ADDEMDUM -- "THE RISE & FALL OF THE HUMAN EMPIRE"

ADDENDUM – “The Rise & Fall of the Human Empire”

We have become a secular society with our civil religion the government and its economic mandates.  Meanwhile, our corporate infrastructure has lost its integrity and the people’s trust.  Rather than challenge this new corporate “Gilded Age,” reminiscent of its appearance in an earlier period in American history when the “Robber Barons” dictated economic reality, today the populace willingly embraces the new “Robber Barons” material and gossipy authority watching their constitutional rights disintegrate before their eyes with no apparent interest in doing anything.  Thirty years ago, I wrote:

Take corporate America. Any large company today is 20 to 30 divisions in search of a corporation. The pendulum of centralization-decentralization is more a yo-yo contest with no clear winners, only painfully confused losers. Meanwhile, this once powerful and energetic nation doesn’t seem to know what is happening or why. The era of free lunch supposedly ended in the 20th century. This century began with such paternal control and submissive obedience has now run amuck. No one (and nothing) is in control (Work Without Managers: A View from the Trenches, 1991, pp. 37-38).

Fast forward and we see government in the early 21st century restoring the free lunch while the sacrosanct functions of the Executive Branch, the Judicial Branch, and the Supreme Court of the federal government seem frozen in inertia compromised by ubiquitous polarity and now unraveling in a worldwide COVID-19 pandemic. Appointed functionaries such as the Center for Disease Control and the National Health Organization hide behind the science that they treat with cavalry inaptitude while failing to manage the situation with any consistency in terms of policy or pronouncements. The vacuum left by incompetent leadership in corporate society has left citizens confused and uncertain as to how to protect themselves and their loved ones.

In this climate, young people ignore the muddle treating their cellphones and laptops as their prayer books having converted to the god of self-interests as millennials and centennials are completely bored with the high jinx of CNN and FOX cable news talking heads who continue to poison the airwaves with their narcissistic polarities. If young people are committed to some church or religion chances are its doctrines have a draconian hold on them which is neither challenged nor acknowledged.

This is to suggest our society is broken. The systemic structures such as the chain of command have lost their impact from parents in the home to academics in the classroom to the corporate governess in enterprise to the military. It happened in ancient Greece. We can still hear the lament of Socrates about children of his times:

“The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers.”

The same occurred in ancient Rome, to the Roman Catholic Church, and currently to the Judaic-Christian culture as political correctness, political identity, and critical race theory distracted from pondering our real challenges to cultural integrity which finds society teetering on the precipice of irrelevance, recalling Nobel Laureate poet T. S. Eliot’s suggestion in “The Hollow Men” (1925): ‘This is the way the world ends not with a bang but a whimper.’

It was in this spirit that I penned this ADDENDUM.

A FUNDAMENTAL WAY OF LOOKING AT WHAT WE HAVE BECOME

“Plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose” – The more things change the more they remain the same thing.

French author, journalist, and critic, Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr (1808 – 1890) coined this expression that lives on to the present.

One way of looking at “The Rise & Fall of the Human Empire” is what we call “reality.” Is it not something man has been making up, creating, and inventing since the dawn of man’s consciousness to cope and survive in a dangerous environment?

The shaman was able to bottle man’s fears by making up what natural phenomena meant (sunrise, sunset, thunderstorms, torrential rains, hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes, floods, extremely hot and frigid seasons, and so on). Religions were a natural progression from these early disturbing episodes from pagan polytheism to monotheism.

Continuing the idea that monotheism like polytheism is made up consistent with the legacy of the shaman, evidence of monotheism emerges first in Egypt in the 14th-century (1353 – 1336 BCE) during the reign of Akhenaten. The king was known to have worshipped Aten, the sun god, which constituted the first monotheistic religion in the world. Akhenaten’s exclusive worship of the sun god, Aten, led Egyptologists to claim that he created the world's first monotheistic religion. However, modern scholarship notes that Akhenaten's cult drew from aspects of other gods—particularly re-Harakhte, Shu, and Maat—in its imagining and worship of Aten.

