by Alan Briskin | Collaboration, 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 Sixteen
The Dark Prophet
Part I: Communism’s Shadow
Time Range: 1867-1883, 2012
For Marx, violence was the only real solution. In the Manifesto, read out loud in his accent and lisp to revolutionaries at the Red Lion Pub, he declared that the specter of communism haunted those who would hold on to power. “The Communists,” he stated, “openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social relations. Let the ruling classes tremble …”
This was Marx, like the clownish homicidal character of the Joker in Batman movies, having his moment of grandiosity. Not only was economic reform not enough; all social relations must be overthrown, and solely by the force of violence could we know it was done. Here are the pathological roots, still in theoretical formulation, that gave sustenance to those who would fashion tyrannical forms of collectivist organization, figures such as Stalin and Mao. They would declare themselves the embodiment of the collective and speak on its behalf. They would fashion a classless society because they said so, and disagreement would not be tolerated. It is one of the great ironies of capitalism that some of its leading proponents advise the same course, warning against discussion of class and economic distribution as if it were sinister or subversive.
Marx made no real pretense that he understood or even cared about what the future would look like from a humanistic perspective. Instead, his style of argument and forceful ways of generating polarization became a bedrock orientation for future organizers. Playing off of frustration and despair, Communism held out the promise that the oppressed suffered but their suffering would be redeemed by revolution. The attraction of communism was not so much a shared image of a better world for all as a belief that your fate would be linked with the side that would inevitably come to power. The wait was painful and exhausting. In one letter to Engels, Marx wrote:
My wife is ill. Little Jenny is ill. Lenchen has a sort of nervous fever and I can’t call in the doctor because I have no money to pay him. For about eight or ten days we have all been living on bread and potatoes and it is now doubtful whether we shall be able to get even that. … How am I to get out of this devilish mess? (Robert Heilbroner, The Worldly Philosophers)
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”.
Nearly all of Marx’s interactions had a tone of confrontation, as if his personal frustrations could find release in the deconstruction of another’s ideas. He could be alternately eloquent, precise, inflammatory, and insulting with no constraint calling others “louts” and “bedbugs.” In one emblematic dispute with a potential ally, Pierre Proudhon, he seemed to set the bar for intolerance and accusations of betrayal. Proudhon had written a book titled What Is Property? and had accepted Marx’s invitation for collaboration with a letter asking that their collaboration be marked by “a learned and far-sighted tolerance; but simply because we are at the head of a new movement, let us not set ourselves up as leaders of a new intolerance. … On that condition, I shall be delighted to take part in your association — but otherwise, no!” (Robert Heilbroner, The Worldly Philosophers)
Marx’s response was succinct and clear. He wrote a devastating critique of Proudhon’s new book, The Philosophy of Poverty, with the title “The Poverty of Philosophy.”
Marx argued that ideas didn’t matter, or more accurately, that ideas were simply products of the economic structure that spawned them and were never truly independent. What mattered were the materialist realities of what was produced and how it was produced, the terms by which products were exchanged, and the pivotal question of who benefited from ownership. Capitalists achieved dominance by controlling these variables while making unfathomable profits from the surplus labor of their workers. The logic extended not only to the production of widgets and wardrobes but also to food, fuel, medicine, housing, and health care.
What is fascinating about Marx and his legacy is how this materialist viewpoint, central to his critique of capital, remained so detached from moral ideas regarding oppression and suffering yet so completely propelled by them. Why else would it matter that one group vies for dominance over others if not for the morality underpinning human dignity, cooperation, and social justice?
The answer lies in the approach. Marx’s obsession with the mechanics of capitalism involved a regard for science as a debunking of falsehoods perpetuated by those in power. Marx composed his first major critique of the economy less than ten years after Darwin published On the Origin of Species and identified his work with discovering society’s “laws of motion” akin to Newton’s classical laws of motion for physical objects.
The arrogance associated with Marx arises from his self-imposed challenge to find the correct, objective, scientific understanding of history. With a quest like that, there could be no concession for the sake of compromise or soft influences such empathy, cooperation, and compassion. Cold hard logic must be the rule and it must be capable of predicting the future in no less certain terms than Newton’s equations about the orbits of the planets around the sun.
