Transthesis

The Road or Blood Meridian?

I was thinking of what books to cite in reference to the Davos Man and the Hiroshima-of-One Man and their imminent confrontation. I hope it is not Cormac McCarthy’s Road that we collectively choose to travel. I hope it is not the Judge who is victorious in the trajectory of our collective Blood Meridian, as we hurtle towards our new Manifest Destiny.

[Photo: Marion Ettlinger]

Drucker’s Monster [the Corp.]

If I were to write this as a morality play, it would go something like this. Drucker is Dr. Frankenstein, and the corporation is his monster. Drucker’s Igor is John Marshall. The Christian Drucker possesses neither the alchemy of the Rabbi Loew, nor the word of God with which to infuse his creation. Drucker also has no way to pull the plug on the corporate monster, even if he were so inclined. Drucker/Frankenstein tries to manage. In the end the monster outlives its creator, re-creates him in his (the monster’s) image. The show is called “Repackaging,” but it doesn’t end yet.

Outside the theater, we, the audience, are made to witness and feed the monster’s growing appetites. No matter how much or how many it consumes, it is never engorged, never satisfied. This creature is driven by an insatiable hunger for land and blood, and it will not stop until it has consumed the Earth. The Jihadists rise up against it. They try feeding it barrels of oil to poison it, which the monster loves. So the Jihadist resort to reproducing faster than the monster’s helpers and offspring (it clones them of itself) can manufacture bullets.

I don’t know the ending yet.

CORPORATE AI IS HIVE MIND

At some point, Drucker must have realized there was a glitch in his matrix. Operationally, the theorem of management failed to adequately replace the hero, the charismatic flawed leader. Although tested thoroughly and proved in many societies over many decades, management did not prevent the second great depression. It turned out to be the cause.

The free market is unofficially a shattered myth. Greenspan is disgraced. Friedman is a laughingstock.

What of the best practices? I guess they seemed like good ideas at the time: culling middle management; crushing labor; opening the floodgates of immigration; minimizing shareholder governance and building a market on short-term gains; unfettering monopoly; gutting or eliminating pensions and benefits for employees; disabling the New Deal social safety net; replacing it with stock portfolios; uprooting the society; downgrading the rights of citizens in the workplace; turning dollars into free speech; marketing for the immediate gratification of any perceived need; copyrighting anything that moved, breathed or otherwise expressed; practically deifying CEOs; creating a profit-focused culture… At the height of this madness, if you asked any smirking MBA, Adam Smith was the only founding father America had. No one’s laughing now, as gun sales go through the roof.

Corporate image turned out to be a happy face sewn onto the head of a corpse, and at the heart of the corporate enterprise, there was no heart. Corporate Man came to be represented in the social topology as a zombie, dead but animated, feeding hungrily on the living.

Corporate mind is a hive mind. It is John Marshall’s golem, not Rabbi Loew’s. The corporate golum is unfettered by the limiting agency of the sacred.  Both Loew’s and Marshall’s creatures are made of the earth by man in the likeness of man, with an intelligence that is only as good as the maker of it. The problem, though, is that intelligence, by definition is generative. In biosystems, generative change, depending on the frame of reference, can be described as mutation, or, alternately as evolution.

In theological terms, a secular golem is the ultimate blasphemy, a manifestation of man’s desire to be the possessor of land and power, and the people who live on land or who are subject to power, and the control of the resources that flow from land, power, and people. In the vacuum that is the unmeasured Epistemological, or Cartesian mind, reason can justify anything a man can do, because what a man does is not who he is. Certainly, a theist confident in the sanctity learned or ascribed to in faithful reason, will estimate the virtue of character to be greater than it is, especially under duress, as when a man is contorted in his behavior by hunger or the horrors of war. We have ample proofs on either side of the ledger of good and evil, courage and corruption, by man in his relations with his fellows and his environment.

Frankenstein’s monster provides a literary analog for the artificial intelligence of the corporate hive mind, but there have been many penned by brave writers, since 1819. What is artificial intelligence other than the mind of the follower, the “dittohead?” No sooner had democracy formed in America, than did the forces that oppose freedom gain the foothold in our governmental apparatus, through which the whole mighty experiment might be undone. That the actor responsible is considered a hero (one cited by Drucker) today, should not be surprising to those familiar with the term samsara.

The artificial intelligence of the corporation is the social topology of human beings subsuming their native perceptual and conceptual qualities to serve an entity that is artificial, composed to produce an effect: profits. Or, in the case of the social sector corporation, the corporate composition is designed to replace the native service orientation, the spiritual motivations, of people, acting within their natural and independent collective topologies. A corporate artifice that performs services that assuage the consciences of corporate people or further erode the independence of individuals, and their trust in their ability to govern themselves.

The USA Isn’t Christian. MGT Society Failed.

