One Vision One Strategy One Voice

What good comes from an economic collapse? It often forces a re-configuration of power relationships for the better. Occasionally it creates an opportunity for accomplishing fundamental structural improvement. Institutions tend to deflect threats to the status quo by recycling leadership. But sometimes the sheer scale of a disruption closes off that avenue. In such cases, immediate structural evolution may be the only way to avoid extinction.

Now that old style capitalism has done its thing again, perhaps there is an opportunity to make it smarter. Most of the current post-collapse discussion centers on the past. It debates the merits and limits of Keynesian economics, socialism or the New Deal’s attempt to regulate the booms and busts out of our economic system. Some people, overwhelmed by nostalgia for some imagined golden age of security, even long for autocracy; single party rule, communism, Disneyfied feudalism as per The Lion King. It is fascinating how little of the public discussion entertains the possibility of a leap forward rather than backward.

History documents our genius for mesmerizing people into compliant behavior. It is filled with a pageantry of gods, goddesses, conquering heroes, charismatic leaders and, lately, secular-poetic philosophies of governance used to secure social organization. Standing on the shoulders of so many schisms and isms, how is it possible that we have made so little progress that we can yet again have brought the roof down on our heads?

A reporter once asked the philosopher James Luther Adams to sum up the history of the Twentieth Century. Reaching back to Henry David Thoreau, he quipped, "Improved means to unimproved ends." So we seem destined to continue on into the Twenty-first century; unless of course, we do something about it. Or, as seems increasingly likely, nature does something about us.

Obviously self improvement is no trivial pursuit even for a species as adaptable as Homo sapiens. If there had been no progress at all over the course of history, it would be pointless for us to do anything about the mess we have made but eat drink and be merry. But there has been progress. There is a clear trend in the cultural evolution of human relations; a slow, painstaking drive toward optimism.

Robert Wright in Non Zero describes it as a cumulative capacity for creating and sustaining positive sum (win-win) behavior. He sees competition and cooperation like the catch and release of a car jack incrementally raising productivity and making distribution increasingly egalitarian. That seems like a fair assessment of the last 5,000 years—with a nod to the brutality of the increments.

The down-side of this progress is that it has been either too fast or too slow. It has been too fast in that we have not had time to evolve a natural discipline for living within our environmental means. It has been too slow in that social culture has not evolved governors that force us to sustain the environment that sustains us. Now we find ourselves in a race against time. It is a race that, if we have not already lost, we will likely win only by the skin of our chinny chin chins.

Where I live, in Maine, global warming is very real. Since 1912, the tide now rises eight inches higher in our harbors. One hundred years ago, the sea froze so solidly that each winter a road was opened across the ocean ice as a shortcut from Brunswick to Portland. Twenty-five years ago, when I moved to Maine and bought a house on Quahog Bay, the January freeze, though dramatically reduced, still stretched hundreds of yards from shore and reached two feet in thickness. Today only a skim, a few inches thick at most, struggles out from the beach in the dead of winter.

If you see a rock coming at you, but you can't decide which way to dodge, is the rock the critical problem or is it your inability to choose wisely and act? A University of Maryland Program on International Policy Attitudes poll in 2006 determined that 65% of people worldwide considered climate change a serious problem. Two thirds of us already see the rock, but, at the institutional level, we mostly continue posturing like Daffy Duck—sound and fury signifying not much.

If global warming is a game of Russian roulette, there is already at least one bullet in the chamber. For each five years that we fail to arrest the increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide, add a bullet, spin the cylinder and pull the trigger. We know how this game ends.

For the most part, our social institutions have demonstrated their inability to respond appropriately in a timely manner. That is peculiar because scientists have been doing research on how to quickly make wise decisions for over a hundred years.

The first scientific study of group decision-making was undertaken in England in 1906 at an agricultural fair on a whim. The famous, octogenarian psychologist Francis Galton noticed that a butcher’s booth was holding a contest to see who could come closest in guessing the dressed weight of the ox they were exhibiting. He decided that it was a perfect opportunity to prove a truism for aristocratic gentleman of the time that the mob, as a whole, is less smart than its smartest member. He discovered otherwise.

What was most amazing about the result was the dog that didn’t bark. Instead of precipitating a tidal wave of research and subsequent re-evaluation of the practice of institutional governance, it was ignored.
A hundred years of research later, most of it done in the last three decades, we know that groups can consistently make better decisions faster than the smartest individual member as long as certain requirements are met—for instance, as in Galton’s experiment, everyone gets to see the whole ox (transparency).

For whatever reasons, the broader world has largely missed or dismissed this opportunity to increase the IQ of its institutions. This is doubly peculiar because history is full of examples of the superiority of collective intelligence: the Beatles together—or separately; Rome as a republic, or as an empire; Lincoln’s team of rivals; the fabled skunk works of Lockheed Martin. The value of collective intelligence is intuitively recognized in our institutions; juries are made up of 12 people, corporations have boards of directors, American Idol has three judges.

In spite of this, we have not yet leveraged the research on collective intelligence to improve government or organizational management. Nor have we refined its use where we traditionally do apply it. Apparently, there is something about behaving wisely, as that is scientifically defined, which is apparently irrelevant to most people in position to make and implement executive decisions.

If you think this does not include you, let’s see. Do you have siblings? If you do, this should be easy. Remember, as a child, maneuvering to be the one who cut the cake assuming that he who cuts gets the biggest slice? Maybe you never did anything like that, but you certainly know someone who did.
Do you remember how that went down—all the indignation, yelling, the inevitable parental intervention—“if you cut, you chose last.” In my case, given the ferocity of my siblings, that struggle was about a very marginal amount of extra-cake. How often in our society do we find ourselves competing to have a bigger slice rather than cooperating to make a bigger cake?

Reactively competitive behavior, probably rooted in the reptilian—grab it and run—part of our brains, has turned finally and undeniably toxic. Uncomfortable, frightening, or threatening as it may be for us to awaken and empower the collective intelligence of humanity, we can no longer afford the pessimism of win-lose behavior. There is no longer time for two steps forward one step back, incremental improvement away from pessimistic elitism toward universal, positive-sum behavior. It is essential now that we embrace a muscular, active idealism.

Usually when our path forks between idealism and pragmatism, the pragmatic path wins because it usually goes downhill. If our only concern is the quality of the trip, that works. If we have any interest in the destination, it doesn't.

A study of 200,000 executives sponsored a few years ago by Lee Hecht Harrison, a large executive outplacement firm, determined that American executives were at their weakest in strategic thinking. That's not so surprising since they are expected to excel in an economic system obsessively focused on quarterly results.

Our whole economic system has been focused on the trip. As long as the trip was easy, no one complained that senior executives were putting multi-billion dollar institutions at extreme risk in order to slip a few million dollars in windfall bonuses in their pockets. That began to change when the rest of the stakeholders caught sight of the ultimate destination.

You might have expected a universal change of heart but habits die hard. Many of those executives and their political enablers are still trying desperately to flog the donkey forward in spite of the waiting debtor's remorse for the vast majority of us.

There is still no real public discussion about the destination at the end of our traveling. Where should our society be going and what changes will be necessary to allow us to reach that goal? Such a discussion would require that we look up, that we entertain choosing an uphill path. It would require that we genuinely open the system to politically dangerous memes like aspiration, compassion and affiliation.

We would each have to ask ourselves and each other when in our lives we have felt truly and fully wonderful. Was it that last pay raise, the up tick in our portfolio, the birth of a child, lifting someone up who had fallen down, walking barefoot in the grass without fear of stepping on broken glass?

Who are we going to become? Answer this carefully. The consequences are real and they are inescapable. No amount of wealth, privilege, or power will secure any of us against the outcome of the wrong choice. Whether the socio-economic game that a culture plays is optimistic or pessimistic has become decisive.

Pessimistic strategies focus on consolidating wealth rather than creating it. They tend to be parasitic or predatory. Being focused on extracting existing wealth, they are short term oriented. And since every transaction entails costs, even as they concentrate wealth, they tend to generate a net loss to the broader system; the potential for massive loss is real, however well it may be disguised.

A 700 trillion dollar tidal wave of derivatives overhangs the world's 79 trillion dollar economy. Most people do not even know what a derivative is in spite of Warren Buffet in the Berkshire Hathaway annual report for 2002 describing them as “financial weapons of mass destruction.” Our financial sector is a perfect example of rampant pessimism. It is also a laboratory for who we are in the grand scheme of things.

Because all is a win-lose game for them, pessimistic leaders strive to secure prerogatives by any means. As gatekeepers, interested in limiting participation, they gum up the works and make society less resilient, creative and vital.

In dramatic contrast, optimistic strategies orient toward inventing new value. They are expansive and inclusive. Rather than grabbing the whole egg, shell and all, they spread the wealth around. The optimist regards the world from the perspective of an emerging future and bases present action on genuine growth.
Optimistic leaders act as catalysts and stewards, equating self interest with the overall vitality of the system.

Annalee Saxenian points out in Regional Advantage: Culture and Competition in Silicon Valley and Route 128 that the main reason that Silicon Valley in California replaced Route 128 in Massachusetts as the technology capital of the world was that Silicon Valley culture was, at that time, somewhat more optimistic than that of Route 128.

Instead of the vertical integration and cut-throat, last gladiator standing style competition endemic to the East Coast, the West Coast formed a web of interdependent contributors, suppliers and producers. Often companies on the West Coast were competing while simultaneously cooperating. This created a robust, innovative and fast growing economic regional system as distinct from the hill top corporate castles of the East Coast.

For the first time, one species, ours, has the power to destroy the whole biosphere. The history of empires is that they collapse. Usually they take down with them everything that they can. This time everything is everything.

We need a new definition of winning, one based on sustainability. Victory is no longer a victory if someone loses. In the language of optimism, a victory is when all the participants and stakeholders benefit. Then we have to implement that definition.

There is a reason the French have the best health care system in the world. They willingly take to the barricades to get what they want. There is a reason Germans lead the world in alternative energy installation. Everyone pays for it. There is a reason the Swedes have the most egalitarian of societies. Their commitment to social responsibility is as great as their love of individualism.

Just so, there are reasons for who we are. Since who we currently are is not sustainable, we need to understand those reasons and use them as entry points for change. One of the central reasons we are who we are is that our institutions consistently make bad decisions. To make “bad” a little more definitive, we can lean on Barbara Kellerman’s characterization in Bad Leadership, “…incompetent, rigid, intemperate, callous, corrupt, insular or evil.” For topical examples of all seven, just read any day’s New York Times. Consequently, one of the most essential steps to becoming sustainable is programming our institutions to make wise decisions.

There are four essential requirements for being consistently wise. Interestingly, processes already exist for meeting those requirements in a variety of venues. All that is required to transform decision making in this country is to identify best practices and enforce—or at least promote—them. And there you have the core problem; the science of this is simpler than the politics.

The first requirement for making a wise decision is one of the most politically challenging. The decision makers must include, either directly or indirectly, all stakeholders in the outcome of the decision. In the oldest versions of the Sleeping Beauty fairy tale, pre-Disney, there was no wicked fairy. The fairy who put the kingdom to sleep was simply the one the King and Queen forgot to invite to the ball. Inclusiveness is critical for creating outcomes that can be readily implemented without significant blow back.

The second requirement also rubs against the grain of contemporary institutional practice. All participants have to be independent. That means they can be neither intimidated nor bribed; no Whip driven, party-line votes in Congress, no CEO appointed executive boards, no corporate controlled press, no “with us or against us” polarization.

It may be more humane that we have institutionalized bribery, in the form of lobbying for instance, rather than physical intimidation to sway politicians, but the end result is still parochial decisions.

The third requirement is generally more nearly honored but rarely fully understood. The decision makers must include subject matter experts along with people who have detailed practical experience. Nothing new there, but they must also include a few wild cards. Wild cards are people who offer stupid, ridiculous or audacious questions or suggestions.

The human mind is a rut building machine. Experience or education lays tracks across consciousness and then the brain paves them over for quick access. Wild cards help jog the experts and the old timers out of their habitual ways of perceiving and thinking. For instance, the original idea to fly a plane directly from runway to orbit evolved from a meeting of engineers and elementary school students.

The structure of the conversation went something like this—Student: “Let’s fly into space.” Engineer: “We can’t.” Student: “Why not?” Engineer: “Don’t have powerful enough engines.” Student: “Can’t we make more powerful engines.” Engineer, pulling out notepad: “Well, I did read something about some crazy idea called a scramjet….”

The path to breakthroughs goes through the Silly Gate, which is protected by a mortifying guardian, the Fear of Mockery. The descent into silliness spurs imaginative associations that often open the way to breakthrough ideas. As uncomfortable as inciting it may be, out-of-the-box thinking is essential to wisdom.

The last requirement has been historically the most difficult both politically and practically. In order to be wise, a decision has to be a synthesis of the inputs. This is really hard to swallow. Trial by combat is as embedded in human cultures and institutions as the struggle between our super-ego and id are embedded in our psyches. In a tense situation, seriously entertaining the other guy’s point of view, much less incorporating it, just doesn’t feel safe.

Even when willing, few people know how. After the election of Barack Obama, the organization Change.Org decided to identify the ten most important actions that the Obama administration should pursue during its first term.

To accomplish this, they invited people to visit their web site, contribute suggestions and then vote up or down on all the submissions. Over half a million people participated. Predictably, this lowest common denominator process concluded that the most important action for Obama to pursue as President was the legalization of marijuana. Up and down voting more often promotes institutionalized stupidity than genuine synthesis.

Had the Change.Org designers done nothing more than replace the up-down vote with a simple ranking for each suggestion, they would have promoted some synthesis. Here is how this works.

Imagine that you are a town manager. A tornado alert is sounded followed by a massive storm. You need to know how to respond. All of the town’s employees have GPS enabled phones and you have the infrastructure to poll all phones simultaneously. You send out a message, “Is there storm damage in your immediate vicinity, yes or no.” The answers from the phones are displayed on a map on your laptop as red (yes) or green (no) dots representing the situation at the location of each phone. What you see in response to your question is red dots all over the map. This tells you what you already anticipated. There was a big storm and there is widespread damage.

Change this scenario a little. This time your message reads, “Look around you and rank the severity of damage that you see in your immediate vicinity from 1 to 5.” Now your computer screen fills with color coded dots ranging from blue, green, yellow, orange to red. You see a corridor of red dots crossing the north side of town. In a matter of minutes, maybe even seconds, you have assessed the situation and are able to triage and direct emergency services to where they are needed.

This is an example of collective intelligence. The observers understood their immediate situations. You did not painstakingly collect raw data person by person and analyze it. Data was evaluated at the source and self organized more or less instantly on your computer screen.

In the Change.Org situation, even if legalizing marijuana made the top ten, it would almost certainly not have been ranked number one. As embarrassed as they were, to their credit, Change.Org did not try to bury the result. Instead they listed the ten winners, “in no particular order.”

The most disheartening aspect of the Change.Org case is that this author among others, sent scores of emails warning Change.Org about what was likely to happen. Then, a few months later, the Obama administration undertook an almost identical exercise called The Citizen’s Briefing Book via the www.whitehouse.gov web site. The same mob decision approach, the one so passionately despised by Franklin, Madison and Jefferson when they argued for making the United States a republic rather than a direct democracy, was used with the same predictable results.

This illustrates how easy it is to make poor decisions when there is little or no understanding of the architectures of participation. There is nothing inherently obvious in the process of promoting collective intelligence, other than that thorough communication and trust are essential precursors. Neither the mob approach nor the parochial elite approach work. The elite approach fails because its exclusivity creates “wicked” fairies. The mob approach fails because there is no qualitative appraisal of information.

