Cooperating with Assholes
What happens when corporate paranoia meets public philosophy at a quiet retreat in the Hudson Valley
Once a year for the past few years, I’ve booked an event at a conference venue in the Hudson Valley for ten days. The event brings together forty five philosophers, and leaders in the media business such as editors for the New Yorker and New York Times, the major trade presses, prominent radio/podcast people, and the philosophers learn about what is involved in starting to do more public-facing work.
The event is sponsored by nonprofit granting agencies, and the cost is not insigificant. I’d say the entire venue, lodging, room and board, conference facilities and A/V, run about $70,000 for the ten days. We book almost a year ahead of time, but we love the venue because the premises have a bar, pool, exercise facilities, and a really nice outdoor hang-out lawn were people can talk, network, and have drinks. Past fellows love this part of the night the best, and stay out until past midnight just talking amidst the fireflies.
About four months before we were scheduled to arrive, well after we signed the contract with the facility, we were informed that another group, a private company that does financial services in NYC, was going to overlap with our group for a day and a half. This is something we’re used to. It is a very large facility. We’ve overlapped with day campers, entertainment networks, weddings, large corporations, vacationers, and memorably one year, a men’s bonding group.
But this NYC financial group did not seem happy sharing the facilities with us. They were asking everyone in our group to sign an NDA, a nondisclosure agreement, for simply being at the venue at the same time they were. I didn’t know this company from a hole in the wall. I didn’t plan to interact with them at all, nor did I think a group of academic philosophers would be interested in what they were doing. Even if they were, we wouldn’t have time. So my first reaction was; no. Why would we? There was nothing we were getting in exchange for the NDA. We already signed a contract with the facility, our work there had absolutely no connection with anything this group was doing. Besides, signing an NDA puts you at risk for legal liability. Who knows who these people are; anyone who asks twenty strangers to sign a legal document just because you happen to be staying at the same hotel as they are might just be crazy enough to sue you on the basis of that document in the future. Hard no.
We went about our business. I even forgot about it by the time we showed up to the venue.
Three days into our conference, I see a woman with a walkie-talkie and name tag quietly walk into our session and take our program director aside. Apparently, the same company was scheduled to arrive the next night, and because no one in our group signed the NDA, the company asked the facility to do the following: (1) Prohibit our group from using the dining facilities that they were using for breakfast the next day. (2) Sequester us at the conference hall in which we were holding our sessions, including for lunch, dinner, and breaks, and (3) prohibit us from hanging out on the lawn in the evening, especially between 8:30pm-9pm when they planned to hold an event elsewhere at the facility, but that might be visible from the lawn. We were to be sequestered for one and a half days, after which our group would once again be allowed free access to the rest of the facility.
In exchange for our cooperation, the facility offered us an open bar of wine and beer for the one night we were inconvenienced. We agreed, to be cooperative with the facility, and because it just didn’t seem worth fighting about since I was so busy with the actual event.
What this ended up consisting in was, the next morning we were ushered away from the dining hall for breakfast into our own separate dining room, which was neither bussed nor serviced while we were there. Half of the fellows couldn’t find the food, which was served in a separate room with the door closed. Then the venue catered our lunch and dinner at our conference room. That night, after dinner for the social hang out, we had to take benches from the lawn down to our conference room so we could enjoy the open bar sequestered from the rest of the facility. No else at the venue ended up on the lawn that night. An employee of the venue, a server, told us the super secret group probably just didn’t want to see us there. There was no risk of us finding out who they were, because they actually held their event in a separate area of the venue. He told us to just go hang out there as we would like, but I already agreed not to. The event we supposedly weren’t allow to see? A drone light show that lasted about 15-20 minutes.
I’m perfectly within my rights to name both the facility and the company involved, and if I were the angry trouble-making type, I would, since I signed no NDA. But I’m not going to do that, because I’m interested in whether there is a lesson in this story, or some kind of social commentary worth communicating. Or maybe its just a good story to tell.
While it was happening, I thought about a Cantonese saying my mom always shouted any time someone rich made some kind of flex. Mom was a bank teller; an immigrant with an 8th grade education who fled Mao’s communist China. She had a very strong moral compass. Some big shot might storm into the bank demanding special treatment because they had a large deposit or withdrawal, or someone in a Mercedes might be driving or parking like an asshole. She’d say, and the translation is something like, “Does being rich make you the biggest in the room?”
