I’ve been thinking this last year or two about corporation, markets and economy and how they fit with compassion, caring, and openness. A number of recent posts have been tinkering at the edges of this. Perhaps I’ve been settling a bit of frame for myself. An email from Penny Scott (BALLE BC)yesterday gives me an opening to push into the center of this a bit… maybe even on the way to a Center of some kind…
towards restorative economy, markets etc: …if the act of compassion by its definition (mutual) transcends self as separate…and capitalism is a free-market system based on private ownership and is characterized by a free competitive market and motivation for profit (encarta)….then [corporate compassion] as language and action would seem to be the essential evolutionary current?
taken in parts now:
if the act of compassion by its definition (mutual) transcends self as separate…
yes, transcends self as separate… AND includes self as separate. Ken Wilber strikes again after TheObvious brought him back to mind this morn.
…and capitalism is a free-market system based on private ownership and is characterized by a free competitive market and motivation for profit (encarta)
i don’t know “encarta” …but i don’t think that people are after ‘profit’ in markets, not primarily and essentially, anyway. if we say that it’s merely about profit, i believe we flatten (more shades of TheObvious) the life out of market participants (all of us). it reduces our needs for security, freedom, power, well-being. it reduces living beings with needs and wants and interests to economic entities that feed on a monoculture of money profit.
but since we know that profit, per se, is not essential to life, we can say this another way. we can say that if markets and their movements are consistent with the flow of life, and ‘profit’ in itself is not essential to life, then there must be other reasons for our being in markets. life reasons. we can’t get past the ‘profit’ unless we get underneath it to those needs whose satisfaction *is* essential to life. food, shelter, hope, future, direction, support. and if we can see and satisfy those life reasons for entering markets, real needs for living, then i think the interim ‘need’ for profit begins to dissolve.
also worth noting, markets are not only based on private ownership… they are also based on public space. no space, no market. without a commons, then we can only have me crossing over to your territory to deal. or you crossing to mine. if there is no other trading space, there may be the sense that there are no other traders, and no alternative to the prices that we quote to each other.
without some other trading space, real physical trading space or at least mindspace wherein other trading/pricing alternative choices can be plausibly imagined and analyzed, then there may be not movement between us… there is always the chance of deadlock or dominance. have you ever been in a marketplace where the seller tried to convince you that his/her product was the only option, tried to keep you from considering others? i think we naturally recoil from those who would limit our access to the rest of the ‘market’ that we know is out there.
we need big markets, open spaces, and commons because they provide the mental juice that lubricates our individual dealings, they mediate life in the same way parks and streets and meeting halls mediate our living together in physical spaces.
….then [corporate compassion] as language and action would seem to be the essential evolutionary current?
yes, i think so. my teachers, julie henderson (ZapchenSomatics)in particular, have led me to understand compassion as one of the conditions that arises naturally and automatically whenever i am able to let another being be as real to me as i am to myself. i think this mutuality of being and perceiving happens naturally in markets that are open and full of people and information. markets that are open conversations. markets are full of risks. they make us vulnerable. they drive us to look around, pay attention, be more aware.
harrison owen (OpenSpaceTech originator) has pointed out that the agora, marketplace, in ancient greece is the root of agoraphobia, fear of the outside. markets draw us out of ourselves and into the world. in open space, the marketplace we open draws people out of their own smaller issues and departments and into the world of the larger organization. it’s exciting, and can be frightening. we go there, out into the markets, because we need their gifts… we need their compassion… we need to be known and noticed, connected, conversing.
to balance the risks, we look for returns. profits. and we join together in corporations, not to eliminate risk (and liability) but to share it around. so profit and corporation are interim steps in a much bigger and deeper coming together. a fortune 150 company i worked with recenty has gathered 140 nationalities to do work in 100 countries. held up against a backdrop of international tensions and wars, their coming together is truly phenomenal.
everywhere, i think, we are learning to be more aware of self, my needs (willingness to pay), AND aware of others, you and your needs (the costs of my actions). we are learning to see these things simultaneously and directly… and coming into an awareness of a new being that is ‘us’ and is bigger than you or me. it transcends you and me as one ‘us,’ while still including ‘you’ and ‘me’ as separate beings.
i’m told that this simultaneous awareness of two beings or experiential states is quite difficult and rare, that in the U.S. no more than 15% of adults ever learn to do this. julie henderson says it’s quite a bit harder than rubbing your tummy and patting your head at the same time. i say that this is what we are practicing in markets, a sort of rubbing your tummy and patting my head at once. you scratch my back and i scratch yours, each giving attention the attending and the being attended to.
in the moments that it really works: compassion, love, joy, and new openness show up! the real joy is in the connection, not the calculations. the more directly we can move toward the connections over the calculations, the more these essential states of compassion, love, openness, and joy in our work can feed us all. the connections are in the markets, the spaces we open between us and for ‘us.’
thinking this must eventually point to the ways that we can expand our understanding and practice of corporation, marketplace, ownership and awareness… for more and more compassion, love, joy and openness. noticing too that this must be the Nature sort of shift that Jon Husband (Wirearchy) and Doc Searls are talking about as deepest level changes, taking longest time. but i’m not at all convinced that they are layers as Jon presents. i see them more like four quadrants translated from Ken Wilber: consciousness/awareness/caring (Nature)… culture/story/seeing (Culture)… structure/support/movement (Governance/Infrastructure)… finance/diversity/making (Commerce/Fashion). i think we cycle through them like the seasons.
i draw them in a cycle because each new fashion stretches our awareness of what’s possible. further, i would resolve the timing issues raised by noting simple that each one has its own time. awareness can appear to grow soooooo slowly but then hits in a flash. infrastructure changes are clearly drawn up quickly, but take long time to build out. four seasons. four entirely different times. one cycle. world without end. amen.
