Editor’s Note: A few thoughts on the American strikes in Iran (more appropriately named Operation Epstein Fury). Supporting people who live under brutal regimes is not the same as waging war against those people. When a government kills its own protesters, disappears dissidents, and sentences youth to death for what they say or wear, the enemy is the leadership and not the nation.

Nations such as Russia, China, N. Korea, and Iran share two defining characteristics: they kill or imprison their own people for political reasons, and they prey on vulnerable populations. They control their media, conduct mass arrests, torture individuals, operate surveillance states, and use economic coercion to get what they want.

This is predominantly an unprovoked and illegal action on the part of our administration. Remember, it is always easy to blow things up. Building is the hard part. It is only a win if Iranians come out freer on the other side. If we get more little dictators out of this, it isn't a win. If our act creates a wider conflict and produces more innocent dead, it isn't a win. This is why you don’t build up a huge military to cook and bake in the sun, and you open Pandora's box only reluctantly, if at all.

But here's the harder truth that Americans are loath to acknowledge:

We are becoming more of what we see in our enemies.

An administration that routinely lies to its own people, that targets minority populations, kills its own citizens, and treats the vulnerable as problems to be removed.

All of sudden, we are looking in the mirror at ourselves.

There's no divine hand in any of this. Regardless of how it is spun, there is no grand strategy. These are illegal actions, made by the whims of one man, oiled by the worms in the ear from a few tongues to tickle the ego. We elected a mafia Don to the highest office in the land, and we will own whatever the results are, good, lucky, or bad.

I’ve had the pleasure of working with students most of my career. One time, a student stopped by my office worried about his next steps. Health struggles had derailed his semester, and he wondered whether taking time off would put him behind. I explained to him that normally a student could take a break for two semesters before there was a bureaucratic reset, the point where he would have to re-enroll. It seemed to me like a built-in grace period for life to happen. A moment to pause and think.

That conversation lodged itself in my thoughts. It reminded me how our institutions, whether campus, government, or companies, are really outcomes of our priorities. They are only as humane as the philosophy that drives them. For me, that philosophy has always been simple:

Your success is our success.

In that exchange, what mattered most wasn’t getting the right form filled out or meeting a deadline. It was acknowledging a shared stake in another person’s growth. That the student understood his success was what we wanted no matter how long it took. And it’s precisely this ethic that today’s economy is missing.

If you were asked to describe the employee customer interactions you see when you deal with any place of business, what would you say? Do you see job satisfaction, stable employment, mutual trust, and long-term partnerships?

We have become used to a model of not asking questions and concentrating on buying the goods. It has led to extraordinary concentrations of wealth, and a proliferation of temporary and contract work.

There’s no roots in this model.

People are cycled in and out like replaceable parts. It’s an abandonment of the social contract.

Leaders who internalize the philosophy of “your success is our success” understand that sometimes the slow choice is the smartest one, or that all share in both profits and losses.

Here’s an experiment worth doing this week:

What are we losing when we design systems that prioritize the transaction over the relationship, the present moment over the shared future?

If this sounds like an exaggeration, consider what's already on the horizon. AI is coming, and if workers are still treated in the disposable manner discussed, things will be bad.

It’s easy to get cynical over this, but resistance begins small. First, recognize how our current system is making work less human. Don’t accept it as normal. Push back against the logic of short-term profit and short-term employment.

A recent piece from CitriniResearch lays out a necessary thought exercise: imagine it's 2028 and AI has quietly gutted white-collar employment and collapsed the tax base.

What does Washington do?

Two proposals emerge in this scenario. The first, the Transition Economy Act, combines direct income transfers to displaced workers with a tax on AI companies to pay for the damage their products cause. The second, the Shared AI Prosperity Act, would establish a sovereign wealth fund based on AI-generated output, and redistribute it back to the public.

The economic disruption being described is already underway. White-collar job losses are going up and the companies moving to automate are the same ones whose workers shop, get mortgages, and pay taxes.

If the last decade has taught us anything, it’s that profit alone cannot sustain a society. Efficiency may even be an inhuman word. We’re burning out the very people meant to keep the system running. The corporate business model has been booming, but it may be more efficient at destroying the social contract.

When we treat workers as liabilities to be managed rather than people to be invested in, we are not building a sustainable economy.

AI is being accelerated in the current business model. If we don't reckon with that now, we will be dealing with a lot more than the future of work.

Your success is my success. Remember that, or it will really be no one's.

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I always love these pieces that ask people what they are reading, and I often find a new book or two that I hadn’t heard of.

Our kids have been reading pretty regularly. If there's one thing I felt we got right, it's that they don't see picking up a book as a waste of time. It promotes exploration and makes them much better conversationalists.

I often deal with people who have some social anxiety, and one of the best ways to get past it is to be well read. There will always be someone in the room who is familiar with a topic, book, or author that you have read about. It's an instant connection with mutual strangers.

As the world changes, reading will help you keep up with it and also keep you grounded. Many of the things we deal with have been experienced before. The answers are often already out there.

That's how we learn and stay connected, if we continue to routinely read.

If you're in the U.S., you'd have to be out of touch to have missed the news about the Buddhist monks walking across the country. At times like these, when brutality, killing, and outrage are dominating the media, it's good to see some attention given to peace.

Scientists continue to learn more about our brains every day, and AI is going to open up all kinds of discoveries and possibilities (and a few anxieties).

More mindfulness and meditation would be good for all of us. Science and health both back it. Just like developing a regular reading habit, you really have to work at making this a habit as well. Even if it means sneaking a minute here or there, I know no one who practices it routinely who doesn't seem more pleasant and at peace.

It is a cheap and effective way to be beyond the noise.

And Now….

The older I get, the more I realize I will not read all the books I want to, though I will most likely die trying. Continue to keep up your regular reading habit and practice your gratefulness. We live in a free country, for now, if we know how to cherish and keep it.

Pray for a peaceful outcome with current events.

Always strive to be a good human.

I typically close with a bit of music. This is an older Syrian protest song against the Assad regime, now deposed and hiding under the protection of our current president’s friend, Vladimir Putin. It vocalizes the passion of people who want freedom from hate, war, and religious zealotry between Sunnis and Shiites.

There are similarities with events in Iran. Hopefully, they, too, will end up in conditions to govern themselves.