A social scientist from the University of New South Wales in Australia, calls for humanity to move to a sustainable society, and do so right now. He calls this path to sustainability The Simpler Way. This is the first of a three part series describing that path: 1) Our Global Situation 2) A Sustainable Alternative, and 3) The Transition

The Simpler Way : Our Global Situation

Ted Trainer

Our industrial-affluent-consumer society is extremely unjust and ecologically unsustainable. Almost all social and economic problems are getting worse. The argument below is that these problems cannot be solved in a society that is driven by obsession with high rates of production and consumption, affluent living standards, market forces, the profit motive and economic growth. Problems of .ecological destruction, Third World poverty, resource depletion, conflict and social breakdown are caused by consumer-capitalist society and cannot be solved unless we move to the simpler lifestyles, more self-sufficient and cooperative ways, and a very different economy.

There is now a Global Alternative Society Movement in which many small groups are building settlements of the required kind. The final section argues that the top priority for people concerned about the fate of the planet should be starting to build these new lifestyles and systems within existing towns and suburbs.

Two Basic Mistakes

There are two major faults built into our society which are causing the main problems facing us. The first is allowing competition within the market to be the major determinant of what is done in our society. The second and even more important mistake is the obsession with affluent living standards and economic growth; i.e., the insistence on high and ever-increasing levels of production and consumption.

Mistake #1: The Market; Global Injustice

Markets do some things well and in a satisfactory and sustainable society there could be a considerable role for them, but only if carefully controlled. It is easily shown that the market system is responsible for most of the deprivation and suffering in the world. The basic mechanisms are most clearly seen when we consider what is happening in the Third World.

The enormous amount of poverty and suffering in the Third World is not due to lack of resources. There is for instance sufficient food and land to provide for all. The problem is that these resources are not distributed at all well. Why not? The answer is that this is the way the market economy inevitably works.

The global economy is a market system and in a market scarce things always go mostly to the rich, e.g. to those who can bid most for them. That’s why we in rich countries get most of the oil produced. It is also why more than 500 million tonnes of grain are fed to animals in rich countries every year, over one-third of total world grain production, while 1.2 billion people are malnourished.

Even more important is the fact that the market system inevitably brings about inappropriate development in the Third World, i.e., development of the wrong industries. It will lead to the development of the most profitable industries, as distinct from those that are most necessary or appropriate. As a result there has been much development of plantations and factories in the Third World that will produce things for local rich people or for export to rich countries. Their cities have freeways and international airports. But there is little or no development of the industries that are most needed by the poorest 80% of their people. The third World’s productive capacity, its land and labour, are drawn into producing for the benefit of others. This is most disturbing regarding export crops. In many poor and hungry countries most of the best land is growing crops to export to rich world supermarkets.

These are inevitable consequences of an economic system in which what it done is whatever is most profitable to the few who own capital, as distinct from what is most needed by people or their ecosystems. The Third World problem will never be solved as long as we allow these economic principles to determine development and to deliver most of the world’s wealth to the rich.

Conventional economics basically defines development as economic growth. Thus what is developed is little more than whatever promises to maximise the profits of those who have capital to invest, i.e., transnational corporations and banks. These never invest in the production of the things most needed in the Third World, such as cheap basic food .and clean water and housing. What their investment does is put Third World land and labour into supplying rich world supermarkets. The large amount of productive capacity a poor country has is therefore devoted to enriching others, or left idle.

In other words development has been extremely inappropriate. Obviously people in Bangladesh who are paid 15c an hour to make shirts would be far better off it they could put that time and energy into local farms and firms to produce basic necessities for themselves.

For these reasons, conventional Third World development can be seen as a form of legitimised plunder.

Our affluence and comfort are built on massive global injustice. Look at the labels on the goods you buy. How much would we pay if the workers who produced them received a viable wage? What would we pay for coffee if most of the land producing it was transferred to growing food for hungry people? Few people in rich countries seem to understand that they could not have their high “living standards” if the global economy was not enabling them to take far more than their fair share of world wealth and to deprive Third world people. We can go to supermarkets to buy the coffee from land that should have been producing food for Third World people. One billion people live in terrible conditions primarily because we are taking their wealth and gearing their land and labour to supplying our supermarkets. (This is not the only causal factor of course.)

Since the early 1980s the most powerful mechanism gearing the Third World to the interests of the rich have been the Structural Adjustment Packages of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. When Third World countries get into impossible debt problems these agencies agree to grant new loans etc, but only on condition that they accept fundamental changes. These are conventional economic strategies designed to cut costs and increase income and therefore “get the economy going again and become more able to pay off the debt.”

The changes enforced are delightful for the corporations and banks of the rich countries. They involve deregulating the economy thereby removing many state controls and therefore increasing the role of market forces, devaluing the currency and therefore reducing export prices and increasing import prices, cutting state subsidies to the poor, and settling more favourable conditions for foreign investors, especially enabling them to buy up the country’s bankrupt firms. State-owned firms and assets must be sold off. Foreign corporations can therefore buy up the most profitable parts of the economy at fire-sale prices. Freedom of access for rich world corporations to the country’s resources and labour are greatly increased, but the consequences for most people are devastating. Most are pushed into much worse conditions than they had before. The economy is literally dismantled, and reassembled largely in the hands of foreign corporations.  It is likely that the Third World will accelerate into squalor and chaos from here on.

It is not just that the global economy is massively unjust, delivering to the rich far more than their fair share of the available resources such as oil. It is not just that much of the productive capacity of poor countries is geared to the interests of the rich countries. We must recognise that the rich countries have and control an empire. The global economy functions as an empire with the rich countries run mostly for their own benefit, resorting to the use of power and repression to keep Third World countries to the sorts of policies the rich want.

The most disturbing aspect of the situation is that the rich countries support many dictatorial and brutal regimes, they enable and actually engage in terrorism, they invade and attack and kill thousands of innocent people, in order to ensure that regimes and regions keep to the sorts of policies that suit the rich countries. This intervention used to be described as countering “communist subversion” but is now more likely to be masked as “humanitarian intervention” and as countering terrorism.

Consider also the hypocrisy of the rich countries. For instance rich countries insist that Third World countries should eliminate subsidies to exporters, yet the rich countries pay hundreds of billions of dollars to rich world agricultural exporters. Rich countries insist on freedom for capital to go where it wishes to invest in the Third World, but there is no question of labour from the Third World being free to work wherever it likes in the rich countries. They inflict SAPs on indebted poor countries but there is no question of one being applied to the most highly indebted of all countries, the USA.

The development progress made between 1950 and 1980 is now being reversed, especially for the poorest people. Conventional theorists stress that Third World GEDP per person is growing. This does not mean that conditions for most people are improving. In fact for the poorest 2-3 billion they are likely to be deteriorating fast under globalisation and the neo-liberal agenda. A few years ago the United Nations concluded that 1.6 billion people, one third of all the world’s people, are getting poorer. (U.N., 1996.) The market system is now giving the corporations and banks much more freedom and power than ever before to develop in the Third World only those industries that will maximise their profits. Poor countries will have to compete more fiercely against each other to sell their commodities or labour, and many countries will simply be ignored and dumped. (For example most of Africa and the Pacific countries have no possibility of competing against the rest to win any export markets.)

Thus reflecting on the Third World problem makes clear how grossly unsatisfactory and unjust the world market system is. It allows investment, jobs, incomes etc to flow to where the most profit can be made, while it ignores the rest, and it allocates the Third World’s scarce resources to the rich few while depriving the majority of a fair share. It draws the productive capacity the poor once had into producing for the rich, it uses up Third World forests etc at negligible benefit to Third World people, and it devastates the environment.

There is no possibility of satisfactory Third World development until the rich countries stop hogging far more than their fair share of the world’s resources, until development and distribution begin to be determined by need and not by market forces and profit, and therefore until we develop a very different global economic system.

The same mechanisms are the basic causes of the main social problems of the richest countries, although the effects are less glaring than in the Third World. An economy driven by profit within the market is greatly enriching the few and depriving increasing numbers.

Market relations destroy social relations

The top priority of governments is to stimulate more production for sale; i.e., to do to whatever will enable businesses to sell more. This means that relatively few resources are devoted to goals like building supportive communities, and providing well for less skilled or able people. Many who can’t compete well are dumped into poverty and despair, which has damaging effects on social cohesion.

More importantly, the more attention that is given to economic goals the more that the values and concerns that are crucial for a good society are driven out. There cannot be a satisfactory society unless people put considerable value on things like the public good, the welfare of all, social justice and the situation of less fortunate people. However in a market situation you have to be concerned only with your own advantage; i.e., with self interest. There is no incentive to think and behave cooperatively or to focus on what is good for society. The more we commercialise all aspects of life, the more space buying and selling take up in our lives, the more we have to deal in a market place to get what we want, then the less attention we give to social values, such as concern for the welfare of others or for the public good.

