A Tale of America as a Family Today
Two daughters got caught in quicksand. One was the 1% Financial-Corporate Community; the other was the other 99%. The parents extended every effort and bore whatever cost to get the first daughter out of the quicksand. You would think she in particular would then join the parents (the lawmakers) to triple their efforts to get her sister out of the quicksand. Instead she turned to her parents and said, “I was able to get myself out of the quicksand by pulling myself up by my own bootstraps; she is not able to do so. To be in integrity with nature we need to let her sink. That is the moral thing to do. Plus, there is this beautiful deck we want to build on the back of the house and these boulders (big debts) are in the way. Since she is going to sink anyway, it makes sense to give them to her to get them totally out of sight. After all, it is right and moral to give priority to our self-interest at all times. Proud of their daughter’s profound, accurate, and moral wisdom, they helped her pile all the big boulders into the second daughter’s outreached hands.
Occupy Wall Street Could Become the Beginning Of the Second Global Maturation of Human Society!
There are three well known fundamental stages to any movement, like the labor, civil rights, women’s, and environmental movements: 1) initial outrage at a glaring injustice that makes the wider public aware of it, 2) actions in the private sector correcting the injustice that reveals it can be done and builds stronger support, and 3) widespread support for legislation. The Occupy Wall Street OWS) movement is now in the beginning of the outrage stage.
As Justin Wedes and Sandra Nurse, two of the organizers of this movement, revealed in their We the World conference call open to all on Wednesday, October 19th, changing the priorities in our governance and economy will not happen quickly and easily. Yes, something close to President Obama’s jobs bill could get passed and there could even be higher taxes on the wealthy. However, those are short-term measures. There is something much deeper being asked for here: fundamental change to be a moral global society.
This could be the beginning of what might be labeled the Second American, Only Now Global, Maturation of Human Societies. The first recent major one was the establishment of America, the first modern nation to honor individual freedom. However, the American founding mothers and fathers set out to do two things, not just one. They wanted to establish both a free and moral society.
Throughout history and in every land mature human beings have basically defined moral behavior as freely choosing to give priority to the common good. Immoral behavior became defined as giving priority to anything else. If so, we are not a moral nation. The purpose of this Second Global Maturation of Human Society is to finish this second part of their mission by establishing a moral global society as well as a free one.
We are not a moral nation because it is the law, supported by nearly every court case on the books, that the highest priority of a for-profit corporation is the financial interests of the shareholders, a few people. This is immoral yet it is the law. Non-profits and political groups are often not much better, giving priority to their mission or agenda rather than the common good. In addition, those who still think it is natural and moral to give priority to self-interest call anything that is not that “socialism” or worse. Giving priority to self-interest is also immoral.
I did not say to not care about self-interest. Priorities allow us to do many things fully at the same time, especially if the priorities are in alignment with nature. I said mature human behavior is moral because people freely choose to give priority to the common good. They obviously have to attend to their self-interest as well. Moral behavior is when we do both fully and freely choose to give priority to the common good
Moral behavior cannot be legislated. It cannot be forced. It has to come from within. So it must occur as a voluntary action within the private sector. This is the role of “movements” that raise awareness, which have us all, individuals, businesses, and other organization, voluntarily change our behavior. This is the story of the civil rights, women’s, and environmental movements and it will be the story of OWS’s call for a global moral social order.
Here is a metaphor that reveals how the extreme of assuming that giving priority to self-interest as moral behavior has destroyed any semblance of true moral behavior in American society:
A Tale of America as a Family Today
Two daughters got caught in quicksand. One is the 1% Financial-Corporate Community; the other is the other 99%. The parents (lawmakers) extended every effort and bore whatever cost to get the first daughter out of the quicksand. You would think she in particular would then join the parents to triple their efforts to get her sister out of the quicksand. Instead she turned to her parents and said, “I was able to get myself out of the quicksand by pulling myself up by my bootstraps; she is not able to do so. To be in integrity with nature we need to let her sink. That is the moral thing to do. Plus, there is this beautiful deck we want to build on the back of the house and these boulders (big debts) are in the way. Since she is going to sink anyway, it makes since to give them to her to get them totally out of sight. After all, it is right and moral to give priority to our self-interest at all times. Proud of their daughter’s profound, accurate, and moral wisdom, the parents helped her pile all the big boulders into the second daughter’s outreached hands.
