 Do people who have acted horribly in public life deserve a second chance? Or does giving them a pass contribute to a decline in morality and standards that makes us all worse off? I'm not talking about the extreme cases like movie mogul Harvey Weinstein, who has sentenced to 23 years in prison on rape and assault convictions. And I'm not talking about people getting canceled because of random dumb tweets, online mobs, or years old statements ripped out of context. I'm talking more about public figures like Lance Armstrong, who was stripped of his record seven Tour de France titles in 2012 after getting caught using banned substances for basically his entire professional career and lying about it. Should we let him and others like him back into the public spotlight when they don't really own their mistakes and try to repair the damage they've done to public trust and confidence? Overall, I think we're generally too quick to let bygones be bygones. I'm your host Lance Armstrong. I still do this podcast. Armstrong is currently the face of We Do, an events and media company, and he hosts a podcast which covered the 2019 Tour de France and raked in an estimated $1 million in revenue during the month-long event. Here's a guy who doped, insisted that he hadn't doped, accused his competitors of doping. He took medals that did not belong to him, denied people for whom those medals were intended. Cultural anthropologist and brand consultant Grant McCracken has worked with Google, Netflix, and Kanye West. His new book is The New Honor Code, a simple plan for raising our standards and restoring our good names. McCracken is a hard no on giving folks like Lance Armstrong a pass. It seems to me a guy who squandered his own honor and brought dishonor upon a sport ought not to be let back into the fold. As we are open-hearted Americans, we like to think that, oh, people should be forgiven, people make mistakes. There's always a second act in American culture. I'm not sure there should be a second act. I think once you've done something as bad as that, you're done. You're out. Honor, the expectation that will hold ourselves and others to high standards, has gone missing in our lives, says McCracken. Too much of contemporary American culture lets celebrities and public figures get away with what he calls monstrous behavior, partly because we view them as entertainment and partly because we project ourselves onto them and don't want to judge ourselves too harshly. Even some Armstrong critics argued that virtually everyone in cycling used performance enhancing drugs, and some defenders of Harvey Weinstein minimized his assault by pointing to the long history of Hollywood's casting catch. Lowering our standards and explaining away bad behavior by claiming that everyone breaks the rules in turn leads to lower and lower standards for our own personal behavior. In a system where everyone cheats and gets away with misdeeds, McCracken says only a fool actually plays by the rules, especially when no one is looking. McCracken is the farthest thing from a moral scold, and he doesn't always call for the figurative equivalent of the death penalty for malefactors. But he says too often people don't pay any price for bad behavior, as in the 2016 scandal involving the Harvard men's soccer team, who had created a spreadsheet ranking the sexual desirability of members of the women's team in graphic detail, and violating the university's honor code by lying about it when first discovered. The players involved got away with publishing an unsigned apology in the student paper, and Harvard's then president and dean of students also let it all slide. These guys have to be pilloried or made an example of, but it seems to me when you look at the details, you look at the damage done by this behavior, there's a detailed account of how one young woman reacted psychologically. It's horrifying, and these guys are apparently to think that they regard themselves as above reproach, suggests that some larger point has to be made here. They have to understand what they did and the cost of what they did. We'll always be adjudicating what we consider bad behavior and the appropriate social response on a case-by-case basis, and McCracken is the first to admit that there isn't a clearly objective measure of whether we're less honorable than we were 25 or 50 years ago. But I think he's fundamentally right that we tolerate a huge amount of absolutely rotten behavior that should be called out for what it is. If our response to lying, cheating, and acting despicably is simply a collective shrug, we can't be surprised when we get more of the same. How can we restore honor to our culture? McCracken says that a positive honor culture, one which expects individuals to uphold standards of behavior even when they conflict with personal desire or gain, still exists in the military. There's still bad behavior there, but it's rarely excused on the grounds that everyone does it. There is a code that governs your behavior. When you disappoint that code, you're much more culpable than you would be if you were in civilian life and misbehaved yourself and said, well, everybody does it, so it's okay for me, right? Nobody in the military ever says, well, everybody goes AWOL this way or everybody steals stuff or everybody misuses their power. So in fact, I think you get more good behavior and when there is bad behavior, that's more culpable, that's more punishable. McCracken believes that we must also do more to recognize and celebrate the people in our community who do all sorts of things that make our lives better. He writes about Bob, his neighbor in a small town in Connecticut, who has quietly helped build little league fields, helped out at local hospitals, is active in his church and more. So this guy does all this stuff, he's completely unheralded. Nobody in my community has any clue of what he does. I said, you know, we need more Bob's. As it turns out, there are about five Bob's in my community. I thought, you know, if you created a reputation economy and you found some way of giving people credit for these accomplishments, you might be able to inspire 30 Bob's to behave in this manner and all boats would rise with that time. We live in an era where trust and confidence in government, business, and religious and charitable institutions are at or near historic lows and continue to decline. The past year's experiences with politics, pandemics, and riots aren't going to turn that around anytime soon. While endless and insane examples of cancel culture make it clear that none of us wants to live in a world of one strike and you're out, we do well as a society to think seriously about McCracken's call for a new honor code. It's time to hold public figures and ourselves accountable for making the world a better place.