ignored. When they did come to the forefront it was because someone either reminded them of it or they went back and recounted what the values were. Just like all organizations there are big displays of “what our values are,” but no one really reflects on them.

What I then tried to do when I left Initial Military Training and went to command U.S. Army Europe, the cool thing about being the USAREUR commander is that we had our own TV station, and it was called the Armed Forces Network (AFN). Everybody hears about AFN because it broadcasts sports events, but we had continuous programming in Europe on AFN, and what was great about that was that, because there were no commercials, we were able to make our own public service announcements.

We started a series called “Army Values are My Values”—that was the tagline. We started doing these 30-second shots of different soldiers throughout Europe as a reminder to everyone that we live by our values and they help guide decision making and actions. I think it worked pretty well. I got a lot of comments from soldiers about it. Of course, some of them said, “Aw, these are hokey”—you would see a soldier walking around portraying duty or personal courage or something like that, but it is a constant reminder that we should be thinking of those things.

KEVIN MALONEY: I want to briefly return to this ARMOR magazine example from earlier. It is sticking with me. Again, I love how the writers would focus on a very tactical issue but end the article with an open-ended prompt, challenging the reader to critically engage on the specific question.

I think this goes to the heart of what applied ethics is for us at Carnegie Council. With ethics, whether it is within the context of military decision making or geopolitics, there is always going to be this spectrum of “good or bad” choices. The reflective life, as Socrates discusses, demands that you reckon not only with the initial choice but the consequences of that choice. Ethics is not some ivory tower philosophy or some punitive human resources standard that we need to follow, but it is the literal process, the examination of choice that creates the most value. Whether that is at the individual level of an enlisted individual in the Army, whether you work on Wall Street, or whether you are a schoolteacher, this framework can be applied across the board.

MARK HERTLING: Exactly right.

KEVIN MALONEY: I want to pivot back for a few moments to General Dempsey. In a recent piece that you wrote you quoted him directly, and he said:

“We are a professional force, and one of the elements of any profession is maintaining a strong ethos and a defined set of values. We are asking a lot of these young men and women in repeated and increasingly difficult combat environments. We would be doing them and our nation a disservice if we did not remind them of the historical principles, standards, and qualities that we consider essential.”

I would like to take that quote, which was originally offered by General Dempsey in the late 2000s and get your opinion on applying it to today’s current environment. How might the message resonate with today’s military, and what pressures are service members facing today that might feel unique to this moment?

MARK HERTLING: Wow. That’s a great question. By the way, I should say that General Dempsey is not only a professional mentor, but he is my best friend. We text each other almost on a daily basis, talking about things that are going on, especially in this area of professionalism, values, and what our nation should stand for.

Values become extremely important during the most troubling of times. When you are tossed around on a rough sea and the lightning is coming down on your small raft and you are really in trouble, it is easy to cave to the easiest approach to problem solving or standing for something. It is then that the embedding of values in maybe the more glorious of times really comes to the fray: Can you hold onto values when you are tested, when you are asked to stand for something, or when you are asked to remind others to believe what we truly say we believe and act on it? It is the proverbial Paine quote, “These are the times that try men’s souls.” The “sunshine patriots” go away. It is tough times that cause you to do something. That is sort of the situation we are in now.

What is interesting to me is what I learned at the National War College as a colonel—we have been talking about my younger days—and I never quite placed it this way is that our national values, what we believe in as a nation, should drive our policies, and our policies then drive our unique strategies as a nation, any nation, not just the United States but anywhere.

We often hear, “I stand for American values.”

“Really? What are they? Which ones do you stand for and which ones have you really”—going back to that magazine article, “What do you do now, lieutenant,” when those values are threatened? That is what should be driving your policies, which drive your national strategies.

One other thing I will point out. When I was commander in Europe whenever I would get together with one of our partner countries, and there are 49 of them in Europe, I would ask their chief or one of their soldiers: “What do you stand up and take an oath toward? What do you vow to defend?”