From “America Is Not a Christian Nation” (Lind, for Salon):

As the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion; as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion, or tranquility [sic], of Mussulmen [Muslims]; and, as the said States never have entered into any war, or act of hostility against any Mahometan nation, it is declared by the parties, that no pretext arising from religious opinions, shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries. - Article 11,Treaty of Tripoli, ratified by the U.S. Senate in 1797 

The citizens of the United States of America have a right to applaud themselves for having given to mankind examples of an enlarged and liberal policy — a policy worthy of imitation. All possess alike liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship. It is now no more that toleration is spoken of as if it were the indulgence of one class of people that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights, for, happily, the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance, requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens in giving it on all occasions their effectual support … May the children of the stock of Abraham who dwell in this land continue to merit and enjoy the good will of the other inhabitants — while every one shall sit in safety under his own vine and fig tree and there shall be none to make him afraid. - George Washington in a letter to the Hebrew Congregation of Newport, Rhode Island in 1790

The United States have adventured upon a great and noble experiment, which is believed to have been hazarded in the absence of all previous precedent — that of total separation of Church and State. No religious establishment by law exists among us. The conscience is left free from all restraint and each is permitted to worship his Maker after his own judgment. The offices of the Government are open alike to all. No tithes are levied to support an established Hierarchy, nor is the fallible judgment of man set up as the sure and infallible creed of faith. The Mohammedan, if he will to come among us would have the privilege guaranteed to him by the constitution to worship according to the Koran; and the East Indian might erect a shrine to Brahma, if it so pleased him. Such is the spirit of toleration inculcated by our political Institutions. – President John Tyler, in an 1843 letter

One of the great strengths of the United States is … we have a very large Christian population — we do not consider ourselves a Christian nation or a Jewish nation or a Muslim nation. We consider ourselves a nation of citizens who are bound by ideals and a set of values. – President Barack Obama, 2009

Lind is incorrect in his title. President Obama is dead on. The US is a nation unencumbered by the monoptical lens of a single brand of faith. We have as a collective of individuals the right to choose the source of our values and the means by which we adhere to them. We are not forced to follow leaders. We elect them, with the understanding that they must adhere to the same principles or laws that we do. We - through our elected representatives - design, implement and enforce those laws. All of us are accountable: we, as individuals, are accountable to our own, collective, legal corpus, which may be corrected, modified and otherwise improved; and our individual leaders to the collect, “We the People.”

It is a shame that Peter Drucker never quite grew comfortable, in my estimation, with the bottom-up topology of American government. Over the past year and a half becoming familiar with his work, and the redesigning of Democracy into corporate modalities, such as “shared leadership,” governance, accounting and so on, conducted by those who are inspired to marshal on in the spirit of Drucker (which will, one imagines, animate variously in the future), I find it unsatisfactory that Drucker wrote the book on Management, and not the book On Man.

When he divorced people from commodities, at least in his choice of subject, he divested his subject of realism. He also divested the means from meaning, and the value from values. It seems as though he spent a lifetime trying to manage putting them back together again. If his Humpty-Dumpty had started on the ground, he wouldn’t have broken in the fall in the first place.

As it was, management, from Peter’s vertical, Epistemological perspective seemed always bedeviled by imperfection, a need for innovation or entrepreneurship, or a stronger third sector, improved productivity, lower labor costs, reduced regulation, diminished governmental competition, better leadership, better organization, more effective execution, a clarified mission, a designated consumer, a need or desire to satisfy, enhanced inducements for Knowledge Workers and on and on. Drucker could find good examples and ample poor ones to illustrate his points. Over the decades (GM the most recently pertinent), those citations were largely made redundant. The financial sector trumped all three of the sectors Drucker defined, stuck its greedy, dirty, risky fingers in all the pies, and came close to ruining all of them. It may still do so.

Management failed. Deregulation failed. Leadership failed. Accounting (more than all of them) failed. Governance failed. Decentralization failed. Outsourcing failed. Knowledge Workers failed. Government failed. Business failed. Nonprofits failed. Missions failed. Goals failed. Vision failed. And Peter Drucker wasn’t here to put it all back together again.

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The Progress of Dimensional Man

Like many of the 20^th Century’s great historical figures, Peter Drucker lived on the cusp in man’s perceptual evolution. The 1900’s can in hindsight be seen as a time for which the old tools of perception and conception were inadequate, and the new tools were exponentially more dangerous than any that had existed before.

Oppenheimer, Freud, Hitler, Drucker: all possessed means for which the ends were unforeseeable. Stalin, Mao, Roosevelt, Ford, Rockefeller and others were joined together in a configuration that was unimaginable a hundred years prior. The power of people to create and destroy had finally encompassed the planet. The atom bomb was not only a turning point in the collective topology of Japan. Hiroshima marked the turning point of all of Man. As Oppenheimer remarked, “I am become Death, the Destroyer of Worlds,” a quote from the Bhagavad Gita.

