Speaking and Communicating Podcast

Does government have influence on people?

I think they do.

I think you have no choice for government to have influence on people, because they hold power for us to tax us, throw us in jail, to take away our freedom.

You can't avoid that power that they have to be able to do that.

So I don't think that they can lose their influence because they just have those tools at their disposal.

Welcome back to the Speaking and Communicating Podcast.

I am your host, Robert Angela.

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Now let's get communicating.

Now let's get communicating with Damien Dubose.

Damien Dubose from Washington.

He is America's Ethical Archetype.

He is so passionate and is on a mission to teach us how to be more ethical, especially raising the next generation of ethical leaders.

And before I go any further, please welcome him to the show.

Hi, Damien.

Hey, how are you doing?

I'm doing fantastic.

Thank you for having me.

My absolute pleasure.

Thank you for being here.

Please introduce yourself to our listeners.

Hello, I'm Damien Terrence Dubose, financial professional.

You all got something doing it.

Wow.

First time author compelled to write this book.

I'm originally from Baltimore, Maryland, reside in DC right now.

Yeah, this is just a subject that I have gotten, wouldn't say thrown in, but just drawn to over some time.

So just interesting to me and something that I'm very passionate about.

I'm intrigued by two things.

One, obviously the fact that you focus on ethics, but you have a financial background and you focus on ethics.

That's very interesting.

How did that come about?

Honestly, I look at financial concepts as very fundamental concepts to society.

I look at it as value exchange.

So a lot of what I talk about in the book is about value exchange.

It's a lot about how people perceive the world, but also with those concepts that we derive to interact with each other and how to actually make it objective in a certain way.

So at its base, at its root, I do look at financial concepts in that way.

And I think that's a lot of what financial professionals do, is try to create objective value exchange, a means of measuring with how people trade with each other.

It's not just about goods and services to me.

Which as the general public, that sometimes has not been an experience.

If you look at the financial meltdown of 2008, that's why I say you have a financial background, but you talk about ethics.

It seems it's the opposite of that.

At least that's how we perceive the financial industry.

I would say that there's no one way to categorize the full financial industry, I guess.

A lot of what I talk about in my book is just an approach to life.

And there are different approaches to life.

And what I tried to do with that is to use one psychological system and one philosophical system to try to tease out and show the nuances and the different ways that people approach life and perceive life.

For some people, they make decisions in a very specific way, and other people may not make decisions in that same way.

And so those differences can cause a lot of friction because people aren't necessarily seeing the world in the same way and we are making decisions in different ways.

That can kind of cause some of that perception of people being unethical or taking advantage of others at times.

Which is what you talk about when you say it's the intersection between philosophy and psychology.

Yes, I mean, I took two specific systems, one psychological system and one philosophical system.

And I just used it as a means to understand.

The philosophical system is pretty straightforward, it's kind of black and white.

But the psychological system, it gives more nuance, just to show how different people perceive the world and make decisions.

Now, let's talk about ethics.

When I started working in the 90s, even the workplace's ethics have changed drastically.

How corporate was 30 years ago is a whole different story now.

Right.

What would you describe as ethical behavior?

For me, the way that I approach ethics is very central to government, government and American politics.

What I would say is just the moral behavior between human beings, between one human being and another.

That's how I would really categorize it.

And the reason why I look at it from a political government standpoint, is because we have to have those foundations, those guidelines in society to be able to interact with each other, and also to be pure chaos.

So it's a little bit different than I would say in business, because people can leave a company.

If you don't like how the company is doing business, people might have a certain perception or way that they go about business that you might not agree with.

But for a country, we kind of have to come together under some basic moral ethical principles to be, I guess, just.

Do you think when looking at government as well now versus a few decades ago, is it starting to lose a bit of its influence on people?

Or is government still as influential as it was back then?

It's just that they seem to not influence us in the direction that some of us hope they would be going.

I don't know if I would say that they had as much influence.

I'm thinking that maybe you mean that people have more trust in government back then.

I'm not sure.