The economic historian Polanyi stressed how misguided it is for a society to allow the market to be as dominant as it is in our society. (Dalton, 1968) No society previous to ours has done this. Polanyi insisted that unless market forces are under tight social control they will destroy society and its ecosystems; everything will be open to sale for maximum profit.

Globalisation

We have entered a period in which all these problems will rapidly accelerate, because of the globalisation of the economy. Since 1970 the world economic system has run into crisis. It has become much more difficult for corporations and banks to invest their constantly accumulating volumes of capital profitably.

Thus the big corporations and banks are now pushing through a massive restructuring of the global economy, the development of a unified and de-regulated system in which they are sweeping away all the controls which previously hindered their access to increased business opportunities, markets, resources and cheap labour. The supreme, sacred principle now is to “free market forces”. Consequently the pressure is on governments to remove the protection, tariffs and controls which they once used to manage, regulate, stimulate and protect their economies and to guide development. Government enterprises are being sold to the corporations. Government services are being cut as are taxes on corporations. These changes are enabling the transnational corporations to come in and take more of the businesses, resources and markets local people once had, and to gear “development’ to whatever suits them rather than to what is needed by most people.

These changes have gone furthest with respect to trade. The effort now is to bring in new rules to guarantee freedom of investment, and to force governments to allow corporations to take over provision of services such as education, health, water and electricity supply.

Globalisation can improve “efficiency” (by moving production to low wage countries), and it can therefore reduce the price of goods sold in rich world supermarkets, but a huge critical literature now explains how these changes are devastating the lives of millions of people, especially in the Third World. Globalisation is eliminating the arrangements which used to ensure that many little people could sell and work and trade, and that local resources such as land would produce things they need. Now the corporations are able to take over all those opportunities to increase their sales. Globalisation is basically a gigantic takeover of economic wealth by the big corporations and banks.

Globalisation will oblige Australian workers to compete against the lowest paid workers in the world. Because the freedom of trade is now of supreme importance, governments will not be able to ban imports of goods produced in environmentally unacceptable ways or unsafe conditions, or goods containing pesticides. Nor will they be able to make woodchip companies pay for replanting the forests they cut. Cases have been decided in which such steps have been judged as infringements on the sacred freedom of trade, and governments have been forced to back down and allow the corporations to sell, and to pay them hundreds of millions of dollars in compensation.

Governments are increasingly unable to govern, because the real control over economic affairs and conditions is in the hands of transnational corporations and banks and World Trade Organisation officials.

One of the corporations’ most powerful weapons is their mobility. If a country tries to tax or control them or get them to pay higher wages they will leave and invest somewhere else. Thus countries must compete against each other in a “race to the bottom” to attract corporate foreign investment.

Corporations are able to minimise their tax payments, especially through the “transfer payments” they put on shipments between their subsidiaries. Governments must lower taxes on corporations or the corporations will locate their plants in some other country. (Half the transnational corporations with branches in Australia pay no tax at all!) Therefore governments have drastically cut state spending. Tax burdens are being shifted from corporations to workers, and state spending on welfare, education, health etc., is being dramatically reduced.

Globalisation constitutes a crushing triumph for the corporations, the banks and the rich. Inequality is rapidly worsening; a few are becoming much richer, the poor are becoming more numerous and even the middle classes of the rich countries are being hollowed out.  It has been a sudden and stunningly arrogant grab that has delivered greatly increased wealth to the corporations and banks and the few high skilled professionals and technocrats the corporations want. The prospect is quite alarming; we are rapidly heading towards a world run by a few corporations, doing only whatever suits their shareholders while rapidly destroying social cohesion and the ecosystems of the planet.

Hence we have the absurd situation where Australia could be running its own economy at a relaxed pace to give all people a high quality of life, importing only a few necessities and securely in control of our own fate, but instead we must work harder, become more dependent on distant forces and markets, accept reduced wages and the takeover of our economy by foreign firms, and complete more furiously to export … while all other countries are locked into the same frantic struggle.

Why do governments willingly go along with these “neo-liberal” policies? Even if a government did not believe the neo-liberal world view, it would have no choice but to go along with it if its country is to survive in a globalised world. In the competitive global economy we have now governments must seek to cut production costs, free corporations to do more business, make national exports cheaper and more competitive, and attract more foreign investment. If a government doesn’t do these things its economy will not survive in the increasingly open and competitive global economy. It will not attract foreign investment, its credit rating will be dropped so the cost of borrowing capital will rise, and its exports will not be able to compete in the global market.

Some aspects of globalisation, such as the internet, are desirable, but the limits to growth analysis (below)shows that a sustainable world order cannot be highly globalised economically; there will not be sufficient energy and resources or all that transport and trade. A sustainable world order must be mostly made up of small and localised economies, with relatively little long distance trade.

Conclusions on the Market

It is a very serious mistake to assume that if we leave things to market forces, i.e., to competition between individuals, corporations and nations trying to maximise their self-interest, then we will end up with a satisfactory society. A free market will inevitably result in the strongest and richest winning, taking even more and becoming even richer while the poor majority become more deprived. The environment and social cohesion cannot be protected if the rules permit individuals to grab as much as possible for themselves. Billions of people are unable to produce and sell the small quantities that would yield satisfactory incomes because a few giant corporations have been able to sell things more cheaply. Thus the market system enables a few to take everything of value and dump most of the world’s people into deprivation, unemployment and poverty.

It is not possible to have a good society unless we make sure that considerations of morality and justice and the good of society are the primary determinants of what happens. In other words there must be much social control and regulation of the economy. (There could still be a place for private firms and markets; see below.)

Mistake #2: The Limits to Growth

There is an even more important and alarming mistake built into the foundations of our society. This is the commitment to an affluent-industrial-consumer lifestyle and to an economy that must have constant and limitless growth in output. Our levels of production and consumption are far too high to be kept up for very long and could never be extended to all people. We are rapidly depleting resources and damaging the environment. We can only achieve present “living standards” because we few in rich countries are grabbing most of the resources produced and therefore depriving most of the world’s people of a fair share. Because we consume so much we cause huge ecological damage. Our present way of life is grossly unsustainable. Yet we are obsessed with economic growth, i.e., with increasing production and consumption, as much as possible and without limit!

Following are some of the main points that support limits to growth conclusions.

– Rich countries, with about one-fifth of the world’s people, are consuming about three quarters of the world’s resource production. Our per capita consumption is about 15-20 times that of the poorest half of the world’s people. World population will probably stabilise around 9 billion, somewhere after 2060. If all those people were to have Australian per capita resource consumption, then world production of all resources would have to be 8 to 10 times as great as it is now. If we tried to raise present world production to that level by 2060 we would by then have completely exhausted all probably recoverable resources of one third of the basic mineral items we use. All probably recoverable resources of coal, oil, gas, tar sand and shale oil, and uranium (via burner reactors) would have been exhausted by 2045.

– Petroleum appears to be especially limited. A number of geologists have concluded that world oil supply will probably peak by 2010 and be down to half that level by 2025-30, with big price increases soon after the peak. (See especially Campbell, 1997.) The US Geological Survey disagrees, estimating that reserves discovered by 2030 could be twice as great as Campbell et al believe. However if all the 9 billion people we will have on earth by 2070 were to have Australia’s present per capita oil consumption even the USGS’s estimated reserves would be totally exhausted in only 18 years.

- If all 9 billion people were to use timber at the rich world per capita rate we would need 3.5 times the world’s present forest area. If all 9 billion were to have a rich world diet, which takes about 1 ha of land to produce, we would need 9 billion ha of food producing land. But there is only 1.4 billion ha of cropland in use today and this is not likely to increase.

– Recent “Footprint” analysis (Wachernagel and Rees, 1995.) estimates that it probably takes 8.5 ha of productive land to provide water, energy settlement area and food for one person living in Sydney. So if 9 billion people were to live as we do in Sydney we would need about 76 billion ha of productive land. But that is about 11 times all the available productive land on the planet.

These are some of the main limits to growth arguments which lead to the conclusion that there is no possibility of all people rising to the living standards we take for granted today in rich countries like Australia. We can only live like this because we are taking and using up most of the scarce resources, and preventing most of the world’s people from having anything like a fair share. Therefore we can’t morally endorse our way of life. We must accept the need to move to far simpler and less resource-expensive ways.

