This morning we continue with the third in our series of excerpts from Barry Carter’s book Infinite Wealth. See: 1) The Rise of a Win Win Civilization and 2)  A Personal Journey of Discovery

“Hundred, perhaps thousands, of consultants and business leaders are pushing for what they see as dramatic reform. They want to re-engineer the corporation, . . . empower the workforce . . .give workers a sense of ownership, . . . These are all worthy objectives and are definitely steps in the right direction. What frustrates me is that they all reach a certain point in both theory and their application and suddenly they hit a wall. They never reach the logical conclusion to their own argument . . . . They are looking for answers within a system that does not work.”  

—Roger Terry, Economic Insanity

Why Corporations Don’t Work
Companies are Controlled Economies
Employment is Socialized Work

Barry Carter

Imagine a society where you have no guaranteed freedom of speech and no right to privacy, where tapping your phone or secretly videotaping your every move is legal and done.  Envision an economy where all customers internal to the society are controlled centrally by bureaucrats and where wealth-creation is socially owned—one where the individual is not allowed to own the fruits of his or her labor. Imagine a place where there is no freedom of market choice and all of your suppliers operate as monopolies and are chosen for you by autocrats in the bureaucracy.  Imagine a place where regardless of the contribution you make, your reward stays the same and you are rewarded the same or less as those adding less or even no value in the society.

In this society the bureaucracy, as in a welfare system, pays for the services provided to you. Imagine a culture where people tap only a small percent of their passion and are relatively non-engaged, where giving mediocre effort and service to customers internal to the society is the norm. Imagine a society where internal customers wait in long lines to have their needs met; one where customer and supplier relationships are mostly ones of indifference or even adversarial. It is a society where the organizing system consistently suppresses individual creativity and initiative. Imagine a system of secrecy, where the central bureaucrats in power tightly hold information. They strategically use information as propaganda to put the best spin on things from their perspective and for their gain and comfort. No, I am not talking about the former Soviet Union. I am describing the internal operations of the company or controlled economy where you likely work. 

As I revolved from one company to another, trying to find someplace that would make sense, it occurred to me that “the company” and all bureaucracies are controlled economies. 

Controlled economies are orga­nizations wherein the wealth-creation process of trade between individuals and groups is controlled. They are organizations where internal suppliers and customers do not have freedoms as owners, since they do not own the specific work they perform, and therefore, must be managed and controlled by others in superior positions. Controlled economies are the very foundation of our Industrial Age civilization, Socialist and Capitalist alike.

For me, the great irony of our age is that we and the Russians lived in abject terror for a generation, spent money to the point of bankruptcy and endangered the existence of life on earth debating a point that was in fact moot.  Our respective economies were and are tweedle-dum and tweedle-dee.  The answer to the debate lies entirely outside both paradigm boxes, which are in fact the same paradigm box—Industrial Age society.  We both had the right ideas, however, we bungled them in different ways.  Capitalists believed that private ownership was the key to growth and prosperity, but then structured private enterprises to severely limit ownership. The Russians believed that the worker should own the means of production, then structured ownership so that control was limited to a smaller, more corrupt and incompetent a horde of fat cats than ever before, and they paid the price. 

The controlled economy has been the wealth-creation engine for Industrial Age civilization as well as the core of our system for organizing humanity. In the west the controlled economy has existed primar­ily in the form of the company. However, controlled economies come in all forms of bureaucracies including hospitals, government agencies, schools, non-profit organizations and even entire countries such as the former Soviet Union.

In fact, companies, like all bureaucracies, are in essence miniature Soviet Unions. They are bastions of dictatorship, with systems that operate structurally almost identically to the former Soviet Union. All controlled economies, regardless of size, operate based upon the same principles, systems and values. This controlled environment is the primary reason that most people dislike work and live for Friday and freedom. The primary difference between wealth-creation within the traditional company and the Soviet Union is size. There is nearly a point by point, item by item match between the principles, systems and values of the company and the former Soviet Union. If there were a company as large as the former USSR, it would be almost identical to that country. We do not live in a free marketplace.  Rather we are languishing in disparate autocratic socialistic entities where our pioneering, entrepreneurial intelligence is systematically crushed.

This chapter shows some startling revelations regarding our pseudo “free market”: 1) approximately 95% of all customers are controlled centrally by bureaucrats, 2) Only 5% to 10% of wealth is privately created with 90 to 95% being socially created. 3) Fully 90 to 95% of the wealth is controlled by 5% to 10% of the people. All of this occurs because our economies are made of collections of controlled economies. Let’s step back and look at the weak principles of the controlled economy and where and why it evolved this way.

For a more detailed analytical point by point evaluation of why and how companies are in essence Miniature Soviet Unions visit the NeuroNet Web Site, subject: Companies are Controlled Economies  – The Hopelessness of Miniature Soviet Unions in an Information Age

Controlled Customers within a Free Market

In a typical transaction of a product to a consumer, most people would consider there to have been only one supplier-to-customer transaction. The supplier is the com­pany and the end-user consumer is the customer. Assume that there were twenty peo­ple in the supply chain performing work to make the final product. In a controlled economy all twenty of these people are brought together and seen as a single entity—the supplier or the company. This, however, is an illusion caused by the socialized and monolithic perspective of the controlled economy.

Whenever work flows from one person to another, there is a transaction as value is added and thus wealth created. There are, therefore, not one, but many actual supplier-to-customer transactions and many customers. Controlled economies disguise these supplier to customer transactions, hiding them so well that it has taken us 200 years to discover them. Today organizations are beginning to practice the internal customer and inverted pyramid concepts, where each worker in the company is seen as a supplier and customer to other workers.

The internal supplier and customer concept is not so much a discovery of what has been or is, but recognition of the direction we are taking. We are attempting to move toward a free market within the enterprise, where the customers, not bureaucrats do the driving. A system of real internal suppliers and customers.

Since the people performing the work are the ones creating the wealth, management adds no value to the wealth-creation process. Though they are the glue that holds the work of an organization together and provides the motivation and leadership, perhaps there are other ways of motivating, leading and gluing. Let’s theoretically remove management and the hierarchy from the picture. What is left is work being performed and people adding value as work flows from one person to another and wealth is created—in essence, real customers and suppliers. There is, however, something still wrong with this picture. As work and products flow from one person to another, money should be flowing in the reverse direction. But it does not.

Cash Flow in Controlled Economies

In controlled economies, money is controlled and flows from external customers up the vertical hierarchy to be artificially redistributed as standardized compensations to the owner’s representatives; the employees. This distribution method allows money to be the “fear-based” controlling glue that holds together the misaligned and fragmented pieces of work. These are the economics of trickle-down inherent to systems of centrally created wealth.

This lack of money flow from individual customer to individual supplier is the primary factor that causes us to lose sight of the fact that the workers are suppliers and customers. In order to correct our problems of misalignment, money must flow directly from customer to supplier as work flows in the opposite direction.

Monopolies within a Free Market

Another factor, which helps disguise suppliers and customers within controlled economies, is the lack of freedom of market choice. Controlled economies work internally based upon monopolies. Traditionally employees have had no say regarding their internal suppliers, the other employees within the organization. Employees are hired by management and work where and with whom they are told. They can complain to management about a poorly performing supplier but management usually has more important and less painful things to deal with. If service is poor to internal customers there is little recourse for the customer. The norm in companies is for service to internal suppliers to be extremely poor, with many internal customers’ needs going unmet for years.

As we looked at the former Soviet Union, we saw pictures of empty store shelves, long lines, poor service and poor quality. In gen­eral, within the old Soviet Union, people internal to the society did not get their needs met very well as the normal mode of practice. All controlled economies have this same problem within their organizations. For example, there was the production person at Insecure Molding who could not get a five-dollar wrench for eighteen years. It would have allowed him to do one of his jobs twice as fast and to save hundreds of dollars per year. He was told by his supplier (his supervisor) for eighteen years that the money was not in the budget.

Processes are systematically not defined, preventive mainte­nance of equipment is systematically not done and details of work not covered. Support is sys­tematically not provided by internal suppliers to internal cus­tomers, systems are systematically not capable. People eventually get tired of fighting the bureaucracy and they give up. Patience with waste and gridlock is our real world even after decades of continuous improvement. In general, within companies we have become ac­customed to the neglect of dozens of critically important needs. People who demand better service, or demand that their needs be met are labeled troublemakers. We have become accustomed to the fact that it will take months and years to meet these needs. The norm is “Relax, don’t get so ex­cited. It’s not your money. It’s just a job.” The supply chain in both systems is system­atically unable to deliver.

“You can’t manage everything” is what one manager told me when I showed him that we were paying 50% more for ink pens of less value than pens from another external supplier. He was exactly right, and this is why controlled economies are obsolete. There is simply too much detail for a few bureaucrats to manage and too many employees’ needs to meet. Companies have the equivalent of the long lines and empty store shelves of the former Soviet Union, as internal customers go for years without getting their needs met because we centrally control the wealth-creation process. And this is true even in the most progressive controlled economies with horizontal business units, self-directed team, empowered employees, gainsharing and the like where companies seek to decentralize authority and ownership. Because of the control core controlled economies cannot go far enough to get the job done. I know because I have been there and done that.

The Liberation of Customers

As middle management and supervisors disappear, as hierarchies flatten, pyramids invert and companies shift horizontally the trend in controlled economies is towards a free market within organizations, with work flowing from one person to another as money flows in the opposite direction.

Internal customers are beginning to have some say regarding their internal suppliers with progressive management programs such as 360 degree surveys, internal customer surveys, peer evaluations, internal supplier and customer value chains and inverted pyramids. In self-directed teams, horizontal business units and team-based organizations, employees are beginning to have some say in hiring, firing, and setting work schedules and relationships through 360 degree surveys and peer evaluations. At W.L. Gore and Associates people wander around the company until they find partners and customers who desire working with them and stay only as long as they add value for these people. As we move towards intrapreneuring and smaller profit centers at the team level, cash is beginning to flow in the opposite direction of workflow.

As we metamorphose toward Mass Privatization, employees are beginning to be seen as the customers they are. The internal customers are gaining control of their supplier base and are starting to have freedom of market choice. In addition, cash is beginning to flow horizontally.

All of the fad management programs above are free-market based. While changes in controlled economies show the trend and direction, they do not and cannot come close to tapping the potential required for a knowledge economy. This is because the very core of what they are, controlled economies, prevents the free market initiatives from really working—from reaching their natural conclusions.

For more detail on the parallels between the company and the former Soviet Union visit the NeuroNet Web Site, subjects: Work and Money Flow, Monolopies, Beyond Controlled Economies, The Trends Towards Holistic and Private Work, Cores Demands of the New Wealth Creation

Adam Smith, the Division of Labor and Fragmentation

As I made my journey through controlled economy after controlled economy, I saw the same trends common throughout—many wasteful, insane and limited perspective decisions being made daily regarding products, resources, customers and materials. There is a question to be asked concerning all of the waste and wasted potential within organizations.

If those making the decisions to produce the waste were in their own private businesses and paying the whole cost and reaping the whole benefit and seeing the whole picture, would there be the same waste? The answer is no.

Herein lies a big chunk of the problem. The work of controlled economies is divided into narrow fragments, with various people and narrow fragmented departments performing specialized segments of the divided work. Because of these divisions the specific person performing the work cannot own it.

Two hundred years ago, at the beginning of the Industrial Age Adam Smith wrote a book, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. In it he defined the Industrial Age wealth-creation system. He presented a concept called the division of labor. With it, work is di­vided into areas of specialty and batch processed in order to mass-produce the same thing over and over. On page one, Smith goes to the very heart of the matter. Using an example of pin manufacturing, he explains that by having an uneducated indi­vidual make as many pins as possible in a day, he produces between one and twenty pins. By dividing the pin-making labor into ten small operations performed by ten uneducated people, the ten people could collectively produce 48,000 pins or 4,800 per person.

We took people from an Agricultural Age, directly from the fields, or one-piece “whole” craftwork and put them on fragmentation-based assembly lines. In the Agricultural Age, an individual performed whole work, such as growing his own food or making one customized horse shoe at a time, or one made-to-order cabinet at a time. Individuals went from this to performing narrow “slivers” of work, such as inserting the same bolt into the same hole thousands of times each day and never seeing an end product. We divided work into such narrow slivers that people lost perspective of what they were doing, the end product and its function.

For over two hundred years, the division of labor within controlled economies has in­creased productivity. Consistent with the Newtonian worldview, the science of the Industrial Age, we viewed work as something that could be divided and sub-divided into its smallest elements and then artificially aggregated back together. The glue which we attempt to patch and hold this fragmented work together is control, which comes through supervision, pay for time, management, procedures, regula­tions, talk, performance evaluations, punishment and propaganda. A major problem, however, is that glued fragmented work leaks massively, with many things falling through the cracks between individual’s fragmented jobs.

The division of labor concept is the heart of the organizational structure that has powered the Industrial Age—the bureaucracy. Bureaucracy is far more than just a synonym for “red tape,” rigid policies or the former Soviet Union’s operating system. It is the very foundation and structure of our entire civilization. Most institutions, whether gov­ernmental, non-profit or privately owned, are based upon this organizing system. Bureaucracy is a system for organizing by bureaus or departments of specialty. Bureaucracy is the organizational structure for vertically integrating the work of a business under one central authority and dividing it for control. It is the operating system for all of the industrialized world, Socialist and Capitalist countries alike. It permeates every segment of advanced civilization. It is a structure for organiz­ing information and the work of people and, therefore, wealth-creation.

Bureaucracy is the ground-rock and framework of huge, powerful organizations. It has created tremen­dously forceful advances in human growth. Nonetheless, we cur­rently associate the word “bureaucracy” not with strength and power, but with clumsi­ness, inefficiency, stupidity and ineffectuality. This alone should be enough to tell us that something is gravely wrong with the foundation of our wealth-creation system.

Today the bureaucratic trend is reversing, even in hard-core manufacturing, as companies shift to programs like manufacturing cells, one piece flow, mass customization, just-in-time production, lean manufacturing, business units, profit centers, re-engineering and horizontal organizations. With all of this activity the division of labor and bureaucracy are literally being undivided and de-specialized. Some products have gone from taking weeks to go through five, six or seven specialized departments (machining, pre-molding, molding, assembly, and inspection) and from 15 various people within these departments working on the product, to one person. The one-person product-focused cell performs the whole work of the entire product. This is a direct reversal of Smith’s division of labor.

“Fundamentally reeningeering is about reversing the Industrial Revolution. Reengineering rejects the assumptions inherent in Adam Smiths industrial paradigm—the division of labor, hierarchical control and all appurtenances of an early stage developing economy. . . . we say that it is time to retire those principles and adopt a new set.”

—Michael Hammer and James Champy,
Reengineering the Corporation 

The Lean Manufacturing approach uses three to four day Kaizen Events to suck a single product line out of several vertically integrated functional departments of specialty. It then places the product line into a one-piece flow manufacturing cell producing whole products. Sometime a self-directed product team is established at the same time along with a team-based incentive system. In essence, a small business is being created, made of a small team of semi-business owners. All of the work of the product line is then performed by this small business.

Having led many Kaizen Events and participated in more than I’d care to admit I can attest to the significant performance improvements from making work whole. Within the Kaizen Events organizations routinely see 50 to 80% improvements in many performance measures—productivity, cycle times, on-time shipments, lead times, scrap, external failure rates and more.

For more detail on the reversal of the division of labor and the concepts above visit the NeuroNet Web Site, subjects: The Trends Towards Holistic and Private Work. For more detail on fragmented work see Trillions of One-Dollar Problems.

“Public Work” and Socialized Wealth-Creation

We wanted to fragment work in an Industrial Age so that it could be centrally owned, planned and controlled from above. There are two reasons for this:

1) The wealth-creation process in the Industrial Age has been capital intensive. To create wealth one needed lots of dollars to purchase expensive equipment and facilities and to hire lots of people in order to mass produce for mass markets. Since most people in the Industrial Age were not wealthy, only a minority of people could afford owning the wealth-creation process. These individuals then needed a system that allowed them to own and control the work of hundreds, thousands, and even hundreds of thousands of people, from a single, controllable point. Divided work and bureaucracy was the answer.

2) It has been natural in a Win/Lose Era to desire controlling as much power, wealth and people as possible. It was and is a norm of “control or be controlled.” When we shifted from the Agricultural Age to the Industrial Age, power shifted from being confined within bloodlines, to anyone who could amass enough wealth.  The wealthy, however, needed a system to own and control the work of others. The answer came in dividing other people’s work and vertically integrating it, under one’s ownership and central control—hence bureaucracy.

Divided work, however, was a foreign notion to those with an Agricultural Age paradigm. I had a great uncle, the grandson of a freedman, who farmed all of his life with a mule and a few acres of land. He was clearly a relic of the Agricultural Age. I heard him say, on several occasions, that he could not understand how people could possibly perform “public work.” Until recently, I never quite understood what he meant by “public work.” At the time, I was 14 and working as a laborer in my father’s privately owned construction business. I could not conceive of this as “public work.”

With the division of labor within companies, work is publicly owned. Al­though a company owned by an individual may be privately owned, the person performing the work does not own that work. That work, therefore, is not privately owned.

In companies, the fragmented work of many individuals is collectively brought to­gether into one whole. It forms one business and is owned by the company. The com­pany, in turn, is owned as a “single entity”—a “collective whole” by one person or a group of people. The word “collective” is defined as “the bringing together of individual pieces into one whole.” (The words public, collective, communal, social as in socialism, shared and co­operative are all synonyms.)

In a company of a thousand employees, the work of a thousand people is brought together and owned by one person or a group of shareholders. This is collective, public or even socialized ownership. It is just as collective as Socialism, where the work of a na­tion is brought together and collectively owned by all of the people.

Whether the com­pany is owned by one person, many people or even collectively by the people performing the work, the company being owned as a “collective whole” disallows work from being owned by the specific individual performing it. This makes work within a company public or socialized by any logical standard.

My great-uncle was correct; any divided work, which is not owned by the individual doing that work, is “public work.” In a conversation with a production worker regarding whether or not work within a private company is socialized, he said “But in socialism, the state bureaucracy owns the work and everything else.” I asked him, “Who owns the work you do, you or the company bureaucracy?”

The term “private ownership” commonly refers to private ownership of the whole enter­prise. There has been little attention paid to whether or not the work and wealth-creation, within the enterprise, was publicly or privately owned. In the former Soviet Union, private ownership was disallowed. In a society of owner­less clerks one would expect to have productivity and growth problems in a customer-driven era.

What do we find when we take a close look at our supposedly “privatized free market” economy? We find that there is not much more private ownership of wealth-creation than in the former Soviet Union. In fact, there is hardly any private ownership of wealth-creation at all. Since wealth is created through the work of people and employees perform the vast majority of work, then the vast majority of wealth is created through public or socialized work.

The Misalignment of Fragmented Public Work

We divide whole work and artificially aggregate the fragmented public pieces back together through control. The result is a poorly aligned organization or economy.

Alignment is the degree to which individual’s interests directly coincide and are in harmony with those of the organization and other stakeholders.

As shown in the following figure, the interests of the various stakeholders (suppliers, customers, stockholders, managers, various departments, employees) in controlled economies point in many different directions. For example, the controlled economy wants to continually “get more out of people” but wants to pay them as little as possible, in order to be more profitable and stay competitive. The net result of poor alignment is a control-based win/lose system where one individual gains when another loses.

Poor Alignment Within Organizations

The more narrowly work is divided, the more controlling glue is required, while less align­ment is possible. The more holistic the work, the better the alignment. Also, the more holistic the work, the less it can be controlled from above and the less central con­trol is required.

A serf from the Agricultural Age did not have an external quality control inspector controlling the quality fragment of his work.  The serf had authority over the whole process from production to consumption. Since he and his family lived off of their share of the crop, there was natural alignment regarding the serf growing the best quality crop possible. Therefore, no quality “controlling” inspector was required to assure the serf’s work—but instead a tax collector to ensure that the noble got his “fair” share.

Today inspectors and other check balance systems are disappearing as work becomes whole and begins to be privatized. As we near breakpoint, organizations are developing new compensation systems in which the individual receives a percent of the wealth she produces: gainsharing, at-risk pay, team-based pay, bonus systems, pinpointing, profit sharing and many home grown systems. Companies such as Nucor Steel and Lincoln Electric have production operators receiving as much as $80,000 per year for work most manufacturing companies pay $20,000 per year or less for.  Most of the income for Nucor and Lincoln workers comes from a percent of the value they add above a set baseline. These companies perceive an abundant reality with an expanding pie and they have been highly successful doing so.

For more detail on Nucor, Lincoln, the private work concepts within organizations and the transition to private work visit the NeuroNet Web Site, subjects: The Trends Towards Holistic and Private Work.

A Life is a Terrible Thing to Sell

The defining trait of poorly aligned public work is standardized compensation. This is compensation for which, regardless of the value one adds, one is paid a flat salary or wage. One is, therefore, paid for one’s time and not for one’s value or the value one adds. It is a system that devalues the individual. One sells one’s time just as any other prostitute. Prostitutes passionlessly rent their bodies for money. Employees passionlessly rent their lives for money.

According to Webster’s dictionary a prostitute is one who deliberately debases, devalues or lowers oneself or one’s talents for money. How many of us, as employees, do not come close to fully utilizing our talents? How many of us work on things that we have little passion for, or do not believe in or outright oppose just for the money? Do we do what the boss wants, knowing it to be wrong, just for the money? How many of us prostitutes come close to utilizing our potential as employees? Very few! Like other prostitutes we must do the “practical” thing in order to meet our daily living needs. One sells part of one’s life to another, and is detached from the outcome of one’s work, in order to pay the bills.  This is prostitution. It is a paradigm of relatively low emotional and spiritual intelligence. This is not bad but merely another sign of our level of maturity and the positive direction of our growth. After all, I would rather be an employee than a serf or slave.

From the organization’s perspective, the problem with human rental property is one of motivation and responsibility. Most prostitutes are not very passionate or engaged in their work, and this includes employees. As we move into the Knowledge Era, where wealth is created through diverse idea-generation, disengagement and Newtonian separation of one’s mind, spirit and body is completely intolerable.

The Insurmountable Problems with Public Work

There are several significant problems with public work and controlled economies that make the Industrial Age system too weak for an Information Age:

1.      Misalignment: Poor alignment is the norm of public work. There is inherent misalignment between individuals, the organization and other stakeholders. Individuals are routinely put into situations where they gain when the organization loses and they lose when the organization gains.

2.      Low Responsibility and Motivation: Since there is no ownership and people are paid for their time and not their value, there is little negative or positive consequence for one’s actions. Individuals are therefore not highly motivated, as their actions are either paid for by others or rewarded to others. It is a system with an inherent level of low responsibility and motivation.

3.      Blindness: Public work is a system lacking in perspective and thus wisdom and intelligence; one of poor vision, near blindness and limited realities. Each individual sees, works and experiences wealth-creation from very narrow and fragmented perspectives with no individuals seeing or having a good understanding of the whole wealth-creation process.

4.      Adversarialism: Public work is a system based upon division or fragmentation, with each individual seeing from different narrow perspectives. Combining this with the fact that the system is competitive makes the system adversarial at its core—Production against Quality, Design versus Process, Management versus employees.

5.      Waste: There are huge amounts waste and wasted potential as work slips through the cracks of the fragmented and glued public work.

6.      Knowledge Work: Public work has too little capability to handle the intangible knowledge work of the Information Age. In the Industrial Age, most fragmented work evolved around the making and moving of things. Work was easily measured and tracked. However, my profitability simply cannot be tracked if as an employee I am sitting in my office thinking, doing brainwork or developing ideas. Knowledge work must be whole and privatized in order for its profitability to be known.

The division and public ownership of work, therefore, results in billions of foolish decisions being made each day globally. Billions of wasted dollars and priceless wasted potential are inherent to our system of work, while our many deficits grow larger.

The narrow and limited perspective of public work, the low intelligence and the inability to handle knowledge work are critical points but far too complex to fully explain here. For more detail: Profit and Loss from Fragmented Divided Public Work; Intangible Wealth from Fragmented Public Work; Divided Public Work and Low Intelligence; Fragmented Work, Reality and Quantum Physics.

Representative Customers Are Not Real Customers

When you purchase a product from Wal-Mart you take a couple of seconds to inspect it. When you get it home perhaps you inspect it more as you install it. When Insecure Molding sells PC backup tape cartridges to Perspective Supplies there is a receiving inspector at Perspective Supplies who inspects the incoming product. He is a customer, however, not being a real customer paying his or her real dollars the receiving inspector has a poor perspective of what is important and what is not. Based upon past experience the inspector knows that if something gets past him that does not meet official specifications he could be in hot water. Having little idea of the end use of the part his motivation is to reject anything for the slightest condition.

Perspective Supplies’ receiving inspector had repeatedly rejected tens of thousands of protective cases for data cartridges supplied by Insecure Molding. Using a magnifying glass the inspector had rejected the cases for two or three very tiny air bubbles (invisible with the necked eye) on the bottom leg of the data cartridges. As a consumer who purchased Perspective Supplies data cartridges I had never once looked at the case much less thought of inspecting it with a magnifying glass. As a paying customer I honestly did not care about the case as long as it protected the tape and did not have any obvious cosmetic defects. Instead, as a customer, I was concerned with the irritating and possibly damaging noise that the cartridge made while in use. My Sony cartridges did not make this noise.