Large corporations are not going to soon disappear. We need to need to raise people’s awareness of their immaturity to the point we can invite them, one by one, into being one of the vanguards of moral behavior because of their leaders maturation or because they have no choice because of public opposition and lack of commercial support. Currently, this is our only choice: they are the real power on the planet at this time. They have all the money, not the nations: they have put nearly everyone else, including the developed nations, into deep debt. There is, however, a very effective way to begin that process to which they will all have to eventually respond as they respond to anything that is necessitated to keep them profitable.
At some point this movement will move to the second stage. My suggestion is that they use their current global momentum to quickly move to it: start some permanent changes in the private sector. Here is what could be one of a number of actions they could take.
The problem is not the people in the corporations. They are just working for a living. They love their spouses and children, coach little league, and guide Girl Scouts like the rest of us. The problem is the immoral contract the corporations have with the nations!!! Therefore, the demonstrators could invite the leaders of large and small progressive corporations to form a non-profit that might be called the Common Good Business Association so its priority is crystal clear. Only companies whose board of directors votes to give priority to the common good and second priority to profits can join. We already expect this of all people and organizations and no laws need to be passed for companies to do this. This assumed freely chosen priority just stopped occurring. Larger corporations would also agree to a yearly common good audit as well as a financial audit by accredited third parties. It would be posted on their website with the company’s comments so the public can monitor their behavior.
This would set in motion a movement where corporations compete to see which can be more creative in serving the common good all the while knowing that in today’s Internet world where all is known this will be good, not bad, for their bottom line. There are many socially responsible companies that would rush to join them to do this! As we saw over the last decades, companies like Tom’s of Maine, Stonyfield, Honest Tea, and Ben & Jerry’s who did this had lower marketing costs because of customer loyalty, even though they eventually had to get bought to survive in this economy and continue to grow. As this movement raises the awareness that we must freely choose to give priority to the common good to complete the task of the American Revolution, now at the global level, companies will either join or have no choice but to join to stay in business. The public will increasingly expect it just as they now expect to see people of all colors in commercials!
There are other things we can legally and non-violently do to create a moral responsible world at this time. I can provide details at another time: a truly honest global currency all can use globally that can be set up on the internet now, a way for everyone in the world to create their own job doing something good they want to do for us all that will get financial support from others they know and on the Internet – just approved by the IRS, how to create the world’s first member directed endowment fund that can become an alternative banking system – ready to go, and how to create the world’s first nation by agreement rather than by geography that anyone can join and leave at anytime – we can do it now. We can allow local chapters to emerge around the world supporting all of this.
This will not bring about immediate change, but it will set something in motion that could eventually, and quickly, bring about permanent change toward a moral global society. Maturation cannot be stopped. It is natural and inevitable. This is ultimately what we want. We want all people and all our global institutions to mature to where they freely choose to give priority to the common good without seeing it in conflict with self-interest. This will be the completion of the Second Global Maturation of Human Society, something intended but not yet accomplished by America’s founding mothers and fathers. Occupy Wall Street can finish their job not just for America but, with the help of people around the world, for us all. We are all in this together.
Terry Mollner, chair of StakeHolders Capital Inc., a socially responsible asset management firm in Amherst, MA (www.stakeholderscapital.com) is also a founder of the Calvert Social Investment Funds and a member of the board of Ben & Jerry’s.
Why cooperation, not competition, is fundamental in nature
In the article by me posted on this blog entitled “Money and morality,” I argued that cooperation is fundamental in nature. A friend wrote back and asked me to provide more clarification about this.
My point was that cooperation is fundamental in nature and cannot be avoided. Competition is a lower FORM of it, a lower kind of expression of it. Cooperation cannot be escaped. It is what nature is because the universe is one indivisible whole. Think of your body. Your right hand has never gotten into a fight with your left hand. That is because you think of your body as a whole. All the parts of a whole cooperate for the good of the whole. That is what we see as normal. Yet so many of us think competition is fundamental in nature outside our skins. That means we are acting as if life is a contradiction: cooperation as fundamental inside our skin and competition as fundamental outside our skin. The one thing all religious, philosophers, scientists, etc. agree on is that life is not a contradiction; they each have an explanation of how it all makes sense to them…that is, is a whole.
