Sep 9, 2011
I read everything I come across by Jon Krakauer. He is a brilliant investigative journalist, adventure writer and biographer. Krakauer’s genius is the ability to reduce actual mountains to mole hills as he did in “Into Thin Air,” and to raise seemingly insignificant lives to extraordinary importance as he did in “Into The Wild,” his best book.
Krakauer’s most recent work is “Three Cups of Deceit.” It is a short, but strong polemic against Greg Mortenson, the co-author and central figure of the bestseller “Three Cups of Tea.” In “Three Cups of Tea,” Mortenson tells of miraculously surviving a failed K2 climb and being kidnapped by the Taliban. The book also covers Mortenson’s Sisyphus-like struggle to build schools in the remote parts of Afghanistan and Pakistan. Sadly, Krakauer claims that Mortenson fabricated his heroic tales and has exaggerated his success at establishing schools.
I remember having two thoughts after reading “Three Cups of Tea.” First, knowing how hard being deeply involved in a mission has been for my own family, I thought, “Wow, what would it be like to be married to this guy?” I have been away from home a lot—missed a lot of birthdays and maybe even one anniversary—but I have never been kidnapped. Second, I thought, “This guy is the missionary’s missionary. His drive is beyond belief.”
It never occurred to me that the story should not be believed. However, it is not Mortenson’s possible fraud and misuse of funds that unsettles me the most. If he is guilty of both or either of these, it’s sad, but easily fixed. What haunts me the most after reading Krakauer’s exposé is a more complex issue and a harder one to solve: Why do we need to hear these stories of extraordinary heroism to be motivated to support good causes?
The CEO of Coca Cola does not have to climb K2, get lost, and miraculously stew up some Coke out of local herbs and water to quench the thirst of an injured Sherpa in order to get investors. Why do we give so much importance to this type of backstory from those who “manufacture” good in the world?
If it is true that Mortensen has fabricated his story, as seems likely, we may be partly to blame. It just may be that stories like Mortenson's are told because society needs to hear them to be motivated to act. This certainly does not excuse Mortenson from the moral or legal responsibility for lying and cheating if he has, but it does explain why he would do it. He told the tale—true or tall—because we wanted to hear it.
Just after putting down Krakauer’s book, I heard an NPR report on another too-good-to-be-true world-saving story that also turned out to be just that. This time it was a veteran journalist who started the snowball rolling by telling just the kind of story we love to hear.
In 2005, Amy Costello, a well-known journalist covering Africa, gushed about a new water pump, the PlayPump, in a video report for PBS’s FRONTLINE. (PlayPump is a merry-go-round water pump that draws water from a well as children spin on it.) Costello’s video of kids laughing as they whirled around the newly installed merry-go-round pump catapulted PlayPump from an under-funded, one-man crusade into an internationally funded water solution for all Africa. Shortly after the video aired, global cause cheerleader Bill Clinton, along with American Online founder, billionaire Steve Case, and then First Lady Laura Bush presented PlayPump with a $16.4 million check.
Hearing complaints about the performance, suitability and sustainability of PlayPump, Costello recently returned to see how the pumps her story had helped launch were functioning. They were not. Costello visited other sites and found more problems. In her follow up report for NPR, she courageously admitted that she had been too quick to support the concept. Without fanfare, PlayPump International—an unforeseen, but celebrated outcome of Costello’s first report—shut down.
When seemingly good-intentioned people are enticed to embellish their stories, and very successful business people are duped into investing into untested ideas, and the world’s goodwill ambassador ends up looking more like a circus carney than a former president, it may be time to reconsider the influence emotional appeal and scalability are having on philanthropy. One thing is for sure: we need to accept more mundane stories.