by Alan Briskin | Collective Folly, Collective Wisdom, Conscious Capitalism, Politics, Spirituality
A serial journal of cogent reflections and irreverent insights on the social effects of capitalism and the roots of partisan politics. Pairing prose with HDR photography and “flash points” drawn from current and historical perspectives, the author seeks to recover lost wisdom and courageous action beyond the shouting and noise of today’s headlines.
Chapter Fifteen
Moving from Factions to the Whole:
Paying Attention in New Ways
Part 1: Psycho-Spiritual Perspectives
Time Range: 1787-1789, Current Times
FLASH POINTS
“Among the numerous advantages promised by a well-constructed Union, none deserves to be more accurately developed than its tendency to break and control the violence of faction.”
— James Madison, Federalist No. 10, November 23, 1787
“I never submitted the whole system of my opinions to the creed of any party of men … where I was capable of thinking for myself. Such an addiction is the last degradation of a free and moral agent. If I could go to heaven but with a party, I would not go there at all.”
— Thomas Jefferson, letter to Francis Hopkinson, March 13, 1789 (source)
The Founding Fathers of the United States, like Madison and Jefferson, were deeply concerned with the tendency of groups to congeal into political factions and dictate solutions from their own factional viewpoint. With only a touch of irony, Jefferson’s statement, that he would decline an invitation to heaven if it meant going with a political party, should give us pause as we look out on our current landscape of political activity. However, it was not conflict they were avoiding, nor were they looking for simple forms of compromise among multiple distorted views. They were, in an uncompromising fashion, looking for productive angles by which the union could be preserved and intelligence awakened in the collective body. They were seeking to unravel a paradoxical riddle: How could creation of a central government be complementary with individual moral agency?
HDR (High Dynamic Range) Photography by Alan Briskin: multiple shots at different exposures are combined into one image in order to show “more of what’s there”
We have never resolved that riddle, but a key element for these Founders was education of a kind in which individuals grew in their capacity for values such as personal reflection, respectful debate, and shared understanding. Similarly, in the research that led to our book, The Power of Collective Wisdom: And the Trap of Collective Folly, we discovered similar values and approaches that created the conditions for collective wisdom to arise. We called these ways of knowing psychological stances indicating attitudes and commitments that fostered reflective consciousness and discernment. Some of these stances included deep listening, suspending personal certainty, seeking diverse perspectives, and welcoming the unexpected.
Beyond any single stance, however, was encouragement to be curious, to ask questions, and to trust in the wisdom of the body, both personal and collective. We also pointed out that collective wisdom’s opposing tendency was false dualities created by forced agreements within a group or extreme polarization between groups. In other words, the same kinds of extreme factions that many of the Founding Fathers were so alarmed about and that still exist today.
Why? What is it about factions that creates such jeopardy for the collective body? Conversely, what is it about wholeness and viewing ourselves as part of a collective body that is so valuable? I offer three overlapping perspectives—psycho-spiritual, physiological, and social—that may shed light on these questions.
Psycho-spiritual perspective.
By their nature, factions, separated from the concerns of the whole, take on radical self-interest. This self-interest is inherently a reductionist view of a larger reality. Psychologically, the limited perspective is captured in the mind for easy retrieval by a symbol, phrase, or fantasized ideal state. Over time, the symbol or ideal gains greater and greater power, further reducing the legitimacy of other viewpoints and limiting consideration of the complexity and ambiguity of actual circumstances. In other words, an obsession of sorts is constellated in the mind and in the group. This thought form, once constructed, can be highly contagious in groups because it offers structure and a reduction of complexity. Law and order is a perfect example of this kind of reductionist label, but so are ideas like liberty, freedom, and even human rights. These concepts all begin with some original meaning or orientation but devolve rapidly into factional interpretations.
If we are to truly consider what it means to move toward wholeness, we must grasp the psychological and spiritual nature of possession. Ideas can take us over, literally. Although our heads may not spin around on our shoulders like in the movie The Exorcist, the effect is somewhat similar when debating each other. We would rather die than give up on our opinion. Rather than dialogue moving us toward something in common, we only exacerbate the polarities among us. Idealized thought patterns become obsessive, mental activity becomes agitated under the cloak of reason, and reason becomes a tool to prove that one is right. Superficial compromise only covers over the rigidity and single-mindedness of the possession.