Insecure Molding was focusing its limited resources solving a non-problem, the bubbles, while the end user customer’s real problem, the damaging noise, went unresolved. Insecure molding thought it was being customer-focused by paying attention only to needs of the next customer in the chain. The problem was that the receiving inspector was not a real customer, not paying his money for the product. He was a representative customer only seeing a narrow sliver of the wealth-creation process with his self-interest only being tied to this narrow, non-aligned sliver. However, being in a position of power he caused the entire supply chain to shift limited resources away from the real customer’s real concerns. I have witnessed inspectors and many others effortlessly jerk entire companies and supply chains around like a fly on the end of a whip—making them non-customer focused in the name of being customer focused. Each day globally supply chains made of many non-owning representatives within many companies waste millions of dollars on things that mean nothing to end users while ignoring the important stuff. People like inspectors do what is in their best interest or face the wrath of insane and convoluted organizing structures.

Companies and supply chains that focus on being directly customer-focused when selling to representative customers, without at least attempting to collaborate on end-user needs miss the boat of the customer-focused concept. The problem is that no departments or representatives within or outside of controlled economies have the perspective or motivation to collaborate on such details.

The Weakness of a Representative Free Market

With our present wealth-creation system, we have a representative free market that corresponds to our representative government. It is part of a whole Industrial Age civilization. With Mass Representative Democracy, politicians represent the owners of the country. With companies, employees represent owners of the company. A representative free market is one where the vast majority of customers and suppliers are representatives of real owners and are not themselves the owning customers and suppliers.

Public work, after all, is representative ownership. An employee is paid for her time to represent the owners of a company, just as a politician is paid for her time to represent the owners of a country. Our free market is weak because people are simply a lot less effective and efficient when spending and receiving someone else’s money and where interests are not aligned. We easily see and understand this weakness within representative government today. We complain about our representative politicians but most of us as employees act with equal levels of self-interest, disengagement, narrow vision, lack of passion and patience with waste and wasted potential in our jobs.

For more details on the representative free market: The Personal Journey Continued.

Conclusion—Centralized Wealth Creation

The vast majority of the trade in the United States and the industrialized world, perhaps as high as 95%, is intra-company trade. This is trade that occurs as work flows from one worker to another within a controlled economy. The customers and suppliers in these companies are controlled by central planning bureau­crats. It then follows that the United States is probably only about a 5% free-market economy.

Instead of being 99.999% centrally command and control, as the old Soviet Union was, the United States is probably 95% or so. The fact that 5% to 10% of the peo­ple control 90% of the wealth in our society confirms this. It is also validated by the fact that we likely have as many bureaucrats per capita as the Soviet Union had. When we tally all of the managers and supervisors within companies and government agencies (state, local and federal) the numbers are also likely close.

Overall our  “fleet-footed” free market is not so free. At the micro-level where people work and wealth is created we have socialized public work, with centralized bureaucrats controlling the work. At the median level, the level where organizations exist and trade with one another, we have a representative free market with ownerless representatives buying, selling and trading for organizations. At the macro level we have a federal government who regulates our system of centrally created wealth. This is in addition to the fact that government directly participates in the wealth-creation process in education, transportation, health care, postal service and more. We can hardly classify ours as a free market economy. In reality, we have a society of miniature Soviet Unions partially regulated by a central government.

By any reasonable definition, we must classify our national economy as a central com­mand and control economy based upon the degree of wealth-creation that is controlled. We have, in fact, for the past couple of hundred years operated upon a system that I term Centralized Wealth Creation. This is a system where the control of wealth-creation is centralized under the authority of relatively few people.

The controlled economy is the primary social institution underpinning our system of Centralized Wealth Creation. However, our government is also part of our Centralized Wealth Creation system. In this system, wealth is created in vertically-integrated bureaucracy-based organizations and is then redistributed to the masses in society through wages, salaries and taxes.

The End of the Company

By synthesizing the age wave precedence, breakpoint science, the incoming Information Age, with my journey of experience, the fact that companies are weak, miniature Soviet Unions, and our economy being primarily a central command and control economy, the following conclusions can be drawn:

Σ        Our wealth-creation system, based upon controlled economies and employment, is too weak for an Information Age where knowledge is the dominant source of wealth and brains within people’s heads are the primary means of production.

Σ        The company and controlled economy will soon cease to exist as the PRIMARY wealth-creation institu­tion in society, and employment will soon cease to exist as the PRIMARY means of working.

Slow, continual improvement, reengineering, reinventing, or reform of public work is not practical without a long-term vision and integration of the various concepts with that vision. Though these and many of our other fad programs all get us closer to Mass Privatization, it is all on the wrong foundation and, therefore, quite ineffective. It is about as effective as improving plantations in 1858 when the Industrial Revolution was about to make them obsolete. There is too much mis-alignment in the system for it to work. It is no more practical than the reform efforts of the Soviet Union. Those diligently working to “continually improve” their companies are the Gorbachevs of the West as they attempt to empower people within an organizing structure based upon control and disempowerment. Like Gorbachev, their efforts, though mostly ineffective, are leading us towards breakpoint. Just as Tom Peters predicts,  “thirty-nine of forty managers will be fired in the next five years.”

The collapse of the Soviet Union’s central-planning monster is a forerunner of what is happening now to today’s corporations and will accelerate in the years directly ahead. As Peter Drucker has said, the Fortune 500 is over. The controlled-obsessed public work institutions of the Industrial Age lack the capacity for the levels of liberty, ownership, intelligence and synergy necessary to power today’s and tomorrow’s civi­lization and has become dysfunctional relative to our needs. With work lying at the core of our institutions, if our system of work is dysfunctional nothing else will operate properly.

Within the coming years, the company, as we have known it, will be all but gone. They will either be metamorphosed or crushed and assimilated by the incoming customer-driven free market.

As a result of these developments . . . the corporation as we have known it for eighty years will have largely disappeared, its few survivors mostly huddled in dwindling market niches. Those in competitive markets that delay, in some cases even refuse, the process of becoming virtual corporations will be swept away, their remnants seized, reorganized properly and absorbed by fast moving modern competitors.

—William Davidow and Michael Malone,
The Virtual Corporation

Some say that it is improbable for the change to happen so quickly. The Soviet Union, however, did something far-fetched. Nobody in ‘1989, ‘1990 or, even, July of 1991 would have guessed that the Soviet Union would disappear overnight but, by the end of 1991 it was gone. Southern plantations and slavery disappeared equally as fast. An entire wealth-creation system was wiped out overnight. Paradigm shifts, breakpoints and social change stop for no one. Even the most powerful quickly become extinct with the advance.

The end of the company does not mean that people will cease to work together in single buildings with direct person-to-per­son con­tact. People will have a choice of working from home, a single build­ing, out of their automobile, from various locations, from a remote lo­cation or a combination of these. People will, in fact, have closer working relationships with more people than ever. The end of the bureaucracy-based controlled-economy does not mean that we shall no longer work in organizations. In fact, we are moving towards a society of interconnected organizations.

The end of the company means that the new wealth-creation pro­cess shall require systems and organi­zations so different from a company that the new in­stitution can no longer be classified as a company by any reasonable definition.

There will be no management, no employees, no central stock ownership, no central control or planning, no bureau­cracy, no departments, no salaries, no wages, no traditional division of labor. The new organization for an Information Age can best be described simply as a community.

The end of companies, controlled economies and employment as the primary way we work also does not mean that there will be no more employees or companies. There will likely be companies, however, it simply will not be the way most people work. In fact, employees are destined to become the new underclass in society.

Copyright 2000 by Barry Carter

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Next: The Emancipation of Capitalism

About Barry Carter.  

Infinite Wealth is available at the author’s website, and can be purchased in bookstores everywhere including Amazon and Barnes & Nobel. There is also an abbreviated free online version.

Reason Wilken’s Review of Infinite Wealth

 

This is the second in a series of excerpts from the book Infinite Wealth. In which the author explains how he came to synergic awareness. Also see: 1) The Rise of a Win Win Civilization 

A Personal Journey of Discovery

Barry Carter

Most managers and workers in today’s enterprises are cogs in obsolete machinery. They sometimes have a vague feeling that the machinery needs scrapping and replacing, but they do not know what to do about it.  . . . We are in the early phase of a revolution that will fundamentally transform enterprises around the planet. The transformation is a paradigm shift of immense magnitude.

The Making of a Non-Conformist

I grew up the second of three children in a middle-class black family living in rural Vir­ginia. My father owned a construction business and my mother worked as a secretary with the state government. In 1965, Virginia instituted a voluntary school desegregation policy. At age nine, I, along with my brother, were the only two black children to integrate the public elementary school system of Boydton, Virginia. While I scarcely met with angry mobs, water hoses or police dogs, I did notice an abrupt change in my station in life.

I had been one of the “good,” smart kids at the black school, but at the white school I was suddenly a loner to be avoided. My class was a harsh, hard and abrasive environment filled with tough country boys. I responded to the challenge by becoming tough, somewhat calloused and tuning out much of the harshness around me. Like the time my fourth grade teacher asked me not to sit with one white boy at lunch because it made him sick to eat with a black kid. I ignored her comment and sat with him the very next day.

I can’t say that the five years there traumatized me in the sense that I was in any pain and anguish. I simply toughened, as it became impossible for me to feel inferior to anybody. I was vaguely aware, at that age, that the black people around me felt apprehensive towards white people, but with what I was seeing, there wasn’t a thing intimidating about those trifling people.  If I sensed people responding to me in a weird way, I concluded that there must be something wrong with them, and tuned them out.

I began to feel comfortable being different and going against the grain. I actually began to thrive on others teasing me for being a non-conformist. I began to question many norms, including the traditional rigid, factory school system, with its petty rules, boring mass production mode of teaching and focus on analysis. From the fourth to the twelfth grade I simply refused to participate. They wanted me to exchange my creativity and love of learning for obedience, grades and conformity, so of course, I paid them no heed.

After my elementary school experience, questioning authority and tradition or seeing from non-traditional paradigms was not an issue for me. The impulse to conform to mindless customs and rules rarely occurs to me. And the superior, intimidating white “bogeyman,” which was quite real to those who came before me, like my grandfather, was exposed as merely a laughable impostor.

It probably is also useful to mention the story of my paternal grandfather and great grandfather. In the year 1900 my grandfather was born to an unwed teenage couple. The boy was of Scottish descent, the girl was the grandchild of former slaves. The two married others and my grandfather lived with his mother. For some reason, however, his natural father took custody of him as a teenager. He lived with his father and his father’s family as the “yard boy,” but it’s clear that the father undertook to surreptitiously raise his son and guide him. The stereotypical qualities of Scottish descent, “thrift, industry and ingenuity” were apparent throughout my grandfather’s life. To this day, my wife says that the only ethnic stereotype she’s ever found to apply to me is the one about Scotsmen and their money. I do despise waste and wasted potential and this is a primary problem of Industrial Age wealth-creation.

The Work Journey Begins

At age 13, when I began to work as a laborer in my father’s construction company, I began to notice that something was wrong with work or people or both. Every summer day, for five years, I’d wake up with my dad at 4:30 AM in order to have enough time to go to the workers’ houses and wake them up. Throughout the workday, my dad spent his time forcefully directing, pointing, and showing people how to do things quickly and ef­ficiently. Day after day, year after year, he showed the same things to the same people.

Those five years taught me a lot about hard work, challenge, pain, fun and life; I did a lot of thinking about work and workers. After all, I was a laborer and a laborer has a lot of free brain time. Why did we have to wake up adults each morning as though they were children? Why did my Dad have to keep telling them the same things over and over for years? Why was there no motivation, no drive, no passion, no life, and no engagement? Why were some of these men walking zombies? I witnessed the same malaise in the farm workers in the Virginia tobacco fields where I spent a couple of summers.

I thought that maybe “walking zombies” were just the type of people that are found in construction and farm work, or maybe it was something peculiar to black people, but my mother had told me many horror stories in state government. There was gross negligence and incompetence, people went weeks, months and years without doing any work at all.

Prior to working with my dad, I had acquired a solid understanding of the value of work from the seemingly endless list of chores that my mom had available for my brother, sister and me. I used to think she sat around all day trying to think of work for us to do. It provided me with an appreciation of work and reward. Working in my father’s business and performing my mother’s chores around the house provided a solid work foundation. It was the beginning of a wide variety of work experiences and the start of a journey of discovery.

College

On August 28, 1975, I went away to college, a black school in central Virginia. The first week of college was rough. Students had to get their college ID, meal tickets and books, as well as a host of other things. I decided to get my meal ticket first. The line was 50 yards long. It was 8:00 AM so I figured it would move fast. By 9:00 things were moving very slowly and by 10:30 I finally made it to the front of the line. The drowsy-eyed, officious clerk asked to see my college ID. I told him that I didn’t have it yet. With a ho-hum sigh, he said, “You’ll have to go to Foster Hall and get your ID be­fore you can get a meal ticket.” From the way he said it, I could tell that he was sick of telling freshman idiots like me the same thing over and over. I wanted to ask him why they didn’t put up a big sign saying, “Lunch tickets dispensed only with ID. Obtain your ID first,” so that people would not waste two and a half hours standing in the wrong line. After all, it didn’t take a genius to figure out the effectiveness of a sign. I thought to myself, “Oh, no! Officious govern­ment workers!

Foster Hall was even worse. The ID’s were being produced on the top floor of a tall, old building with no air conditioning. It was August in Virginia, and when I opened the door to the fourth floor to see a line 70 yards long with people packed in the eight foot wide hallway, the temperature was 85 degrees. Two hours later it was 95 degrees. When I got to the front of the line, the student-workers moved as though they were in slow motion. They reminded me of the zombies in the movie Night of the Living Dead, as they moved in a sort of dazed state, distant and detached from the present, their work and me, the customer. They made no eye contact and seemed to look right through me, as though I wasn’t even there. While processing my ID they talked to other workers about personal issues, which slowed them down even further as the line grew longer. I had seen this “zombie-clerk syndrome” in employees before and many times since.

Throughout the week I faced many zombie-clerks and stood in many long, wrong lines, wasting a lot of time. Why was there such lack of intelligence in the system? Why were there no posted instructions?  Why didn’t people care about their work? Why were these people dead? During the next four school years, I saw many more examples of these problems, with many people not doing their jobs. For example, in my four years there, ‘75 to ‘79, a relatively large percentage of my electronics class time was spent studying vacuum tubes. Why, in 1979, an era of PC’s and electronic chips, was anybody spending any time on vacuum tubes?

Teachers did the traditional factory-style, boring lectures, much of which was out of date and out of touch with the real world. Students put in as little effort as possible and cheated to get grades. The school continuously lowered its academic bar because the students would not even attempt to clear it.

Being a pole-vaulter, I understood clearing bars very well, but the four-year experi­ence with my college coach did little to help my opinion about people and work. The head coach had recruited me to attend the school and pole vault. I quickly found that my coach was a talker, not a doer. He gave me the run-around for a couple of weeks about getting the pole vault equipment set up. I finally decided to do it myself. When I found the vaulting pit, it was torn, old, ragged and hard. I found some old poles, but none my size. I spoke to the coach about the equipment he’d promised me a year earlier, when he proposed that I attend the school. I got only slippery answers and more false promises. I figured that I had all I was going to get, so I knuckled down and began working with what I had.

Five months later I was in the hospital with a broken neck from a weird landing on the hard, old pit. This wasn’t so bad, since I had made the decision to use the pit, but coach didn’t call or visit me in the hospital. He had forgotten to list me on the track ros­ter, so I wasn’t even insured by the team’s insurance policy.

I recovered with no permanent damage and successfully pole vaulted for three more years. In four years of pole vaulting, I received coaching advice on a total of five occa­sions. It was always the same advice.  As I ran down the runway, planted the pole and began going up and over the bar, five times in four years I heard the words, “Over the bar,” come from across the track field.

Why wasn’t he doing his job? It wasn’t as though we pole-vaulters did not con­tribute to the team and his success. In our second year the three pole-vaulters won first, second and third places in the championship meet. We clinched the CIAA confer­ence title for our track team. It was our coach’s first championship in his 25-year career. However we pole-vaulters languished for lack of coaching.

Defense Department

My second year into college, I started working for the Defense Department. The waste boggled my mind. When I walked into one of the many, many warehouses filled with people and goods, I saw desk after desk and row after row of what looked like hundreds of office workers. They were bored, half-asleep and half-alive. Many had nothing to do. Some had their heads propped on their arms on their desk. In the department where I worked, we spent a large percentage of our time repairing other employees’ personal property since there was not a lot of official work. We averaged two, maybe three hours of work per day, at a nice, slow pace. The rest of the time was spent debating, playing racquetball or working on personal property.

Note: The actual names of companies where I’ve worked have not been used in the remainder of this chapter, and instead fictitious names used, so as not to cause any harm to these institutions.

Respect Computers Incorporated

After two years working at the Defense Department, while still in school, I landed a job with Respect Computers Incorporated in the field engineering division. A year later, I accepted a permanent position as quality engineer at a Respect Computers manufacturing plant in New York State. This was the beginning of a twenty-year journey in Quality Improvement and organizational change.

Respect Computers was a tremendously empowering envi­ronment. In fact, out of all of the things I’ve done in life, the work at Respect Computers was the most enjoyable thing that I’ve ever done. At Respect Computers, I had the opportunity to experience firsthand the tremendous productive power of creative freedom and empowerment. I loved going to work. Workdays were the same as holidays or vacation days. I used to say I couldn’t believe they paid me to have that much fun.

Respect Computers was viewed by the world as probably the premier corporation in the world. It was the model for companies worldwide. Consultants wrote about it continuously. Only one of every one thousand applicants was hired. Wall Street loved it. It had been one of the most profitable corporations in the world for many years. It was consistently rated as the best place to work in the world.

Going into Respect Computers I thought, “these are some of the smartest people in the world. With their profit, growth and success, for sure I’ll see how work is done right. How else could they have gotten where they are?” Yes, they were some of the most intelligent people in the world, but this means little, given the state of the world of work.

I kept hearing the same recurring theme from many different people throughout the company. “How do we possibly make money?” The waste was so enormous that it was apparent to virtually everyone that something was gravely wrong. I worked six years at three different Respect Computers manufacturing plants and one field location. I interfaced with many Respect Computers locations nationwide and worldwide. The single biggest waste factor was the huge number of people who did nothing, added no value or even subtracted value. This showed up not only in wasted salaries but also in insane decisions that were being made re­garding products, resources, customers and materials.

There was the lost $30,000 piece of test equipment that nobody cared about.  There were customers who could not get a replacement printhead for their down printers and were told that it would take months to get replacements while replacements were available at the time. There were rooms full of scrap, hundreds of thousands of dollars worth, in Receiving Inspection, due to poor shipping con­tainers and no corrective action.  There were presentations where none of the product Quality Engineers knew what was going on with their product lines.

One department I was in had four engineers and a manager. The manager was completely out to lunch, never of­fering advice. There was no guidance, no coaching, no involvement, no direction, no nothing. For the year that I reported to him, I did not know of a single thing that he contributed or ac­complished.

Regarding the other people in the department, one middle-aged engineer had a chip on his shoulder about work and was simply determined that he was not going to do any. And he didn’t. A second engineer was very timid and lost in the political maze of the company. The third engineer was the senior engineer in the department. He did nothing; he had no responsibility that I knew of. He had written a few procedures but hardly anyone ever looked at them. The department, as a whole, simply was missing in action. Al­though this was one of the worst departments I’d worked in at Respect Computers, it was not far from average. My personal estimate, at the time, was that Respect Computers could cut 75% of its workforce and not miss a beat. Seventeen years later Respect Computers had cut 50% of its workforce with profits higher than ever.

In addition to this, I was simply astonished at the number of goofs, buffoons and idiots there were in management. Respect Computers had a “Respect for the Individual” concept. They were so sensitive to the treatment of employees that they sacrificed competence for niceness. This was not all bad, but the negatives, particularly the bureaucratic method of implementation, far outweighed the positives.

The “Respect for the Individual” concept had been grossly distorted. There was so much freedom and “Respect for the Individual,” that if one did not want to work, one did not have to. It had become disrespectful to the individuals who did work. Work was shuffled around to the people who would work. Joe and Jane were getting the same pay, except Joe was working one hour per day and Jane was working fourteen. His presence cost the company money, while hers made money. Although there were al­ways overworked “real workers” who would pick up some of the slack, most of the needed work simply didn’t get done and nobody cared. Respect Computers was making plenty of money; it was growing like a weed; customers were happy. Consultants wrote books about Respect Computers as though it was Valhalla. Who cared about the tremendous waste and wasted potential? The customer was, after all, happy and willing to pay for it. “If it ain’t broke don’t fix it,” was the attitude. 

Then there were the self-interested shysters. As quality engineer, I worked on one printer that had a lot of quality problems. The production manager had his sights set on the fast track and had told me, privately, that he would do anything it took to get there. We were having functional problems with the printers as the quality inspectors tested them. This was bottlenecking production and holding up shipments. He called my second-level manager and requested relief. Without conferring with me on my product line, my second-level manager told the inspectors to stop checking the fail­ing parameter. A couple of hours later, when I heard what had happened, I told them to start back-checking the parameter. Again behind my back, my second-level manager told them to discontinue the inspection. I found out later and called the field service de­partment, notifying them of the situation. When confronted by field service, they both denied what they had done.

My time at Respect Computers was a period where I vented some rage. I was judgmental and quite angry at what I perceived as other people’s lackadaisical approach to work. I was in Quality Control, which requires one to judge others’ work. I was a bureaucrat in a posi­tion of power and able to do something about what I perceived as laziness.

I was a one-person terror, working 80 hours per week to build some accountability and responsibility into the system. To put it mildly, I kicked some butt. I played the game of controlling bureaucrat as well as it could be played. Though this effort was fun and yielded relatively good product quality results and many awards for myself, I now know it to have been a waste of time.

The Dream of a More Natural Life

I was on a personal five-year plan when I started Respect Computers. Having given considerable thought to the concept of work while in college, I had concluded that being an employee simply was not for me. After all, one should work to live, and not live to work, right? At least as long as we see work as separate from living. Working as an employee one spends approximately 54% of one’s waking hours away from one’s family and passion, usually doing some passionless job where one’s reward does not reflect the value one adds. At the time I saw a clear division between working as an employee and living.

I had decided to work for five years, then move to the mountains, build a log cabin powered by a small-scale hydroelectric power plant, and build a family-centered life.  A life in which the majority of my family’s needs were met through the passion and love of family as opposed to external lifeless bureaucracies and by zombie-clerk employees. I planned to home school my children considering my boring experience in the mass production factory school.

Though I basically perceived work as something done by an employee, deep down my values were grounded in a private work and a family-centered paradigm. My mother had been the only employee in the history of my family; with my father, grandparents and ancestors since abolition all making their living in their own businesses or farms.

Starting at Respect Computers on a $19,000 per year salary, in five years I had saved over $100,000. Everything was on track except I had missed one minor detail. I did not have a wife. I left Respect Computers and was off in my travel trailer, traveling the world, hang gliding, canoeing, wind surfing, scuba-diving and searching for a wife. I was like Cane, the Buddhist Priest, wandering, learning and discovering.

In 1986 while traveling, I read half of a book titled The Third Wave by a fellow named Alvin Tof­fler. It began to make sense out of my work experiences and my work values and began shifting my paradigm re­garding what I had witnessed in work.

Life as an Corporate Stock Investor

During my nomadic period, as I invested in stocks and mutual funds, I dis­covered just how distant and out of touch the real owners of corporations were. I tried to make mental connections between the $40,000 of Respect Computers stock I had just purchased and the fact that I actu­ally owned a piece of Building 101 in Charlotte, North Carolina. I simply could make no connection in my mind between where I had worked, the people I knew, what they were doing and the stock certificates I was holding. It was simply not real to me.

As an investor, I was interested in what most investors and I consider to be long-term gain, six months to three years. Of course, by any real standard, the long-term well being of a company is much longer.

With the system of ownership in our wealth-creation system—corporate stock own­ership, most owners could care less about the true long-term well being of the company. With the owners of the company giving little to no thought to the long-term well being of the company, one could hardly expect management, employees or anybody else to care very much. I can recall thinking about these companies as “ownerless enterprises.” In essence, nobody owns them. Employees own a paycheck and care about little more. Management owns a bigger paycheck, with some of them caring about the next quarter and the year-end results for their fragmented job. Management cares only as much as their personal interest is involved. The owners think of little more than a few months out or a few years at most.

When something goes grossly wrong which harms society enormously, usually nobody’s held responsible as the corporation files bankruptcy, vanishes into thin air and leaves the taxpayers holding the bag. I had discovered, as an investor, that the public corporation, the heart of our wealth-creation system, is, in essence, an ownerless system in which ultimately nobody is responsible and few people really care about its real health and well being.