For Marx, it was scientifically incorrect to propose a static, unchanging order for social relations or a promise that capitalism would be the engine of never-ending progress toward the good. No, the tensions, conflicts, and contradictions of society were what propelled the motion of social relations forward, and capitalism was a temporary digression, holding the seeds of its own destruction. This was Marx’s dark prophecy. Let’s examine its major features.
At the core of the tensions Marx foresaw was the inability of businesses to permanently maintain their profits. Each time they achieved a rewarding valuation for their products or services, a countervailing force would increase their costs or force them to lower their prices. The threat may come from workers organizing for higher wages or from competitors competing on the price or quality of the commodity. However it came, it would set in motion an anxiety for returning to profitability and a fear of annihilation. Three direct consequences would follow from such a dilemma: the pursuit of growth, the ceaseless quest for labor saving technology, and business cycles of boom and bust.
Growth was virtually the only means to deal with shrinking profits, and it would engineer the need for excessive consumption of energy and other natural resources as dictated by the needs of the marketplace. Although Marx is not known for addressing ecological concerns, he predicted that the absence of any mitigating influence on capitalist laws of motion would result in undermining the “original sources of all wealth — the soil and the worker.” Businesses would treat the air, the rivers, the seas, and the soil as gifts provided them by nature, just as they would treat workers as part of a mathematical equation for profits.
The quest for labor-saving technology would be driven not by human need but by the requirements of growth. First and foremost, it would be directed by the need to minimize the costs of employing human labor and reduce the persistent wailing of workers for higher wages. Technology was simply the price for keeping up with or outrunning competitors, not a means to grow profits or lessen life’s hardships. The result would be an obsession with labor-saving technology that was independent of community or need. Marx believed that not only would technology not lighten the “toil” of human beings; it would be singularly preoccupied with reducing the cost of commodities by reducing the cost of human labor or eliminating human labor entirely. Labor-saving technology, for all its value, would be a defensive gesture, forcing us to speed up and multitask. Businesses, for their part, would need to constantly adapt to the new technological shifts or perish.
Finally, Marx predicted the boom and bust of business cycles that were associated with the growth of giant enterprises, the buying up of weaker competitors, and a shift to financially riskier investments. Each of these trends would foster greater instability on a national and international scale. “Concentration increases …,” Marx wrote. “The mass of small dispersed capitals is thereby driven along the adventurous road of speculation, credit frauds, stock swindles, and crises.” (Daniel Chirot, A Turning Point or Business as Usual )
In the wake of riots in Europe and too-big-to-fail scenarios that preceded the 2008 financial collapse, this may seem somewhat obvious, but in the late 19th century, when Marx wrote, small enterprises dominated. Phones, televisions, and airplanes had not been invented. For someone who complained about not even being able to keep up with current events in his own time because he couldn’t afford a newspaper, Marx’s premonitions were remarkable, if not miraculous. He foresaw the growth of mammoth organizations based on industrial production, swelled by purchases of smaller companies, driven forward by labor saving technology, and increasingly investing in financial instruments with greater and greater risk.
To put this in real-world perspective, General Electric, founded nearly a decade after he died, built itself up through the production of industrial machinery; became known for its technological innovation; went on a spree of buying smaller companies; and by 2008, just prior to the financial crisis, earned 62% of its total profit from its financial services division.
Next Week: The Dark Prophet: Part II
It is easy to dismiss Marx as a revolutionist or even as a theorist of socialism, but much harder to ignore his warnings about capitalism. He had discovered the Achilles’ heel of economic arrangements that celebrated their ability to create prosperity, generate innovation, and provide a bounty of goods and services as well as jobs. Capitalism proclaimed itself the final act in the history of economic evolution. Marx refuted the claim. His diatribes, as painful and polarizing as they were, force us to become conscious of capitalism’s other consequences.
by Alan Briskin | Collaboration, Collective Folly, Collective Wisdom, Community, Conscious Capitalism, Health, Leadership
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 III: Social Perspectives>
Time Range: 1811, Current Times
FLASH POINT
“If we move in mass, be it ever so circuitously, we shall attain our object; but if we break into squads, everyone pursuing the path he thinks most direct, we become easy conquest to those who can now barely hold us in check.”