First of all, they normally would have to think about it, and then they would say, “Well, we vow to defend the fatherland” or the motherland or "El Presidente." In the case of Israel, you put yourself between the people and the sea. There is that inculcation of what you stand for as a military force if you are a professional.

I think we are one of the very few militaries in the world that raises our hands to swear to defend a piece of paper, which is pretty unique, and that piece of paper represents our values and who we are. That is the difference in many cases between what we do as a profession and what we might do as normal human beings; we vow to defend ideas.

KEVIN MALONEY: I was reading the other day an early piece by Hans Morgenthau right after World War II, in 1950. He talks about after the original founding generation you basically have a hundred years of isolationism from the United States, and he talks about it as a “foreign policy and a moral desert,” where we turned inward. We had this pivot post-World War II, and now we find ourselves in a place where there seems to be an attempt to pivot back to that but in a highly interconnected and technically aligned world.

My next question to you is in terms of the vision for the future of U.S. foreign policy, which used to be underpinned by what we would call at the Council a “moral principle of international cooperation.” I would love to get your thoughts on the temperature in the room right now: Are we on a pathway that is irreversible in that regard?

MARK HERTLING: I don’t think we are on an irreversible path. I know what I’m seeing is troubling because it does not seem to represent those values we say we believe in.

I wrote a piece about this. It isn’t just our values that are in the Constitution or the Declaration of Independence. We have had centuries of great people proclaiming what America stands for—FDR’s “four freedoms,” Kennedy’s inauguration address, Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech—people who have not only spoken but written about what we as a nation say we believe in and how it is reflected in what we do.

I will tell a brief story. I had a chance a couple of weeks ago to interview a guy who was a 1942 graduate of West Point. He was 103 years old, and he had the mind of a scientist. He was an engineer when he was in the service, retired major general, and literally was a lieutenant at Normandy, climbing Pointe du Hoc with the Rangers.

I asked him about his cadet days. He talked about something we don’t fully discuss in our history. He talked about the German American Bund before World War II and how strong it was in the United States in a very anti-Semitic way. He talked about the vote for the draft act, which passed by one senator. I didn’t know that. He was a cadet when all this happened, and he said, “I remember the front-page headlines distinctly.” Then he was working out in the gym as a cadet when Pearl Harbor was bombed, so all of these things reflected back to a time before the so-called “new world order.”

I asked him, “What did you think about all these things?”

He basically proclaimed, “We were somewhat morally bankrupt in our approach because of a few people who were guiding us”—he mentioned Lindbergh and a few others who were taking us down a dark path. We now have people guiding us in a similar direction, and I am not quite sure why unless it responds to or reflects a basic instinct that is not in line with what we say we believe as a nation. That is troubling to me.

KEVIN MALONEY: To me this alludes to a point that you brought up earlier, that in your early days in the military you had this institution or system of the military that was very top-down and regimented but also very pluralistic in nature. You can have both of these things, as we have seen in the United States, complement one another and actually produce something that is an incredibly powerful force in the world.

At the Council we think a lot about this reductionist or one-dimensional view of realism or power devoid of any moral considerations. In our view that has not been the history of the United States post-World War II, and it is something we are seeing a lot of conflation publicly now in terms of, “Well, we are putting the national interest first, and therefore we are prioritizing you.” It really goes against this vision of a values-based pluralistic society.

We talked a little bit about that from the domestic and military perspective, but I would like to pivot to the values question as maybe a value-add or something additive when you were doing your job at the most senior level of the military. When you were in Europe, in rooms with your counterparts, meeting politicians how was the values equation important when meeting people who are aligned with us, friends, or even adversaries outside of the United States?

MARK HERTLING: It also gets to the point of leadership. I think one of the principal values found in most of our founding documents as well as the speeches that have been given through the ages is the value of respect for one another. It is the understanding that each person is not judged on who their father was or what their upbringing was; they are judged on this, the “aristocracy of the mind,” as I once heard someone say. It is the value of the individual.

That is reflected in the value of respect. Incidentally, that is what leadership teaches, that in order to lead others and to influence them you have to see their point of view, you have to see who they are, and deal with them in either a harsh or more participative way.