But what about nuclear energy?If you think we can solve these problems using nuclear energy then you are assuming about 800 times the world’s present reactor capacity (before fusion power can be developed, assuming that’s possible.) They would mostly have to be breeder reactors, with about 1 million tonnes of Plutonium in circulation, and more than 25 worn out reactors to be buried every day. In any case reactors only produce electricity and that only makes up 17% of rich world energy use.

What about solar and wind energy?

We must eventually move from fossil fuels to the use of renewable energy, but it is not likely that we can all live in energy-affluent ways on renewable energy forms. (For the detail see Trainer, 1995c, or the more recent discussion, Note 9.) This is because there are large energy losses in converting sunlight into electricity and then into a storable form, such as hydrogen, in transporting the energy to cold northern American or European countries, and then converting it back to electricity. At present efficiencies less than 5% of the solar energy collected in Sahara desert solar plants would be delivered as electricity in northern Europe in winter. The cost of a solar plant would probably be more than 50 times as much as a coal fired plant in Europe that would deliver the same amount of electricity (and twice that when interest charges on the money borrowed to build the plant are taken into account).

There are similar problems with wind energy, especially the fact that there is always a probability that at some point in time all mills will be idle. This limits this source even in high wind areas to providing only about one-quarter of the electricity needed. (Grubb and Meyer, 1993.)

There is far too little available biomass to provide liquid fuel for the world’s present car fleet. If 10 billion people were to have cars at the American per capita rate, 10 times as much fuel would be needed. To produce fuel for one car would take as much land as would feed 9 people. (Pimentel, et al., 1984.)

Certainly we should be developing renewable energy sources as fast as we can, but more important is developing ways of living well on per capita levels of energy use that are a small fraction of those we have now.

The environment problem

The reason why we have an environment problem is simply because there is far too much producing and consuming going on.

Our way of life involves the consumption of huge amounts of materials. More than 20 tonnes of new materials are used by each American every year. To produce one tonne of materials can involve processing 15 tonnes of water, earth or air. (For gold the multiple is 350,000 to 1!). All this must be taken from nature and most of it is immediately dumped back as waste and pollution.

The Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change has concluded that in order to stop the carbon content of the atmosphere from rising any further we must reduce the use of fossil fuels by 60-80%. If we did cut it by 60% and shared the remaining energy among 9 billion people, each of us would get only 1/15 of the amount we now use in Australia per capita. Most people have no idea of how far beyond sustainable levels we are, and how big the reductions will have to be.

One of the most serious environmental problems is the extinction of plants and animal species. This is due to the destruction of habitats. Now remember the footprint concept mentioned above; if all 9 billion people soon to live on earth were to have rich world “living standards” humans would have to use eleven times all the productive land on the planet. Clearly our resource intensive lifestyles, which require so much land or so many resources, are the basic cause of the loss of habitats and the extinction of species.

Conflict

If all nations go on trying to increase their wealth, production, consumption and “living standards” without limit in a world of limited resources, then we must expect increasing conflict. Rich world affluent lifestyles require us to be heavily armed and aggressive, in order to guard the empires from which we draw more than our fair share of resources. We cannot expect to achieve a peaceful world until we achieve a just world, and we cannot do that until rich countries change to much less extravagant living standards.

The absurdly impossible implications of economic growth.

The foregoing argument has been that the present levels of production and consumption are quite unsustainable. They are too high to be kept going for long or to be extended to all people. But we are determined to increase present living standards and levels of output and consumption, as much as possible and without any end in sight. Our supreme national goal is economic growth. Few people seem to recognise the absurdly impossible consequences of pursing economic growth.

If we have a 3% p.a. increase in output, by 2070 we will be producing 8 times as much every year. (For 4% growth the multiple is 16.) If by then all 9 billion people expected had risen to the living standards we would have then, the total world economic output would be more than 60 times as great as it is today! Yet the present level is unsustainable. (For a 4% p.a. growth rate the multiple is 120.)

Social Breakdown.

We are seeing increasing social breakdown, stress and depression, drug abuse, suicide, litigation, decay of communities, rural decline and loss of social cohesion. Attitudes to the poor, homeless and unemployed are hardening. Each of us must focus on competing to succeed as a self-interested aggressive entrepreneur, and we must not expect much assistance from the state, for instance in old age. Public institutions like museums and even universities are expected to operate like corporations that must sell to customers and make a profit.

Because of this corporate pressure to reduce the power and activity of government, and the power of the corporations to avoid paying tax, governments are drastically cutting their spending on public institutions and welfare, which is increasing the deprivation and suffering of large numbers of poorer people. Governments no longer have full employment as an important goal. The main role of government now is to provide the conditions for business prosperity.

It has become a divided, winner-take-all society, with many now classified as “excluded”. The rich, including the upper-middle class which does the top managerial and legal work for the corporations, and the professionals, are rapidly increasing their wealth and have no interest in calling for change. Inequality and polarisation are accelerating. The state has ceased to be very concerned with redistribution of wealth. The greed evident in bank fees, corporate executive salaries, legal and professional fees, cheap sell-offs of public assets, etc does not evoke significant resistance.

All this is sociologically appalling. Damage is being done to social cohesion, public spirit, trust, good will and concern for the public interest. You cannot have a satisfactory society made up of competitive, self-interested individuals all trying to get as rich as possible! In a satisfactory society there must be considerable concern for the public good and the welfare of all, and there must be considerable collective social control and regulation and service provision, to make sure all are looked after, to maintain public institutions and standards, and to reinforce the sense of social solidarity whereby all are willing to contribute to the good of all.

“But can’t technical advance solve the problems?”

Most people assume that the development of better technology will enable us to go on enjoying affluent lifestyles and pursuing limitless economic growth, e.g., by reducing the energy and resource inputs needed to produce things. However the magnitude of our over-consumption makes this impossible.

Perhaps the best known “technical fix” optimist, Amory Lovins, claims that we could at least double global output while halving the resource and environmental impacts, i.e., a “factor 4″ reduction.

Let us assume that present global resource and ecological impacts must be halved. Now if all 9 billion people expected on earth by 2070 were to rise to present rich world “living standards” world economic output would be 10 times as great as it is at present. If we in rich countries average 3% growth, and 9 billion rose to the living standards we would then have by 2070, total world output would be 60 times as great as it is today.

Do you think technical advance will make it possible to multiply total world economic output by 60 while halving impacts, i.e., a factor 120 reduction?

Clearly we can’t possibly get resource consumption and environmental impact down to sustainable levels without dramatically reducing present volumes of production and consumption, economic turnover, and present rich world “living standards”. The “technical fix” optimists seriously mislead people into thinking that we can achieve a sustainable world without any reduction on consumer ways, and indeed that growth can go on.

Greed and history

History can largely be put in terms of people struggling to grab more than their fair share of the available wealth and power. Consider the behaviour of states over recent centuries, constantly jockeying diplomatically and fighting each other. Why? Simply because they are never content to live with what they have and to organise satisfactory lifestyles for themselves within their own borders. There are always classes of energetic “entrepreneurs” who are not content with being wealthy; they want more, so they go out looking for more resources and markets, and try to outmanoeuvre and bully their rivals. States constantly strive to increase their wealth, territory, status and power. Meanwhile “ordinary” people would have mansions and luxurious lifestyles if they could.

Yet there are many people living in what we refer to as “primitive tribes” who maintain stable social systems within stable boundaries and are not constantly seeking to outsmart or steal from their neighbours. This is not true of all tribes, but it is true of many, and it is totally foreign to Western culture with its restless urge to go out and acquire, conquer, build empires and take over markets or one way or another to get more and more.

Most people fail to grasp these connections between greed and conflict. They wonder why there are poor nations, conflict, and poverty. Every now and then their leaders tell them their children must go to war and slaughter the children of other people just like themselves. They don’t like this much but it never occurs to them that they have brought it on their own heads, by being keen supporters and beneficiaries of the grabbing that has led to the conflict. They have been enthusiastic about the empire building, the quest for more markets, the pursuit of national prestige, the promise to raise “living standards”, and they want to be members of “a great and powerful nation”. Why can’t they be content to be members of a noble and admirable nation, or a caring nation, or an ecologically sustainable nation? Above all they want the high “living standards” they can’t have without taking more than their fair share.

At a deeper level there is the problem of lack of meaning and purpose in consumer-capitalist society. Many suffer unsatisfying work, lack of community, dreary dormitory suburbs, and little purpose in life other than shopping, sport and mindless entertainment. They can have little pride in their society and are at best cynical about politics. They have little sense of power over their circumstances or of making a valued contribution. This is mostly because corporations have taken from us the provision of almost all the things we used to make and do; they want us to buy all entertainment, products and services from them.

