The benefits of depression - on a social scale

Individual depression may have a benefit to the herd. If so, it may be hard-wired into our genes nd our social structures that reflect our genes as a preserved trait, and that changes how to treat it.

All organisms and organizations need immune systems to detect invaders or parts of themselves that have gone astray, so they can be marked for removal and eliminated.

In the body, one troublesome situation is that some cells or pathogens may get off into a corner, or inside a bone, or up against a steel plate, where they are hard to be evaluated and attacked, so they multiply. Another may be that they no longer recognize the authority of the body, and go off on their own doing something else. But, evolution has come up with one clever solution to this problem - namely, apoptosis or "cell suicide."

If a cell is removed from active, productive, working connection with the body, it is programmed to kill itself. It doesn't need to be found by the body's police force - it finds itself. No castle or moat or steel wall or bone can protect it, because the destruct system is already built in.

It may be than that evolution has similarly built in an "auto-braking" system into human physiology, so that, when a human becomes disconnected from productive interaction with the social body, the human slows to a stop and then shuts himself down.

This results in resources flowing primarily to social members still able to act energetically and confidently. Over time, those who care about interactions with the social body end up dominating the scene. (sources of "altruism"?).

But, what's that model say about treatment of depression?

First, it says that depression is a symptom, not a cause - and so treating depression with drugs to "cure it", while immediately helpful personally, from the social body's perspective is a bad idea -- in that it means that socially discordant individuals will continue to act badly and absorb energy and resources, and, if left unchecked in large scale, eventually the social body will die from a loss of cohesion and trying to carry the burden of all this non-productive tissue.

Second, it would mean that "depression" is not, in fact, a pathology - it is a very healthy normal response of a subsystem of the social body to a disconnection event. From a social point of view, it's good. In fact, the whole terrorist "problem" and the corruption "problem" could be viewed as precisely a breakdown in such a system: people who have turned against the social body should, many people would assert, self-destruct so we don't have to go to the very hard work of trying to destroy them ourselves. That would be very efficient if they'd just get really really depressed, then suicidal. It would be way more efficient than trying to locate them in caves somewhere on earth.

But, it brings to focus a different problem. If we use that model, then why is it that we now are looking at 20 or 30% of the US population that is depressed? And, have all these people broken the connection with the social body, or did the social body break the connection with them, or both in some sort of vicious circle? It may be that the cost of health care is rising because the body of the public is, in fact, becoming unwell. And, again, this may be a symptom not a cause, and masking it with drugs would be "quackery" - treating symptoms while the disease grows worse.

Well, the work of Robert Putnam ("Bowling Alone") and the Duke study (mentioned in myprior post on depression) would seem to indicate that connections are, in fact, deteriorating and rather rapidly. That begs the question of why this is happening, or how.

One possible hypothesis would be that the culture of materialism and self-centeredness, sustained and amplified by television, is causing people one by one to abandon their concern for society and become increasingly self-oriented, which is triggering the hard-wired fatigue and depression responses. The trend towards "Me first" or "Only me, forget you, Jack" is evident and widely discussed in the media.

Another possible hypothesis is that, collectively, whole groups of people, such as the rich or middle class, have turned their backs on and abandoned the poor, the 45 million without health coverage, the jobless, etc. This could cut both ways, both by making the ones cut-off from social life become increasingly depressed or anxious, and by making those who are doing the cutting-off also depressed, because they are losing the other end of the social connection.

In other words, class-ism and racism ultimately do as much harm to the holder of the destructive bigotry as to the group on the receiving end -- it just takes longer. That would predict that even some of the very rich - say Britney Spears or Paris Hilton, would end up extraordinarily unhappy. That's not proof, but it illustrates the point. Britney lost custody of her children to get what? Another drink?

There is a long literature on the harmful effects on the rich and powerful of exploiting, or neglecting the poor and the [apparently] powerless. By this herd model, the powerless actually have their own protection built into the DNA of the powerful, where it can and will be triggered as the powerful cut ties to the powerless.