CheckMate

In 1986, opportunity struck and I started a business. For a few years, I had been searching for a wife. I found it crazy that in Alvin Toffler’s Information Age, I was having such a hard time connecting with her. After all, the only thing that separated us was information. I’m here, she’s out there somewhere. I decided to start an on-line computerized personal ads system. The personal ads were different from those in newspapers because they were 600 words long and included photos. The computer could hold thousands of photo introductions and allow customers access indefinitely. I invested $50,000 in equipment and start-up cost. I quickly met my wife and we married, but business success was a lot tougher. I accepted a position at a defense contractor, Central Aircraft, while my wife and I operated the business.

Central Aircraft

After the empowerment of Respect Computers, the rigid bureaucracy and centralized control of Central Aircraft was like going from the freedom of hang gliding to the rigid regimentation of boot camp. At Respect Computers, there was a great deal of individual ownership, for those who desired it, due to less work frag­mentation. Central Aircraft had work divided in smaller pieces.  The work was controlled less by the individual than by management. It was less interesting, less real, less empow­ering and a lot less fun. Decisions were made as far towards the top of the organization as possible. Although Central Aircraft was more controlled and exhibited less tangible waste, the wasted potential was far greater.

Central Aircraft’s customers were paying a huge price in poor quality and high cost due to this waste and wasted potential. It didn’t much matter to Central Aircraft’s customers, because they were only other defense contractors who just passed the cost on to the defense depart­ment. The bureaus within the defense department didn’t mind because they’d simply pass it on to the taxpayer, and more spending by a given bureau meant a bigger budget next year for that bureau. This waste would possibly even mean a salary increase for the bureau manager because the more resources he managed the higher his salary.

The problem was that the people making wasteful decisions at all levels stood to lose little by perpetuating waste. It wasn’t their money and they didn’t own any significant piece of the company or bureau. If they owned stock in the company their contribution was so small that it did not effect their return on investment. In many cases the decision-makers even stood to gain from the waste. This applies to most companies, not just de­fense contractors.

With tightly controlled military specifications it was difficult to change things. It created an anti-change, status quo environment. With change, one risked attracting the attention of government auditors. On the other side, there was no positive benefit to the company or individual to counter this risk. The last thing a defense con­tractor wants is an auditor snooping around. It was, and still is, a system based upon sta­bility. Seven years after the military adopted the concepts of Total Quality Management and continuous improvement, I have seen no real change away from stability.

Central Aircraft could not change because its customers, other defense contractors, could not change, and they could not change because of the defense department. Individuals like me could not make changes because the management was locked into the stability of the company. Nobody could change because everybody would have to change in order for one person to change; there simply was not enough in it for these ownerless bureaucrats to desire changing or improving.

At Central Aircraft work was boring, lifeless and tedious. People were clock-watchers. They had good ideas, but the company was simply not interested in any kind of improvement. The vast majority had given up and was just going through the motions, like all good zom­bie-clerks. Employees repeatedly said, “How can management be so dumb?” Manage­ment was in a position where they controlled and defined most things. Not being at the level of detail where the employees were, management simply lacked the infor­mation, perspective and time to control and define the details intelligently. On the other hand, management viewed employees as idiots in light of their poor participation.

Central Aircraft wanted to turn me into a zombie-clerk like those people I’d seen at the Defense Department warehouse with their heads propped on their desks. At Central Aircraft, I probably averaged a couple hours of work per day and that two hours, in my opinion, added no value. Central Aircraft was undoubtedly the most boring experience of my adult life. I did, how­ever, learn a lot about the current state of work, people and bureaucracy while there.

I tried for a year to make change and improve productivity and quality.  Eventually, it was verbally communicated to me though a conversation between my manager and his manager, the Director of Quality, that Central Aircraft was not interested in fixing anything which was “working,” regardless of the waste or poor quality of the work. I interviewed for a position with TOPS Printers Incorporated and was out of Central Aircraft within three weeks.

Central Aircraft not only desired zombie-clerks, but also would not tolerate anything else. The message I got, not in so many words, was that Central Aircraft did not want me to do anything, just show up promptly for work each day, go to and come back from lunch on time, and be there for eight hours. From their perspective, I was merely filling an affirmative action slot.

I began to see that the problem was larger than controlling managers or lazy em­ployees. Individuals and organizations are locked into a mutual death dance of low productivity, low creativity, poor quality, poor communication and boredom. The Central Aircraft bureaucracy is interlocked with other defense contractors, the Military and FAA bureau­cracies; the human resources bureaucracies, the union, environmental and other governmental bureaucracies; customer and supplier bureaucracies, and vice versa.

At the individual level, senior management is locked into middle management and employee inertia and vice-versa. Departments are locked into other departments and traditional ways of doing things, and the entire system is locked into gobs of regulations pertaining to affirmative action; harassment; family leave; “mil-specs,” worker compensation; COBRA; OSHA; the environment; SSI; state and federal taxes and on and on.

The entire system is stuck because our entire system works off of relationships of dependence and bare tolerance. It is the “G” word—gridlock! (Certainly not limited to Washington politics.) Gridlock, I discovered, is everywhere. I saw it at Respect Computers and at Central Aircraft and discovered more of it everywhere I went. Stability, which had been so good in an Industrial Age, had transformed into this grotesque gridlock. We were entering an era that required change, but were being held by the structure of stability that had got us where we were.

Like Respect Computers, the real waste again showed up in crazy, insane decisions that were being made regarding product, resources, customers and material. One example was Fiber Optic Mil-Spec-347, which we debated over for hundreds of hours because we could not simply call the person who wrote it in order to get clarification, since that might have drawn the attention of auditors. Now I understood why the military was paying thou­sands of dollars for a hammer. The enormous cost of military products is not so much due to fraud and abuse, as it was due to waste, rigid bureaucracy, gridlock and disengagement.

CheckMate

In the meantime, my home business was moving at a snail’s pace. I did well in com­panies, producing tremendous savings and productivity improvements for them, but couldn’t muster a profit out of a small “mom and pop operation.” How could companies be so stupid and tremendously wasteful in their decisions and actions but be successful? I was quite confused. The problem is that the lone entrepreneur lacks the supporting structure and momen­tum that an established company provides. As a manager once said, “cash flow and profit covers a multitude of sins.”

The lack of momentum presents the lone entrepreneur with a “Catch 22” situation. He needs the resources of an organization with momentum—the financial power that comes from the sale of current products. He needs the cash flow to cover the many mistakes and trail and error experimentation required. I was discovering why most entrepreneurs fail. There isn’t the momentum as in the established bureaucracy.

I was discovering that most new things fail and that it would be only through trial and error that I would get anything to work. I was learning this the hard way. Trial and error with limited capital was extremely time-consuming. We were implementing what worked and discarding what didn’t and it was taking forever. For years, I thirsted for a method to move faster, with limited dollar capital.

There was a bigger “Catch 22.” Companies were too rigid and gridlocked to produce the intelligence to meet customer’s rising expectations, and lone entrepreneurs lacked the momentum and power. I began dreaming about ways to combine the momentum and power of a large bureaucracy with the freedom, intelligence and agility of an entrepreneurial ven­ture. This became my paradigm, the reality for which I searched. It was a dream out of the practical reality of profit and loss.

TOPS Printers Incorporated

At TOPS Printers I found more of the same tops-down management and strong central control as in Central Aircraft.  At least TOPS Printers sought improvement, but they wanted it dictated by the few people at the top because the workers and engineers were considered too stupid to solve problems.

TOPS Printers, more than any other of my employers demonstrated the “Catch 22” of our centrally controlled wealth-creation system. Unable to get employees to make the “right” deci­sions and do the “right” things, senior management made the employees’ decisions for them. This was flawed because they did not have sufficient time, detailed information or intelligence to do the job well. The distrust and contempt for the individual was a self-fulfilling prophecy. The combination of a strong command and control system and a view of people as incapable, stupid or a liability caused the workers to live up to that image and reinforce it. TOPS Printers had taken a group of intelligent people and made them stupid through their system of organization. This was not new; I’d seen it before and would see it again and again.

The following represents a typical example of the ineffectiveness of management-controlled decisions, not unique to TOPS Printers. On the X8000 program, management, at the Vice President level, decided that they needed to begin reviewing all engineering changes because the Manufacturing, Design and Quality Engineers, as well as the Production Planners were not competent enough to do the job properly.

Being the Quality Manager I happened to be present when one hot engineering change was being processed. The engineers, who all worked closely with the product line, took a couple of minutes to review thoroughly and sign-off the change. Quickly and efficiently, they made a good decision based upon all of the facts. Later, I was in a meeting with the Vice Presidents when the same change was delivered to them for their sign-off. It took more than an hour for them to sign the change. There was much misin­formation, lack of information and confusion. They looked like stumbling clowns at a circus due to their ignorance of the details. In the end, the decision that they made was the right one, but it was a poor one due to their insufficient knowledge of the facts. They were too far from the action to be attempting to make detailed decisions.

What had happened at TOPS Printers was that management had taken ownership of activities that they deemed to be poorly performed. As they did this, workers more and more gave up ownership of their responsibilities. The more the workers pulled back, the more management said “I told you so, we can’t trust them, we must do this ourselves.” In the end, the workers at TOPS had fulfilled management’s belief that they were limited, inca­pable and stupid.

Over time, management divided jobs into very narrow slivers, allowing for maxi­mum control from the top. Most people just accepted this division. I knew that there were other, more productive and enjoyable ways to divide work. From my empower­ment experience at Respect Computers, I knew that work could be divided so that there was more own­ership and fun. Although Respect Computers had its own problems with waste, Respect Computers’ empowering “Respect for the Individual” concept had shown me that there was another way to divide work.

With just one year of experience as an Associate Quality Engineer at Respect Computers many times I dreamt up concepts overnight and had them implemented by 10 AM the next day. Nine years later, as TOPS Printers Quality Plant Manager, it would take me six months to implement one of the same successful concepts. It now took political maneuvering, strategic planning and great effort. Although these hypotheses were not proven before implementation at Respect Computers, by the time I was attempting to implement them at TOPS they were proven concepts that won me numerous awards.

As TOPS Quality Manager, I had less real authority than I did as a Respect Computer associate engi­neer. At TOPS Printers, I had a nine-year track record of success with 25 people reporting to me. At Respect Computers, I had zero people reporting to me, with one year of experience and no track record. The difference in authority came from the way work was divided. At Respect Computers, I was the product quality engineer for the 3268 printer and had responsibility for quality on the product for the entire process. I was free to do whatever I wanted as long as I got results.

At TOPS Printers, on the P9000 printer, no one person had full responsibility for the entire product from supplier to customer. A couple of people in the quality department had responsi­bility for suppliers; one had line support and another field support. Not only that, but no single quality department had ownership for the whole product, quality support was housed in several different departments.

The only people who had vision over the total product line were at the Vice Presi­dential level. I guess this is where the term “super-vision” comes from. In divided, ownerless work, the person seeing from the higher vantage point has better vision over the entire system. Respect Computers had discontin­ued the position of supervisor decades ago. At Respect Computers, each quality engineer had “super-vision” over its entire product line and was therefore his own supervisor. It was clear to me that ownership and control had everything to do with how work was divided; the more narrow the division, the less ownership was possible.

What I usually said at TOPS Printers was, “There is only one quality engineer here, the vice-president. The rest of us are just quality clerks.” Again, I was trapped by another com­pany that wanted no more than a zombie-clerk.

TOPS Printers began to reveal something very new to me. I began to discover that the person­alities, insecurities and weaknesses of the individuals in central control were limiting factors to wealth-creation. Their beliefs about people’s ignorance and limited capabilities were something in their heads, not reality. These beliefs caused people to become what those in control expected. A person in central authority limits others by his incorrect be­liefs, mis-perceptions, insecurities and weaknesses. Today, I believe that many of these beliefs about others were a reflection of beliefs about themselves—their insecurities, weaknesses and fears.

This limiting aspect of management worked for an Industrial Age because the knowl­edge and intelligence of the organization was not as important in an Industrial Age. Management’s job was controlling and limiting the intelligence of an organization. Like Respect Computers and Central Aircraft, waste and wasted potential again showed up in stupid decisions that were being made regarding product, resources, customers and material. For example, I witnessed a situation in which ten inspectors spent a full year sorting out irrelevant cosmetic “imperfections” on the X8000 printer, “imperfections” that would not have mattered or even been noticed by a customer.

CheckMate (Continued)

Back at CheckMate, I was still seeking a way to move faster in my business. Many people, who desired forming partnerships, approached me, many of these requiring some kind of shared ownership of my business. I did not want to give away a piece of my company and the freedom that went with it, nor did I want joint ownership. Part­nering would have helped me leverage resources and move faster by having more peo­ple investing their own time into the project. I would not have been paying hard tangi­ble dollars for every minute of work. However, I felt that the trade-off wasn’t worth it.

I was continuously contrasting being an owner by night against being an employee by day. Looking back upon it, I was learning more about work by experiencing the stark contrast between the two than anything else I could have done. The waste in bu­reaucracies was so plain to see. I wanted that momentum and those resources in my business so badly I could taste it. 

Insecure Molding

As I continued my journey I went to work for another company, Insecure Molding. By now, I was quite skeptical about what I would find at any company. I knew that something was gravely wrong with our entire work system.

While at Insecure Molding, I worked on selling a Statistical Process Control program to senior management. Statistical Process Control is simply a tracking program that lets one know that a manufacturing process has changed and could produce defects. The ad­vantage of SPC over traditional Quality Control inspections is that Statistical Process Control lets you know ahead of time that defects will be produced. Traditional inspec­tion is an after-the-fact system. After defects are produced, they are impossible to catch and sort out. What is produced is what will ship to customers regardless of after-the-fact inspections. The difference in Statistical Process Control or traditional inspection is the same as driving your car with or without a gas gauge. With one you know when you are getting low and will run out; without one, it’s a blind guessing game. It’s one of the concepts that caused the Japanese to excel at the global quality movement. Even though Statistical Process Control has been around since 1922, in all of my visits to different companies around the country and world, I can count on one hand the number of com­panies that really use it.

At Insecure Molding, with our Statistical Process Control charts, we were quickly able to deter­mine when a manufacturing process had changed and defects would be produced. Hours ahead, we were able to detect when defects would be produced. The quality con­trol department had a detection-based quality control program that missed many de­fects. At best, it would catch some defects hours after they had been produced.

Even when the quality department caught defects, the production operation rarely sorted out all of the rejects, or even cared. I kept a running log of all of the incidents and repeatedly provided management with copies of this report. The Production Superintendent flatly told me that Statistical Process Control would never be implemented there. “The president had started the company and built it into a 60 million dollar com­pany without Statistical Process Control and he does not need it now,” he said. Many people told me that the President ran the company, and following his lead and his ideas was what was important.

The Production Superintendent was right. I could hardly believe what I was experi­encing. A business owner, “entrepreneur” was not interested in profitability and growth unless it was his idea. We had conducted experiments and there was solid, real data showing actual improvement. Scrap could be cut by huge amounts, quality would be increased significantly, customers would be happier and profitability increased. But all I was getting was indifference.

I learned, here, that there are many reasons why people are in business. Some of these reasons have to do more with satisfying some internal personal insecurity, weak­ness or need than making a profit or satisfying customers. I learned that even though a company is privately owned, that does not mean it is going to be profit-driven based upon logic, data, facts, intuition or anything else.

I was learning that insecurities (and we all have them) and the limited perspectives of individuals in central control were primary factors limiting the creation of wealth. The higher up in the organiza­tion, the more magnified the individual’s weakness becomes throughout the organiza­tion.

I began to see that one person having authority over another lessens the organiza­tion’s vision, intelligence and capability. Since we all have insecurities and very limited perspectives, I began to doubt the entire concept of employment and hierarchy. I began to question the employee-management system of control. I was wondering if the management of people had become an impractical means to create wealth in Alvin Toffler’s Information Age.

In my own business, I began trying to remove myself more and more from blocking others, but had no easy answers and little success. I some how knew that, more than anything else, in order to thrive in the Information Age, a system of organization was needed which made everyone an engaged owner and leader. We needed a system that re­moved any position that would limit the worker’s capability or motivation.

Through a lot of political maneuvering, eventually I was able to implement Statisti­cal Process Control in another Insecure Molding plant a few miles away. I was able to get a Total Quality Management program kicked off companywide. On one part for one product alone, in three months we reduced scrap by $500,000 per year with Statistical Process Control by reducing the defect rate from 15% to 3%. Insecure Molding had hired a new Vice Presi­dent of Manufacturing, Phil Taylor. We worked in the one plant to implement SPC and some other programs, and within one quarter, the plant was operating in the black, leading the company’s profits for the quarter. The Total Quality Management program produced $2,000,000 in the first year, but it died because it did not have the president’s support. Seeing that quality improvement was a losing cause at Insecure Molding, I left the company.

Although there were people in Insecure Molding with more SPC experience than I had, they would not even attempt to implement it. I have seen this in every company for which I’ve worked. People had the answers to many problems but were not willing to risk their jobs by going against the grain. They would not fight the politics or the bureau­cracy. On the other hand, why should they? After all, there was and still is nothing in it for them. Most people realize that they are being paid a flat salary or wage simply to do what they are told—not to do what the believe in.

CheckMate

We eventually hired a few employees. One, Tracy Teaford, was creative, bright and inventive. After my experience with Respect Computers, I was a heart and soul believer in empower­ment, and had an empowerment philosophy within the company. Tracy thrived in this environment. I had started the business with the goal of maintaining a very low cost, affordable service for all to use. Tracy came up with the idea of significantly in­creasing prices. She believed the fee for membership should have been $195, rather than the $35 we were charging.

Our sales showed that we probably needed to increase prices to become profitable. We began to experiment with increased prices, trying $45. We were risking a lot of money since it took weeks to see the results. The initial responses did not seem to be good. However, we knew from history that the initial responses were not reliable. We got nervous and directed Tracy to lower the price, but she was certain that we should hold out. Her intuition told her that raising prices was the right action to take. We still told her no. Against our directive she maintained the higher price. We found out a week later and were furious. We explained that it was our money being risked, not hers.

We thrashed her for this “insubordination,” just as any good authoritarian bureaucrats would. We lowered prices to the original setting. There wasn’t enough data to tell if the price increase worked. Tracy eventually left our employ. At some point, we did eventually increase prices. We tried $45, then $55, then $75, $99, $150, settling at $195. We found that the $195 had a perceived value in line with what the customer was ac­tually getting.

At $35 customers had under-valued and under-utilized their membership. We also found that $195 was the perfect balance for sales rate and profitability. At $35 we got 20% of the people who received sales packages to join. At $195 we got 9%. If we sent out 400 sales packages in a week at $35 we grossed $2800 and at $195 we grossed $7000. It was the difference between profit and loss.

Tracy was right, but I hadn’t trusted her intuition. “In God we trust; all others bring data” was, and is, the creed of the controlling bureaucrat. It was not her money being risked. My central control of decisions cost me a lot. Perhaps it cost me that business. What if there was an organizing system, within CheckMate, which allowed Tracy to invest some of her money into her decisions? She could use intuition and she would share in the gain or loss. This would have been a win/win situation for all. Instead we all lost.

Tracy had experienced the same disempowerment that all other employees routinely experience. I had tried empowerment in an inherently disempowering organizing structure. It was sham empowerment, just as it is in every other company and bureaucracy.

More and More Companies

I went on to work at several more companies, large, medium and small. I saw more of what I’d seen many times before. To date, I have worked in or with companies in the automotive and computer industries, defense, cosmetics, nuclear, aerospace, farming, construction, machining, plastics, rubber and retail. I have worked in government, dat­ing services and with the stock market. I have worked in the U.S., Japan and Mexico, and with many people and companies around the world. I had worked with most of the fad management programs of the past twenty years.

I worked as consultant, manager, engineer, writer, supervisor, business owner, pro­duction worker, and maintenance technician. In my business I’d done it all from customer service, to accounting, marketing, sales, production to company president. I had seen a very broad and detailed spectrum of work and wealth-creation from many perspectives and the common theme never changed; waste, wasted potential, little real change and lots of veneer hype.

The Status of Wealth Creation

I had discovered the status of work and wealth-creation to be in very poor condition from virtually all perspectives. It is one of relative weakness, gridlock, dependence, ap­athy, frustration, waste and enormous wasted potential.

Σ        Artificial Laws of the School: In The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People Stephen Covey speaks of laws of the school verses the laws of the farm. The laws of the school are artificial and manipulative. They are based upon veneer surface appearance. One can cram for tests and get high grades without learning anything. One can present statistics in a way to show a preferred reality. One can present a surface picture showing that an outstanding job is being done when in reality one is just a slick sales person presenting fragments of reality.  “We want to put on a good front.” The laws of the farm are natural and substantive. Either you plant your crops in time or they do not yield results. You reap what you sow. There is no way to whitewash the results or cram for the test at the end. Our Industrial Age wealth-creation institutions work primarily upon the weak laws of the school. This includes schools, companies, Representative Democracy, politics, courts, government agencies and far more. In our weak world of work, appearance counts far more than reality and veneer far more than substance. Organizations look great on the surface with profits, growth, nice buildings and accelerating careers. However, just beneath the surface lies the rot and discussing stench of dysfunctional systems, wasted potential, horrible injustices, pathetic insecure dictators and brain dead wealth creators.

Σ        Gridlocked Free Market: Free markets are supposed to squeeze out waste, ineffi­ciencies and weaknesses. They are not working because they are locked in by the mu­tual death dance of low productivity, low creativity, poor quality, poor communication and boredom. The control and stability of the centrally controlled organization has mu­tated into a death grip on wealth-creation. Virtually all that defines a company, includ­ing politics, self-interest, factional fighting, bureaucracy, employees, apathy, central control and more contributes to this death grip.

The people at the micro level have the solutions to problems but do not or cannot contribute those solutions. Each day, nationwide and worldwide, the answers to hundreds of bil­lions of problems, as well as potential for answers and opportunities, lie idle in employees’ heads. This condition equates to hundreds of billions of dollars in waste, and trillions in wasted potential. In a society of deficits as large as ours, where the primary wealth creator is knowledge, this is simply intolerable. With our norm of gridlock, things change only when they have to. Patience is the primary virtue which customers, suppliers, employees, managers and all stakeholders must have to survive within the system. Patience with road blocks, patience with the rigid hi­erarchy, patience with management ineptitude, patience with poor quality and service, patience with waste, employee incom­petence and on and on.

Σ        Entitlements: The vast majority of people have a sense of entitlement; employees, welfare recipients, subsidized farmers, artists or managers receiving subsidized government training. People feel entitled to get what they’ve always got regardless of contribution or conditions. “I should be paid just for showing up for work.” “The organization and society owes me something.” “I should get raises each year regardless of performance and market conditions.” Seniority is one of the most sacred entitlements. In our entitlements-based system of work personal responsibility and contribution means little.

Σ        Dependent Victims: We are stuck in a system of gridlock where most people, from CEO’s to the front-line workers, feel like helpless, dependent victims being swept along by a raging current. We have a system of Mass Victimization because employment is a system based upon relationships of depen­dence as will be explained in more detail later.

Σ        Fictitious Wealth-Creation and the Lack of Passion: There has been a common thread wherever I’ve gone. Most people are disengaged from their work, going through the motions with little passion, little love and, therefore, little life. Most peo­ple start out with passion but the system of red tape, central authority and gridlock beats it out of them. The fictitious laws of the school wear them down. People evolve to one of many types: some put on a good show, get good results on paper, add little value, and climb the ladder; some people simply don’t care; others are angry and frustrated; some are dogmatic believers in authoritarian control; most have simply given up. (They work for a paycheck and do what they are told.) In general, companies and employees are going through the motions, with no com­panies even coming close to their potential.

        Σ     Alignment: There is poor alignment throughout our wealth-creation system. People’s interests, in many cases, run counter to the bureaucracy and the other stakeholders; alignment being the degree to which all stakeholders’ interests directly coincide and are in harmony—customers, investors, suppliers, partners, co-work­ers. (Naisbitt, Aburdene, 1985, p24-26)

Σ       Pseudo Free Market: With the free market of the Industrial Age we have not focused on the win/win of meeting customer needs. Instead we focus on the win/lose of beating the competition at meeting customer needs; being just a notch better than the competition regardless of what customers want; regardless of the waste; regardless of the wasted potential; regardless of our systemic and collective social deficits. Our progress is therefore slow and retarded. Organizations are not focused on what is possible with their resources nor the reduction of waste and wasted potential. There are huge deficits between customers’ expectations and quality delivered but there is no problem since there is no threat from other slow-moving bureaucratic competitors.

Σ       System of Limited Personal Growth: Instead of a system that inherently encourages the growth of individuals, the present system of ownerlessness, supervision and regulation structurally inhibits the growth of the individual and personal responsibility. Like a child under the supervision of an overly protective, micro-managing parent, the child’s growth is stunted. The result is immaturity and low emotional intelligence.

Σ        Wealth Limiting Bureaucrats: People in central positions of authority are today halting the driving forces of the free market, holding back advances and limiting wealth-creation in the name of stability and control. Bureaucrats today are preventing the free market from advancing.

Σ        Stifled Employees: In survey after survey, the majority of people working as employees say: 1) They do not like their job. 2) Their job utilizes only 10 to 20% of their potential. 3) They would rather be doing something else.

