Jay-Z & That Liberty Statue
Today we run part four of TTLA's 2009 interview with Matt Harrison, founder and executive director of The Prometheus Institute, an upstart, Gen Y, L.A. think tank.
TTLA: Do you or anyone involved with Prometheus have goals of working in local, state, or federal government?
MH: I don't think so, right now. We try to represent ourselves as the anti-Washington group, being beyond what people think of as "politics." The difficulty is, anything with politics, people just think it's a dirty game and they don't care.
In terms of influencing people in our generation who might be a little disillusioned with politics, having the appearance of being that beholden to the political system would really be disastrous for our brand, and disastrous for us in terms of differentiating ourselves from what's out there right now. One of the things that we really like is when people say, "Hey, this looks totally different from anything I've seen." If we're talking about, "Oh, this bill should be modified in this irrelevant way," then people would see what we're doing. They can see that we'd be trying to be in Washington, we're trying to be in the business of politics. And we never want to be that, we never want to be perceived as that. While who knows what anybody on that staff will do ten or twenty years down the road, in terms of what The Institute represents, we want to make sure that people don't expect that out of us.
Read part one, part two, and part three of the interview.
TTLA: So I shouldn't expect to go on the website and find text of a bill you all have written?
MH: No, you won't find that.
TTLA: But I can turn to page 135 of your book and find Jay-Z lyrics.
MH: You can find that!
TTLA: The conventional wisdom "? cliché or not "? is that Generation Y wants everything on the real.
MH: That's completely true. And we realize that, although I wouldn't say we've thought about it that explicitly. There is this sense that politicians are fake, that everything is fake about politics. So yeah, keeping it real would be a good way of putting it, in our generation's parlance.
TTLA: Let's talk about your book, American Evolution. The cover features a double helix and the Statue of Liberty. You've spoken already about marketing, so that cover must have mattered.
MH: That's a lot of Mike, our graphic designer's, work. In the book, I talk about "freedom of choice" as the evolutionary catalyst. I cite a lot of evolutionary science for support of that, as well as American history. The cover shows the light of liberty illuminating the DNA of the American system "? what makes us great, what makes us unique, what helps us evolve.
In the book, I argue that freedom and liberty are the source of that evolutionary growth. So you can view that as lighting the source of our creativity.
TTLA: If I'm not mistaken, if you add an "R" to your title, you get "American Revolution." Is that a neo-tea party reference?
MH: The book was written before the tea parties. I pride myself on sometimes coming up with clever titles. This was one I thought was good "? I had a couple others that weren't so good. I couldn't believe that no one had made a book with that title. There is an element of inspiring patriotism, realizing that our nation does stand for something unique and something valuable, and at the same time kind of implying a revolution, really changing people's perspective on things. I try to argue in the book that even though my perspective might seem different from what's considered the right-left political duality, in terms of American history, it's deeply rooted in our traditions. Trying to bridge that gap is a point of the book.
TTLA: And your bridge, your answer, is?
MH: Freedom of choice. I explain how different that phrase is from a lot of what people think, which is people just doing whatever they want and that's okay. I explain how freedom of choice is basically the search process for beneficial advancement "? just as natural selection is in the natural world.
The natural world stumbles upon the innovative solutions that help it adapt to various difficulties. Freedom of choice is the same way "? most times, we don't know where we're going. But we empower diversity, we empower entrepreneurship, we empower freedom of choice, and when we do, we discover we have much greater opportunity to discover the advancements that help us adapt to those situations. I explain in all these different situations how freedom of choice can empower that search process in various ways, in everything from the economic process to foreign policy.
TTLA: What, or where, is your Galapagos?
MH: I bring in real world examples of growth and change. You talk about Jay-Z "? hip-hop is a great example. Jay-Z is now worth almost a billion dollars "? $800 million or something like that. The hip-hop industry is a big job creator and has economic as well as social impact. A lot of people deride hip-hop but I mean, Michael Phelps listens to rap before he swims. Would you say that inspiration that he gets from that, however small, is something he shouldn't have? That he should be forced to listen to Mozart instead?
You see how spontaneous events like the growth of rap music can really help our nation grow in unforeseen, unappreciated, and really almost invisible ways. You see freedom creating progress and progressive adaptation in our society.
COMING FRIDAY: Snowboarding & Social Technology
The Week
Monday: Meet Prometheus
Tuesday: No Litmus Test? And Clean-Up on Aisle Four
Wednesday: Sports, USC, and When To Stop
Thursday: Jay-Z & The Statue of Liberty
Friday: Snowboarding & Social Technology
Photo Credit: The image accompanying this post was taken by Flickr user beezwaxxx. It was used under Creative Commons license.
