A Beautiful Truth: It’s the Economy, Stupid

We have not seen this movie before.

With tariffs calculated by ChatGPT, “Liberation Day,” the Day of Economic Independence (or DEI for short), as Marina Hyde dubs it in The Guardian, crashes America’s most American innovation—the stock market—and grinds the world economy to a halt, wiping out not only our retirement funds but also our belief in humanity.

How can it be possible that one single man—an unsuccessful business con artist—holds the modern world of checks and balances, of hyper-complex, interconnected financial markets, hostage at his whim?

How is it possible that on the one hand, we’re witnessing exponential advances in artificial intelligence, and on the other, human intelligence at its lowest level—sitting in the highest office?

The banality of evil: it’s all there again, in plain sight. The extent of the cruelty: it was morally imaginable. There is no excuse. We all knew what was coming.

“Always listen to dictators: They lie about what they have done, but often tell you what they are planning to do.” Garry Kasparov’s famous line remains etched into our minds.

And yet, here we are.

One of the passholders of our New York Retreat this coming weekend—the second in-person gathering of our PolyOpportunity series—emailed me “washed over with concern and a little fear,” given that our work and programming ran “antithetical” to the current political climate in America. “I worry that many people, especially those not living in the US, might feel unsafe here being who they are, and speaking candidly about the issues they want to address,” he wrote.

I appreciated the note and understood the concern, but I was also unnerved by it. It says a lot about the times we live in that concepts such as empathy, inclusiveness, diversity, kindness, sustainability, or beauty—all part of our ethos—are now considered controversial.

And it raised some uncomfortable questions for me. What is our responsibility as the House of Beautiful Business? As conveners and curators, we cannot be “neutral.” Any idea, insight, or perspective we present represents not only the contributor’s belief but also our own: a theory of change, a worldview, a thesis that had better be antithetical to someone. If it’s not—what’s the point?

While we are not a political organization or movement, our agenda naturally reflects the political, social, psychological, and spiritual issues that businesses and workers face today. Suppressing them would be self-censorship—exactly the kind of fear-based surrender that autocratic leaders hope to elicit.

“The most likely path to American autocracy depends not only on a power-hungry president but also the voluntary capitulation of a cowed civil society,” The New York Times reminded us this past weekend. Anne Applebaum and others have repeatedly pointed out that democracies are fragile—that they erode unless we invest in them every single day—and that they can, in fact, fail faster than any Silicon Valley startup.

So yes, we are proud to be antithetical.

At the same time, we want the doors of the House to remain open to different perspectives—always. As we aspire to serve as a safe and brave space, we have a soft spot for contrarians and dissenters. We see ourselves as a bridge between rebels and ranks, dreamers and doers, between the world of ideas and the world of business. We take what is out there (often quite out there) and bring it in there: into boardrooms, leadership publications, development programs, strategy sessions, management summits, and future-visioning exercises of large and midsize companies.

In doing so, we strive to steer off the beaten path. We are antithetical not only because we are anti-business-as-usual, anti-growth-at-all-costs, and anti-extractive—but also because we are anti-bullshit. We stand against overly simplistic truths and any form of “__washing.”

We do not believe in “business logic,” “business people,” “business decisions,” or “business education.” These things do not exist. We are against anything that reduces business to a hermetically sealed, manageable mechanical system divorced from life.

For us, business is a story, a play, a home, a garden. If the term hadn’t been so abused by corporate jargon, I would indeed call it an ecosystem. To create, design, and cultivate it, we need calculation and compassion, reason and rhyme.

Our mission is to radically imagine the future of business on—and with—terms different from those imposed on us by those in power. We’re here to create hope in and through business.

The latter is particularly critical these days.

Yes, it is appalling to see businesses aligning themselves with the Trump regime—see a partial list of shame here, most recently joined by some big law firms that bent the knee, betraying not only their values but also the trust of their clients and employees. Some of this capitulation is driven by fear; some of it is pure greed. Remember that line from Gone With the Wind? “There was a fortune to be made when an empire was destroyed.”

But if economic power can be a force for good, the time is now.

Take those companies that refuse to surrender and hold on to their principles. Take the consumer boycotts aimed at stripping the populist of their populist power, which, at the end of the day, depends on people’s most prized item: their wallet.

It is the economy, stupid, that makes me hopeful—and might save us from sliding into full-on endgame autocracy.

Power, if used uneconomically, vanishes. The chainsaw that Trump and Musk are wielding has begun to bend back. “Liberation Day” may well mark the pinnacle of Trump’s ego rush—and for that very reason, the beginning of his downfall.

Even more is at stake, though. The damage Trump has done with his stupidity can perhaps still be fixed. The damage we’re causing with our collective stupidity will soon be beyond repair.

When a board member of Allianz—one of the world’s largest insurance companies—warns that the risks of climate change might soon become uninsurable, leading to the collapse of capitalism, you know that while economic power can do the right thing now, we must do things completely differently in the future.

Rock-bottom is a place for both urgent action and bold vision. The extremity of the current polycrisis can be an opening for a new reality we create together. One where a plurality of stories, paradoxes, and truths strengthen one another. An economy of care, an economy of the other, an economy of true attention—breaking free from addiction and extraction, shifting us from casino to play, from hardcore transactionalism to new soft power, from human-centered to life-centered.

This new era—it is possible. In fact, it has already begun.

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This article first appeared in the Beauty Shot newsletter by the House of Beautiful Business.