Σ        Frustrated Individuals: Company after company desires no more from their em­ployees than “zombie clerks.” In fact, they demand that employees be no more. Where there is passion, it is driven out. Where there is creativity it is stultified. Where there is diversity, it is forced to conform. Where there is growth, it is stunted. Where there is challenge, it is restrained. Where there is thinking, it is lobotomized. Where there is risk, it is avoided. Where there is relative stagnation, it is embraced. As the Japanese say, “The nail that sticks up shall be pounded down.”

Σ        Continuous Improvement: The past decade has seen continuous improvement within bureaucracies as managers try to move these organizations beyond their natural limits. As documented in book after book, as well as throughout this book, we witness one failing or mildly successful fad management program appear, nudge the paradigm, make some improvement, then disappear. Employees have become fatigued with the “program of the month” meandering. Managers void of vision grope in the dark from one program to another. Though meandering has increased organizational effectiveness in the past two decades, we have only tapped the smallest fraction of the available potential. “Even a blind hog gets an acorn once in a while.” Employees and customers still are not getting their needs met. Most employees still dislike their work. And most bureaucracies are still grossly ineffective at tapping the potential at their disposal. With Continuous Improvement we are attempting to cross a chasm in small steps. Alone, and void of vision, it is a bankrupted long-term policy. Short term, however, managers look great while killing the goose that lays the golden eggs.

Σ        Zombie Clerk Employees: As one senior employee recently said after years of progressive fad programs and a new one that was targeted to make him productive, “I haven’t worked in twenty years and I’m not about to start now.” Though fads show the direction of change they have barely scratched the surface of the wasted potential in companies.

The Discovery

Somewhere in my journey, I discovered the problem. It was neither government workers, construction workers nor bureaucrats. Nor was it company presidents or lazy employees. All of these were symptoms of deeper prob­lems.

The problem was, and is, our entire system of organizing work and wealth-creation. Our system of organizing work, at its core, is based upon owner­less representation, divided work, authoritarianism, bureaucracy, subordination, low intelligence, and standardized compensa­tion. It is based upon impersonal relationships of dependence, mistrust, adversarialism and mis­alignment. Underlying all of this it is a system of control based upon fear.

The very foundation and structure is based upon control by a few brains and therefore low intelligence. The system, one of “tolerable bondage,” is based inherently upon disempowerment and idea suppression.

At its core bureaucracies are organizing systems with extremely limited perspectives. Work is fragmented into specialized departments, jobs, divisions and titles, where no one understands the whole. Then through adversarialism we fight for and try to get each other to understand our fragmented perspectives. The present system is simply not geared for a knowledge era of diverse idea genera­tion. It is not geared for the wealth production of an Information Age.

What I continually heard through the 1980’s was “Customers are content, companies are growing and profitable, people are being employed, taxes are being paid, boom times are here So what if there is waste and wasted potential? If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” Though today we finally recognize the need for change, most of us do not yet see the extent of change required. In the 1990’s I continually heard, we are continuously improving ahead of the competition. So what if customers needs are not quite met or employee potential is stifled—who cares? As long as we stay ahead of the competition at meeting our customer’s needs and, therefore, profit grows each year, so what?

I’ll tell you so what! The competitive paradigm is dead, that’s what! What happens to your organization when new types of organizations appear focused strictly on customer’s needs with the primary purpose of helping others? They are so highly focused on customers’ needs that they do not even see or care about competition. In fact, competition does not exist from their perspective. What happens when their workers, who are intelligent business owners, collaborate to meet people’s needs with high levels of synergy, creativity, speed and customization? What happens as teams and individuals tap near genius levels of potential daily while working to help others? Will anyone be buying your inferior products at higher prices made by your brain dead employees? Will you have time to grow your employees into collaborative business owners? Will you as an employee have the time to develop the thinking, partnering, leadership and collaborating skills required to feed your family in the new economy?

Breakpoints happen very fast. Most plantation owners never recovered their leadership positions in society as they were forced through breakpoint to the Industrial Revolution. And most on the Agrarian side of the shift felt great pain, as their entire civilization was lost.

As you read this, millions of individuals are connecting and building the foundation and infrastructure for a new way of working through an infant Information Superhighway. Millions are doing the healing work required to collaborate and synergize with others. What are you and your organization doing? Are you merely playing at progressive wealth-creation and personal growth? Are you in denial regarding your personal and organizational progress? Do your “laws of the school” graphs and numbers look great but deep down you know of the waste and wasted potential lurking beneath the surface?

Copyright 2000 by Barry Carter

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Next: Why Corporations Don’t Work

About Barry Carter.  

Infinite Wealth is available at the author’s website, and can be purchased in bookstores everywhere including Amazon and Barnes & Nobel. There is also an abbreviated free online version.

Reason Wilken’s Review of Infinite Wealth

 

Understanding ‘Wealth’

Timothy Wilken

The collective term we humans use to describe what we value is “wealth”.

The human species emerged in the world of space-binding. Here the rule of survival was fight or flight. The values in this world were adversarial. Adversary relationship originates on earth in the animal world. Earth supplies limited space for the animals. Space is finite. Good space is even more finite. This means it is very limited. There is only so much good water, so much good grazing land, so much good shelter, and so much good food. There is not enough to go around. The space-binders must compete for this limited amount of good space. They compete adversarialy. They compete by fighting and flighting. They compete by attacking and killing other space-binders. Humans living as space-binders follow the adversarial rule. They compete by fighting and flighting. They compete by attacking and killing their enemies. In this world survival depends on securing good space and avoiding bad space. Bad space is where the predators live – bad space is where you lose – bad space is where you die. Bad space has threatened humans for a very long time as Jared Diamond explains writing in 1998:

“For most of the time since the ancestors of modern humans diverged from the ancestors of the living great apes, around 7 million years ago, all humans on Earth fed themselves exclusively by hunting wild animals and gathering wild plants, as the Blackfeet still did in the 19th century. It was only within the last 11,000 years that some peoples turned to what is termed food production: that is, domesticating wild animals and plants and eating the resulting livestock and crops.”

Jared Diamond makes the point, that for 99.9% of the seven-million-years that our species has existed, we have been hunter-gatherers. And, for that same period, our species has been dominated by the adversary way, and all human values have been adversarial values.

Adversarial wealth – physical force

Physical force is what adversarial humans value most. The force to physically control other humans. Adversarial wealth is weapons, fighting men, horses, fortresses, that which gives me the adversarial advantage.

In our modern world, adversarial wealth is B2 bombers, F15 fighter aircraft, aircraft carriers, tanks, military satellites, explosives of all types from hand grenades to nuclear weapons, trained soldiers and last but not least guns.

The adversary world is a game of with losers and winners. This is a world of fighting and flighting – of pain and dying. Survival depends on securing good space and avoiding bad space. To win in this game someone must lose. Winning is always at the cost of another. All humans living in the adversarial world are struggling to avoid losing – struggling to avoid being hurt. Recall our definition:

CONFLICT –def–> The struggle to avoid loss – the struggle to avoid being hurt.

Here humans must fight and flee to stay alive, and they do. Always ready at a moments notice to go tooth and nail to avoid losing – to avoid death. Losers/winners is the harshest of games. Winning is always at the cost of another’s life. The loser tends to resist with all of his might occasionally prevailing by killing or wounding his attacker. So both parties can lose, turning the game – losers/winners into losers/losers.

If we analyze adversary relationships, we discover that individuals are less after the relationship. (1+1) < 2.

In the adversarial world where the loser forfeits his life. (1+1) = 1. Or, in the end game of losers/losers, both adversaries may die in battle. (1+1)=0.

The adversarial value system is much intact in our present world. Much of today’s wealth is weapons. Nearly all of today’s nations maintain large armies, navies, and airforces. They also maintain equally large national, state, and local police forces. The number of weapons in private hands is equally enormous – over 200,000,000 just within the United States1999. Adversary wealth is physical force – adversary wealth is firepower.

Adversarial humanity uses force to seize their wants and needs. By coercing the actions of others with force or threat of force, they seek to protect their own lives and well being. They seek to optimize their individual survival and to make their individual lives meaningful by hurting others.

Adversary humanity sees self and other as separate – as different – as distinctly apart. Things are black or white – good or bad. You are either for me or against me. You are either my ally or my enemy.

However, in 1776, a new option for humanity emerged with the institutionalization of Neutrality. And with this new option came a new set of values – neutral values.

Neutral wealth – money

Neutral relationships originated in the plant world.

Sunlight provides unlimited energy for the plants. Each individual plant needs only the sun, and adequate water and minerals to survive. Plant survival does not require any relationship with other. This fact makes plants the independent class of life – independent of other.

Humans living in the world of institutional Neutrality view themselves as independent of others. While they should not deliberately hurt other humans, they are not required to help them.

Their success or failure depends solely on their own efforts and talents. Individuals have no relationship with each other. Individuals have no awareness of each other, they ignore each other. To survive in the neutral world, you must be self-sufficient. If we analyze neutral relationships, we discover that individuals are unchanged by their relationship. They are neither less nor more after the relationship. They are the same. (1+1) = 2.

Choices which do not hurt or help are neutral choices. Actions which do not hurt or help are neutral actions. Relationships which do not hurt or help are neutral relationships. The mechanism of relationship is conducted through a free and fair market with the honest exchange of merchandise of good value at a fair price. Recall our definition:

FAIR TRADE –def–> The bartering to insure that the exchange is fair – to insure that the price is not too high or too low – to insure that neither party loses.

Institutional Neutrality is about fairness. The market place is a fair and safe place to exchange goods and services. Neither seller nor buyer should be injured in the exchange. Products should represent a good value and be sold at a fair price. All citizens are guaranteed freedom from loss.

The medium of exchange in the neutral world is money. Money is used as symbolic representation of all real wealth. For all intensive purposes in the Neutral world money and real wealth are the same. Money is what neutral humans most value. The money to purchase help. Neutral wealth is any negotiable security – cash, stocks, bonds, certificates of deposit, that which can be exchanged in the fair market.

Neutral humanity uses money to purchase their wants and needs. By purchasing the actions of others with money, they seek to protect their own lives and well being. They seek to insure their individual survival and make their individual lives meaningful by ignoring others.

Neutral humanity sees self and other as independent – as separate – as different – as distinctly apart – as buyers and sellers in the great market.

And, if other is not independent, if other does not have the price of admission to participate in the great market, then neutral humanity cannot see other at all.

In 2001, humanity has the option for synergic relationship. If we choose Synergy we will adopt a new set of values – synergic values.

Synergic wealth – mutual life support

In a synergic culture wealth is defined very differently. Synergic wealth is that which supports life for both self and other. It is mutual life support. Synergic wealth by definition excludes adversary wealth – physical force that hurts other human beings, and neutral wealth – money that ignores other human beings.

Synergic humans recognize that interdependence is the human condition. They recognize that all humans need help unless they wish to live at the level of animal subsistence. They choose to help others and trust that others will choose to help them.

They know that adversarial humans use coercion to force others help them. They know that help obtained with force or fraud is the lowest quality help because the helper is hurt.

They know that neutral humans use money to buy help from others in the fair market. Help purchased in the market place is of average quality because the helper is ignored.

They understand that synergic humans use co-Operation to attract help from others. They help others and trust others to help them. They know that help attracted by helping others is of highest quality because the helper is helped.

Recall that when others understand that by helping you, they will also be helped, they will automatically help you. That when others understand that when you win, they win, they will support and celebrate your every success. Recall our definition:

Co-OPERATION –def–> Operating together to insure that both parties win, and that neither party loses. The negotiation to insure that both parties are helped, and that neither party is hurt.

Synergic relationships are mutually helpful. Both parties in the relationship experience a gain. In Synergic relationships, one individual plus another individual is more after their relationship than before. (1+1) >> 2. Synergic relationships are marked by low conflict, high effectiveness and enormous productivity.

Synergic humanity uses co-Operation to attract their wants and needs. By attracting the actions of others with co-Operation, they are able to protect their lives and well being. They seek to insure their individual survival and make their individual lives meaningful by helping others.

Synergic humanity sees self and other as components of the same whole – as aspects of the same unity – as existing together – as a co-Operative alliance. Co-Operation is mutually life affirming. Both self and other join in an alliance to seek mutual survival. They seek to be more together than they can be apart.  

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What Is Wrong with Making Money?

Solving the Fossil Fuel Depletion Crisis

Infinite Wealth is an important book by Barry Carter. It is available at the author’s website, and can be purchased in bookstores everywhere including Amazon and Barnes & Nobel. You can read Reason Wilken’s Review of Infinite Wealth or simply sample the first chapter that follows.

There is also an abbreviated free online version, which has been reposted here at Future Positive: 1) The Rise of a Win Win Civilization  2)  A Personal Journey of Discovery 3) Why Corporations Don’t Work 4) The Emancipation of Capitalism  5) Mass Privatization: Organizing in the Information Age  6) Decentralized Wealth Creation  7) The Infinite Wealth Potential of Liberated Humans The Mandate for Win-Win Wealth Creation  9) Breakpoint: Why You Must Act Now  10) SYNOCRACY: True Democracy Through Synergy 11) THE SHIFT: Awaking to a Win-Win World  12) The Synthesis of a Win-Win World and 13)Vision for a Synergic Transition.

A new civilization is emerging in our lives, and blind men every­where are trying to suppress it. —Alvin Toffler

The Rise of a Win Win Civilization

Barry Carter

Imagine working in an organization where you love your work as much as your favorite hobby. Work is fun, exhilarating and challenging. Imagine being eager to wake up each morning to get to work. Your work makes you feel that you are making a difference in the world. It connects you with a deeper meaning in life.

Within your organization you work in a small team—a collaborative partnership where you are connected with partners on a personal level. Your team is interconnected with and interdependent upon other small teams, forming business units and a massive global networked organization, all through the Information Superhighway. All members of your team and organization are as passionate and devoted to their work as you are.

Imagine a customer-focused system where the more one genuinely cares for others the more financial success one has. Teams and individuals excel financially by understanding and being tightly focused on meeting other people’s needs—customers and partners. It is an environment where you directly receive a percentage of income based upon the value you add for customers and partners. The more value you add the more income you receive. In addition, the more value your small team and other small teams add the more income you receive.

It is a system based upon alignment. The better you are at meeting customer needs and helping others win, the more income you directly make for yourself. People, therefore, do the “right thing” because they work in aligned organizing structures where helping others, partners, potential partners, suppliers and customers, is in their direct best interest.

Imagine a society made up of thousands of these organizations or communities all interconnected through the Information Superhighway with the shared purpose of helping other people. The communities are overlapped and chaotically interconnected and intertwined forming a seamless, ordered and interdependent global society. Individuals act locally while thinking globally. Every individual on the planet is directly or indirectly interconnected electronically, financially and socially to every other individual.

Imagine a world of six billion liberated, interconnected individuals who are extremely creative, challenged and productive. Teams routinely taps near genius levels of creative potential. These ideas are readily passed on to thousands of other partners, because it helps the individual, all partners, customers and the organization all win. Organizations, therefore, are structured to liberate and propagate knowledge and wealth flow as opposed to controlling or monopolizing those things.

Imagine a knowledge era where the premier power and creator of wealth in society is knowledge—an infinite resource, one that can be used by many people at the same time with everyone winning. Thus it is a civilization void of oppression because the means of production is widely dispersed and controlled by the masses of individuals in society. This is because individuals own the brains that produce the knowledge.

Imagine a customer driven world where each product or service is tailor-made to fit each customer’s exact, unique needs. It is, therefore, a world where tremendous empathy towards other diverse individuals is the key to meeting customer’s needs and thus thriving financially. In this New World racial division, therefore, has all but disappeared because people thrive economically when they understand, empathize and work with diverse people. The more diversity there is, the more wealth.

Imagine that your work puts you in contact with many diverse people from around the world on a daily basis—partners, potential partners, suppliers and customers. Potential partners routinely approach you on various ventures. Likewise, organizations and teams continually seek new partners and ventures because this is how they grow and produce more income for themselves. One works by connecting with others on the Information Superhighway and finding niches where one can add value, for customers and partners, by adding on to what an existing team is already doing. This is done with minimal risk for all. Because everyone has immediate access to unlimited opportunity and income potential we live in a world where poverty and scarcity have all but disappeared. In fact, we live in a world where the vast majority of the world’s population is wealthy, both materially and non-materially.

As astonishing as it sounds, directly before our eyes we are shifting to this New World as we enter “The Third Millennium.” What we are seeing is a shift at the very foundation of our civilization—wealth-creation and work. For all of human history the powerful forces of wealth-creation (the meeting of our daily practical needs) have driven people apart—to compete for scarce resources, to control the wealth-creation process, to only see from our own narrow perspectives and, therefore, to remain immature. Today, however, the powerful forces of wealth-creation are driving people towards helping one another, meeting others’ needs, interconnecting and becoming interdependent. We are moving towards a deeper understanding of who we are and towards a higher level of maturation.

Wealth-creation and work are changing so fundamentally as to reorder civilization and replace tens of thousands of years of human social norms. Infinite wealth is replacing finite wealth. Win/lose social norms are giving way to win/win norms. A paradigm of abundance is abolishing the illusion of scarcity. Collaboration is beating out competition. Human interconnectedness is revealing the illusion of human separation. Empowered masses are overcoming powerlessness. Inter­dependence is transforming unhealthy dependencies. At the core this is a shift from fear to love.  It is the most significant change in all of human­ history and the beginning of the height of the human journey. It is a shift to a win/win world based upon caring and abundance, driven by information technology and changes in our wealth-creation system.

The creation of this New World, which has already begun, will likely be the most enjoyable part of your life. Out of tens of thousands of years you have the privilege of being alive in what we will soon know as the most exciting time in human history, a time of human awakening. 

Regardless of who you are, you have tremendous opportunity in the immediate years ahead. We are entering a period where you and your fam­ily will have the opportunity to learn and grow significantly; attain substantial material and non-material wealth while con­tributing enormously to a sustainable society. You will have the chance to experience the world, and meet many new and diverse people.

The Historical Precedence

Alvin Toffler in The Third Wave breaks history into three eras; the Agricultural Age, the Industrial Age and the Information Age. As we transition from one era to another, history has shown that all of our social institutions are replaced. It has also shown that these eras come in with a bang, defined as breakpoints (Land, Jarman 1992). With breakpoints, trends and pressures build for years and decades but with little substantive change. People become convinced that nothing is changing—“its all talk.” The old institutions become gridlocked and ineffective as citizens lose confidence and become increasingly frustrated, angry and disillusioned. Then, all at once there is social breakpoint and all of society is thrust into the new era when the old social institutions begin to be replaced.

We saw breakpoint in the transition from the Agricultural Age to the Industrial Age in the United States with the American Revolution. In Russia there was the Russian Revolution and in France the French Revolution. Globally in all of what would become the industrialized world, we transitioned from monarchy to representative government. We globally saw the abandonment of serfdom and slavery and the shift to employment as our system of work. One piece “made-to-fit” customization gave way to mass production as our system of production. Formal religion gave way to Newtonian science as the science of the era.  The extended family was replaced by the nuclear family as our family structure.

All around the world in what would become the industrialized nations, all of the Agricultural Age social institutions were not merely changed, they were systemically replaced.

Today, we see the same transition as we shift from the Industrial Age to the Information Age. In work and business we are transitioning from employees to owning partners, from bureaucracies to virtual networks of teams and from controlled economies (organizations of employees controlled by bureaucrats) to free market economies of real internal customers and suppliers within organizations. At the same time we are shifting from mass production, which thrives on homogeneity, control and stability to mass customization, which thrives on diversity, freedom and chaos. In science we are shifting from the mechanical, analytical Newtonian worldview, to the new synthesis-based sciences of chaos theory, complexity and quantum physics.

In regards to social power we are seeing a shift from the masses of people being passive cogs in an Industrial Age machine controlled by managers and politicians to people being fully empowered as proactive owners, responsible for and in control of their work and lives. Relative to social organization we are literally witnessing the death of representative democracy as we all daily participate in the creation of new, more liberating and collaborative form of democracy based upon synergy. The new system is moving us beyond the limits of taxes, politicians and bureaucracies. It is a system of synergy where order in society comes as a natural by-product of our system of work. Social order is produced as individuals and organizations work to meet each other’s needs as interconnected and interdependent owners, partners, customers and suppliers.

Social Evolution or Social Engineering?

We are witnessing the end of representative democracy, companies, the nuclear family, employment, managers, unions and far more as the norms in society. Sound implausible? Sure, however, think of a French aristocrat in 1780. Imagine trying to explain that every institution in his agrarian civilization, which had existed for hundreds of years, would be replaced. There would be no more serfs, monarchy, aristocrats or extended families as the norms and power structures in society. It would be overwhelming and unbelievable. He would have a hard time even imagining a world operating without those age-old institutions. However, it did happen and today it is again happening.

What I wish to demonstrate in the following pages is that the new civilization and world view is already easing its way into our lives and the successful trends burgeoning onto the world scene exhibit traits conducive to it. I am not proposing a Utopia for you to “sign up to” and attempt to live by and I am not proposing any socially engineered solutions or political dogma.  What I am doing is showing you a perspective which will allow you to see what is already coming at you with lightning speed, inundating you with opportunities. But you must see these opportunities or they will fly right past you.  I want you to see them, use them and thereby prosper with this New World.

The Shift to Infinite Knowledge Power

As we enter the Information Age, a shift has occurred in work and wealth-creation which propels all of the other changes. We have, for millennia, lived in a world in which the creation of things is what has generated wealth. But now, the creation of knowledge is the primary generator of affluence and this is changing our world and world view forever.

Today, the vast majority of value added to human lives no longer comes through tangible things. It comes through knowledge, ideas, intellect and brainpower. Even with tangible things, the knowledge content far outweighs the value of the physical thing. For example, for the $500 one paid for a 200 megahertz 586 Pentium microprocessor in 1997, the knowledge content far outweighs the handful of sand from which it is made. Likely only a fraction of a penny of the $500 goes towards the cost of the sand. This has not always been the case. A typical product in the Industrial Age had a very large percentage of its value in the material good itself. Coal, as an extreme case, had nearly its full value as it was taken from the ground.  In the Industrial Age, the people who owned the raw materials and processing facilities for oil, coal, steel, etc., were the world’s wealthiest people. Today, however, we do not see great fortunes being made with sand mines. Instead the people who control the knowledge control the wealth.

An example of this transition can be seen with a comparison between IBM and Microsoft. IBM for decades was the premiere corporation in the world. Many people considered it the world’s best company to work for. Consultants rated it the world’s best-managed company. For years it reigned as the most profitable corporation in the world. Though IBM led us into the information revolution, its profit and growth had come from the manufacture of computers and other hardware—material goods, things.

In the late 1970’s, at the beginning of the personal computer revolution, IBM contracted with a fledgling corporation called Microsoft. Microsoft produced the software operating system for the IBM PC, while IBM focused on the “important” stuff—the hardware. Yet, by 1992, in a little over a decade, the stock market value of Microsoft had surpassed that of IBM. Microsoft had also replaced IBM as the leader of the information revolution. IBM had billions invested in hardware, factories, buildings, machinery, and equipment. It had 400,000 em­ployees, decades of experience and history. Microsoft, on the other hand, had only 11,000 brains, producing only thoughts, ideas and knowledge.

Another example of the knowledge power shift can be seen in the value of companies. Throughout the past couple of hundred years, in the Industrial Age, hard assets have determined the value of a company. Today, however, when companies buy other companies they routinely pay far more than the value of the hard assets. For example, in 1988 when Philip Morris bought Kraft for $12.9 billion, the hard assets of Kraft were only $1.3 billion as determined by Philip Morris’s accountants. The other $11.6 was all knowledge value—brand equity, ideas in employees’ heads, market prowess. (Peters, 1992, p. 657.) 

Three Pillars of the New Civilization

The transition to knowledge power is unleashing several unstoppable forces in work and wealth-creation, which are changing our world forever, including all of our social institutions. These three are the building blocks for a win/win wealth-creation system:

1)      A shift from finite wealth, which operates on win/lose rules, to infinite wealth which has the potential to operate on a win/win norm.

2)      A shift from an competitive, seller controlled society to a collaborative, buyer driven society.

3)      A shift from a marketplace dominated by employment to one where individuals own the specific work they perform and are compensated directly by customers for the value they add.

Towards Infinite Wealth and Win/Win

In the Industrial Age, the power that propelled wealth-creation and society was dollar wealth. It took lots of dollars to finance the equipment, facilities and employees to make money. In the Agricultural Age violence and brute force powered civilization (Toffler, 1990). There is a fundamental difference between the power of violence and the power of money versus the power of knowledge. Violence and dollar power are finite, whereas knowledge is infinite. This means that for the first time in history we are shifting to an era of infinite wealth!

When we consider the microprocessor, we humans have taken a small amount of physical resource and amplified its value perhaps 50,000 to a million times. We have produced, in effect, unlimited wealth through knowledge power and intellect. And when we benchmark using the cost and performance of the first computers or even computers 20 to 30 years ago, compared to the cost and performance of today’s computers, we have perhaps amplified the value of the sand by as much as one billion times. Through the power of knowledge and intellect we have created something with greater value, per ounce, than gold (Pilzer, 1990).  The alchemist’s dream is at last achieved!

