 Things
are the way they are for a reason. I know I keep saying that, but it's
true: If we want to change anything, we need first to understand why it
is the way it is. The answer, more often than not, is human nature. Or
more precisely, in very large organizations, the collective nature of
thousands of people. And in the world as a whole, the collective nature
of billions of people. If humanity were but a tiny group, scattered
pockets across the globe, and reasonably well-connected, we could and
would probably change rather quickly.
Paradoxically, however, if
that were the case, we probably woudn't need to. Our species is like
the Titanic or the Exxon Valdez -- far too massive and unwieldy for our
own (or anyone else's) good. The more there are of us, and the greater
our footprint, our collective action on the planet, the harder it
becomes to steer us in a different direction from the one our horrific
momentum is taking us in, the harder it begins to overcome the inertia
needed to even think about changing direction on a global scale. When
our organization or civilization is small, and someone comes up with a
credible, compelling model of a better way of doing things, we can
simply nod and adopt or adapt that model. That is how most
organizations began, full of hope, following one model or another that
sounded magnificent at the outset but soon becomes a victim of its own
success -- the model just doesn't scale well, and modern humans have
this propensity to grow and centralize and increase things until the
model becomes dysfunctional and breaks down completely. That's happened
to every organization and every civilization in human history.
If
size is the enemy, of organizations and of civilizations, it is also,
in the human way of doing things, inexorable. Rather than throwing up
our hands and letting the ship crash when it gets too big to handle, we
need to understand why it is human nature to demand that perfectly wonderful small organizations and civilizations grow (and, what's worse, become increasingly hierarchical). And then we need to find some humanly natural
way to allow these small organizations to stay small, and to allow
large organizations and our Godzilla-sized civilization to become small
and workable again. Is that too much to ask? After all, we fancy
ourselves pretty smart creatures. And although we do have an addiction
to power and wealth and consumption and debt, we also seem to have an
instinctive revulsion to other people having too much power, to
tyranny, to gross inequity of wealth (aka poverty), to stealing our
children's future, and even to the destruction of nature. Those
addictions have been exploited by those with great wealth and power to
try to hold on to that wealth and power. That's not to sat that those
with wealth and power are ogres -- beneath the apparent greed and
paranoia and violent defence of the status quo they are as much addicts of their possessions and prisoners of our civilization as the rest of us.
What
is it about human nature that drives us to want to grow beyond
reasonable limits? What is it about human nature that makes us so
susceptible to addiction to things that are ultimately no good for us?
Did nature or evolution screw up in imbuing our species with
self-defeating ambition and addiction?
Australian reader and blogger John McCann writes (emphasis, and square-parentheses comments mine):
I
am interested in your observations on why there is so little innovation
in most organisations today (as someone who has tried to sell
innovative ideas from within organisations for several years
unsuccesfully). I agree absolutely that it's not for lack of creative
talent within organisations, or information washing around both within
and around the organisation. I agree that organisations are not set up
to 'tap' that creativity, but that is more a symptom than a cause, and
the cause I think gets back to the other point you mention -
management's lack of trust, and the 'steady as she goes attitude' that
says 'if it ain't broke don't fix it'.
I've come to the view that organisations have a natural (and almost inevitable) 'inertia' which is (paradoxically) driven by their success. Whatever works very well (some new or cheaper product, or a captive market) tends to, over time, make the the organisation risk- and change-averse.
This flies in the face of logic, but while I agree that organisations
are 'not stupid', they are not always rational. Of course the
organisation 'in crisis' should (if one accepts this argument) be far
more willing to 'innovate' their way out of trouble - except that
organisational crisis usually results in a very standard response of
shedding staff. Time and time again I've seen this process 'depopulate'
organisations of the very best creative talent - even seen
organisations ditch these people overboard deliberately as they were
seen as 'non-core'.
At the end of the day I think if we are
looking for innovation we'll find it in the wreckage of companies that
have collapsed [they're once again small], and in start-up companies
[while they're still small] - situations where individual talent and
creativity have a chance to 'stand out' from corporate mediocracy and
aversion to change.
There is now overwhelming evidence that
life on our planet, the human species to some extent excluded, operates
as a single, coordinated, self-regulating organism. Why should this be
so, rather than the savage, selfish and self-interested world most of
us were taught we live in? Simple -- because it works.
As we are learning, dangerously late, our planet is a hugely variable
and often life-hostile place, and the best way to protect and optimize
life on this place is to create an atmosphere
(in both senses of the word) that regulates the planet's extremes and
gives life more time to adapt to changes. This has taken billions of
years of work and careful trial-and-error experimentation to get right,
and it is an astonishing accomplishment, sustained only by
collaboration, cooperation, and lots of diversity to keep it agile and
adaptable when catastrophes like meteor strikes and sun-obliterating
volcanic eruptions and ice ages caused by minor perturbations in the
planet's rotation occur.