This is certainly a core lesson of many religions of the world. "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you." The model seems to say that no "enforcement by an angry God" is necessary in fact - that the downstream result of the action of discrimination and superiority culture, both individually and overall, follows automatically from the action, and returns the favor, with interest.

So, if we boost the world, it will echo with amplification, and we will be boosted, and that becomes a self-climbing loop or spiral. If we cut off the links to the world, the world cuts off its links to us, which, surprisingly, we needed to continue to exist. If we actively exploit the outside world (think sub-prime mortgages) it will come back tremendously amplified and damage those who thought they could "get away with it."

This would imply that the same feedback mechanism and pattern might be true for cells, for individuals, for companies, and for entire nations or cultures.

For a company-sized organism, though, I've discussed the need for the "horizontal loop", the living feedback that Toyota calls "pull" that connects the company to the customers. Breaking this loop, as Comcast is described to be doing by many customers in today's Washington Post, may appear in the short run to be "working" and making more money than caring what customers think, but this model says that the resentment and social response is just building up steam and ultimately will come back with amplification.

It's a fairly simple model, but it seems to explain a lot of what we see going on around us. These "scale-invariant" patterns seem important to investigate to see if they hold up under more rigorous investigation. If so, we have some public policy and public health decisions we may want to rethink.

Religion and commerce (the Toyota Way) suggest the model, and system dynamics simulations show that some feedback with delay and amplification like this may be very hard to detect coming until it is too late. As with the Georges Bank model we ran in class, as the sustainable limit is passed and use turns into abuse, the fishing just seems to get better and better and the catch keeps rising as the fishermen build more boats until one day it is exhausted and it's simply over. We've depleted it entirely. The rising exponential plummets to zero.

There are almost no blatant clues this is happening. You have to understand what is going on to "see" it and realize it.

But it's up to Science now to take that suggested model and design careful experiments to test whether this is just an interesting analogy or the handle to some basic principle like gravity that we need to pay attention to. If the NIH or Business Roundtable won't fund it, maybe the John Templeton foundation will. Maybe a business "depression" bears more than a passing resemblance to a larger version of an individual "depresison."

Actually, MIT's John Sterman in his 1000 page textbook "Business Dynamics" lays out exactly how trying to push a company to grow too fast results in an apparent speed-up of profits, followed by a drop or crash, depending on exactly how it went. That implies that the villains of the corporate growth story are the stockholders themselves, from venture capitalists who demand 37% growth per year, to e-traders who chase the smallest fraction of a percent of a rate, punishing any CEO who pauses for breath or needed consolidation.

It also is a lesson for China, one that it is increasingly realizing, that growing too fast can be as much of a problem as not growing fast enough. Living things have natural growth rates, and we don't gain by trying to push them to do unnatural acts.

There's nothing wrong with wealth and prosperity, but vastly unequal and unjust accumulation of wealth by taking it instead of earning it does seem to lead to a "correction" that undoes all of the apparent progress and then some. Short-term greed is a very expensive pleasure, for it quickly becomes the long-run, and the bills come due. Without a deep keel, a culture and a social ethic that can hold off that temptation to maximize short-term gains, we can easily be led astray.

It's time to fund that research and let the data speak for itself. A reasonable search for counter-examples and contrary evidence is required. All models are wrong but some models are useful - so maybe this has merit regardless.

There is a way out of this mess

Executive summary - there is a way out of this mess we've gotten ourselves into. It involves using renewable spiritual power instead of oil or technlogy to power our commerce. There is substantial hard-nosed evidence that this works, economically. It should be investigated further, cause, frankly, we're dying out here.

Reflecting on "lean" process, yesterday I focused on some aspects of "pull" and how envisioning a future that benefited and inspired other people, or pulling on brotherly love in the immediate present, could lift the spirits and support whatever other secular task was being done at the time -- including producing goods and services that generated profit for a corporation or nation.

