"The men you are in these times derideI totally agree with the sentiment. Ever since mankind discovered "simple machines" we've been trying to remove the spirit and spiritual components from society, trying to make a society that functions like a machine.
What has been done of good, you find explanations
To satisfy the rational and enlightened mind."
It's not working. It hasn't been working. It will never work.
Management "Theory Y", the nature of "positive deviance", the "Toyota Way" all require a strong and growing central spirit of the enterprise to overcome inertia and local interests. We tried Frederick Taylor's dream world of making employees interchangable cogs, and the model breaks down in several ways. De-spirited employees are simply not individually very productive, regardless how much you whip or motivate them with fear or greed, and collectively they are not very productive either. It proves to be impossible to get high-reliability performance from individuals who lack enough group spirit to overcome fragmentation of vision and work together selflessly as one.
When there was no global competition with Taylor-model industrial structures, they seemed amazingly good at making cloth and mass-produced cars. Lately, as Toyota continues to pass us by and plant after plant closes, the model doesn't seem so great by comparison.
So, I want to very briefly look at a somewhat larger world-view, the kind T.S. Eliot envisioned. Some atheistic scientists will cringe, and I can only reply "Yes, but what have you done for us lately? Where is the "better world" and "better life" you promised we'd get if only we'd listen to you?" The American "rugged individual" model has been tried and found lacking.
Anyway, here are two concepts that stir thinking in a different direction.
The first is to look at LIFE, not in terms of actors and actions and events, but in terms of "residual waves." After "you" have "done something" and left the building, what remains?
More than nothing. All of our actions have repercussions, some more than others.
Sometimes those downstream waves seem to be random noise, but sometimes they are a type of American football "forward pass", and the analogy is worth considering. Most of what we wake up to every day is a "man-made environment" - it is the collective forward pass we get today from what everyone who came before us ever did.
Some of that "doing" was random activity that "satisfies the rational mind", but some of it had a nuanced quality of "intent" behind it. Some of what was passed forward to our vicinity was very consciously bundled and passed forward with conscious intent.
Those things have a different quality than things that just "happen" to still be here today that were here yesterday. We hurt ourselves when we fail to distinguish that difference.
Some things are here because we went to a lot of trouble to bring them to pass here -- we have forward passes from ourselves. Some things are here because our parents went to a lot of trouble, pain, and sacrifice to make them be here for us. Some things are here because other people, maybe soldiers in a different war long ago, fought and died so that we'd have them here when we woke up today.
Those things are not the same as things that "just happen to be here." To my knowledge, "science" makes no distinction, and the measuring devices of science find no hidden fluid inside them that makes them different, but I think that's a failing of science as we know it today. Science also can find nothing unusual about a small place in upstate New York where migrating birds cannot orient, and can only stumble through blindly before they continue their 1000 mile straight-shot trips. We don't deny the spot exists because science isn't there yet.
And, then, changing perspective, there are the things we do that are intentionally designed to be a forward pass - to ourselves, to our family, to our descendants, to our society and planet and all humans from here on out. These are not the same, in some important way, than "things we do" for some other reason.
A very large fraction of the power of "The Toyota Way" comes from consciously managing and shaping these forward passes, so that each day we make changes so that tomorrow when we try to do the same thing, it will actually be easier and work better with less effort and more joy.
But I'm asserting here that "things" are, in some way "imprinted" or come bundled with effects, over time, that depend very heavily on the "intent" we did them with.
Things done just to get them done, with no thought of the past or future, behave differently over time than things done in full awareness of the past and future.I don't know exactly how that works, but, empirically, it seems to be true. The walls built by those "building walls" and by those "building cathedrals" perform differently over time.
And, it turns out, "building a cathedral" is in many senses easier for people than "building a wall" for no obvious reason. Again, I doubt that the effect could be measured or even registers in the "work = force times distance" metrics of classical physics. It's not "that kind of work."
This brings me to the second property of doing things that science lags religion in observing, and that is the source of energy you draw on in order to accomplish your work.
To science, all energy is alike. And, locally, it may seem to make no difference whether you pay for your purchase with your corporate American Express card or your own debit card, but they are sort of different when the bill arrives (or doesn't.)
