In the Absence of Creed

This isn't about Trump, AI, and DEI, it's about the horse loose in the hospital

“There’s a horse loose in the hospital.”

Did anyone else catch John Mulaney’s bit? Hilarious and accurate in its description of pure, unhinged absurdity wrapped in panic. No one knows where the horse is, what it wants, or what it will do next…but everyone agrees a horse should not be loose in a hospital.

The state of chaos, acceleration, and absence of creed that is 2025.

I’m not even talking about politics, though that’s part of it. We face a cultural war where truth is up for debate and history is being rewritten in real time, sometimes by actual legislation. We’re deep in a trade war dressed up like economic policy but behaving more like a supply chain pissing match. Tariffs swing like mood swings, and AI is being shoved into every boardroom, product roadmap, and workforce strategy with an unspoken hope it doesn’t destroy anything important before we can figure out what it actually is. AI isn’t just fast-moving, it’s untethered.

A creed isn’t just a belief system, it’s a shared operating model. Rules of the road that help us navigate traffic every day. Creed is an implicit contract that says how we do things, what we value, what we reward and protect, what’s right and wrong, what we hold sacred and what we challenge. It gives us coherence. Allows for movement, reduces friction. When we agree, at least broadly and on very high-level terms of engagement and belief systems, we can build, collaborate, self-govern, even disagree productively.

Creeds make the world navigable. Provide safety, identify threat, build trust.

In the absence of creed, we don’t agree on facts, leadership, or the definition of fairness, safety, freedom, or success. The horse is loose in the hospital.

Incoherence is unnerving, to say the least. Our sudden allergy to all things DEI feels unnerving because we thought it was commonly understood and generally agreed that bias happens and should be mitigated, that parity and equity were worthy outcomes deserving of pursuit and measurement, that everyone deserves safety and protection, that diversity is to be celebrated. Our headlong pursuit of AI at all costs means at human cost unless and until we decide humans should benefit and how. We race toward automation, augmentation, and algorithmic intelligence with a loosely sketched map, no ethics playbook, and no consensus on how this technology should be designed, governed, or used.

Innovation seems to be the new creed, speed the new virtue. And progress, at any cost, is the new religion.

Bias gets baked into models, we call it optimization. People are displaced, we call it transformation. Trust erodes, we call it disruption.

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In a weird way, I’m thankful for Trump.

Don’t come for me until I explain.

I’m not sure we would have burned it all down ourselves just to begin again. Maybe this is our chance to build from scratch rather than iterate incrementally. I wouldn’t wish for the harm, the erosion of decency, the chaos for chaos’ sake, the deep fractures in our social fabric that may take a generation to heal. But ripping the curtain down doesn’t just break the system, it reveals it.

Our systems weren’t strong enough to withstand Trump. That’s everything we need to know. We’ve been unstructured, uncreeded, uncovered, pretending our systems are self-correcting, outsourcing our ethics to policy teams and systems, and living in a state of hope that everyone will do the right thing.

I have the same discomfort with AI.

The collapse of creed is painful and disorienting, but it’s also permission. What instincts rise to the top, what values do you redefine and articulate as sacred, and what do you choose to protect like a dog with a bone when it’s no longer safe to assume agreement?

I used to talk about making work more human. And I still do. But now, that means something different. It means looking inward before looking outward. It means holding space for discomfort and ambiguity. It means acknowledging that we’ve built systems that were never designed to serve everyone, and letting those systems collapse so we can build better ones.

It means refusing to pretend we have it all figured out, because we don’t. Every institution, from government to business, from education to media, is undergoing a real-time identity crisis. We’re rebranding democracy, stress-testing capitalism, and rewriting social contracts without legal precedent or ethical consensus.

So here’s to the next chapter, the charting of a new creed. If we’re being honest, there’s a kind of fierce, necessary beauty in starting from scratch. Would we have built something radically more human, more equitable, more sustainable if we started from where we were? Or is rebuilding in open air more powerful?

I wish I could attribute this quote, I’ve tried sourcing it before, but it seems to be an internet meme or social graffiti. I use it often. Thank you, Unknown.

Don’t know that we have a choice, so I’ll start writing on our blank page here:

1. Stop the spin: Insist on genuine dialogue about what fairness, justice, and progress actually mean. You’re not going to be good at this because we’ve lost the art of philosophical debate. I don’t care, practice.

2. Rehumanize work: Time to revisit the mission of recognizing people as individuals with aspirations, challenges, and intrinsic value.

3. Redefine power in the Age of AI: Human dignity is at the foundation of Artificial Intelligence. Design systems that prioritize transparency, fairness, and accountability over sheer speed and market disruption.

4. Human cost as a non-negotiable metric: Protect people, don’t trample them. If we use AI to optimize humans out of the equation, we’ve already failed. I don’t mean save every job, I mean think about every human. Measure this impact like you would ESG & sustainability KPIs.

5. Rebuild trust in institutions: Equity isn’t performative, it’s baked into models, policies, hiring loops, datasets, and outcomes. Institutions are stewards of the common good; act like it.

6. Embrace uncertainty with courage: Being swept into chaos isn’t a call for nihilism, it’s an invitation to reimagine and uphold a new social contract. That calls for radical transparency and accountability.

7. Tell the truth. Even when it’s messy. If our systems require dishonesty to function, we’re architecting failure at scale. Say the thing. Own the gaps. Build with eyes wide open.

8. Redefine leadership as stewardship. The best leaders are builders, not bosses.

9. Shape the conversation: Actively create. Actively curate. Actively care.

I have no #10, why do I feel compelled to give you 10 perfect creed-builders? You have no idea the strength it takes to leave this hanging at 9, 10 feels so perfect. OK, I’ll use it to make an imperfect and unwritten point. In fact, offer your own #10. This is the beauty of a blank page in the absence of creed.

All for now. I told you we’d be starting a conversation here. Obama spoke publicly for the first time in a while at Hamilton College quite recently, and he said “it’s up to all of us to fix this.” Rebuilding creeds isn’t about vision, it’s about willingness to act, contribute, and commit to rebuilding.

Godspeed.

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¹ Someone recently (earnestly) called me “the Nora Ephron of our time.” Which is wildly flattering, mildly confusing, and frankly, an enormous amount of pressure for someone who mostly writes from the edge of righteous burnout and still says “what even is this?” at least twice a day. But sure, I’ll take it. I guess if the world’s on fire, someone has to document it with heart, sarcasm, and good sentence structure. Nora, wherever you are, forgive me.

“Above all, be the heroine of your life, not the victim.”
– Nora Ephron