If the global environmental crisis is as serious as most of us believe, our objective must be to produce highest common denominator decisions that do not end up creating more problems than they solve. In the history of our species, we have never more desperately needed the synthesis of originality, agility and sustainability.
In spite of this, I seriously doubt that any of us entertain any illusions that fundamental change will start from inside our formal institutions. The real work of creating a sustainable future will have to be done in a different venue. Fortunately, the most powerful mechanism for positive change on the planet is wide open and that is where this transformation has already begun.

I first experienced the Web in its infancy in the late 1970s. As far as I knew then, it was just people using computer terminals to communicate cross country. But when you set your telephone handset into a thingy with two rubber suction cups, you instantly had access to relevant information within a trust-base social system called the worldwide scientific community. As such win-win systems tend to, it grew at an astronomical rate.

From its beginning, people used it to promote change; not just garden variety innovation, but real structural transformation. There is nothing new about encyclopedias or socializing, but social networking sites and the Wikipedia are dramatically more powerful structures for disseminating usable information and promoting social cohesion than the structures that preceded them.

Mostly, the Net’s evolution has been stigmergic, like termites constructing a twenty foot tall insect arcology by leaving tiny mud balls at the end of scent trails laid down by anonymous siblings. While spontaneous, indirect coordination among people pursuing their individual passions has improved the usefulness of the Net, we are not likely that way to fully tap its potential as a medium for mobilizing our collective intelligence.
The public policy side of the Internet is an example of the difference between what is and what could be.

Moveon.org has been one of the earliest pioneers in using the Net to influence political policy. Despite being a relatively populist organization, it uses the big media few-to-many model. It substitutes progressive political activists for capitalists while contributors fill the role of advertisers. The activists, using intuition and ideology, decide which policies to promote. To the contributors they sell productions designed to support topical political positions; typically letter campaigns or ads.

During its emergence, Moveon.org did several many-to-few experiments apparently looking for a way to engage public participation in developing its policy agenda. All of these attempts were based on a vote up or down model and produced disappointing results. The organization seems to have settled for having the contributors prioritize set piece lists of issues provided by the leadership.

Moveon.org and similar Net based proselytizers provide a welcome leavening agent in the political system, but there is little synthesis and thus little engagement of a larger collective intelligence.
While Moveon.org is representative of the typical missed opportunity to use the Net to promote collective intelligence, there are plenty of successes. Everyone is well aware of the Wikipedia. It is fashionable to complain about inaccuracies in the articles but research indicates that they are as accurate as most encyclopedias. More important, inaccuracies are typically corrected in the space of hours rather than months.

Wikipedia has even been a superior source for information on breaking news as it was in the shootings at Virginia Tech. Students were updating and correcting the entry as events unfolded.

Wikis have shined in catalyzing focused stigmergic behavior in emergencies. A Wiki blossomed overnight to provide support for victims of hurricane Katrina—part of the Wiki was devoted to re-uniting dispersed families. A Wiki spontaneously emerged in advance of hurricane Ike. It helped people at risk track the storm and prepare for it.

The United States Patent Office has discovered another use for many to one process. The search for prior art is a particularly time consuming and therefore costly aspect of securing a patent. The patent office has now made it possible for interested citizens to do the searches themselves and alert the patent office to potential examples. This dramatically shortens search time and cost. Many hands make light work.

In another example of mobilizing collective intelligence on the web, researchers at the University of Washington posted an online game to help them explore protein folding. Anyone can download the game and play Foldit. Thousands of people, having fun, are actually fulfilling the function of a vast supercomputer entirely dedicated to discovering all the possible ways a protein might be folded to produce different biological effects.

As with ants, bees and termites, self organization can give rise to superior adaptive behavior. The Internet is effective in that respect; making it easier for individuals to communicate, verify, organize and engage. This reinforces positive sum behavior.

The essential next stage is to make the structure of self organization more accessible, friendly and consciously self improving. The insect equivalent would be all of the termites jointly designing their arcology in response to emerging conditions as they simultaneously build it.

We can add structures to the Internet that will expand the use of our collective intelligence. The actual design of such structures is not particularly difficult. Much of that has already been evolving in pockets of innovation for decades.

Almost fifteen years ago, using a wise decision model based process called the Advanced Management CatalystTM (AMCat), a diverse group of industry experts created a strategy for the United States shipbuilding industry in three days.

Through synthesizing their wide range of knowledge and experience, they also discovered a critical constraint on the future of American shipbuilding. While U.S. marine research was the best in the world, American companies were not translating that research into mainstream performance. The insights from this event traveled like wildfire throughout the industry.

The technology and infrastructure is in place to support rapid implementation of such stigmergic decision processes. We are talking about months, not years, to do this. That is good because we cannot have wise and universally compelling decisions soon enough.

With structures in place that leverage collective intelligence, the initiative of thousands, someday millions, of people can be brought to bear on creating and implementing a vision for humanity’s common future. We will be able to share a vision, act from a strategy and communicate with a clear voice. People will support what they have personally participated in creating.

Who’s Afraid of Regulation?

To regulate or not to regulate is not the question

The momentum of public perception increasingly favored deregulation for most of the last four decades. For example, primarily Republicans but also Democrats pursued serious deregulation of the financial industry beginning in the 1970s. This made it so much more profitable to manipulate money than to create new wealth (by inventing and manufacturing things) that by 2000 finance had superseded manufacturing as the United State’s major economic sector. Conventional wisdom holds that globalism is to blame for the erosion of American manufacturing but, in fact, the shift of focus from creating new value to consolidating and leveraging existing value had just as much to do with it. Why make money creating value the old fashioned way when you can make it so much faster by manipulating the perception of value?

In retrospect, the most astonishing aspect of the deregulation of finance was the casual way Congress rewrote banking laws to make it possible for credit card companies to charge interest rates previously associated with loan sharking. No surprise that it all went downhill from there. The financial industry kept finding new ways to expand the money supply through increasingly complex, opaque and highly leveraged financial “instruments”. Lately we have been reading a good deal about some of those associated with the mortgage industry. Unfortunately, we are going to begin reading about some of the others in the near future. The stock market also threw itself onto the “perception is reality” bandwagon. You think tech stocks were a bubble, wait until the DOW hits the wall. By traditional measures of value it should be closer to 6,000 than 12,000. That run-up also began in the 1970s with changes in financial regulations.

Regulations are a means to establish and enforce codes of civilized conduct. Like the laws intended to discourage crime, regulations protect us from a host of bad practices and predatory behaviors. Even more important than providing protection, Regulations promote cooperation. Regulations act like traffic lights. They tell you what you can do and when you can do it. The result of obeying traffic lights is that driving is dramatically safer and everyone gets to their destinations substantially faster. Most of us don’t hesitate to barrel through an intersection when our signal is green or even yellow. We are confident that we will not be rammed by a car speeding in from another direction. That confidence translates directly into bottom-line productivity.

Trust reduces the transaction cost of driving. If there were no signals, cars would still get through intersections, but it would require playing chicken as traffic from different directions attempted to force their way through each other. Every intersection would be a series of confrontations. Each of those confrontations represents a transaction that requires time and has multiple levels of cost that range from economic to stress related disease. Bus drivers live an average of twenty years less than the rest of us in part because every time they pull into traffic from picking up passengers they have to engage in exactly that kind of confrontation. Just so, society depends on regulations to reduce the transaction costs of sustaining civilization.

High levels of trust are essential for sustaining a highly interdependent, technological society—less so if you live by yourself in the woods, shoot first and ask questions later. Transaction costs can quickly spiral out of control in a complex system. Trust is essential for keeping those costs at a tolerable level. Since a certain percentage of human beings are untrustworthy, there have to be credible laws and regulations to give the rest of us the confidence that people who are naturally or functionally predatory face intolerable levels of risk when they behave badly.

In spite of the fact that one in twenty-five Americans is a functional sociopath, there are people in this country who can confidently do million dollar deals on a handshake. In the diamond district of New York City, it’s a daily occurrence. That level of trust requires more than just laws and regulations though. It has to be reinforced by a whole culture of mutual responsibility and accountability. It is not an accident that in Japan only one person in one thousand is an identifiable sociopath. The price paid for socially unacceptable behavior is so immediate and high that sociopaths conform to social norms.

Win-Win or Win-Lose, that is the real question

Laws and regulations also involve transaction costs so there is a balance to be struck between massive bureaucratic oversight (very expensive) and laissais fair (also very expensive as it regularly produces predatory excesses that cost tax payers hundreds of billions of dollars in one way or another—can anyone say “bailout”). Too much regulation can also be a symptom. Regulation balloons in an attempt to compensate for a lack of consistent enforcement or meaningful penalty. If past regulation reached onerous levels, it was in part because enforcement was sporadic and penalties mere slaps on the wrist compared to the payoff for breaking the rules. What message do we send when our legal system deals out relatively cosmetic punishments to white collar criminals? In effect, weak regulatory regimes encourage crime.

Regulation is also necessary to resolve the legitimate tension between short and long term agendas in any society. Policies that favor the interests of a newborn do not necessarily seem to make sense for people at the other end of the spectrum. If my children are grown, what interest do I have in paying taxes that support public education? In fact, the strength of a society can be measured by its ability to engender such pay it forward mechanisms as public education. The self made person conceit is a howler. Any singular success in modern society requires a level of trust and cooperation that has taken centuries to construct. Somebody has to pay for those traffic lights that allow us all to speed complacently through to our destinations, why not those who have had the advantage of them in the past as much as those who will have the advantage of them in the future.

All of this is intuitively obvious to most of us—the point of regulation is to maintain a social contract rooted in fairness. Fairness is not just an idea. It is so fundamental that most of us are born with an innate capacity to recognize it. We call it conscience. So we have to ask ourselves to whom does basic fairness in society not make sense or seem irrelevant?

The answer to this is complex because it takes us from the fundamental nature of the universe straight through to the utility of civilization, and the basis for social relations. Of course folks who already have an advantage vested in business as usual do not want to lose it. If you, like the top one tenth of one percent of Americans, had seen your income multiplied by 700% while the vast majority of people’s had seen theirs stagnate or decline, you would probably want more of the same. That seems a safe assumption given that simultaneously with deregulation we have witnessed a return to Gilded Age disparities in the distribution of national wealth. We can even identify the specific political interventions that enabled the rise of this new financial and political elite.

From 1935 to 1970, America created a broadly based, comfortably middle class society. Many people had to very aggressively undermine that society in order to recreate extremes of wealth and poverty last seen in this country in the 1870s through 1920s. What kind of persons choose to enrich themselves at the expense of the greater society? Certainly this would be a self centered, even narcissistic, person; a person who for whatever reason feels some deep sense of entitlement. But what we have seen may go beyond simple egoism. Extraordinary deceptions and abuses of power were required to overthrow a thriving democratization of American society—a tide that was progressively lifting all boats. What kind of person says to a group of his peers, as the famous Gilded Age financier, J. P. Morgan did,

Capital must protect itself in every way... Debts must be collected and loans and mortgages foreclosed as soon as possible. When through a process of law the common people have lost their homes, they will be more tractable and more easily governed by the strong arm of the law applied by the central power of leading financiers. People without homes will not quarrel with their leaders. This is well known among our principle men now engaged in forming an imperialism of capitalism to govern the world. By dividing the people we can get them to expend their energies in fighting over questions of no importance to us except as teachers of the common herd.

This suggests something more than just simple selfishness or egotism. There is a premeditated, callous coldness here, a megalomaniacal quality that points to something far darker than a simple narcissistic disorder. It has the same feel to it that pervades an equally infamous statement by Herman Goring, Hitler’s number two.

Why of course the people don't want war. Why should some poor bastard on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece? Naturally the common people don't want war: neither in Russia, nor in England, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is in a democracy, a fascist dictatorship, a parliamentary system, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders.

That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.

It’s not just worse in a bleeding heart sort of way. It is worse because it goes against the very core of life. We live in a universe of entropic and neg-entropic forces. Everything moves from higher to lower energy, hot to cold, light to dark. In contrast to this overall pattern, life is neg-entropic. It leverages entropy to create local areas of increasing order—the way a dam can turn downward flowing water into electricity. Life uses entropy to power emergent complexity. It builds up. It emerges. It cooperates. It takes simple elements and combines them into marvelous complexities. Whatever life is, it turns matter into ever more complex organisms: organisms that establish interdependencies, cultures, and civilizations.

Certainly life uses competition, but peripherally, as a tactic. Its core driver is inclusiveness—an inclusiveness that in higher animals manifests as cooperativeness. Research in game theory demonstrates that cooperation is more productive than competition. As evolution tends to favor efficiency and productivity, it should be no surprise that human beings are in fact the most cooperative form of life on earth. We are the only species that congregates in groups of groups. Some scientists even think that our intelligence evolved to meet the intellectual demands of cooperating.

There is something fundamentally wrong with people who knowingly tear down the world without creating something new and better in the process. We have already mentioned one term of art used to describe them, “sociopaths.” These are people without conscience, without the mental machinery that encourages most of us to prefer cooperation over destruction. Sociopaths experience themselves to be literally the center of the universe. Everything begins and ends with them. Everything around them, nature, society, even their children are just objects to be used to fulfill their whims. Needless to say these people believe that laws and regulations are for common people, not for them.

Discussion about the effectiveness, efficiency or wisdom of a given regulation is always justified. What isn’t justified is a war on regulation and law or the use of regulation and law to give advantage to the few at the expense of the whole. Total deregulation leads to a two class society—predators and prey. Predator societies consume themselves from the inside out and collapse. Cooperative societies go on and on and on albeit constantly transforming themselves.

Over the last forty years American society has progressively forgotten how essential cooperation is to sustainable success. As we have undercut the middle class in order to concentrated wealth into the hands of a small elite, our society has significantly declined according to almost every positive measure of first world countries. A self centered, sociopathic mind set has wormed its way deep into our culture; “Winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing,” “Greed is good,” “Let them hate so long as they fear,” “Divide and conquer.” Nihilism and the cynicism it breeds has profoundly weakened us as a people and a nation. A great society constantly refines its ability to cooperatively achieve magnificent goals. It is not too late for us to get back to basics, to the foundation of life—one for all and all for one.

Translating Me or You into Us

(Originally published in Green Horizon Quarterly Winter 2007)

How does a political party dedicated to sustainability maintain its integrity and expand its credibility in the midst of a poisonous, slash-and-burn political culture? The long-term future of the United States may depend on how Greens answer this question.

Even if the outcome of the recent mid-term elections reflects widespread revulsion toward ideological politics and Orwellian government, nothing substantive has been promoted by the mainstream political parties as an alternative. Many doubt that anything new is likely to emerge from them. Nevertheless, the possibility for improvement does exist. Scientific research has already illuminated many exciting avenues for improving public participation and the quality of political decision-making.

Political parties typically put the preponderance of their resources into gaining power. They assume that political power is a pre-requisite for governing. Because this could become substantially less true in the future than it is currently, Greens have a rare opportunity. We could be the ones who learn how to govern—in effect—without access to the traditional apparatus of power. Accomplishing this will entail the adoption of new methods, technologies, and, more fundamentally, a different stance in how we talk to and, ultimately, with America and the rest of the world.

The New Politics May Not Even Resemble the Old Politics

In 2004 Democrats were galvanized by George Lakoff’s book don’t think of an elephant! [stet]. His message was very simple; understand the values in play and use language strategically to control the debate so that putatively progressive values triumph. He modeled this advice on his analysis of the Republican party’s public relations machine which has so successfully used Madison Avenue-style misdirection— “death taxes,” “no child left behind,” “culture of death”—to manipulate public attitudes. He proposed that Democrats play a similarly manipulative game, albeit in the service of superior values.

