Honestly, I'm working to reduce 12 pages to 2 on this important subject! In the past 2 posts I've reflected on how humans depend on context for sense-making and motivation, how we can be that "context" for each other, and why that leads naturally to religious or professional groups to help us "be all we can be".
Our friends can remember for us that we should get up and jog with them, or that we asked them to help us not drive when we're drunk. In an abstract sense, we can use our friends to sort of shift our perception over time, so that "the morning after" is more vivid and powerful "the night before. "Enforcement" is not required for social norms - the simple fact that we share a perception of what we "should" and what we "should not do" and what we "promised" or "resolved" to do is usually enough to get us past our "weak spots" and "bad days".
And, people are smart enough to realize, after they grow up, that they need this outside assist to not join the crowd of "smart people who do dumb things." The first step in humility is realizing that neither wealth nor brains or education will make "us" so good, in isolation, that we wouldn't do even better with a "little help from our friends."
For reasons that are not entirely clear to me, people in the US seem to think that they are some sort of super-genetic creatures who are "above" the need for friends. There seems to be a norm that "leaning on others" is a bad thing, some sort of "mooching" or parasitic behavior or a sign of "weakness" that makes us unacceptable not only as leaders, but even as colleagues or friends. This conceit is really sad, and tremendously damaging to the society.
The latest example of this is the 2.5 million families that recently signed up for just terrible mortgages on new homes, and are waking up to the fact that they can't make the payments that they signed up for, past the initial low rate period.
Our jaws should drop to the floor in surprise at this - not because it's surprising that 2.5 million people are weak or uneducated or in trouble, but because 2.5 million people didn't ask for help when making that big a decision.
Now, of course, oh yes, after it's too late, suddenly the full impact of how bad a decision this sinks in. All the damage this has caused everyone, to our economy, our banking system, our corporate ability to raise money, our jobs, the probable recession and cuts in social services and fire and police protection and school teachers -- this was all totally unnecessary. There were plenty of other people who understood these facts, and no shortage of telephones or on-line sources or neighborhood wise people.
It is not the individual weakness and lack of experience that is startling - it is the fact that, as a society, we've lost the collective strength that would prevent that predictable weakness from turning into an actual problem. We aren't asking each other for help, and aren't giving it enough.
For reasons that again I cannot grasp, our entire education system seems to be based on the assumption that group strength is some kind of bad thing, and that we need to be "strong enough to not need help" so that we can "do our own work." This is an absurd goal. No person will ever be that "good". No CEO will ever be that smart. No King or President will ever be so wise they don't need advisors. Even Nobel Prize winners have weak spots and blind spots and bad days.
No one can possibly know everything or be strong all the time. Everyone has to sleep. Everyone has to inhale sometime. Everyone has short-term crises that use up all their internal coping energy and they need to fall back on their social bank account to bridge over until they can recover.
So why do we have a whole country that pretends we are "better than that?"
This concept or "mental model" makes us sitting ducks, easy prey for every con man, advertiser, or politico that comes along, as they surely will, and attempts to take advantage of us. It paralyzes us, just at the moment we should be reaching out for help.
It leaves males driving around for hours when it would take a minute to stop and "ask for directions." Some of those "drivers" are our department managers, CEO's, and governmental leaders, who are also trained that asking for directions is "bad."
While our consumer-based culture may not have created that tendency to be divided and conquered, it certainly doesn't hesitate to move in for the kill and take advantage of a whole population conditioned to be proud of the fact that they are behaving stupidly.
This makes the work of those of us in the quality and high-reliability field much harder. It becomes a major challenge, as all the books and academic papers describe, to simply get people to help each other and to ask for help. The guru of quality, W. Edwards Deming, was just furious with the whole Western civilization's concept of "school" and "education" and annoyed many people by saying so loudly.
As you may know, no one wanted to hear Deming in the US, so he went to Japan, which did want to hear him, and which built a whole culture of quality based on his ideas, which is what we're facing now in companies like Toyota, built around the core concept of employees helping each other out instead of competing with each other to be "perfect" individuals.
Our top schools' educational programs are build around books like "Leading with Questions" by Marquart, which charge $10,000 apiece to teach people that it's OK for an executive to not know how to do everything, and to ask everyone else how it should be done.
It's hard to count the number of other problems we see around us in society that are the result of this single error in our model of how life should work. On every side, we see bad decisions made worse by cover-ups or refusal to accept the fact that the bad idea isn't actually working.