— Thomas Jefferson, letter to William Duane, 1811
Social Perspective: How Inequality Gets Under Our Skin
What societal pattern might connect a heightened sense of mistrust, poor health, violence, diminished life expectancy, and low job status? If you guessed social and economic inequality, then we are beginning to think collectively together. But why? Why should this be the case? We would need to explore the multiple interlocking factors that determine and influence the frequency and distribution of this kind of pattern. We would need epidemiologists willing to use their training to identify the root causes of illness and other health-related events in social and economic circumstances, unrelated to any particular economic theory or ideology.
Remarkably, this is exactly what epidemiologists Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett set out to do in their book The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger. With mind-numbing charts, diagrams, and statistical comparisons, these two professors documented why, by virtually every measure of well-being, the distribution of wealth far outweighs the importance of overall wealth in a community, region, or nation. Boiled down to its core, the results of these studies demonstrate how social and economic factions fracture the whole and make it worse off for everyone.
How so?
Social
and economic inequality creates exaggerated differences in social
standing, and social standing — our place in groups — has a dramatic
influence on our health, intelligence, well-being, and positive images
of the future. Here are three dramatic examples from animal and human
studies drawn from Wilkinson and Pickett’s work:
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”.
- At Wake Forest School of Medicine in North Carolina, 20 macaque monkeys were initially housed in individual cages and then placed in groups of 4. Observers noted social hierarchies that developed, with special attention to the evolution of dominant and subordinate characteristics. They performed scans of the monkeys’ brains before and after the monkeys entered their social groups. Next, they allowed the monkeys to administer cocaine to themselves by pressing a lever. The results were unmistakable. The dominant monkeys, who showed evidence of increased dopamine activity in their brains after becoming dominant, took far less cocaine than the subordinate group. A plausible hypothesis was that the subordinate monkeys were in effect “medicating themselves against the impact of their low social status.” Conversely, the dominant monkeys were producing natural forms of stimulation and required fewer external boosts.
- In 2004, World Bank economists reported on a remarkable experiment. Three hundred twenty-one high-caste and 321 low-caste male children from rural areas of India were asked to solve various puzzles involving mazes. They did this without any knowledge of the other children’s caste, and the results were similar, with the lower-caste boys doing slightly better. Then the experiment was repeated, but this time with the announcement of each child’s name, village, and father’s name and caste. The results were dramatically reversed, with the lower-caste children’s performance dropping significantly. The epidemiologists noted the profound effect on performance and behavior in education based on “the way we feel we are seen and judged by others.”
- The Whitehall studies in England followed civil servants to assess the impact of job status on health issues. The initial study, which followed only men over a ten-year period, attempted to investigate the causes of heart disease and other chronic health problems by looking at job-related responsibilities. The initial hypothesis was that heart disease would be correlated with the stress of the highest-status jobs. The exact opposite was shown. Men at the lowest pay grades had death rates three times higher than their higher-grade administrators. A second study, Whitehall II, which included men and women, showed lower-status jobs related to higher rates not only of heart disease but also of some cancers, chronic lung disease, gastrointestinal disease, depression, suicide, sickness, work absence, and back pain. The study revealed that not only were the lower-status civil servants more likely to be obese, smoke, and have higher blood pressure, but these obvious health risks accounted for only one-third of the subjects’ increased risk of death. Poverty and unemployment were not factors, as these were all working people. The epidemiologists concluded that job stress and “people’s sense of control over their work seem to make the most difference.”
Wilkinson and Pickett highlighted the multiple ways in which heightened degrees of inequality lead to social disaster. The social disaster cannot be changed through techniques of mass psychology or medication or even education, which tends to replicate the existing social status of parents. What mitigates the effects of inequality is greater equality and greater signs of respect.
Greater economic equality might mean a goal of shrinking the economic disparity between the richest 20% and the poorest 20% of a nation to a ratio closer to 4:1, as it is in Japan and Scandinavian countries like Finland, Norway, Sweden, and Denmark, and less like 8:1 or 9:1, as it is in Singapore, the United States, and Portugal.