This divide and conquer strategy, made notorious by Machiavelli and refined to a science by Karl Rove, as well as Lakoff’s response to the recent Neo-conservative modernization of it, derive their attractiveness from the assumption that political dominance can be achieved simply by polarizing people and using their strongly felt passions to manipulate their voting behavior. While history confirms the potential effectiveness of this approach, in their zeal to adapt it to American culture, Republicans and Democrats have failed to grasp that the power gained this way is inevitably contested, usually short-lived, and comes at a profound cost to society.

Part of that cost has been immediate, direct and financial. Aggregate campaign expenditures in national elections run ten or more times higher than they did a decade ago. What Americans now squander on election hostilities could transform the lives of millions. The money to support this escalation has been raised at the expense of the nation’s economic foundation—the American middle-class. In the last thirty years, an astonishing amount of wealth has been transferred from middle-class Americans to an elite class of large political donors. As President Bush characterized this new class in a speech to his major contributors, “What we have here are the haves and the have mores. Some people call them the elite, but I call them my base.” The political machines of both Democrats and Republicans have been appropriating middle-class assets to feed this new base which, in turn, feeds the parties.

Other costs exacted from the culture, comity and future prospects of the nation are harder to quantify but clearly more damaging. The fabric of American cultural values is being distorted in qualitative ways that undermine the vitality of our civilization and our international reputation.

The Fundamental Culture of America is Changing

Beneath a superficial charm, American culture is becoming callous, deceitful, and increasingly exploitive. Since these are pathological characteristics, it should come as no surprise that research indicates that one in every twenty-five Americans is now a functional sociopath. Compare this with one in one thousand in Taiwan and Japan. The 1991 Epidemiologic Catchment Area study funded by the National Institute of Mental Health reported that between 1975 and 1990, the incidence of anti-social personality disorder nearly doubled among young people in the United States. That has to come from changes in social attitudes and culture. It is not the kid’s genes that are changing.

How we talk to and relate with each other matters very much. The way we are currently doing it, is making us and our society ill. Over the last two generations we have seen a chasm developing between people and our society’s institutions—both private and public. A spirit of adversarialism is poisoning every sector of society and undermining our ability to meet the challenges and opportunities that a rapidly evolving world is presenting us. This has real consequences. While superficially successful, the U. S. is falling behind its peer group of nations. According to the OECD (Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development) among the 28 countries in our peer group, on key economic, social and environmental indicators, the U.S.
has fallen to 16^th as of this year. According to the World Health Organization our health care system has fallen to 37^th, and we have become the biggest debtor nation in the world. This is not a good trend. History is full of cultures that began well and ended badly.

We have no one to blame for this other than ourselves—really—the French didn’t do it to us. Having settled the issue of blame, there remains the issue of what to do about the situation.

Back to the Future

Americans need to become connoisseurs of leadership. We need to be able to tell good from bad at a glance. Good leadership demands discerning followers who push and prod their leaders to pursue the extraordinary. This country needs new methods, big initiatives, real dialog and courageous action. According to this election, that is what people want. Americans are increasingly disenchanted with the culture of exploitation that has so badly betrayed classic democratic ideals. Over the last six years our nation flirted with totalism as promoted in the Neo-conservative agenda. Having now observed the consequences of reactive authoritarianism, we are recoiling. People are hungry to be appreciated and supported for what is best in them.

If sociopathy is characterized by exploitation, then the majority of Americans are craving supportive relationships with their society and their leaders. Think about a family argument. It can be ferocious. An outsider might expect blood to fly in response to angry and blunt characterizations. But it is rare that families disintegrate into enduringly hostile camps. Almost always a new and better equilibrium emerges. That is the magic of genuine relationship. It is a magic we need to harness among ourselves and bring back to society.

In this we are incredibly fortunate. To date, the West has accumulated almost 100 years of research on group decision-making. We now know, via science, things that this nation’s founders could only intuit. More importantly, we know ways to fulfill their vision of wise governance that were entirely unknowable to them. For instance, we know with certainty that with the right approach, groups can make superior decisions, faster, than their smartest individual member. Most importantly, research has identified the core requirements for assuring that groups make wise decisions—decisions that solve problems without creating more problems than were solved. This research has already led to the development of a number of methodologies for fulfilling those requirements; at least one of which could be implemented over the internet.

Then there is language. As the philosopher Martin Heidegger pointed out on the opening page of his 1947 Letter on Humanism, “Language is the house of being.” Instead of using language as a weapon to conquer mind-space, the know-how already exists to use it facilitatively to increase our society’s intelligence, build social capital and transform challenges into opportunities.

Psychologists have recognized for decades that a large part of the process of socialization in any culture consists of teaching the young that which they must not see, not hear, not think, feel, or say. Social demarcation of sexual roles highlights this. Men are expected to behave like “men” and women like “women” in spite of the fact that most of us, having had both a mother and a father, can more than adequately fulfill either role; and, in stressful situations like single parenthood, often do. As a quick reminder of the power of acculturation, imagine yourself saying aloud, in a mixed group in public, the word “menstruate.” Just the thought experiment is sufficient to make most of us blanch.

Since the demands of reality regularly require broaching such socially engrained taboos, a large part of human communication takes place outside of direct consciousness. Consider that in the U. S. “leaders” typically speak in a lower register than subordinates. You might note sometime whether or not your voice range changes relative to your listener. One might wonder what impact this has on the prospects of women to achieve leadership status.

Beyond the complexities of signaling, people are also conditioned to communicate in sanctioned styles. The relationship between the meaning of words and structure of presentation profoundly shapes communication. You can communicate the same information with a whisper or a shout, with a tome of sarcasm or praise, with a declaration or a question and the way this is done is as telling as the content.

As a result of these factors, miscommunication among people is guaranteed, especially among those who do not share common acculturation in tacit signals. This is what makes diplomacy so diplomatic. It also makes it possible to code messages to say one thing to one group of people and something entirely different to other constituencies. The ambiguities of communication were used brilliantly by Karl Rove to strongly appeal to evangelicals without alienating other segments of society. Many Americans might not have voted for George Bush had they realized that through his calculated use of evangelical phrases in his speeches, he was tacitly promising evangelicals that Armageddon and the second coming would happen in their lifetime.

There is a fundamental bias integral to the process of communication that profoundly influences group process. People turn data into meaning using their personal beliefs as the instrument of construction. Beliefs are highly influenced by culture and remarkably stable. Having once assembled an acceptable meaning from immediately available information, any questioning that might reveal a different interpretation is shouldered aside in favor of the seductive security of comfortable certainty. People assemble a picture of the reality they expect from the information they receive, and stop there, rather than engaging in the constant exercise of "not knowing," that might lead to insight and better understanding.

Whipsawed by events, people indulge in rituals of certainty; engineering illusions of unanimity, rather than continuing to ask questions. It is hard to get people to explore areas that cause them discomfort, where answers are not readily apparent. It is compellingly easy to manipulate the longing for certainty. Leaders are especially susceptible to doing this because in most cultures, including ours, they are expected to maintain control and appear to be knowledgeable at all times. With the power to either inspire or demand compliance, they easily slip into dictating expedient answers rather than facilitating the emergence of genuine solutions.

When the goal of communication is a creative, forward looking response to challenge, people behave differently. They listen carefully. They ask questions. They conjecture, explore and test. Above all, they are pragmatic. In a culture where communication is facilitative, leadership is responsible for clarifying that a need exists, that an appropriate group is convened to meet the challenge, that an effective process is used to deliver wise decisions and that the forthcoming decisions are effectively and efficiently implemented.

Such an approach in our culture is so uncommon that it is considered newsworthy, as when the 911 Commission was convened with great public fanfare over the assurance from the White House that the commission’s recommendations would be implemented. The promise was necessary because the normal behavior of political leaders is to ignore the recommendations of blue ribbon commissions.

Process is the Ultimate Message in Politics

Were the Green Party to take on the role of national facilitator, what would that job entail? When acting as catalysts, facilitators enable groups to make effective use of their resources and adopt synergistic ways of behaving. This requires being alert to and subtly enhancing the group’s ability to be inclusive, to maintain participant independence, to draw on an appropriately diverse knowledge base, and to synthesize the agendas and understandings of all the stakeholders into implementable decisions. Furthermore, a good facilitator urges the group to engage in increasingly valuable action. If we substitute “society” for “group,” does this seem too utopian a role for Greens to consider assuming? Hasn’t the Green Party essentially done exactly this, albeit to a limited degree, even in the absence of significant political power? If you shape a society’s strategic agenda and promote constructive behavior to achieve that agenda, are you not, in a fundamental sense, governing?

The language, methods and tools to support being catalysts in society are available for any relevant human scale. They are already in use on a limited basis. The potential of these tools to promote constructive behavior far exceeds that of our familiar political process. What does this mean? Imagine the word “consensus” coming to denote universal and passionate commitment to a wise decision. By way of contrast, the Republican and Democratic parties’ application of traditional political power, has been characterized by consistent failure to mobilize action scaled to the gravity of the challenges confronting the nation.

The greatest difficulty we will face in picking up these new tools and using them, is surrendering what has become familiar, including our attachment to a positional point of view. We would have to trust that “the people,” all of us working together, are capable of quickly making wise decisions. Is comfortable familiarity too much to trade for a Green Party that is the keeper of a process for empowering Americans to make and implement wise decisions. There are 100 years of scientists’ shoulders on which to stand. The research has already been done, the methods and tools exist, an infrastructure is in place. All that’s lacking is the will, a plan and the decision.

The future has always gone to those best able to translate “you or me” into “us.” For most of history “us” has been imposed on people. While this was usually accomplished at a horrifying cost in lives and treasure, it was sufficient to create nations of “us.” Classic forms of electoral democracy made the process of creating “us” significantly cheaper and faster, but no longer fast or powerful enough to meet current demands. As a nation, we are, more often than not, hiding from the challenges that face us rather than mobilizing to meet them. Democracy is still the way to go, but we clearly need a more agile, effective democratic process. What are we waiting for?

Girls Wrestling and the Toyota Way Save America

Girls just want to wrestle and, according to an article by Tamar Lewin in the New York Times, some people think that is a problem. Even though only about 5,000 girls are currently wrestling on high school teams, the number is rapidly growing. Because there are still too few girls to regularly form their own teams, most of them join boy’s teams and compete against boys. The coach at Francis Lewis High School in Queens, New York Josue Herrera, expresses the general discomfort with this, “‘I think it’s better if it’s girl and girl…. If boys and girls wrestle together, it’s physically harder for the girl, but mentally harder for the boy.’”

While this dilemma probably does not rise to the level of historic significance, it does underscore some of the essential flaws in the way Americans often think and behave. The distress generated by coed wrestling emerges from a convergence of four of the most critical weaknesses in contemporary American society.

We give more importance to whether or not things are easy than we do to whether or not they are wise. We blur or, even, dismiss valuable distinctions through mystification rather than pay attention to what is really going on around us. We validate and reinforce victimization rather than promoting self-determination. We slavishly bow to authority rather than doing the hard work necessary to either understand or influence the decisions made in our name.

Coed wrestling genuinely does provoke uncomfortable feelings for a lot of people. It raises questions that need compelling answers before most folks will embrace it. Some of those questions are very difficult to formulate much less settle. When coach Herrera voices the idea that maybe we just shouldn’t go there at all, he is speaking for a lot of Americans, maybe even most Americans. It seems easier to disregard the Olympic medal aspirations of a few thousands of children, than engage in the exploration, self-examination and dialogue necessary to evolve a wise response to the issues raised by those aspirations.

This is a common reaction to discomfort in our country. In venue after venue, political, social, scientific and economic, we see Americans and their leaders dodging problems rather than solving them. The typical strategy for avoiding the hard work of engagement and resolution is to reduce complex issues to simple-minded debating points and then focus on building cadres of true-believers dedicated to driving their passionately held position down the throats of all dissenters. We see ourselves habitually going to war against anything unfamiliar.

Given this pattern of response, it comes as no surprise that girls’ wrestling is being politicized. In Minnesota, lawmakers are on the verge of repealing that part of state law which allows girls to participate with boys in public-school-sponsored sports when no girls’ teams are available. If this happens, coed wrestling will no longer be allowed in Minnesota's public high schools. How can we tolerate such non-solutions?

Yes, pound for pound, boys tend to be stronger than girls. Nevertheless, some girls consistently beat their male opponents. Moreover, this type of problem was solved in sports like boxing and, yes, even wrestling before the dawn of history. Bantam-weights do not box heavy-weights for obvious reasons. The familiar approach of applying a refined understanding of performance characteristics to creating competitive classifications solves the problem. If a familiar solution to the differences in capability between girls and boys is so obvious, what, really, is the problem with girls and boys wrestling each other? If it is not a problem of fairly weighting physical differences, what kind of problem is it?

In Lewin’s article, Jamie Block, who coaches wrestling at Dobbs Ferry High School, notes that “‘It’s always a little intimidating for the boys at first. They’re raised not to do this to a girl.’” He adds that the girls who come out for wrestling are serious and often have more training than some of the boys. The father of a girl with Olympic potential points out that for boys, coed wrestling opens a can of worms. In his experience, “‘A boy who goes out on the mat against a girl doesn’t win. If he beats her, he was supposed to, and if he doesn’t, he’s dead meat.’”

How do boys get the idea that girls are necessarily pushovers, unwilling or unable to take care of themselves? And who gave boys the idea that losing to a girl is different from losing to anyone else? A great deal of effort over the last century has gone into de-mystifying and empowering women. Had multiple generations of Americans not struggled with the issues of feminism and equal rights, our country would be significantly poorer and far less interesting today.

It’s Culture Darling

Obviously women are different from men. Many of the differences are unquestionably biological, but some are clearly the result of cultural conditioning. Cultural conditioning can be a good thing. It is one of the ways we pass on lessons learned from generation to generation. A great deal of what we believe about men and women derives from our cultural heritage.

Culture definitely matters. Beliefs have consequences, sometimes un-intended consequences. One of the greatest strengths of Western culture has been its slowly evolving ability to objectify reality and itself. We have a methodology, called science, which we use to test what works and what does not work in the real world.

When we apply that methodology to our cultural beliefs, we are sometimes forced to confront that some of the things we have been taught to believe aren’t good for us. Up through the nineteenth century, Americans believed that portliness in men was a sign of good health. Science has subsequently taught us that it is instead an invitation to heart disease, diabetes and a variety of other life shortening ailments.

The consequences of some of our beliefs about women and men are not entirely clear. Perhaps there is good reason for barring women in the military from combat, for reinforcing the idea that women should be the gentler sex, and for discouraging competition between the sexes. The point is that we don’t fully understand all of the consequences of the many things we are taught to believe, because much of what we believe is yet to be meaningfully tested.

It is very common for Americans to avoid dealing with reality by ignoring distinctions and promoting mystification rather than paying attention to what is really going on around us. For instance, the widespread failure to clearly distinguish between the roles of science and religion in society has generated a huge amount of pointless strife.

The controversy about intelligent design is a classic example. Because religion is rooted in faith and science is rooted in test, the concept of intelligent design is irrelevant. It is unnecessary to faith and easily discreditable by science. It could only become controversial through the blurring of distinctions and mystification. While those who engineered the controversy may have used it to successfully pursue personal or political agendas, it is otherwise a pointless and ultimately embarrassing confabulation.

