A comment by NBBooks discusses the resonance between the Wizard of Oz mythos emerging in the late 1890s and the politico-social mileu in force then. When Baum wrote the Oz books, we was an artist immersed in his time. Citizens felt helpless, hoisted on poles like Scarecrow. Farmers and workers were looking for leadership that would change the economy and the nation to a new path. The current path was just too terrible to continue.
America can do this kind of transformative change. We have done it before. We have to do it periodicially. How do we do it?
In rare contexts such as the times in which we are now moving, we have a chance to see what we believe, as the People, about economic and social justice. We vary over the generations, but we tend to vary toward less inequality both economically and socially. In a cusp of national history like this, we have to jump together. This change is not linear. It is nonlinear: a choice.
Chaos theory in mathematics illustates the kind of process in which we are now engaged. When a system reaches a point where chaotic patterns emerge in the maps by which we believe we control it, we are forced to find or make a new map to survive. Since our maps are the only way we can see the system, abstract as it is, we lose sight of the details "going on", and that scares us. TV, radio, print, electronic media and interpersonal engagement a la six degrees of seperation provide the fodders for our own map, shaped also by culture and education and personal experience. Businesses and government agencies use budgets and accounting information (i.e., "the books") and data about the people they encounter. The details of the encounter become transactions, recorded in a host of ways.
Chaos theory teaches us that complex systems end up in a new ordered state, but always in twos. This bifurcation is startingly simple as the result of factors unknowably complex. Chaos theory teaches us that when systems like our economy "collapse", We The People have a choice between two futures. Either outcome is as likely as the other. On the knife-edge of the cusp, the system makes a choice, because in a cusp, it has no choice but to transform.
One of those stable futures is more organized and "in control" and the other sheds subsystems which cannot be controlled and settles to a lower level of organization. 300 million people are each going through those cusps in various aspects of their own lives. Governments are, too. Businesses. Schools. Every institution and every market are systems themselves, vast and deep, as well as subsystems of larger systems.
No one can measure this. One can only watch and remember for later contemplation and wisdom. Right now the math doesn't help very much. We have reached the collective snapping point on many fronts, and have many more to go.
The Limits Of Analysis
Analysts use linear streams of information to summarize "what is going on" in charts and other ways. Chaos is nonlinear, so their maps fail to reveal its handiwork. The charts simply show huge swings in value and whole charts going to zero suddenly. No fancy curve-fitting algorithm can project beyond the point at which volatility and extinction occur. The whole universe of financial instruments depend on maps such as these.
New maps are called for.
Frontline people in businesses use their experience and intuitions to make things work each and every day. A whole spectrum of maps, and uses to which they are put, grow in layers like a giant crystal of facts with cracks and flaws and refractions from the syllogisms which give those facts structure. Then we can capture them in gossimer webs of electronic recording devices -- themselves ever more numerous.
People are recording events on their cell phones, and sharing them worldwide to millions. People are blogging and writing and singing and using all their arts, often long pushed aside for career, family and retirment planning. Art is flowing. Conversations are flowing. Nonlinear maps are most often intuitive. Someone who has mastered a craft has worked the details until they become second nature. Master business managers use a few measures, often not even charted, to anchor their minds in the map and know what decisions lead to what results.
New maps are emerging, every day.
The Prestigious Faction
The linear maps still in use by the large corporations are inadequate to the task of self-regulation. The belief that they can regulate themselves is a conceit, and an easy one for a generation of managers and accountants used to well-behaved economic forces. When things are in balance, the nuances of difference within that domain of balance (like your personal economy) are free to be magnified in our minds. The balance in my 401K becomes the measure of "how I'm doing". The balance on our credit cards becomes the measure of what I've got to get rid of. We each have several measures like this by which we gain a sense of control.
In a bubble of balance, we can ignore the information businesspeople and government are using in their maps: we assume they are competent. Big financial firms forgot to look at themselves from the outside. They forgot to look at the web of social responsibility in which they are engaged as fellow citizens. They forgot to re-member, in this generation, who they really are: fellow citizens.