The neuroscientist Robert Burton calls it the feeling of knowing and wonders if we are creating a reward system for the brain that values being correct and feeling certain over “acquiring a thoughtful awareness of ambiguities, inconsistencies, and underlying paradoxes” (Robert Burton, M.D., On Being Certain: Believing You Are Right Even When You’re Not).
The sobering news about factions is that moving toward wholeness cannot be accomplished through good intention, reason, or compromise—at least not initially. There are times when in polarized situations we must confront the limitations of the other point of view and address directly the potential or reality of dangerous consequences. This takes courage.
Conflict-resolution strategies, as valuable as they are, should not be mistaken for trying to find a false middle ground or become justification for avoiding conflict. Some degree of polarization and conflict is needed to flush out underlying causes, especially the strong psychological forces that underlie genuine conflict. By engaging consciously with the dualities that possess us, we use the very tension of the opposites to bring forth new awareness. We should not imagine, however, that engaging the conflict is the same as convincing the other side that they are wrong or winning them over to our solutions. This is not about personal confrontation or victory in debate. The spiritual focus is very clear in this regard. Resolving conflict cannot be about individual ego. Rather, we are seeking to bring forward a memory of wholeness, a memory that already exists in each of us.
The way to transcend the possessions that claim us is to engage the imagination and the heart as well as the mind. We are seeking to notice more, to arouse a yearning within us to move from a lesser perspective to a greater one. This is altogether different than simply selecting positions or choosing sides. How we do this is unique to each situation. In some cases, it may be through humor or through the innocence of a genuine question or by reminding others of the human consequences of certain actions. It may be by bringing forward the true complexity of a situation or the moral ambiguity of almost any charged circumstance. It may be by standing firm. It is often by listening and demonstrating to the other side that they are being heard.
However it is accomplished, the hope is that reason and moral agency can be awakened in both the individual and the collective group. We may not be able to sway those most strongly identified with a factional viewpoint, but the appeal is to the larger whole.
The call to something greater can be understood as a spiritual mandate, change necessary to bring balance to a human system gone awry. I use “spiritual” here to express the best of the human spirit, qualities such as kindness, intelligence, compassion, discernment, and justice. These qualities arise from a regard for wholeness, linked linguistically with the words healing and holy through the Old English word haelan. The movement from faction to whole is a journey of healing, reawakening what is best in us and putting a salve on old wounds.
Many years ago, in a personal correspondence, Peter Vaill, the pioneering theorist on organizational change, wrote to me about the relationship between spirit and large-scale change: “Several years ago when I was first trying to think systematically about spirituality, I realized that spiritual ideas hold promise for healing some of the deep divisions among people; and conversely, if we try to heal deep divisions while leaving soul and spirit out of this process, we will probably fail. Any agreement will be temporary and expedient only.” In Peter’s words, we see again that change is not solely on the outside or inside, but at the intersection of the two.
A spiritual mandate for change is not a new form of obsession, though it could be, but rather a re-acquaintance with our inherent connectedness with others. Sometimes this can create discomfort or even heighten differences, but as Martin Luther King demonstrated regarding civil rights or Mahatma Gandhi showed us when fighting for India’s independence, the spiritual context is not about the domination of others. It is about creating the conditions for our interconnectedness to be revealed and our old wounds healed. To do this requires not only intellectual insight or even emotional warmth, but the wisdom of the body.
NEXT WEEK: Moving from Factions to the Whole, PART II
The movement from factions to wholeness includes the wisdom of the body. It may seem a leap, but being aware of our body is a direct experience of the movement from part to whole. By attending to breath, we slow down and cultivate presence. By being aware of our physical body, we bring into consciousness the wisdom of the throat, heart, and gut. The body does not lie.
by Alan Briskin | Conscious Capitalism, Consciousness, Spirituality
A serial journal of cogent reflections and irreverent insights on the social effects of capitalism and the roots of partisan politics. Pairing prose with HDR photography and “flash points” drawn from current and historical perspectives, the author seeks to recover lost wisdom and courageous action beyond the shouting and noise of today’s headlines.