Likewise, the idea that it is bad for girls to be strongly challenged physically or for boys to be strongly challenged mentally, reflects widely held cultural prejudices that seem questionable. If wrong, they certainly are not good for American society. Frankly, it is a little hard to believe that a nation can have too many physically strong, mentally agile citizens.

It is as though strongly challenging young women and men to fully achieve their potential were a form of victimization. But that implies that achieving goals should be easy. We reinforce the idea that struggle is avoidable. But struggle is only avoidable if you never attempt anything that is demanding or out of the ordinary.

Focused aspiration and sustained effort are essential to achieving maturity. In some sense, each of us constructs a self just as an artist creates a work of art. When people are denied skills and experiences with which to build justified confidence in themselves, their capacity for solving problems and making wise decisions is undermined. Their ability to take care of themselves is compromised.

When people lack the skills or inclination to dissect problems and create solutions, they naturally look outside themselves when faced with challenging situations. They look for comfort from leaders who express self-confidence and optimism, whether or not justified. Insecure people are prone to authoritarian tendencies and are more likely to slavishly follow rather than do the hard work of finding answers.

In the New York Times article, Tamar illustrated how strongly the idea of coed wrestling affects some school administrators. She described one athletic director who blocked a girl from joining a boy’s team by using rules intended for protecting younger athletes who want to compete alongside older ones. The director insisted that he was just following state guidelines, “‘It’s not up to me.’” Other officials countered that he clearly exceeded state requirements in his determination to shut the girl out. Would he have behaved so callously had he talked to coaches at other schools where girls have been successfully integrated into boy’s teams?

Authoritarians usually do not bother asking questions since they believe they already know the answers. They are themselves obedient to authority and they expect obedience in response to authority. For them, reference to a higher power trumps all other consideration.

People who have adopted authoritarian personalities are not inclined to evaluate what their leaders tell them. They defer to authority and characterize their sheepishness as a requisite expression of trust. Had they been challenged in early life and helped to master the challenges, one wonders if they might hold themselves and others to a higher level of transparency and accountability.

Cut to the Bottom-Line

This has ramifications for America that reach far beyond coed wrestling. Toyota is set to become the largest automobile manufacturer in the world, displacing General Motors. It has already been the most profitable for quite some time. One of the primary reasons for its success is that it has transcended the culture in which it originated. Toyota is far less Japanese than GM is American. From the beginning, Toyota’s leaders recognized that culture is critical to success. Success at anything depends on what people believe about themselves and what they expect from themselves. Recognizing this, Toyota has self-consciously evolved a culture, the Toyota Way, rooted in visionary pragmatism, commitment to social responsibility, and determination never to be satisfied.

Over the course of the last two generations, the United States, like GM, settled for good enough. Rather than embrace challenges that would have made us stronger. We pulled the covers over our head. The most obvious example is our failure to follow-up on the first tentative steps taken in the early seventies toward a post-petroleum future. More recently, we elected one of the worst Presidents in American history to a second term.

Instead of aggressively pursuing ways to create new wealth, the center of gravity of our economic system has shifted toward consolidation of existing wealth. Instead of creating greater transparency and participation, our political system has progressively disenfranchised anyone who does not embrace one of the two dominant, big-money parties.

This hasn’t all been bad. These have been wonderful times for an elite class of Americans who comprise roughly a tenth of a percent of the population. They sponsor and benefit from a culture of greed—greed for material possessions, greed for control and greed for self-aggrandizement. Their legacy is a country in decline by almost any measure of social and economic well-being. The lessons they took from reading Animal Farm, 1984, Brave New World and The Prince were not cautionary—quite the opposite. They were inspired to own and eat the whole egg, shell and all.

Can a culture in decline save itself. While history does not encourage optimism, there is at least a past from which we can learn. There are several potential avenues for re-invigorating American culture. The place to start is with a ferocious dedication throughout society to transparency and full participation.

In a rational community, this would be easy since substantial research indicates that transparency and democracy increase productivity. In case this is news to you, consider one of the studies published in 2003 in the Quarterly Journal of Economics. It compared the performance of corporate “dictatorships” to that of corporate “democracies.” According to its authors, Paul Gompers, Joy Ishii and Andrew Metrick,

Corporations are republics. The ultimate authority rests with the voters (shareholders). These voters elect representatives (directors) who delegate most decisions to bureaucrats (managers)… One extreme tilts toward democracy, reserves little power for management, and allows shareholders to quickly and easily replace directors. The other extreme tilts toward dictatorship, reserves extensive power for management, and places strong restrictions on shareholders’ ability to replace directors.

This very sophisticated study, which ranked 1,500 companies across 28 governance provisions, compared the performance of the 10% of firms with the most dictatorial governance against the performance of the 10% of firms with the most democratic governance. Through the 1990s, the returns from the stocks of the Democracy Portfolio outperformed the Dictatorship Portfolio by 8.5 percentage points per year. Certainly, if GM’s annual return on investment had been 8% higher over the last 15 years, Toyota would not be overtaking it, at least not anytime in the near future.

Another study compared the performance of companies that opened their accounting books and taught their employees how to understand them against companies that didn’t. Again, the more transparent companies outperformed those that reserved their accounting information to senior management.

Decades of research tells us that inclusiveness translates into superior performance. This doesn’t mean that elitists can’t be successful. Political history and the whole structure of managerial capitalism deny such a Pollyanna conclusion. The average pay of corporate CEOs didn’t jump from 30 to 200 times that of their lowest paid employees in the last twenty years because modern society is increasingly inclusive. What is important to understand it that the dramatic and accelerating consolidation of the U.S. economy into the hands of a class of politically enfranchised elitists has been accomplished at the cost of that greater fortune which would have been available to be shared by all had transparency and inclusiveness been promoted.

America can re-learn a great deal from Toyota’s successful culture. Visionary pragmatism and commitment to social responsibility are not new in America, just eclipsed by an atavistic re-interpretation of the social contract between labor, capital and management. Somehow American culture has become enthralled with the illusion that a sustainable society can be based on the pursuit of pure self-interest and immediate gratification. How many times throughout history have we seen elites promote this social equivalent of perpetual motion only to reduce their societies to dust and ashes?

The most difficult and possibly essential lesson from Toyota is that the job is never done—a determination never to be satisfied. Continuous improvement is a relatively new idea in human history. Broadening its application from manufacturing to culture building and politics would be especially powerful for Americans because it transmutes authoritarian defensiveness into a much healthier drive to make things better. Making things better requires that you understand what is going on in the first place, always a good thing.

Elitists strive to secure their prerogatives by exclusions of one sort or another. Energy that might have gone into making the world a better place for everyone, instead goes into creating social and economic barriers to entry. Inevitably those barriers become literal walls with the modern equivalent of broken glass embedded in their tops.

The elitist habit of mind looks for ways to keep girls from wrestling. It promotes socially stultifying authoritarianism. It makes America non-competitive which in turn provokes fear. Fear is readily manipulated into a defensive imperialism. So begins the journey down the rat-hole of history.

America is well on the way to becoming a GM among nations. We have fallen to 16^th place out of the 28 developed countries, our healthcare system’s performance ranks 37^th in the world, and we are the world’s largest debtor. We can start turning this around by helping girls who just want to wrestle.

Society of Vampires

The Cumulative Effect on Society of Sociopathic Elites

How does American society benefit from an uncivil war between political ideologues that is undermining our democratic values? In the presidential election of 2004, candidates spent a billion dollars, in 2000, $100 million.

Where is the virtue in a legal system that frequently attaches greater value to achieving a conviction than it does to delivering justice—with the demonstrated result that hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people continue to be incarcerated, even executed, for crimes they didn’t commit?

Is the United States well served by a health care system that is the most expensive on the planet, but which the World Health Organization ranks behind 36 other countries in its performance—with 1.6 million Americans injured or dying annually from preventable medical errors?

What are the long term prospects for an economic system that flaunts the exploitation of the many for the benefit of an elite social class?

How has the nation that was once widely viewed as the champion of the world’s poor and oppressed been transformed into a “rogue state” pursuing a unilateral strategic agenda that includes pre-emptive incursions into other countries?

These are some of the questions this article either explicitly or implicitly addresses. It illuminates the growing impact of the sociopathic behavior characteristic of critical elements of our nation’s institutional and political leadership. It shows that the original cultural intention that created the United States is being undermined from within.

Should the current trend continue, we will join history’s other sociopathic cultures, and suffer the implosion that inevitably destroys such cultures. So, in the end, we will explore how our society might begin pulling itself back from the brink. We will consider what we might do to re-invigorate the original impulse that created the United States and made it the most successful nation in the history of mankind. Hopefully, this is a salient contribution to the dialogue that we must trust will shift the American experiment from accelerating morbidity to once again leading the evolution of human society.

Part I: Real Vampires Don’t Drink Blood

According to Dr. Martha Stout of Harvard Medical School, there is an expanding population of people among us who does not share the full panoply of human emotions. They experience fear, greed, lust, novelty, the thrill of victory, even the frustration of defeat, but they do not feel love, compassion or conscience. Tragically, they live lives without affection—lives in which only the self, in its most primitive, egoistic manifestation, has personal meaning. Every waking minute of every day they exist in a state of being that most of us can imagine only as the stuff of horror. They are damned to Nietzsche’s nightmare, the endless, lonely, meaningless pursuit of immediate self-gratification.

Their’s is a cold hell. They perceive the people among whom they live, even their own children, as animate objects, as tools to be used to attain their goals. They live in a universe similar to ours, but it is without the warmth of human connection or the hope of a self-transcending future. Being the center of their universe, they literally feel that everything begins and ends with them. Their existence is synonymous with exploitation.

Superficially, they are indistinguishable from the rest of us. They have talents, ambitions, appetites and intelligence just like ours. We often initially find them attractive, spontaneous—even charismatic. Their personalities radiate a frisson of edginess—a dangerousness which excites our desire for adventure. Having only the moment, they can be incredibly alive to it.

Psychology actually knows quite a bit about these extreme egoists, considering how poorly people in general understand them. The term of art for them is “sociopath” and research suggests that they make up about 4% of the population of the United States. As a matter of statistical probability, you shared each of your elementary school classrooms with at least one and you almost certainly know several. You may even be married to one; you wouldn’t necessarily realize it. They are natural chameleons. Ironically, they see affection, and the conscience that goes with it, as weakness. They see themselves as living at the top of the food chain, as the ultimate predator, with everyone else as their prey. Yes, dearly beloved, as Kipling might say, there really are vampires. They just don’t drink blood.

For most sociopaths, personal satisfaction is intertwined with domination and control. Winning is genuinely an ecstasy and defeat is literally dreadful. Since satisfaction is bound up with the psychological experience of victory, they can be ruthless and single-minded about pursuing it. Not surprisingly, the most adept of them can achieve elite positions. They have an uncanny ability to play dirty without anything sticking to them. Having no affection, they aren’t tripped up or restrained by empathy, shame or guilt.

For the rest of us, imagining that everyone is more or less like ourselves, it is easy to misperceive their coldness as exceptional dedication, even enviable ambitiousness. Some of us even imagine that we can deploy these people to carry out our intentions—like a medieval hunter who launches his “tame” falcon at prey. Yet, the failure to grasp the nature and potential of these people usually has dreadful consequences.

Hjalmar Schacht, famous for ending the run-away inflation that destroyed Germany’s economy after WWI, in his desperation to stave off civil war, helped the Nazis secure power. This is especially ironic because, politically liberal himself, he disdained them. In 1931, he told an American journalist, “No, the Nazis cannot rule, but I can rule through them.” He promised the German industrialists whom he recruited to finance Hitler’s rise to power that they, not Hitler, would control Germany’s future. By the time these powerbrokers understood what they had unleashed on themselves and on the world, it was far too late to prevent World War II and the Holocaust.

Research on cannibalism in non-human species suggests that there might even be an evolutionary niche for sociopaths. The speculation is that some species use cannibalism as a last ditch strategy to protect their kind from extinction. In his observations of one species of fish, Conrad Lorenz discovered that a small but consistent percentage of the population is cannibalistic, a few in a thousand. Under normal circumstances, when food is abundant, the cannibalism is relatively insignificant. Only under starvation conditions does it emerge as a significant behavior. He speculated that this sub-population made the species more resilient in the face of ecological catastrophe—at least the cannibals might survive to produce a new generation.

Given this, you might conclude that affection and conscience are liabilities, or, at best, luxuries. As it turns out, you would be wrong. Research on games, called Game Theory, demonstrates that cooperation is a far more productive strategy than winner-takes-all competition. In fact, without external intervention, cooperation drives out competitive behavior simply by producing obviously higher returns on investment. Predators may win more often than not, but they don’t win much when compared with the rewards that accrue to cooperators.

Capitalism, the most successful economic system in history, originated as a group of strategies to reduce risk and thereby promote investment. Reducing risk, as cooperation does, makes it easier to mobilize resources. Having sufficient resources increases the likelihood of success. Increasing the likelihood of success increases the scale of projects undertaken. Increasing the scale of opportunity expands participation. All of this is a self-reinforcing “virtuous” cycle—trust breeding success. Capitalism has since evolved into something less benign, but we will get to that later.

So why don’t we live in a paradise: lion bedded down with the lamb and all that? Well, there is the problem of maintaining a level playing field. Predators are not interested in fairness, justice or sharing; those values make absolutely no sense to them. Remember, in their experience they are the center of the universe; they have no affection or conscience, just the drive to win on their terms. Most of their activity on any given day is devoted to warping the playing field toward their advantage. To that end, they are quintessentially Machiavellian in their behavior. If they can get the job done with an efficient lie, fine. If it takes subverting powerful people, the government, even the law itself, well, that’s just another exciting challenge for them. Character assassination, murder, war—all in a day’s work.

Sociopaths realize early in their lives that they are different from most of the people who surround them. They quickly come to fully appreciate how uncomfortable “normal” people are with differentness in general and with “coldness” in particular. They tend to be astute observers of behavior, with a talent for identifying and using people’s vulnerabilities. The successful ones are adept at disguise and manipulation. One misapprehension is that sociopaths are violent criminals of the serial murderer-Hannibal Lecter sort. Some are, but that’s uncommon. While they do often derive pleasure from inflicting pain, they aren’t compelled to behave criminally any more than are you or I. They just have no internal governor—no empathy that would make hurting people uncomfortable for them. When you and I look at another person, we see someone like ourselves—there is an experiential recognition. A sociopath only sees an object that may or may not be useful—there is no experiential recognition of similarity.

You and I might also treat people as objects. Stanley Milgram’s research, done at Yale University in 1961-1962, demonstrated that many people, under the right circumstances, can be made to behave callously, even cruelly. Across several studies he found that 65% of his subjects, all residents of New Haven, Connecticut, were willing to give what they believed were painful and potentially dangerous electric shocks to an innocent victim. As long as an authority figure instructed them to do so, they continued raising the voltage and shocking a person who was begging and pleading with them to stop. Sadly, real examples of this abound, from Rwanda and Abu Ghraib to the documented torture of suspects by Chicago police aggressively seeking confessions. In contrast to sociopaths, most people in such situations ultimately suffer guilt or shame, or lapse into a state of denial about what they have done. Milgram offered free psychological counseling to all those involved in an experiment, and most took it because they found their behavior disturbing.

Because they are recognizably different, sociopaths with a thirst for either power or wealth and the talent to pursue them face a dilemma. The absence of conscience makes them ruthless and fast. Their vitality often makes them attractive. Their insight into personal motivation makes them skillful manipulators, charming or intimidating as necessary. These are formidable competitive advantages. They are also potential liabilities, if their manifestation invites close scrutiny.