So what I kind of put forth in the book is just that government takes the path that it's on and the direction that it's gone over the past, I don't know, 150 plus years in the country.

It intrudes more and more on the individual over that period of time.

What I think that does is that kind of destroys people's ability to make decisions for themselves.

I'm more of a small government person.

In the book, I present the reasoning behind that.

Does government have influence on people?

I think they do.

I think you have no choice before government to have influence on people because they hold power for us to tax us, throw us in jail, to take away our freedom.

So you can't avoid that power that they have to be able to do that.

So I don't think that they can lose their influence because they just have those tools at their disposal when dealing with civilians.

The reason I asked the question is because I don't know if it's more because we live in the information age, so we have more exposure to what they do and we get the news in real time versus back then.

Speaking of ethics, we seem to have the perception now that they seem to be less ethical than they used to be.

They get voted in by the people, we think, oh, they're going to surpass the people.

But now is it still ethically seeming like it still is the government of the people?

Yeah, I mean, on both of those points, I think you're right on the first point.

It's just technology changes everything.

It gives us so much information, so much stuff to process.

And so it changes how we perceive everything, just with all of the information that we have access to now.

But also the perspective that I take is that truthfully, the government may be intruding in places where they shouldn't be.

And I try to lay out that case in the book.

Hopefully I did it effectively.

It's just that the things that we have to do for ourselves, because the government is supposed to secure our opportunity to go out and live our lives and do what we need to do, or do what we want to do.

That's the stuff that we make our life from, our adversity that we have to work through, our ups and downs, all of those things, our families and everything.

And really the government's job is to protect us so we don't have to defend ourselves against people coming into our homes or destroying our communities or having us at war all of the time.

So we can go out and pursue our own goals.

And that's their core main job.

I talk a lot about collectivism in the book.

They perceive that they're supposed to be doing things for the people, but you have to get resources from one group, distribute it to other groups.

So who makes that decision?

Who's supposed to do that?

Or which groups do we take from?

Which group do we give to?

And that's always going to be the question.

For the benefit of our listeners, please elaborate on the idea of collectivism and how government, how they use that as a principle.

I don't know if America has it as a specific principle.

I think that it's kind of grandfathered in.

And I talk about the old way of thinking and collective primitive mindsets and how it kind of grandfathers in with all of us.

I mean, we all have a perception that we are all one in some ways, or your family is all one.

That's kind of the way that we bond with each other in many ways, different communities.

And there may be things that we feel are true or believe are true about each other that we all have to do individually.

We have to make individual decisions.

We may think that, oh, we're all supposed to take care of the world or take care of everyone, and that's our duty.

I make the argument that that's not your duty.

That's your choice, and that's what makes you an individual.

If you want to do things for others, that's your choice, and you should accept it as a choice, but not as a duty.

So, those are some of the core ideas that I try to pull apart within the book, and just show, you know, the track of how we came to become individuals, cycle out what Young would call psychological individuals over time.

That is what I've observed.

I'm not from here, so I've only been here for about four years.

And compared to my country, South Africa, here, it tends to be very individualistic.

That makes sense to me.

Obviously, you know, your individual and personal freedoms, the life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness and all that.

Yes, I understand that.

And you need your individual freedom to live life the way that you choose.

Right.

But at the same time, that's why I was quite interested when you mentioned collectivism, because to me, from an outsider's point of view, it seems as though because of the Constitution and how government is structured, that's the lifestyle that gets promoted, or am I wrong?

I don't know if most people perceive it that way, but I would agree with you on that.

That is its purpose, I would think.

That's the argument that I put for, is that is its purpose.

That you should enjoy your individual freedoms.

Yes.

To elaborate on that just a little bit.

Okay.

It's a mind shift for a lot of people.

What I put the basis for this mind shift is, everything should be based upon your choice.

So it doesn't mean that you don't care about your community.

It doesn't mean that you don't care about your family.

It just means that you would never do these things because you feel like it's your duty.

You do these things because you choose to do them.

You see the world in a totally different way when you operate on choice.

Because choice is what makes you an individual.