Chapter Fourteen
Moving from Duality to Wisdom
Part Two: The Triadic Mind of Kabbalah
Time Range: Future Times
I find it to be one of the great paradoxes of creative thought that only by wiping the mind clean of categories and assumptions can we think clearly and in new ways. Yet, it makes perfect sense if it is our habitual thought that keeps us trapped. In the physical brain, there is a very real neurocognitive architecture that keeps us confined to certain ways of thinking. At the collective level, there are social fields that influence individual thought and action. All the categories we have discussed directly or indirectly—privilege, poverty, protest, rebellion, anguish, revenge, reform—all have had thousands of years to imprint themselves on the human collective through repetitive patterns. These patterns have within them predicable associations and moral judgments, good or bad, just or unjust, moral or immoral. The mind seeks to find new solutions but often simply re-creates the old patterns in new ways.
Some today are asking if there is larger purpose behind these patterns or a meaning we should glean. Is it all part of a greater evolutionary destiny moving us toward divinity? Or, are these patterns the breadcrumbs leading to species annihilation? Let us for the moment answer mu.
In the movement away from duality, what the wisdom traditions offer are enhanced cognitive and emotional tools. Provocatively, I believe that wisdom traditions, properly understood, cast grave doubt on the propositions that answers can all be found inside ourselves and, conversely, that solely by altering social institutions can we achieve a more stable society. We must, as Einstein prophetically proposed, find answers from a state of consciousness different from the one in which the problem was created. Let us return to the Kabbalist structure of the triadic mind to see what elements are crucial to continually move from duality to noticing something new.
The first element, Binah, is a hungering for the logic of a given situation. Sometimes compared to the methodical skills of the brain’s left hemisphere, the emphasis with Binah is on analytic understanding. The analytic way of understanding is the home of the scientist but also anyone who uses logic and quantitative analysis to gather, analyze, and build hypotheses based on data and observable information. But the true power of this mode of thinking is its capacity for coherence, the ability to show how facts hang together in regard to the questions that are being asked. This process requires imagination but operates within strict parameters.
HDR (High Dynamic Range) Photography by Alan Briskin: multiple shots at different exposures are combined into one image in order to show “more of what’s there”.
The legendary physicist Richard Feynman offers a good description of the quality of this way of thinking. To make his point, he contrasts the analytic form of mental activity with that of fiction writers.
But the scientist’s imagination always is different from a writer’s in that it is checked. A scientist imagines something and then God says “incorrect” or “so far so good.” God is experiment, of course, and God might say, “Oh no, that doesn’t agree.” You say, “I imagine it works this way. And if it does, then you should see this.” Then other guys look and they don’t see it. That’s too bad. You guessed wrong. You don’t have that in writing. (Mlodinow, L, Feynman’s Rainbow)
Along with analysis, we need something further to extend beyond duality. The second aspect of mind that Kabbalists describe is Chokhmah, or wisdom. Here we have something closer to the power of intuitive insight, flash understandings, even revelations. It is why the composer Tchaikovsky can say, “The germ of a future composition comes suddenly and unexpectedly. If the soil is ready …” Chokhmah is the constant preparation of the soil through study, observation, playfulness, flow—the deepening presence of a mind capable of emergence. Wisdom of this kind is aware of subtle shifts in interior awareness as well as shifts in the external circumstances of a group or larger collective.
Wisdom of this nature has the capacity of transcending conventional categories and the power of linking the world as it is with how the world might be. This is the kind of wisdom that led Mahatma Gandhi to read Henry David Thoreau’s account of personal civil disobedience and see in it a larger collective form of protest tied to universal principles of justice and truth. If Binah seeks the logic of how something is put together, Chokhmah asks to what end? Why should we put effort into something if not to create something that has a larger more universal truth.
So far so good. A mind capable of creating coherence from logic and the agility to leap categories in a single bound is a formidable instrument but still incomplete. In the triadic tradition of mind formulated by Kabbalists, a third thing is necessary to ground and complement both logic and intuition. This third thing is knowledge, or Da’at. This is the willingness to engage in study, to continually gather information, and to adjust one’s thinking in alignment with new information. We become less capable of remaining in duality if all three forms of intelligences are activated.
But the Kabbalists took it one step further. They understood the mind as an infinitely elusive channel seeking wonder, awe, and beauty but capable of being caught in its own web of individual mental thought. The triadic mind required something more, a secret sauce, also associated with Da’at. This secret sauce was reflective consciousness, a joining together of multiple layers of awareness equated metaphorically with sexual union.
The great Kabbalist Reb Zalman Schachter Shalomi compares this form of reflective intelligence to the brain’s cerebellum, which acts as a switchboard for our attention. What is worthy of our attention? What do we consider important or irrelevant? Do we pay greater attention to threat or opportunity? What about our memory? Do we selectively choose bits and pieces of our past, or do we work at retaining wholeness? What is the nature of our attention? Is it disciplined or jumping from thing to thing? Is our attention primarily self-referential or about others? What ultimately do we pay attention to, and what is the quality of that attention?