Richard Christie and Florence Geis developed a test (MACH-IV) for measuring manipulativeness—Machiavellianism—in people. Using the test, researchers discovered that bright individuals who are highly manipulative tend to be successful. By contrast, less intelligent high scorers tend to get crushed. People almost universally distrust, and often despise, obvious manipulators. At the same time, almost all of us indulge in some degree of manipulativeness—who would dare tell grandma what we really thought of the blouse or tie she sent us for Christmas. Smart sociopaths learn early in their lives how people are likely to react to their manipulations. Consequently, they become adept at hiding who they are and what they are doing.

Part II: The Destructive Impact of Elite Sociopaths on Society

In order to understand the full impact of elite sociopaths on society, we need to appreciate a particular competitive strategy. There is an ultimate strategy of strategies, one that is intuitively obvious to the sociopathic personality. Sun Tzu, renowned general and author of The Art of War, wrote about it in the 6^th century BC. He focused on achieving victory through deception and distraction rather than by winning pitched battles. Three quotes from him will give the flavor of his approach to conflict; "Thus, what is of supreme importance in war is to attack the enemy's strategy," "Be extremely subtle, even to the point of formlessness. Be extremely mysterious, even to the point of soundlessness. Thereby you can be the director of the opponent's fate," "The best victory is when the opponent surrenders of its own accord before there are any actual hostilities...It is best to win without fighting." Sun Tzu focused on controlling the playing field and the rules of the game, rather than direct conflict.

According to Sun Tzu, the task is to make the opponent defeat himself. Deception, distraction and speed are the primary tools for accomplishing this. For Sun Tzu, the purest victory is in convincing the enemy that struggle is futile, pointless or, best of all, unnecessary. Covert manipulation is the essential tool for this strategy. Ingratiation, seduction, intimidation, provocation are used to cause the enemy to self-destruct.

The sociopath consistently relies on this strategy to achieve his ends. Like Sun Tzu, he very clearly understands that exposure not only undermines his ability to control situations, it also puts him at personal risk. The logic of the predator demands that he disguise or hide himself and his actions from his prey. Simple observation of nature tells him that the best place to hide is in plain sight.

The most sophisticated sociopaths, those with whom we are concerned, recognize that the best way to hide in plain sight is to make sociopathic behavior normal rather than exceptional. If everyone behaves like sociopaths, then true sociopaths are just the most accomplished performers.

If you are old enough, you grew up with society telling you that trustworthiness was essential to personal success. Society insisted that how you played the game was more important than winning—meaning that fair play, sportsmanship, modesty, and self-sacrifice demonstrated good character. Good character was the bedrock on which one’s reputation and society itself grew—a rising tide that lifted all boats. It wasn’t so long ago that men dueled to the death to defend their “honor.” What a difference now. A commentator at the 2006 Winter Olympics insisted that the only way for one contestant to “redeem” herself was by winning a gold medal. What was her sin? She only won a silver medal at the last Olympics. If there is a newly dominant sentiment in American popular culture, it is, “winning is all that counts.” Do we really have to wonder why the abuse of performance enhancing drugs has exploded over the last twenty years? One look at the transformation of the Olympic gold medal from a small medallion into a neck straining chest saucer says it all.

An ethos of “take-no-prisoners” competitiveness serves the interests of sociopaths: it plays to their strengths. It’s only natural that they would act to promote and reinforce it at every opportunity. A cultural atmosphere suffused with selfishness further acts as a catalyst for the formation of sociopathic elites.

It’s best to think of sociopaths working together as birds wheeling together in a flock. They are moving on parallel paths based on common circumstances. This has nothing to do with empathy, affection or cooperation, only self-interest. Sociopaths do not experience, therefore do not trust, the power of emotional bonding between people. They do understand the power of domination. Sociopaths treat relationships as commodities to be stolen, bought or sold to suit their advantage. Having no experience of love or compassion, they regard altruism as stupid and any manifestation of it actively threatening. Altruism represents something beyond their control and therefore dangerous. Instead of mutuality, they attempt to structure relationships purely in terms of indebtedness. In practice, they talk about relationships almost exclusively in terms of “loyalty.”

If you imagine that an elite group of sociopaths functions in the manner of the typical secret society, like Yale’s Skull and Bones fraternity, or like a basketball team, you don’t quite understand sociopaths. While they are perfectly capable of creating conspiracies and organizations, the bonds that hold them together are only as strong as their perception of self-interest. Their willingness to appear cooperative is purely mercenary. They recognize this in their kind. In fact, it’s what they are most comfortable with as well. They discourage cooperative attitudes—self-transcendance, altruism or self-actualization. Instead, they go to extraordinary lengths to seduce, buy or coerce loyalty, essentially self-sacrifice, from their subordinates. Stalin’s reign of terror was particularly effective because any failure was regarded as disloyalty and the consequence of disloyalty was death. During World War II, he ordered that soldiers who attempted to retreat, even in the face of certain defeat, were to be shot. It is easy to understand the abject terror of him demonstrated by his immediate subordinates, the most powerful men in the Soviet Union, as they hovered over his unconscious, obviously dying body.

Because of the primacy of predatory competitiveness in their world view, sociopaths naturally promote a consistent philosophy with little need for social coordination. The founder of the Soviet Union, V. I. Lenin, characterized the philosophy as “Who eats whom?” When the egoistic glamour is peeled away, it is essentially vampirism.

Elite sociopaths singly or in agglomerations, have promoted variations on this philosophy probably for as long as they have existed. We see it throughout history: “Might makes right;” “Let them hate, so long as they fear;” “Nature red in tooth and claw;” “last gladiator standing;” “me or you;” and as some wit parodied it, “What’s mine is mine and what’s yours is mine too.”

Since Charles Darwin published The Origin of Species, their propaganda has taken on a pseudo-scientific tone. In the nineteenth century, their vampirism was defended as “survival of the fittest.” While they attribute this concept to Darwin, he did not theorize that nature is a struggle between the successful strong and the unsuccessful weak. In fact, repeatedly and almost exclusively, he demonstrated the pivotal role that cooperation plays in survival and evolution. He writes extensively about love, but almost nowhere mentions competition in the sense extolled by the exploiter elites. That you may find this statement unbelievable illustrates the effectiveness of their propaganda.

We see evidence of sociopathic thinking and behavior all around us on a daily basis not just throughout history. We see it in politics—scratch a hegemon or imperialist and you will likely find a sociopath. We see it in religion—some priests have preyed on the vulnerable since babies were sacrificed to Baal thousands of years ago. Any institution that is hierarchical, powerful and wealthy is especially attractive to sociopaths. Armies have always been irresistibly attractive, though this has waned somewhat with the advent of world destroying weapons. Without the possibility of winning, there is no glory in mutually assured destruction. We see its influence in the systematic deconstruction of democratic procedures in Congress—excluding minority party members from hearings for example. We see it in the rapid emergence of an imperial Presidency—a president who signs 750 bills into law with the stated intent that he will refuse to enforce those parts to which he objects. We see it in the extreme gerrymandering intended to thwart the electoral process and assure the re-election of incumbent politicians. It leaps out to grab at our throats through the endless lying that has become normal behavior across the media—from blatantly false advertising to the widespread substitution of infotainment and propaganda for investigative journalism. No one can have missed the triumph of the looters mentality that emerged with the shift from traditional to managerial capitalism. Most disturbing, the tax system has been flagrantly used by the Bush administration to transfer hundreds of billions of dollars borrowed from foreign countries to the economic elite, while leaving the rest of Americans saddled with an historically unique and likely catastrophic level of foreign debt. You know the cultural rot has reached the breaking point when the executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union assumes that he can attempt with impunity to limit the freedom of speech of his board of directors in the middle of a campaign to raise money to protect freedom of speech.

The business community has become one of the preferred venues for spreading the philosophy of extremism in our culture. For instance, sociopaths have been tireless champions of laissez-faire arguments in economics. The refrain is always that unfettered competition is the key ingredient in an efficient economy. This idea is correctly attributed to Adam Smith, as much the inventor of capitalism as any single person, but as with the attribution of “survival of the fittest” to Darwin this is misdirection. For Smith, a moral philosopher in addition to being the author of The Wealth of Nations, self-interest and virtue were synonymous, for instance, while he argued against government manipulation of commerce, he did not argue against government regulation in general. He was decisive in his warnings against monopoly and aggressive in his support for public education. The whole sorry concept of callous competitiveness was debunked in detail in the 1930’s as the absurdity it is—absolute laissez-faire would mean no contract law for instance. Yet it re-emerges today as the contemporary exploiter propaganda variously referred to as Rationalism or financial rationalism.

Financial rationalism promotes the idea that if everyone acts on their “pure” self-interest without regard to any mediating factors, the economic system will work perfectly. No self-respecting economist—certainly none familiar with Utility or Prospect theory—is benighted enough to sincerely believe this. Nevertheless, significant segments of the financial and business communities promote it religiously. If you have come under their spell, try this thought experiment. Imagine what would happen if you removed all the traffic lights in Manhattan.

In just such an experiment, broad segments of the financial, corporate management, accounting and political communities colluded over roughly the last thirty years to eliminate traditional business and government regulatory systems in the United States. The result has been an ongoing, twenty-year looting spree marked by the largest transfer of wealth into the hands of a tiny economic elite since the Gilded Age, when 1% of Americans received 45% of all income (currently at 40%) and owned 90% of all assets (currently at over 70%).

As pathological levels of greed blossomed into blatant criminality during this period, a few of the most flagrant corporate malefactors, like Enron, collapsed. This precipitated some very modest re-regulation, and subsequently over 1,500 major corporations were forced to correct years of deceptive accounting and restate their earnings. It is not coincidental that during the last twenty years, compensation of top corporate executives ballooned from 30 times that of the lowest paid corporate employee to 250 times (at one point in the late 1990s, it exceeded 500 times).

The shape of the modern corporation has been a particular triumph of the vampire elite. Psychologists use a simple test to assess whether or not someone is likely to be a sociopath. It looks for the presence of symptoms like; “lack of remorse after having hurt, mistreated, or stolen from another person,” “deceitfulness, manipulativeness,” “reckless disregard for the safety of self or others,” and “failure to conform to social norms.” Anyone who exhibits three or more of the seven characteristics of sociopathy is suspected of being a sociopath. While it might seem strange to give a psychological test to an institution, this was recently done for a documentary film called “The Corporation.” The rationale used was that, as the law treats corporations as though they were people—with equivalent legal rights, let’s give them a psychiatric exam to see just what kind of people they are. The modern corporation scored seven characteristics out of seven.

You might wonder how one of the central institutions of our society could become so prone to pathological behavior (Enron, WorldCom, Merrill Lynch, AIG and Halliburton as recent, newsworthy examples) that it requires constant monitoring to control its depredations. From the mountain of regulations imposed on them, you would think corporations are potentially more dangerous than nuclear power plants. Measured in terms of body count, they are, devastatingly so. At the same time, corporations are immensely useful, productive and just as capable of behaving as good citizens as they are liable to being bad citizens. In fairness, most are like WalMart, who while noted for over-exploiting its employees on the one hand, is credited with good samaritanism on the other; being well ahead of the Federal government in delivering, by the truck load, life-save supplies to victims of hurricane Katrina. What the corporate vehicle has become, in the last quarter century especially, is near perfect cover for the exploiter elite.

The incremental but dramatic tilt toward a culture of exploitation and the glorification of vampirism have not been the work of a monolithic conspiracy, though doubtlessly there are any number of well organized efforts involved. It is the result of elite groups of people with little in common except their lack of humanity working toward a common material and cultural agenda. More than any specific policy or act, their triumph is psychological and political, in making narcissistic materialism and Social Darwinism not only acceptable, but admirable, and seemingly inevitable, in the public consciousness.

Humanity pays a high price when it comes under the spell of sociopaths. Sociopaths almost inevitably crash and burn. When winning is all that has meaning, life becomes serial competition. If there are no ready “enemies,” the sociopath creates them. Having conquered Germany, Austria and the Sudeten, Hitler wanted Poland next. He took German convicts, dressed them in Polish uniforms, murdered them on the German side of the border, accused the Poles of invading and precipitated World War II. He couldn’t stop—his standing order to the German military was “never retreat, never surrender.” The sociopathic mind believes that people can be terrorized into submission—If not with threats, then in a few weeks or months of bloody, brutal conflict. They incorrectly intuit this because they are insensible to the power of empathy and affection. Understanding that the death of neighbors, of women and children, might inflame the spirit rather than freeze it in mortal terror, requires a leap of counter-intuitive imagination for them. Life without the experience of connection to anything other than one’s own self-centered gratification, entails the delusion that reality begins and ends with the self. Notoriously, sociopaths, when they go down, take with them everything that they can. At the very end, Hitler railed against the German people for their “failure” to give him victory. He considered the reduction of the country to rubble as just punishment for their “betrayal.”

Each of us has an ego—a sense of a self as distinct from others. We are also acutely sensitive to differences—variously welcomed as novelty or abhorred as perversion. This discriminative ability is essential to survival. Consequently, at the root of human relations, there is a tension—me/you—that readily expresses itself competitively. Yet, the default state for people is cooperation, not competition. In fact, research indicates that Homo Sapiens is the most cooperative species on the planet. For most of us the self is not precisely bounded as it is for a sociopath. Self includes family, and readily extends to community, and nation. For many, the inter-dependence of all life, an expanded sense of self, includes the whole planet—all for one, one for all.

This is very important for our future together. Compare chimpanzees with baboons. When a group of chimps is out foraging, if one of them spots a leopard stalking the group, he is likely to sneak away rather than raise the alarm. He survives, but the leopard adds chimp to its menu. By contrast, if a baboon spots a stalking leopard, he alerts the troop. Two of the most powerful males will break away, stalk the leopard, attack and often kill it. Invariably one of the baboons dies, frequently both do, but so does the leopard. What else do we know about chimpanzees and baboons? Chimps are an endangered species and baboons are among the most successful animals in Africa.

Cultures, of necessity, harness human aggressiveness. Sociopaths glorify it. They celebrate competition as the foundation for strong character and the source of innovation. As misapprehensions go, this is a tragic one. The value of competition is in the implicit dialogue among people, no one of whom has perfect understanding. Winning a contest is no prize. When the emotional excitement of competition overwhelms the core conversation, the value that might be gained is lost in self-sustaining circuits of reprisal.

Conflict is epidemic in societies obsessed with competition. Labor disputes, legal actions, turf battles, hostile takeovers, interpersonal conflicts, marital strife, political vendettas, crime and simple misunderstandings annually leach trillions of dollars from economies worldwide. Tension, instead of creating dynamism, devolves into conflict. This pattern undermines the fabric of social relations, reduces quality of life and, too often, results in the destruction of careers, families and lives. Provoked by trans-national sociopathic elites, this friction inflames societies worldwide. Usually, it is only a sullen smolder, but, too often, it ignites in the indiscriminate conflagration of war.

Cultures that elevate competition over cooperation, domination over reciprocity, become imperial in success and vindictive in failure. They necessarily over-extend, exhaust their resources and cultivate the hatred of those they dominate. Empires don’t last, they eat themselves. They die, and the land they cultivate often dies with them. The Garden of Eden, the once fertile plain between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, has been desert now for thousands of years. The clear scientific consensus on the reality of global warming, itself exacerbated by exploitive behaviors, alerts us that the same thing is now happening on a global scale.

Very rarely does one face such a clear choice. We can continue slavishly emulating the sociopathic elites in their relentless pursuit of excess, complicit in the exploitation from which that excess derives. Or we can give up our pretensions, surrendering our grandiosity, and live lives defined by compassion, intimacy and service.

