IS OUR QUEST FOR SUCCESS KILLING US?

IS OUR QUEST FOR SUCCESS KILLING US?

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© December 2005

Corrupt influence is itself the perennial spring of all prodigality, and of all disorder; it loads us more than millions of debt; takes away vigor from our arms, wisdom from our councils, and every shadow of authority and credit from the most venerable parts of our constitution.

Edmund Burke (1729 – 1797)
English Statesman

Shame may restrain what law does not prohibit.

Seneca (4 B.C. – 65 A.D.)


At one point in my life, when my work took me about the globe, I thought what ails the world was the “American Disease,” CORPOCRACY. In my writings, I go against the grain and claim business is the prime practitioner of this disease if not its architect.

I have come now to understand that corpocracy is only symptomatic of this disease. For the reader not familiar with my work, I claim CORPOCRACY consists of ten elements of management:

· It is insensitive to its employees;
· It supports company politics at the expense of productivity;
· Secretiveness is the controlling aspect of communication;
· Documentation is its principle product;
· Endless meetings get in the way of productive work;
· Its focus is internal while its language is external;
· Its planning is proxy for action;
· Individual initiative is suspect for you never know where it might lead;
· It is isolated from operations by the insulation of mahogany; and
· It overtly praises while covertly discouraging innovation.

Corpocracy, outlined here, is the working (not the theoretical) model of most multi-national corporations despite all the electronic wizardry of the moment. The evidence is palpable with a predisposition to treat people as things to be managed rather than people to be led.

We see this from the recent New York transit strike over the 2005 Holiday Season to the constant battle of Wal-Mart to put a halo on its business by a full-court public relations campaign, rather than quietly dealing with internal problems directly. We see it, too, with employers of steel workers, autoworkers, airline employees, and retail clerks across this nation, and now it is infecting other parts of the globe as well.

Missing in the paradigm is that most people, wherever they are, prove to be quite reasonable. They want a living wage, but along with the living wage the respect, dignity, trust and freedom to do the job. Not all pay is in coin.

The curse is that we are addicted to progress, and progress is impersonal.

People are a thing in this equation, which finds them being hired and fired at whim as the economy fluctuates, and it fluctuates radically because progress is its most important product.

The fall back position of corpocracy is that entitlements are killing companies, which I addressed nearly a score of years ago (Work Without Managers 1990).

The disease, I have come to concede, is not corpocracy. Success is the disease. No company can ever have too much success, even if its success is at the expense of killing the land, killing the sea, killing the air, and killing the spirit of the workers who grind at the core of progress.

Success is the narcotic that has found companies losing their moral compass and way. Sartre says an authentic life is lost when what people do has little to do with what people would prefer to do. It is the same with companies.

Companies have jumped aboard the treadmill, which goes faster and faster. Rather than get off when they can't keep up, they attempt to slim down to stay on. They do this by cutting and trimming, and downsizing, and reorganizing, and reengineering, and doing whatever is the current fad to stay aboard.

It never works because companies lose their identity in the frenzy. Companies are dying like the land, the sea, the air and the spirit of their people that they have unwittingly killed.

Success has resulted in the world being turned inside out with the natural perverted to the unnatural, the good to the bad, and the sensible to the ridiculous. Small wonder that we have corruption, collusion, wire fraud, bribery, duplicity, chicanery and scandals of all description. A singular appetite for success with reckless abandon feeds this beast.

Once sensible people viewed a little comfort, a roof over their heads, clothes on their back, food on their table, the company of family and friends, and a job to go to enough. The rest was fluff.

It is this fluff that has made success a disease, and its master driver, corpocracy.

This finds research scientists painting spots on laboratory animals at the Sloan-Kettering Research Institute to corroborate research data. It leads renowned physicist William Shockley, a Nobel Laureate, to fudged research data on race to show whites superior to blacks. It results in Dr. John Darsee, a brilliant young doctor, creating fictional medical studies, getting gullible and lazy famous medical scientists to “co-author” these works.

Once these works were published and found bogus, scores of papers and abstracts had to be rescinded, damaging literally thousands of works where other medical scientists had referenced Darsee’s works.

It underscores the blatant denial that cigarette smoking is harmful to your health of a panel of tobacco CEOs before the US Congress, when they held the overwhelming evidence of this fact in their bulging files.

Most recently, an esteemed South Korean scientist, Hwang Woo-suk, admits his stem cell research is unhappily counterfeit. A national hero, the drive to achieve, to win adoration and acclamation was too heady for this scientist when success was the Siren.

Even the great discovery of DNA and the “double helix” by James Watson and Francis Crick is not without its chicanery.

The key to the discovery was the exhaustive basic research work of the late Rosalind Franklin. She spent thousands of hours in refractory X-ray analysis of coal, exposing herself to excessive amounts of radiation. Exposure to this took her life in her mid-thirties, or before the Nobel Prize was awarded to these two men, along with her boss, Maurice Wilkins.

Incidentally, Wilkins gave the vital X-ray photograph of crystalline DNA in A form to James Watson without her knowledge. Once he and Crick saw this photograph the rest, as they say, was history.

Watson in his best selling book THE DOUBLE HELIX (1968) referred sarcastically to Dr. Franklin as “the dark lady,” because of her singular dedication to research and little inclination to small talk. Watson and Crick were model builders far removed from the laboratory. The American biochemist, Linus Pauling, already a Nobel Laureate, was hot in pursuit of this prize as well, but an ocean and a continental coast away from his enterprising fellow American Watson.

Science is grossly Machiavellian when reduced to transparent success.

We live in the so-called “scientific age” with miraculous scientific breakthroughs taking precedence in status to billionaire CEOs, or to corporations growing ten percent per year. The marvel of success has shifted and with it our moral moorings.

While some think a McDonald’s on every square mile of the planet typifies American crass materialism, others believe industrial global expansion mirroring that of the United States is killing the planet. If true, it would seem the quest for success has become iatrogenic, or the economic cure worse than the disease treated.

While half the people in the world have no decent housing, clothes to protect their bodies from the elements, enough food on their table, or even a job to go to, but instead are subjected to unimaginable terrors, the other half of the well-fed world are dying from too much of everything.

Dubious success is a disease that fractures the soul, kills the spirit, and plays havoc with the capacity for moral goodness. It is not because success is necessarily bad; it is because it has been turned inside out exposing devious motivation.

Look at history and you see war and terror are at root dissatisfaction: the “haves” look for justification, the “have-nots” for satisfaction.

Traditionally, religion has assuaged this division. Now, it is part of the problem, as science has eclipsed its roll and is meant to provide the solution. The new knights of the periodic table, however, are proving just as vulnerable to this crippling disease of success with its driver, corpocracy. Einstein was on to something when he said, “Science without religion is lame, and religion without science is blind.”

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Author’s note: Dr. Fisher’s books and articles address this concern, with an in depth discussion in his not yet released book, “Near Journey’s End: Can the Planet Earth Survive Self-indulgent Man?”