When I was holding discussions I can tell you that many of our NATO members and many of our partners who were not part of NATO did not see the things we saw because of their particular national security requirements. A security requirement in Estonia is very different than it is in the United States. You have to see things from their perspective and then work another value which America claims, and that is compromise.

When you eliminate the respect for others, no matter who they are, and you eliminate compromise and trying to get to a middle ground where both people see the intrinsic value of what they are coming to in terms of a solution, that is goodness. That is how leaders lead. It isn’t an I-win-you-lose situation. It isn’t my approach versus yours. That is who we proclaim to be as Americans. I am trying to answer your question. I think that is the biggest thing that struck me as I was dealing with my colleagues and counterparts.

KEVIN MALONEY: I think it goes again to this idea of good faith and that you are entering a diplomatic engagement with the goal to create mutually beneficial outcomes and not purely as a vehicle to be coercive or to push somebody to do something.

I recently interviewed the UN ambassador from the Maldives, who touched on this point as well. You could not think about more different backgrounds and you and he, but there is this level of universality around mutual respect equals mutually beneficial outcomes. We can see it in his role at the United Nations, and we can see it in your role as the commander in Europe, so it is interesting to connect those dots.

At the Council we reject this idea of moral relativism and are constantly looking for a high level of universality in the human experience because that’s where we believe you can start the conversation. That doesn’t mean I am going to impose my values on you or I need to agree with you on anything, but these principles and concepts such as respect I keep finding pop up in these conversations, which gives me hope. It’s a good thing.

MARK HERTLING: I don’t know if you saw the article I wrote about applying the Army values approach by Americans to look at what our national values are because most people can’t name what our national values are. That is the first step, trying to figure out what your values are and, like you said a minute ago, writing them down on a piece of paper and then living by them.

I’ll tell you a quick story. I teach a bunch of MBA students leadership, and one of the first things we talk about is that as a CEO in an organization your organizational values should guide your approaches to problem-solving. They are all, “Yeah, yeah, that’s right, that’s exactly right.”

“You come from an organization. Tell me what your organizational values are,” and almost none of them can say what they are.

We then go into the drill of, “Well, what are your values?” It is actually a homework assignment.

They come back with a list, and I say: “Okay, great. You now have your values. Let’s put them to the test,” and what I do is give them four different scenarios that actually occurred in businesses here in Florida, and ask: “How do you react to this according to your values?”

Sometimes they realize that the values guide them and sometimes they find themselves wanting to do one thing where their values suggest they might do another. It is a very interesting dynamic to watch them fumble through this exercise.

KEVIN MALONEY: It is an interesting example. Whether it is in the private sector or political sphere, there is certainly a supply-and-demand issue right now regarding ethics. It is also becoming increasingly difficult to find like-minded individuals, not necessarily in terms of political affiliation or even cultural preferences. I define “like-minded” as individuals who want to engage in good faith. Are people willing to make the good-faith effort to ask questions and challenge ideas of values at this zero-sum, hyperpartisan, winner-take-all moment?

Even if the “ethics market” is dropping, this is a time I would argue—and I think the Council would argue—to go all-in on investing in values and investing in ethics. Any smart investor will tell you, as the trope is, that you invest in a market when it is at its low point.

As you said a few minutes ago, values become extremely important at the most troubling of times. I think this is an important framing for our listeners today.

MARK HERTLING: What is fascinating to me is that every challenge we have has to do with a violation of ethical standards. There used to be a chief of ethics at various political organizations. The keeper of ethics in various governmental organizations is usually the inspector general, who sees things for what they do as right or wrong, and many of those have been eliminated or ignored, and it is creating some of the problems we are experiencing.

KEVIN MALONEY: It is “death by a thousand cuts” in terms of this normative shift, and it goes back to something you talked about before in terms of leadership. It is something we are very focused on here.

It is the permission to behave in a certain way. You kind of skip the reflective part and you just look to the people in power and say, “Nope, that’s good,” then the needle keeps moving slowly, one at a time. There are these kinetic moments like January 6 that we can point to, but most of the time it is permission, dehumanization, and lack of shame that slowly moves things along.