Part III: It Takes More than Garlic and Wooden Stakes to Deal with Vampires

The struggle between cooperators and predators is perennial. It’s not an accident that so much of world culture, law and government is dedicated to protecting cooperators from predators. Societies, especially fast-evolving, technological ones, are uniquely dependent on trust and transparency. Modern complexity demands a high level of participation. If people begin opting out or just pretending to participate, eventually it all falls down. Shortly before the collapse of the Soviet Union a worker explained the Soviet system to a western reporter, “They pretend to pay us; we pretend to work.” In a high tech world, when the right hand doesn’t know what the left hand is doing, or either one fails to act responsibly, you get Chernobyl, Enron and Iraq. Fifty million people died in World War II. In excess of 70 million died under Communist regimes. And the stakes are only getting higher. Were the avian flu to break out, the death toll could be in the hundreds of millions. In this rapidly integrating world, where the time between cause and effect is shrinking from decades to hours, it really has to be one for all and all for one.

Trust is essential, because it is both efficient and liberating. Investments can be undertaken that would be, without it, inconceivable. The creativity and innovation at the heart of complex societies always entails risk. What does it take to declare independence from the world’s largest maritime empire and found the world’s first representative democracy? Benjamin Franklin wasn’t kidding when, at a particularly divisive moment, he reminded the Continental Congress that they would “hang together or hang separately.” What does it take to sustain the collegiality at the heart of so much of Silicon Valley’s success, when the surrounding business culture lionizes take-no-prisoners competition? Do you believe that the Internet would have grown to encompass the world as it has, if it had been invented by a WorldCom rather than an open consortium of universities and government? In general, people will not take risks without confidence that they will be protected and appropriately rewarded. Ensuring such protection and reward is the central purpose of a modern, democratically-oriented society. No one wants to play in a stacked game. If forced to do so, people exact their revenge through a thousand cuts: from simple disengagement to slacking, theft, malicious obedience and outright sabotage. Overall productivity eventually drops off. According to the OECD Factbook for 2006, compared with the other OECD countries, on key economic, social and environmental indicators, the U.S. has now fallen to 16^th of 28.

Societies are perfectly capable of promoting or limiting sociopathic behavior. In contrast to the United States, where one person in twenty-five demonstrates evidence of anti-social personality disorder, in Taiwan and Japan that figure shrinks to only about one person in one thousand—40 times less. Alarmingly, the 1991 Epidemiologic Catchment Area study funded by the National Institute of Mental Health reported that between 1975 and 1990 the incidence of anti-social personality disorder nearly doubled among young people in the United States.

This is a cultural phenomenon. The genetic make-up of our kids didn’t change overnight. Like individuals, cultures can become unstable—diseased. A diseased culture promotes values and behaviors that will ultimately bring about its collapse. People are the cells in the body of a culture. The sickness attacks and changes the people who bring the culture to life.

Cultures are built up around shared memes—constellations of self-perpetuating ideas. Memes are to cultures as genes are to species. Some genes can be so selfish that they have the potential to drive their species to extinction. These genes cheat—they trick the biological machinery of individuals into reproducing them at the expense of the species as a whole. Consider Wolbachia, both a bacteria and a parasite. Passed only from mother to daughter in insects, it tampers with the host’s reproductive system so that daughters are produced rather than sons. Obviously this leads to a potentially catastrophic decline in the male part of the population. Through mutation, effectively the same thing can happen at the genetic level. Such mutated genes are called selfish because they cause their host to reproduce in such a way that the species as a whole faces extinction.

The same thing can happen in cultures. Consider the micro-cultures that emerge around massively multiplayer computer games. These are games that are played by thousands of people interacting with each other in real time over the internet. According to Tony Ray, the president of the Houston-based company Even Balance, when the game QuakeWorld came out online, it developed a huge community. "There was serious competition and an enormous amount of online status. Then the cheats showed up, and almost overnight it went from something that was a hugely popular community into something that was a wasteland.''

A much more disturbing example of micro-cultures is the evolution of gangs in the United States. Gang culture gained momentum after penal systems abandoned rehabilitation for a new focus on the isolation of chronically violent offenders. The intent was to neutralize dangerous inmates by segregating them into new “Supermax” facilities. The Supermax prison was designed to house inmates in stark isolation for up to twenty-two hours a day. Instead they became the headquarters for some of our biggest and most violent gangs. What emerged from this concentration of “talent” is a group of leaders who organize and run criminal empires that reach deep into the life of communities all across America. They have turned prisons into colleges for criminal behavior that young gang members aspire to attend. In spite of life sentences without parole, this criminal elite uses all the mechanisms of acculturation from rap CDs, videos and training manuals to military-style organization to recruit, educate and control their crime “families.” They have engineered a sub-culture dedicated to criminally exploiting the communities in which their members live.

If you think there are no cultural mechanisms capable of this kind of influence in our broader culture—of spreading selfish memes—watch some of the adolescent and young adult oriented reality TV programs, play some of the teen and mature rated videogames, and listen to talk radio with the ears of a child. As you observe the kind of culture that corporate-controlled media are promoting, keep the following list at hand. Assess the characters being presented to you and your children as cultural icons. Remember that consistently exhibiting just three of the diagnostic symptoms is enough to lead a clinician to suspect that the person in question is sociopathic. If some of these characteristics strike a little too close to home for comfort, consider that while you are probably not a sociopath, culture shapes behavior, including yours.

Diagnostic symptoms associated with sociopaths:

1) Failure to conform to social norms,

2) Deceitfulness, manipulativeness,

3) Impulsivity, failure to plan ahead,

4) Irritability, aggressiveness,

5) Reckless disregard for the safety of self or others,

6) Consistent irresponsibility,

7) Lack of remorse after having hurt, mistreated, or stolen from another person

Additional documented characteristics of sociopaths

· Refusal to acknowledge responsibility for errors

· Shallowness of emotion and a callous lack of regard or empathy for others.

· Grandiosity

· Glib, superficial charm used for seduction

· Extreme risk taking

· Substance abuse

Cooperation is the essence of civilization. We measure a civilization ultimately by its ability to do work and its longevity. The ancient Egyptians were able to build pyramids. The ancient Romans built thousands of miles of roads. Modern societies have built millions of miles of indoor plumbing. From primitive pecking orders to the emergence of religion, social evolution has been driven by the need to win the benefits of cooperation and reduce the damages of conflict. One of the most significant breakthroughs—the codification of law—was invented by the Sumerian King, Hammerabi, only 5,000 years ago. In the last few hundred years, the practice of politics has evolved from a simple attempt to reduce the violence of power struggles into sophisticated procedures for balancing and harmonizing the interests of more and more finely characterized constituencies.

It is very likely that the intellectual demands of extended cooperation are what made us human. Anthropologists have struggled for over a hundred years to understand the origins of our species’ high intelligence. Why did Homo develop the big brain? Arguments have volleyed back and forth contending that upright posture, tool use and social interaction are the catalysts for our ancestral transformation. While all of these must have contributed, none is definitive. Our ancestors walked upright for millions of years before our brains leaped ahead of the monkeys and great apes. Most of the great apes demonstrate some use of tools, and primates generally maintain complex social relationships. In an attempt to better understand our roots, Richard Leakey, who has spent his life making some of the most extraordinary anthropological discoveries about our ancestors, tried seeing humans from a chimpanzee’s perspective. What his imagined chimp found most extraordinary about humans was that when we found food we didn’t immediately eat it ourselves, but took it back and shared it with the others in our group. He also pointed out that we are the only primate that gathers together in super groups that extend beyond immediate family or local ties to groups of communities. We’ve evolved to better cooperate.

Cooperation is a very complex ability. It requires a capacity for high level abstraction. This was illustrated in a research study done a few years ago. The scientists wanted to know if chimpanzees could do arithmetic. Researcher set up problems that required two chimps to add or subtract M&Ms in order to divide them fairly. The researches quickly discovered that the chimps could easily do simple addition and subtraction, but they couldn’t share. In the final version of the experiment two chimps were separated from each other and the candies in Plexiglas cubicles. Each chimp in turn did the math problem assigned using numbers and then the researchers divided the M&Ms accordingly in front of the chimps. In every case, the chimps understood how many they were supposed to get, but they were, nevertheless, frantic over having to share any at all.

They had the mental capacity to do some abstract thinking—relating numbers to M&Ms, but they couldn’t make the next leap. That numbers gave them a means to manage equitable sharing. Making that leap would have required an appreciation of the value of cooperation.

As a metaphor, imagine that human beings have two sets of genetic wiring. One set is organized around competing and the other is organized around cooperating. When getting dinner may require intimidating lions and tigers and bears, you need a keen and highly tuned sense of how to compete. You don’t have time to think about it. On the other hand, cooperation has an obviously higher return on investment so that when you aren’t dealing with the local predators but other human beings, you want to be just as efficient at cooperation. Again you don’t want to have to spend time and energy figuring out how to cooperate every time the opportunity presents itself. Over a few million years, the mental machinery for cooperation keeps being reinforced because the better you are at cooperating, the more likely you are to pass on your genes. In time the whole species develops a bias toward cooperation and away from competition. Nevertheless, in the face of a threat or the appearance of a threat, the competitive wiring tends to kick in automatically. You can actually see the two sets of wiring at work in differences in the behavior of men and women. When men feel threatened they tend to immediately become aggressive. By contrast, when women feel threatened they initially try to make friends.

While our biological wiring may be biased toward cooperation, obviously it is only slightly so. For all of our social progress from the first mud-walled towns in ancient China and the Middle East to the megalopoli of the modern world, our triumphs of cooperation are built on the rubble of past conflicts. The fragility of our inclination toward cooperation cannot be overemphasized. Small influences acting steadily over time can have very major effects.

A few years ago biologists did an experiment in which they genetically modified a bacterium so that it was unable to produce a single critical enzyme. They then put it together with an equivalent sample of its original, unmodified mother culture. As long as the missing enzyme was supplied in the food fed to both bacteria, the daughter culture invariably overwhelmed the mother culture. The minute faction of energy saved in the modified bacteria was applied to reproduction. That tiny advantage enabled it to reproduce faster and quickly take over. Although it is a different kind of culture, something similar happens with societies. Small influences can undermine cooperation as easily as reinforce it.

Over the generations, the best parts of American culture have been aimed at reinforcing cooperation. And that has paid off for us. While Europe regularly destroyed itself, the United States flourished by comparison. History shows us that triumphal competitiveness usually ends badly for everyone. It promotes materialism, exploitation, elitism and authoritarianism, all of which undermine the vitality of a society. Healthy culture reduces threats and channels reactive competitiveness into constructive behavior.

As far as our modern institutions have taken us toward increased cooperativeness, we still have a long way to go before we tap the full potential of the human species. One of the greatest threats to continuing progress remains the prevalence and burden of sociopathic behavior. Aggressive, exploitative behaviors trigger the compete wiring in everyone they touch. At some point, society roils like the surface of a pond in a thunderstorm. The Civil War was such a time, and its aftermath continues to resonate in contemporary politics over six generations later.

With interpersonal differences and tensions inevitable, most of us are ready to believe competition and conflict also are inevitable. Much of the power of sociopathic elites depends on that intuitive anxiety. But even if those differences among people that are often at the root of conflict are inevitable, competition, contest and combat are not. Dog-eat-dog competition may temporarily consolidate wealth and power, but it also creates self-sustaining cycles of retribution. The violently-accumulated hoard ends up being defensively squandered. The sociopath may often triumph in an egoistic sense, but everyone ultimately suffers when cooperation is undermined.

Part IV: Promoting Cooperation

If, as Robert Wright contends in The Moral Animal, “human beings are a species splendid in their array of moral equipment, tragic in their propensity to misuse it, and pathetic in their constitutional ignorance of the misuse,” then we know what we have to do. Most of us have the necessary equipment, and we appreciate tragedy when we see it, so that leaves the problem of constitutional ignorance. It’s that constitutional ignorance that leaves us vulnerable to reactive competitiveness and exploitation.

In fact, sociopaths are only peripherally our problem. The real danger that we face is the insidious spread of sociopathic behavior. Biological sociopaths may be with us always, but they are a very small part of the population—probably a handful in a thousand. It’s the proliferation of sociopathic behavior that threatens the future of our society, as it seems to have undermined other societies in the past. Sociopathic behavior is like the heat-generating electrical resistance in a computer chip. As heat builds up, the performance of the CPU begins to degrade—enough heat and it altogether fails.

In the abstract world of game theory, where computer simulations are used to test the successfulness of different games, there is a near perfect strategy for creating “success.” It’s called Tit-for-Tat. Tit-for-tat, devised by Dr. Anatol Rapoport, relies on two rules; cooperate on the first move, then on succeeding moves respond in kind to the other players’ moves. It can thank three properties for its success. First, it is nice. Nice rules — those that are never the first to defect — have been more successful than those that start by defecting. Second, it retaliates. It punishes defectors immediately, which helps it to resist exploitative strategies. Third, it forgives. It only remembers the previous move, so it stands ready to re-establish fruitful cooperation with any like-minded approach. Since tit-for-tat is very hard to push around, it makes sense to cooperate with it. It demonstrates a practical amalgamation of “do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” “an eye for an eye,” and “turn the other cheek.”

Two other games can marginally outperform Tit-for-Tat. But they do so at a cost that is significant when translated out of the mathematical world of computer agents into the real world of human beings. One is a modified version of Tit-for-Tat, which adds a third rule. If another player is obviously a sucker, take him for all he is worth on the first move. While this works in computer simulations, it is not a “nice” game. It gets its edge from defection. It is a short term strategy because in the real world perception does not always match reality; the apparent sucker turns out to be the bait in a trap. Even if successful, word gets around so the pool of potential suckers shrinks and non-defectors refuse to play at all. Unlike true Tit-for-Tat, when translated into daily practice, it creates spreading ripples of distrust and increases the risk inherent in cooperation. Raising risk reduces benefit, and as far as society as a whole is concerned, you are back on a downward spiral toward a sociopathic culture where increasing energy is devoted to artificially creating suckers for an, increasingly conspicuous, elite to exploit.

The second strategy that sometimes out performs Tit-for-Tat depends on collusion among a group of agents some of whom sacrifice themselves to force a Tit-for-Tat agent into the less productive adversarial mode of operation while pre-selected colluders continue to cooperate. While both of these games can beat Tit-for-Tat, neither has as high a long term potential for return on investment. In the real world they both suffer a burden of overhead that Tit for Tat does not. Identifying or creating suckers in the first case and enticing or coercing sacrifice in the second, carry significant social price tags in the real world. Both of these require energy that could otherwise be productively deployed.

It is in the best interests of society to extinguish exploitation. If exploitative economic, political and social systems dominate, people continually attempt to manipulate those playing fields in order to maximize the number of suckers available to be exploited. Contrary to conventional wisdom, suckers aren’t born, they are created. By default, suckers are ignorant and ignorance can be created through disinformation or deception. Systems that are clearly rigged create discontent and are eventually abandoned.

The unfortunate history of communes and other cooperative groups is well known. Most fail abysmally. A recent study published in the journal Science by German economists suggests why. It reveals that clear methods of punishing group members who become selfish or exploitative are essential to successful cooperation. Groups that punish defectors are more profitable than groups who do not. Since such punishment seems contrary to the idealism typical of cooperators, typically their efforts fail.