Greenspan, 82, acknowledged under questioning that he had made a "mistake" in believing that banks, operating in their own self-interest, would do what was necessary to protect their shareholders and institutions. Greenspan called that "a flaw in the model ... that defines how the world works."
MSNBC article on Greenspan's testimony
10/23/08
Excuse me, mister Master Of The Universe. You admit that you now longer have a model which defines how the world works? Duh!
Freidman economics, the bane of Naomi Klien's books and interviews, and the mythos of Ayn Rand's Objectivism were both mastered by Alan Greenspan. He was The Wizard Of Oz for many years. We didn't have to know the details he was using. His map had to be right, and better than ours could ever be.
His "flaw in the model" should have been challenged. But it wasn't. Not by Republicans, as a party. Not by Democrats, as a party. In a bubble of balance, the actors come to ignore the bubble itself. They start fighting and clawing over every small profit they can see. Day traders scour the market for crumbs while "pretigious financial firms" set ROI targets and aggressively pursue them. Each kind of stakeholder comes to see each system as something to exploit, er, "maximize". "Optimize" is foolish when profit is so easy to claim.
Optimization is never popular. Balancing shareholders lobbying for evre-higher quarterly results and employees lobbying for retirement benefits, the executives feel put upon to deliver the impossible. Their sense of resentment for even being questioned about their judgement grows. The auto executives showed this week they didn't get the message. Their resentment doesn't matter to Us. Our resentment is what you have to deal with now. To Us, excessive compensation is not tolerated any longer when we are paying your dues for you. In a leap like this, everyone sacrifices.
Everyone. Every citizen does their duty. Especially the wealthy and powerful who unfairly gained, and too little appreciated, the deference given them in the "Reagan Revolution". They were supposed to create jobs with higher pay. They were supposed to defend us from war, disease, ignorance and pestulance. They were supposed to be experts whose maps could never lead us astray. Now that they have failed in those promises, they must act a fellow citizens and give up their privilege, their power and a larger portion of their wealth to the common purse.
The bubble of balance which has held for several generations is dis-integrating around us. Right. Now. That business executives are so clueless is reducing their power over the transformations We The People will now impose. Whatever is on the other side of bifurcation, regulation by government will be fundamental to it. Those three executives from the Big Three automakers bound that fate for their cohorts. The same week, Treasury Secretary Paulson said the markets had stablized -- right before they tumbled again.
What map are you using, "master of money" Paulson? The same one the "MBA President" uses? 'Cause We The People have made Our judgement on that assertion pretty damn clear.
We guess We'll have to make it clearer still.
The Palin Faction
When a system is in a cusp, the bubble of balance is disturbed or destroyed. In either case, it will re-form. When it does, it will be transformed into a new system. This natural process is now being studied by scientists, using new mathematics like chaos theory. In the intellectual crisis of our time, new paradigms like this have a chance to be taken seriously and become a vital parts of the new maps we will naturally make once things are stable again.
Chaos theory teaches us this reformed bubble of balance will either be a more robust and highly-organized politico-social system, or a more divisive and highly-polarized one. The former bubble of balance would be the culmination of the American progress, in the line of such reformations our forebears endured and overcame. The latter would be the dis-integration of the Federal government from the state governments, and on down to the neighborhood. It would be the war for which Palin's faction has been preparing for a very long time.
Palin's faction believes they can change society and politics to their requirements. In this mythos, they can then exercise control over the earth in anticipation of turning it over to Jesus when He returns. They pursue that strategy in seven domains, which they call "the 7 mountains". They have mapped the culture war. They do polls and market research based on these domains. They perform Overton window analysis, using the same consulting community who used to be employed by the politicians and pundits of the Reagan Revolution and the Bush Administrations.
Overton windows are maps, and each movement along the slidepoint, the map changes. If the movement is continuous and slow enough, the map changes are subtle. If the movement is a leap or too fast to track, the map must be transformed.
Transforming the map means, in the moment of transformation, we don't really know what the future will look like. We have to guess, but in a holistic and powerful way. We have to measure things ourselves. We start crunching the numbers. We start analyzing the documents. We start polling ourselves. We are now the Netroots.