I want to extend those ideas into the question of global social and economic development, and see what in there could possibly offer relief to the economic burdens so many people are now suffering, even in rich countries such as the USA.

Along those lines, I am very explicitly stating a normative belief that corporate leaders should be looking into ways in which intangible "spiritual" changes in their workplace could substantially improve their "bottom line" financially. This is consistent with McGreggor's "Theory Y" and the idea that human beings actually like to use their muscles, both physical and mental, to accomplish useful and helpful work and do not need to be whipped or terrorized into doing so if they can simply be given the means to see how their work benefits others that they care about.

This post is a continuation of the general theme I've been following, which is my understanding of a model that is consistent with science, business, and the Baha'i approach to globalization, development, peace, unity, and "spiritual solutions to economic problems."

I also found a nice thread this morning that's relevant,

Perspective: Spirituality in Development

[Editor's note: The following is adapted from a paper, entitled "Valuing Spirituality in Development: Initial Considerations Regarding the Creation of Spiritually Based Indicators for Development," presented by the Bahá'í Faith at the World Faiths and Development Dialogue on 18-19 February 1998 in London.

Development, in the Bahá'í view, is an organic process in which "the spiritual is expressed and carried out in the material." Meaningful development requires balancing the seemingly antithetical processes of individual progress and social advancement, of globalization and decentralization, and of promoting universal standards and fostering cultural diversity. In our increasingly interdependent world, development efforts must be animated by universal values and guided by a vision of world community.

Local and national communities that prosper in such a future will do so because they acknowledge the spiritual dimension of human nature and make the moral, emotional, physical and intellectual development of the individual a central priority.

The secret, of course, is that the "gasoline" in this engine is not in the "seeing the end customer" type of "pull", but is in the profound power buried in that misused word "care." This fact seems to me self-evident with a little reflection -- it won't have any motivational power to "see" how a task will help someone else unless you care about helping that someone else. If you are indifferent to their fate, then it makes no difference to you whether you're helping or hurting them.

But, wait -- isn't this simply "exploiting" the worker's vulnerable primitive spiritual beliefs in order to make a buck? Even if it works, which it seems to, is this activity morally acceptable?

I don't believe that God or spiritual principles only exist in the twilight or dark. I think they are perfectly capable of standing on their own in the bright sunlight - and, in fact, that may be one of their signature characteristics. They can withstand scrutiny. Like the power of gravity, they work whether you believe in them or not, and whether you realize what is going on or not. These are not phantoms that vanish when the tribe's belief in them weakens.

The laws of physics and chemistry are fine with your "exploiting" them to build a gasoline powered engine and using it to power your truck. There is some human pleasure, in fact, in doing that engineering task extremely efficiently, with as little noise and waste as possible. A powered up jet turbine engine is a wonder to behold.

Similarly, I believe that the laws of spiritual development are fine with your "exploiting" them to build a powerful and profitable corporation. Just don't be stupid about it.

The key here is that, as I've pointed out numerous times in discussing feedback loops, the whole nature of causality becomes a sort of resonance state, either/or relationships become "and" relationships, and before/after relationships become phase-locked dance relationships. As Peter Senge points out in "The Fifth Discipline", it is as correct to say that the water level in the glass controls the hand on the faucet, as to say that the hand on the faucet controls the water level in the glass. In reality, the mind and vision of the person you left out of that picture entirely is what is controlling both simultaneously and equivalently.

So, while it is true that the corporation can be a turbine engine, "exploiting" spiritual power and turning it into hard cash, it is simultaneously true that optimizing this process will reshape the nature of the corporation at the same time in a way pleasing to God. It's not clear, in other words, who is being exploited and reshaped by the constant structure in place that makes this all possible. More correctly, it is clear who is being reshaped, and it is BOTH the workers and the corporation, and, indirectly, management, and indirectly again, the whole culture that builds in reliance on these spiritually-fueled corporations. God is totally neutral about the fact that the process generates cash and employment -- those are human-level variables.