These people would angrily reject the claim that they are greedy; they only want “normal” and “nice” things and “good” standards. They do not realise that what is regarded as normal in rich countries involves levels of resource consumption that are grossly unsustainable and condemn most of the world’s people to deprivation. Essential to The Simpler Way is the understanding that affluence is an enormous moral problem, and a serious mistake because it is a basic cause of global problems.

“When corporations rule the world”

This heading, the title of a recent book by David Korten, sums up the situation that has arisen over the last 20 years. A tiny corporate super-rich class has risen to extraordinary wealth and power and are now able to more or less run the world in the ways that suit it. (About 1% of the world’s people now control more than half the capital.) They run the transnational corporations, the media and especially the World Bank, IMF and World Trade Organisation. Their wealth funds the think tanks, foundations, universities, journals etc which pump out the message that the neo-liberal way is the best and the only way. Governments eagerly comply with this agenda. Rich world military power is liable to be used ruthlessly against nations which interfere with this agenda of free access for corporations and integration of all regions into the one global market (e.g., Yugoslavia, Iraq.) Much of the literature on globalisation is alarmed at this situation of corporate rule; (see especially Chussudowsky, 1996, Fotopolous, 2002, and the many works by Chomsky.) There are good reasons for thinking that it is now too late to do anything about this rapid surge to world domination by the super-rich, especially since the “war on terrorism” has provided a perfect pretext for crushing dissent.

The ideological problem.

Yet there is very little dissent! It is an era in which corporate power and wealth is surging, yet capitalism has never been more secure from threat. There is little or no opposition to what is happening from any sector of society. The working class and the middle class have been seduced into docility and willing compliance by the promise of ever-rising “living standards”. There is some discontent, there is grumbling, but there is no focused resistance let alone outraged disgust at the great injustice and brutality underlying rich world affluence and no demand for fundamental system change. The media’s obsession with trivia, spectacles, celebrities and sport distract attention from important issues. Governments are blindly in favour of market forces and refuse to give any attention to the possibility of limits to growth. “Educational” institutions are preoccupied with preparing the workers, competitors and consumers the system needs and give little attention to critical social issues. Even university graduates have usually never encountered the themes this document is about.

The academic and “intellectual” ranks fail to focus on the massive global injustice that underwrites their privileges, or on the limits to growth that will soon terminate them. Universities have become corporations churning out product innovations and diligent technocrats, eager for affluent lifestyles and convinced that they deserve them.

Overall, consumer society shows a stunning inability to respond to the alarming challenges now facing it. All people seem to be totally unaware of and indifferent to the fact that their high “living standards” are delivered by a massively unjust global economy which so severely deprives the majority that tens of thousands of people die every day, and to the fact that their “living standards are grossly unsustainable.

What we have seen in the last 20 years is an unbelievably brazen and successful grab by the rich. Their share of national income is rapidly increasing. They have routed the working class. The Left has been eliminated as a political force. Above all the rich have crushingly won the ideological battle establishing neo-liberalism as the only way. The collapse of communism has been taken to have established that there can be no sensible alternative to free market capitalism, and that the fundamental, indeed sole considerations are now “efficiency”, individualism and competition, getting richer, and freedom for market forces.

Conclusions on our situation.

It should be obvious from the foregoing discussion that the present socio-economic system is extremely unsatisfactory and cannot solve our problems. There is no possibility of having a just, morally satisfactory and ecologically sustainable society if we allow the economy to be driven by market forces, the profit motive, the quest for higher “living standards” and economic growth. In a satisfactory economy the needs of people, society and the environment would determine what is done, not profit. (We could have markets and private enterprise in a good society; see below.) These economic faults cannot be remedied without radical change in values and world views, which are presently obsessed with individualistic competition, selfishness and greed.

Above all it must be stressed how far beyond sustainable levels of production and consumption we are. The foregoing figures show that we must develop ways of living in which we can have a good quality of life on per capita resource rates that are a small fraction of today’s rates.

NEXT: A Sustainalble Alterative

 

Copyright 2003 Ted Trainer

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Visit Ted Trainer’s website: The Simpler Way 

 

The following essay is from: Dee Hock’s Birth of the Chaortic Age, Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc., San Francisco, 1999. You can buy his book in most bookstores or on the net. He is affiliated with a very interesting group of humans at the Chaordic Commons.

Superior / Inferior

Dee Hock

Retirement on the job at the National Bank of Commerce was not all reflection. One day stands out. I had been sent to a suburban office to learn branch banking. The manager turned me over to a crusty woman who was to train me to be a teller. The very soul of courtesy to customers and a genius at the work, she was, nevertheless, of choleric disposition, not at all improved by tenuous relations with men. When she turned away from attending to a customer, she could be a veritable bear, and I was raw meat. At the close of a trying day she brought me to my knees.

The branch was closed for the day and empty of customers. The lady and I could not balance the day’s activities. More than an hour passed as we checked everything time and again without success. Clearly, this was not something to which she was accustomed. The likely source of the problem was standing at her side. She turned to me with an order, beneath which there appeared a glint of sadistic humor.

“It must be a lost deposit. Go down to the basement, look through the garbage, and see if you can find it.” Speechless, I descended to the basement visualizing a single can of crumpled paper. There, neatly in a row, were eleven fifty-five-gallon cans stuffed with far more than paper-cigarette butts, ashes, chewing gum, rotting remnants of leftover lunches, and other disgusting detritus.

My neck grew hot with anger. This ripped it! After managing businesses since the age of twenty, this was preposterous! Language learned working my sixteenth summer in a slaughterhouse poured out. Damned if I was going to spend the night grubbing though garbage for a lost deposit, and double-damned if a snotty bank teller was going to order me about, and tripledamned if I was going to spend another day at the #*X*X#* National Bank of Commerce. They could take this job and “put it where the sun don’t shine.”

At the worst and the best of times, the ridiculous has always tickled my funny bone. As anger and expletives diminished, in the dismal basement, laughter came pouring out. Sure, I’d been climbing the corporate ladder for sixteen years, but before that I’d done stoop labor, picked beans, thinned sugar beets, mucked out dairy barns, cleaned offal, and dumped slop. I’d been proud to be a boy able to do a man’s work, and never felt demeaned by a minute of it. Hell, I’d worked for sadistic bosses who made this woman look like the tooth fairy. Words spoken a thousand times to employees came swinging back to clout me in the back of the head. “There isn’t any poor work; there’s only work poorly done, poorly recognized, or poorly paid.”

Off came coat, tie, and shirt as I upended the first can. If there was a lost deposit I would find it if it took all night. Then, they’d learn what they could do with this job. The more I worked the more I laughed. Pride is pride. This work was not going to be poorly done. I dove into the garbage.

Within minutes, Old Monkey Mind took me happily into the magical forest of questions without answers, only more fascinating questions. What is pride? How can there be such a thing as pride without humility? How can there be such a thing as humility without pride? Humility would be impossible to conceive without the notion of pride. One defines the other. They are integral, one and the same, different faces of the same coin. Were not both pride and humility dancing simultaneously, seamlessly through me? What made me think of them as separate? What made me want to choose one and deny the other?

Was someone shuffling papers alone high up in a luxurious building at an expensive desk in a large room with a sign reading President a superior form of humanity to someone sorting trash in the basement? Whence came the craving for one rather than the other?

Where did all this superior, inferior nonsense come from? By what method could one possibly know — by what possible measurement and what standards could one judge the value of climbing a ladder of power, wealth, and fame, other than the pronouncements of those who lust after them? Could such desires amount to no more than a basement of trash? Isn’t all life a seamless blending of all opposites? If so, why do we think to separate one thing from another and elevate it to the status of a deity? On and on the questions whirled and swirled as time lost all dimension.

Two hours and ten cans later, my “boss” came down the stairs to take away my desired victory, smiling smugly as she said, “I found the error. We’re in balance. It wasn’t a lost deposit after all.” Had I been had by this diabolical woman? I could not know, but no matter, for if I’d been had, it was a masterful piece of work. The next day, equanimity restored, working frantically in the teller’s cage to keep up with a flood of customers, she casually turned. As though it were a rhetorical question, she sweetly said, “Would you run down to the drug store and pick up a prescription for me, and bring a cup of coffee on your way back?”

I gave it to her like a man. “Run your own #X*&#*X errands. I’m not your personal servant.”

She didn’t take it like a woman, but gave it back in kind. “And I’m not here to clean up your *X#*X# mistakes.” We stood nostril to nostril, eyeball to eyeball, breathing fire as we stared each other down. Later, in a slack half hour, both defeated and laughing, we went on the errands together.

