HAITI'S "DIRT COOKIES" -- A PASSIONATE AND THOUGHTFUL RESPONSE

HAITI’S “DIRT COOKIES” – A PASSIONATE AND THOUGHTFUL RESPONSE

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© June 11, 2009

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“We are but stewards of what we falsely call our own; yet avarice is so insatiable that it is not in the power of abundance to content it.”

Seneca (4 B.C. – 65 A.D.), Roman stoic philosopher

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“Greed is a mindset and lifestyle obsessed with having. Frugality is a mindset and lifestyle obsessed with accumulating. With greed spending holds the interests at the expense of saving, with frugality saving holds the interests at the expense of spending. Compulsion is the shared common denominator. The person of greed is reviled the person of frugality is revered. Either extreme is endemic to a sick society.”

James R. Fisher, Jr., “Fragments of a Philosophy”

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A READER WRITES:

Hello Jim,

I hope you enjoyed your Alaskan trip. I understand you were not likely to maintain contact during that journey and hope you are reading this after your return.

While there have been some interesting threads on your blog lately, none has encouraged me to tappity-tap on the keyboard.

The commentary on torture, a truly hot-button subject, has no answer. Maybe it never will. The power elite because the truth, the whole truth, will remain hides this from us. This is as it always was, just as your attempts to clarify our desire for subjugation is aptly highlighted.

Humans desire to hide our eyes from the reality of our distasteful world is real. Let someone else deal with the dirt, as if we elect politicians to be our housemaids. Don’t show me the pile you’ve swept under the rug. Just make sure it’s gone by the time I return from (work, vacation, movie, ballgame, whatever.) And, don’t put it in the cookies.

Dirt cookies and MBAs have striking similarities in the hollow sustenance each provides.

I earned an MBA over two and a half years taking evening classes at the Loyola Graduate School of Business. Was I enhancing my capabilities, advancing my career, feeding my ego, or making and eating dirt cookies?

Loyola has been noted for its emphasis on business ethics. It amused me somewhat that in ethics class everyone seemed to know the right answer and engaged in high-minded, self-congratulatory discussions.

The same people, in other classes, seldom struggled to find an ethical balance in their solutions to case studies. Of course, you know what I did. Playing devil’s advocate for the sake of discussion in an ethics course taught by a Jesuit priest is not a road to success. He even pulled me aside after one class and said, “Young man, you had better change your ways.” He actually thought I believed the positions I would argue. Sorry for the digression. Here’s the point.

Was this learning? Or, was it dirt cookies? The similarity between tired women trudging up a hill to gather nutrient rich dirt, mixing it with fat then selling it to the hungry and MBA students dragging to class after a full day’s work, learning how to manipulate financial spread sheets and people, mixing in some ethics awareness, and then selling the package back to their employer or the highest bidder is striking.

There is some naiveté in thinking democracy would help either of these situations. There is no democracy in business. Our government has legislated human rights out of business. What happens in Haiti with the powerful capturing and holding onto “revenue” is no different than what happens in the corporate world. The economic order of the world today has been distorted to the point that parity is likely unattainable.

And, this is not a recent change. It has always been this way. There is less naiveté and more simplicity in thinking access to knowledge would make a difference. When one spends a majority of time in a survival mode - making dirt cookies or working to scrape together a few bucks to pay for dirt cookies; or dragging yourself to evening classes after a day of work hoping to “get ahead” – the real nurturing required to help a family grow is lost.

The ability to provide context for the awareness children gain from their window to the world is lost. Ted appears to be a bright man with some knowledge of the world, likely much more than I have. However, I think both you and he are missing the point or misunderstanding the context.

The thought that people of Haiti or those overpopulating any other resource poor island will ever be participants in a high-wage global economy let alone within the next decade is absurd.

There are millions of people here in our own country that will never realize that dream. And, we have tremendous resources. The reality is that some nations will always be handout cultures. And it will get worse. If projections are correct, in less than fifty years there will be 12 billion people on Earth. That is twice today’s population. Think of 3 billion people in China, 2.5 billion in India, 700 million in the US, and 17 million in Haiti.

Today, nearly two-thirds of Haiti’s population is employed in subsistence farming. What happens when 650 people per square kilometer becomes 1300? The same land that cannot feed the population now will have to feed twice as many people. Only 2% of its original forest cover exists today, meaning soil erosion will diminish further its ability to produce food. How will democracy and computers change this?