Respect might indicate behaviors that demonstrate an understanding that how we are seen by others is a major factor in physical and mental health, including anxiety levels, drug use, depression, the use of violence, and the experience of pain. Signs of respect are indicated by the presence of greetings, curiosity, honest feedback, and positive regard for others, and the absence of condescension, aloofness, and constant negativity. Dignity is a universal human need, and regard for the dignity of others is a foundational element of healthy social groups.
With this kind of social perspective on the nature of factions, we turn on its head the conventional ideal of who we should seek to emulate and why. In an article titled “The Pay Gap Is Vexing, but Don’t Blame the Rich: A Defense of the 1%,” Fortune magazine editor Nina Easton makes the more typical argument. She writes that while blaming the rich is convenient, it misses the point that this group of people demonstrates a level of talent, advanced degrees, and two-income, two-parent families that should be the envy of everyone.
To her credit, she points out that the nearly 1.4 million households in the United States that make up the 1% are quite a diverse lot, some with household incomes that, while substantial, are nothing near those of the billion-dollar-a-year hedge fund executives who have become the symbol of this faction. She concludes, however, on a point that is simultaneously misleading and dangerous: “It’s entertaining to wail about fat cats and the greedy rich. But if we’re serious about addressing widening inequality, we should figure out what the 1% is doing right — and apply some of those ideas to closing the gap.” (Nina Easton, Fortune, April 30, 2012.)
The remark is misleading because regardless of the diversity of this group, what makes them special is their household income, not their talents or degrees. We can’t all be in occupations that provide us with incomes offering more than the other 99% of the population. Further, based on the data provided by Wilkinson and Pickett, we would expect to see the group with the highest income demonstrate higher levels of education and lower rates of divorce. We would expect to see greater time and devotion to the success of their offspring. This is how class is replicated.
It is also to be expected that the higher-status group will be fascinated with why they are more successful than others, believing it must be their character, intelligence, or work ethic rather than the arbitrary nature of economic distribution or rights associated with privilege. The danger of this form of analysis is that it reduces the argument over economic distribution to one of simple human envy.
A dangerous social narrative is created that castigates anyone who dares to criticize economic arrangements and pivots the discussion back to the psychology of the individual. “Oh, you’re just upset because you don’t have a million dollars and a second home on an island.” This recourse back to the individual is supported by two deeply rooted assumptions: (1) there is no system better than the one we have, and (2) we cannot change human nature.
These may be comforting narratives for the status quo, but they ultimately fall into conflict with leadership theories on transformation. A transforming leader is one who willingly confronts uncomfortable issues with a belief that positive change can occur if people work together. Greed and self-interest may be obvious realities of human beings, but they need not be the basis for constructing our social world.
Factions destroy the ability to work consciously toward a union capable of holding disparate elements. In the end, it is not about the 99% against the 1%; it is about saving the dream of prosperity from collapsing into all-out warfare. Prosperity for all, in all the different ways that might be manifested, is a goal worth working toward. The majority of the 1% simply benefited from the arrangements granted them, and like any group of privileged human beings, they are not inclined to simply give them up. So be it. There are many among the 1.4 million wealthy households who would embrace a system that truly included them rather than putting them up on a pedestal or violently threatening to take them down.
Let there be no doubt that there is common cause for creating a world that works for all — on a relative if not absolute basis. So much creativity is yet to be released by working across sectors of business, government, and community initiatives. If there is to be sacrifice, it must be for everyone. The privileged should be the last group that seeks to be spared. Beyond sacrifice, however, there is much to be gained by truly unleashing the talents and passions of groups working on behalf of healing this planet that we inhabit together. This is the image of the future that we should hold dear.