It did not seem so then, but now it seems a matter of perspective whether sorting trash in the basement of the branch was the high or low point in my retirement on the job at the National Bank of Commerce. The year provided ample time for reading and reflection, along with days wandering forests, mountains, and ocean shores. Better yet was reconnection to the suppressed, yet incredible, spirit, will, and creativity of the managed-the many who day in, day out do the ordinary work of the world from which the wealth, power, and fame of the few is extracted. These were my people. It was where I belonged, although I denied it then, and longed to escape.

Years before, words by Emerson had leaped from the page to stick in my mind like a cockle burr in a long-haired dog. “Everywhere you go you take your giant with you.” He was writing about the insatiable desire to escape the present and seek paradise in the new and different-new places, new stations in life, new possessions — a futile quest to escape self. No matter how hard I had tried to escape my giant, he always returned-the country kid, the two-room house, manual labor, no university degree, estrangement — the raging sense of inferiority. It was then that I had the guts to turn, look my giant in the eye, and say, “You’re an ugly cuss and you scare the liver out of me, but if we’re going to be together forever we might as well get to know one another and live civilly together.” My giant and I are not yet buddies, but we’re working on it.

In a strange way, every institution is the same. Everywhere they go they take their giant with them. No matter how much we shuffle control and responsibility back and forth from one Industrial Age form of organization to another — government or private enterprise, democracy or socialism, monarchy or republic, planned economies or free markets, national or municipal government, nonprofit or for-profit — our social and environmental problems continue to escalate. Everywhere our institutions go they take their giant — mechanistic, Industrial Age organizational concept — with them.

No matter how we try to suppress our problems with Industrial Age techniques, they reemerge in different dress or form, more complex and virulent than ever. Something is deeply, fundamentally wrong. No matter how many technological miracles we perform, no matter how sophisticated the virtual worlds we create, no matter how many atoms we crack, no matter how much genetic code we splice, no matter how many space probes we launch, things will get progressively worse until we discern and deal with that fundamental institutional problem.

In truth, there are no problems “out there.” And there are no experts “out there” who could solve them if there were. The problem is “in here,” in the consciousness of writer and reader, of you and me. It is in the depths of the collective consciousness of the species. When that consciousness begins to understand and grapple with the false Industrial Age concepts of organization to which it clings; when it is willing to risk loosening the hold of those concepts and embrace new possibilities; when those possibilities engage enough minds, new patterns will emerge and we will find ourselves on the frontier of institutional alternatives ripe with hope and rich with possibilities.

At bottom, it is a wrong concept of organization and leadership based on a false metaphor with which we must deal. Until our consciousness of the relational aspect of the world and all life therein shall change, the problems that crush the young and make grown people cry will get progressively worse.

Reposted from the Co-operative Information Superhighway.

Co-Operation & Peace in an Era of Globalisation

Pauline Green

The world today is light years away from the world inhabited by the early pioneers of our co-operative world.  Co-operation was conceived and developed in a local context to solve local problems for local people.  Its international perspective, which we celebrate here, came on the back of its appeal and attraction in dealing with the problems that beset ordinary people in their daily lives.  It was hugely successful because it gave people a sense of control over their own and their family’s destiny.

In its inception it operated most successfully, as we all know, in an environment ripe for change, and in some cases in the midst of change, an environment generally rife with inequality, injustice and discrimination.   Its strength was that it was a practical, value-driven philosophy based on solidarity, democracy and equality that could make a real and immediate difference to people’s life.

It succeeded because it developed a cadre of leaders who led their communities, through self-help, to value and seek education as a means of bettering their lot, and to encourage a sense of responsibility for neighbour and neighbourhood.

In essence co-operation provided leadership in local communities.

In today’s world, today’s globalised world, the environment is anything but local.

Today, the working world is global.  The information revolution has cut through local links, radically altering traditional and previously permanent relationships with localities and workforce. One time local businesses are now able to, and do operate from anywhere in the world, as easily as if they were in the room next door to their customers or clients.

Today, the educational world is global.  Students and young people, perhaps more than any other part of our global society, take advantage of the opportunities offered by easy travel and the expansion of language ability, to live, learn and enjoy the experiences of the world wide educational offer.

Today’s world, today’s global world is also in the throes of dramatic change.  Politically the stability of the ‘cold war’ era was created through balance.  Balance between competing ideologies, balance between competing economic systems, balance between competing military strengths – all in the context of balanced global spheres of influence.

Today’s world is struggling to come to terms with the new, global reality. In particular, that new global reality has generated a real sense of dislocation.  Dislocation has been felt in many communities, localities and regions, whose very existence has been challenged by the disappearance of  traditional industries.  The failure and disappearance of many such industries of itself would have been difficult enough.  But with global economic forces now able to take advantage of the free movement of capital guaranteed by world trade structures, indigenous government at all levels from local to national, are constrained in just what they can do, and what levers they can pull to remedy the economic disadvantage to their regions and their people.  So that economic reality, is, all to often being accompanied by the disappearance of a way of life, of community values, cohesion and stability.

As the world shrinks in terms of economics, trade, work, politics, education, culture and so on, unless we are very careful, the gaps in understanding and the antagonisms between people will actually grow.  Those gaps themselves cannot any longer be anticipated as the ‘traditional’ ones.  The antagonisms and conflicts may not be along the national or historical lines that we have become accustomed to over the last hundred or so years.  That fact is all too evident in the sad experience of the present international conflict.

The demonstrations and street battles that now all too often accompany regular meetings of the world trade organization, the G7 or 8, European Union Government Leaders and so on, are the extreme manifestation of that sense of dislocation.  But, underneath it lies a far larger proportion of the world community that feels uncertain, unsure of their place in this world;  that feels insecure, no longer clear about their future or that of their family;  that feels disconnected, unable to see how they have any impact, even through the traditional ‘vote’ on life around them, let alone in the bigger scheme of things.  Their own sense of self worth, cultural rooting and belonging is beginning to fracture.

It is in this ocean of the dislocated that the radical movement of our day is emerging. On its waves are those who cross half the world to demonstrate in Seattle, in Prague, in Gothenberg or in Milan.  Most,  genuinely concerned for the future.  Most,  wanting simply to articulate their fears, to be heard.  Some, unhappily with less altruistic motives.

Whilst more than a million miles removed from the genuine motives of the truly concerned, it is sadly the case, that in the depths of this ocean of the dislocated we also find those engaged in the politics of hate, and it is here as well that they seek their recruits.

Nothing could be a greater threat to peace and democracy in our world than that we allow this ocean to get deeper.

But, the global world is not going to go away, it is not going to be defeated to facilitate the restoration of some sort of  ‘cold war’ stability or its equivalent.  We must find a new equilibrium.

This is where co-operation and co-operators could play a real role.

Perhaps uniquely, co-operatives can play a fundamental role in restoring or reinvigorating that sense of local identity, of local being and of local community that lay at the heart of the genesis of our movement.

It is time colleagues for a renaissance in co-operation.  We need to reactivate that sense of local leadership and excitement in co-operative innovation.  We need to reinstate the clarity of our co-operative forebears in focusing on just what co-operatives can do today.

I believe that co-ops are the bridge, the conduit between local communities and local people and the global market.  We can re-engage people with their local world and help them to place themselves in the context of the global world.

Is this too ambitious?  Our founding fathers had a vision and look what happened.  The time they were living in was equally tumultuous, equally challenging.

So how do we do it? Of course, every country, each region, all peoples will have a different co-operative profile, be at a different stage of their domestic development, confront different challenges, have different opportunities So, how?

Well let me give you our thinking, based on our situation and our challenges and opportunities in the United Kingdom co-operative movement.

By accident rather than design, in the last three or four years, there has been a coming together of the wider co-operative family in the UK.  Driven by the need to regionalize if we are to gain support, but more importantly funding, from government, we are pulling together our powerful consumer co-ops with the smaller sectors of housing co-ops, worker co-ops, credit unions and so on.

Of course, we have always had dialogue between the sectors, but it was always on a superficial level, always a non-essential part of our business.  Now it is fundamental.  Now there is a more general awareness of opportunity – that by working together we can secure a greater expansion and benefit for co-operative development, than we can by working separately.  That experience has engendered a greater sense of trust and confidence between us and less suspicion of our sectoral motives than has existed for decades.

It has also led to the ideas people, the co-operative innovators, reaching out to new segments of our local communities in a desire to reawaken the knowledge and experience of co-operation on the ground.

For the young new co-op forms designed to involve them locally.

