Accordingly a free (unregulated) market is the answer to everything, since it is the mechanism affording unfettered self-interested action that makes for the invisible hands to do their work.  What’s the solution to our economic crisis? Allow the self-interest of those with the most—the winners—to be enacted without constraint and in so doing it will help the rest of us be winners—ah the wonders of the invisible hand doing their trickle-down thing.  What’s the solution to our educational problems?  Enable profit-seeking organizations to provide an educational experience to society’s children.  What’s the solution to our healthcare system problem?  Put healthcare in the hands of profit maximizing insurance and pharmaceutical companies.  In general what’s the answer to how to provide society’s services (apart from national defense) to its citizens?  Privatize, because the business minded can solve it all!  That is except for the many recurring problems in business they themselves create and can’t quite resolve.

Only the foolish seriously expect to realize improvement by intensifying commitment and effort toward the very same thing that created or caused the current situation.  Doubling down on a losing hand is losing strategy—it is sure way to accelerate loss.  Or as the tribal wisdom of the Dakota Indians asserts, “when you discover you are riding a dead horse, the best strategy is to dismount.” For example (staying with the Dakota Indian analogy) in business we get a stronger whip by raising standards, holding people accountable and exhorting others to get better results.  Since we are seeking to turn educating children into a business we employ the same but stronger whip—we double down.  We even go further and hire outside firms to ride the horse (we put education in the hands of profit-maximizing organizations).  Not surprisingly, with our market-based solutions to education we see no real lasting improved system of education.

It’s Heresy

Those who question capitalism—those who think critically about it and want to improve it—are heretics, heathens and worse socialists.  Unless you fall in line, you fall out of favor! If you can’t credibly argue the veracity of your belief—if you haven’t facts to support your argument—then the only recourse is to disparage those who bring it into question. Thus name-calling is clearly a reactive response in defense of an unsupportable position.

Who are the ones disparaging those who seek a better way?  Usually it is those who benefit (most) from the way things are.  So it is a good idea to challenge the real motive of those calling people who ask ‘what if questions’ heretics.

Be a Heretic

Yet because of the power of and propaganda from those benefiting from the way things are and not critically thinking about the why of things, our past continues to overtake our future. The habits of thought we’ve been following are no longer serving our collective interest—they are not serving society as a whole.  We must acknowledge that the fundamental set of beliefs and practices that we have embraced are no longer helpful toward guiding behavior and structuring life in society.   If we wish a better reality, then we need to enact a better belief system.

Where is it proven as an immutable fact that people are at base selfish?  If this was so, how do you explain people risking their life to save others—doesn’t this smack right up against self-interest? Where is it proven to be an immutable fact that markets require short-term profit maximization as the dominant motive? We can only change what is by changing how we think about ourselves. If we wish to experience a better reality, then we need to enact a better belief system.  Its time we change our errant ways.

Our economic system has no (explicit) concern for ‘we’ in its design, it is all about ‘me’ getting what I can for ‘myself’—it is best labeled an egoistic economic system.  The pursuit of material self-interest is the guiding principle for all action.

It promotes (and requires) a belief system about what being human means that is narrow and thus limiting.  That is, it rests upon people believing they are at base individualistic, selfish, materialistic and competitive.

As discussed in It’s the EconoMe, Stupid, society to the egoist is “nothing but the sum of the actions of each individual; it is nothing apart from what each individual separately contributes to it” and what one can extract from others.

Making Society In Service

While most acknowledge that democracy is of, for and by the people, it’s objective is also to afford individual freedom in life in the pursuit of liberty and happiness. Since democracy is about having a society of free individuals it is rather easy to mold it into a system in service to egoistic economics.  That is, given the focus on individual freedom and without a similar compelling vision of a collective ‘we’—everyone’s responsibility to each other, to community—democracy is easily hijacked by self-interest.  Everyone believing in self-interest is not the same as people having a shared common interest.