Others claim the world's first monotheistic God was Zoroastrianism, an ancient Persian religion that may have originated as early as 4,000 years ago. Arguably the world's first monotheistic faith, it's one of the oldest religions still in existence. That said, some claim the first god was Brahma and that the Hindus are the creators of god. Brahma is also known as the Grandfather and later as the equivalent of Prajapati, the primeval first god. In early Hindu sources such as the Mahabharata, Brahma is supreme in the triad of great Hindu gods which includes Shiva and Vishnu.

The point is that Judaic, Christian, and Islamic monotheism are relatively recent in the schemes of things yet consistent with the need for some deity outside ourselves to cope with life in its growing complexity and confusion.

Christianity, we see in these pages, has been self-conscious in its quest for dominance, relevance, and legitimacy. In that sense, it has been like other religions fallen prey too often behaving counter to what it claims its sacred mission.

To sustain its existence, Christianity created the “Divine Right of Kings,” which is a European political doctrine in defense of monarchical absolutism, which asserted that kings derived their authority from God and could not, therefore, be held accountable for their actions by any earthly authority such as a parliament.

Originating in Europe, the divine-right-of-kings can be traced to the medieval conception of God’s award of temporal power to the political ruler, paralleling the award of spiritual power to the church.

By the 16th and 17th centuries, however, the new national monarchs were asserting their authority in matters of both church and state. King James I of England (reigned 1603–1625) was the foremost exponent of the divine right of kings, but the doctrine virtually disappeared from English politics after the Glorious Revolution (1688–1689). It was also called “The Bloodless Revolution,” which took place from 1688 to 1689 in England. It involved the overthrow of the Catholic King James II, who was replaced by his Protestant daughter Mary and her Dutch husband, William of Orange.

In the late 17th and 18th centuries, kings such as Louis XIV (1643–1715) of France continued to profit from the divine-right theory, even though many of them no longer had any truly religious belief. The American Revolution (1775–1783), the French Revolution (1789), and the Napoleonic Wars deprived the doctrine of its remaining credibility.

The bishop Jacques-Benigne Bossuet (1627–1704), one of the principal French theorists of the divine right asserted that the king's person and authority were sacred; that his power was modeled on that of a Father’s and was absolute, deriving from God; and that he was governed by reason (i.e., custom and precedence).

In the middle of the 17th century, the English Royalist squire Sir Robert Filmer likewise held that the state was a family and that the king was a father. He claimed, in an interpretation of biblical Scripture, that Adam was the first king and that Charles I (reigned 1625–1649) ruled England as Adam’s eldest heir. The anti-absolutist philosopher John Locke (1632–1704) wrote his First Treatise of Civil Government (1689) to refute this argument.

The doctrine of divine right can be dangerous for both church and state. For the state, it suggests that secular authority is conferred, and can therefore be removed, by the church. For the church, it implies that kings have a direct relationship to God and may therefore dictate to ecclesiastical rulers such as the Supreme Pontiff of the Roman Catholic Church.

That said the patterns displayed in religions of our time continue to clash culturally with each other and with the West in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Syria, Iraq, and Iran as the West attempts to impose its free enterprise and human rights value system and economic civil religion on them unhappily with the same embarrassing results that occurred with early Christian Missionaries on native Americans in the new world in the 16th century.

The Protestant Reformation ended the dominance of Roman Catholicism and gave birth to free enterprise and capitalism, ending, or so it seemed, European feudalism while European post-World War Two national industrial centers more resembled capitalistic feudalism as I experienced them working for Honeywell in Europe in the 1980s.

Following the idea of everything being made up or opportunistically created as we go along, once Rome fell and the Roman Catholic Church gain new life, the Supreme Pontiff of the Church resembled the Roman Emperor with the Pontiff’s governing Curia resembling the Roman Parliament, the College of Cardinals, Catholic Bishops, Monsignors, Priests, and Monks, the command and control staff of the Roman Army’s Generals, noncommissioned officers, and soldiers.