Firstly, the hugely successful football co-ops.  In the past, fans of a local football club would be influential in the running of that club – today, football is big business, successful clubs are floated on the stock market and it is the corporate investors who call the shots.  Of course, fans can buy shares in their football club, but what good is the handful of shares that most fans can buy, when compared to the corporate thousands.

On their own, of course, those shares held by individual fans give little influence to their owners.  But combined, now that’s a different matter. And so our football co-ops came into existence.  Pooling the shares of all the individual fans into a co-operative has given the fans an opportunity to, not only hold significant common shareholdings, but in many instances now, to be able to sit on the Board of their local football club.  And one football club has become wholly owned by the co-operative.  Started just three years ago, over forty football clubs now have supporters co-ops – giving back to fans something that had disappeared from their horizon.  What a culture shock for us in the Co-operative Union to have the most unusual co-operators asking for information on how to run a co-op and even asking for help on good governance of their football co-op!

So powerful has that model become that work is now being carried out to look at forming a similar model for the employee shareholders in large private sector companies.  Can you imagine any greater irony than an employee co-operative securing places on the Boards of large ‘blue chip’ companies!  Isn’t that what we mean by empowering people, encouraging participation in the workplace, developing worker knowledge and information on their own company.

Just a few weeks ago we launched the first ever wholly co-operative students union in the UK.  With the active support of the National Union of Students, the local Co-op is working with the new student’s union co-op helping to mentor the new co-op leaders, developing their understanding of how to manage and administer their co-op.  Can this really be the same old co-op?

Working with our credit union colleagues, some of the traditional consumer co-ops have opened up co-op shops as collecting points for local community credit unions.  But not just as a cash taking exercise – this is much more sophisticated.  Credit Union members are now able to use the plastic dividend card of retail co-op stores, to deposit and withdraw savings with the credit union.  This co-operation between co-operatives avoids an undue work burden on credit union volunteers, it deals with the increasingly worrying security concerns for local credit unions and, of course, it brings members of credit unions into the shops of consumer co-ops.

As the transfer of public services in the UK from public to private provision continues, the co-operative movement is opening up the door to those very structures that can offer a middle path in tune with community desires and often local political imperatives.  Whilst the sterile debate rages in our press about degree of private involvement in the public services, we are set to launch in the coming weeks a new co-operative model of residential care for the elderly working hand in glove with the major public sector trade union. We are establishing a network of co-operative childcare provision, seeking co-operatively owned and run learning centers and are looking imaginatively at ways we can actively help develop the UK’s rural economy which has been so devastated by the dual scourges of ‘mad cow’ and then foot and mouth disease.

All of this designed to ensure that local people remain in ownership and control of local community facilities designed and used by local people.

The important fact is that all of these sectors are new for British co-operation.  They are areas in which we have been wholly or almost wholly absent until now.

At the same time, the ground breaking report produced by the Co-operative Commission established with the sponsorship of the British Prime Minister, has shown the way forward if we are to secure a stronger performance for consumer co-ops, and has demanded that the movement rededicate itself to its social agenda in order to guarantee the benefits of our virtuous circle, that is our clear social agenda providing us with a competitive advantage, leading to commercial success which in itself allows us to invest yet more in our social agenda.

Now, you in your co-ops in your country may already be doing all the things that we are just setting out to do in the UK.  In fact, we have learned a great deal from our sister organizations in other countries as we have sought to reinvigorate ourselves.  And please be clear, I’m not saying that our development is the way forward for all.

The message that I would like to leave with you is that we must keep in touch with the wider evolution of the economy in the global market.  We must keep in touch with the sense of political change that is driving the global economy.  We must capture those local demands, whatever they are, that is right for each country or each region.

For too long co-operation has been seen as yesterday’s answers with nothing to offer for today’s questions.  We in this room know that the truth is otherwise.  It is, fellow co-operators, up to us to deliver a different verdict on our co-operative generation.

Copyright © 2003 International Co-operative Alliance

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Pauline Green is theChief Executive and General Secretary of the Co-operative Union, UK. This paper was delivered at the ICA General Assembly Seoul 2001 in October 16, 2001.

Reposted from Jay Salsburg’s website.

“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”

George Bernard Shaw

Reposted from Jay Salsburg’s website.

Reposted from Leader to Leader.

There was a time a few years back when for one brief moment the essence of leadership was crystal clear to me. Strangely, it was after leaving Visa and moving to a small, isolated ranch for a life of study and contemplation, raising a few cattle. I was attending to chores in the barn, comfortable and secure from the wind howling about the eaves and the roar of torrential rain on the tin roof. Through the din, I became aware of the faint, persistent bellowing of one of the cows. Awareness gradually rose that the bellowing was unusual.

Flashlight in hand, I plunged into the storm and worked my way across the pasture in the direction of the sound. On the far side, in the circle of light from the flash, I could make out Eunice, the huge, one-horned mother cow. Sheltered in the corral to await the imminent birth of her calf, she had somehow gotten out and sought a private place to give birth — unfortunately, on the brink of a steep bank fifteen feet above a flooded creek which raged through a ravine choked with poison oak and wild blackberry vines.

I raced to the spot and saw from trampled ground and smashed bushes what had happened. She had given birth. The calf, struggling to gain its feet, had slipped over the edge and plunged down the bank into the creek, then desperately tried to climb the sheer bank to get free of the water. Eunice had done all that she could, racing up and down the bank, bellowing and searching in vain for a way down. By the time I responded to her cries, the calf had been swept downstream beneath tangled vines and brambles.

Grabbing at limbs and bushes, I half fell, half stumbled down the sheer bank into the creek. Pushed by the rushing, icy water, I worked my way under and through the thickets and brambles. In a bend of the creek a hundred feet downstream, I spotted the exhausted calf fighting to keep its head above water. By the time I arrived, it had given up and was submerged. I pulled it onto a shelf of rocks beneath the mass of tangled growth and began pumping its ribs trying to eject water and assist its breathing. It was a magnificent, dark-red, bull calf, the hair on its flank a mass of curls, its soft hoofs torn and bleeding from efforts to climb the bank. It revived a little and began to kick and struggle. Pocketing the flashlight I managed to heave it across my shoulders and began a struggle upstream to the place where I had entered, and might have a chance to climb out.

What does a one-horned mother cow have to do with leadership? The answer requires a bit of reflection. Let’s begin with a few words about words. Words are only secondarily the means by which we communicate; they’re primarily the means by which we think. One can scarcely think or talk of organizations or management these days without coming across what leading thinkers from many disciplines believe will be the principal science of the next century: the understanding of autocatalytic, nonlinear, complex, adaptive systems, usually referred to as “complexity.”

The word is much too vague to describe such systems. After searching various lexicons in vain for a more suitable word, it seemed simpler to construct one. Since such systems, perhaps even life itself, are believed to arise and thrive on the edge of chaos with just enough order to give them pattern, I borrowed the first syllable of each, combined them and chaord (kayord) emerged.

By chaord, I mean any self-organizing, self governing, adaptive, nonlinear, complex organism, organization, community or system, whether physical, biological or social, the behavior of which harmoniously blends characteristics of both chaos and order. Loosely translated to business, it can be thought of as an organization that harmoniously blends characteristics of competition and cooperation; or from the perspective of education, an organization that seamlessly blends theoretical and experiential learning. As I learned from the formation and operation of Visa, an early archetype of such organizations, they require a much different consciousness about the leader/follower dichotomy.

Leader presumes follower. Follower presumes choice. One who is coerced to the purposes, objectives, or preferences of another is not a follower in any true sense of the word, but an object of manipulation. Nor is the relationship materially altered if both parties voluntarily accept the dominance of one by the other. A true leader cannot be bound to lead. A true follower cannot be bound to follow. The moment they are bound they are no longer leader or follower. If the behavior of either is compelled, whether by force, economic necessity, or contractual arrangement, the relationship is altered to one of superior/subordinate, manager/employee, master/servant, or owner/slave. All such relationships are materially different from leader/follower.

Induced behavior is the essence of leader/follower. Compelled behavior is the essence of all the other relational concepts. Where behavior is compelled, there you will find tyranny, however benign. Where behavior is induced, there you will find leadership, however powerful. Leadership does not necessarily imply constructive, ethical, open conduct. It is entirely possible to induce destructive, malign, devious behavior, and to do so by corrupt means. Therefore, a clear, constructive purpose and compelling ethical principles evoked from and shared by all participants should be the essence of every relationship in every institution.

A vital question is how to insure that those who lead are constructive, ethical, open, and honest. The answer is to follow those who behave in that manner. It comes down to both individual and collective sense of where and how people choose to be led. In a very real sense, followers lead by choosing where to be led. Where an organizational community will be led is inseparable from the shared values and beliefs of its members.

