75 years ago Friday, March 5th 1946, the sitting President of the United States; a man who had never been to college himself, traveled to Westminster College in Fulton Missouri to introduce a guest lecturer, the former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. The resulting speech, delivered by Winston Churchill set the tone for the second half of the twentieth century. It leads nicely into the topic I’m planning to discuss today and if you will indulge me for a moment, I think is worth considering on this, it’s 75th anniversary.

Churchill’s speech was titled “The Sinews of Peace” and the main line that people remember from the speech is Churchill’s phrase “an iron curtain has descended across the Continent.” The term “Iron Curtain” when used to describe the Soviet bloc countries would come to be one of the defining terms of the latter half of the 20th century and would help crystallize our understanding of the Cold War and the difference between the west and the Soviet bloc. Sinew as defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as “a piece of tough fibrous tissue uniting muscle to bone or bone to bone; a tendon or ligament.” That is to say that sinews aren’t the source of strength, but without them, all the strength of the muscles and bones is useless. Without strong sinews, it is possible to appear strong without actually being strong.

This gave me pause to think about appearances. Humans have been attempting to project the appearance of being something we are not for almost from the Garden of Eden, but it’s never been easier than it is today. Technology and its disembodying influence on our interactions means it is easier than ever to project an image and harder than ever to validate the image of themselves that others are presenting. We see this almost across every sphere we inhabit. In the business world, the primary goals of companies is not to return a strong dividend to their shareholders, but to appear to be strong so as to attract investment. The most extreme examples of this line of thinking are Theranos and WeWork, but there are plenty of other examples. This line of thinking inhabits our political spaces as well with many politicians being more focused on building their personal brand (see Ocasio-Cortez, Alexandria, Cawthorn, Madison, Cruz, Ted, and Hawley, Josh as primary examples) than doing the hard work of actually governing.

I can’t help but think with all the emphasis on branding in our current age, we have created organizations whose “brand” has never been stronger, but are themselves actually weaker than ever. Two millennia ago, the Roman orator Cicero summed up the problem nicely in a letter to a friend “few are those who wish to be endowed with virtue rather than to seem so.” In other words, most of us are more focused on appearing to be virtuous than actually being virtuous. See, when you are focused on making sure everyone knows you have virtue, it leaves precious little time for the actual hard work of being virtuous, and lets not kid ourselves, developing and maintaining virtue is hard work.