This ability to hold an image of a positive future for all is deeply embedded in the collective psyche of this nation and this world. The Founders of the United States were for the most part privileged white men who negotiated a common cause at the expense of others, most specifically African slaves, whose freedom they denied. Yet among them were extraordinary figures like Franklin, Washington, Adams, Jefferson, and Madison. None of them were pure; all of them were tainted by the prejudices, animosities, and conflicts of their time. Yet, they shared an almost mystical understanding of union and common cause. This is the meaning left behind by Jefferson’s words to William Duane:
“If we move in mass, be it ever so circuitously, we shall attain our object …”
Never forget the true purpose of the journey. Do not be deluded by the long, winding, indirect path that must be followed. We can only reach the goal in mass.
“… but if we break into squads, everyone pursuing the path he thinks most direct, we become easy conquest to those who can now barely hold us in check.”
Be ever alert to individuals and factions promising a more direct route or advantages to only a portion of the collective. Stay united, even in your differences, or you will be subject to those who will return us to tyranny and unadulterated privilege.
Sitting off in a corner on a barstool is a disgruntled gentleman. He’s not one of the 1% or conservative guardians of privilege. No, it’s our old friend Karl Marx, and he’s not a bit happy.
NEXT WEEK: The Dark Prophet
Growth was virtually the only means to deal with shrinking profits, and it would engineer the need for excessive consumption of energy and other natural resources as dictated by the needs of the marketplace. Although Marx is not known for addressing ecological concerns, he predicted that the absence of any mitigating influence on capitalist laws of motion would result in undermining the “original sources of all wealth — the soil and the worker.”
by Alan Briskin | Collective Wisdom, Conscious Capitalism, Wellness
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 II: Mind – Body Perspectives
Time Range: NOW
FLASH POINT
“The transformation of human consciousness is no longer a luxury, so to speak, available only to a few isolated individuals, but a necessity if humankind is not to destroy itself.
At the present time, the dysfunction of the old consciousness and the arising of the new are both accelerating. Paradoxically, things are getting worse and better at the same time, although the worse is more apparent because it makes so much `noise’.
Silence and Stillness
When you lose touch with inner stillness, you lose touch with yourself. When you lose touch with yourself, you lose yourself in the world.”
~ Eckhart Tolle in Stillness Speaks
Mind and Body: A Physiological Perspective on Wholeness
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. By attending to stillness, we awaken our connection to the infinite.
The body does not lie. When we are excited, aroused, joyous, giddy, we know it from inside our physical being. Similarly, when we are feeling disturbed, frightened, humiliated, anxious, or angry, our body is registering that as well through physical processes that cannot be negated by the outer mask we wear. Eckhart Tolle said it well: “When you lose touch with yourself, you lose yourself in the world.”
In our research on collective wisdom, one of the surprising findings was how many people in the field of facilitation understood this as an essential element in their work with groups. Named one of the ten key practices for preparing for the movement to wholeness, whole body sensing was described as the movement away from logical, orderly, cognitive processes alone and toward the mind’s connection to a “cellular intelligence that permeates the body.” This form of intelligence allows for subtler signals from the body to be recognized, a “serious discipline for the integration of the human system — mind, emotions, and body, for right and left brain integration; and essential for the integration and completion of collective learning” (Alan Briskin, Sheryl Erickson, Chris Strutt et al, Centered on the Edge).
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”.
Factionalization of the mind and body has the same effect as it does in groups — imbalance, loss of alignment, and being at risk for missing key information. Cognitive functioning, when separated from body and emotional awareness, is a particularly dangerous form of thought, especially when that cognitive activity attempts to be objective through analytic, concrete, sequential methods dependent on logic and language. If that sounds to you too much like the practice of economics, law, and bureaucracies in general, you may be on to something. There is a tendency in this modality of mental activity to always seek convergence, the correct answer, rather than allowing for emergence and divergence of thought.
Malcolm Gladwell, in his book Outliers, tells the story of two people: one is a bright but average student when measured on conventional intelligence tests; the other is a prodigy as measured by the same tests. They are both given a “divergence test,” which is quite different from conventional testing and requires answers that describe the uses of objects such as a brick or blanket in as many ways as possible.