True leaders are those who epitomize the general sense of the community — who symbolize, legitimize and strengthen behavior in accordance with the sense of the community — who enable its shared purpose, values and beliefs to emerge and be transmitted. A true leader’s behavior is induced by the behavior of every individual choosing where to be led.

The important thing to remember is that true leadership and induced behavior have an inherent tendency to the good, while tyranny (dominator management) and compelled behavior have an inherent tendency to evil.

Over the years, I have had long discussions with thousands of people throughout many different organizations about management: aspirations to it, dissatisfaction with it, or confusion about it. To avoid ambiguity, I always ask each person to describe the single most important responsibility of any manager. The incredibly diverse responses always have one thing in common: they are downward-looking. Management inevitably is viewed as exercise of authority — with selecting employees, motivating them, training them, appraising them, organizing them, directing them, controlling them. That perception is mistaken.

The first and paramount responsibility of anyone who purports to manage is to manage self: one’s own integrity, character, ethics, knowledge, wisdom, temperament, words, and acts. It is a complex, unending, incredibly difficult, oft-shunned task. We spend little time and rarely excel at management of self precisely because it is so much more difficult than prescribing and controlling the behavior of others. However, without management of self no one is fit for authority no matter how much they acquire, for the more authority they acquire the more dangerous they become. It is the management of self that should occupy 50 percent of our time and the best of our ability. And when we do that, the ethical, moral and spiritual elements of management are inescapable.

Asked to identify the second responsibility of any manager, again people produce a bewildering variety of opinions, again downward-looking. Another mistake. The second responsibility is to manage those who have authority over us: bosses, supervisors, directors, regulators, ad infinitum. Without their consent and support, how can we follow conviction, exercise judgment, use creative ability, achieve constructive results or create conditions by which others can do the same? Managing superiors is essential. Devoting 25 percent of our time and ability to that effort is not too much.

Asked for the third responsibility, people become uncertain. Yet, their thoughts remain on subordinates. Mistaken again. The third responsibility is to manage one’s peers — those over whom we have no authority and who have no authority over us — associates, competitors, suppliers, customers — one’s entire environment if you will. Without their respect and confidence little or nothing can be accomplished. Our environment and peers can make a small heaven or hell of our life. Is it not wise to devote at least 20 percent of our time, energy, and ingenuity to managing them?

Asked for the fourth responsibility, people have difficulty coming up with an answer, for they are now troubled by thinking downward. However, if one has attended to self, superiors, and peers there is nothing else left. Obviously, the fourth responsibility is to manage those over whom we have authority. The common response is that all one’s time will be consumed managing self, superiors and peers. There will be no time to manage subordinates. Exactly! One need only select decent people, introduce them to the concept, induce them to practice it, and enjoy the process. If those over whom we have authority properly manage themselves, manage us, manage their peers, and replicate the process with those they employ, what is there to do but see they are properly recognized, rewarded — and stay out of their way?

It is not making better people of others that leadership is about. In today’s world effective leadership is chaordic. It’s about making a better person of self. Income, power and position have nothing to do with that. In fact, they often interfere with it.

The obvious question then always erupts. How do you manage superiors, bosses, regulators, associates, customers? The answer is equally obvious. You cannot. But can you understand them? Can you persuade them? Can you motivate them? Can you disturb them, influence them, forgive them? Can you set them an example? Eventually the proper word emerges. Can you lead them?

Of course you can, provided only that you have properly led yourself. There are no rules and regulations so rigorous, no organization so hierarchical, no bosses so abusive that they can prevent us from behaving this way. No individual and no organization, short of killing us, can prevent such use of our energy, ability, and ingenuity. They may make it more difficult, but they can’t prevent it. The real power is ours, not theirs, provided only that we can work our way around the killing.

It is easy to test this chaordic concept of leadership. Reflect a moment on group endeavors of which you are an observer rather than participant. If your interest runs to ballet, you can undoubtedly recall when the corps seemed to rise above the individual ability of each dancer and achieve a magical, seemingly effortless performance. If your interest runs to sports, the same phenomenon is apparent: teams whose performance transcends the ability of individuals. The same can be observed in the symphony, the theater, in fact, every group endeavor, including business and government.

Every choreographer, conductor, and coach — or for that matter, corporation president — has tried to distill the essence of such performance. Countless others have tried to explain and produce a mechanistic, measurably controlled process that will cause the phenomenon. It has never been done and it never will be. It is easily observed, universally admired, and occasionally experienced. It happens, but cannot be deliberately done. It is rarely long sustained but can be repeated. It arises from the relationships and interaction of those from which it is composed. Some organizations seem consistently able to do so, just as some leaders seem able to cause it to happen with consistency, even within different organizations.

To be precise, one cannot speak of leaders who cause organizations to achieve superlative performance, for no one can cause it to happen. Leaders can only recognize and modify conditions which prevent it; perceive and articulate a sense of community, a vision of the future, a body of principle to which people can become passionately committed, then encourage and enable them to discover and bring forth the extraordinary capabilities that lie trapped in everyone struggling to get out.

In the deepest sense, distinction between leaders and followers is meaningless. In every moment of life, we are simultaneously leading and following. There is never a time when our knowledge, judgment and wisdom are not more useful and applicable than that of another. There is never a time when the knowledge, judgment and wisdom of another are not more useful and applicable than ours. At any time that “other” may be superior, subordinate, or peer.

Everyone was born a leader. Who can deny that from the moment of birth they were leading parents, siblings, and companions? Watch a baby cry and the parents jump. We were all born leaders; that is, until we were sent to school and taught to be managed and to manage.

People are not “things” to be manipulated, labeled, boxed, bought, and sold. Above all else, they are not “human resources.” We are entire human beings, containing the whole of the evolving universe, limitless until we are limited, whether by self or others. We must examine the concept of leading and following with new eyes. We must examine the concept of superior and subordinate with increasing skepticism. We must examine the concept of management and labor with new beliefs. And we must examine the nature of organizations that demand such distinctions with an entirely different consciousness.

It is true leadership — leadership by everyone — chaordic leadership, in, up, around, and down that this world so badly needs, and industrial age, dominator management that it so sadly gets.

But what about Eunice, the one-horned cow? A frantic thirty minutes after shouldering the calf, I arrived, shaking, bruised and bleeding from cuts and scratches, at the bottom of the cut bank where the calf had tumbled in. Legs braced against the force of the rushing water, I paused to recover breath and strength before trying to clamber out. Suddenly, over the sound of pulse pounding in my ears, the rushing water, shrieking wind and pelting rain, from directly overhead came a furious, heart-stopping roar. In stark terror, I let go the calf’s front legs and fumbled for the flashlight. Another earth-shaking roar, then another. The light came on as I swung the beam in the direction of the sound.

What then happened in the middle of the night to Eunice, her calf and a panic stricken Homo Sapiens in a ditch need not be told, for that is not the point of the story. But for those who must find a moral in every story it is simply this: If your keep your wits about you, you can learn everything you need to know about leadership from a one-horned cow.

This is our fourth from a series of letters to President Bush reposted from EDGE. See: 1) Steven Pinker’s letter 2) Kevin Kelly’s letter 3) Daniel Goleman’s letter.

Dear President Bush

Seth Lloyd

Thank you for your invitation to advise you on matters of science. Science is after all the most public form of knowledge.

Scientific knowledge consists exactly of those pieces of information that can in principle be verified by anyone with the tools and desire to do so.

My advice to our highest elected official is to keep science public. Secret knowledge, no matter how laboriously acquired, is less than science.

Some knowledge, of course, must remain secret for the security of the nation. Do not have the National Security Administration publish its cryptographic keys.

But unless there is a clear security risk, publish all else. Why? Science belongs to the public: they pay for it; they benefit from it. The benefits of scientific knowledge accrue far more rapidly when that knowledge lies open for all to see, to test, and to try.

Your administration has presided over some good examples of the benefits of open dissemination of scientific knowledge. I will restrict my attention to my own field of quantum computation.

Quantum computers are devices that store information at the level of atoms, and that process that information in a way that respects the wave like nature of quantum mechanics. Quantum mechanics is famously weird, and one of the consequences of quantum weirdness is that even a small quantum computer, consisting of a few thousand atoms, would be able to break all existing public-key cryptosystems.

By their potential power, quantum computers pose a significant threat to the security not only of classified encoded material, but to the security of most commercial transactions, in particular those that take place electronically. Despite the clear application of quantum computation to problems of national security, your security agencies have elected to pursue the majority of their research on quantum computers by open competition for public funds, under the stipulation that the results of the research be published and made available to all.