One of the things I have been most concerned about is this generation of younger adults, the generation after me. All they have known is this dichotomy of Trump and Biden in the United States for basically over a decade. What does that do to the formation of a young person, and what is going to be the impact down the line, five or ten years from now?

MARK HERTLING: I believe one of the biggest challenges we face is the degrading of our institutions, which have worked for over 200 years, because different political masters and the misinformation/disinformation/malinformation campaigns have said these institutions are bad and the people running them are horrible and they are crooks and they are nasty.

What is interesting to me, having worked in government—I had this discussion with an individual who was on the other side of the aisle from me just the other day—what I would say is that most people wake up in the morning and go into their government jobs saying, “I want to do the best job I can.” Do they always do it? Of course not; none of us do, but people are trying to do what’s right if they are given the right direction, and yet there are many in our country right now who think our institutions are horrible, even to the point now where we think our military is bad because they are not as lethal as some people think they should be. I have to tell you, having spent the last 40 years in the military, it is pretty damn good. Does it have problems? Sure. All large organizations have problems, so you address those individual problems by trusting in the individuals who run the different organizations.

KEVIN MALONEY: Interestingly you had this very long and distinguished military career and then you actually went back to school to get a Ph.D. later in life. Now you are in more of a day-to-day role as an educator. Your thesis was focused on applying leadership lessons from the military to the healthcare industry.

Today you are engaging with professionals across industries and not just in healthcare. I guess your mission is that you are trying to place values at the center of this leadership equation. To ask bluntly, what is the private-sector appetite like right now for even wanting to have this values-focused conversation? Do you feel the private sector is being performative? Do you feel like you are getting good-faith engagement when you go to speak with these industries and companies?

Right now I think we are seeing the private sector tested like never before. These norms within the United States specifically between government and industry are starting to erode or shatter. Again, in the United States specifically, we are seeing the government attempting to exert greater control over higher education institutions and the legal industry. The list goes on. It seems that day-in and day-out we hear about something new. What is your diagnosis right now of the appetite for values and the relationship of values within the private sector?

MARK HERTLING: Based on the organizations I have talked with I think there is a desire by many CEOs in large organizations to do things like “get to yes”—that is the big topic—or “communicate better” or “lead during a crisis.” What I try to point out is that in every single containerized approach to something there is the requirement for: “What do you believe in? How do you want to act?” For leadership in a crisis, the first thing you have to rely back on is what do you believe in, what will you stand for, what kinds of approaches will you take?

There is a lot of business research that says the majority of businesses fail because of a lack of communication within the organization. Okay, well, lack of communication is a direct reflection of what we talked about a minute ago, respect for one another: Who else needs to know? How do you get them that information? How do you communicate? All of those things go back to behaviors, attributes, and competencies that help an organization flourish, and when you find really good organizations what you normally see is good communication, respect for each other, and diversity of views. All of the things that some would say might be “woke” are just good business practices.

I was asked to give a keynote address at a very large organization—which I won’t name because everyone would recognize it—and I asked a bunch of the C-suite managers in the front row, “What are your organizational values?” As we talked about before, they didn’t know.

One guy finally said: “It’s not all that important. They’re on our website, so most of our employees know what they are.”

I said: “Yes, that’s true. They are on your website because I did a little research before giving this speech, and in fact they are on your website three different times, and in each one of those proclamations of what your values are there are three different sets of values.”

It is that kind of ignoring of behaviors that I believe, in speaking to different audiences, opens their eyes to say, “Hey, we’ve got to be more reflective.” Leadership is a lot more than just the name on your door or the parking spot outside of your office; it is about providing the example and the behaviors that help other people generate trust in what you are doing.

KEVIN MALONEY: The narratives for substance, the communications debate is interesting in terms of what is effective. In my own research on narratives something that has spoken to me is this idea of socialization. If you hear something, if something is said to you by your boss, or if you get an email, what is the actual empirical measurement of that being absorbed if you feel confident enough to bring this up at a bar or around the dinner table with your family, or to talk to your kids about it. It is the level of socialization and personalization that is now rooted within you. It is not just an email you got.