To move beyond dualism is to be capable of slipping the chains of having to be aligned with one thing or another. Reflective consciousness simultaneously is a deepening of one’s own presence.
I am reminded of a dialogue I facilitated with Deepak Chopra and three wonderful Japanese thought leaders: a filmmaker, a philosophy professor, and a spiritual leader. The philosophy professor, as best as I could understand through translation, was describing with rigor the question of whether the ego actually exists. I was finding myself exhausted following the subtle points he was making about ego and its illusory nature. Deepak listened with great patience, and after the man finished, he simply said, “There is no greater drama for the ego than to debate its own existence.”
Immediately, I could feel my body relax and the crease in my brow ease. I had been caught in the duality of the question, and my attention had become entirely analytic. Does the ego exist or not? Come on now, follow the argument! But the moment Deepak spoke about the ego’s excitement about debating its own existence, I was brought back to my reflective consciousness. I became aware that my thoughts about ego had taken on separateness. Deepak’s comment brought me back into my body and with that my intuitive intelligence. Suddenly, there appeared a great deal of subtle humor—the ego debating with itself about its existence. This could be theater, an interior version of Waiting for Godot, becoming more and more ludicrous by the minute. Now, everything shifted and I came closer to mu and ayin, the obliteration of dualistic form and the opening to new creative formulations. I could pay attention in a new way.
Next Week: Chapter Fifteen, Part One: Moving from Factions to the Whole
“Among the numerous advantages promised by a well-constructed Union, none deserves to be more accurately developed than its tendency to break and control the violence of faction.”
~ James Madison, Federalist No. 10, November 23, 1787
by Alan Briskin | Conscious Capitalism
A serial journal of cogent reflections and irreverent insights on the social effects of capitalism and the roots of partisan politics. Pairing prose with HDR photography and “flash points” drawn from current and historical perspectives, the author seeks to recover lost wisdom and courageous action beyond the shouting and noise of today’s headlines.
Chapter Fourteen
Moving From Duality to Wisdom
Part One: The Limits of Duality
Time Range: Starting Now
“There is so so little of the world that we
are able to take in without cognitive dissonance,” writes colleague Elizabeth Doty, “our blind spots are so big, and our worldviews so often fragile.” How might we then proceed? How might we begin to navigate beyond our small islands of understanding toward something larger and genuinely collective?
If we are able to do so, we will need to strengthen capacities for tolerating ambiguity and paradox while still embracing action. We will need to draw on wisdom traditions and spiritual knowledge without negating the impact of history, social institutions, economic arrangements, or the value of the individual. In other words, we will require a capacity to hold opposites together personally and in our social interactions to such a degree, and with such fierce intent, that something new is born. .
In duality, we are left with two choices, yes or no, up or down, good or bad. This is the obvious part. What is far subtler is how our minds begin to organize everything we encounter into two irreducible elements. We are either comfortable with a certain attitude, ideology, or viewpoint or not. For simplicity, we begin to polarize our choices and see others as fitting in with our view or not.
More insidiously, our views are shaped by intangible forces barely conscious to ourselves — genetics, family background, place of geographical birth, economic status, educational achievements, personal experience, and so on. The science of cognitive psychology teaches us we are unconscious most of the time about the reasons for our actions. We do our best but it requires great effort just to keep up with life’s demands. At some point, there is a natural progression from a chaos of inputs — conflicting information, internal emotions, social pressures, economic incentives — to a feeling of being overwhelmed by complexity. We all experience this to some degree.
In duality, our worldview shrinks to a smaller and more manageable subset of the world, but as Elizabeth noted above, we are prone to blind spots, insecurities, and a sense of having to protect our fragile grasp of a barely cohering reality. Duality is a fine and necessary instrument of human consciousness, allowing us to choose salmon or steak from a restaurant menu, but it is a tragically dysfunctional orientation when dealing with complexity. In the prison of dualism, ambiguity and the paradoxes of life become dangerous dilemmas to be met with rules and predictable responses.
HDR (High Dynamic Range) Photography by Alan Briskin: multiple shots at different exposures are combined into one image in order to show “more of what’s there”.