However, the most striking trait of infinite knowledge power is that it can be leveraged across many people so that they all win at the same time and from the same idea. For example, one gun (representing violence power) or one dollar (representing dollar power) is finite and can only be used by one person at a time. For that reason, in the past, one had strong motivation to tightly hold onto whatever power (money and guns) one had, and not to share it with anyone (Toffler, 1990). We, therefore, had competition over finite wealth. Thus, the two primary powers that have propelled civilization throughout all of human history have motivated us to create adversarial win/lose, competitive wealth-creation systems.

The power of knowledge, however, is such that one idea can be used simultaneously by fifty or five hun­dred or five hundred million people.  All of these individuals can win, and because of synergy, they can win more individually by sharing knowledge than by not sharing it. Instead of competing over finite wealth we can collaborate to create infinite wealth where everyone wins. Stephen Covey, Marianne Williamson, Tom Peters, Scott Peck share their ideas in books and millions of people use their ideas and win with more growth, increased wealth and happiness, while these authors win millions for themselves.

Rich Devos and Jay Van Andel, the two co-founders of Amway, developed a system where partners win by collaborating and sharing their knowledge and successes with others partners. The result is an organization that has created more millionaires than any other organization in history.  For their part, in 1994, the two billionaires, Devos and Van Andel, were the fifth and sixth wealthiest people in the United States.

Bill Gates, Microsoft founder and CEO, established an employee stock ownership program (ESOP) at Microsoft; a pure knowledge business containing no tangible product. Gates shares the wealth opportunity with Microsoft employees and encourages knowledge sharing and collaboration within Microsoft, producing thousands of millionaires. In 1994, 33% of Gates’ 11,000 employees were millionaires, with two being billionaires. In 1995, Paul Allen of Microsoft ranked as the fourth wealthiest person in the world with 5.3 billion, while Steven Ballmer ranked 13^th.

Gates helped other people win by sharing ownership and wealth opportunity in a knowledge business and thus won for himself. He has been the wealthiest person in the world for much of the 1990’s. In 1997 he was worth over $36 billion—ranking as the wealthiest person in history. Unlike guns and dollars Gates is dealing with knowledge—a power derived within individual’s brains. Because of the infinite capacity of knowledge power Gates wins more by creating a win/win system where the wealth-creation opportunity and knowledge are shared. In the heart of the Industrial Age and the Agricultural Age one never found this type of wealth sharing, because “thing”-based power and wealth was finite.

Larry Ellison, CEO of Oracle, another multi-billion dollar software producer, has helped create hundreds of millionaires through his Oracle ESOP. Because of his wealth sharing initiative he was the 20^th wealthiest person in the United States in 1995. In a sort of cascading effect, some of the millionaires he helped create have gone out and started their own companies and ESOP is creating a list of their own millionaires. For example, in 1993 Tom Siebel, one of Oracle’s employee millionaires, went out and started his own company, Siebel Systems Inc., creating 40 millionaires in three years.

In company after company we here of teams, teamwork, collaboration, partnering, learning organizations and far more. We here of collaboration between competitors, with suppliers and customers, with employees and unions. As we transition from competition to collaboration we see books appearing with titles such as Co-opetition. Collaborating to Compete and The Death of Competition. In the Win/Win Era of infinite wealth the more we help others win the more wealth we create for ourselves.

Towards a Customer Driven World and the Golden Rule

During all those millennia while the manufacture of things was central, we lived in a seller-controlled society.  Henry Ford arrogantly bragged that we customers could have a car any color we wanted as long as it was black. We were happy to buy his black cars because it was a whole lot better than walking or riding a mule. Managers, executives, bureaucrats and CEO’s were the sellers and they dictated what buyers would get, when and at what price. The seller was king and the one to be served by society, not the buyer.

In the seller’s era of Ford’s day, both the end-user consumers and the workers served the company’s and society’s managing elite. It was a pe­riod where the managers and executives were elevated in social, financial and political status, education and power. Their needs were met better than those of the common buyers and workers in society, who, after all, were (and still are) the same people—the masses. Being in the privileged position of seller was the ultimate position in society, as reflected in the nearly universal desire to climb the “corporate ladder.” If the customer is defined as the one to be served, then the “social customer” during the seller’s era has been the managing elite.

Bureaucrats used mass production and mass marketing “push” systems to push products onto what were interchangeable customers.  For example, my wife and I recently endured a high pressure pool salesman who spent three hours selling us on a $12,000 above ground swimming pool, for which we told him outright we had no interest. We continually tried to define our needs only to hear at the end, “Well, it’s a numbers game. I pitch the same to everybody and a percentage will buy.” In the “sales era” the seller’s job was to convince you that you needed some product, regardless of whether you needed it or not. The measurements used by management to track success were internally driven measurements having little to do with customers. In fact, many things were done to hurt customers in order to make the bureaucracy’s month-end quotas. For example, in push mass production systems pre-built “batched” inventory must move regardless of customer needs. You may need “x” but we have “y” in stock, so this is what we will try and convince you that you need.

Today, the marketplace is reaching a breakpoint where the buyer is becoming the one to be served. Consumers have more choices each year spawned by knowledge power and technology. For example, in 1980, there were 2,689 new grocery and drug store products introduced. By 1991, this number rose to 16,143 (Peters, 1992). There are many suppliers globally seeking to meet any need we have; vying for our dollars, courting us, wooing us, bending over backwards for us, trying to anticipate our needs, thinking from our point of view.  It’s as if they are actually caring for us. We are shifting from a “sales era” to a “service era” (Williamson, 1992) where the seller’s job is to empathize, understand, anticipate and meet the buyer’s specific, individual needs.

We are shifting from the bureaucrat driven push system of mass production, to the customer driven pull system of Mass Customization (Toffler 1980, Davis 1987, Pine 1992). Suppliers, such as Motorola, while still mass-producing pagers, tailor make each one to meet specific customer needs. They pull from 29 million variations of pagers and produce the exact pager you desire within minutes of receiving your order (Pine, 1993). At Levi’s Personal Pair an individual’s personal measurements are electronically sent to the factory. Tailored jeans are then produced from 10,000 combinations of sizes (Peppers, Rogers, 1997). The notion of “careless” batches of thousands of products being pushed onto customers is being replaced with one customized product at a time being “carefully” pulled by customers to match their exact needs.

Through cellular manufacturing, entire “push” factories are being broken into dozens of customer driven, mass customization-based “pull” mini factories called manufacturing cells. Formerly these factories “batch processed” or mass-produced, then mass marketed thousands of identical products and “pushed” them onto the public. At Milwaukee Electric Tool in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, liberated self-directed teams of individuals work in cells without supervision, pulling product one piece at a time to meet a customer’s specific needs. Other organizations have combined customer-focused cells with self-directed teams, team incentive systems and profit centers to produce, in essence, nimble customer-focused businesses within businesses.

In school systems such as Snow Hill Primary in North Carolina, learning is tailored to each individual student’s unique intelligence, using child-centered learning based upon Howard Gardner’s Multiple Intelligence (1993 p8). Snow Hill has moved from the “factory school” with rows of desks and all students hearing the same boring mass-produced lecture, regardless of their needs or special gifts. Led by people like Paul Browning and Gail Edmonson, they have moved from pushing rigid education on children through discipline and control, to a system of caring and love, where children pull learning at their own pace, because they are passionately engaged and having fun learning.

The global quality and customer-focused movements of the 1980’s and 1990’s were just the beginnings of a shift to caring for others. Just as those like Gates, Ellison, Siebel and Devos are winning by helping others win, by sharing wealth-creation opportunity and knowledge, others are winning big by helping us move into a buyer-driven society.

Tom Peters in 1984 published In Search of Excellence, sharing his ideas, igniting the customer-focused movement and allowing billions of people globally to win, while making millions for him. The book stands as the largest-selling business book in history with over 4.0 million books sold in ten years. In 1996 Peters commanded $80,000 per day to share his ideas with an audience.

Those like Sam Walton of Wal-Mart have won big by helping buyer’s win with low prices, high quality and good customer service. For years, he reigned as the wealthiest person in the world.  Even after splitting his fortune with his children, combined they still held the world’s top slot with $23,450 billion in 1995. The billionaire Nordstrom family, with their retail stores famous for customer service, ranked among America’s top wealthiest people.

The global quality movement is also part of the shift to a customer-driven world. Edward Deming sparked this movement using knowledge power as he taught the Japanese statistical quality concepts in the 1950’s. We saw the full impact in the 1970’s when Japan’s superior quality in the automotive industry nearly put some of the big three out of business and eroded market share permanently. We also saw it in the electronics industry where today there are few, if any, American manufacturers of televisions, VCR’s, video cameras, etc.  In 1995 we saw those like the Milliken family of Milliken Textiles and Marriott family of Marriott Hotels, both famous for quality and service, in the Forbes list of America’s wealthiest billionaires.

Towards Individual Ownership of Work and Human Liberation

During the Industrial “things” era there was a division between “ownership” and work, with employment being the primary means of working and creating wealth. Whether in socialist or capitalist countries the worker, as employee, is void of direct ownership of the specific work he or she performs. Part of the shift to a win/win world and a customer-driven society involves the liberation of workers from the bonds of the controlling bureaucracy and managing elite, to become real owners of the specific work they perform. With the real value for customers now coming from knowledge and knowledge coming from the brains in people’s heads, we are evolving to a point where the individual, by default, owns the means of production. Toffler says, “Today the most powerful wealth-amplifying tools are the symbols inside workers’ heads. Workers, therefore, own a critical, often irreplaceable, share of the means of production.” In an economic environment where wealth comes from brains, it is only natural and more effective for organizations to evolve into systems in which individuals actually own the specific work they perform.

The combination of knowledge-based wealth-creation and employment-based work simply are not compatible. In the Industrial Age, people making and mov­ing things created wealth. Wealth-creation could be tracked and, therefore, controlled easily. Motiva­tion through regulation, supervision, and punishment could increase the number of tan­gible things one produced. Employment-based work was, therefore, feasible. Today the company attempts to own the thoughts in the worker’s heads, but how can a person’s thoughts truly be controlled?

The trends towards personal ownership and liberation of work are apparent in the innovations of organizations globally with variable compensation systems, empowerment programs and much more. What we are witnessing is no less than the mass privatization of work—a privatization of wealth-creation on a much more profound and elemental level than traditional capitalism has ever embraced. It is a shift to each individual owning his individual work and having the freedom to work as desired to meet other people’s needs. In fact, we are moving towards a new wealth-creation institution, the Mass Privatization enterprise, which is replacing the company and bureaucracy as the primary wealth-creation institution in society.

Mass Privatization is a system of human orga­nization where the indi­vidual worker, or a small team of workers, own the substantial share of the specific work per­formed. Individuals are interconnected through advanced information technology. They are also interdependent through partnerships with other individuals, organizations or teams of private owning partners. The organization is structured so those individuals win when they help others win. It is a system with no managers, employees, unions, salaries, wages, bureaucracy or hierarchy. (defined in more detail later)

To end our deficits, the person who controls wealth-creation must also own the thoughts. This will be the individual, and the system must come through private work. This work must be connected for leverage and synergy; hence Mass Privatization.  With Mass Privatization there is natural alignment between ownership and the means of production, since the person who owns and controls the thoughts also owns and controls wealth-creation.

Most companies have today implemented some form of variable compensation system and/or empowerment program. With variable compensation, an individual’s compensation varies, based upon the value he or she adds. Just like a business owner, the worker’s compensation varies from day to day or week to week or month to month. The individual is in effect getting some percentage of the wealth she creates and therefore has some privatized or personal ownership in her work. With variable compensation, organizations hope to approximate some of the incentives and pride found in owning one’s own business.

The road to the privatization of work has a long history, as will be defined in more detail later. Starting near the middle of this history we see employee stock ownership arising; a system in which employees own shares in the company. It has progressed to include profit sharing, where employees receive a percentage of the total company profits, as well as bonus programs where employees receive a bonus based upon some criteria. There is also gainsharing, in which a group within a company receives a percentage of the gains made by their specific unit.  With at-risk pay, an employee is guaranteed only a portion of her previous salary or wage, but will be entitled to perhaps substantial additional income based upon the profits generated by his team or local group. With employee product royalties an employee receives a royalty on each sale of a product or service that she helped create. These are only a few out of many private ownership programs being tried in organizations globally.

Lincoln Electric, a 100-year-old manufacturer of welding equipment, uses a form of private ownership. At Lincoln, a worker’s income reflects directly the amount of work performed, quality produced and value added. In 1991, the average production worker’s income was about $50,000 (compared to less than $20,000 for most production workers). Lincoln sees its workers as a collection of entrepreneurs, where the more the individual wins, the more the company wins. Located in Cleveland, Ohio, the rust belt of the United States, it has flourished where others have dropped by the wayside.

Nucor Steel has a similar personal ownership system, with the average production worker in 1996 earning $53,000. Nucor has grown from a $20 million company in 1970 to a two-billion-dollar com­pany by the early 1990’s, largely due to its personal ownership-based pay system. This occurred as the Japanese put many United States steel manufacturers out of business due to their ineffective operations.

Amway is another example of this trend. It is an organization that sells products relatively similar to those available in retail stores. Individuals personally own their one-person dealership, and are exponentially rewarded for any growth they can create for the company in selling their products. As stated earlier it has created more millionaires than any other company in history.

To further show that economic success is moving towards private ownership of work and away from managerial hierarchies, consider the following facts. In the early 1990’s, on any given day, 8,000 people moved into self-employment.  During the same period, on any given day, 250 managers and 1,500 employees lost their jobs! In 1994, the fastest growing segment of the economy was the one-person enterprise. 

Along with private ownership systems, most companies have implemented some form of worker empowerment or human liberation system such as self-directed teams. These are teams void of supervision. At the heart of any democratic country there is a degree of freedom and liberty supported by the right of ownership. Like countries, as organizations move towards democracy, they also are moving towards more individual liberty and freedom of workers supported by the individual’s right of ownership.

Billionaire Ross Perot founded and built EDS based upon empowered and liberated knowledge-based project teams. At EDS, the project team has replaced the bureaucratic structure. In return, Perot is one of the wealthiest billionaires in the country. At Johnsonville Foods, self-managing teams, combined with a variable pay profit sharing system have helped the organization grow from a $7 million company in 1981 to $130 million by 1991 (Peters, 1992).

Winning By Helping Others Win

As can be seen with the examples of Devos, Andel, Perot, Nucor and the others, we are shifting to an era where in order to thrive economically we must care for and help other people win. The more people we are able to help, the wealthier we become ourselves, both materially and non-materially. We must also consider that 46% of the United States’ 129 wealthiest people in 1995, whose fortunes were acquired through their work and not inheritance, did so in knowledge-based businesses or through privatized work or from a commitment to customers.

The cases listed above are not isolated incidents. They are part of a rapidly growing trend. Intel in 1996 paid out $620 million in profit sharing to 40,000 employees. Mary Kay Ash, is CEO of Mary Kay Cosmetics, a multi-billion dollar cosmetics company which offers private work opportunity to women. In her book Mary Kay, You Can Have it All, she says her highest goal is helping women everywhere achieve their full potential.

Tom Melohn, CEO of North American Tool and Die, says in The New Partnership, “If you reach out and genuinely care for your fellow employees, there is no limit to what you can accomplish.” After buying NATD, Melohn radically changed operations, making honesty, trust, respect and caring core values of the company, basing this on the assumption that peo­ple want to do a good job. Although NATD was in trouble when Melohn purchased it, within 12 years NATD’s pre-tax earnings increased 2400%. The return on investment moved to top the 10% of the Fortune 500, sales grew by 28% per year, stock value in­creased 47% per year and productivity increased by 400%.

Hal Rosenbluth, CEO of Rosenbluth Travel, in the Customer Comes Second, shows a similar philosophy of caring for workers and customers. Rosenbluth Travel has grown 7,500% in fifteen years. We see similar philosophies and results in Anita Roddick’s Body Shop as defined in her book Body and Soul, Ricardo Semler’s Semco as defined in his book Maverick, Jack Stack’s Springfield Remanufacturing Corporation as defined in his book The Great Game of Business. Then there is Percy Barnevik’s ABB (Asea Brown Boveri), and Nordstrom’s focus on customers as defined in the book The Nordstrom Way by Robert Spector and Patrick McCarty.

Towards a Win/Win Wealth-Creation System 

Perhaps none of the individuals above are 100% benevolent and perhaps none are 100% win/win, customer-driven believers in private work. In fact, those like Gates and Ellison are known to be fierce win/lose competitors. Ellison is famous for quoting Genghis Khan’s statement, “It’s not sufficient that I win; others must fail.” The United States federal government sued Gates in an anti-trust suit for unfair competitive practices. Walton and Wal-Mart have been criticized broadly for systemically ruining small business owners in small towns.

Undoubtedly, there are contradictions and incoherence in our actions and thinking. However, it is not necessary that we do everything 100% consistently in order for us to evolve from a win/lose to a win/win wealth-creation system. In fact, it’s rather silly to think that we could evolve from one system to another without some slow progress and mixing of the two systems and worldviews. As we transitioned from the Agricultural Age to the Industrial Age we shifted from “make-to-fit” customization and serfdom to mass production and employment. During the transition we see the mixing of the Agricultural Age’s concept of serfdom with the Industrial Age’s concept of mass production. The result was slavery and plantations, with hundreds of slaves working in a mass production mode in the Southern United States. The first Industrial Age steam engines were used to pump water onto Agricultural Age water wheels to drive factory drive-shafts, as opposed to using the steam engines to drive the shafts directly.

New wealth-creation systems, social systems and worldviews are not born fully matured and complete. They slowly evolve with various pieces developing independently, confusing the old with the new. They build momentum, the various new pieces begin to integrate and build on one another until breakpoint is reached. After breakpoint, the systems continue to evolve. Therefore, if we expect to understand the frantic change occurring around us today we must synthesize and integrate the developing and incomplete trends into a coherent whole. By synthesizing the trends we learn to see that some things are leftover residual activity or success from the outgoing system and other things are part of the new, incoming system.

Today the vast majority of leaders and organizations still operate primarily upon win/lose adversarialism, in one form or another. However, if we look from certain perspectives we can see the win/win trends developing, growing and evolving. Clearly there is a long term trend from the ruthless robber barons of the Industrial Age, seeking to control and get as much as they could from everyone they could, to the more customer-focused and win/win entrepreneurs.  The entrepreneur seeks to help him or herself by helping stockholders, customers, workers and suppliers.

The Rise of a Win/Win Civilization

As shown in Figure 2 , the shift to knowledge-power is the foundation upon which an entirely new civilization is arising. Knowledge-power is already producing the pillars and building blocks of this new civilization:

Σ  Infinite win/win wealth.

Σ  A buyer-focused society.

Σ  The privatization of work.

In the past decades, partial success with just one of the three pillars has been shown to be quite effective, as demonstrated throughout this chapter. An individual looking to win big for herself tomorrow stands an excellent chance of achieving substantial wealth if she embraces all three of the above, not merely because she wants to win, but because helping others is simply the right thing to do.

The three knowledge-based building blocks are the pillars supporting a new system of win/win wealth-creation. The new wealth-creation system is literally causing humanity to mature and see a broader reality that has always existed—we win by helping others. For the first time in human history, practical necessity depends upon us exercising a new version of the Golden Rule, which is, treating others the way they want to be treated.

Atop this entire structure is emerging a new win/win civilization. A civilization which is leading to a new social order, beyond representative government, taxes, politicians, companies, employees and control. It is a new society propelled by the synergy of six billion fully participating individuals; one where success comes from caring for others, sharing with others and exercising individual freedom. It is a new civilization with new social institutions for a Win/Win Era.

As Goes Wealth-Creation So Goes Human Maturity

A civilization’s wealth-creation paradigm and system determines its citizens’ maturity and forms their percep­tion of human nature. For thousands of years we have operated from a win/lose competitive paradigm not because it is our universal “human nature” but because humanity’s level of maturity has been determined by our wealth-creation system. As we mature we are learning that by collaborating we can synergize and create infinite wealth where we all win more far more than we would if we were competing with one another.

As we evaluate the traits that make up human nature or human maturity we find that they fall in one of two categories. Either they come from a love paradigm or they come from a fear paradigm. From love we see traits such as creativity, generosity, caring, sharing, nurturing, mercy, compassion, understanding, friendliness, empathy, helpfulness, consideration, cheerfulness, confidence, intuition, understanding, forgiveness and abundance. We also see the desire to help others, for synthesizing, collaborating, synergizing, learning, changing, improving, and growing. From love we see a strong connection to our children, friends, relatives, humanity, nature and the universe.

From fear we see greed, selfishness, hatred, scarcity, the “survival of the fittest,” laziness, competition, envy, jealousy, violence, fear of diversity and change. We also see such traits as being closed, distant, non-caring, dis-trustful, inconsiderate, and resentful as well as the desire to analyze, to divide, separate, conquer and control.

For thousands of years there have been great spiritual leaders and philosophers who have put forth lofty notions of a win/win and love-based human nature. We, however, could not fully buy into and consistently actualize a love-based nature in our daily lives because it was in conflict with the practical reality we experienced each day. If you have little or no food on the table and someone is trying to take what you do have, it’s hard to focus on such lofty notions. One feels compelled to focus on getting those practical needs met. Tangible things, such as food and shelter, are what we have considered the fundamentals of wealth in the past, as we focused on the more basic of human needs. Even for those who are relatively wealthy we have all been nurtured in a worldview where fear is the wealth-creation norm and most people’s material wealth has come from fear-based activity.

In the past, our wealth-creation paradigm, the making, mining and growing of things, and our wealth-creation systems to make, mine and grow these things, have propelled our perception of human nature toward fear. This is because these “things” were considered finite or scarce and thus wealth was finite. We, therefore, had to compete with one another through win/lose means for scarce wealth, attaining it much of the time at the expense of others. Because of finite wealth, our wealth-creation system has been one driven by win/lose behavior, making competition the very core of human civilization. Wealth-Creation has, therefore, driven us to more fully develop the fear-based traits of our perceived “human nature.”

What would happen to human nature if, through advances in knowledge, wisdom, information technology, human maturity and technology we created a new win/win organizing system for work. What if we discovered that we could create more wealth for ourselves by collaborating with more diverse people and the more people we helped, the more wealth we created for ourselves?

What would happen if, year after year and decade after decade, the people using win/win collaboration tapped an infinite source of wealth, continually becoming wealthier while those who continued the immaturity of win/lose competition slipped further and further into the lower economic class? What if on every level and in all segments of society we began to see the win/win reality developing and working directly before us, in small, medium and large ways, and the more we saw, the larger it grew? What would happen if each time we participated in win/lose activity we lost more than we gained when we participated in win/win activities?

What if we discovered that the world’s problems from gangs to drugs, to greed, to violence, terrorism, war, low self-esteem and more are caused by limited paradigms or hurts inflicted upon us by a competitive win/lose environment—in other words adaptations to win/lose wealth-creation systems? What if, as these hurts are healed we begin caring for one another? What would happen if the power of wealth-creation and a six billion person collaborative, customer-driven free market began healing humanity?

An awakening would occur as our worldview shifted and we rapidly began to mature. We are witnessing the beginnings of a transformation from a perceived fear-based human nature to our true nature; love, which is based upon an infinite and abundant wealth reality.

If fear-based wealth-creation has driven humanity, against its true nature, to do the evils that it has done, then there are no limits to what we can do as wealth-creation becomes aligned with humans helping one another.

In order to facilitate your seeing all of the above I would first like to take you along a few miles in my shoes, so that you can hopefully experience along with me this evolution of thought.  Once this is accomplished I can expand more completely on the concepts involved. My journey is one about work because we create wealth through our work. Our civilization rests upon our system of work and as this changes so does everything else.

Copyright 2000 by Barry Carter

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Next: A Personal Journey of Discovery

Yesterday, we featured part one of Peter Corning’s article on Evolution and Ethics written in 1997.  Today we continue with part two.

Charlie Allnut: “What ya bein so mean for, miss? Man takes a drop too much once in a while, it’s only human nature.”

Rose Sayer: “Nature, Mr. Allnut, is what we are put in this world to rise above.”

C.S. Forester (The African Queen)

Evolution and Ethics II

Peter A. Corning, Ph.D.

Pre-Darwinian social philosophy — the so-called “tradition of discourse” — can roughly be divided into two competing schools, namely: (1) “idealists” who have viewed the social order as a reflection of human nature and, perhaps, as a vehicle for human betterment (some have even espoused the dangerous idea that the “state” is an end in itself), and (2) those who, like the Cynics and Epicureans, have equated human nature with the unconstrained pursuit of self-interest. To the latter, an organized society is at best the product of convention and expediency — a regime imposed, or a bargain struck, among autonomous, self-serving individuals.

Although it has taken us a while to appreciate it, Charles Darwin changed the ground-rules for the philosophical debate. In The Descent of Man (1871/1874), Darwin proposed that moral systems should henceforth be studied as a branch of “natural history” — that is to say, within an evolutionary framework. Darwin’s “take” on morality was that it is indeed a product of the evolutionary process. He believed that the “social instincts”, including even our capacity for “sympathy”, “kindness” and the desire for social “approbation”, are rooted in human nature; in fact, the rudiments of these behaviors can be found in other social species as well. And yet, Darwin also recognized that such instincts seem to contradict the imperatives of natural selection; how can selfless behavior arise from the machinations of selfish genes?