A species that becomes ambitious,
and refuses to participate in this extraordinary and never-ending
balancing act, is, like a cancer, a huge threat to the whole
Earth-organism, and of course to itself as a part of that organism. A
species that becomes addicted to things that are not good for it, to
the point it becomes fragile, violently hostile to others who threaten
its supply of that to which it is addicted, and disconnected from the
Earth- organism, is likewise a huge threat to the whole of life on the
planet and to itself.
So how did humanity get to this point? How
did the ever-adapting and self-regulating Earth-organism allow itself
to create a monster that now threatens its creator's survival? A number
of studies have been done that show, in ant colonies for example, how rhythmic
order (in the best interest of the whole) emerges out of (apparent)
chaos, and how self-organization and self-regulation (with no need for
hierarchy or top-down control) naturally
produces the best result for the greatest number. Some companies, like
WL Gore and Semco, have replicated this model, and when the embedded
hierarchical behaviours humans have learned over the past 30,000 years
can be shaken off, it seems to work well. But most people describe such
a model, whether for an organization or a state, as anarchy, and they use the term disparagingly. But anarchy literally means 'without established political control' -- no one in charge, i.e. self-regulation.
What
has caused our species to depart from this evolutionary successful
'rules' of self-regulation and, along with cancers and a few other
rogue species, replace these rules with single-minded, selfish and
ultimately unsustainable 'human-made' rules, and to continue the folly
of following these rules for 30,000 years despite overwhelming evidence
still staring us in the face that the much, much older self-regulating
rule-set is sustainable and healthier for all? If it's our ambition, or
our addiction, how was this allowed to occur? When Ronald Wright wryly says
If we fail -- if we blow up
or degrade the biosphere so it can no longer sustain us -- nature will
merely shrug and conclude that letting apes run the laboratory was fun
for a while but in the end a bad idea.
how can we account for nature having such a "bad idea" in the first place?
In Arthur C Clarke's book and movie 2001: A Space Odyssey
he introduces the idea that human civilization was 'suggested' to us by
an alien 'monolith'. I haven't read enough of Clarke's work to know if
there is a reason the monolith -- literally a massive, rigid, uniform
object -- is chosen as the 'model' for civilization. Was Clarke saying
that size, inflexibility and homogeneity (all of them undesirable
qualities in a self-regulating planetary organism) are inevitable
elements of any civilization?
I don't happen to believe that
civilization, and humans' contrarian way of trying to run the world,
are the result of alien (or for that matter, divine) influence. The
invention of the wedge (the arrowhead and spear) was a perfectly
understandable evolutionary adaptation by a species that necessarily
had a large brain (without evolving a large brain we would never have
survived, since our 'natural' survival tools -- speed, sharpness of
teeth and claws, reflexes, sensory acuity -- are pretty pathetic by
nature's standards). Ravens, another species that evolved a big brain
because it had to to survive, use curved hooks routinely to dig prey
out of hard-to-reach areas. As a consequence of the arrow and spear, we
quickly decimated the numbers of the large predators upon which our
survival depended (helped in part by the onset of ice ages), and as a
result the only alternative to extinction was to invent agriculture and
animal farming, which Jared Diamond has sarcastically called "the worst mistake in the history of the human race".
Agriculture
was the genesis of the "bad idea" of civilization, because it wasn't
(and isn't) suited to a self-regulating, 'anarchic' species or a
self-regulating world. For agriculture (and the subsequent development
of industrialization) to 'work' requires that people specialize, and
that the land 'specialize' in the growing or grazing of one crop or
food animal. We had to give up our self-sufficiency, our personal
autonomy, and become, for the first time, utterly dependent on many
other humans doing other specialized tasks that dovetailed with our
own. If one group abandoned their work and returned to an 'uncivilized'
natural gatherer-hunter lifestyle (which could no longer support the
number of humans that were living at that time) the entire pyramid of
the new civilization would collapse. Therefore, specialization had to
become mandatory. I have written elsewhere how all this led to
hierarchy, the genocide of 'competing' predators and 'farm pests',
political states, state warfare, overpopulation and all the other
consequences that civilization has bestowed upon us, but it's not hard
to see how, once we started down this path, there was no going back --
nor why we had no alternative but to start down that path.
One
could speculate that, had we been able to invent the Internet before we
invented agriculture, civilization might never have been necessary.
When agriculture and civilization began, there was simply no
alternative 'self-regulatory' way to get large groups of people to
cooperate and specialize and trade with others. We had no language to
convey this sophisticated need at the time anyway (language and
mathematics were invented because agriculture and civilization needed
them for hierarchical instruction and centralized planning). Had we
invented sophisticated language for self-expression, and communication
tools that would allow large and physically disparate groups to network
and self-organize much earlier, we might have been able to create a
non-hierarchical self-regulating system that would have allowed us to
prosper as a species without the need for slaves to work the fields,
without the need for political states, without the need for war and
laws and prisons and other tools to perpetuate the fragile
civilizations that we found counter-intuitive and which encroached so
much on our freedom.