I think that is very difficult to measure. I don’t think we can sit in people’s homes and do that, but it was a light-bulb moment for me when I thought more about not just the formation and projection of the message but how you really measure the impact of that message. It obviously needs to be underlined by something that is substantive, but I think a lot about that, especially in terms of trying to get this concept of ethics out there in a way that is digestible and understandable.

MARK HERTLING: You bring up a good point. We have a phrase in the military, “The audio doesn’t match the video,” what the person is saying does not match their actions, the walk doesn’t match the talk.

It gets to the point when you are talking about values, ethics, and good leadership, in all my days I have come to conclude that one thing that is very important is that a good leader is reflective of a good person. If you are not a good person, you are probably not going to be a good leader. That comes first, and being a good person requires the things that we’re talking about, the values, the ethos, and the actions toward others. That is my conclusion as an old guy.

KEVIN MALONEY: There is wisdom there. We need to focus more on wisdom and getting that out into the world versus the quick endorphin hit of the latest piece of disinformation or misinformation while you are scrolling. We like to take the slowdown approach here at Carnegie Council. We will die on that hill. I think it has a lot of value added.

Just to close, I want to talk about the general moment in terms of this public space that we are in. The media ecosystem and public space ecosystem seem to be prioritizing emotion and passion and de-prioritizing other areas, what we might term empirical argument or fact-based argument.

You were both in the media space and the military space for many years. Could you maybe talk about this dynamic currently and what you see as a prescription or antidote in how you might want to address this?

MARK HERTLING: That is a great question because I think we are in the opinion and belief stage as opposed to inculcating what Aristotle called “logos, pathos, and ethos,” using logic, reason, and passion in terms of forming an argument.

There is an anti-intellectual base saying that facts don’t matter and it is only what you believe, and I think that is dangerous. As someone who has spent a life in the military, if I only did things that my gut told me to do—especially if my staff was telling me, “Hey the logic or the reason we’re doing this is X and Y,” which would shape my opinion—I would have found myself in a lot of very difficult and losing situations, yet that is what we seem to be gravitating toward in our country, that opinions matter more than facts, that emotions matter more than logic, and that being an intellectual is elite, and we don’t think about the repercussions of those kinds of arguments.

It is fascinating to me that it goes back to our values question, “What do you respect?” Do you respect someone who is thinking through a problem and trying to analyze it and come to a logical and pragmatic solution, or are you just wanting to talk to individuals who have the same opinions and emotions that you have and damn the other side?

There is also a human nature piece to this. I know I am guilty of it though I try not to be, but I make value judgments based on opinions people give me that are not based in logic or fact. If it is only opinions, then you question, “Well, what makes you believe that?”

They say, “Because I heard it here” or “I read it in this” extreme newspaper or whatever.

Then you say, “Okay, I am unfortunately losing a little bit of respect for you,” and that runs contrary to what one of my values is, respect for other people.

I have trouble and have to fight my way through that, and I have to knock myself across the forehead and say, “Let’s approach this in a different way.” I think that is critically important in today’s environment.

KEVIN MALONEY: I think that is a great place to end, but before we do I want to underline an idea you alluded to, which is that our ecosystem right now is de-prioritizing values, fact-based argument, and even ethical reflection. Even for somebody who wants to be more ethically reflective and who wants to make a good-faith effort our political and social environment is making this incredibly challenging. So much of the reward structure in society right now is organized around this idea of aggrievement and “winning” while simultaneously de-prioritizing the concept of universality in the human experience and even fact-based arguments or forums or civic spaces to express that.

I think working to improve this dynamic can be a good North Star for our listeners, and the tools and experiences that you have shared with us today, Mark, are certainly going to be helpful in that regard. Thank you so much on behalf of all of our listeners and Carnegie Council. We appreciate you joining us on today’s episode of Values & Interests.

MARK HERTLING: It was a pleasure and a great conversation. Thanks, Kevin, for having me. I appreciate it.