Industrialism in the West evolved with craftsmen out of feudalism during the middle ages to form small working groups that differed from the original guilds of merchants. There were no bosses but workers of various skills committed to the same enterprise: i.e., producing wood, metal, glass, and machine parts and finished products such as furniture, evolving to carpenters, sheet metal workers, and tool & die, makers.

With war came the invention of new weapons in the American Civil War including battleships, submarines, and canon power providing new roles for tool & die craftsmen to produce machine parts. In the late 19th century and early 20th century, bicycle mechanic Henry Ford became a successful producer of his Model T Ford, while equally self-educated Thomas Edison was inventing the electric light bulb that led to the public utility.

Henry Ford also used the newly invented assembly line to economically produce his automobiles, cleverly coming up with the idea in January 1914 to increase hourly workers' pay to $5 a day when this was more than twice the weekly pay rate for industrial workers. His motive was to make his model cars within workers’ financial means. He also created an incentive plan. Doubling the average wage helped ensure a stable workforce and directly boosted the sales of his Model T Ford as workers could now afford to buy what they were making. It laid the foundation for an economy driven by consumer demand. As a result, the working middle class took off more than one hundred years ago thanks to Henry Ford.

Thomas Edison exerted a similar influence on modern life. In addition to inventing the incandescent light bulb, he invented the phonograph, and the motion picture camera, as well as improving the telegraph and the telephone. More dramatic still, thanks to Edison, the electrical age began on September 4, 1882. That day, Edison Illuminating Company flipped the switch on his power station on Pearl Street in lower Manhattan, providing electricity to homes at a price comparable to gas. Cleverly, because Edison used 100-volt direct current to power his new light bulbs, customers could be no further than ½ mile from the generator. But he needed a high-profile location to promote the system. Edison chose a site in the heart of New York's financial district, at 255 and 257 Pearl Street.

Henry Ford, Andrew Carnegie, Cornelius Vanderbilt, and John D. Rockefeller, among others, were called “Robber Barons” because they created monopolies in railroads, steel, automobile manufacturing, et al, to control these sources of revenue to result in huge profits while intentionally restricting goods and regulating prices. Author Mark Twain called this period the “Gilded Age,” an era that occurred in the United States during the late 19th century, from the 1870s to about 1900. It was a period of rapid economic growth, especially in the Northern and Western United States.

Continuing our creative thesis, the organizations of these “Robber Barons” in terms of compensation for executives and managers were relatively modest before and during World War Two. Managerial compensation compared to workers was the equivalent of ten times that of American workers – who earned approximately $12.98 per week for 59 hours of work in 1900 or $674.96 a year – or a little less than one-tenth of the $70,000 some executives earned.

Management as a class was a product of WWII. After 1950, management successfully sold the idea to the American public that “it” had won the war by successfully managing logistical support, the timely delivering of supplies and weapons to fighting men at the battlefront, while economically husbanding vital resources to effect a positive outcome of the war, thus implying its extraordinary role in the war’s triumph.

A spate of books after WWII focused fixedly on management in the 1960s – 1980s timeframe to supposedly benefit working men and women in the trenches. To wit:

Robert Blake & Jane Mouton, The Managerial Grid, 1964

Peter Block, The Empowered Manager, 1987

James MacGregor Burns, Leadership, 1978

Saul Gellerman, Why Good Managers Make Bad Ethical Choices, 1985

Paul Hersey & Kenneth Blanchard, Management of Organizational Behavior, 1972

Douglas McGregor, The Human Side of Enterprise, 1960,

Peter Drucker, Management, Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices, 1973, et al

It is clear that management was seen as the parent and workers as its family, an inevitable reflection of the “Divine Rights of Kings” of the middle ages with little sense of, or anticipation of the personal computer, the Internet, the Information Age, much less that one day the majority of American workers would be knowledge workers superseding the position power of management, making management anachronistic and managers atavistic.

