BRAVE NEW WORLD IT IS NOT!

BRAVE NEW WORLD IT IS NOT!

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© May 28, 2008

REFERENCE: A friend writes:

I find this article fascinating: http://www.globalethics.org/newsline/2008/05/27/uk-teens/. This is Capitalism 2.0 in the flesh - something I didn't invent (sadly), but that I preach actively now. Our global economy is transforming, and I think it's a wonderful thing.

Now let me play my own Devil's Advocate: (a) This is England. Those people still live in trees, from what I understand (never been there myself). London may be the new leader in international banking, but the rest of the UK economy has a lot to learn from ours. (b) These are teenagers. They'll out-grow it; this is just a phase. (c) They won't work for unethical companies? Good for those companies! Have you managed a person under 25 lately?

All of that is fair: the British economy doesn't exactly set our trends. Kids do indeed get more practical and less idealistic as they mature. And how much influence do you really think these kids will have on their parents' investments? But it still heartens me. It indicates a trend.

As top brass at Johnson & Johnson dubbed it in the '50s, this will motivate Enlightened Self-Interest: companies will start to cater to this trend, and the world will benefit.

______________________

MY RESPONSE:

Ted,

I've not read the article, but have read Gene's and Frank's comments with interest. I'm sure the article can't improve on Aldous Huxley's book of the same title, which is still relevant today.

You will recall in Huxley's "Brave New World" it is the year 632 After Ford. The Director of the Central London Hatchery and Conditioning Center takes a group of new students on a tour of the plant where human beings are being turned out by mass production.

Huxley published the book in 1932 and had the misfortune of dying the same day President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in November 1963 to vanish from conscience and notice without a pause.

Having spent a great deal of time in England, dealing with such folks as those at ICI Ltd., while acting as a director for Honeywell Europe Ltd. in the late 1980s, and prior to that living and working with the Brits in South Africa to form a new company in the late 1960s, their comments resonate with me in a peculiar way.

In South Africa, warm beer off the shelf is part of the Brit's ritual -- I cover this somewhat in the novel-in-progress -- and this for a person that was before and after South Africa a teetotaler, not because of religious persausion but because of an Irish ancestry of want-ta-be's along with a penchant for control.

In Gabriel Garcia Marquez's novel, "Love in the Time of Cholera," the nephew says he wants to be rich like his uncle. His uncle replies, "I am a simple poor man who happens to have money."

A Brit would never say or think that. A Brit would rather speak well, dress well and reflect nostalgic empire and maintain its reflection than work. That is my assessment after forty years of breaking bread with Brits on the continent and in South Africa.

Now, the Afrikaner, on the other hand, would prefer the comfort and company of his own people, working hard and living well without the accouterments of, shall we say "ostentation and flamboyant style"? An Iowan can relate to the Afrikaner.

All my technical people in South Africa were Afrikaner, all my sales people, and the managing director of the company had gone to public school, but not university. They all spoke with the soothing diction and the noticeable flair of movie stars, even dressed like them with their ascots, sports jackets, as the artful histrionics and expected depth of such performers.

Brits knew how to hold their tea cups, and ate with splendid manners, but strangely, with a terrible need to please and be well thought of.

I've taken a break from my novel to write this because WE HAVE BECOME LIKE THE BRITS.

Pomp and circumstance mean more to us now than substance, as the shortest distance between two points has become, not a straight line, but an obsessive focus on ends at the expense of means. We don't want to go there; we want to be there, now!

My 12-year-old granddaughter shared her private school annual with me, where there is an article on "achievement" at any expense. The article claims in student surveys that 90 percent of grammar and high school students admit to cheating, and that 80 percent of college graduates from "high end" colleges and universities (translated Ivy League) admit that cheating to get the best jobs is a matter of routine.

We have become a shallow empire, a leaderless society, still imitating our illustrious cousins, who treat life as a passive if not vicarious experience.

Notice the draconian measures taken for European football (soccer) tournaments where spectators live out their lives vicariously and passionately, identifying their team's success or failure with their own. Sound a little like the NFL?

Passivity has become the pathology of normalcy. This disease expresses itself in taking soap operas seriously, and being glued to computers, cell phones, and BlackBerrys.

"American Idol" is national news, and has television's largest audience. Answer the question, why? A half century earlier "Amateur Hour" had a sense of humor and didn't take itself so seriously. Imagine if these "would be" performers spent a fraction of this time and attention to scholarship!

Erich Fromm wrote in "Beyond the Chains of Illusion" (1962):

"Man himself, in each period of history, is formed in terms of the prevailing practice of life which in turn is determined by his mode of production . . . Not the man who has much, but the man who is much is the fully developed, truly human being."

Man's primary motivation is to contribute, not to consume.

Capitalism makes the "wish to have and to use" the most dominant of human desires. A man so dominated is a "crippled genius" with the ambition to acquire overpowering the desire to accomplish.

Could it then be said that man's mission in life is the unfolding of his human potential and not as it would seem neither the quest for private property nor profit?

I write in my "Six Silent Killers: Management's Greatest Challenge" (CRC Press 1998):

"We elect people to public office whom we believe are like us, crippled but not too crippled, part of our herd, but slightly separated from it, who stand out, but not too much.

"Adlai Stevenson was nominated for president twice but never stood a chance. He seemed too European, too sophisticated, too intellectual, and too urbane for our tastes. Yet he was from the Midwestern farm belt.

"The same kind of people ascend the ladder of an organization. Those who rise in our culture are people afraid of negative freedom. Early on, they tested the waters of negative freedom and discovered that positive freedom and fear won out.

"The problem with empowerment can be frightening. In the United Kingdom while I was working in Europe in 1987, the press related how some 60 fifth-form youths (16-year-olds) who had been at a roller-skating party, were robbed of their money, clothes, rings, and other possessions by five young toughs as they left the roller-skating ring. They were commanded to line up, and those who hesitated were kicked into line. The 60 youths obediently followed. A few dominated the many.

"Were the young toughs leaders? No.

"What about the 60 youths?

"Great Britain, it appears, is still very much a repressive society (positive freedom), with children conditioned to be obedient, to be literally kicked into line by the time they are 16. Rebellion is out, as is confrontation. So, to get even, they probably resort to the six silent killers, first at home, then on the job, then in marriage, and beyond.

"It all starts with not being able to show a little fight when young, not being able to discover their own power. These young people were used to being kicked into line -- at school, church, and in the community. Like many elsewhere, including the United States, chances are they will never grow up, lock stepping to terminal adolescence because that is where it is presumed safety resides." (Six Silent Killer, pp. 260 - 261)

I'm sorry. I don't see a "brave new world" at all, and I don't see capitalism leading the way. What is happening in China and India, Indonesia, and elsewhere is not a positive empowering process, to my mind, but creating the calamity and chaos that now seems endemic to our small planet.

Be always well,

Jim