We have to choose.
The Majority Rules, When We Have To
We The People are the ones who will make this choice. We will make it without a map which falsely comforts us. We will make it based on our fundamental principles, in consonance with the best our tested and cherished wisdom. We look to the past for themes and motifs instead of charts. We look to our mythos for strength and comfort in eternal truths. We look for new leaders whom we can shape -- someone strong enough to endure the shaping and still lead. We prepare to jump.
Palin's faction is refusing to admit their map must transform. Therefore, they are ill equipped to be of any use to the rest of us in the choices We now have to make, together.
And here is the mind which hath wisdom. The seven heads are seven mountains, on which the woman sitteth.
—Revelation 17:9 (various))
Widipedia article
The seven mountains are now cast by Palin's faction as:
- business
- government
- media
- arts and entertainment
- education
- the family
- religion
In short, they are actually derived from Lewis Powell's memorandum to the U. S. Chamber of Commerce -- the memo which launched the "system", as Powell himself called it, into a battle with the "socialists". A living mythos is a powerful thing, as we have discussed before. In the end, when you have to jump without a map, it's all you have left to depend on to make the right choice. When Jerry Falwell and Lee Atwater joined forces in the 1970s, this is the toxic brew they concocted and sold for thirty years. It is this brew We are swearing off.
It's time to sober up. Choices have to be made. Real choices suitable for the real world. It is time for progressives to take over the reins.
Progressives do not need this kind of map. Our only measure is progress itself. Have we progressed? If so, how can we accelerate progress? Are we regressing? If so, how can we reverse course? If extreme enough, we band together in conversations focused on solving the various problems we face together, as fellow citizens. Regressives can pour all the money and talent they want into those seven domains. That maw can swallow whole nations and take them down into the abyss. It will certainly swallow a paltry social movement who cheated to gain power for a season.
Luckily, most of us do not want to go. It will be the Prestigious Faction, Palin's faction, and many others, who will be Left Behind.
The Twilight Of Certainty
In Baum's time, the Populist movement of the 1890s, the choices were made which led to breaking up monopolies. In FDR's time, the middle class was created. In Kennedy's space program, science and engineering were lifted up to address a challenge. In LBJ's Great Society and civil rights legislation, the inequalities among citizens were lifted up. In Clinton's time the prospect of spreading the middle class to nations all over the world and thus reaping a Peace Dividend was the mythos.
After Carter's "malaise speech", we conserved 8 percent of our energy use within a year. Poverty was at an all-time low. The social safety net kept the bubble of balance in place while we tweaked the maps. Even Reagan dared not pierce that bubble in pursuit of his agenda. But he took the wrong path, and We followed into the wilderness to wander thirty years. In that cusp, We failed in our judgement.
Bush sliced every bubble of balance, at every turn. He defied the scientists and ostrasized the engineers. He spoiled the Prestigious Ones so their maps became so personal they didn't even pay attention to the information available to them through information technology.
Even now, Bush seems hell-bent to dis-integrate the remaining stability of that bubble -- almost instinctively so. He hates that bubble. He loves that bubble. Balanced things are liberal things, I guess, to him. He is ultimately now ensnared by the collapse of economic, social and political bubbles.
We stand now in the maw of the dis-integration. We The People stand in a nexus of history. We The People, in this group of generations now alive, hold the sacred duty of making our choices for ourselves and our fellow citizens in our hands. We hunger for information, the more raw the better suited to making our own maps, and doing it right. We thirst for inspiration so we have the courage to choose what we know in our hearts is the right thing to choose. We aspire to be equal to our forebears, in the very least, when they stood in such a time as this.
The shape of the other side is forming in our hearts. This wisdom, this desire to be righteous again in our common civic religion, this hunger for redemption and reconciliation one to another -- this moment of truth -- calls us forward into an uncertain and perilous future.