You have to use your personal judgment.

It's not just, oh, this is the traditions that I have to adhere to.

Because I meet a lot of people who go to work and say, oh, I have to go to work.

Or you don't have to go to work.

You don't have to do these things.

Or I have to do this for my family.

I have to do this for my mother.

You don't have to choose to do these things.

If you love a person, if you really want to care for them, you make the choice to love on that person, I guess, for lack of a better word.

But just taking that different mindset is what makes you an individual to make those personal choices for yourself.

And so your government should facilitate that kind of environment.

Now, when you wrote the book America's Ethical Archetype, what was the purpose or in whose hands were you hoping the book would land in order to create this transformation?

The book is made for conceptual thinkers, people deeply concerned about morality, and people who were perceiving something was going wrong in the country, but just couldn't quite put their finger on it.

But a little deeper than that, I think I wanted to reach out to people who had a understanding or some kind of base grasp of right and wrong, or perception of it, or sense of that life, and didn't want to hear that story told in spiritual or religious senses or means.

I wanted to talk to them in a philosophical, strictly intellectual argument, and that's what I attempted to do, is just to take everything down to a fundamental basis, and say, this is what makes a thing good, this is what makes a thing bad.

Just to have that type of ethical conversation with them, devoid of any spirituality or religion, anything like that.

And you did say that you don't think religion and tradition are effective, basically, in driving morality.

Why do you say that?

Because they don't operate on choice.

They don't operate on you choosing for yourself.

They operate on things that you may not be able to perceive, but you have to take the words of others.

I wouldn't say that I believe that spirituality or religion has a place necessarily, but I would say traditions make sense to me.

Traditions, they're a means to let your brain rest, I guess I would say.

You know, because I read a book after I completed my book.

It was called The Power of Habit.

And it was just talking about how they did an experiment with a mouse.

I think they were checking the brainwaves of the mouse, and they would let the mouse figure out where the cheese was or wherever the food was.

And at first, when the mouse didn't know where the food was, you can see his brainwaves were working a lot.

But once he got into the routine to know that the food was in the same place, they saw that the brain activity went down.

But when they changed the placement of the food, the brain activity had to go back up because you had to think again.

And so the point that I'm just trying to make is that traditions allows you to say, oh, I know how to do this thing.

I don't have to think about it very much, and I can let my brain relax.

Now, if I had to wake up every day and to figure out where I am, where I'm going, a new situation every day, that would just be so taxing on us as human beings.

That's why we try to simplify in some way.

So I understand tradition, but if we were to take that understanding and understand explicitly and say, hey, this is what it does for us, but this is not a means to knowledge.

This is not how we evolve.

This is not how we get better.

This is not how we know things.

It's just as a means to give us some reprieve from our day-to-day decisions and making that we have to do.

I hear your point on that when it comes to religion and tradition, but you also said intuition.

I would not have categorized intuition into the religion and tradition aspect, because those are kind of set rules, so to speak.

Whereas intuition is more ongoing and situational.

So why did you put intuition into the same category of religion, and tradition and intuition don't seem to be as effective when it comes to morals and ethics?

I think that's kind of specific to the system that I use.

I use Jungi and Carl Jung's psychological types for the basis for the psychological piece of my book.

And he delves a lot into what he calls sensation and intuition, which they both come up into perception, but they kind of both intuition in a sense to me.

But it's not a means to knowledge.

Like we all use intuition.

We all have to use it at some point in time, but it doesn't prove anything for us.

It's just a best guess.

That's the only thing that it is.

And so if we're going to set out a pathway that we can have a country of 300 million plus people, we just can't all be using intuition to come out with these guidelines for ethics.

Damien, I did not see you go in that direction.

That's kind of my point.

You know, it's just we have to be more thorough to be more loving and caring for people.

People at their base, people will do what they feel like they need to do for themselves, if they are using those methods of going through life.

And they will forget about other people.

But if you plan it out, you figure out what's possible, what's not possible, you think about it and you use your judgment in that long-range type of way, that's superior to intuition and structuring an ethical framework.