All the effects of decisions and proclamations by leaders of religions, governments and businesses in human history were converging on a point. The ideas and migrations of individuals and collectives were simultaneously yielding solutions and generating problems by orders of magnitude in pace and scale. The progression became exponential and geometric in its movement and depth, seemingly infinitely expanding and contracting consequentially.

The policies and decisions of leaders no longer affected the lives of the immediate hundreds or thousands of people. They affected millions and then billions.

Leaders tried to solve problems with command and control techniques. They employed psychology and planned obsolescence. They created chaos, psychotics, and the slacker.

In the end, the great leaders of the world generated a reactionary backlash that introduced a new term to the English language: “the suicide bomber.” Man individually learned to model himself in alignment with the New World Order. Men, women and children had been redesigned in the collective topology as “Hiroshimas of One,” to paraphrase the US Army ad campaign. Incidentally, the US Army has discovered no innovation to defeat the Hiroshima of One.

The world’s greatest fear is a small band of suicide bombers, eyes alight with religious fervor, pushing the buttons on the atom bombs strapped to their chests. Finally, the Age of Epistemological Superiority, spanning at least two thousand years, will culminate with the confrontation between the Davos man and the WMD-strapped suicide bomber.

If man will survive, it will be as dimensional man. If America is to survive, it will be without private ownership or corporate personhood to quell the progress of dimensional man. This is our new Manifest Destiny: to choose between the two futures.

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MGT and the Superclass

When I pine for Peter Drucker, wishing to add a few decades to his tenure, it is because I [might] prefer Drucker’s analysis to David Rothkopf’s. [Or at least, I would very like to interrogate Herr Drucker on the relativity of Management theory to the New Gilded Age and perpetuation of a Super Class. - 02.03.10]

From “The Rise of the Superclass,” a Salon review of Rothkopf’s “Superclass: The Global Power Elite and the World They Are Making:”

Not everyone Rothkopf writes about in “Superclass” is a Davos man, but despite his efforts to remain impartial toward “the global power elite” he describes, you can tell that the elect milieu of the WEF gives him a palpable thrill. The book opens with a scene of the author making his way through the town’s frozen streets, recognizing CEOs, oil company executives and Harvard professors on his way to a fondue restaurant. Suddenly, he’s greeted effusively by a bestselling inspirational writer with whom he has been trading e-mail: Paulo Coelho, “an icon of the global literary scene”! (The literary scene? I don’t think so, though Coelho certainly is a publishing phenomenon.)

Rothkopf’s credible, if not especially original argument in “Superclass” is that over the past several decades a “global elite” has emerged whose connections to each other have become more significant than their ties to their home nations and governments. They schmooze regularly at conferences like Davos, go to the same schools, serve together on corporate and nonprofit boards, and above all do business with each other constantly — to the point that they have become a kind of culture in themselves, a “class without a country,” as Rothkopf puts it. Furthermore, these people are “the new leadership class for our era.”

A former undersecretary of commerce in the Clinton administration and an officer in an assortment of “advisory” firms (including Kissinger Associates, run by former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, and the consulting company Rothkopf himself founded, Garten Rothkopf), Rothkopf is an insider of sorts, well enough connected to sit in on meetings of power brokers without quite being one himself. He also writes Op-Eds on international affairs for major newspapers and is a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, positions that require the display of some critical distance. “Superclass” isn’t as condemnatory as Naomi Klein’s anti-globalization manifesto “No Logo,” let alone the conspiracy theorizing of “The Iron Triangle,” Dan Briody’s exposé of the Carlyle Group, but it doesn’t merely fawn over its subjects, either.

Rothkopf announces that he and his researchers have identified “just over 6,000” people who match his definition of the superclass — that is, who have met complicated (and vaguely explained) metrics designed to determine “the ability to regularly influence the lives of millions of people in multiple countries worldwide.” These include heads of state and religious and military leaders — even the occasional pop star, like Bono — but the core membership is businessmen: hedge fund managers, technology entrepreneurs and private equity investors.

I would have also liked to ask Peter Drucker what he made of Madonna, travelling to Africa, to adopt a new child. “What, Professor Drucker, does this mean? What is the value of that baby?” I would have many questions to ask of Peter Drucker, about GM, about the redistribution of wealth occurring via the US Treasury to offset the asset-free credit boom precipitated by the rise to power in America of Ronald Reagan, the proto-conservative Christian de-regulator, privatizer, anti-Communist, anti-Socialist, anti-union, etc. I would want to know what books Peter Drucker opted not to write during his real lifetime, and what books he would publish in his dimensional lifetime.

[Dynamic Symmetry]

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