Happiness when viewed through the lens of egoistic economics becomes the egotistical ‘Me’ having ultimate freedom to maximize ‘My’ profit. The story is that if you do what is expected, if you work hard in striving to maximize your material self-interest then you too will realize happiness.  If you don’t realize happiness then it is your fault, after all as the story goes we are all independent individuals each seeking our own gain. You’re on your own and should be lovin it! (That is if you are among the few who can win.) While this is an alluring story, it is also a foolish story to believe.

Think Again, Critically

Just a little inquisitiveness and critical analysis with an open mind would reveal that no one ever got what they have without the cooperation and help of others.  Each individual would be lost without the support and help of  ‘We’.

Thus we understand that life in society is not simply a collection of independent individuals bumping into each other as each exercises their notion of individual liberty to have it all for ‘Me’. The fact is that we need each other for more than the satisfaction of our material desires. We are not simply instrumental to each other’s needs. While our economic system would have us believe this for the sake of maximizing our self-interested desire to consume we are not mere cogs in this machinery.

It is a fact that each is an individual whole person and just as factual each is part of the whole of human society. That is, while you and I are different individual ‘I’s’ we are not separate ‘Me’s’.  This ‘I’ that I am and the ‘I’ that you are are deeply connected. And by acknowledging and acting on this connection we can become a ‘We’.  In our society we can sustain the unity implied by us being in this particular society.

Accordingly, we each must recognize our I-We nature and the dual responsibility that this implies.  Forsaking either one we forsake our self.  We have a very deep interpenetrating responsibility to each other’s unfolding, and therefore each of us is incomplete without each other.  As noted by Amitai Etzioni “the I’s need We to be” (The Moral Dimension). To treat anything collective with contempt is to disdain human society itself; the same can be said about the individual.  Moreover, with morality and ethics requiring a concern for ‘we’ a society of individuals where ‘me and mine’ is what’s important would find it impossible to avoid becoming an unethical society.

To hear people speak disparagingly about ‘those people who rely on society’s assistance’—you know the poor who have not gotten ahead on their own—you would think that they themselves took no help from society whatsoever.  They seem unable to understand that if not for society—especially the government policies written to favor their interests—the current gains they enjoy would not exist.  They wouldn’t have so much to love about ‘your on your own economics’ if the politicians they paid for hadn’t helped them to make the vast majority of gains derived from society their gain.

The collusion among moneyed interests and government—private business and political parties—is tantamount to injecting steroids into self-interested behavior.  It is nothing short of pure greed.  But in the context of egoistic economic society greed is good; the 1987 movie character, Gordon Gekko, and his 21^st century real life incarnates on Wall Street tell us it is so.  It is because of greed that the drive for getting and having goes forever unsatisfied ensuring a consuming and acquisitive society.  This has transformed what could have been a society of equals in regards to political power into a system for maximizing gain for a select group.

With money equating to speech, those with the most money overwhelmingly have the most say; the converse being those with the least money have the least say.  When money matters the people with money matter more!

It Can Be Better

In a culture that’s all about me getting it all for me, it is a bit naive to believe that those who rigged the system to serve their material self-interest will actually change things for the benefit of everyone.  You see the system is not at all broken, it is working just fine doing what it is rigged to do.  It is not that those in authority don’t know what to do to right the ship: It is that they haven’t the will to do what is right for the benefit of all.  We mustn’t forget that universal care and compassion is anathema to the greedy.

What we are facing is a self-imposed crisis of will.  We participate in the creation of our reality by acting on what we believe about our selves.  Having the will to change enables our ability to change. Where there is a will there is (always) a way also implies where there is no will there is no way.

Preserving What Is

In a self-interest based culture most people’s concern is a narrow (self-interest) concern.  Appealing to the general narrowness of concern among the citizens political parties readily gain support from various self-interest groups by creating fear among the people that their interest is at risk.  Such a strategy tends to be divisive (it creates an ‘us versus them’ mentality) which is exactly what those seeking to control the thinking of their audience requires.  If I can get you to think other citizens are detrimental to your interest and that I am on your side then you will support me, which is in my interest—after all my interest is what I really care about.  Facts must not get in the way of ‘me’ getting ‘mine’.