We soon found that it was useful (for
keeping people in line) that many of the artifacts of civilization were
addictive, physically and psychologically. We found that, in
hierarchical systems, the bigger the better -- more slaves at the
bottom to leverage, more built-in redundancy, and less competition. We
found, too, that this strange, man-made construct, so different from
everything in nature, gave us an evolutionary advantage -- it appeared
to support more people per square mile than 'natural' systems, and
power brought more power and wealth brought more wealth, to the point
we really believed we had 'improved' on nature. And after a few
generations, the essential survival skills for self-sufficient living
had been lost, so we could not go back to a pre-civilization
self-regulating lifestyle even if we wanted to -- we were prisoners of
our own invention.
It is not surprising, then, that as our
economy evolved, economic organizations used as their model not the
'anarchic' self-regulating model of nature but the hierarchical,
command-and-control specialization model of the political state.
I
doubt that we have either the time or, with our current massive
numbers, and our civilization's huge momentum in some areas and inertia
in others, the adaptability, to evolve our political system (forward, not
back) to a self-regulating, networked, natural model. I am less certain
that the economic system we have developed cannot evolve forward to
such a model.
There is a lot of attention being paid now to
aspects of just such a self-regulating, networked, natural economic
model: Entrepreneurship, the starting of one's own business, is finally
getting the attention it deserves (thanks to the fact the corporate
giants have, for ROI reasons, stopped hiring) and, as John points out
above, innovation can thrive in such businesses, giving them an
enormous competitive advantage over the corporate giants, to offset the
giants' enormous political and wealth advantage. The Internet offers
the promise of allowing vast self-regulating networks of entrepreneurs
to self-organize and collaborate while staying small and agile, and to
get their message and products out to billions of customers
increasingly dissatisfied with the monolithic (had to use that word
somewhere in this essay!), shoddy, remote and overpriced offerings of
the giant corporate oligopolies. And the emergence of the Gift Economy,
where human generosity and technology are allowing people to provide
other people with many things for free, can also powerfully disrupt the
ideology that nothing has value unless it is paid for, upon which
absurd measures like GDP and absurd prices charged by greedy
corporations for essential goods like medicines rely for their
perpetuation.
So I see a World of Ends
as the future of business, a world made up of hundreds of millions of
sustainable (changing but not growing) entrepreneurial businesses
giving away and selling at modest prices high-quality, personalized,
healthy, socially and environmentally responsible, innovative, mostly
locally-made products and services, as part of a vast self-regulated
economy where the customers -- the people
(let's not call them 'consumers') call the shots. It could be the real
'market' economy we always dreamed of and have so long deluded
ourselves we actually had. And the giant corporations, even with the
subsidies and payoffs from politicians, won't have the agility to
survive it.
I'm skeptical that innovation and technology can
get us out of the other messes we've created for ourselves
(overpopulation, overuse of resources, political subjugation and
environmental destruction etc.), but an economy that is resilient,
sustainable and really focused on people's needs would certainly be a
step in the right direction.
Things are the way they are for a
reason. Yes, we've gotten to where we are now because of "the worst
mistake" in our history and because of a "bad idea", but at the time,
we had no alternative except extinction. We did what we had to do. But
today we do have
alternatives. The answer is not to deny that the way we live now is
massively destructive and unsustainable. The answer is not to assume
that the only way we still know how to live is the only way to live.
And the answer is not to try to go back: Neoprimitivism is just
romantic folly. The answer, the only real option available to us now, is to evolve forward,
quickly, to innovate a whole new economy by merging the empowering new
technology of our age with the wisdom of natural models that have
always been with us, showing us how to allow egalitarian
self-organization and sensitive self-regulation to emerge out of
complexity and chaos, for the benefit of us all.
'Fare forward, you who think that you are voyaging;
You are not those who saw the harbour
Receding, or those who will disembark.
Here between the hither and the farther shore
While time is withdrawn, consider the future
And the past with an equal mind.
At the moment which is not of action or inaction
You can receive this: "on whatever sphere of being
The mind of a man may be intent
At the time of death"—that is the one action
(And the time of death is every moment)
Which shall fructify in the lives of others:
And do not think of the fruit of action.
Fare forward.
O voyagers, O seamen,
You who came to port, and you whose bodies
Will suffer the trial and judgement of the sea,
Or whatever event, this is your real destination.'
So Krishna, as when he admonished Arjuna
On the field of battle.
Not fare well,
But fare forward, voyagers.
-- TS Eliot, The Four Quartets |
MADE IN CANADA
trust your
instincts 