The Dawn Of Hope
Once frightened, then numb, we now rise together, unified by the surge of empowerment we all felt the night Obama was elected President. We await his leadership impatiently. Meanwhile, we are insulted at every turn by the factions who once were embued with Our confidence. Now they seem petty and now we know them amateurs. We suspect them to be con artists and criminals. Yet in having to pay attention to them at all, we are forming an opinion. A tentative, realistic map of the future into which we want to leap dawns on each of us naturally, without words.
For it is times such as these for which our generations were born. The world still holds the mythos of the American in their hearts, and we know we can be worthy of it again. In times such as these our collective wisdom is tested in the breach. It is exhilerating. Our fear is giving way to envisioning the mythos by which we will allow ourselves to be governed. On the other side of the bifurcation of the systems we must control to save our nation and our planet and pass them on to our progeny lies an unknowable future.
We do know we must change the economy. Labels, and the associated maps, like "socialism" or "capitalism" are too vague and outdated to be useful. We must bend the arc of profit toward the arc of social justice. We must reaffirm our equality. We must do our duty as citizens. We are no longer just taxpayers or stockholders or managers or employees. We are Americans, jack. And we don't do business this way no more.
Changing A Society, American Style
We know we must change our society. A black President with the name Barak Hussein Obama will stand up before us and lead us on. We revel in his victory, because it is our victory. We imagine the power of his name, so different from the names who have proceeded him, but now becoming the normal, the mundane. We envision ourselves prosperous again, and better than we have been when we restore our common weal together. We demand justice delivered, knowing all too well the depravity of justice deferred to "make us safe".
Our safety, as the People, is in our adherence to the Constitution. Our future, as the People, is in our hands and no others. Our common eye is fixed on the prize. We can make it there. Americans change their economy to realize such a prize. We connected our nation with railroads so the resources in the West could sustain the industries of the East. We fought a bitter war to keep the states of the South in union with those of the North. We have sacrificed much, and we all know we must sacrifice again. That is the price of freedom. That is the price of wisdom. That is the price of progress.
We were able to depend on maps which rarely showed us reality in the midst of a bubble of balance, secured for us by previous generations. No longer. Those maps transform in the act of using them again. The whole chain of assumptions which shaped their elements is being thrown back and forced to justify itself to be depended upon again. The future will not be this fate being visited upon our nation in this moment of choice. We will not allow it to bind us like fate.
We are rising up. We are speaking out. We are transforming. We The People are finally ready for the old bubble to be gone and a new one to be aborning around us. We want to hope again. We want to walk at risk, but free, again. We want to secure our own safety and pursue our own profit, now mindful of the true cost of that safety and that profit. We want to be better capitalists. We want to be better socialists. We want to be better citizens at all levels of government and trade.
In the end, this is why we change our economy. To perfect our union. To secure our freedom. To advance our cause, written down in a living document called the Constitution. To be ruled by laws, not men. To be left to pursue our own happiness without having to rob a fellow citizen of theirs. We want to walk in righteousness again, anywhere in the world. We want to be known as partners, not an empire, and to reach out to our fellow citizens on the planet Earth.
We want to help people after natural disasters. We want to alleviate poverty and feed the hungry. We want to protect our planet from ourselves and our weakest from the machinations of the strongest. For now we have seen the truth of it, and those who we allowed to be strong were actually weak, while those cast as weak were showing true and enduring strength. We have looked anew after not looking for a while, and we can see clearly what is amiss.
New maps spring forth from knowing captured with our eyes and our hearts instead of from our media chatterboxes. We're all ears now, and our hearts are troubled.
Changing An Economy, American Style
We The People want our national soul back. To seize that prize, we must transform our economy, yet again. It's worth the sacrifice, any sacrifice, to gain back the most precious thing each of us has. Our dignity. Our sense of worth among our peers. Our sense of prosperity and progress.
All else is decoration. Money without honor is of no value at all. We know that now. We saw it moving in our politicians (their lot acutely aware of how the People are looking anew at them) as they grilled Paulson and sat in amazement at the arrogance of the three automotive CEOs who came before Us to ask for our money. Those without honor, without common decency, will be cast aside. We have no choice. We are taking up all the slack we can by consuming less and sharing more. We are trimming back on our driving and on our energy use. We are taking to the streets, real and digital, to register our grievances and we expect them to be addressed in kind.
