Brian wrote:
I think that profit is not a good motive for individuals or organizations.
Profit is necessary for both: Individuals will starve, organizations
require profit to carry out their other goals. I believe that individuals
and society would be healthier if both individuals and organizations
committed to a higher goal of improving society in some way. Even Gandhi
always balanced the books and stayed in the black!
Brian,
Several years ago I read a book by Aaron Lynch titled 'Thought Contagion:
The New Science of Memes'. In his dissertaion, Lynch described a rather
elegant theory of how our ideas--and what else are beliefs,
anyway?--propogate and how those dynamics affect both individuals and
whole societies. For the most part, his theories are steeped in dynamical
systems and complexity theories. Note that his emphasis is not on the
idea per se, but rather on the dynamics of their propogation. I think
there is something useful to be learned from what he described.
Based on his thinking, the 'health' of a society lies in having a thing in
common that serves BOTH the individual and the collective simultaneously.
The issue is not whether profit is the appropriate choice as a focus for
our attention (an emphasis on the idea) but, rather, whether it can act to
strike a sustainable balance (an emphasis on the dynamics) between the
individual and the collective in a way which adequately serves the needs
of both sides over a relevant timeframe.
Currently in our modern world, profit attempts to strike that balance.
Taken from Lynch's perspective then, profit acts as a 'matrix' which
serves to enjoin the whole, that whole being the belief system which is
our society of individuals. And therein lies the trap. Too much emphasis
on profit and we create what I'll call a "cult of the lowest common
denominator". Too much emphasis away from profit and the glue that holds
our western world together begins to let go and we see the emergence of an
anarchic state of affairs. Nature abhors either extreme.
I believe we are at a time and place in the continuum of human existence
when we need to identify a new common denominator that can transcend
profit not because profit is immoral but simply because it doesn't serve
us well enough any longer.
Cheers, Arnold
--"Arnold Wytenburg" <arnold@originalthinking.com>
Learning-org -- Hosted by Rick Karash <rkarash@karash.com> Public Dialog on Learning Organizations -- <http://www.learning-org.com>