As I see it, there are three players in this little saga, each with some blame. The NYC financial services company, the venue, and us. The company was trying to use money and an NDA, which is a legal threat, to do a little flex on us. They were trying to impose burdens on strangers to which they were not entitled by simply flashing money. I’m sure the only reason the venue would even ask us to sign an NDA, after we already signed a contract with them, is because this company had a little extra money to ask the venue to make requests they never would have done otherwise. The company had very minor interests that conflicted with our very existence at the venue, and they are used to flexing their wealth in a way to get what they want. The moral failure of the company is that they are rich assholes, who do not see other people’s interests as constraints on any of their own behavior. Any problem, no matter how minor, can be bought, threatened, or sued away.
Then there is the venue, who made a decision to issue two unreasonable requests of an agreeable client on behalf of an asshole client. From their perspective, the agreeable client is likelier to compromise and cooperate, and if that happens, then the asshole client gets what they want, and the venue gets to keep both clients, and are out only about $200 in alcohol costs. On the other hand, if they do not make the unreasonable request, the asshole client is likelier to bail, and you have only an agreeable client, who would likely have cooperated anyway.
But that’s not how I would have handled it. If I were the venue owner, I would have told the asshole to fuck off. I’m not asking another client to sign an NDA, nor asking them to sequester themselves even for a day. These are unreasonable demands given the contract, unreasonable demands given that we care about all of our clients. There are some kinds of special treatments you simply aren’t entitled to at a venue no matter how much money you flex. I’d bet there is an amount of money I could give to the manager of a McDonalds to kick out a family that I don’t want sitting in the same room as me. If I made the offer, the manager has a decision to make, the family has a decision to make, and everyone is free to decline it. Is libertarianism and business transactionality so endemic to American thinking that we think this kind of offer should be a normal course of interaction with other people in the world?
And finally, there is us, or me really, who ended up deciding to comply with the second request. The whole event ended up going smoothly despite some hiccups like this, thanks so much to my program director who had to do all the dealing on site. For that, I’m grateful. But this episode still nags me. One thing I could have done was demand that to which we were entitled, namely, free use of the grounds and facilities as determined by our contract. The rich assholes flexed their wealth on us and they benefited, the venue benefited, but our group did not; we were only burdened. These were minor burdens; if they were imposed on us because of a busted water pipe or construction, I would have thought nothing of it. But the fact that they were burdens imposed, against our contractual rights with the venue, as a result of a flex, should have been a sign to me. I probably should have put on my own libertarian-business-lawyer, homo-economicus hat, and asked exactly how much extra the venue was getting for imposing such a burden on us on behalf of the asshole client. I then should have asked for half of it. I know many people, very nice people, who would be the kind of people who, while running the same program I was running, do exactly that. But I’ve never built the stomach for it.
So my mistake is that I could have asked for a generous amount of compensation for the foundation for signing the NDA, or for the burdens imposed on us. I cooperated for prosocial purposes, while everyone else defected. We had minor burdens placed on us, everyone else got what they wanted, we all moved on.
I don’t know what the lesson of this little episode is. Is playing nice in a world of flexers noble—or just naive?
Great story. I think you drew the right moral, too. In some interactions, nobody is going to take account of your interests unless you *make* them take account. Sometimes just naming a price is a powerful thing. (Or if there’s no price you’d accept, just saying your piece.)
We live in a society in which serious wealth translates in all sorts of fairly direct ways into power. Venues don’t want to lose uberwealthy clients who will spend a lot, the clients know this, and so they throw their wealth around. The NDA request is disgusting. If that secretive group is worried about prying eyes, they should hold their gathering in a private location or rent a different facility. You don’t get to enjoy what society makes possible and then ask others who also want to enjoy the same opportunities to give up their rights. Ditto for offering your group money to forgo a valuable and enjoyable experience in exchange for free alcohol. You might have declined, but you didn’t know whether that would cause enmity or frustration or poor treatment in return. Most importantly, I can’t stand it when others take advantage of a person’s or group’s good nature and willingness to accommodate. This is treating others in a way that violates any reasonable reciprocity norm (CI, golden rule, whatever). Perhaps the secretive group would say, “look, we won’t object if you treat us the same way.” But that just shows that they have an impoverished and messed up sense of valuable, respectful, and generous human interaction.