Wisdom traditions, cultivated over thousands of years of human history and in every geographic region of the world, offer something more valuable than even solutions to immediate problems. Wisdom traditions offer us a way to climb out of our dualistic mental models and construct with others something far greater. We are able to move from an individual perspective to awareness of universal principles and shared understanding, an inherently ambiguous journey that necessitates personal growth, learning, dialogue, compassion, and intelligence.
To move in this direction, from individual to universal, is like fresh air flowing into a stale room. Oxygen revitalizes us, and so too does freeing ourselves from the shackles of dualistic chains. We are free to consider something larger than just our constricted mental models. In the great wisdom tradition of Zen Buddhism, for example, a master is asked by a student with great earnestness whether a dog has Buddha nature. Do not all things have Buddha nature? Is not the answer obvious? The master answers “Mu,” which translates literally to nothing or nothingness but which has many interpretive translations. My favorite is “Unask the question” or in another variant, “Untie the duality of your thought.”
The way we frame our questions matters because the nature of the question predicts the response. If our questions are only about choosing between two things, we will find ourselves forever tied up in knots. However, if we have the presence of mind to ask questions that appreciate what is and allow for what is yet to be, something else can emerge. We can move away from duality and bring back the richness, complexity, volatility, and ambiguity of our world.
Wisdom traditions also offer a methodology to integrate and synthesize complex issues. The triadic mind in the Jewish Kabbalah tradition is a good illustration of a way beyond dualism. In this tradition, three separate elements together with a secret sauce form a constellation made up of analytic understanding, wisdom, knowledge, and focused attention. And this constellation is only a part of something even greater, with various dyads, triads, and multiple interlocking constellations.
The brilliance of the design is that one can attempt to simplify the relationships of the structure, but it becomes obvious that simplification is only for temporary purposes, like developing mathematical equations in order to derive a larger mathematical proof. Additionally, the discipline of forming coherent relationships among the variables is humbling because at the highest point of the structure is ayin, an obliteration of all forms. Ayin is the pure ethereal atmosphere beyond duality. Ayin, like the Japanese mu, is a state beyond category and dualistic thought.
Next Week: Chapter Fourteen: Moving From Duality to Wisdom, Part Two
I find it to be one of the great of paradoxes of creative thought that only by wiping the mind clean of categories and assumptions can we think clearly and in new ways. Yet, it makes perfect sense if it is our habitual thought that keeps us trapped.
by Alan Briskin | Conscious Capitalism
A serial journal of cogent reflections and irreverent insights on the social effects of capitalism and the roots of partisan politics. Pairing prose with HDR photography and “flash points” drawn from current and historical perspectives, the author seeks to recover lost wisdom and courageous action beyond the shouting and noise of today’s headlines.
Chapter Thirteen, Part Two
My Own Little Tea Party II
Talking about the Concentration of Wealth
Time Range: Present Times
The issue of taxes appears to be quite a touchy subject. The people at my party feel they have good reason to be concerned. They made extraordinary gains regarding cutting their tax burdens over the past half-century. As recently as 1960, the top bracket for the very wealthy was 91%. Even in the 1970s, the top bracket was 70%. With rates like that, it was necessary to pay accounting professionals to find every possible loophole, even if it meant paying lobbyists in Washington to create them.
In comparison with these past rates, the Buffett Rule, recently championed by President Obama, is relatively meek. It would affect approximately 450,000 households (1%) who earn at least $1 million. Under the rule, they would pay an effective tax rate of at least 30%, almost double what Buffett and presidential candidate Mitt Romney paid in taxes, but still less than the 35% paid by Buffett’s secretary. And some analysts have taken it even further.
Robert Reich writes that Yale professors Bruce Ackerman and Anne Alstott have proposed a 2% surtax on the wealthy. This would be for the richest one-half of 1% of Americans who have more than $7.2 million of assets. They estimate that the tax would generate approximately $70 billion a year, or nearly $750 billion over the decade. This is equivalent to about 50% of the savings that the unsuccessful Super Committee of Congress had sought as a goal for reducing the deficit. (source)
Some at my party are becoming quite agitated. What about all those people who pay no federal taxes? One man in particular is incensed by the fact that the bottom 50% of the nation, whose collective assets are roughly equal to those of the 400 people drinking Earl Grey tea with me, pay no federal taxes. How dare they? Some of those sympathetic to Buffett’s way of thinking argue that it’s because this group has no money, but to others at the party, this still sounds like a free ride, and it makes them upset. “The poor need to find themselves jobs, and they need to share some of the responsibility,” grouses one.