So I was arguing that, yes, we can perceive competition as occurring in nature. However, at a more fundamental level of perception it is just a form of cooperation, not fundamental in nature. Nature is one indivisible whole. Nature is cooperation. That is why the scientists can find all those “laws of nature”…those cooperative patterns. They are everywhere.
So, yes, competition is PERCIEVED to be occurring by most today. That is because they have not discovered the fact that cooperation is fundamental and that the competition they perceive is but a kind of cooperation, not fundamental in nature. This is the next layer of maturity of perception into which we are graduating. Someday all babies will be brought up to know this as true as much as they are brought up to know that the Earth is round, there are many languages not just the one they learned, and that the Red Sox are always the best team in baseball!!!!!!!!!!
Money and Morality
Even in a free market, common good should prevail
Terry Mollner
By Daily Hampshire Gazette
Friday, October 31, 2008
Alan Greenspan, the most respected figure and main financial architect of the Reagan Revolution (“no government is good government”) just admitted before Congress that there was a major “flaw,” to use his word, in his lifetime of economic thinking. He proposed – are you ready for this – that the government consider creating tougher regulations. Maybe the people selling securities, he said, should have to keep some of them so they would be on the hook too, and maybe there should be stronger rules against fraud. “Da!” as our teenager would say. As head of the Federal Reserve Bank for 18 years up to 2006, he is one of the main leaders who have taken the world off this cliff, and he is only now discovering the obvious?
What is painful for us to own as a country of people is that so many of us agreed with him back then and still do. What is happening is not just the fault of Greenspan, George Bush, Congress, Wall Street, etc. It is the fault of us all. So many of us wanted to believe that if we were one of the first ones in on this chain letter that it was OK that all those many people at the end who would be sending us checks were not being hurt – because they could be one of the first of the next leg, etc. The problem is that in short order we run out of billions of people to provide for the rich at the beginning of millions of legs – because it is those who are good at creating more legs who can’t control themselves from creating more of them. Greenspan said that the current financial crisis had “turned out to be much broader than anything that I could have imagined.” That gets two Das. Da! Da! All chain letters end up with far more losers than winners. When the winners are addicted to the possibility of there always being millions more people willing to risk being losers there comes a day when there are no more people and everyone loses on their new legs also and the entire activity comes to a halt.
To some degree that is where we are now. The saddest thing is that they are doing the exact wrong thing to solve the problem. The problem is that everyone has too much debt and they are trying to solve it by giving priority to making more credit available. That gets three Das: Da! Da! Da!
I am on the board of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream. We got bought by Unilever, the fourth largest consumer goods multinational on the planet. (Please don’t ask how that happened!) It doesn’t make any difference how successful we are as a socially responsible and financially successful business; the top executives always want us to get more people to buy more ice cream so they can make more money – and it never stops. All of us involved are good people who love our children and coach little league teams, etc. But the company is a chain letter. It is not a local business run by people. It is controlled by Wall Street’s rules. The highest priority has to be the financial interests of a few, called the shareholders, at the expense of the rest of us. We are one of the legs of the chain letter. The goal of us on the board of Ben & Jerry’s is to model succeeding as a socially responsible company inside a multinational. We even cut a contract that will allow us to sue them if they do not fulfill their social agreements. It is tough love at all times.
We live in a country where a majority of people want to become millionaires; so even if they are poor they vote for policies and politicians who they think will make it easier for them to become millionaires. They want to be one of the winners in the chain letter game. That is how we got Republican presidents who promise to reduce taxes and regulations while reducing the deficit; they then “solve” the obvious impossibility of this approach by greatly increasing the deficit and blaming it on someone or something else. However, we chose these policies by electing these people as our leaders. This begs the question: “What is the fundamental flaw in the thinking of so many of us?”
Have you ever tried to just leave the universe? Decided you were sick of this place and decided you wanted to go somewhere else? You quickly noticed that there is not a second place to go. In other words, we are all in this together. The universe is one indivisible whole and we are a part of it. This means that cooperation is fundamental in nature, not competition.