Humans are a parasite on the Earth. As with all parasites, they thrive unless checked eventually depleting the nutrients of the host faster than the host can regenerate them. Further, as the parasite overpopulates, it begins to choke on its own waste. Ideally, the parasite dies off before the host. But, more typically both
die.

Resource poor island nations are the “canary in the mine” for Mother Earth. We can’t save them. Their deaths are an alarm. We should heed it and learn from their bad examples.

I apologize for that last paragraph and its harsh attitude towards human life. Unfortunately, the lesson we should learn has not and never will be learned. To take the anti-Gekko approach, reversing a mantra of the Eighties, “Greed is bad.” Greed of the slave trade created Haiti and contributed to its over-populated, under-educated history.

Don’t be confused. Haiti throughout this discussion is a metaphor. The destitution represented by dirt cookies draws our attention away for the important broader issue. Focusing on raising-up the poor is a smokescreen. Nothing really changes until the economic order of the world changes.

This is why Obama has the right idea for the US. So what if this economic rescue will lead to higher taxes? Who gains from the rescue? We all get back some portion of our comfortable life-styles. Who gains the most from the rescue? The rich do. Who pays most of the taxes that will cover the debt used to finance the rescue? The rich and their rich children will. Who has been doing most of the complaining? The rich and their puppets in the media and right-wing talk radio do. Why? Because they want the US to become Haiti, with a majority of the nation poor and under their gilded thumbs, while all the wealth flows into their pockets. Greed is bad.

M

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DR. FISHER RESPONDS:

George Clooney in the 2009 film, “Michael Clayton” is asked if he is a miracle worker. He answers, “I’m not a miracle worker I’m a janitor. I clean up other people’s messes, and sweep them under the rug.”

You are not a janitor, and should be noted for speaking your mind. Moreover, there is no need to apologize for your metaphor of the parasite and its host, as it is an apt description of how we human beings are acting as parasites on our willing host, the planet earth, and that in the process we are killing our host, and therefore placing our own survival in considerable jeopardy.

The cartoon “Dilbert” by Scott Adams, which appears on the business page of The Tampa Tribune, has been bringing our attention recently to the insanity of our MBA culture, and by extension the duplicitous behavior of managers and human resources professionals in collusion in this chicanery.

“Dilbert’s” entertaining sting currently focuses on ground I’ve covered in books and articles, such as MBAs, skunk works, and now as I return from Alaska on Quality Control Circles, and the charade of leadership excellence. Here is one of the back issues of “Dilbert” saved for me:

FIRST SQUARE: Dilbert, the boss, and a female employee. The boss is speaking:

“Last week I attended the Circle of Excellence Conference for Managers.”

SECOND SQUARE: boss and female employee. Employee speaking:

“So, while we were doing actual work, you sat in a circle with a bunch of managers?”

THIRD SQUARE: Dilbert, the boss, and female employee.

Boss: “It wasn’t like that.”

Female Employee: “Oh, I think it was.”


“Dilbert” is popular, and is placed on the business page, I suspect, because it resonates with readers, but, alas, nothing changes.

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Tom Brokaw wrote “The Greatest Generation” (1998), pointing out the sacrifices made, the courage displayed, and the resolve and determination exhibited by an entire generation to realize total victory and unconditional surrender of its adversaries in WWII.

What is not celebrated, but which David Halberstam addressed in “The Next Century” (1991) was the massive mobilization effort that took the United States from a handicapped military posture in 1942 (US soldiers were being trained with wooden rifles) to become the greatest military power in the history of mankind by 1944. This was achieved largely due to a superior management model. Halberstam writes:

"With our great assembly lines and our ever-expanding industrial core (and protected as we were by two great oceans in an age when weaponry could not yet cross an ocean), we became the industrial arsenal for the mightiest of war efforts. In 1942 and 1943 America alone produced almost twice as many airplanes as the entire Axis (German, Italy and Japan). In 1943 and 1944, we were producing one ship a day and an airplane every five minutes.” (p 59)

The management paradigm took off after the war with a momentum that made “management” the dominant profession of the twentieth century, as the nineteenth was “the engineer,” the eighteenth “the lawyer,” the seventeenth “the pilgrim,” the sixteenth “the theologian,” and the fifteenth “the explorer.”