The researchers discovered that groups with few rules attract exploitative people, who then proceed to undermine the cooperation that initially made the group successful. On the other hand, communities that punish defectors and distribute power equally attract people who will enforce cooperative behavior, even at their personal expense. According to the study's senior author, Bettina Rockenbach, who was joined in the research by Bernd Irlenbusch, now at the London School of Economics, and Ozgur Gurek, "The bottom line of the paper is that when you have people with shared standards, and some who have the moral courage to sanction others, informally, then this kind of society manages very successfully." She observed that being exploited appeared to cause deep frustration and anger in most of the student participants.

Assuring fairness is critical to superior and sustained individual performance. Research on reward systems bears this out. Reward systems, especially “merit pay” systems that provide extrinsic rewards for specific outcomes, actually undermine both performance and morale. In No Contest and several successive books, Alfie Kohn has exhaustively reviewed the research on the effects of interpersonal competition and the reward systems that competition engenders. His conclusion, based on overwhelming data, is that the destructive effect of competition and systems of extrinsic reward, whether in the workplace or on the playground, far outweigh the putative, largely mythic, benefits. Kohn says, “To the best of my knowledge, no controlled scientific study has ever found a long-term enhancement of the quality of work as a result of any incentive system. In fact, numerous studies have confirmed that performance on tasks, particularly complex tasks, is generally lower when people are promised a reward for doing them, or for doing them well. As a rule, the more prominent or enticing the reward, the more destructive its effects.”

Kohn cites four reasons for the failure of extrinsic (pay-for-performance) reward systems. The first is that they are manipulative and patronizing. Maurice Holt notes that such systems shift “accountability away from politicians and administrators, who invent and control the system, to those who actually do the work." Secondly, they undermine collegiality—cooperating carries the risk that one might surrender an advantage. Systems that set up merit pay as a competition are especially destructive. As Kohn points out, “Merit pay based on rankings is about victory, not about excellence.” Third, artificial rewards imply that people could be doing a better job, but are choosing not to perform up to their potential. At best, this is confusing, at worst, it is insulting. Kohn says, “researchers have demonstrated repeatedly that the use of such extrinsic inducements often reduces intrinsic motivation. The more that people are rewarded, the more they tend to lose interest in whatever they had to do to get the reward.”

Finally Kohn refers us to the complications surrounding adequate measurement. He cites W. Edwards Deming, the premier authority on statistical quality control, who said, "The most important things we need to manage can't be measured." Lord Kelvin may have been correct when he said that, “We are what we measure,” but the problem is that we can’t fully measure what we are. Consequently, reward systems will always seem arbitrary, however well-intentioned. Kohn concludes that the best formula for compensation is to, “Pay people well, pay them fairly, and then do everything possible to help them forget about money.”

A large body of management research points to the critical role that fairness, equality and participation play in successful outcomes. It’s been known since the early 1960s that the surest way to secure long term improvements in performance is to give workers the information and power necessary to participate in the design and improvement of their work process. This has been an essential factor in the extraordinary successes of Japanese manufacturing. As we will see, superior performance seems to be the outcome of systems that focus attention on promoting participation and guaranteeing fairness. For instance, a recent major study indicates that democratization of decision making in corporate governance dramatically enhances profitability.

The study, published in 2003 in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, compared the performance of corporate “dictatorships” to that of corporate “democracies.” According to its authors, Paul Gompers, Joy Ishii and Andrew Metrick,

Corporations are republics. The ultimate authority rests with the voters (shareholders). These voters elect representatives (directors) who delegate most decisions to bureaucrats (managers)… One extreme tilts toward democracy, reserves little power for management, and allows shareholders to quickly and easily replace directors. The other extreme tilts toward dictatorship, reserves extensive power for management, and places strong restrictions on shareholders’ ability to replace directors.

This very sophisticated study, which ranked 1,500 companies across 28 governance provisions, compared the performance of the 10% of firms with the most dictatorial governance against the performance of the 10% of firms with the most democratic governance. Through the 1990s, the returns from the stocks of the Democracy Portfolio outperformed the Dictatorship Portfolio by 8.5 percentage points per year. A difference of this amazing magnitude can mean the difference between extraordinary achievement and abject failure.

Another study compared the performance of companies that opened their accounting books and taught their employees how to understand them against companies that didn’t. Again, the more transparent companies outperformed those that closely held their accounting information.

Over and over, meticulous research tells us that fairness, equality and inclusiveness translate into superior performance. This doesn’t mean that cheaters can’t be successful. Political history and the whole structure of managerial capitalism deny such a Pollyanna conclusion. The average pay of corporate CEOs didn’t jump from 30 to 200 times that of their lowest paid employees in the last twenty years because the modern corporate system is fair. The dramatic and accelerating consolidation of the U.S. economy into the hands of one tenth of one percent of the population over the last generation reinforces the idea that the economic playing field has been badly compromised in the United States. Cheaters, defectors and exploiters can amass fortunes beyond the dreams of avarice—as Voltaire said, “Every great fortune is founded on a great crime.”—but they do so at society’s expense and at the cost of that even greater fortune that would have been available to be shared by all had cooperation been promoted and a level playing field enforced by society.

Part V: Getting Specific

In effect, the degree of cooperativeness in a society is a measure of its intelligence. Nurturing in our society the fairness, equality and inclusiveness that makes a culture vigorous comes down to how we make decisions, both interpersonally and institutionally. Since a culture that does a good job of making and implementing excellent decisions is effectively more intelligent than a culture that consistently makes poor ones, a great deal hangs on how we make our decisions. A society is not so different from a brain; people are the cells. If all the cells in a brain are working efficiently together, you get good decisions, quickly, and with surprisingly little expenditure of energy. If the cells aren’t cooperating efficiently, it takes more energy and more time to make comparable decisions. Fortunately science has amassed over 100 years of research on decision-making. We even know enough now to list the minimum requirements for making wise decisions. Wise decisions are practical and produce positive results with a minimum of unanticipated consequences. In effect, this research gives us the capability to improve the “intelligence” of society by improving the quality or our decision-making.

The large volume and consistent message of this research makes it definitive in its core conclusion. It is a conclusion that is violently unwelcome to some (especially sociopaths), contrary to experience for many, and, most unfortunately, generally disregarded by Americans. With appropriate rules and processes to organize them, groups consistently make better decisions than the smartest individuals in them and do so just as quickly and often faster.

Alan Blinder, both an economist and a past vice chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, and Princeton economist John Morgan did two of the many studies confirming this. They set out to learn how well groups, as compared with individuals, would deal with the types of incredibly complex challenges faced by the Federal Reserve in managing the timing of interest rate changes. In a scenario that mimicked the Fed’s task of responding to changing economic conditions at just the right moment, the participants had the job of spotting when a shift in monetary policy became appropriate. The participants’ performances, as individuals, were compared to the performance of the group as a whole. In the first of two experiments, the participants working as a group made faster and more accurate decisions than when working individually. In the second experiment, more demanding than the first, the group again made better decisions faster. The second study was especially significant, because the participants were using real data to adjust interest rates in order to sustain a stable economy. Subsequent studies by other researchers have confirmed the results of Blinder’s and Morgan’s research.

The implications of this and the rest of the research on group decision making are transformational, and not just for improving our ability to sustain a productive economy. Just the intuition that people in the aggregate are smarter than the smartest individuals was enough to inspire a small group of Englishmen to reconsider the relationship between people and their governments, and subsequently, in 1776, launch a revolution that created what is now putatively the most powerful country on earth. What a shame if their descendents, knowing to be true what the founders only suspected, continue turning away from that enlightened and enlivening wisdom.

In his book-length exploration of the research on group decision-making, The Wisdom of Crowds, James Surowiecki, pulls together information from several fields including economics, organizational dynamics, sociology, psychology, politics and even traffic control. He explores the characteristics of good group decision-making, contrasting them with the characteristics of collective decision-making gone wrong. What he discovers illuminates why it has become so difficult in our society to generate, and especially to implement, solutions that match the nature and scale of the problems they purport to address.

His review of the research illuminates a consistent set of core characteristics that characterize superior decision-making. These are inclusiveness, independence, diversity and synthesis. There is some complexity underlying these four simple words. Inclusiveness pertains to who participates. Independence refers to both freedom of expression and freedom from bias. Diversity addresses the range of backgrounds of the participants and the information brought to the table. Synthesis characterizes how the information gleaned in compliance with the first three requirements is actually processed.

Inclusiveness means that the people affected by a decision participate, either directly or indirectly, in making it. If relevant constituencies are inadequately represented, the likely effectiveness of intervention declines and the risk of blowback balloons. Yet, inclusiveness is increasingly unwelcome in our society. We have strayed very far from the United States of President Andrew Jackson, who complained that entirely too many Americans felt they had the right to walk into “their” White House, without an invitation, and sit with their muddy boots on the furniture. A mania for exclusivity is ingrained in the exploiter mindset promoted by sociopaths. As that mind set has come to dominate society, inclusiveness has come to seem naïve or even threatening. After twenty years of consulting, I am convinced that most people in positions of power in our country perceive themselves to be at odds with the people on whom their success depends. One of my colleagues reported a lunch conversation that he’d had several years ago with two executives from competing American car companies. He had joked that the competition between their companies was so ferocious that they probably shouldn’t even be in the same room at the same time, much less having a conversation over lunch. Both had laughed and one responded, “But we’re not in competition with each other, we’re in competition with our customers.”

In twenty years as a strategist consulting to senior executives, in only a handful of cases has this author managed to convince leadership to undertake planning as a communal process. In the cases where enlightened management has included its customers, vendors and other members of its strategic community directly in planning, the results have consistently been phenomenal by any measure of performance. But, even in the face of a flawless record of performance, the perceived threat attached to opening the decision-making process overwhelms the rationality of most leaders in our culture. In complete disregard of demonstrated success and massive research, no leadership I’ve worked with has been willing to formally institutionalize inclusiveness as part of their decision-making process.

The second requirement for wise decision-making is participant independence. Independence is possibly the most complex of the requirements. It concerns the freedom of participants to express their personal truth, the essential role of transparency, and also the reluctance of people, under stress, to risk standing out from their peers. The Japanese say that the nail that sticks up gets pounded down. W. Edwards Deming who pioneered statistical process quality control, in honor of whom the Japanese created the Deming Prize, addressed this issue by insisting that driving fear out of organizations is essential to long term success. He recognized that fear is a critical enemy of independence. Any number of factors can provoke fear, but the primary source is intimidation. If you’ve ever been faced with the duty of speaking truth to power, you know that sometimes the source of intimidation is as internal as it is external. People who are afraid for the loss of their livelihood, their reputation, in fear for their lives or just overwhelmed by the pressure of conventional wisdom are less likely to behave independently.

Independence is also increasingly unwelcome in our society. This is most apparent in our tolerance of lying. One well done bit of research showed that young people with the greatest ability to lie convincingly were judged by their peers to show the greatest potential for leadership. Clearly, the propaganda of the sociopathic elites has been frighteningly successful.

What greater threat is there to independence? A lie is disinformation—bad data with an agenda. Disinformation travels just as widely and easily as information. If allowed to, it crowds out good data—that’s what a lie is intended to do. When people take action based on conclusions derived from falsified or biased data, more often than not, the results are inappropriate. Behaving inappropriately is a defining characteristic of both ignorance and craziness. When we lie to people, we undermine their ability to be effective—we make their behavior less likely to be intelligent. If we surround ourselves with misinformed people, we damage the effectiveness of our own support system—our colleagues, friends neighbors or family—we risk damaging ourselves in the long run, whether or not anyone catches us in our lies. Misinformed people are not likely to make intelligent decisions. This is especially true for governing society, wherein the consequences of disinformation affect whole populations.

When reading history, we are astounded by the disinformation campaigns of the Third Reich, the militarists in Japan and those of the Soviet Union. We wonder how whole populations of people could have believed such transparently false propaganda. Writing “work makes you free” over the gate at Auschwitz didn’t disguise the smell from the crematoria. “From each according to his ability; to each according to his needs,” may have sounded great to the Russian people, but it doesn’t take great sophistication to spot the inherent flaw in such a premise. Abilities are finite and needs infinite, the equation doesn’t balance.

Nevertheless, in the United States one can daily listen to legions of experts and politicians discuss America’s problems in the Middle East without ever hearing anyone connect them with the dependence of America’s economy on cheap oil or with the petro-imperialism practiced by the West for the last 100 years to get at it. One of the great ironies of the current hostility between the United States and Iran is that in 1953, the United States orchestrated the overthrow of a secular Iranian democracy and installed a dictator whose sociopathic behavior toward his own people precipitated the revolution that gave power to the current intransigently theocratic dictatorship. No doubt, securing concessions for American oil companies by whatever means seemed like a good idea at the time.

We are warned that people who forget their history are forced to relive it. When people grow up in a society that casually disregards or obscures its history, politicization of information becomes habitual for them—perception is treated as though it were reality, with predictable consequences.

The ancient Egyptians made a big deal of telling the truth. Apparently, they prized it above every other virtue. One can’t help thinking that there might be a connection between that cultural characteristic and the extraordinary longevity of their civilization. Perhaps a civilization that promotes, or even tolerates, lying condemns itself to degeneration and demoralization. The experience of living in a house of lies resembles trying to find a way through a carnival house of mirrors; frustrating and scary! Prolonged, the experience is deadening. If it is their experience of life, eventually most people will give the search for a way out or not try in the first place. Perhaps, from the perspective of vampiric elites, that’s the point.

The assault on independent thought pervades modern life. Ad hominem argument is casually accepted in public and professional discourse; if the facts don’t support your position, attack your opponent’s character. There are no serious social consequences for such misbehavior, not even shunning. Casual humiliation of people, dissing or roasting them, is considered a laudable form of entertainment. The kinds of verbal assault that would have occasioned a duel to the death at the beginning of our national history have become too common to be noteworthy. People with the integrity to point out wrong-doing (whistle-blowers), have to be protected by law and, in any case, they almost invariably suffer for their conscientiousness. Our corporate controlled media gives fawning attention to the bad behavior of celebrities, but generally, at best, ignores courage and self-sacrifice in the service of society. It is common to hear pundits equate the effectiveness of political leaders with their ability as enforcers—to command party line votes in Congress—rather than by their ability to promote the public discussion essential to the emergence of meaningful solutions to critical national problems.

The value of independence has been debased through the corporate controlled media by substituting polling for investigative reporting. This substitution of popular bias for critical analysis undermines social intelligence.

Consider how the issue of global warming has been treated. It is almost impossible to find a knowledgeable, independent expert who does not consider the research on global warming conclusive. How corporate media, government and other institutions deal with conclusions they don’t like is indicative of what is happening throughout society.

If leadership doesn’t like a conclusion, but feels obliged to address it publicly, they present all positions on the issue as having equal merit. Panels of “experts” are convened to present their views, and if there are three scientists on the panel to represent overwhelmingly definitive research, there will also be three people (often not even experts in the field) to present contrary, disingenuous or ad hominem discursions. This gives the impression that scientifically settled issues are controversial. Then public polls are taken to see what percentages of the population agree or disagree with the various positions presented. These polls are treated as though they have some relevance—as if, so long as a majority of people didn’t believe in gravity, one needn’t have any fear of falling. When enough people indicate a preference for the approved conclusion, this conclusion is formally elevated to the level of policy, law or custom. [Of course the earth is the center of the solar system. It’s obvious to the rest of us that the sun swings around the earth, what’s wrong with you Galileo?] Instead of assembling accurate information and presenting it to people in a way that they can fully understand it, the public is presented with a mirror that only reflects a carefully manipulated popular prejudice—political talking points rather than facts.