The choice and the ethics.

Now, let's talk about, you said you want to transform governance and education if a school curriculum was being designed and they want to teach morals and ethics.

Based on what's currently being taught, what do you think is missing?

I mean, for number one, I don't think that they teach it from an individualistic standpoint.

We could start everything from there because I think that's where morality comes from.

Our independent individual look at the world.

I think if we start there, because I'm more of a fundamentalist, then there would be a lot of parts that we don't miss or skip or gloss over.

And to give an example of that, one part I wrote about in the book is just that I associate collective thinking with what they call concrete thinking as well in the book.

And a lot of people have pulled another concept from another book, Seven Habits, Highly Effective People.

Covey.

Oh yeah, exactly.

He talks about the circle of influence versus the circle of concern.

And so people deal a lot in that area of circle of concern, where they don't necessarily have influence.

But that circle of influence is what, that's how you get your feedback loop because you have to make decisions, succeed or fail, and then adjust after that.

But when this becomes your circle of concern, you're not always directly connected to those outputs or those things that you may be concerned with.

I mean, I will take social media as an example.

I mean, a lot of people are concerned with what people are saying on social media.

People that you've never met, you've never seen ever in your life.

And they have such a bearing on your life.

It really is not within something that you can control, it's something that you can use to feed your life, to nourish yourself.

That's just one example.

So that also feeds into your moral standpoints.

And how you choose the circle of influence versus the circle of concern.

Correct.

Because one has actual meaning to you.

One you have to deal with.

Your day to day life, you have to eat, you have to make, you have to figure out where you're going to stay, you have to figure out who you're going to be around.

The other one is just more of a, I am concerned about this thing that has no bearing on my life.

Or it's only a perceived bearing on my life, which it sets you on the wrong path.

And I go through a lot throughout the book just to show the differences of what I guess what I would call an extroverted mentality, which Young introduces as well.

Say it's similar to, probably the reference to second-handedness or vicariousness.

Value is outside of myself.

I don't create my own value.

Value just exists in the world, which is a falsehood.

It certainly is.

So how do you raise ethical leaders, future ethical leaders?

I think you start with the basics.

Let people have the consequences of their own decisions.

And when you don't allow people to fail and bounce back and rebound and build that tough skin or build that resiliency, then we're crippling our next generation of people.

That's how I see it.

Because that's what you need.

That's what makes up a life.

That's what makes your decision making better.

That's what gives you the experience that you need to develop and get better.

You have to have those moments.

Every successful person that I've ever known has had to fail and then overcome failure.

That's a necessary part of life.

But if we don't ever let people fail, we say that everything, we're going to save you here and save you there.

That's just not a realistic outcome.

I think that's the basics.

Just teach them how to be individuals.

Teach them how to make decisions.

Teach them those decision-making strategies from a young age.

Then I think it will just kind of exponentially develop over time more and more.

Do you think that there are currently US government policies that do just that, not give people a chance to experience their own consequences?

Yes.

Please give an example.

An easy example might be entitlement programs, any type of entitlement program.

And once again, I spoke with someone before the media things like, well, what do we do about these people?

And my response is, the government doesn't make any money.

If they don't take it from you, you're free to help whoever you want to help.

So people think that the government makes money somehow, and then we could just dole it out anyway, or we get it from rich billionaires and whatever people think about that.

It's just that, yes, allow people to make decisions.

Hey, you made me somebody, I made me somebody, and I have a belief in that person, and they need some help.

Okay, then that's part of my journey to help them, to take my resources that I worked hard for and share with them or invest in them, and I actually get the benefit that I would call, quote, unquote, deserving of actually having that personal interaction with that person and the emotional benefit of helping that person develop, or maybe they don't.

But that was what I felt like I wanted to do, and it came out of my pocket, it came out of my time, came out of my energy, so I get to enjoy that experience selfishly.

When you talk about religion and tradition, especially religion, sometimes the argument is religion uses fear to force people to be moral and ethical.