That said management’s compensation continued to increase as management became a consortium without precedence multiplying levels of management and creating variable empires within the organization rising to the point where a CEO today can earn as much as 300 times or more in compensation than his or her workers, growing a staggering 940 percent since 1978. Consequently, professionally trained engineers, statisticians, chemists, biologists, and other highly skilled professionals have opted to become pyramid climbers seeking their fortunes as managers leaving their professional credentials behind (see Corporate Sin: Leaderless Leadership & Dissonant Workers, 2nd edition, 2014, The Worker, Alone, Going Against the Grain, 2nd edition, 2012).

Management guru Peter Drucker writes regarding executive compensation:

In the current version of business ethics in the United States, one side has all the obligations and the other side has all the entitlements. This is compatible neither with the ethics of interdependence nor with a universal code of ethics. It corrodes the bond of trust that times superior to subordinate (Peter Drucker: Shaping the Managerial Mind, John E. Flaherty, 1999, p 270).

Some thirty years ago this ethic and trust were already unraveling as the “Rise & Fall” of the corporation was evident in the tea leaves (see Work Without Managers, A View from the Trenches, 2nd edition, 2013).

The Covid-19 Pandemic has accelerated this demise as virtual workers in their homes and not in brick & mortar centers is now a reality. More than 60 percent of professionals now prefer working at home, and 20 percent are willing to take less money to do so, seeing no reason for bosses and the constant disruption of work by managers whose only function seemingly is to get in the way of productive work. We can see how management has mucked up this pandemic from the Center for Disease Control to the National Institute of Health to the President of the United States to the Governors of the fifty states, to the media that takes sides such as CNN and FOX Cable News, leading to the increasing confusion of many Americans, another example of corporate management exceeding its perceptive deft.

At another level, our constitutional government, the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights, the role of elected representatives of our Democratic Republic by the citizens of the United States, the sacrosanct nature of civilian authority over the military and other appointed officials, indeed, the very integrity of the American language and culture, is being compromised at every turn.

New York Times journalist Michael S. Schmidt writes:

The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff twice called his Chinese counterpart in the final months of the Trump administration to reassure him that Donald J. Trump had no plans to attack China to remain in power and that the United States was not collapsing, according to PERIL (2021), a new book by Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Robert Costa.

“Things may look unsteady,” the chairman, Gen. Mark A. Milley, told Gen. Li Zuocheng of China on January 8, two days after Mr. Trump’s supporters stormed the Capitol to try to stop the certification of his election loss and in the second of two such calls. “But that’s the nature of democracy, General Li. We are 100 percent steady. Everything’s fine. But democracy can be sloppy sometimes.”(Published September 14, 2021, Updated September 15, 2021)

Imagine President Harry S. Truman’s Chief of Staff General George C. Marshall warning the Japanese that the president was about to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 which essentially ended World War Two in the Pacific.

Then remember in the most famous civilian-military confrontation in American history: Truman relieved General Douglas MacArthur of his command of the U.S. forces in Korea. This firing set off a brief uproar among the American public but the president held his ground and weathered the emotional storm. On April 11, 1951, President Truman flew to Korea and met with General MacArthur who was saber-rattling at the time threatening to invade Manchuria and even suggested the possibility of using the atomic bomb against China in Manchuria. Truman aware of the general’s flamboyant comments, said, “I’ll put that egotistical bastard in his place,” and he did flying to Korea and relieving him of his command, demonstrating publically that in America’s democracy civilian authority takes precedence over military authority.

Imagine if General Milley bypassed the President of the United States in 1945 as he did in 2020, with the bogus rationale that he had to console China by promising to forewarn China if the United States should ever plan on launching an attack.

It is only a brief 75 years ago when the President of the United States was clearly in charge, only to find this republic three-quarters of a century spiraling into confusion if not chaos prominently crippled with the COVID-19 pandemic. Indeed, this young nation that will be only 250 years old in 2025 appears to be unraveling as did the empires of Greece, Rome, Egypt, Great Britain, Spain, and the Roman Catholic Church. If there is an iota of truth to the alleged findings of Bob Woodward and Robert Costa in their new book, PERIL, our demise as an empire may be closer than we think, and the reason for this provocative assertion that the civilization we cherish and the Judaic-Christian culture that is our heritage and anchor appears to be unraveling.