The “average” student goes hog wild, offering both conventional uses (bricks are for holding houses together) and imaginary ones (a game of Russian roulette with bricks instead of bullets). The prodigy offers conventional answers (building and throwing) and then stops. Gladwell asks who is more suited to the brilliant imaginative work that wins Nobel Prizes? The answer from his research is the average student with divergent thinking, not the prodigy who thinks in conventional terms. Obviously, we need both forms of intelligence, but that means recognizing and reinforcing the form of intelligence that have become less valued by society. We need the wisdom of the body and the creative expression revealed in divergent thinking, skillful awareness of emotion, and deep intuition.
Wisdom traditions call attention to wholeness of the body and mind by never emphasizing analytic thinking in isolation. There is always an invitation to see more than what is first captured by the mind through the senses. Wholeness includes an ability to distinguish the inner core dynamic of a situation from its outer manifestation, to recognize relational elements involving the emotions of others, and to see a transcendent aspect beyond the task at hand. When we can practice that with others, something truly remarkable can happen.
There is also a direct analogy between the physiology of the brain and the collective body. The prefrontal cortex of the brain functions to differentiate among conflicting thoughts, consider future consequences, and inhibit the body’s reactivity to sudden impulse. When the cortex is overwhelmed by impulses from outside or within, there is an inhibitory effect on its higher-order functioning involving discernment and planning.
Similarly, the bundle of neural fibers called the corpus callosum functions to connect the two hemispheres of the brain. And each hemisphere has a dramatically different way of constructing reality. The ability to think, process emotions, and reflect comes from the synthesis of these two hemispheres working together alongside the somatic markers in the body – a symphony of electrical activity and blood flow that constitutes the wholeness of the body.
When only one aspect of brain functioning is stimulated, such as when considering an analytic problem with a narrow focus, the corpus callosum shuts down key activity from the other hemisphere. The consequence over time, if continually reinforced, is that one side of the brain becomes dominant, diminishing the flexibility and adaptability we need to survive.
So what are the consequences for the whole person? The prefrontal cortex cannot differentiate among competing thoughts if it is overwhelmed with restraining destructive impulses. Under pressure for order, predictability, and structure, the corpus callosum will inhibit the functioning of the right hemisphere, which plays a critical role in imagination, playfulness, and flow. The body under threat releases high levels of cortisol and other stress-related hormones, which prepare it to fight or flee but not reflect and discern. Blood flows away from the brain to the limbs. The body is in disarray, ready for immediate battle but incapable of creative thought or extricating itself from long-term danger.
It should come as no surprise, then, that in the collective body we mirror the same tendencies of the physical body. If we perceive ourselves continually under threat and crisis, attempting to solve immediate problems, we cannot choose wisely among competing ideas or foresee the future consequences of our actions. If we attempt to solve our problems with analysis and rules alone, we cannot come up with truly creative approaches. Factions develop, representing only one aspect of the whole, leaving sides continually at war with each other or caught up in paralysis.
This is what Marx predicted would arise from unequal distribution of wealth—social classes doomed to battle each other until the end. The balance between immediate self-interest and constructive thinking about the future would be thrown into disequilibrium. Marx believed the center could not hold. Was he wrong?
This is ironically the very problem that the triadic nature of government developed by the Founding Fathers was designed to mitigate. The executive branch, legislative branch, and judicial branch were meant to function as a whole, but with overlapping jurisdictions. For Madison, government required circuit breakers for restraining the speed by which a faction’s zeal could be put into motion at the expense of others. He was, metaphorically speaking, seeking to create a prefrontal cortex within a governing structure that could restrain rash action.
The Founders, however, did not wish to negate a governing body’s ability to think together, to set goals, consider future consequences, and discriminate among competing policies. They were trying to find an optimal point along a continuum of checks and balances. They were promoting a union in the only way they knew how, with a vigilant eye to the dangers of a majority that could dominate or a minority that could gain control of all the levers of power at once.
At some point, economic disparity breaks those subtle links. This is what Roosevelt was warning us about, the reason he tied together political freedom with economic security. He saw the collective body at risk, and it is the same risk we face today.
Next Week: Moving from Factions to the Whole: Part III
What societal pattern might connect a heightened sense of mistrust, poor health, violence, diminished life expectancy, and low job status? If you guessed social and economic inequality, then we are beginning to think collectively together. But why? Why should this be the case?
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.
