The Veil of Ignorance
⚡️A Flashpoint
Mental Mosaic- Timeless wisdom, made actionable for life, work & money.
Rather, think about whether it is excessively early for Christmas Decorations: What if you could rebuild something from scratch—without knowing who you’d be inside it?
ACT I — The Visit
The town square still carried the bones of beauty—Greco-Roman arches catching the sun—but its spirit had thinned.
Shuttered shops. Boarded-up homes. Only two restaurants remain: one is fancy enough for a wedding, while the other serves defrosted pizza.
As a newly minted bank regulator, visiting forgotten towns was a rite of passage:
Fly into Pittsburgh, rent a car, and drive three hours toward the edge of Ohio.
The grandest building on Main Street was, of course, the bank—mahogany gleaming, stone immaculate, towering above the town. I remember turning to a coworker and saying, “No wonder everyone hates banks.”
ACT II — The Pivot
The town had lived on coal.
When production fell—hit by tighter regulations and depleted seams—the economy suffered a collapse.
Businesses shuttered, families left, taxation revenues dwindled.
Most community banks either merged or went out of business.
This one did something rare: it adapted.
As fracking spread to rural America, the bank followed.
It opened branches near drilling sites, serving workers the big banks had abandoned.
Over time, it lent to energy firms, contractors, and the small businesses supporting them.
A coal-town lender became a regional energy bank.
The turnaround wasn’t sudden or flashy—it was steady, local, and pragmatic.
It stopped trying to rebuild what was lost and started serving what remained.
ACT III — The Philosophy
That kind of adaptation takes distance—the ability to see problems without nostalgia or bias.
Philosopher John Rawls called this the veil of ignorance:
Fairness emerges when we make decisions without knowing our personal stake in the outcome.
Imagine designing a system not as a banker, miner, or regulator—but as anyone who might live with its consequences.
The bank’s reinvention wasn’t just financial—it was philosophical. It began from first principles:
What still creates value here?
What’s fair?
What works now?
That mindset—removing identifiers and starting clean—is just as valuable for policy, business, and everyday work.
ACT IV — Your Turn
Rawls wrote for politics, but the veil applies everywhere.
Whether you’re running a team, writing policy, or navigating workplace politics, ask:
Can I decide as if I didn’t already know my role or advantage?
That’s the spirit behind this week’s experiment:
🧮 Budget Game
Imagine you’re responsible for balancing the federal budget—
but you don’t know who you’ll be in the society that results.
A CEO? A teacher? A retiree? A single parent?
When you draw the veil, fairness stops being ideological—it becomes about tradeoffs.
And you realize something deeper:
The veil doesn’t make the problem easier.
It makes it honest.
Takeaway
Before your next big decision—at work or in life—
Try writing it twice:
Once as yourself, and once as if you were the intern, customer, or neighbor affected by it.
That’s the veil in action.
That’s wisdom made practical.