Darwin was the first of many Darwinian theorists who have struggled with this conundrum, and therein hangs a tale. Darwin proposed to account for our sociality with a combination of selection for individual reciprocity (reciprocal altruism), “family” selection (a.k.a. kin selection) and “group selection” — that is, the positive selection of traits which provide an advantage for groups that are in competition with other groups. Moreover, only humans have true morality because we alone can superimpose reasoned cultural constraints on our baser motives. (In this respect, Darwin seemed to be invoking the Kantian precondition of “intentionality.”)

Many late-twentieth-century Neo-Darwinians have viewed Darwin’s explanation as unsatisfactory: “The more you think about it, the less likely it seems,” says Robert Wright in The Moral Animal (p.186). And Helena Cronin, in The Ant and the Peacock (1991/1993:327), concludes that Darwin “lets us down.” How so? Because Darwin recognized but did not solve the problem of how a selfless gene could spread within a group and not be eliminated by selfish competitors. Darwin’s argument for group selection therefore seems unworkable. Accordingly, in its contemporary incarnation, evolutionary ethics has been constrained to fit within the framework of individual and kin selection, reciprocal altruism and, more generally, the egoistic “social contract” paradigm (but see below).

Robert Wright’s volume provides an illuminating example of this approach — and much more. The Moral Animal is, first of all, a work of formidable intelligence, wit and skill (and is deeply researched to boot). It has been lavishly reviewed, highly praised and deserves its reputation as a somewhat provocative synthesis of evolutionary psychology. Wright calls his volume a “sales pitch” and, indeed, it is a highly partisan rendering of the subject with an admittedly cynical edge. Fair enough. Ambrose Bierce in his Devil’s Dictionary defined a cynic as “a blackguard whose faulty vision sees things as they really are, not as they ought to be.” Wright provides a very creditable review and analysis of the literature on such topics as male versus female reproductive strategies (including the highly-charged issue of monogamy versus polygyny), parental investment, friendship, and the nettlesome problems of deception and treachery in human relations, not to mention the convoluted relationship between our ethical preachments and our practices.

In many respects, Wright got it right. As he points out, evolutionary psychology supports the view that there is indeed a biologically-based “human nature” but that it is also highly flexible and adaptable (not genetically determined). Wright invokes a metaphor from electronics — the idea of “knobs” and “tunings” — to characterize the relationship between our genes and our environment. We have many biologically-based biases and urges, but we are also capable of learning from experience and controlling these urges — as Darwin, and Huxley, and Rose Sayer (each from a different perspective) suggested. Wright also reviews the “case” for “gene selfishness” as the guiding principle behind our behavior; often it is the invisible anchor for our psychological proclivities. The good news is that our moral impulses may also have a biological basis. The bad news, Wright claims, is that these impulses are highly selective, inconsistent, and “ruthlessly” subordinated to our self-interests; they do not seem well-attuned to the “good of the species.” In short, says Wright, we delude ourselves in thinking that our morality is not really self-serving.

While it is hard to find fault with Wright’s reportage — he is after all a senior editor of The New Republic — the spin he puts on it, his interpretation, is deeply disappointing. At the very end of this “feast of great thinking and writing” (as one reviewer puts it), Wright finds himself in an ethical cul de sac. Evolutionary psychology can give us no more ethical guidance than can the musty musings of an Antiphon or a Plato (we can’t escape from the naturalistic fallacy). Nevertheless, in what amounts to a non sequitur, Wright resurrects a dubious argument for utilitarianism and the greatest happiness of the greatest number. “It’s just about all we have left,” he tells us. Indeed, having adopted the Darwinian definition of true morality as the conscious control over our urges (which sets the bar pretty high), he concludes that we are not moral animals (his title be damned); we are only “potentially” moral. The final result is a logical tangle — a whole that is far less than the sum of its impressive parts. Because this issue is crucial to whatever future evolutionary ethics may have, it is worth taking the trouble to try to disentangle it.

We begin with a simple question: How does Wright (or Antiphon, or Jeremy Bentham, or even Adam Smith for that matter) define “self-interest?” Often the term is used to connote a zero-sum relationship in which the “self” gains at the expense of some “other”. Indeed, Neo-Darwinians seem to relish the idea that, where selfish genes are concerned, the self is “ruthless” (a flagrant anthropomorphism). Of course, there is a large philosophical literature on the concept of “enlightened self-interest” — a form of selfishness that may overlap with the interests of others (say collective goods like safe drinking water or the “common defense”), which goes under the heading of “mutualism” in evolutionary biology. In theory, there are at least three distinct kinds of self-interest: (1) those that are also consistent with — or supportive of — the interests of others, (2) those that are neutral in their effects on others, and (3) those that conflict with the interests of others.

Unfortunately, the enlightened self-interest (or “ESI”) paradigm often gets short-changed in favor of the competitive, “zero-sum” paradigm, and Wright’s treatment reflects this bias. Although Wright speaks at several places in his text (mostly in passing) about the phenomenon of “non-zero-sumness” in human societies, his clumsy euphemism obscures the vastly important role in humankind of synergy (beneficial co-operative effects that are not otherwise attainable); it is the equivalent of referring to white as “non-black.”

The root of the problem, I believe, is a flawed vision of a human society as no more than a vast set of dyadic “transactions” between individuals in an essentially competitive arena, when in fact it is also a complex system of ongoing relationships and interdependencies, many of which are mutually beneficial, from the division of labor in production and reproduction to shared public roads and public order. Competition and co-operation are the “warp and woof” of human societies, to resurrect that old but still useful weaving metaphor. Evolutionary psychology (and its now politically-incorrect predecessor sociobiology) have tended to underrate the co-operative dimension of human societies. Our species is sui generis — vastly more dependent than any other social species on economic “niches” that are created by the needs, wants and activities of others, and on joint efforts that produce both collective goods and divisible “corporate goods.” Richard Alexander (1987) calls it “a system of indirect reciprocity.” To cite one hypothetical example: suppose that two hunter-gatherers each are able to collect enough firewood at dusk to feed a campfire for half the night. If the two of them pool their hoards and share a fire, they will both have enough firewood to stay warm through the entire night — and, equally important, to ward off potential predators. That’s synergy, and human societies are rife with it.

Not only is non-zero-sumness (synergy) very important in human societies but it casts our moral impulses in a very different light. Human nature (as best we can discern at this stage) is highly adapted to exploiting the human potential for socially-produced synergies, which necessitates fitting ourselves into a social order. We (mostly) enjoy associating and working with others and are highly attuned to the opinions, and influences and “approbation” of others, precisely because it is most often in our self-interest to be so motivated; our imperfect social and moral propensities are thus not opposed to our self-interests but are more or less aligned with them; often, in fact, our social needs become ends in themselves. To be sure, moral actions usually require some “sacrifice,” but, with some notable exceptions, the “costs” can be viewed as tradeoffs for compensating benefits of various kinds. From an evolutionary perspective, we would expect moral impulses to be motivated and supported at the psychological level if they are in fact instrumental to positive synergies and, ultimately, to our reproductive success. Moreover, we would expect to find that these propensities are also influenced by the specific cultural context. Wright himself illustrates this point with the irreverent, and somewhat scatological, use of Charles Darwin’s life as a “test case.” Darwin, and many other Victorians, demonstrated that a society can after all be a vehicle for moral betterment — for an increase in mutually-beneficial civility and “domestic tranquility” (for the “good life” sensu Plato). In other words, we can make cultural choices that will encourage or discourage moral conduct — i.e., conduct that is responsive to the needs and attitudes of others.

And yet, we also remain hard-core egoists. The point is that we are not one thing or the other; the “idealists” and the “cynics” are both partly correct. The great, inescapable paradox of the human condition is that both the market/exchange metaphor and the “superorganism” metaphor are partially valid. Human societies (in all but some pathological cases) represent a unique blend, in evolutionary terms, of all three kinds of self-interests, and the endemic conflicts within every society — indeed, within each individual — are a reflection of the interplay between them.

Wright himself unwittingly provides a possible illustration. Why, he asks, has the cultural practice of monogamy arisen in the face of the presumed reproductive advantage of male polygyny? This would seem utterly to contradict the bedrock premise of evolutionary psychology. Wright’s explanation is that the advantages must have outweighed the disadvantages. It is a dangerous and destabilizing state of affairs to have relatively few males controlling the reproductive “resources” of the females in any given society while many more males are denied access to reproduction. So, in a kind of biological Magna Carta, some of our male ancestors made a “bargain” among themselves to share the females more or less equally. But why should peaceful coexistence and reproductive co-operation matter more for humans than for, say, chimpanzees or elephant seals? Precisely because human economies, by and large, involve much more intense, ongoing co-operation and economic interdependency; the benefit side of the social order is typically much greater, as is the potential cost of internal conflict (just read the daily newspapers or watch CNN).

This subtle revisioning of the human condition also has a bearing on the group selection debate. The traditional assumption, from Darwin to Wright, that group selection only applies to unalloyed, uncompensated “altruism” is, to put it bluntly, perverse. Group selection can also occur in cases where there are net advantages for all concerned (win-win). For example, among our protohominid ancestors, the most effectively co-operating groups may have been more successful in driving away competing groups, even competing species, from the often precious resource of a water hole, or potential prey. The reason that such successful collaborations should not be treated simply as cases of multiple individual selection is that the benefits are jointly produced and shared — there is a functional synergy involved. Maynard Smith calls it “synergistic selection.” (See also the more extensive discussion of this issue in Corning 1996.)

But what about the naturalistic fallacy — the prohibition against deriving ethical “oughts” from any empirical “is”? Even if our ethical impulses make evolutionary (adaptive) sense, so what? Here it may be fair to accuse Wright of letting us down. As noted earlier, Wright could not discern any basis for ethics in Darwinism or evolutionary psychology. “Can morality have no meaning for the thinking person in a post-Darwinian world? This is a deep and murky question that (the reader may be relieved to hear) will not be rigorously addressed in this book” (p.329). Nevertheless, a few pages later Wright presents an argument for utilitarianism as a basis for morality. He claims that the “happiness” criterion is “unscathed” by the naturalistic fallacy because happiness is in fact a value that “we all share” (pp. 334-335). Furthermore, happiness has a non-zero-sum property; everyone’s happiness can go up if everyone treats everyone else nicely (synergy). In other words, we can derive an ethical system from a shared and/or interdependent set of social values. Ethics are not ends in themselves but instrumental means; if we all prefer happiness, then an ethical system can promote our common objective.

Why, in the name of Darwin, can’t the same logic be applied to the biological problem of survival and reproduction? Forget happiness. Let’s focus on evolutionary ethics. If we all (or almost all) seek to survive and reproduce, and if our survival and reproductive success — not to mention the longer-term reproductive success of our progeny (call it “posterity”) — is largely dependent, ultimately, upon the “collective survival enterprise” — the tacit raison d’etre of a complex human society — why can’t we use our shared Darwinian “interests” as the basis for an evolutionary ethics? If we take the long view, and the large view, any ethical system that is conducive to “the survival and reproductive success of the greatest number” would, on balance, also be likely to be conducive to our own survival and reproductive interests. That, I submit, is a logical (and sturdy) foundation for an evolutionary ethics, although I am also well aware that there are some pitfalls to be avoided.

A useful analogue for “parental investment” within the framework of an enlightened, post-Neo-Darwinian evolutionary ethics might be “community investment.” After all, this is what the Goodwill, the Salvation Army, Habitat for Humanity and the like, not to mention our many charitable foundations, are implicitly all about. So we are not just talking theory here. We are talking about what people actually do in the real world. And the good news is that the “public interest,” or “general welfare,” is not the chimerical fantasy of incurable romantics whose genes are headed straight for the evolutionary “dustbin”. Rather, these quaint old-fashioned terms — whose roots trace far back in the tradition of discourse — are conceptual container-ships for the non-zero-sumness in society.

The case for an “ESI model” of evolutionary ethics is buttressed, compellingly, by Frans de Waal’s new book on the origins of moral behaviors. Good Natured (a clever title) is a rare treat, a work that combines good primatology, good social science, good moral philosophy, good writing and, not least, good will. De Waal sets out to show via the research literature in other social species, especially our primate cousins, that morality is not opposed to our animal instincts. “We are moral beings to the core” (p.2). The mixture of “good” and “evil” that can be observed in human societies reflects a duality that can be seen also in other socially-organized species. Our close relatives are very often selfish in the zero-sum sense of the term, yet they also exhibit such “enlightened” behaviors as sharing, succorance, empathy, attachment, reconciliation, tolerance, even concern for the community and for social harmony. (De Waal defines “community concern” somewhat stiffly as “the stake each individual has in promoting those characteristics of the community or group that increase the benefits derived from living in it by that individual and its kin” p. 207.)

Furthermore, there is evidence that other-regarding behaviors are encouraged and supported in primates and humans alike by a substrate of psychological and emotional “rewards” and “punishments”. “The fact that the human moral sense goes so far back in evolutionary historx that other species show signs of it plants morality firmly near the center of our much-maligned nature,” de Waal concludes. “It is neither a recent innovation nor a thin layer that covers a beastly and selfish makeup” (p. 218). De Waal also nicely deflates the conceit that true morality requires conscious deliberation: “Animals are no moral philosophers,” he concedes, “but then, how many people are?” (p. 209). Animals occupy a number of floors of the “tower of morality,” as de Waal puts it, but it is a bit gratuitous to claim that only the very top of the tower can be labelled “moral”. De Waal likens our moral propensities to language acquisition, a human trait that exhibits both a specific biological predisposition (and associated “machinery”) and extensive learning.

Some of de Waal’s earlier work, especially his book Primate Politics, has been criticized for excessive anthropomorphism (for the record, by some of the very same people who freely employ the blatant anthropomorphism of selfish genes). Indeed, even Robert Wright fires a barb or two at de Waal — he calls de Waal’s primate stories “almost soap-operatic” — before appropriating some of them to use as “re-runs” for the entertainment of his own readers. In Good Natured, de Waal responds to his critics with a review of the formal primate research literature and an argument for “parsimony” in theorizing about the striking comparisons between primates and humans. (De Waal also repays Wright with a sharp critique of Wright’s charge that we are all self-deceiving hypocrites.)

One aspect of de Waal’s book should be highlighted. A centerpiece of human relationships, and human morality, is our apparently universal (albeit imperfect) sense of “equity”. It is deeply embedded in the human psyche, and it provides a somewhat erratic moral compass for human relationships — especially for our concepts of “justice” and “fair play”. Consider the classic story about “The Little Red Hen” — one of the all-time best-sellers among children’s books. The Red Hen works hard and is frugal. One day she finds some grains of wheat and decides to plant them. She asks her friends (a dog, a cat and a pig, in one version of the story) “who will help me plant these seeds?” Well, her friends all have more important things to do, so she plants them herself. And so it goes at each successive stage in the production process — tending and weeding the garden, harvesting the wheat, threshing the grain, grinding the flour and baking the bread. At each step the Red Hen asks for help, but her friends are always too busy. Yet, when it finally comes time to eat the bread, her friends are more than willing to help; they’re eager to do so. By then, of course, it’s too late. Now, a well-trained defense lawyer might object that the Red Hen should not have eaten all the bread herself, but many generations of children, unburdened by the teachings of our moral philosophers and legal scholars, seem to have gotten the point.

De Waal finds suggestive evidence that this sense of “justice” has its roots in the finely-tuned “economy of sharing and exchange” in chimpanzees. If so, this has enormous theoretical significance; it links one of our most fundamental ethical principles to, yes, natural selection. Our own acutely-developed (sometimes) sense of justice may be without precedent in nature, but so are our language skills, our manual dexterity and a variety of other evolved traits.

One significant shortcoming in both Wright’s and de Waal’s presentations — a criticism that can be applied to most recent discussions of “human nature” — is that human nature is not a fixed, cookie-cutter set of traits. Individual differences, both biological and culturally-induced, are as important with respect to personality characteristics and social behavior (including the moral dimension) as with any other evolved trait. Both of these authors make some generalizations about our behavioral propensities that are not always true, and the exceptions matter a lot. Thus, Wright asserts that the males of our species may be biologically predisposed to promiscuity and that monogamy is somewhat at odds with a Darwinian perspective. How, then, do we account for the wide variations in male behavior in our society? While some males cheat regularly and marry often, others make life-long commitments or become celibates. Consider the couple in Sacramento California that, in the spring of 1997, celebrated their 81st wedding anniversary. (He was 101 years old and she was 97.) In strictly Darwinian terms, these centenarians have done fairly well: they have 14 children, 75 grand children and, so far, 43 great grand children. Real-world ethical systems must take account of the variations that exist in any society, for whatever reason. That is why we have both formal and informal systems of rewards and sanctions to back up and reinforce our ethical norms. What some of us may be inclined to do, or not do, “spontaneously”, others may need to be “persuaded” to do for the sake of the “general welfare”.

Maybe, after all, Herbert Spencer had something useful to contribute to the debate (see Part One). An “ethical science,” he asserted, should strive to harmonize “self-preserving activities,” the “activities required for rearing offspring” and the “social welfare,” so that individual self-interests will mesh with the interests of others (including the “superorganisms” through which our various needs and wants are met). A tall order, of course, but at least this ideal is grounded in the biological fundamentals and is consistent with Darwinian principles. It can perhaps provide a general framework within which to address specific issues.

An excellent example of this approach to evolutionary ethics, in my opinion, is the final volume under consideration here, John Beckstrom’s latest book Darwinism Applied. Beckstrom is an emeritus professor of law at Northwestern University School of Law and the author of two previous books on the interface between evolution/biology and jurisprudence. Thus, he is able to write with authority, and with a mature understanding of both fields. He forthrightly addresses many hot-button issues: child abuse, incest, rape, street crime, intestate transfers of wealth and aid-giving behaviors, among others. However, he adroitly avoids the land-mines that litter each of these battlefields. As Beckstrom stresses: “Science may be able to offer social planners advice on how to reduce or even eliminate a large array of social problems… [However], it cannot be used ‘normatively.’” Beckstrom likens the role of science to that of a travel agent: “They cannot tell you where to go, but they can give you information about the costs and benefits of various destinations and help you get there once you finalize your decision.” It is not possible to detail here Beckstrom’s treatment of each of these issues. In general, this is an exemplary effort, with valuable insights for anyone who has a specific interest in any of these biologically-significant problems. One representative example involves the reduction of sibling incest. The incest taboo is an ancient and universal norm in human societies, and its adaptive biological value is well-understood. Inbreeding in humans, as in other mammals, can have seriously detrimental fitness consequences for any offspring that might result; the consequences are commonly referred to as inbreeding depression. Moreover, our cultural taboo is powerfully reinforced (normally) by a biologically-based psychological inhibition against sex with close relatives. Nevertheless, incest does occur in modern societies. The ethics of incest avoidance are clear-cut, so how can this problem be addressed? It happens that the biopsychological inhibitory “mechanism” is heavily dependent upon proximity; children who live in close quarters (whether in fact related to one another or not) will normally establish as part of their day-to-day relationships a corollary aversion to sexual intimacy. The implications for child-rearing practices are spelled out by Beckstrom in some detail. (One hot-button issue that Beckstrom did not anticipate — who did — was the breakthrough that now makes imminent the possibility of cloning humans. In dealing with this highly contentious issue, it is clear that science and ethics will need each other.)

If a guiding metaphor for evolutionary ethics might be of use, we can probably do no better than an improved version of the image that was introduced by T.H. Huxley in the 19th century, in his famous Romanes lecture. Huxley suggested that a society could be likened to a domestic garden, where the task of the gardener (i.e., an ethical system) is to struggle with the hostile forces of nature to achieve an ordered regime. John Dewey, in his rebuttal to Huxley, proposed a more benign image of the garden as a plot in which, contrary to Huxley’s view, the gardener works with nature to make improvements and create conditions for abundant growth. From our vantage point, we can now recognize that both versions of the garden metaphor are partly correct. Our ethical systems must, at one and the same time, weed out the dandelions and fight the aphids and snails while simultaneously fertilizing, watering and pruning the hybrid petunias and English tea roses. Perhaps, to put a somewhat different spin on Wright’s conclusion, we can now admire the ethical aspirations of the Victorians and learn from their accomplishments even as we acknowledge their shortcomings, imperfections and, alas, sometimes their hypocrisies.

And so, we return to my leading question (in Part One). Is the time ripe for evolutionary ethics? I would argue that it has always been ripe, ever since Darwin. The difference now is that the continuing progress of the life sciences and behavioral sciences makes the case more irresistible. So the proper question is, are we yet ripe for it?

Copyright © 2001 ISCS. All rights reserved.

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References

Alexander, R. D. (1987). The Biology of Moral Systems. New York: Aldine de Gruyter

Corning, P.A. (1996). “The Co-operative Gene.” Evolutionary Theory, 11, 183-207.

Cronin, H. (1991/1993). The Ant and the Peacock. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Darwin, C. (1871/1874). The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex. New York: Burt.

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Peter Corning’s Website

In today’s world of increasing immorality in business,  government and on our streets, I think we could benefit from looking back at this article written in 1997. It is, in part, a review of the following books:

Evolutionary Ethics, Matthew H. Nitecki and Doris V. Nitecki, eds. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1993.

Darwinism Applied: Evolutionary Paths to Social Goals, John H. Beckstrom. Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers, 1993.

Good Natured: The Origins of Right and Wrong in Humans and Other Animals, Frans de Waal. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996.

The Moral Animal: Evolutionary Psychology and Everyday Life, Robert Wright. New York: Pantheon, 1994.

Evolution and Ethics

Peter A. Corning, Ph.D.

Can there be any doubt that ethics is a cutting-edge issue? We are daily assaulted by routine private acts of violence, chicanery and deception, as men and women (and children) make choices or act out compulsions with ethical ramifications. We are also daily witnesses to ethically-abhorrent political acts — the Oklahoma City bombing, the gas attacks in the Tokyo subways, the assassinations of political leaders in Mexico and elsewhere, the brutal civil war in Bosnia, the tribal bloodbath in Rwanda, the ruthless destruction of Chechnya, and the prospective new acts of inhumanity that are almost certain to occur before this review is published.

Can “evolutionary ethics” — as represented by the two volumes under consideration here — play a part in addressing this age-old problem? Although evolutionary ethics traces its roots back to the 19th century and the “Synthetic Philosophy” of Herbert Spencer, its role in the ethical discourse of this century has been checkered, to say the least. It played a prominent part in the ethical and political dialogue of the late 19th and early 20th centuries — most visibly in connection with Social Darwinism and the eugenics movement — but from the 1930s to the 1970s it was totally eclipsed by cultural determinism and value relativism. During this minor dark age a number of prominent biologists continued to write ex cathedra on biology and ethics (Julian Huxley, Warder C. Allee, Theodosius Dobzhansky and C.H. Waddington come to mind), but it was not until sociobiology forced its way through the previously barred doorway into the social sciences that evolutionary ethics regained legitimacy. Several book-length monographs and numerous articles on the subject have appeared over the past few years. However, the two volumes to be evaluated here provide a significant opportunity to assess the status of the field and to address the broader question: Is evolutionary ethics an idea whose time has finally come?

First some historical perspective — admittedly glimpsed through a very small peephole. The use of nature and/or “human nature” as a grounding for ethics can be traced at least to Periclean Athens. To Plato and others of the so-called “idealist” school, human communities have their origins in the ability of individuals to meet their basic physical needs (including self-protection) through collaborative efforts; mutual aid, reciprocity and the “division of labor” are the root causes. “We must infer that all things are produced more plentifully and easily and of better quality when one man does one thing which is natural to him…and leaves other things,” Plato wrote in the Republic. But if utilitarian ends are the basic incentives for social life, a community can also become the instrument for human development — specifically, for the realization of “the good life” and for taming the darker side of human nature. In the Republic, his utopian masterpiece, Plato proposed to vest such a perfecting role in specially-trained philosopher-kings. But in later works, specifically the Statesman and the Laws, Plato opted for the second best alternative of using government and law as instruments for societal improvement.

Aristotle, Plato’s most famous student, had less confidence in human nature: “Man when perfected is the best of animals, but when separated from law and justice he is the worst of all.” Accordingly, governments and legal systems exercise a vitally necessary constraining influence on human behavior. To borrow a line from the poet Robert Frost: “good laws make good neighbors.” However, Aristotle like Plato endowed the political community (or polis) with an overarching ethical purpose, namely, that of molding the raw material of its members into a “self-sufficient” and “harmonious” whole. In Aristotle’s view, the true “nature” of a person, or a polis, involves what he/she/it is capable ultimately of becoming. It is not the genes but the phenotype that defines human nature and human potentialities. Here we have the model for a variety of progressive modern visions — socialism, the New Deal, the Great Society, etc.

A very different view of human nature and the social order was advocated by the Greek philosophers of the Sophist, Skeptic, Epicurean and Cynic persuasions (the very terms give the game away). The Sophist Antiphon, who actually predated Plato’s school, preached the shocking idea (to his contemporaries) that all laws are merely conventions and that what is “natural” is the pursuit of self-interest. Human nature, in other words, is grounded in egoism. Morality, law and justice are at best the embodiment of enlightened self-interest. Thus civilization is a product of artifice and expediency; it is not a moral Jello mold. Many years later, when the Greek city states were in decline, the Epicureans revitalized and embellished these ideas by advancing a materialistic “pain-pleasure principle” and an early incarnation of the Benthamite slogan “the greatest happiness for the greatest number.” Here, then, were the philosophical roots of social contract theory, of 18th and 19th century Liberalism, and of late 20th century conservatism.