The fact that a permanent developmental piece is thereby generated that takes on a life of its own in converting social needs into socially-useful solutions is fine with God and is in a very real way a multi-level process of building the material body of God on earth.

Of course, to work well, the process can't be totally hijacked in a stupid and selfish fashion by "management", killing the goose to get one golden egg. Not only do profits have to be shared with workers, but control of the production process, and ultimately, control of the goals of the corporation need to be shared with the workers, who are the experts in this new vision. Again, this is not an either/or conflict, because the constant goal of both the workers and management is to do a great job of finding social needs and meeting them efficiently and effectively, and in so doing generate sustaining cash flow to workers, management, owners, and a whole raft of neighbors who also benefit.

The more the owners can push, nudge, and help the Chief Executive Officers of the owned companies to do a good job and finding and meeting social needs efficiently, the more financial rewards they will reap so they can continue to do this. Again, if they are stupid and kill the goose to get one quarter's golden egg, this won't work. Again, it turns out that a good understanding of the principles here means that BOTH owners and management have ultimately the same goal, as do the workers - which is to make this process sustainable and effective for the long run, which is consistent with society's goals and values.

At every level, the thing that can cause this to be noisy and inefficient is an attempt to break up the development of stable, sustainable, long-term growth in order to maximize some local month's or quarter's cash flow. That is simply harmful to everyone's long-term interests, regardless how attractive it looks locally.

And, unlike the world's supplies of oil or nuclear power, tapping into the grid of spiritual power and converting it to developmental progress and cash flow is not only non-polluting, it's the opposite - it's health and benefit generating -- or it can be, if not applied stupidly and short-sightedly. As the investor John Templeton has sought to demonstrate, development of wealth and prosperity is not something that has to be inconsistent with spiritual development and family values. What is immoral and inefficient and ultimately self-destructive is the failure to understand the process fully, resulting in stupid short-sighted efforts to push the engine over the red-line, or attempts to hijack the process so that management or owners get all the profits and workers get none, or so that the corporation gets all the benefits and the customers get screwed. That kind of stupidity will self-destruct rapidly.

There can be, and is, a multi-level, win-win-win solution here, once you allow for the compounding effects of feedback loops, keep a very broad horizon, and think in terms of the multi-level "holons" that Ken Wilber is fond of - that is, entire hierarchies of live that span multiple levels of scale. But, also, the process won't work if participants insist on trying to rip off customers, or eat the seed corn and remove strength from the system. A properly tuned system will be agile and will grow at whatever rate conditions allow and it's stupid to try to drive it faster than that because of some concept that only, say, a 37% return on investment per quarter is "acceptable."

The only people who are desperate for cash in the short run are those who have done a bad job of managing what they have and are now trying to cover that up with theft of God's resources somewhere else, "robbing Peter to pay Paul." Very large scale investors realize quickly that they will happily settle for any non-zero rate of return in real wealth if it can be made self-running and sustainable. And, once they realize that and stop over-driving the engine, in fact they get their original goal because the whole system can now stabilize and stop burning up all the energy fighting with itself, with two different pistons firing at the same time in conflicting directions trying to rip apart the camshaft or engine block.

There is, in short, a "spiritual" solution to our economic problems, and by "our" I mean the full multi-level hierarchy of "us" from individuals to corporations to nations. It's a "win-win-win" solution, and the rich can stay rich and get richer while so does everyone else -- provided we attend to spiritual principles through-out at all levels.

It's also a non-zero sum game, a tap root into an infinite supply of spiritual energy of caring for each other's welfare, which goes up when the population goes up. If we could all realize the principle involved, and stop trying to out small sections of the engine for personal short-term gain, we would have so much output that everyone would have way more than they do now in the long-term.

