Independence Day – 2019

Surfactants Blog - Independence Day 2019

Happy Independence Day! I’ve written this before, but I love it so much, here it is again. Today is right up there with Christmas, Easter, Passover et al for me. Honestly, I woke up this morning with genuine excitement, like a kid anticipating presents. Today it was announced, to a candid world, that all men are created equal. Stop and think about that. A radical idea for the time and in fact, still radical in many parts of the world today. Now, certainly you could argue that the idea was not new in 1776 and that the Hebrew scriptures, the new testament and other texts had asserted much the same thousands of years prior. But here was a rebel bunch of colonies standing up to the world’s superpower and saying something that surely resounded through the palace of Westminster and beyond. You can imagine the great and the good, the crowned heads of Europe, spitting out their port, exclaiming “all men are created .. what!?!? – you gotta be kidding me!”. Outrage, mirth, contempt, maybe a little prescient dread formed regarding this radical concept dumped, like a rotting fish, into their well ordered drawing rooms.

Every Independence Day in my little town here in New Jersey, we gather in front of the town hall to read the declaration. About 120 people each get a part to read in front of the crowd, in sequence. As usual, I was given the part about “The history of the present king of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations….”, the British accent forming an amusing contrast to the meaning of the sentence. Great fun, patriotism, civic sharing and a nice example for the many youngsters there. This year, about a hundred motorbikes roared through town to join us. Freehold police closed off a few streets to facilitate their passage and the NJ Transit bus to New York, just had to wait. Loud, a little startling, reeking of individualism and a bit incongruous; just like America, at least in my view as a 35 year immigrant. Something (someone) else that I always thought was just like America- Lee Iacocca. He died on Wednesday and the WSJ published a superb obituary. My favorite line was a quote from Iacocca’s less known book published in 2007, in which he offered opinions on the quality of political leadership at the time. “Stay the course? You’ve got to be kidding. This is America, not the damned Titanic….” .

Anyway, here’s the thing about the declaration. As a political communiqué, they really could have skipped the second paragraph and gone straight from “Hey we’re declaring independence..” to the “here’s why” which is the laundry list of abuses and usurpations which forms the bulk of the rest of the document. Instead, some collective genius caused the second paragraph to be inserted, which goes all the way back to first principles. All men are created equal. Fantastic right. Truly brilliant for the reasons we know today. But it’s more than that. They could have said something like “Our new government will treat men as being created equal” or maybe “From now on, under our new system, all men are created equal” and any one of a number of statements of policy and that would have been just fine. And we would still celebrate July 4th. Instead, though they went back to the beginning for a truth. And they didn't even discover this truth or deduce it or invent it. They just held it to be self-evident and that’s it, that all men are created equal, since the beginning of time, now and for evermore. This fundamental truth along with the unalienable rights with which men are endowed by their creator, (not by their new rulers or by some evolution of society) requires certain standards for how governments are instituted among men. Given that King George had fallen short of these standards, then a change was needed. Then on to the abuses and usurpations which underline exactly how and how far, the king had fallen short. To me this paragraph ensures that the declaration, while very specific in its enumerations, is in fact a transcendent event that speaks to truths which have nothing to do with the time, 1776, the place, Philadelphia, or the politics of what was happening. Just like Christmas or Easter or Passover.

Here’s the other thing. This could just as easily been a declaration of war and, de facto, maybe it was. But there was no hint of contempt or even enmity. No pledges to rid the world of the British blight or to stamp out imperialism. Just a commitment to hold them (the British) “as we hold the rest of mankind, enemies in war, in peace, friends.” So, basically just saying that – if you guys want to get on board, then great, we’re not going to exact revenge on you for this long train of abuses. You know if you want to join us in conducting your affairs in line with this eternal truth we’ve been talking about, then cool; we’re friends. This to me is more evidence of the transcendent nature of the event. On one level – “we’ll fight you if we have to” and clearly there was plenty of fighting and heroism along with it. On another level the message was “here’s an eternal and fundamental truth about human existence. You guys might want to think about that, because, you know, you’re humans too!”. Not exactly trash-talking. Pretty radical.

So, what does this have to do with surfactants? Everything. Trade is the great democratizer. It’s quite interesting right? Because money can be really dirty and some horrible things are done to get it. However, your money is just as green as mine and it doesn't matter who or what you are, if you have the cash and I have the goods, we’ll find each other and transact and maybe even form a relationship which lasts for years. I talk a lot in my conferences this year about the think-say-do alignment. It sounds trite but it’s pretty hard to do consistently and that’s because you (and I) are barely in control of what we think, say and do, for starters. And that’s because we’re humans. We have, among other things, an autonomic nervous system that controls things we are completely unaware of (by definition – the things we do unconsciously). We have conscious and unconscious minds. We have dreams and emotions, many barely controlled. We worry about the future; heck we even worry about the past. Figure that one out. We can hardly understand our own thoughts, actions and motivations let alone someone else’s. Despite all that we accomplish a lot. When two companies do business with each other; it’s one bunch of humans with, in the case of the chemical industry, a load of expensive kit, trying to create value by trading with another bunch of humans. All the while acting in their own collective interest, and individual interest, competing with each other for money, status and pride, playing favorites and keeping grudges, reacting impulsively, subconsciously and trying to look good doing it. Oh and worrying aout the mortgage and tuition and car payments and the girl at the gym and are these shoes OK for work. In short, acting like humans. Ha! What could possibly go wrong? A lot and it sometimes does. What’s amazing to me is how much goes right – very right – most of the time. In fact things go incredibly right incredibly often and incredible things result. Insanely complex supply chains and technological marvels, and beauty; every single day. How come? I think because at the basic, trading level, humans interact with humans with the underlying assumption that we’re all created equal. Not that we all are equal, but created equal. It’s something that when it’s tacitly agreed between individuals and groups, the greatest things are accomplished. The less that view holds the more difficult and less efficient trade becomes between people who don’t respect and trust each other and you end up like, say, Soviet Russia or North Korea. Stilted. A spring, never stretched. Rusted over. Unfulfilled potential.

The people who wrote the declaration were clearly intellectual giants and who knows whether they really intended to write something so profound and timeless, but they did. For that, we should be grateful perhaps even just slightly more so than for the creation of the country built on the document.

That’s it for today’s blog. We’ll publish another one for the last month that actually does deal with the surfactants news.

In the meantime, here’s a couple of talented human beings with their rendition of the Star Spangled Banner.

And one of Dr. Who’s many commentaries on humans which I really like. Skip to 3:16 if you don’t want to watch the whole thing.

And Dr. Who on human life