The fear of a burning hell and Satan will poke you with a fork, whatever it is that we were talking about.

It's the fear, not just religion, but even politically where they use fear to try and make people abide by the laws of the land.

I mean, I would definitely say that I agree in religion.

I think that the world is a safer place because some people do experience that fear.

I don't think that that's the best way to do it, but I think it's a safer place.

My issue with government is they don't have a strict standard like maybe a religion might be, because I grew up as a Christian.

They were strict standards.

I guess they probably are local.

It depends on what group you're in, denomination, what area or wherever.

I'm pretty sure that they're a little different everywhere you go.

But the government, American government, what principle can they unify us under?

What could they say is good?

Because even in the book, I just talk about how there are different approaches to good.

People have different ways to understand what good is.

So to give an example, some people may say, like I say, what's good is good for the individual.

And then there's an opposite point of view where other people will say, no, what's good is good for the collective.

Those are two antithetical points of view.

So which point of view does the government take?

Now, I could say that America does take the point of view of what's good for the individual, but I don't think that they actually practice it.

But I think that that's behind all of this.

I don't know if I would call it rhetoric, but when we say we're never going to be a socialist country, that's behind that type of talk, that kind of loose association with individualism, even though we don't necessarily practice it all the time.

Yeah, the word socialist gets thrown around this country, but we're not going to get into that.

Because here's the reason I ask the question when you talk about fear.

I remember when my mom was raised, so before she married my dad and had us, when she was raising us, she used to say, when she made a mistake, my grandma, her mom, who was very loving but also a big disciplinarian, if you do something wrong, she just slap you.

And it used to make my mom very angry, because my mom would say, had she explained to me how to do that, for instance, if you're chopping, she's like, chop onions, I'm going to start cooking dinner, okay?

There's different ways to chop onions depending on what you're cooking.

Sometimes you chop them as round circles.

Sometimes you chop them in little pieces.

Sometimes you chop them in different whatever shapes, right?

So, my grandma wouldn't be specific in her instructions to my mom.

My mom just chops them like, she's two little pieces, she's cooking curry.

And the next thing, my grandma's like, I'm going to drink or whatever it is.

And my mom would think, obviously, she wouldn't talk back, African parent, hello.

So, however, my mom, she said, I used to say to myself, when I get married and have kids, my kids will be smart enough for me to teach them one.

They'll be smart enough to know that if I say this, they will follow through.

And secondly, my kids will be critical thinkers, and they will understand choice and consequence.

Slapping us and making us be afraid was not good, because she grew up like that.

She said, this is not, I'm not going to do this.

My kids are going to be smart enough for me to have a conversation with them.

And I remember my brother and I used to say, my mom never beat us, nothing.

She used to talk to us like smart kids, like grownups.

And I remember my brother and I used to say, here's the funny thing about the way Uma is raising us.

When I'm away from her, it's not that I'm afraid if I do something wrong that she'll beat me.

It's not the fear.

It's the disappointment that doing so well as a parent, I still go wrong and understanding the consequences as well.

But it's that she instilled those values in us so much so that it's not that we chose not to do wrong out of fear.

That's good.

It's because you understood the consequences and you just thought, after the way Uma explains everything to us and I still do this, come on, I'm better than, you know what I mean?

Like that disappointed, you think I'm beyond saving.

How, after all this brilliant parenting, I'm still a mess, you know?

So she didn't use the fear tactic she was raised with.

That's good.

And I think that's an evolution.

I think that's kind of like how we've come along as people.

That's the journey that I take people along in the book, I think.

I mean, look, when we started to think about cavemen and what did they know?

They had to develop some type of ways to calm down the world so they can get some kind of safety, you know?

And I understand older methods, but I'm appreciative that your mother approached it the way that she approached it because what she did, like you said, judgment and choice, an easy saying that I heard is kind of like, you know better, you do better.

When you learn these things, when people actually explain them to you, when they don't just expect you to know them, because that's part of the collective mind that I talk about.

In the past, people had different opinions.

It's just that we all knew what we were supposed to do when you just do it without even communicating and stuff.