One thing would be lost, and that is something we need to let go of - the intentional, conscious effort of some people to be better than, richer than their neighbors. We have to let go of the totally destructive mentality that "It is not enough that I win, everyone else must lose!" We have to let go of a proportional disparity of wealth as a goal of the system. It's a stupid goal, and left over from the days of massive unidirectional exploitation, where there was a sense that if the "peasants" ever got strong, they'd revolt and kill the elite. The flames are fanned by those who believe that marketing the idea of "being better than everyone else" will cause more products to be bought, and ultimately more prosperity and wealth to occur.

Our planet is finite, however, and we're getting near the limit. There is no way 6 billion people can burn resources at the same rate the citizens of the USA do without killing the planet, literally. The solution is not to stop everyone else from getting rich - it is to redefine "rich" so that it doesn't involve insane striving to get "better than" each other.

The economic power of honest compassion and caring is much stronger as a business model than the false solution of trying to run the world on greed and competition. Nothing in God's plan or the world is in the way of everyone being healthy and wealthy and safe from terrorist attacks, except our own stupid efforts to sub-optimize the engine we have here at our disposal.

I wish someone at the Santa Fe Institute, or some other think tank, could simulate this process and demonstrate convincingly, in secular terms that our national and international financial leaders could understand, that it could, in fact, work that way.

If every person on the planet had food, clothing, shelter, health care, and honest compassion from their neighbors, I think the wind would go right out of the sails of violent extremism. It's like looking at the tremendous drop in interpersonal violence as you drive the mile and cross the river from Detroit to Windsor, almost certainly due to the fact that Canada has a social safety net and the US does not.

Somehow, we are trying to power the USA workforce with terror, fear of death, fear of loss, fear that their "enemies" might get "stronger than them", fear of being unemployed -- on the implicit myth that nothing else is strong enough to get people motivated to power the wheels of commerce and wealth. That's a stupid, misguided, out-dated concept. 50 years of studies with "Theory Y", well documented by the USA's Ross School of Management, show consistently that caring, compassion, and sharing are, in fact, the basis for a much more powerful engine of profit, agility, sustainability, creativity, innovation, stability, etc.

Some very solid case-studies are available on the links from "Positive Deviance - Kim Cameron"
and the book "Making the Impossible Possible" is a must see. (The video of the book is here, if you have a high-speed link. (Nov 6, 2006) It's an hour but just spell-binding if you've ever tried to get a hostile, reluctant department to do an impossible task.

If you are experiencing difficulty viewing the video, please turn off your pop-up blocker and verify that you are using version 9 or greater of Windows Media Player.

) Many other videos on "Positive Organizational Scholarship" are there. Professor Cameron designed an approach for dealing with the cleanup of the nuclear waste mess at Rocky Flats, Colorado around what I'm terming "spiritual" principles. An effort viewed as "impossible", hopelessly locked into a management /labor dispute, estimated to take 70 years and cost $100 billion, was accomplished in 2 years using such principles.

The reason we have such social conflict and rising unemployment is that we're trying to make a defunct, broken model work when there is a better one available. It doesn't involve people giving up any of their wealth to get there, only their myths.



And, it is not some idealistic dreamer's fantasy that this can work , but well-documented studies by a well-respected School of Management. At this point, the problem seems to be one of inertia and persuading the older generation to let go of "solutions" that turn out not to scale up to global size, regardless how well they worked from 1900 to 1950.

This post "Virtue Drives the Bottom Line" has links to the serious management literature.

There's a lingering fear that this will lead to communism, or socialism, or some other ism that will force the wealthy to become poor, and lead to the workforce becoming lazy and stopping productive labor, and cause corporations to stop seeking efficient distribution of resources to meet social needs. I don't think that's the case, but some rigorous economic modeling of the ideas would really help make the case.

Repeating the summary - there is a way out of this mess we've gotten ourselves into. It involves using renewable spiritual power instead of oil to power our commerce. There is substantial hard-nosed evidence that this works, economically. It should be investigated further, cause, frankly, we're dying out here.


(Team crossing stream photo credit: Ollieda )

Photo credit: Amish barn raising by heyburn3.