Now, fast-forward through more than two millennia of philosophical writings, during the course of which these and other assumptions about human nature and society were utilized to anchor various systems of ethics and political theory. The list of theorists includes, among others, Cicero, St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas, Marsilio of Padua, Machiavelli, Grotius, Hobbes, Locke, Montesquieu, Hume, Rousseau, Comte, Burke, Bentham, Mill, Kant, Hegel, Marx, Charles Darwin…. Yes, Charles Darwin.

In more ways than are generally appreciated, Darwin himself laid the theoretical foundation for what later came to be called evolutionary ethics. One of his contributions was a more sophisticated understanding of natural selection and its behavioral implications than is found in many Social Darwinist (and neo-Darwinist) caricatures. His most famous slogan “the struggle for existence” was, as Darwin himself pointed out, somewhat hyperbolic. The problem of survival and reproduction in fact encompasses a great variety of specific circumstances, from plentiful resources and easy living to extreme scarcity, from mutualistic symbioses to literal cases of “nature, red in tooth and claw” (in poet Alfred Lord Tennyson’s redolent metaphor). Mutual aid, moreover, is commonplace. As Darwin wrote in The Origin of Species:

Animals of many kinds are social; we find even distinct species living together; for example, some American monkeys; and united flocks of rooks, jackdaws and starlings…The most common mutual service in the higher animals is to warn one another of danger by the united senses of all… Social animals perform many little services for each other; horses nibble and cows lick each other for external parasites….Animals also render more important services to one another; thus wolves and some other beasts of prey hunt in packs, and aid one another in attacking their victims. Pelicans fish in concert. The Hamadryas baboons turn over stones to find insects, etc.; and when they come to a large one, as many as can stand around, turn it over together and share the booty. Social animals mutually defend each other. Bull bisons in North America, when there is danger, drive the cows and calves into the middle of the herd, while they defend the outside….

Some 19th and early 20th century ideologues, who wrote as though the existence of co-operation falsified Darwin’s theory, seem not to have read his work. Nor, one suspects, did some of his more carnivorous defenders (see below). In fact, in The Origin Darwin explicitly theorized that co-operative behaviors, including the division of labor and even altruism, could well have evolved via natural selection. Presaging the later theoretical work of Haldane, Hamilton and others on what Maynard Smith termed “kin selection,” Darwin posited “family selection” as the mechanism responsible for the evolution of altruism in nature, most notably including the existence of sterile castes in insect societies.

In The Descent of Man, Darwin carried his reasoning about natural selection and sociality two significant steps further, thereby erecting an explanatory framework that sociobiology has yet to fully apprehend (see below). Seeking to account for the emergence of “social and moral faculties” in evolving hominids, Darwin proposed that three distinct evolutionary mechanisms were involved: (1) “family selection” (kin selection), (2) mutualistic co-operation, which modern theorists have variously labelled “intraspecific mutualism” (West Eberhard), “tit-for-tat” (Axelrod and Hamilton), “reciprocant selection” (Hamilton), “reciprocity selection” (Boorman and Levitt), “synergistic selection” (Maynard Smith) and “egoistic co-operation” (Corning), and (3) group selection, or the differential survival of groups of co-operators. Darwin emphasized that these mechanisms were not necessarily antagonistic but could well have been complementary and mutually reinforcing. (In recent decades, evolutionary biologists — and especially sociobiologists — have generally discounted the role of group selection in evolution. However, a reassessment may be underway. See below.)

We need to stop the tape one more time on our way to the late 20th century — and the two volumes that are under consideration here. Herbert Spencer, who (among other things) inspired the systematic study of ethics from an evolutionary perspective, has been caricatured and libeled so relentlessly over most of this century that it is difficult to climb the wall of prejudice that has been built up around him (but see Corning 1982). Briefly, there are two Herbert Spencers — the young ideologue and polemicist of the Social Statics (1850) and various public policy debates (this is the Herbert Spencer who inspired Social Darwinism, though technically he was not one himself) and the mature theorist whose monumental, ten-volume Synthetic Philosophy (1879-1893) placed him among the great intellects of the 19th century.

Like Plato and Aristotle, Spencer viewed society as a utilitarian instrumentality — a system of exchanges and mutual benefits that arose out of the struggle for existence: “Cooperation…is at once that which cannot exist without a society, and that for which society exists….The motive for acting together, originally the dominant one, may be defense against enemies; or it may be the easier obtainment of food, by the chase or otherwise; or it may, and commonly is, both of these,” Spencer wrote in The Principles of Sociology (1874-1882). Moreover, the “progressive” evolution of human societies has been the product of an interaction between what would now be called ecological, psychological and socioeconomic forces, including both co-operative and competitive or antagonistic forces. In concluding his overview chapter in The Principles of Sociology, Spencer penned a statement that is, to my mind, an underappreciated classic:

Recognizing the primary truth that social phenomena depend in part on the natures of the individuals and in part on the forces the individuals are subject to, we see that these two fundamentally distinct sets of factors, with which social changes commence, give origin to other sets as social changes advance. The pre-established environing influences, inorganic and organic, which are at first almost unalterable, become more and more altered by the actions of the evolving society. Simple growth of population brings into play fresh causes of transformation that are increasingly important. The influences which the society exerts on the nature of its units, and those which the units exert on the nature of the society, incessantly co-operate in creating new elements. As societies progress in size and structure, they work on one another, now by their war-struggles and now by their industrial intercourse, profound metamorphoses. And the ever-accumulating, ever-complicating super-organic products [it was Spencer, not Emerson, who coined the term "super-organism"], material and mental, constitute a further set of factors which become more and more influential causes of change…

One aspect of Spencer’s formulation should be stressed, namely, that he is here clearly suggesting a basis for resolving one of the more vexing problems in the social sciences — the nature of the relationship between the individual and society and the causal potency of each in social behavior and social change. Spencer’s views, which were derived from both his psychology and his sociology, were similar to but also differed somewhat from those of Plato and Aristotle. To Spencer, human nature (man’s psychological propensities and mental faculties) and society are involved in a coevolutionary process: “The phenomena of social evolution are determined partly by the external actions to which the social aggregate is exposed and partly by the nature of its units…observing that these two sets of factors are themselves progressively changed as society changes.”

Though Spencer is often portrayed as a conflict theorist who sought to account for societal evolution through a competitive struggle for the “survival of the fittest” (another term coined by Spencer, not Darwin), actually he was a pacifist who abhorred war and held a dualistic view. He suggested that societies can be ranged along two ideal types (to borrow Max Weber’s term), “militant” and “industrial” (economic). Whereas the former type had predominated in the past, it was Spencer’s view that the latter would do so in the future, and that the overall direction of societal evolution was toward material affluence, peaceful integration, personal freedom and the withering away of the state — a vision of the future that he shared with, of all people, Karl Marx. (We must remember that Spencer died at the apogee of the Victorian era, more than a decade before the paradigm-shattering struggle of World War One.)

Spencer’s “science of ethics,” which provided a foundation for what became known as evolutionary ethics, was derived from his vision of society. As articulated in The Principles of Ethics (1879-1893), the final two-volume unit of his encyclopedic opus, the “science of right living” as he called it consisted of an application of the scientific method to the problem of determining which ethical principles and moral precepts would best be able to harmonize a given society at its particular stage of evolution. The criteria for evaluating ethical issues should be their consequences both for the super-organism and its members, recognizing their interdependence:

So that from the biological point of view, ethical science becomes a specification of the conduct of associated men who are severally so constituted that the various self-preserving activities, the activities required for rearing offspring, and that which social welfare demands, are fulfilled in the spontaneous exercise of duly proportioned faculties, each yielding when in action its quantum of pleasure; and who are, by consequence, so constituted that excess or defect in any one of these actions brings its quantum of pain, immediate and remote.

In other words, ethical prescriptions must be tailored to the results that they are likely to produce in specific contexts with regard to the ultimate purpose of society (as Spencer saw it) — the greatest happiness (broadly interpreted) of the greatest number, but with an appreciation also for the fact that individual satisfactions in complex societies are both biologically-based and very often interdependent. Here, then, are the philosophical roots of “evolutionary ethics” — a unique amalgam of Aristotle, Benthamite Liberalism, Darwinism properly understood (although Spencer was also a die-hard Lamarckian), 19th century psychology and Marxist idealism (minus the dialectic).

With this historical perspective, we may now be in a better position to evaluate the two newly-minted volumes on evolution and ethics. First Evolutionary Ethics. This is, above all, a commendable effort to provide a vehicle for surveying the state of the art. It grows out of a 1990 symposium at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, sponsored by the Society for the Study of Evolution with support from the National Science Foundation. The organizers and editors, Matthew and Doris Nitecki, assembled a distinguished group of contributors across a dozen different disciplines. Collectively, these authors touched on most of the traditional conundrums in the field — the problem of defining ethics, the “naturalistic fallacy” or so-called “is-ought dichotomy” (which dates back to Hume), the basic dynamics of the evolutionary process, the problem of “progress” in evolution, “nature” versus “nurture” in behavior generally and in human societies in particular, and, of course, the implications of sociobiology for evolutionary ethics. The quality of the individual contributions is generally very good, and each author at least made some effort to take account of the other contributions.

Nevertheless, the overall results were a disappointment. At the root of the matter, I believe, was the ultimately deconstructive role of the editors. They tried too hard to be non-partisan. They took too many of the substantive arguments at face value, leaving many contradictions and ill-informed or inaccurate statements unchallenged. Rather than producing a synthesis that could point the way toward future development of the field, if possible, they left us with an almost entirely unmodulated cacophony. Indeed, Matthew Nitecki in his lengthy introduction sounded a note of pessimism and disparagement that was strangely defeatist.

To be specific: Nitecki’s introduction has the unpromising title “Problematic Worldviews of Evolutionary Ethics.” He begins his essay with a question: “Can a system of evolutionary ethics be perceived as a legitimate subject of analysis?” In the past, he notes, opinions have been sharply divided. His own conclusion is that, despite the claims of sociobiology, the time may not yet be ripe. Perhaps an adequate definition of evolutionary ethics is not possible, he says. Nitecki even raises doubts about whether such an effort is worthwhile. He echoes John Dewey’s curiously cynical view: “Problems are usually not solved, but are left behind [here he quotes Dewey] ‘not because any satisfactory solution has been reached; but interest is exhausted.’” Nitecki concludes: “We do not solve them; we get over them.” (This implies a surprising naivete about the ideological and academic wars of the 20th century, when theorists who were on the “wrong” side of the nature-nurture issue became non-persons, or worse.) Nitecki also argues that the notion of progress is essential to an evolutionary ethics (a questionable assertion), yet he claims that progress has been relegated to “the dustbin of history.” The notion of progress is “defunct,” he declares. Furthermore, the dubious nature of the quest for an evolutionary ethics is attested to by the (presumed) finding of anthropology that ethical rules vary widely among cultures; the only universal is that all cultures have ethical systems. Finally, Nitecki opines that perhaps the search for an evolutionary ethics is not related to any meliorative or practical objectives but reflects the ongoing quest to understand who we are and our place in the universe; in other words, our motivation is curiosity, not utility. We will return to these points. A more serious problem with this volume is that both its premises and its conclusions are colored (darkly) by a biased perspective on (a) the history of evolutionary ethics, (b) the ethical implications of Darwin’s theory, and (c) the ethical implications of sociobiology. On the first point, the Niteckis let stand the assertion that the origins of evolutionary ethics are associated with Herbert Spencer’s Social Darwinism [sic]. In fact, Social Darwinism was a movement fostered by an assortment of lesser minds — Charles Sumner, Albert Keller, Ludwig Gumplowicz, Gustav Ratzenhofer, Andrew Carnegie and others — who perpetrated a one-sided caricature of both Darwin’s and Spencer’s views. The Social Darwinist rendering of Darwinism accorded with the radical views of Thomas Henry Huxley — “Darwin’s bulldog” as he was dubbed for his vociferous defenses of Darwin’s theory. It was Huxley who purveyed the image of nature as an implacable, no-holds-barred struggle. Kropotkin’s famous book, Mutual Aid, was mainly written to defend Darwinism against Huxley’s gladiatorial model of evolution.

Thus, it seems peculiarly inappropriate to launch a book on evolutionary ethics with a reprint of Huxley’s famous 1893 Romanes Lecture (and his long-winded 1894 “clarification”), followed by two well-taken but historically obscure rebuttals. Huxley shocked his listeners, and subsequent readers, by disavowing Darwinism as a basis for ethics. If the “cosmic process,” as Huxley called it, is characterized by “relentless combat” — a “war of every man against every man” in Thomas Hobbes’s dour image — how can one build a social ethics on its implications? How indeed. Huxley had painted himself into a corner in which he could not locate any ethical corollaries. And so, the only way to avoid a disavowal of his well-known image of nature was to give humans the capacity to transcend it: “Social progress means a checking of the cosmic process at every step and the substitution for it of another, which may be called the ethical process…” By substituting the “State of Art” for the “State of Nature,” Huxley claimed, human societies would ensure the survival of those who are ethically the best. Huxley likened the process to that of a gardener who transforms nature into an ordered regime. As Matthew Nitecki suggests in his introduction, the accompanying rebuttals by Leslie Stephen and John Dewey display better biology than Huxley’s. It is worth quoting Dewey here:

I have discussed this particular case [Huxley's garden metaphor] in the hope of enlarging somewhat our conception of what is meant by the term “fit”; to suggest that we are in the habit of interpreting it with reference to an environment which long ago ceased to be. That which was fit among animals is not fit among human beings…because the conditions of life have changed, and because there is no way to define the term “fit” excepting through these conditions. The environment is now a distinctly social one, and the content of the term “fit” has to be made with reference to social adaptation…We have then no reason here to oppose the ethical process to the natural process.

Leslie Stephen expands on Dewey’s argument by pointing out that morality can be based on purely prudential grounds. Following Hobbes’s reasoning, men may find that peace is preferable to war, that the division of labor and reciprocity can be mutually advantageous and that a personal morality can be derived from our dependence on others for the meeting of our needs. If a public ethics are in our own best interest, then the logical gap between “is” and “ought” can be bridged by an “if-then” set of prudential rules — and a system of enforcement designed to prevent anyone from cheating. Leslie concludes: “An individualism which regards the cosmic process as equivalent simply to an internecine struggle of each against all must fail to construct a satisfactory morality, and I will add that any individualism which fails to recognize fully the social factor, which regards society [merely] as an aggregate instead of an organism [i.e., Spencer's functionally interdependent "super-organism"], will, in my opinion, find itself in difficulties.”

In Robert Bolt’s award-winning morality play, A Man for All Seasons, there is some dialogue between Thomas More and his son-in-law, William Roper, that speaks forcefully to this point (to which we will return below):

Roper: So now you’d give the Devil benefit of law!

More: Yes. What would you do? Cut a good road through the law to get after the Devil?

Roper: I’d cut down every law in England to do that!

More: Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned round on you — where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country’s planted thick with laws from coast to coast — man’s laws, not God’s — and if you cut them down — and you’re just the man to do it — d’you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I’d give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety’s sake.

Another troubling aspect of this volume has to do with its one-sided presentation of the so-called Neo-Darwinian synthesis. Briefly, for more than a generation the “selfish gene” metaphor has dominated the evolutionary paradigm, thanks in part to Richard Dawkins’s popular book by that name. However, the theoretical groundwork for Dawkins’s vision was developed by George C. Williams in his Adaptation and Natural Selection (1966). This now classic volume was a therapeutic cold-bath that had the salutary effect, overall, of purging evolutionary biology of some fuzzy thinking. But Williams also expounded the extreme reductionist view that functional organization of any kind (above that of an individual organism) was a product of “romantic imagination.” Such fantasies, he claimed, were (a) a misinterpretation of individual adaptations, (b) fortuitous effects, (c) statistical artifacts, or (d) the necessary result of the operation of physical laws. “A wolf can live on elk only when it [coincidentally] attacks its prey in the company of other wolves with similar dietary tendencies. I am not aware, however, of any evidence of functional organization of wolf packs.” In other words, group selection is largely impotent. In a more recent volume (1992), Williams is less dogmatic but still a skeptical reductionist. (As one of the contributors to the Niteckis’s volume, Williams burnished his curmudgeon image by heartily endorsing Huxley’s “tooth and claw” vision of evolution.)

Neo-Darwinians do acknowledge the existence of “group selection” at the level of organisms. In The Selfish Gene (1976), Dawkins concedes that genes are not really free and independent agents. “They collaborate and interact in inextricably complex ways…Building a leg is a multi-gene co-operative enterprise.” To underscore the point, Dawkins employs a metaphor from rowing. “One oarsman on his own cannot win the Oxford and Cambridge boat race. He needs eight colleagues… Rowing the boat is a co-operative venture.” Furthermore, Dawkins notes: “One of the qualities of a good oarsman is teamwork, the ability to fit in and co-operate with the rest of the crew.”

There is something a bit perverse about a theoretical stance which fully appreciates the evolutionary significance of functional organization at the organismic level but which denies the same status to functionally-organized “super-organisms” — from microscopic symbiotic partnerships to human societies — while unabashedly using metaphors from the super-organismic level to illustrate the same principle at “lower” levels. Group selection at the social level is not a figment of someone’s romantic imagination. Functionally-organized, interdependent “groups” play an important role as “vehicles” of selection. The substantial and accumulating evidence for this assertion is documented in a recent review by Wilson and Sober (1994), and their article did not even include much of the recent work on symbiosis, or inter-species mutualism. (See also Wilson and Sober 1989; Maynard Smith and Szathm·ry 1995; Szathm·ry and Maynard Smith 1995; Corning 1983, 1995.) The full implications for evolutionary theory, and ethics, of this resurgent appreciation for the role of interdependent group selection at all levels of biological organization have yet to be fully assimilated (see below).

Sociobiology also plays an ambiguous role in this volume. On the one hand, sociobiology can certainly be credited with stimulating a renewed interest in evolutionary ethics. However, sociobiologists have promoted a truncated view of social life which, among other things, has had the unfortunate side-effect of narrowing the scope of evolutionary ethics. Edward O. Wilson launched his discipline-defining work, Sociobiology (1975), with the startling assertion that altruism is “the central theoretical problem of sociobiology: how can altruism…possibly evolve by natural selection?” The implication was that social life is based primarily on altruism, and many sociobiologists (including Wilson) adopted W.D. Hamilton’s view that there are only three classes of social behavior: Altruism (or self-sacrifice for another), selfishness (raising one’s own fitness at the expense of another), and spite (lowering one’s own fitness in order to diminish that of another).

What Hamilton, Wilson and other pioneer sociobiologists left out of their typologies was “egoistic co-operation,” joint, coordinated or reciprocal actions that are mutually beneficial (not at all altruistic). Plato, Aristotle, Spencer (and Adam Smith, for that matter) all appreciated that social life can be mutually advantageous, in many different ways. In addition to indivisible “collective goods” (sensu Mancur Olson), there are also many “corporate goods” — jointly produced products that are divisible and that can be shared in more or less “equitable” ways. In fact, only a fraction of the social interactions in human societies involve uncompensated self-sacrifice, yet altruism — and Robert Trivers’s misnamed “reciprocal altruism” — are treated by many writers (including some of the contributors to the Niteckis’s volume) as the centerpiece of sociobiology and, by extension, of evolutionary ethics.

The broad implication of utilizing a revised set of premises about nature, evolution and the evolutionary status of societies generally and human societies in particular is that we may have a more hopeful basis for developing an evolutionary ethics than the Niteckis were able to derive from the chapters included in their volume. The perspectives provied by several other recent books in this area — by Robert Wright, Frans de Waal and John H. Beckstrom — will be addressed, along with some additional implications, in Part Two of this review essay, to be published in a subsequent issue of the Journal of Social and Evolutionary Systems.

Copyright © 2001 ISCS. All rights reserved.

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References

Bolt, R. (1960[1962]). A Man for All Seasons.New York: Vintage.

Corning, P.A. 1982. Durkheim and Spencer. The British Journal of Sociology, 33:359-382.

Corning, P.A. 1983. The Synergism Hypothesis: A Theory of Progressive Evolution. New York: McGraw-Hill.

Corning, P.A. 1995. Synergy and self-organization in the evolution of complex systems. Systems Research, In Press.

Corning, P.A. 1996). “The Co-operative Gene.” Evolutionary Theory, 11, 183-207.

Dawkins, R. 1989[1976]. The Selfish Gene, new ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Darwin, C.R. (1874[1870]). The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex. New York: Burt.

Maynard Smith, J., and E. Szathm·ry. 1995. The Major Transitions in Evolution. Oxford: Freeman Press.

Spencer, H. 1850. Social Statics. New York: D. Appleton.

Spencer, H. 1874-1882. The Principles of Sociology, 3 vols. New York: D. Appleton.

Spencer, H. 1879-1893. The Principles of Ethics, 2 vols. London: Williams and Norgate.

Szathm·ry, E., and J. Maynard Smith. 1995. The major evolutionary transitions. Nature, 374:227-232.

Williams, G.C. 1966. Adaptation and Natural Selection: A Critique of Some Current Evolutionary Thought. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.

Williams, G.C. 1992. Natural Selection: Domains, Levels, and Challenges. New York: Oxford University Press.

Wilson, D.S., and E. Sober. 1989. Reviving the superorganism. J. Theor. Biol., 136:337-356.

Wilson, D.S., and E. Sober. 1994. Reintroducing group selection to the human behavioral sciences. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 17:585-608.

Wilson, E.O. 1975. Sociobiology: The New Synthesis. Cambridge, MA.:Harvard University Press.

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Peter Corning’s Website

Time to Grow Up ?

Timothy Wilken

The SynEARTH network is for humans. At News for a Synergic Earth, I try to have an equal serving of good news and bad news–the carrot and the stick. The bad news are problems that need to be fixed. The good news are opportunities to fix problems. I am trying to motivate my fellow humans to grow up.

Our species is in crisis. We are simply too powerful to live as children.

This is a problem that all parents face. If a two year old throws a temper tantrum, most mothers can contain the violent outburst of the child and protect him and others. But as the child grows, he gets physically much stronger. If a 12 yo throws a temper tantrum it may be hard for both parents to contain him and protect others. And when the child gets even older …

Dylan Klebold, 17, and Eric Harris, 18 armed with semi-automatic rifles threw temper tantrums at Columbine High School, it took a swat team to contain them. And the cost was 15 deaths and 34 casualties.

Now our human societies are growing ever stronger, India, Pakistan, Israel, China, Russia, France, England, and the United States are all armed with nuclear weapons. Iraq, Korea, Iran and many other nations are heavily armed with conventional weapons, and some may have biological and chemical weapons of mass destruction. 

If /when a society throws a temper tantrum, there will be no power than can protect us.

We, Humans are a life form that adapts to our environment by understanding and control. This is the power of Time-binding. Time-binding is unlimited. When human knowledge is incorporated into ‘matter-energy’ it is called a tool. Humans make tools. When a tool is used to hurt others, it becomes a weapon. BOEING  767s are tools used transport humans all over the Earth. But when they were deliberately flown into the Trade Towers, they became weapons.

Since human knowledge grows without limit, human societies can make tools without limit — or — they can make weapons without limit. … Knowledge is knowing how to make a nuclear weapon. Wisdom is knowing not to make one.

Isn’t time for humanity to grow up?

Chris Lucas is a researcher working on the philosophy and new sciences of Complexity Theory and Artificial Life. He has been involved full time in this area since 1994, and previously did related research in his spare time. He is the founder of CALResCo and Director of Research. He holds a 1st in physics and computer science and is a member of the Institute for the Management of Information Systems (IMIS). He has an extensive background in telecommunications, networks, computer science, finance and management. He lives in Manchester, England, U.K. and is single.

Holarchic Meta-Ethics and Complexity Science

Part 1: Generating a Meta-Valuation Methodology

Firstly we set the scene for our evolutionary ethical treatment by reviewing the relationship between complex systems science and our enhanced axiological science, in the context of human behaviour, and in asking how we act dynamically in our world as autonomous entities.

Complex Modes of Thought

In relating valuation to complexity, science and logic from a synergetics (e.g. Coulter’s) viewpoint we can identify five separate modes of thinking and of behaviour, and these all have clear correspondences across our treated disciplines. The following table shows these relationships (of necessity somewhat simplified for clarity):

Let us look more closely at these five levels of thinking with a view to understanding just what they mean in terms of our behaviours and judgements (the levels here relate to Wolfram’s CA Classes and our equivalent Types of high-dimensional complex systems):

Level 0: Identic – The World As Void

This is the unconscious or inorganic mode, corresponding to a dead, homogeneous universe, a world in equilibrium at the lowest energy state. Here we have no escape, random fluctuations simply fallback to the same meaningless state (the ergodic attractor). The world is identical in all respects, corresponding to the quantum vacuum, and we can say nothing useful about it. Given a world not yet at such equilibrium, all actions here take place mindlessly, regardless of consequences, as the world runs down (dissipates) towards ‘heat death’ – this is the behaviour of inanimate objects. In human terms these are the automatic responses, the reflexes, those very simple physical cause-effect chains over which we have no control. Despite the ‘observers’ having values, reflected in what is chosen to be observed, scientifically they pretend that they do not, and hence take no responsibility for their behaviours, this world is ethically barren.

