The Most Important Lesson from the Kanye West Documentary Jeen-Yus
A Lesson on Power Distribution and Limit Setting
The Jeen-Yus documentary followed a video-maker Coodie Simmons as he started his career following Kanye West on his journey, and shows the meteoric rise of Kanye and some of his personal challenges. It’s a bit of a tragedy/parable because once Kanye gets all the fame and money he wanted, his mental illness seemingly becomes more severe and goes largely unchecked. It’s a great demonstration that using American popular culture definitions of success hide a dangerous moral hazard, or many.
The first moral hazard, is that it is dangerous not to set limits on oneself. This contradicts catchphrase marketing ideologies such as ‘Be all you can be’, ‘Just Do It’, or the concept of living without limits — obtaining as much money as you can, for example. The world would be a nightmare if everyone followed these catchphrases at face value.
For example, maybe it was not a good idea for Kanye to run for president. And from the documentary it seemed Kanye had surrounded himself with ‘yes-men’, which is a pattern that seems to happen to many people who’s resources exceed their judgement. If Kanye didn’t have so much money and power that he could pay people for everything, maybe he would have a friend that would have told him not to run for president, not just because it may create a distraction from other issues in his life, but the backlash may actually be damaging.
A prime example from the documentary of this moral hazard is when Kanye is having a meeting with some real estate agents in the Dominican Republic. Kanye suggests creating a church in the area. In the next moment he’s asking the real estate agents, “Have you guys ever been locked up in handcuffs and put into a hospital because your brain was too big for your skull?” and as things continue Kanye gets more riled up and rants, possibly having a minor episode, with zero response from all the people there. The problem is that Kanye West pays almost everyone there, or they would like to be paid by Kanye. To his credit, Coodie turns the camera off, clearly concerned for his old friend that by this time has drifted away into a new life.
At a high level of wealth, the wealthy person obtains centralized power/judgement to such a degree that it is inevitable that a they make a huge mistake. A scenario is created in which a psychological ‘blind spot’ cannot be covered, due to the social structure that the wealthy person operates in, which has been created by the wealthy person themselves.
I wonder if Kanye would have actually been happier if he had only made 2 million or 10 million dollars. It’s even possible he may not have developed such serious mental illness because he would have worked less, not entered into a marriage where he would get divorced, and been put into a situation early on where he’d have to asses his mental well-being and outward behaviour because of the influence of other people.
How to solve this moral hazard? What if Kanye had setup a company with a bylaw that automatically donated all profits after 10 million? Maybe you’d have to have a trigger to automatically reduce his voting power at the company at the same time. Of course the same characteristics required to succeed at such a high level are probably what prevents one from setting such healthy limits. What if society had a limit on wealth (will return to that later)?
Often times limits for an activity are most effective if they are created before one starts the activity. That’s my experience anyway. It’s because when you are engaged in the present you have trouble mentally simulating the future. If I have something to do in the morning and I’m going to a party, I like to decide in advance the latest I’ll stay at the party, or maybe the maximum number of drinks I’ll have. It’s harder to set reasonable limits on oneself when you are under the influence of alcohol, fame, or something with an addictive quality. However, this strategy creates a difficult situation, in which a present you, needs to trust the past you, or assess the present situation and see if it matches the constraints that the past you made a decision under. For example, maybe I’ll have another drink if there is something to celebrate I wasn’t expecting.
A great example of the cognitive differences between Japanese people and Americans regarding limits when selecting a mate. It’s become a main-stream cultural discussion point that American woman are looking for a man that makes six figures, but in Japan, their hopes are exceedingly more realistic <https://soranews24.com/2018/05/12/japanese-women-show-continuing-decline-in-how-much-they-expect-a-husband-to-earn-in-survey/>. Anecdotally, I have been told (and/or read quotes somewhere?) that Japanese sometimes don’t want their husbands to make too much money, because they believe it increases the chances of the husband having an affair or over-working.
And then there are times when you should move personal limits. When it comes to competition, maybe you turn off your limits completely. It’s okay to hurt a competitor under the rules of competition, but you don’t want to hurt your training partners. Maybe you run that 10k race as hard as you can. But this shows that removing limits is the rare case, not the normal day-to-day.
The second moral hazard is that it’s dangerous for a society not to set proper upper limits. This may come off as banal, but I never hear people in America talking about it even though they talk about the problems in the country all the time. For example, what should the limits on the power of the president really be? As of October 8, 2022, President Biden has signed 102 executive orders, and Trump signed 220. Should there be a limit on the total number of executive orders a president can issue? Or, since some of them have ultimately failed, as they were not legal, should the privilege of issuing an executive order be taken away if a threshold of bad orders is reached (e.g. 3 orders that are illegal)? Should there be a limit on personal wealth? Should there be a limit on the market cap of a private company? I would say yes to all, because they create extremely dangerous scenarios. The whole concept of the formation of the US government was distribution of power, which creates checks and balances, of which Kanye West is severely lacking.