This is a wise course. Although potentially highly disruptive, quantum computers are hard to build. Large-scale quantum computation is a decade away, at least. To construct such large-scale quantum computers will require the scientific and engineering community to solve wide-ranging problems of nanofabrication and control. The solutions to such problems will have wide application in the design and manufacture of high precision, high-power technologies across the board. The potential benefits of such research are a thousand times greater than any drawback from potential disruption to security.

By keeping the science public, your agencies are dramatically speeding the development not only of quantum computers, but of a wide variety of other quantum technologies, ranging from enhanced lithography to more accurate atomic clocks, to precise global positioning. The frontier of the very small offers huge space for development: keep this frontier open to all.

Science is public knowledge. But science is not the only field where openness is important. The security failures of 9/11 were caused not by too little, but by too much secrecy. And the discussions that form public policy should be public.

I know that other advisors are offering you conflicting advice: keep your cards close to your chest—don’t let our enemies (or our allies) benefit from our hard-earned knowledge. Don’t listen to them. Science isn’t poker: it only works when the cards are dealt face up. Don’t go down in history as the Texan who closed the scientific frontier.

Copyright ©2003 Edge

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Humanity’s Crisis

a dialogue with Arthur Noll and Timothy Wilken, MD 

As I have written elsewhere, it is a complete waste of time to expect big government and big business to help us. They are the problem. They are invested in a model of society that depends on separation and scarcity. Big government wants only to get re-elected and big business wants only to make a buck. Together they completely dominate our current political-economic system by their reality of one dollar = one vote.

They cannot solve our human crisis. They don’t have a clue. They can only make it worse. It’s up to us. We can only rely on ourselves. We need individuals of integrity to join with us to build a new model of society that depends on co-Operation and abundance. And, by abundance I am referring to an abundance of integrity, intelligence  and responsibility. Then we can begin restructuring our society in ways that will lead to a relative abundance of matter-energy even within the finite world we inhabit.

Modern society is currently ruled by a political-economic  system that is controlled and determined only by money. One dollar = One vote.

2) There are neutral products. The use of these products are without benefit or harm. The users of these products would be equally happy, equally effective, and equally productive without the use the product.

Scott Meridith writing on the Energy Research Group , an internet discussion group in March and April of 2001:

“For example, I’ve often observed that the entire global “soft drink” industry could and would be eliminated in any rational world, as this is a collossal waste of energy and resources, with only two outcomes:

- a brief and mildly pleasurable stupefaction of the senses
- tooth decay

“So, is the energy involved in the soft drink industry doing “useful work” or not? From a rational point of view, obviously no. Completely and absolutely useless. Just rots your teeth. Now calculate how much energy it uses, in all aspects, and how many people it directly indirectly employs.”

A neutral product is one that has no effect on the happiness, effectiveness, and productivity of the user of the product. No one wins. No one loses. Neutral products are of no benefit for humanity.

Since these neutral products have no benefit, buying them is a complete waste of time, energy, and resources. So don’t buy neutral products.

3) There are adversary products. The use of these products are harmful. The users of adversary products are less happy, less effective and less productive than they would be without the use of the product. An adversary product is one that reduces the happiness, effectiveness, and productivity of the user of the product. The user loses, and even worse everyone else loses. I lose, you lose, others lose, and the Earth loses. Adversary products are bad for humanity.

Don’t buy adversary products.

I am often asked, “What I can do to help. How can I make the world work better for all humanity.” All of us could develop our own Buy/Don’t Buy lists.

Apparently human intelligence scientist Daniel Coleman agrees with me. Read our third from a series of letters to President Bush reposted from EDGE. See: 1) Steven Pinker’s letter 2) Kevin Kelly’s letter.

Dear President Bush

Daniel Goleman

One large set of pressing problems our nation and the world face—ranging from growing rates of childhood asthma to global warming—stem in large part from a shared root cause: the cumulative impacts of our habits of consumption. The asthma and global warming, for example, both stem largely from the build-up in the air of particulates from the production (through, say, coal-burning power plants) of the energy we use in our homes and the exhaust of autos. Yet most of us make little or no connection between our own buying habits and concerns like our children’s asthma or the warming of the planet.

The reason: Virtually none of us can give a precise answer to the question,”What are the impacts for health, the environment, our planet’s resources, the gap between rich and poor, of the products we buy? The answers are potentially available, but now are hidden by a fog about the consequences for ourselves and the world of our own actions as consumers.

Yet the multiplier effect—the vast number of people who buy those same products—creates a vast network of inadvertent, adverse consequences. This goes on because we have little or no information about the hidden links between what we buy, and how it impacts our world, our health, our climate, our children. So those of us who complain about or suffer from these problems still continue to be part of their very cause.

My proposal: surface the hidden links between what we buy and the consequential impacts of those products. Then let consumers make choices based on this new information—in a sense,”voting” every time we purchase goods—and let the power of the free market, rather than government policy alone, become a force for improvement.

So, Mr. President, I urge you to deploy the forces necessary to fill in the hidden links between the goods we consume and their impact in the world. Then create a website that consumers could access at the point of purchase—perhaps by passing a palm pilot-like device over the barcode to get to the product-relevant area of the website.

That website should provide immediate data comparing a product to others in its category on any of several dimensions, such as working conditions in factories where components or the product was manufactured; wages (weighted for national norms, etc.); how much energy was used in producing and transporting the product to market; impact on the environment of its production (this alone involves multiple factors, from industrial byproducts like heavy metals and other toxins, to polluting micro-particles); and so on.

Ideally, consumers could determine which of such dimensions were most important in their personal decision to purchase, and so have a built-in logarithm that would pop out the best choices as they wander down the aisles of a store.

As we’ve seen in the diamond industry—with the industry wide effort to certify the source of diamonds to keep from market “blood” diamonds that finance corrupt regimes and civil wars in Africa—consumer preferences can become forces for social, political, environmental and economic good. But this can only be only true if consumers become aware of links that are now hidden.

Such transparency could alter the buying habits of substantial numbers of consumers, and so create a new marketing advantage for some companies. Ethically driven (or simply nimble) companies could find market advantage in becoming the”good guys” in their category, and so gain market share. This could then open up an entirely new arena for competition between companies, creating a financial incentive to find ways to improve the environmental; health, and other consequences of everything from their manufacturing processes to their wage structures.

Of course, gathering the required data poses a formidable task. It can begin modestly, focusing on the easier dimensions of information. But ultimately filling in the missing links could require a Manhattan Project-like intensity of research, that would draw on findings from fields as diverse as industrial engineering and sociology, environmental sciences and economics, biochemistry and systems theory. It might also require the creation of an impartial body to gather and vet the data—something like a mega-Consumer Reports. Perhaps a new cabinet post for transparency, Mr. President?

Copyright ©2003 Edge

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More about Daniel Goleman

This is our second from a series of letters to President Bush reposted from EDGE. See: 1) Steven Pinker’s letter

Dear President Bush

Kevin Kelly

Thank you for your confidence in me. Here are the three things you should encourage; these are neglected by our current science policy:

1) Develop Long Term Science.

Most science experiments, clinical studies, and data collection lasts about 4 years—the duration of a graduate student. Most problems we have before us last for generations. Science, like business, has been totally captured by the next quarter mentality, and it will require a deliberate effort to stress the long view so that our knowledge matches our predicament. Long-term studies can begin to alleviate much of our ignorance of climatic, environmental, health, social, and biological issues.

2) Foster a Global View.

While the United States is among the nations leading the world in monitoring and mapping its own territory, most of the world has not been mapped. We, as humans, lack a sufficient survey of the geology, habitat, weather, and biological diversity of our home planet. For instance we have identified as few as 5% of all the species living on earth. A detailed map of the planet, which would include geological assets, urban impacts, ecological assessments, and detailed cartographic information would be invaluable to business, military intelligence, social work, and peace and prosperity, at the very least, to the US. As it is we are trying to run a planet with only a dim sense of what it is.

3) Fund Blue Sky Work.

US universities were once renowned for funding work that could not possibly pay off for ten years or more. Much of university research was pure research that had no obvious application at all at the time of its funding. In an effort to weed out seemingly frivolous work that might wind up as a headline in a supermarket tabloid, a lot of bold research has simply been dropped. Research is now expected to show results quickly, and to fit into return on investment curves developed by business. This may be good for business, and maybe even for government in the short term, but it is disastrous for science, especially in the long term. Some federally funded research should aim for a ten- or even 25-year result horizon. This would create the strongest possible science culture.

These three things could be implemented without substantially increasing the science budget, although that is always a good idea.

Copyright ©2003 Edge

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