You have an extremely limited amount of "internal" energy, and, by the laws of thermodynamics, really, the best "you" can do is to go downhill at a faster or slower rate. You can't even break even, says science.
But then we have muscles - which get stronger only if we "use them up." That's a funny sort of thing, isn't it?
The truth is that any agent in the world can only spend energy that it is receiving or has already received from outside itself. We don't "generate energy" inside ourselves magically.
Peter Drucker, the famous management writer, noted that corporations are simply a way of spending outside resources to accomplish outside tasks. (The part in the middle that we call the corporation and usually focus on "washes out" of the equation.)
The whole idea of "carrying out an intention" is already a concept science can't measure and machines don't even have. The idea of being influenced now, here, by both the past and the future as we picture it in our heads, in a very subtle but powerful way, is also observable but makes no sense to flat-world science. It is "out of the plane" that science works in, at least so far. Someday, science will catch up. And only in quantum mechanics are particles or waves influenced by what might happen in the future, and that's hard to understand, so phyicists don't imagine similar effects could happen on a social scale.
But, viewed over time, particularly with repeated actions, we have to plug into some source of power or our drill will just stop. Some larger part of the world has to be engaged, perhaps remotely, in order for us to operate at all.
We lose sight of it, as Toyota tells us, because we "batch" things. We invent "money" so we don't experience the full trade directly. We have "batteries" so we don't perceive the source of the power as being remote, and forget there is a step where we have to plug in the battery pack and "recharge it while we sleep." Like muscles and Santa Claus, a lot goes on while we sleep that we don't perceive directly.
In reality, over a longer period of time and a longer view, the source of the power matters. Some sources are better than others. They are not all the same, even if "science" can't see the difference yet.
We can operate with spiritual power and love in our hearts, and sometimes run almost forever without becoming fatigued. We can operate on internal batteries, and simply run down rapidly and cut down what we do. We can operate out of anger or bitterness or rage, and have bursts of destructive impact. Our final state is different, depending on what we use for motive power.
And, the external world's final state is different, depending on what we used for motive power.
All the external power supplies, like our own muscles, need to be used and "pulled on" (in Toyota's language") or they themselves will degenerate and decay over time. We are doing a favor of others when we draw on their power and assistance and guidance in this way, even though the "science" computes that it is a net loss to the person we ask for help. In reality, people will leave a job rapidly if their own skills and knowledge and gifts are not tapped and called upon. Like our muscles, we want to be "used" and we need to be "used" - so long as it is not the same as "used up and discarded."
In English we lack a nuanced word for "used and thereby strengthened." It is a huge gap in our understanding, and makes it hard to think about asking people for help when such a step would benefit both parties.
Regardless, be careful which power supply you select to draw from, because you are voting with your actions for the world to increase that power supply at the expense of others. Think this through and be sure that's where you want to end up.
These are all things that science could understand and model, and will some day, but it is not there yet. These involve heavy interactions and coupled events, and the math is harder there than few interactions and isolated events, so most science deals with those easier cases, and calls itself "hard science" proudly because it is so powerful -- in that area.
The original problem we sought answers for somehow got lost in the social activity of science, and we end up paying the bill but still don't see a better life ahead. In fact, a lot of the problems we see around us are clearly the downstream residuals of use of blind science and the "machine" model of humans. If we didn't have technology, we wouldn't have global warming.
I'm not saying we should abandon science, but that we need to help science "grow up" and tackle the harder social problems it has been avoiding facing up until now.
It's somewhat ironic that there is a huge push in scientific communities today to deal with the fact that policy makers and governments and the people "don't listen to science". Hmmm. Maybe, communication is a two-way street. Maybe Science would have more impact if it spent just a little more time listening to people.
It's sort of like the man who comes home to a complaining wife, and says "I brought you presents, what more do you want?" and she says "I want a better life, not presents." Science happily brought us cars, for instance. Cars are nice. I have one. But a car, overall, isn't a better life, just a different one. It's the difference between building a wall and building a cathedral. Science needs to start considering building a cathedral, not a billion gifts and fixes.
Repeating the thought I started with:
"The men you are in these times derideThere is more to life than the rational and enlightened mind. Have a nice day!
What has been done of good, you find explanations
To satisfy the rational and enlightened mind."
Wade
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