A limit is a boundary, and it’s useful to implement them both at the societal level, and also at the personal one. When I was living in San Francisco, where people are very flaky and often don’t make concrete plans, I came up with a limit, two flakes and I won’t make an appointment with that person again. After the first flake/cancellation I would explain my rule so my boundary was understood. Meanwhile I would watch friends and acquaintances without clear limits treat each time as a first rodeo, and complain or be upset each and everytime when someone canceled on them to go to a concert or a better party. While it’s reasonable to be upset when you get flaked on, if it happens regularly it’s a personal responsibility to manage the situation. For example by filtering your friends for characteristics by clarifying your boundaries/expectations.
Returning to the national level, what exactly are the limits on central banks? By looking at Japan for example, having no limits on the purchase of government bonds is a huge moral hazard. Having no limit on debt is a moral hazard. Japan at a national level has basically gone insane this past decade — by repeating the same behaviour (Quantitative Easing) and expecting a different result even though it has failed every year. Many cities in the US have gone bankrupt precisely because the limits for debt (as municipal bonds) was not low enough and the city didn’t grow as much as expected or businesses left...etc so the city couldn’t pay back the debt it took out.
I’ve only bet money at a casino once (I left the table when I was up!), but that’s a place where you probably want to set a limit on acceptable losses before you start, and really many things are like that. And then the question arises, should the casino to set a limit on how much a person can lose before they have to stop?
There’s always tension between society and the individual, which should be healthy, it’s when there is not tension, not checks and balances, when an individual or an organization grows too powerful, that is when problems occur.
Of course now I’m basically just getting into regulations, about rules. A rule is often a limit, but often binary. For example, in some places you can’t drink alcohol in public, it’s a binary rule, a limit of anything >0. But often rules with limits are for behaviours that are good in moderation, that we want to encourage, like drinking and driving. Oh no wait, I mean like gambling, errr, I meant to say activities that are good in moderation. Wealth generating, like making rap albums and fashion lines, or useful technologies like search engines or social media. Making money is good, but too much in a centralized place, maybe not, in the long-term.
Failure to set limits is possibly where the greatest failure has been in the last decade (well, there were many failures of the sort in the last century). Technology improves at a faster rate and the quality of the political leadership may not be improving at all. It seems painfully obvious social media should have been regulated ten years ago (considering current conditions, parents should be regulating it at home). My friend Kento brought up a good example today, that it seems likely the A.I. based realistic photo-generation will be available soon for the consumer. For example, say a high schooler spreads a rumor that a classmate had sex with the whole football team, and then provides a photo to prove it (A.I. generated). Maybe the bully quickly has the A.I. Software create 200 photos that are used for cyberbullying. While this could be handled as cyber bullying in the courts, maybe to prevent this situation, there should be a limit on the realism that a person, in control of a photo or video generator, can create of an individual, without the individual's consent. There likely aren’t that many laws that thoroughly cover this as the problem did not exist before. This is a good example because memes are funny, but deepfakes often less so.
Setting lower limits tends to be more obvious than setting upper limits in a philisophical/ethical sense, but even there I find thought-provoking issues to consider. For example, returning to the topic of wealth, it is more obvious to people that in society there is a minimum on the resources we should provide to people who are vulnerable and suffering. The elderly, the physically injured, the mentally injured or limited, but really, there is a moral argument that the quality of a society is largely evaluated by the lower limits of human experience that exist in the society. Often these questions are:
To what level are the weakest or the minority raised up?
Is there any lower limits to the pain and suffering people in the society can experience legally? How does this balance with freedom of the individual?
Many developed countries have a formal support system for wealth (e.g. social security) or discrimination (e.g. constitutional rights). And it seems to me smaller communities are less tolerant of people in the community suffering in the lower limits. I’m reminded of my Aunt’s husband finding an elderly relative in Ireland, a former farmer, and while clearly living the old man was living in poverty, he had neighbours that would stop by and care for him. Then getting to the individual level, what are appropriate lower limits? Some things are maybe obvious, 10,000 steps a day they say. Or returning to an earlier topic, making sure to have at least three beers before you get behind the wheel. Focusing on the individual interacting in society, what is the minimum frequency that you call your parents? What is the minimum that you talk to your friends to maintain the friendship? Maybe it’s unnecessary to quantify, but thought-provoking. What is the poorest I allow my friend to become before I help them?
As I’ve described, I notice that many problems occur when people have not decided on the upper and lower bounds that are acceptable at the personal, community, and national level. The tragedy is that it’s often easier to identify the upper and lower limits that are acceptable than the optimal level to achieve. For example, it’s difficult to answer:
What’s the optimal level of debt for the country to have?
What’s the optimal percentage to spend on defense budget?
What’s the optimal amount of stock portfolio to split between stocks and bonds? (If you say ‘60/40’ then you didn’t check your portfolio this year)
What’s the optimal term for the president or a congress-person?
I could go on and on with difficult questions no one can give me good answers to. But often you can easily know when something is too much or too little.