Diversity is the third requirement for making wise decisions. It improves decisions both by insuring that critical information isn’t overlooked and by expanding the options available for action. Repeated studies demonstrate that a mix of local knowledge and expertise along with input from “outsiders” improves the creativity and quality of decisions. As much as is practicable, more diversity is better. With the right process, good information reinforces itself while simultaneously driving out bad information.

This presupposes that the participants are independent. In circumstances in which people are disposed to “group-think,” more information can actually lead to bad decisions. Stock market speculators exemplify this. Constantly spun by vested interests and gaming the psychology of other investors, their stock portfolios consistently under-perform the market as a whole because they speculate rather than actually invest. Stock market bubbles are a classic case where, because of a failure of independence, more information actually exacerbates already unrealistic expectations. A wonderful study done by economists at the Experimental Economics Laboratory at Caltech, illustrates how this happens.

Students were given shares to trade and money to buy additional shares. They were given a fixed number of opportunities to trade (15). This means that the true value of the shares could be easily ascertained for each round of trading. The initial value of a share was $3.60. At the end of each trading period the students were paid a dividend of 24 cents (360/15) for each share that they owned. With each round of trading the real value of a share fell by 24 cents. There was no uncertainty about the value of a share as the trading counted down. Yet, when trading began the price of shares immediately jumped to $3.50 and stayed there until very near the end. Even when the actual value of the shares was only $1.00 some people continued to trade them at around $3.50. Most of the participants were speculating on the behavior of the other players rather than investing in the actual value of the shares. And that is the essence of stock bubbles. Bubbles expand as the proportion of non-independent investors—people speculating against the behavior of other investors—overwhelms the proportion of people independently investing in actual value. The bubble inflates. Speculators are the enemy of market driven economies, but as they are such easy prey for the professional sharks who exploit them, the financial system promotes speculative behavior rather than restraining it. From a vampire’s perspective, why wait for suckers to be born when you can farm them?

One of the great successes of modern societies has been the extraordinary diversity of information and insight available to citizens and decision makers. In the Middle Ages, the average European was exposed to about the same amount of information in a lifetime as someone today garners from a single edition of the Sunday New York Times newspaper. Recent estimates suggest that as of the beginning of the twenty-first century, the sum of human knowledge doubled annually.

One of the unappreciated values of so much information coming from so many sources is that it becomes harder to use disinformation to manipulate people’s perception of reality. Contrary to one of the most malevolent sociopathic memes in play, perception is not reality. Those who devote their attention to manipulating perception to confound reality run a greater risk of being caught in the act. The collusion of the accounting profession with managerial capitalists to promote the market speculation that culminated in the cascade of business collapses after Enron is one example. The Bush administration’s efforts to doctor economic reports and other government data that included firing senior civil servants who refused to go along with their disinformation campaigns is another. Since it is almost impossible to control the impact of diversity without limiting inclusiveness and independence, these three aspects of decision making create a harmony whose disruption is acutely noticeable to anyone paying attention.

Synthesis is the last essential requirement for wise decision-making. It is also one of the least understood and most counter-intuitive for Americans. The idea that apparently conflicting information and points of view can be synthesized goes against the grain of a society that believes in the infallibility of competition. Trial by combat seems to have a primordial hold on human consciousness. When baldly stated it seems a ridiculous a way for determining truth or creating practical solutions to pressing problems. Yet, we see it taken for granted, even lionized, throughout popular culture. Polarization, whether of ideas, groups, societies, nations or ideologies, is the default response to differences. This is especially ironic in the scientific community. While scientists don’t put on boxing gloves to defend their interpretations, even these acolytes of objectivity regularly substitute political maneuvering for relevant data to win their cases and their funding.

Synthesis can be accomplished through any number of methods. Some are simple, such as the one used to find a lost nuclear submarine. Others are more complex, for example, the process used to create a strategic action plan for “homeland security” for the State of Maine.

When the U. S. nuclear submarine Scorpion disappeared in the Atlantic Ocean, the Navy had to extrapolate its location from its last known contact. They concluded that it was somewhere in a circle of ocean twenty miles in diameter and several thousand feet deep. A senior civilian Navy scientist and expert on underwater technology named John Craven was given the seemingly hopeless task of finding this needle, one football-field long, in a haystack covering 314 square miles. This is a ratio of roughly 8 million to 1. The odds of winning in most State lotteries are better than of find such a small object by means of a random search.

Spurred by the sheer impossibility of the task, Craven came up with a novel approach. He created what has since come to be known as a decision market. First he described a wide range of scenarios for what might have happened to the Scorpion. Then he assembled a team of specialists from very diverse backgrounds. Some of them were submarine specialist and marine salvage experts, but others like mathematicians knew little or nothing about submarines or the ocean. Instead of consulting with each other, the members of his team were instructed to independently study the alternative explanations and rate their plausibility. They did this in the form of wagers. The team members bet on a wide range of likely factors including the cause of the sinking, how fast the submarine sank, the descent path, etc.

Using Bayes’ theorem, a mathematical model from the eighteenth century that tells how to update or revise beliefs in light of new evidence, Craven built a picture of what most likely happened to the submarine. Using this he was able to estimate a probable location for the wreck. This conclusion was a true synthesis of many points of view. It was also a brilliant one—the Scorpion was found a little over 200 yards from where his decision market predicted.

While the problem was anything but simple, the method used was almost as familiar as setting the odds in a horse race. The most surprising thing about this method of synthesis is how rarely it is used and how controversial it can be made to seem when it is.

The very first known study of group decision-making was undertaken as a fancy to prove what the experimenter thought he knew with certainty—that groups are less smart than their smartest participants. Francis Galton, the British scientist who undertook it in 1906 learned that his assumption was wrong. We have been relearning it for 100 years, but, as a society, we remain captive to the elitist myth that the best and the brightest will inevitably know best.

Our politically polarizing, party-driven system of governance has made achieving synthesis in public affairs seem like a fanciful dream of the European Enlightenment. Even though a process of political synthesis served to create the United States, ever since American politics has degenerated toward more and more closeted approaches to policy making. In spite of this unfortunate trend, wise decision-making in the public sphere is still possible.

Soon after the new federal Department of Homeland Security was established in response to the terror attacks of 9/11, the Governor of Maine, Angus King, independently gave the nod to creating a homeland security strategy for his State. The job of doing this was given to Major General John Tinkham. General Tinkham delegated the task to a consulting firm that proposed to use a unique process that conformed to the requirements for wise decision-making as applied to politically sensitive initiatives.

To meet the requirement for inclusiveness, the consultants worked with the General to recruit credible representatives for every constituency likely to be touched by homeland security. The group that was ultimately convened ranged from small town fire chiefs, local and state police, business owners, public health bureaucrats and health workers, the State’s Attorney General, a deputy secretary of the federal Department of Homeland Security, newspaper editors, the Coast Guard, MEMA, to State legislators. In all, 81 people convened to represent roughly 100 constituencies.

Over four days, using software developed by the consultants, the participants created a vision, strategic objectives, strategic priorities, identified strategic and tactical constraints to achieving the vision and set out an agenda for action complete with defined measures of success. Governor King immediately adopted the plan on his return from vacation and it was posted on the State’s website. The Maine Emergency Management Agency immediately began implementing it. Maine’s plan antedated by almost a year a similar one produced by the Department of Homeland Security for the nation as a whole.

The Governor’s plan came together quickly—concept to start of implementation took about four months. The actual planning took four days. The proposed approach was so transparent that it successfully surmounted partisan attacks that included the threat of a legislative boycott. It was so powerful that it led to a revelation that contradicted a critical pre-conception shared by most of the participants. Almost everyone attending thought that the primary bottleneck to achieving security was a lack of funding for “first responders.” Through the synthesis of their different perspectives, they discovered that the real bottleneck was a lack of knowledge about the nature of potential threats. Finally, the plan was so compelling that even when the money promised by the federal government to fund it’s execution was delayed for over a year, a new governor from a different political orientation took office, and FEMA funding in the State was reduced, it was still aggressively implemented.

This effort was so successful because the process used by the consultants adequately fulfilled the requirements for wise decision-making: inclusiveness, independence of participants, diversity and synthesis. At the end of the four day process, every participant backed the conclusion of the whole. There was no minority opinion to undermine the effort. The press shifted from being aggressively hostile to the effort to highly laudatory. When the plan was done, it really was complete in the eyes of all the participants and their constituencies. There were no political barriers left to implementing it.

This is the power of synthesis. It transforms differences, even entrenched positions, into constructive, creative consensus. Methods of synthesis exist for almost any kind of challenge from supremely complex technical issues to politically controversial social issues. When combined with the other elements of wise decision-making, it is unparalleled as a method for solving problems.

Wise decision-making is antithetical to the vampire mindset and agenda. It confounds all of the rationales for exploitative and elitist behaviors carefully nurtured over the course of human history. For sociopaths and people trained to behave sociopathically, the premises underlying wise-decision processes inspire dread, if not outright hostility.

For them, transparency is something to be avoided at all costs. They fear that effective, efficient democracy would justify an egalitarianism that would inevitably threaten their expanding and carefully protected prerogatives. They know intuitively what research has confirmed, that cooperation drives out competition. The corollary proposition, which they fear, is that cooperators, once mobilized, will drive out competitors. Since competition is all they know and domination through winning is their primary joy, they will do whatever is necessary to forestall that happening.

Part VI: Conclusion

A democratic society reinforced by a participatory, pluralistic culture has little to fear from sociopaths. For one thing, compared with the general population, they are relatively rare. Proportionately few have the wherewithal to gain the kind of influence that shapes societies. The cooperativeness, appreciation for diversity, and transparency on which a successful democracy depends all limit the damage that the conscienceless are likely to do. In such a milieu, sociopathic behavior is self-defeating. It is self-extinguishing, just as game theory predicts.

Unfortunately, democratic societies with cultures tolerant of elitism and authoritarianism are particularly vulnerable to subversion. Since making hierarchies—“pecking orders”—is genetically ingrained in most species including Homo Sapiens, every democracy is at some risk of being undermined by exploiters eager to leverage a relatively benign tendency into full-blown despotism. Exclusivity, cronyism, dynasticism, factionalism, tribalism and imperialism are all conducive to the promotion of sociopathic behaviors and provide cover for elite sociopaths. Vulnerable democracies have to take programmatic actions to protect themselves.

The P-Scan, developed by Dr. Robert Hare of the University of British Columbia, is a test that is widely used by police departments to screen new recruits for psychopathology. Hare’s ideas have inspired the testing of firefighters, teachers, and operators of nuclear power plants. Such testing might need to be extended to leadership positions in general. If the image of a charismatic sociopath in a police uniform is disturbing, how much more dangerous is that same sociopath occupying a high office in business or government. While we can point to any number of recent examples of sociopathic personalities at the tops of corporations causing devastation for scores of thousands of people, so far the United States hasn’t put such a person in its presidency. But other countries have. To assume that it couldn’t happen here is hubris.

Since elite sociopaths do the most critical damage to a society through their influence on its culture, a democratic society must take aggressive responsibility for its cultural values. This is especially difficult because so much of culture is tacit. It resides in a dimension outside of consciousness—a realm of unexamined assumptions. Asking people to evaluate their values is like asking them to analyze the air they breathe. Intangibles, even one as common as air, are difficult to objectify scientifically. How much harder is it for us to bring into consciousness and characterize freedom, fairness, compassion, responsibility, commitment, integrity and the many other values essential to sustaining a vibrant, self-renewing society?

In their book The Seven Cultures of Capitalism published in 1993, Charles Hampden-Turner and Alfons Trompenaars compared the value systems of the business communities of what were at the time the major capitalist countries; United States, Britain, Japan, Germany, Sweden, France, and Netherlands. Their research revealed that values, habits and cultural styles usually associated with social development turn out to be critical indicators of economic success.

Of the seven, Sweden, Britain and the United States were almost uniquely similar in the values of their business communities. In only one of the values cited by the authors did the Swedes differ from those shared by the Americans and British.

All three cultures believe in universalism: that there is a standardizable solution to any requirement. All are analytical: anything can be understood by reducing it to its individual elements. They are committed to individualism: that championing the interests of individuals first best serves the community. Their cultures believe that status should be determined through achievement: that reward is based on accomplishment. They champion equality: that all people should have equal treatment and consideration. Finally all three treat time sequentially: that raw speed of performance is more important than synchronization of effort. In only one critical value do the Swedes differ from the other two.

While the Americans and British are inner directed (one should rely on one’s own perception and judgments), the Swedes, along with the Japanese, Dutch and French are outer directed (it is essential to integrate the perceptions and judgments of others with one’s own thinking). This one difference turns out to be very important. By almost every measure of quality of life, civilized behavior and economic success, Sweden ranks higher, often significantly higher than either the United States or Britain.

According to Hampden-Turner and Trompenaars, the Swedes are the most successful of any culture in integrating individual freedom with social commitment.

More than any other culture examined in this book, Swedes begin with the individual, his or her integrity, uniqueness, freedom, needs, and values, yet insist that the fulfillment and destiny of the individual lies in developing and sustaining others by the gift of his or her own work and energy.

Hampden-Turner and Trompenaars convey how this plays out in day-to-day relations by recounting a Swedish fairy tale.

Ronia loved the son of a family with which her own family had a bitter feud. The other family lived geographically and symbolically on the far side of a deep gorge, separating the two houses. To miss one’s footing in crossing this gorge was certain death. Ronia’s true love visited her by stealth in her house but was discovered by her father, who seized the young man and imprisoned him, regarding his prisoner as a valuable hostage in the continuing feud. To prove her love, Ronia leapt to the ‘enemy’s’ side of the gorge, risking her life to save her relationship to her beloved and to equalize the bargaining power of the two adversaries.

Now that each adversary held the other’s child, the breach between them could be negotiated and the lovers united in marriage. This very Scandinavian version of Romeo and Juliet replaces tragedy with a sensible, negotiated solution initiated by the young upon their elders. It is a cultural parable of risk taking to achieve equality and fulfillment of desire.

Ronia lifts the two families from a relationship grounded in exploitation to the mutually advantageous “I/Thou” relationship necessary for the negotiation that makes productive cooperation possible. Given what we know from other areas of research, Hampden-Turner and Trompenaars conclusions from their cultural research will not be surprising.

We have seen that the ethos of competitive individualism, persons displaying themselves with the purpose of beating other individuals, is negatively correlated with economic development. We found no exceptions to this trend.... Moreover, persons directed from within, by resolute moral convictions, are ill adapted to kaleidoscopic world changes. The ‘conviction leader,’ of whatever gifts, cannot for long sustain an organization or country by feats of ‘brilliant’ manipulation.

Effectively, a nation is a group of people constantly making decisions and taking action. We know what is required to make wise decisions. We know what values are most productive. We already have conceptual and technical tools to support cooperative behavior.

Now we have to decide whether or not we want to live in a smart culture or a dumb culture. If we decide that the long term advantages of a smart culture outweigh the burden of responsibilities inherent in living in one, we need to start a movement capable of restoring equity, civility and inclusiveness in our society. Certainly our children will think well of us if we opt for smartness whether or not we see the benefits of it in our own lifetime. It has taken generations to distort and fracture American culture, but it doesn’t need to take generations to smarten it up. Cooperation is, if anything, more natural to human beings than competition. We just need to take ourselves away from bad influences.

The first step toward re-invigorating our culture is to require of ourselves, and those around us, that we be open in our dealings and play fair with each other—no more manipulative deception, no more exploitation—all for one and one for all. Doing the right thing just because it is the right thing will always be a risk, but great rewards demand great risks.

A society can tolerate the depredations of the occasional vampire, but a society of vampires eats itself alive.