We will not be detered. We will not be taken for a fool. We will choose, and that choice will put into existance the new bubble of balance by which all of us will abide -- for a generation or two, at least.
After the tipping point and in the cusp of history, we are choosing even now. Our economy is dis-integrating while a new one is emerging. We are giving more to food banks and buying less for Christmas presents. We are talking to each other instead of plugging ourselves into our etoys and media streams. We are voting, and making sure that vote counts.
We are Americans, and we will not be held back any longer. Our ideals are our business, and the economy now coming must allow us to do business among ourselves and with others in ways which exemplify those ideals.
It's time to give each other and everyone a fair shake.
Doing Business Righteously
"Business!" cried the Ghost, wringing its hands again. "Mankind was my business. The common welfare was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence, were, all, my business. The dealings of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business!"
A Christmas Carol
by Charles Dickens
Quoted in Dining With Scrooge by Gary North
Let it be ever so: that we engage in our true business more in the coming bubble of balance than we did in the previous one. We change our economy to do precisely that, because that is all one generation can do in this great experiment we call the United States of America. Let us do just that -- not perfection attained, but redemption sought and forgiveness received -- in our daily business one with another. Let us choose to move toward the perfection of our common union, as Americans and as citizens of the world.
Let us pray, then choose. The economy will follow as far as it can. Let's make our next bubble a good one, perfected as far as we are able when working at our individual best in concert with our common best. Let us embrace the future without having to model what we should expect it to be. For in that moment we make those choices without being presented the solution on the map we are using, the map itself changes. What we learn by acting in the face of uncertainty gives us touchpoints for a new map. Like explorers of old, our diaries become the basis for new maps other sailors want to use as they venture further into the Unknown.
Here, in this blog, and in thousands of other ways, we are remapping our society and our economy. The new maps will show us the logical choices and we will choose among them. If chaotic results come back, we will try new logic. Over time, in surprisingly short order, a logical mythos which works better than the previous one will be found. We will share these memes with others, and absorb and use theirs. Over time, in surprisingly short order, new shared understanding will take hold.
In this new congress of souls, seeking more perfection than ever before, we will remake this economy as only We can do.
Crossing The Next River
Crossing the cusp happens in the transactions among people, monetary and otherwise. In our great congress among ourselves, conducting the business necessary to secure our family and better our community, we come to understand in new ways how to comport ourselves one to another. The crossing happens in an instant, unknown to decision made. The crossing is personal just like pioneers wading into unknown rivers, putting all of their earthly belongings to the perils of ever-changing currents, unknown potholes and alien peoples ahead on the other shore. But cross the river they did. The people on the other side were encountered. Balances were struck, shattered, then struck again.
Crossing happens on a day like any other in the course of our lives. Each of us has already crossed in many of the domains of our lives. Each of us is crossing still in the details of our lives. The majority of us will be across soon. Standing on the other side, we will look around and scout out the terrain. Then we will decide which way to go, for a ways at least.
We are Americans. We like to explore new frontiers. We're ready to be on our way, if you don't mind. It's time to cross that damn river and get on with it. Whatever is over there, it'll be a damn sight better than what we see around here.
Let's get this show on the road. It's not the river Jordan into the Promised Land. But its the next river we gotta cross to get somewhere where we can put down stakes and build a better place than where we come from. Time to cross over and see what's on the other side.
Hope to see you there, and soon. Hope your crossing is safe. Hope you find what you are looking for over there. Hope our children will look back on us as pioneers who made the right choice in leaving the places we have been behind. Hope we have the moral strength and character to build an honorable life whereever we end up.
We hope for a future worth living.
Frodo – "I wish the ring had never come to me. I wish none of this had happened."
Gandalf - "So do all who come to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to do is decide what to do with the time that is given to us."
The Lord Of The Rings
J. R. R. Tolkien
We, all and each of us, have a river to cross. Best get on with it.