Level 1: Reactive – The World of Distinctions

This reactive thought mode is often associated with emotions, here we ‘take sides’, we polarise into either/or positions. This is the mode of love/hate or fight/flee, a bipolar classification of the stable versus the unstable, the ‘us’ and the ‘them’, the world of basic discrimination that attempts to reduce diverse order (viewed paradoxically as disorder or ‘heresy’) in a striving to conformity, a biased walk through state space to a single static far-from-equilibrium ‘utopia’ (a self-maintaining autopoiesis). This is also the bureaucratic world of ‘no exceptions’, no options, no choice and ‘taboos’. Actions here promote systemic valuations and social dogmas, disjoint categories of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ within mind and isolated scientific ‘facts’, resulting in fixed behaviours based upon an inflexible ‘box’ mentality (the point attractor).

Level 2: Uniordinal – The World of Measurement

At this point we discover variability, but in only one-dimension. We fixate on single paths (the cyclic attractor), single variables, single issues. We have one track minds, trying to maximise and perfect an isolated value (e.g. money). Actions here establish linear hierarchies of the better and worst, extrinsic valuations and deterministic (dynamical) scientific functions fit into this mode, which positions all issues along a continuum. Whilst many different continuums (based upon each systemic distinction) may exist, only one is employed at any time by any group. These axes remain disjoint and unconnected (e.g. academic specialisms).

Level 3: Multiordinal – The World of Possibility

At this level we discover inter-relationships, that we have many values within ourselves or that our viewpoint must mesh with those of essential others. We create for the first time a whole (the strange attractor), whether at a personal level or at a social one (e.g. the individual, the state or the ecology becomes important). We fight for the preservation of our chosen whole, for the chosen level of detail. Here actions focus on single scales, ignoring shorter and longer term consequences, wider and narrower issues, in order to optimise a single intrinsic value, a chosen (but isolated) set of objectives, which often interact nonlinearly and can only be described scientifically in probabilistic terms.

Level 4: Synergic – The World of Actuality

This is the real world, where all the levels interact. We cannot in our actions pretend that their effects are restricted to single levels. In considering the issues we must now take account of all the various wholes and how they affect each other. To optimise this actual world we need an holarchic valuation, we need to consider multiple timescales, multiple spatial scales and multiple emergent levels and the full dynamics of their interactions. Here we also begin to understand that many different short-term solutions (or transient attractors) are possible, depending upon the interactions employed, many different niches or balances of values are equally valid. We need to respect diversity in order to benefit from actualising these possibilities and to consider scientifically the role of our normative values in evaluating the overall result.

The Components of Holarchic Value

The Undifferentiated Whole

Initially we have no parts, there is no awareness of anything, the world is one and completely unknown to mind, so no valuations exist. In essence infinite information is possible, the ‘territory’ is unconstrained, uncategorised, unmeasured. We have no ‘maps’, implicitly or explicitly, we are blind observers.

Disjoint Systemics

First we simply identify the distinctions present within our system, the types of ‘parts’ present. This is the systemic value level, the level of binary (Boolean logic) classification into just true (present) and false (absent). It is the assignment of a label to a difference, a timeless and spaceless 1 bit abstract value. Each distinction is a line on a map, a contour separating ‘in’ from ‘out’, and we can have as many of these ‘systems’ as we choose, i.e. our distinctions form a 1 dimensional set of binary values (implicit labels or categories, not necessarily made explicit in a conscious symbolic language). State space for this level of value alone consists of 2^N alternatives (where N is the number of distinctions made).

Causal Extrinsics

Now we proceed by identifying how each of these parts relates to measurement, i.e. associate with another part or parts. This is the extrinsic or instrumental value level, where we treat parts or combinations of parts as variables, giving them fuzzy truth or completeness values. Thus here we give our labels a context (often a function of time), but they remain still flat spaceless abstractions (2 dimensional – one the systemic label, the other the magnitude), a set of disjoint real numbers. Almost infinite possible state space combinations will be possible at this level of value (depending upon the resolution employed for the variables).

Holistic Intrinsic

Putting together all these linkages we assemble a complete system and determine what emerges as a result. This is the intrinsic value level where only the whole matters and we tend to treat the components as unimportant (if necessary) details. Now we have a system space, the whole occupies both time and extent as a complete reality (4 dimensional – each 2 dimensional extrinsic value relates to each of the others in a matrix that forms the intrinsic whole).

Cubic Holarchic

But note that we have so far only created a single whole, one self-contained entity or ‘object’. Our world contains many of these, and they in turn are interconnected in complex ways. We can classify this by the CAS cube. This identifies three forms of relation. First there are the intrasystem connections, which are the same as those we considered at the extrinsic level – links wholly within the entity. Second there are the hierarchical connections, those levels of emergence that form the entity as a whole, these correspond to the intrinsic connectivity that forms the overall assembly that we call the system. Finally there are the intersystem connections, those links between different entities. But here it starts to get complicated, since these can link parts in our system to parts in another, as well as the wholes to the wholes and parts in our system to other wholes or vice-versa. Additionally entities may overlap, sharing parts with other entities and swapping their configurations over time, the dimensionality in both space and time become fractal (non-integer). This larger holarchic value level comprises an hyperstructure (using a static description) or hypersystem (incorporating the dynamics), an integration of all the intrinsics:

What is Doing the Valuing ?

Part 2: Real World Ethical Problems

Comparing Meta-Ethical Systems

Conclusions

Our approach here has been to subsume ethics under the wider remit of values as a whole, noting that we cannot artificially divorce ‘moral’ issues from issues of sustenance or cultural behaviour. All of our values potentially affect each other and it of no use whatever taking a ‘high’ moral stance if this dynamically destroys our world with its dysergic side effects. In many complex systems it is difficult to predict the effects on the whole of changes to the parts, considerable instability is common wherein small changes can have catastrophic effects (a leap to a very different attractor under positive feedback), or major changes can self-stabilise back to the same attractor state (following negative feedback paths). It is in the non-reductionist behaviour of such systems that an holarchic form of evaluation comes to the fore, leaving our options open to react appropriately and innovatively to contextual system changes that take us by surprise.

Chris Lucas Resume

CALResCo

The What the World Wants Project was completed in 1997. It was the work of many people led by social scientist Medard Gabel.

Synergies of the Whole

Medard Gabel

Each of the various individual strategies in the What the World Wants Project have their unique purpose and seek to accomplish specific goals. But what of the strategies combined together? What happens to the world when all of these actions are taken? Each strategy described in this report has a primary objective. What happens when it is reached or as it is being reached? What are the spin-offs, secondary and tertiary effects of the process of reaching the objectives?

A View of the Whole
Never before in the entire history of the planet has so much been possible for so many for such a small amount and in such a short time. With a relatively small portfolio of investments per year for the next decade-less than 1% of the world’s annual income- everyone in the world would be wealthier, healthier and more secure and the standard of living would be moving forward at an unprecedented pace.

With universal access to health care, infant and child mortality and birth rates go down, and life expectancy goes up. A marked decline in maternal death rates, particularly where they are currently highest, would be accomplished by the primary healthcare program. Close to 495,000 mothers’ lives would be saved each year if every country had access to health care. Families would have fewer children because more children survive. As a result, population growth has another force driving it towards a leveling-off and a stable population becomes more possible and probable. Economic productivity goes up as debilitating illnesses are reduced, and education is more effective when low levels of health and nutrition are no longer present to prevent children from taking full advantage of schooling.

There will be a decrease in illness-induced poverty. Through improved health care, a lowered environmental threat of disease, widely disseminated health information, better living conditions and greater access to food, the individual strategies would combine to produce a great reduction in the illnesses that leave many people either unable to work or under-employed. With such increased individual health and vitality, society and local economies become healthier and more robust. The synergy of adequate supplies of food, access to healthcare, clean water and improved housing will result in a marked improvement to the quality of life for the individuals, families and communities where these needs are not currently being met, but will also impact regional, national and international society as the stability and productivity of each region increases.

Other combinations of the strategies would raise the world’s standard of living in different ways. The well-being of children would be raised dramatically. Besides reduced infant and child mortality, with universal immunizations polio would join the ranks of smallpox as a disease eradicated from the planet. Measles, whooping cough and other childhood diseases-and sometime killers-would be greatly reduced. Better child nutrition will result in healthier children, eliminating the specter of reduced brain development caused through chronic malnutrition. With fewer maternal deaths in childbirth, fewer children and families will be left motherless. With better educational opportunities for women, children will be among the first beneficiaries of mother’s new knowledge. Children throughout the world will have, for the first time in history, unparalleled chances of reaching their full physical and mental potential.

All of the strategies would directly or indirectly provide jobs, thereby increasing employment and combating poverty. The debt retirement initiative would increase employment by freeing much of the capital of developing nations to be used in new development projects.

With the elimination of illiteracy, the raising of educational levels for everyone and the improvement of schooling in general, social and economic productivity will rise as more information and know-how enters into society’s decision-making processes and more options become more readily available. Literate people are prodigious consumers of information. The global communications industry-the suppliers of information-will be a direct beneficiary of rising educational levels. Publishers and other suppliers of information for literate people will prosper as their market size increases by almost 1 billion people. All the problems of the world will be affected as more and more people become better educated and informed. Democracy tends to flourish in well-educated societies. As Thomas Jefferson has pointed out, “The best defense of democracy is an informed electorate.”

As democracy grows throughout the world, the planet might see the demise of all the more repressive forms of government and a corresponding increase in the freedoms of press, religion and individual expression found in the world’s older democracies. One of the benefits of a thriving democracy is that it allows more intelligence, creativity and problem-solving abilities into the process of solving society’s problems than do more centralized command and control forms of decision making. As more people are involved and democracy flourishes, the fuller potential of any given society will tend to be realized.

Another assumed benefit of global literacy and rising educational standards is the reduction of innocent and ignorant people’s gullibility and vulnerability to emotional manipulation that leads to fears of other people and the resultant prejudice, hatred, “ethnic cleansing” and other euphemisms for genocide. As Buckminster Fuller pointed out, “Each generation is born into less and less misinformation, and into more and more reliable information.” As we learn more about the world, our ignorance and fear of other cultures and people with different clothes, looks, tastes, foods, beliefs, and customs than ours becomes less threatening. And, as a possible tertiary benefit, our knowledge of our own culture will increase. As our knowledge of others increases, our knowledge and understanding of what we are not becomes clearer and our own beliefs and customs come into sharper focus. We learn to see who and what we are as we see what we are not. Our culture-distinguishing features rise from the ambient background noise to take on a texture and substance that is unique. Another way of saying this is, “Globalization drives diversity.” Even as it interconnects us all into one global market, it also makes it clearer to each of us what we are bringing to the market.

By eliminating the need for time- and energy-consuming trips to obtain water, reducing the debilitating effects of disease through extending health care and improving sanitation, protecting and enriching the soil of existing farmlands, and teaching effective, sustainable farming techniques, the productivity of farmland and farm workers and the quality of their lives would be significantly improved. Rural/urban inequities in services and opportunities would decrease thereby lessening the migration towards the city and decreasing the growing pressure on metropolitan environments.

Stabilization of the world’s population, the new health care system, projects to provide clean water and sanitation systems for those lacking adequate facilities, the health education campaign, and better housing would clearly have a dramatic yield in reducing general illness and allowing existing health systems to meet more of the needs of their regions.

One of the worst results of poverty would be reduced significantly as homelessness was eliminated. Nations would become healthier, more politically stable, and more environmentally secure as densely populated, unsanitary urban squatter camps are replaced by adequate housing and thriving communities.

Other interactions would yield ameliorating effects on the environment. One effect would be long-term protection against the potential damage of global warming. The combined effects of planting more trees and grass with a program to reduce both immediate consumption and long-term dependence on fossil fuels would reduce the carbon emissions that are one of the major causes of global warming.(127)

The greening of the deserts would be another environmental boon. Planting large numbers of trees, undertaking a major soil conservation effort and increasing organic fertilizer usage would actually reverse the process that has been turning farmlands into deserts. The local environments and the world at large would benefit from the addition of these stable ecosystems. They would maintain and in some cases foster an increase in biodiversity and provide the world with both additional places of beauty and vacation spots. In addition, by changing the albedo of the local micro-climate they would help bring about increased rainfall-thereby accelerating the further greening of the deserts.
Programs to replace open sewers with effective sanitation systems and to increase the efficiency of energy use and the adoption of clean energy sources as alternatives to fossil fuels and nuclear power would sharply reduce local and global pollution.

The combined effects of greater energy efficiency and development of renewable energy as an alternative to fossil fuels and nuclear power would enable the world to develop without the destabilizing impact of dwindling sources of energy. The renewable energy sources are more evenly distributed throughout the world than are the fossil fuels. Their distribution in locations that have few sources of industrial energy makes them ideal sources of clean energy that is appropriately matched to end use needs. An energy system based on renewable energy sources will be more diversified than our current system. As such, it will be less vulnerable to supply interruptions caused by international political events, local terrorist attacks or malfunction. Such an energy system will not only be more stable, but provide more employment as the number of energy harnessing devices proliferated. A renewable energy system would also foster energy efficiency because the energy sources would be less concentrated.

Renewable energy sources, because they cannot be depleted, will have a stabilizing impact on the global economy. Given the economies of mass production, large numbers of small-scale renewable energy-harnessing devices will be able to be produced for less than large- scale one-of-a-kind power plants. The savings and benefits to society are not only found in production of the energy harnessing devices themselves-transport and transmission costs and losses are reduced, breakdowns that could cripple a system if a large scale power plant goes down are eliminated, and there is more flexibility in dealing with fluctuations in demands and emergencies. As renewable energy became the dominant energy source, the rising competition for smaller and smaller amounts of remaining oil supplies would be lessened. And, because renewable energy sources would be less likely to be under centralized control, the society that they would foster would be a more decentralized and democratic society.

With the world’s basic human needs problems moving towards solution, local, national and international security would be more stable. As the basic human needs of each country were met, the personal and national security of each group of people would increase.

Building upon this stabilizing force for peace and international security could be the addition of an empowered UN peace-keeping force. A global peace-keeping force that could guarantee the sovereignty of each nation from outside aggression could operate at a fraction of the costs of the combined national military expenditures. A guarantee of protection against aggression by the UN (or some other multilateral peace-keeping force) would allow each nation that has spent large amounts of resources to protect itself from real or imagined threats from its well-armed neighbors to free up resources previously used by the military. In addition, many of the programs listed above could be implemented by the military or with its assistance. Their discipline, energy, organization and logistical capabilities make them ideal for securing the peace of their country and the world by participating, or leading, reforestation projects, greening of deserts, providing clean water and sanitation facilities, stopping soil erosion and providing shelter for the people in their regions of the world. Such activities would be an ideal bridge for those countries that did not feel safe letting their standing armies disband or decrease in strength, but who were willing to take the first step towards increased regional and global security by allowing their soldiers to participate in the type of activities described here.

Money Follows Vision
The set of strategies described in this paper would not, of course, solve all of our world problems. They would, however, change the world in fundamental ways. Both history and prehistory have been marred by the somber assumption that the survival of much of humanity must forever be in jeopardy-that it is the survival of the fittest, instead of the fittest survival of all.

Instead of a pervasive fear of the future that leads to alienation, apathy or nihilism, the information about our global and local options can help lead us towards a purposeful implementation of these positive solutions. Resources can always be found to implement a vision. Once a vision is clear to enough people, the will needed to make the vision real can make the decisions necessary for its implementation. Once the decision is made, things happen. We go to the Moon; we eradicate smallpox; we build the next generation computer or climb the highest mountain. For the first time, the existence of all humanity can be secure, and, free from the once-interminable and bestial struggle for survival, humankind can gain the opportunity to thrive in a manner and scope unprecedented in our history. Whether we proceed to that stage in our development or continue the present paths is no longer determined by the limits of our resources or abilities, but rather by our will.

Eighteen Strategies for Confronting the Major Systemic Problems Confronting Humanity:

Introduction
What We Have and What We Want
Synergies of the Whole

1. Eliminate Starvation and Malnourishment
2. Provide Health Care & AIDS Control
3. Provide Shelter
4. Provide Clean Safe Water
5. Eliminate Illiteracy
6. Provide Clean, Safe Energy: Efficiency
7. Provide Clean, Safe Energy: Renewables
8. Retire Developing Nations Debt
9. Stabilize Population
10. Prevent Soil Erosion
11. Stop Deforestation
12. Stop Ozone Depletion
13. Prevent Acid Rain
14. Prevent Global Warming
15. Remove Landmines
16. Refugee Relief
17. Eliminating Nuclear Weapons
18. Build Democracy

Credits, Major References & Footnotes

World Game Institute

“All forgiveness is self-forgiveness. Your [experience of] the world is the result of your combined state of thought and feeling – [your arena] of consciousness. [Since your experience of the] world is a result of your state of consciousness, then if you hate anyone, you are disliking a part of yourself.” -Raymond Charles Barker

Forgiving Myself:
Being Who I Am by Forgiving Who I Am Not

Noel Frederick McInnis

The key to beginning the allowance of forgiveness, both of myself and of others, may be found in a statement by Rudolph Steiner:

“If it depends on something other than myself whether I should get angry or not, I am not master of myself . . . I have not yet found the ruler within myself. I must develop the faculty of letting the impressions of the outer world approach me only in the way in which I myself determine.”

For the first two-thirds of my life I did not know that such a “faculty” existed. I was so tardy in taking self-dominion of my own being that not until my 43rd year did I experience my first fully mindful engagement of “the ruler within myself.” This encounter initiated my genuine commitment to self-emancipation, after more than a decade of flirting with the prospect of taking such command.

In those days my wife and I meditated each morning before I went to work. During each daily meditation a pick-up truck stopped in front of the house next door as its driver honked the horn to alert our neighbor that his ride to work had arrived.

I became increasingly irritated with the driver of the truck for disturbing my meditation. One morning I angrily exclaimed, “If I had powers, I’d give that guy four flat tires!” To which my wife gently replied, “That’s why you don’t have powers.”

Illuminated by the profundity of her response, I instantly saw her point. Like the sorcerer’s apprentice, I am not capable of reliably wielding my inner “powers” – which do exist! – until I am sufficiently centered to effectively command them. I replied, “You’re right. If I actually did have powers, all I’d really do is bust his horn.” Again ever so gently, she said, “That’s a bit better.” And again, I saw her point: I was still in forceful reaction to my awareness of the horn.

Following our meditation on a subsequent day I announced, having mellowed considerably, “If I had powers, I’d see that his horn didn’t work in this neighborhood.” Yet again my wife quietly observed, “That’s a bit better.”

Though I had clearly seen my wife’s point from the beginning, I obviously wasn’t “getting” it. I thought that selectively silencing the horn was the ultimate solution. So now what?

I eventually recognized the real issue, as my wife had from the start: I was looking for the forceful resolution of my distress “out there,” as if the honking horn were my problem rather than my choice of relationship to it.

With this alteration of perspective, I also recognized that changing the time of our meditation to an hour when the neighborhood would be even noisier (during the day) or when we would be tired (after our evening ministerial classes) would also be a reactionary solution. Such capitulation is no less reactionary than the flattening of tires, even when it is I who am the target of my reaction rather than someone else. The only satisfactory resolution of my inner turbulence was a non-forceful response to the honking.

In due course, such resolution was forthcoming. “If I had powers,” I announced to my wife one morning, “I wouldn’t be distracted by that horn.”

“Yes,” she smiled.

I had finally recognized that my upset and distraction did not come from the horn. If they did, then everyone would be comparably upset and distracted whenever and wherever the horn was being blown. No, my serenity of whole being is forsaken in the same place that it is otherwise realized, within myself rather than in my outer world. The honking horn itself was neither upset nor distracted. All upset and distraction originates and sustains its existence in me, not in any stimulus that may evoke it.

None of the incidents in my life is causal of my response to it. My reactions and responses are caused by me, albeit often unconsciously according to established patterns of habit, rather than by the effects to which I attribute them. This is indeed fortunate, for if the state of my own being were dependent on the state of the world around me . . . well, as they say, “There goes the neighborhood.”

Having Powers

“Intention organizes its own fulfillment.”  -Deepak Chopra

The “powers” that I long for will continue to elude me so long as I mistake effects for cause. I sometimes illustrate how commonly this mistake is made by asking participants in my workshops to watch my hand as I wave it back and forth above my head. After waving it I ask, “What caused you to watch my hand?” Some say that the waving hand itself caused them to watch. Others say that my invitation was the cause. Yet if either of these were the case, wouldn’t everyone caused to watch my waving hand? What about the few who do not watch it, because neither my invitation nor my waving hand itself succeeded in distracted them?

The waving of my hand is watched only by those who, in response to my invitation to do so, make an intention to watch when it is waved. Intentionality governs choice. My intentions are what cause me to make corresponding choices.

It is sometimes suggested that those who do not watch my waving hand were not caused to do so because they were not paying attention when I gave the invitation. This suggestion rests my case. Having formed no intention – no matter what the reason – these inattentive people can have no corresponding result, because there is no corresponding choice to be made. Furthermore, people who were unaware of my invitation would still tend to watch my waving hand, because of their subconscious autonomic nervous system’s intention to take notice of unusual movements in their visual field. I finally rest my case, however, on the admission of one whom I questioned: she chose not to watch my waving hand because she thought that, like a magician, I was going to pull some trick on them while everyone’s intention was diverted.

Intentionality governs my choices, by selecting for choices that are fulfilling of my intentions. Accordingly, therefore, once I made the intention to be distracted by the honking horn no longer, it soon ceased to do so. When I accepted it as a natural component of the soundscape of my morning meditations, it was no more disruptive of my meditation than are passing overhead clouds disruptive of my experience of daylight.

And so it is with forgiveness. My intention to be forgiving is the cause of my forgiving behavior, so long as I am committed to the intention. Commitment is distinguished by non-divertibility. Non-divertibility of intention does not mean that I am never off the course that my intention has set, only that I correct my diversions from my intended course as I become aware of them. Where there is no persistent inclination to course correction, there is no committed intention, and without committed intention I am incapable of forgiving those persons, situations and circumstances that I otherwise feel powerless to forgive. Persistent course correction is the lifeblood of all commitment.

I am off course in my intention to be a forgiving person whenever I entertain violent or otherwise outwardly forceful feelings and thoughts. Even when I do not act upon such forceful impulses, my inner powers are nevertheless forsaken. Only as I release the distracting body/mind states that preclude my exercise of inner powers do I become mighty to manage the outer world’s impingements from the very centeredness of whole being that my meditations are intended to empower.

Having powers is a matter of translating capacity into ability. I can’t “have” (i.e., exercise) my powers until I actualize my latent, innate capacity for their exercise into actual ability to employ them. Furthermore, the exercise of my inner powers requires that I cease my forceful engagement of outer ones. Only thus may I empower the faculty of allowing external impingements on my sensibility to approach me in the way that I myself determine.

The desire to have powers over one’s circumstances and other people seems to be universal to the human experience. Yet having power over some person, thing or circumstance means – as the term suggests – that I must overpower him, her or it. And overpowerment requires the use of force.

The desire to have power over one’s externalities accounts for much of the unforgiveness that likewise seems to be universal in extent. Unforgiveness represents a self-deceiving use of outer force in reaction against some person, thing or circumstance that I feel myself to be lacking power over. Yet unforgiveness is a mere simulation of having power over that which is unforgiven, a simulation that I must perpetuate lest my feelings of powerlessness return.

The alternative to having forceful power over my external impingements is to be inwardly powerful with them. “Having powers” consists of mindfully determining the influence that external impingements are allowed to have upon me, rather than concerning myself with the influence that I have on them. When having (i.e., exercising) powers is my objective, my unforgiveness is clearly seen to be a liability, because my unforgiveness has far less influence on others than it allows those unforgiven others to have on me. Those to whom I relate in unforgiveness are thereby allowed, whether deliberately or merely by virtue of their existence, to have enormous manipulative influence on my feelings, thoughts and behavior. As Della Reese has remarked:

“If I don’t forgive you, and I hold some kind of resentment or grudge inside of me, it’s not going to bother you. You’ll go right on with your life, but I’ll be suffering. I’ll have backaches, nervous tension, or disease from the festering sore of this unforgiveness of you in me. My attitude about that is that it’s not worth [it]. I won’t give a person free rent in my mind when I don’t even like that person.”

My unforgiveness not only gives others a lease on my mind, it provides them with a corresponding leash on my well being. Forgiveness cancels such negative occupancy of my mind by all concerned, myself included. How I know that I have forgiven someone is that he or she has harmless residence in my mind, which means that my thoughts and feelings about him/her are without any negative association or charge. And only as I myself enjoy harmless residence in my own mind are others likewise safe therein.

As I came to recognize what “powers” are about in the aftermath of my honking horn conniption, I commenced the ongrowing realization of my ability to relinquish self-distracting, reactionary states of body/mind. My flirtation with self-emancipation had ended, and my serious courtship thereof had begun. I had discovered the foundation of all forgiveness.

©2001 by Noel Frederick McInnis

World Forgiveness Alliance