Political campaigns have devolved into medicine shows where each seeking election is selling his/her brand of snake oil while at the same time casting opponents and their supporters as the enemy as they play upon the fears of the audience’s narrow self-interest.  So election after election, congressional session after congressional session nothing fundamentally really changes.   It is the same wine in a different bottle.

So the assumption of egoistic economics (which guides the functioning of American society) that if you attend first and foremost to your self-interest—in the extreme holding supreme your liberty to do as your self-interest desires—then eventually and unintentionally everyone will benefit is at best clearly false and at worst destructive to society.  If America is the United States, then what is it that they are united about?  What is it that unites them?

The Root of It All

So what’s the problem with American democracy?  Egoistic economics is the problem! Self-interest can’t possibly unite!  Having only concern for me and mine is not the way to a well functioning sustainable human society—it is more the making of an unruly unethical collection of divisive groups.  Each seeking self gain does not lead to a unified effort toward a future better than the present.

Organizations that are sustainable are not designed and managed this way, so why would anyone believe society without a unifying vision that binds people together would have a chance of sustaining itself?  A wise businessperson would not even try to design and manage an organization wherein everyone is out for him or herself and where no one has concern for and commitment to the collective known as the organization.

It should be quite clear that a functioning viable society must advocate equally for individual and community—for the ‘I’s’ and ‘We’—since they are complimentary (and necessary) components of a wholesome society.

For more than 30 years there has been a downward trend in the household income of the vast majority of people (yes the 99%) while the income of the remaining 1% trended upward.  Fortunately for the remaining 1% benefiting from this widening income gap, the gradual decline (i.e. year-to-year incremental change) in real income among the majority of citizens went largely undetected—people didn’t realize how hot the water is getting.

Gradualism Abruptly Ended

However the greed among the 1% who created the mortgage-based casino game to feed their addiction to ever increasing monetary gain led to the disastrous 2008 financial collapse.  It punctuated what had been an insidious trend.  Accordingly what had been previously tolerated and/or unnoticed was now brought to the conscious awareness of a sizable portion of the 99%–all of a sudden it got a lot hotter.

Because of capitalism’s grounding in material self-interest maximization, this situation and situations like this are inevitable.  The insatiability of material gain—one can never have enough—and the auto-correlative nature of competition—winners are most likely to win next time—make for the perfect storm.  This is especially the case in a society wherein the wealthy has the greater voice.

Since the 1% really needs the cooperation of the 99% for their game playing to continue, it is now up to the frog.  Does the frog continue in the same body of water—continue cooperating in the same system—with only the promise from those—the 1% winners—in control of the temperature that they won’t do it again? Does the frog demand that those in control of the temperature be constrained in the changes that can be made to the temperature?  Does the frog demand that the control of the temperature be taken out of the hands of the 1%?  Does the frog demand that a different body of water—a different system—be provided that would ensure a livable environment for all to enjoy?

To continue saying that it is broken suggests that all that is needed is a little repair when in fact what is needed is critical thinking: It is a fundamentally flawed system that has infiltrated the very workings of democracy.

In the existing system our choices range between unfairness and fraud, from a little greed to a lot of greed.  Greed won’t allow itself to be regulated: Such an idea runs counter to its very essence!

Thus, if the Occupy movement allows itself to be colonized by a political party—beware of the demagogues—then it will render itself ineffective toward calling for and facilitating fundamental change.

If we are to have a serious conversation, then that conversation can’t begin with the aim of fixing a broken system, it must begin with the intent of revolutionizing the system.  What is required is a majority that continually challenges the status quo by asking what if things don’t have to be as they are.