An argument ensues, with one person from the Buffett side saying that the half who pay no federal income tax do pay sales taxes, federal payroll taxes, state and local taxes, and — if they own a home — property taxes. And the total of those taxes can actually be more than what the very wealthy pay on a percentage basis. “Bull” is the response, and “That’s pathetic,” says another. “What about the 50% of us who do all the heavy lifting in this country and foot all the bills?” says a third. A fourth says we need to cut spending and broaden the tax base so that there is not an unfair tax burden on the shrinking minority who are taxed. I offer everyone cookies, but the party spirit has dissipated, and some look like they will be going home early.
HDR (High Dynamic Range) Photography by Alan Briskin: multiple shots at different exposures are combined into one image in order to show “more of what’s there”.
I end up talking with one of the staff catering the party. She is 62 years old and has been in the food services business for 35 years.** She has no medical insurance and not enough savings to retire on. She had not anticipated working into her 60s, but she is not alone in having to change her plans. She tells me that she was recently at a workforce center in her town and was struck by how many older workers seemed lost and bewildered. And she has had to emotionally support her daughter, who lost a well-paying job at a pharmaceutical company when it was bought up by a larger corporation.
“Things are what they are,” she says with a mixture of resignation and resolve. She notes that even having an education is no security. She has a master’s degree. What she won’t accept, however, is a lack of respect. Her last job offer, a catering position at an upscale yacht club, was actually for a position she previously held but had to reapply for after they went through a restructuring. The new job offer came with a provision that she would accept a pay cut to minimum wage and have 40% of the staff’s catering tips taken off the top for management. Meanwhile, customers would be asked to pay a “service charge” of 20%, up from 18%. She refused the offer but then was denied unemployment benefits. “What did you do?” I asked. “Found a lawyer.” Sometimes our patience just runs thin.
* Based on industrial companies with about $500 million in sales. Source: “Effects of Excessive CEO Pay on US Society,” Towers Perrin & Finfacts.
**Based loosely on the article “After a Lifetime of Hard Work, the Indignity of a Layoff,” Huffington Post, March 24, 2012.
FLASH POINTS
Glad to Pay Uncle Sam
“They’re rich. They’re angry. And they want to pony up more money to Uncle Sam.
Armed with placards reading ‘Please Raise Our Taxes’ and colorful budget charts, about 75 well-dressed middle-aged folks assembled on the steps of San Francisco City Hall at noon on Tuesday — tax day.
‘Like millions of Americans, today was not fun — it was more like a root canal,’ said real estate developer John Stewart. … ‘But I was the beneficiary of Bush-era tax cuts that put more bucks in my pocket.’
‘Those cuts for wealthy people caused today’s deficit’, he said. That’s why his group, which identifies as ‘5 percenters, not 1 percenters,’ seeks tax increases for themselves and other top earners.”
~ Carolyn Said, San Francisco Chronicle, April 18, 2012
Featured in the New Yorker: Super-Rich Irony. The real meeting of the .01 percent at the Belagio in Las Vegas, Nevada
Next Week: Chapter Fourteen: Moving From Duality to Wisdom, Part One
“There is so little of the world that we are able to take in without cognitive dissonance,” writes colleague Elizabeth Doty, “our blind spots are so big, and our worldviews so often fragile.”
How might we then proceed? How might we begin to navigate beyond our small islands of understanding toward something larger and genuinely collective? If we are to do so, we will need to strengthen capacities for tolerating ambiguity and paradox while still embracing action.
We will need to draw on wisdom traditions and spiritual knowledge without negating the impact of history, social institutions, economic arrangements, or the value of the individual. In other words, we will require a capacity to hold opposites together personally and in our social interactions to such a degree, and with such fierce intent, that something new is born.
by Alan Briskin | Conscious Capitalism, Politics
A serial journal of cogent reflections and irreverent insights on the social effects of capitalism and the roots of partisan politics. Pairing prose with HDR photography and “flash points” drawn from current and historical perspectives, the author seeks to recover lost wisdom and courageous action beyond the shouting and noise of today’s headlines.