See my missive on this typology posted on my blog (www.fisherofideas.com) February 23, 2005 with the title, “Cold Shower 6: Advent of the Professional Worker, Vol. I, Article VI.” “The professional worker” was profiled as the dominant profession of the twenty-first century.

You are a professional, and your anxiety is noted. The professional worker has been limited, controlled, misdirected and exploited in an MBA culture dominated by an anachronistic management model. The corporation remains committed to this model, finding managers refusing to step aside and make way for the new leader, “the professional worker.”

Perhaps I am impatient. After all, management played surrogate parent to workers during the last half of the twentieth century, and continues to do so. This has produced a counterdependent worker, professional or otherwise, who reacts, rather than acts, and who is paid a dollar more an hour than to challenge atavistic management.

Consequently, even with all his education and expertise, “the professional worker” remains complacent, resigned, obedient and passive to a system that no longer exists.

As you know, I’ve described this in a series of books, but I cannot change it. Indeed, I have written volumes on the need for the mature adult worker to step forward to establish a culture of contribution. Despite management’s impotency and the opportunity for professionals in these trying times, professionals wait for a “miracle worker” when only janitors show up.

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Your point is well taken that the “have nots” in Haiti and elsewhere are likely to grow in the next fifty years if humanity as parasite does not come up with a plan of population control, pollution control, and social justice.

It is a complicated problem because even with an army of miracle workers you cannot force people out of poverty. Mindset and lifestyle count here as in the most sophisticated of societies. You cannot coerce people out of their natural habitat as impoverished as it might be. The barrio is home to them despite the most grinding poverty.

Were $100 billion spent tomorrow in Haiti to provide potable water for all citizens, restore the forests, provide state-of-the-art farming methods, install modern sanitation, and develop a master plan of education, community development, and industrial development consistent with the climate, culture, and creative verve of the people, the results would not appear for several generation, and then only modestly.

Poverty is a mindset and as well as a human condition. Hunger cannot be obliterated by a constant supply of ships landing with food supplies. We have seen this drama repeated again and again in Africa where pirates interdict these supplies and then use them to buy arms, or demand exorbitant prices for what was meant to be free. Then too, such humanitarian efforts have been nullified by government corruption.

The most effective efforts have been by those in the Peace Corps, the International Red Cross, and Doctors Without Borders, as well as religious and humanitarian groups that deal directly with the people at the level of consequences.

Imagine a veritable army of such people protected by the military to discourage hostile tribes from insinuating themselves in the effort. Idealistic? Of course. Yet grass root efforts have made an impact on Haiti, and other impoverished Third World countries.

Social justice starts with the:

(1) Creation of a climate of peace in freedom.

(2) Moves forward with having potable drinking water and modern sanitation.

(3) Continues with teaching people how to maintain potable water and sanitation.

(4) Educates people in the practice of good hygiene to ensure good health.

(5) Moves on to cultivate the land with adequate topsoil, fertilization, and irrigation.

(6) Provides farmers with education in modern farm technology including the proper use and maintenance of farm machinery.

(7) Demonstrates how to rotate crops and practice soil conservation.

(8) Establishes a reforestation plan, which means finding alternative energy sources including municipal power plants.

(9) Develops diversified industries that will support the population, and improve the quality of life.

(10) Creates an infrastructure and governance to implement and monitor these developments.

(11) Constructs continuing education facilities for all adults as well as schools for young people.


This agenda will take the next hundred years to achieve, but it can be done step-by-step leaving no citizen out of the intervention.

Notice I don’t speak of laptops and other electronics, which are the equivalent of placing ice cream on the dirt cookies at this stage. A primitive society must grasp the bottom rung of the ladder and hold on securely before it can pull itself out of the swamp of despair.

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As for greed, it will always be with us. So often the compulsion for wealth possesses the person rather than the person taken possession of the wealth. This was apparently the case with Bernard Madoff and his $50 billion Ponzi scheme. Greed attracts greed and eventually nullifies itself, whereas the likes of Bill Gates and Warren Buffett continue to accumulate wealth the hard way, by working for it.

Be always well,

Jim