You see no matter how corrupt the system, it does require the cooperation of the people adversely impacted for the system to continue as it is.  So squelching or disparaging protesters increases the likelihood that cooperation will continue.  However, once a critical mass stops going along with the way things are, then what can be becomes probable.  Hence the power of non-violent movements!

However the price one pays for his/her education should be commensurate with the ability that his/her education provides him/her to pay for it while at the same time affording the necessities of a healthy life.  But the value of learning is not solely for the money it affords.  Learning is far more fundamental and essential to the human condition than that! That is to say, we shouldn’t educate people for the sole purpose of providing labor to feed the economic system we must educate to develop human beings—if we intend to have a humanly productive society.

Which brings us to the issue of improving the quality of education.  The many solutions offered thus far are grossly off the mark!  Union busting is likely a tactic in support of the desire to privatize the system, to enable profiteering.  This will not ensure quality any more than it has ensured the quality of the products and services we purchase from private corporations.  Also blaming teachers (i.e. the worker) for poor quality, a common practice of American management, will not result in improved quality.

Of course teachers change student’s lives, but so too does everyone else and everything they interact with—like parents, society and community culture. The way to a value-added system of education is not through union busting or accountability for results or any other such reductionist tactic.  The way to an improved system is through an unwavering commitment to quality—period.

A ‘what if question’ is the key to unlocking and opening one’s mind to other possibilities.  So those participating in Occupy Wall Street are calling for new thinking that will lead to a better future for all, and not just a select few.

There are people who benefit from the way things are, so ideas that require change will always have resistors.  Consequently there are those who can’t think anew, who can’t or won’t entertain the possibilities of what thinking anew might bring.  Why?  Likely they can’t bear the thought of giving up what they gain from the way things are, even if the new idea will benefit everyone in the long run.  So they pursue thoughts of why we can’t change what is, thus diminishing the likelihood of things changing.  Further, those who are really consumed by fear disparage and demonize those calling for change in an effort gain support for their resistance.

This is often experienced in organizations.  Many never even recognize the need to change because those in authority become so attached to the idea of what they’ve been that they can’t think (imagine) about being anything else.  For example Kodak, the leader in film photograph, could not think anew so now it is an icon of an outdated idea, film photography.

Invariably, what if questions challenge assumptions and beliefs underlying the generally accepted reality of the way things are.  But reality is not something out there, it has its beginning in the mind of people.  If this were not the case then the United States would not have emerged and organizations that seem inextricably part of life in our society would not exist.  That is, reality is not something we merely react to it is something that we actually participate in creating and sustaining.  Simply put, reality requires our cooperation!

For example, our elected officials require people to elect them: why else would big business and other special interest groups invest so much in a candidate in the election process?  In effect we don’t choose whom we would like as our elected officials, our choices are restricted to whom the money backers want.  We can’t expect those who control and benefit from what is to change what is.  Evidence of this is seen in the inability of politicians to even limit contributions to political campaigns. Just think: What if there was an election and nobody showed up to elect them?

What’s the implication?  If you don’t like the reality you have then cease your cooperation with the system that it rests upon!  If you don’t like the reality of your experiences then act according to new beliefs that will provide different experiences.

As discussed in a previous article, if we want a different reality then we must actually enact it. Reality won’t change if first we don’t change our thinking about our selves! Wanting change is not sufficient; we must change our mind—changing the ideas and beliefs we hold—in order to embody the change (in reality) we desire.

At base the intent of a protest is to communicate the need to change what is by raising the awareness of the need and building a critical mass of people for the change. As long as people do not challenge what is assumed unchangeable then what is will remain as it is.  In short, our past will be our future! Why should anyone or any group be given the power to require this to be so?  So there must always be what if’s and we must seriously engage with those who raise them!

What if our system of government was a democracy and not a plutocracy? What if we’ve been structuring society and (our) life according to a fallacy?  What if we aren’t as materially driven as the system of economics has led us to believe and live? What if maximizing your material self-interest was not the way to joy in life?  What if your job was a joy?  What if flow of money throughout society meant something other than trickledown from the wealthy elite?   What if the way things are didn’t have to be as they are?  What if those in authority didn’t recoil against challenging ideas?  What if we all were critical thinkers?  What if you actually gave serious focused attention to these questions?

