This has been a watershed week for sexism and Silicon Valley. The New York Times published a searing article implicating well known VCs in harassing behavior. It feels like the culmination of a years-long effort spearheaded by Sarah Lacy, whose relentless reporting helped lead to the resignation of the CEO of the most valuable private company in tech as well as the dismantling of a VC firm.
For men in tech, it’s been a good week to reflect on the injustices done to women, to think about the women in these stories and the women in our own lives. A focus on the women’s perspectives is clearly the most necessary, just and safest line of introspection. This post is not for people who haven’t undertaken that line of thought. This post is about the men.
Chris Sacca and Dave McClure are two of the men highlighted (lowlighted?) in the Times. Each responded with a well-written admission of guilt. Sacca said “I am sorry” five times in a single post. McClure admitted “I’m a creep.” I’ve seen two kinds of responses to these mea culpas:
Group 1: “This is a transparent PR move. These guys are only interested in saving their own skins. They don’t deserve praise for coming clean after being exposed, and the actions they’ve taken in their ‘woke’ stage will never be enough to clean their record. People don’t change, they are what they did.”
Group 2: “Kudos to these guys for coming clean. It takes some bravery to face the crowd, to admit what you did, to make a public statement about your efforts to do better. Everyone makes mistakes, it’s the rare few who can improve upon their past. People can change, there’s no hope for any of us if that’s not true.”
Group 1 is right … and so is Group 2. The day I write my admission of guilt, even if only to myself, it will be driven by this truth: You can’t change who you are, you can only change your reaction to it.
You are what you’ve done, full stop. You might think that there’s more to it, that your own private thoughts count for something, that the high opinion of your loving friends and family mean something, that the dollars and ratings and likes and tweets show the true score. But no. You are what you’ve done, that’s it. And you can’t change what you’ve already done.
Everyone has done bad things. When we do bad things, we often want to believe that they’re not so bad, that they’re not consistent with our “true” character, that we somehow can make up for it in other ways. This kind of self-denial, of course, allows us to continue doing bad things. I’d argue further that this self-denial leaves us with little choice other than to continue doing bad things.
Being a good person is about choice, for most of us. If you are someone who has just always been a good person, who’s never done wrong, who’s always been on the side of the angels – well, I think you’ve probably just been lucky in this regard, if unlucky in others. You had good parents, good friends, good influences. You’ve never been tempted by sex or power or money or fame. But you’ve lived a life outside of the more typical human condition.
Once you’ve done something bad, your options typically diminish: you can only feel guilt and shame, or denial. You would think that a “good” person would choose guilt and shame – but that’s just as dangerous as denial! Guilt and shame lead to self-flagellation, often self-medication, and ultimately to an amplification and repetition of the behaviors that led to the bad actions.
It may seem perverse, but accepting your faults gives you more options for how to react in any situation. If you can accept what you’ve done, accept that it’s who you are, you are more free to choose how to react to it. You don’t have to choose the cover-up, you don’t have to choose to deny it, you don’t have to choose to ignore it. You are much more free to address it, and to make a different choice in the future.
I think that’s what Sacca and McClure are doing in their posts; they are publicly accepting who they are, and trying to make choices in the harsh light of that reality. Is it self-interested? Yes. Is it brave? Yes. I know that some people reading this are going to think I’m going all Stuart Smalley, and I get it. That’s their choice. You can’t change who you are.
ginsudo 