Competition, it turns out, is the lowest form of cooperation, compromise is a more mature form, agreement a still more mature form, and love the most mature form. They are all forms of cooperation because cooperation cannot be escaped. This means we are able to identify the fundamental rules by which this cooperation occurs. Scientists love finding more and more of them and they use a method that tries to isolate truth from beliefs, myths and projections. We usually call these fundamental cooperative rules “the laws of nature.” For instance, one of the laws of nature we have discovered is that, where there is gravity, what goes up must come down.
Well, we have become stuck at the layer of maturity that assumes that competition is fundamental in nature. It isn’t. What is going on in the financial markets is a symptom of our transition into “the next layer of human maturation” in the skill of self-consciousness. That is where we give priority to the fact that cooperation is fundamental in nature. This means that, when we reach full maturity, our freely chosen highest priority at all times is the common good. That, we discover, is the only priority that has us always moving in alignment with the cooperative rules of nature. Throughout history this has often been called “moral behavior.”
Competition does not exist in nature. It only exists in the immature perceptions of immature human beings. When it occurs it is a human-made invention. You can’t escape the fact that cooperation is fundamental in nature. A basketball game cannot occur without “agreement” on some “cooperative” rules: “We play within these lines, a basket is two points, etc.” A free market cannot exist without giving priority to “agreement” on some “cooperative” rules: “We will not kill, steal, etc.” Without these cooperative rules being given priority, it would not be possible to build a factory, produce a product, distribute it, and collect payment day in and day out. People would instead give priority to killing and stealing to get what they wanted – and then everyone would do it because “everyone else is doing it so I have no choice!”
A government is also “agreement” on some “cooperative rules” that will be given priority at all times.
It is fine to pursue one’s self-interest fully; however it is only “mature” to give “priority” to the common good while doing both fully. A “government” is the agreements on “the layer of maturity at which we want to operate.” Regulation or no regulation is not a false dichotomy; it is an immature one. A more mature question is “What regulations do we want to give priority as the rules within which we will compete, compromise, agree and love?” As self-conscious beings we can’t avoid having agreements within which we relate; even choosing to relate is an agreement. We already agree that we want free people and free markets. Now we need to agree at what layer of maturity of cooperative rules we want to operate.
Here is the wonderful thing about giving priority to priorities in our thinking: We can do many things fully at the same time as a result of turning skills into habits. You are probably currently wearing clothes, sitting, reading, etc., all at the same time because they are skills you have turned into habits so you do not have to think about them anymore. You easily and consistently do them because they are mature ways of cooperating with nature: Conflict is, therefore, absent and they can remain habits for the rest of your life.
The most important priorities to keep in the right order and turn into a habit are self-interest and the common good. To be a mature human being, with the possibility of continuous happiness as we move through life because our habits are in constant cooperation with nature, these two priorities must reflect the rules of nature accurately. That is done by always freely choosing to give priority to the common good. When we understand the importance of giving priority to priorities instead of “getting this or that now,” we discover we can do both fully. When they are in the mature order of priorities they are naturally in full and effortless cooperation with each other. They are reflecting the rules of nature in a more mature way and we enjoy inner peace.
Let’s hope that the main outcome of this debacle will be that we as a nation of people will grow up to the wisdom of recognizing that cooperation is fundamental in nature. That our “natural highest priority” at all times is the common good and about this we do not have a choice – it is nature. Our only choice is at what layer of maturity we cooperate, that of giving priority to competition, compromise, agreement or love. That embracing this wisdom as individuals and as a country is the secret to personal happiness. And having “enough” financial income is enough because it allows us to work to help everyone else have enough also. We are all in this together. What is more important than being a millionaire is freely choosing to give priority each moment to playing the role that we can each uniquely play for the good of us all. This is living at the layer of human maturity called “love.”
Terry Mollner, the president of Trusteeship Institute, is a founder and board member of Calvert Social Investment Funds and a member of the board of Ben & Jerry’s.
Daily Hampshire Gazette © 2008 All rights reserved
Source URL: http://www.gazettenet.com/2008/10/31/guest-column-money-and-morality
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