The choice between Gilding and Hagel is not just one of threat versus opportunity (as Friedman contends), but of challenging the solidity of the foundation versus believing the foundation is unquestionably solid.  Based upon the summaries provided by Friedman, Gilding seems to be saying we must re-think the very precepts of what we are doing and Hagel is saying we must continue with the system and just up the ante (i.e. the Big Shift) to succeed—its re-think or re-load.

If Hagel is correct then our problems (e.g. inequitable distribution of wealth, unemployment, social unrest, environmental destruction etc) will go away because we will work harder together to learn faster and realize advances in technology that will overcome the ill effects of our actions.  But how do we come together when the system tells us we should care only about our personal material gain!

It makes little sense to try to turn a bad idea into a winning idea by increasing the investment in the idea.

If Gilding is correct (and I think he is and the argument in It’s the Econome, Stupid explains why) then following Hagel will only accelerate us toward committing suicide.

Friedman claims “my heart is with Hagel, but my head says that you ignore Gilding at your peril.”  It seems we ought to be using our critical thinking minds and not increase energy in applying the same system of orientation that caused The Great Disruption.

Not only is it telling of where we are as a society that there is immunity for those who perpetrated this situation—injustice persists—it is even more telling that there is immunity to change among our elected officials.  Yes the very same people who were elected to serve the collective ‘we’ of society.  Moreover, with those actively participating in Occupy Wall Street being characterized as a bunch (or is it a mob) of miscreants and malcontents deserving of disparaging remarks, by even the news journalists, is telling of a sad state of affairs.

Those protesting are asking such questions as ‘why haven’t we bailed out homeowners’ or ‘why must students be saddled with enormous debt and little to no job prospects’? It is not that Occupy Wall Street protest is diffuse and lacks a defining focus—the one thing reductionist can put their finger on—it is that its focus is the system itself.  Its focus is all encompassing of life in a society that is supposed to be of, for and by the people.

Our government officials were complicit in the crime perpetrated against the 99% by making it possible for the finance industry to act as they did—they provided the means for material self-interest (i.e. greed) to run amuck.  The signal was evident for at least 30 years with an inequality gap growing larger and larger.

Accordingly those participating in Occupy Wall Street are calling for new thinking that will lead to a better future for all, and not just a select few. So this is not about what’s in it for the (private) ‘me’ rather it is a wake-up call for our elected officials to start thinking about and working for (the public) we! They are no longer exempt from the obligation they assumed upon taking public office.

In a society that has become so consumed by ‘what’s in it for me’ this challenge to immunity can be quite disorienting to the overlords, which can be a very good thing for all.

However it seems that we’ve lost our way.  It seems that when the religion is the worship of material gain (i.e. profit), the intertwining of (this form of) religion and government has been accepted even though it is clearly destructive.

As stated in the preamble to the U.S. Declaration of Independence “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed, by their Creator, with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness. Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.”

Of course we should support Occupy Wall Street since it is citizens exercising their right to alter or abolish what has become destructive!

However as long as our society practices capitalistic democracy, the overlords of industry will have us be governed according to their self-serving interests—overly influencing the democratic process from elections to directing both policy and law/regulation—whereby the common and collective voice and interests of the citizenry matters not.  So the demand for change must go to the root of the problem.

So what is the solution? As explained in It’s the Econome, Stupid, the engine of self-interest driving business and economic activity is destined to destroy the very system it created and depends on—it is a system that is nothing but suicidal! You see, the pursuit of unlimited growth and wealth accumulation is not a self-regulating process, but rather self-reinforcing toward self- destruction.

A little greed manifests as unfairness and a lot of greed as fraud—neither are acceptable in the governance of society.  So the demand for change must go to the root of the problem. We must change the system, not merely seek to regulate greed.