Chapter Thirteen, Part One
My Own Little Tea Party
Talking About the Concentration of Wealth
Time Range: Present Times
If I had 400 people come over my house for tea and they happened to be the wealthiest 400 people in the United States, their accumulated wealth would be equal to the wealth of the bottom half of the entire US population, or approximately 150 million people. This would be true with or without my personal financial assets included. How did so few come to have so much, and conversely, how did so many come to have so little? Disparity in wealth has grown rapidly in the United States over the past half-century. What are some of the factors? Wouldn’t it be fun for my guests to discuss this?
From 1940 through 1970, the ratio of CEOs’ pay to their workers’ average hourly wages held steady. However, during approximately the next 30 years, wages for workers slowed to a halt, and the earnings for the top 5 to 10% of senior executives went through the roof. From the 1970s to the 1980s, the compensation gap between incomes of CEOs and hourly wage earners escalated from 11:1 to 42:1. From the 1980s to the 1990s, it climbed further to 85:1. In 2000, the gap was 531:1.*
To put this in perspective, if an average worker made about $20,000 a year, the chief executive would make about $11 million a year, or more than $45,000 a day. As difficult as this is to comprehend, the numbers seem in line with those in a study done of the average compensation among CEOs of 367 US firms in 2004. The average compensation for CEOs was $11.8 million. Among the top 100 firms, the figure is even higher.
The surplus value of labor was being shared with senior executives and top-end professionals but no further. The Christian injunction to never envy another’s wages if it does not affect the wages you have agreed upon for yourself was now being put to the stress test. The wealth disparity was even more evident in pension funding.
As journalist Ellen Schultz documented in The Retirement Heist, legal maneuvers have allowed retirement savings for modest-income individuals to be shifted to senior executives. In one of many examples, she noted how GE addressed corporate profitability as being adversely affected by out-of-control factors such as a large number of retirees, poor stock market returns, and foreign competition for cheap labor. GE argued that adjustments in new employee medical benefits and retirement plans were necessitated by such market forces. What they neglected to say was a $4.4 billion obligation was dedicated to senior executive pensions. Some things just don’t seem worth mentioning.
HDR (High Dynamic Range) Photography by Alan Briskin: multiple shots at different exposures are combined into one image in order to show “more of what’s there”.
What about the stock market? Certainly this appears a more participatory institution involving tens of millions of people directly or through such things as annuities and retirement plans. This is true to a degree, but 90% of the nation’s financial assets, including stocks and pension fund holdings, are owned by the wealthiest 10% of American households. The top 1%, including the 400 individuals I invited for tea, own 38%. So, for example, when the market goes up in value by $1.46 trillion, as it did in the fourth quarter of 2011, $1.3 trillion goes to the 10%. And the 1% would make out with $554.8 billion. With that kind of money, what is a few million here and there to promote political agendas and politicians who share your passion for liberty and freedom? Meanwhile, most Americans, whose financial assets are mostly in their homes, realized a loss in value.
Of course, not everyone at my tea party agrees with each other. At this gathering of the very wealthy, Warren Buffett is seen as somewhat suspect, at least when he is not being asked for stock tips. Why? Buffett went around his office and asked approximately 20 people—secretaries, clerks, and assistants—what they paid in taxes.
He found that he paid a lower tax rate than any of them. And he didn’t think this made a lot of sense. “I have never had it so good,” he said on national television, sitting next to his secretary, who pays double the percentage of taxes that he does. “What has happened in recent years,” he noted, is that “we were told a rising tide would lift all boats, but the rising tide has lifted all yachts.”(source) Recalling those lines, some at the tea party grumbled about how much he actually paid his secretary (quite a bit), and others thought it was poor judgment to be seen sitting next to her. Many shared with each other the belief that if he wanted to write a check to the government, he was free to do so.
FLASH POINT
Buffett Rule Vote: Tax Measure Fails in Senate
“WASHINGTON — Democrats’ attempt to pass a Buffett Rule tax on the super wealthy failed Monday in the Senate, as Republicans blocked the measure in a sharply partisan debate.
Democrats cast it as a bid for fairness that would end the circumstance in which billionaires like Warren Buffett pay a lower percentage of their income in taxes than their secretaries.
Republicans cast it as a political gimmick and an attempt by President Barack Obama to give more Americans a ‘free ride.’”
~ Huffington Post, April 16, 2012
Next Week: Chapter Thirteen: My Own Little Tea Party, Part Two
The issue of taxes appears to be quite a touchy subject. The people at my party feel they have good reason to be concerned. They made extraordinary gains regarding cutting their tax burdens over the past half-century.
FLASH POINTS