It doesn't have to be this way. Nothing in human nature prevents us from making friends and relying on them to make it through the day and make it through our lives.
But recently, the full power of the media seems devoted to teaching the opposite lesson - that other people are enemies, that we need to be strong and being strong means we don't ever ask directions. I can understand why individual marketing departments think this is a great idea. What I can't understand is why we put up with it, and why we drink this Kool-Aid, and why our government doesn't realize the damage this is doing to our personal, corporate, and national ability to thrive and prosper.
In the short run, I suppose, it makes us "easy to govern", but in the long run it makes the society we build become "ungovernable" because nothing works any more. Even things that used to work don't work. Our aviation system becomes a nightmare. Our urban infrastructure of pipes and wires and roads is crumbling. Now, with the mortgage mess, our banks and staggering around and firing their CEO's, and housing is collapsing and jobs are going away.
That's not good. And it is 100% predictable, because this need for a larger group of friends to get us over the weak spots and temptation to take the short-cut happens on every level, not just to humans, but also to corporations and states and nations.
It's that role that religion has been trying to manage for the last 5000 years -- being a larger framework to hold the lessons that take a while to learn, and the lessons that require overcoming temptation to cheat or take the short cut, or to drive while drunk, or to head off to bed with that person that we will truly regret in the morning.
We are all weak, but that is no reason we cannot all be strong for each other. It's a timing thing. We are not all weak on the same day, or at the same moment, or in the same way so that the whole of us can be a buffer and get us each over whatever personal pot-hole we're falling into now, until a strong arm grabs us and steadies us and keeps us safe.
This is a role we absolutely must do for each other. We will never be able to get past this or grow beyond it. No amount of technology will make it go away. Every crowd of computers or robots or humans or companies or cells or Martians will face the same challenge. This is a universal truth.
And, we can "take it to the bank." Or, more likely, our bank account will certainly take a hit if we ignore this basic fact of life. If enough of us ignore it, the bank itself will fail. If even more of us ignore it, the entire banking system will fail. If even more of us ignore it, the whole country will fail.
Hello? This isn't rocket science. As the Beatle's song "I get by with a little help from my friends" shows, this is actually common sense and our shared experience.
But it is growing weak from official neglect. Which is to say, in a democracy, it's our own fault and we're doing this to ourselves.
We can continue to be proud and arrogant and think we don't need each other, but we'd be wrong. The Psalms of David in the Old Testament of the Christian Bible say "Pride goes before a fall." It was true 3000 years ago. It's still true.
It's a building block, a stable foundation we can plan on still being true tomorrow and 3000 years form now.
So, we tried something - living without that -- and it turns out not to work very well. In fact, it seems to be crashing around our heads right now.
If you trace back almost everything that's going wrong around you, sooner or later you will come across a point where this refusal to cooperate allowed the fatal flaw got into the building design, or allowed someone, somewhere to drive drunk, or sign up for a "super incredible unbelievably good mortgage deal" or some other nonsense.
We need to stop blaming individuals for being human, and look in the mirror, and stop congratulating ourselves for being super-human. We're not super-human, and that's never going to change, but it's also OK, because we can cope with it if we just help each other out.
To get there, we need a culture that supports that as a value and a social norm. We need to hear it every day on TV and in the movies and in our popular music.
The answer is right here, right in front of us. We don't need a $500 billion study commission to figure out that this is where a lot of stuff is going wrong.
I'm hearing from religions that the way we deal with each other is something that needs work. I'm hearing it increasingly from industry studies into corporate productivity and safety. I'm seeing it in simulations. But I'm not seeing it on television or hearing any of our politicians call this by name.
We don't hear that much from academic researchers, but, there's a problem -- these are people who are "experts" and who have built a whole universe where intellectual Rambo-ism is the norm -- at the opposite end of the spectrum from Deming. This crowd wants to pour new trillions of dollars into "education" where we will produce students better at "math and science" in order for our companies and country to be strong.
Won't work.
Can't work, unless we fix this other problem, this social problem first. Every gain we make in commercial innovation will be flushed away by larger scale drunk driving.
First, fix what's obviously and clearly wrong socially. Then, with a social system that actually works, address the other problems that are still there.
This doesn't require socialism or communism or overturning the profit motive or some total disruption of free markets or any change in the pecking order. It only requires that we work together more within that structure, and do the obvious things to help that happen, and see where that gets us.
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