And so now, in your situation, yes, teach your kids, tell them the reason.

And I guess this is the part of random objectivism that I bring in, because her basis for everything is reason.

Give people reasons, help them.

Help them understand why we are doing these things.

Because if you have traditions devoid of reason, then you don't really understand anything.

You're just being obedient.

And that's what you are in fear.

Fear is what's going to drive that obedience instead of understanding.

Which is how we explained religion earlier.

At least those of us who are raised Christian, that's how we were made to act right.

That's what drives me right now is just to take, to have this idea of what I call America 2.0, is to take us from that world that you just described to the new world where this is what we need to explicitly do.

Tell people the reasons for why you're doing.

Communicate.

Communicate those reasons.

Understand those reasons.

Make choices and also understand it with every choice is a consequence.

Right.

Actually, that's what they say.

When you make a choice, you're not making the choice.

You're choosing the consequence because it's going to follow either way.

Whatever you like it or not.

The consequence of that choice is coming.

So you decide when making that choice if you want the consequence ahead.

Exactly.

That's going to be the byproduct of what you're choosing.

Yeah.

Damien, any last words of wisdom?

Anything you were hoping to share today?

I haven't asked you yet.

That was the basis of just that journey that I was just trying to take people through in the book just from ancient times of how there were no individuals through a collective period where maybe intuition, tradition, fear, those things helped us develop to the next stage.

And now trying to use our ability to reason, to think.

We have tools like scientific method and things of that nature, but also approaching everything from an individualistic standpoint.

I think that's important and we touched on that.

That's what I wanted to get through in the book.

And the consequences is another part that I touched on heavily in the book, because if you're going to live a life based upon choice and consequences, there may be times you're going to have to actually issue consequences out to others if they transcend moral grounds or your boundaries, your moral boundaries.

And in the end of the book, I do give people an application section where instead of just explaining principles to them in theories, I say this is how you apply all of this theory and principle in your lives.

On America's Ethical Archetype, Damien Dubose's book, if any parent is listening and they're wondering, what is the best resource for me to know how to teach my kids morals and ethics as they grow?

What would you say to them?

I would say start small, understand, give reasons.

Give reasons, let them fail.

I mean, be a parent as well.

You don't want to throw your kid out there and just let them fail the whole time.

Give them tools, give them tools and help them develop their judgment.

And don't be afraid of upsetting them.

I mean, I'm not expert in that field, but I would say that these are my opinions on.

Don't be afraid of upsetting your child like you're going to have to fix everything, because there won't be a time when you're not there, and they're going to need to be able to do these things without you.

And if you raise them in that way, they're going to be handicapped.

It's just going to give them anxiety and angst and a little bit of fear if they don't have their crutch with them, if their crutch is always stepping in.

Help them develop in a way where they can handle situations themselves and understand that to me is my opinion.

That's your job as a parent.

This is your exact job is to help your children develop their decision-making, to be able to provide for them and take care of themselves.

Because that literally gives them their own wings, especially if you're not there, they'll be able to fly still.

Exactly.

Well, you can take care of yourself and you can make decisions for yourself.

You don't feel all of the nervousness, the anxiety, the nihilism, what is all is for.

You understand what, especially if people give you, your parents give you reasons, you understand what is for, you understand what your development is for.

It helps build up your character and your self-esteem.

Words of Wisdom from Damien Dubose, the author of America's Ethical Archetype with a financial industry background.

Thank you so much.

This has been very eye-opening, very insightful.

We appreciate you being here today.

Thank you.

Thank you for having me.

My absolute pleasure.

Before you go, would you like our listeners to reach out to you and where can we find you?

Well, yes.

damientdubose.com, DamienTDubose Instagram, and I think also Damien Terrence Dubose on Facebook.

You can find the book on Amazon, America's Ethical Archetype, and just released the audiobook version as well.

So that's on Audible soon to be on Amazon and iTunes.

Excellent stuff.

damientdubose.com.

Thank you so much.

Thank you.

My pleasure.

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