Dystopian Paradox

I do some part time contract work, and we have a catered luncheon the last Thursday of every month. Yesterday we were talking about the next day’s luncheon, and someone asked the person who would know what we were having. She said “Chicken divan.” A smart guy asked her, “Do we get a side of couch potato? Or is it potato couch?”

I couldn’t believe there was such a thing as Chicken divan, but after eating it today, I decided it was as good a name as any. Right after lunch, I Googled it and got several hits for the recipe and read one of them. I should have Googled it before I decided to show up for lunch.

A couple of weeks ago, my son Bud mentioned to me an article in the Summer 2008 issue of Strategy+Business. A few days later, I found the article entitled “The Next Industrial Imperative,” and low and behold, Peter Senge and three of his colleagues are the authors.

Peter Senge, who is now a senior lecturer at MIT, authored The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization, published in the early ’90s. I read it soon after it was published, and have carried with me as a part of my personal creed what I condensed from it: I am a learning organism and want to be associated with learning organizations; a learning organization is one that realizes it is in control of its own destiny; I am a learning organism because I realize that I am in control of my own destiny as long as I have my health and no one is holding a gun to my head.

Presently, none of us individually is in control of our destiny. Check out the upcoming Frontline episode “Heat” on global warming. Global warming is the loaded gun pointed at each and everyone one of us.

If you read “The Next Industrial Imperative,” you will discover that Senge and colleagues use imagery effectively to make their points memorable. In The Fifth Discipline, Senge did the same by relating the boiled frog parable in the context of a business on its way out because it is not aware of or denies the existence of forces and changes that are taking it down.

It seems as though frogs, and human beings for that matter, sense heat only when heat is moving through their heat sensory systems. Ever notice when you relax in a hot bath, the water seems to lose its heat quickly? It’s not losing its heat so fast, but rather the flow of heat from the water through our heat sensors has slowed down because all layers of our skin (and probably the fat just beneath it) are approaching the temperature of the bath water.

So the boiled frog parable is that you put a frog in a pot of water that’s at room temperature and then put him on the stove. The water warms slowly, with the result that heat is flowing through the frog’s heat sensors slowly. At any point in time, the doomed frog doesn’t perceive a dangerous change in the water temperature. The result is a boiled frog that never becomes aware of his imminent demise.

I gave my copy of the The Fifth Discipline to Bud not long after I read it, so when I sat down to write this post, I called him to see if he still had it. Of course he no longer had the copy but had recently bought an audio version on CD to listen to in his car. I mentioned the boiled frog thing and we started talking about the financial pundits on CNN etc and how they are clueless as to what’s going with the breakdown of the financial system. Bud said, “Yea, and if you tried to relate the boiled frog story to one of them, they’d think the point of the parable is that the pot is half full.”

That’s a nonsensical quip but that’s what you get from the financial and political pseudo pundits in the mass media. Nonsense. Pseudo information. Kinda like eating a Twinkie. Tastes good but no nutritional value. Check out what’s in a Twinkie and you’ll discover it has more ingredients than a car engine has moving parts. It’s manufactured not for its substantive value but rather only to taste good and get you hooked. Just like nicotine-enriched cigarettes and high octane Starbuck’s coffee.

And if we rely on pseudo pundits in making personal decisions, we may find ourselves in boiled frog heaven. Or hell. The talking heads aren’t there to communicate useful information, but rather to entertain people. Any useful information in the content is accidental. Strategy+Business and its content are not Twinkie-like.

“The Next Industrial Imperative” article uses images of bubbles to help make its points. We are living in the industrial revolution bubble. Bubbles tend to pop. There was the dot.com bubble and it popped. There is the housing boom bubble of the last several years and it has popped. The securitized debt, over-the-counter derivatives bubble is connected to the housing boom bubble; sort of a double-bubble. These bubbles pop when the real value of the assets within are overvalued and the overvaluation becomes generally accepted. The result is that the assets inside the bubble become assets outside the bubble and their value drops to true value in the sustainable world outside the bubble. Enron and Bear Stearns are examples of micro-bubbles.

What keeps a bubble inflated is the belief of those operating inside the bubble that the notational values of the assets are their real values. Once this perception becomes generally accepted as being a fantasy, the bubble pops.

The industrial revolution brought about a great many benefits for some of us, including improved health and comfort. But it has created environmental problems culminating in global warming as the most pressing challenge of our time. We have been like the boiling frog, sitting inside a pot of water on a stove located in the bubble of the industrial revolution. The present value of the industrial revolution as it currently exists is less than zero. It is not sustainable as it’s presently configured.

And while the financially savvy among us chose to avoid both the dot.com and securitized debt, over-the-counter derivatives bubbles, none of us can unilaterally escape the industrial revolution bubble. It is imperative that the industrial leaders of the world work together to develop solar based energy sources to replace fossil fuels. Not to do so will result in continued global warming evaporating the thin film of the industrial revolution bubble, casting us into a dystopian one that may last centuries.

“The Next Industrial Imperative” points out that the level of Co2 is “35 percent higher than at any other time in the past half million years.” In addition to the bubble imagery, another visual reference in “The Next Industrial Imperative” is a bathtub filling up with water. At some point, the inflow of water exceeds the outflow and the tub becomes full. At some point in our future, the inflow of Co2 into the atmosphere will “cross a threshold” where continued global warming will be beyond our ability to reverse.

To avoid disaster, “The Next Industrial Imperative” states that the world must reduce the release of Co2 from the burning of fossil fuels by 80 percent in the next 20 years. The Frontline trailer includes a sound bite of a person stating that the goal cannot be met. Let’s hope that person is wrong.

Visit the Strategy+Business website and read the entire “The Next Industrial Imperative” article. It contains much more information than this post.

My hope is that we avoid the worst case scenario from the effects of global warming. Or even the next worse, which is a dystopian world for us all.

It’s imperative that a new industrial bubble emerge that is sustainable. Hope means nothing without action, so become politically involved. Read about Sweden’s amazing progress in “The Next Industrial Imperative.”

Driving a Prius, or a plug-in electric when they become available, will help. But keep in mind that transportation in all forms accounts for less than half of our present rate of consumption of fossil fuels.

Express your concerns to public officials at all levels, and take advantage of available means to learn more. Let your views be known to your friends (and your employers if you can do so without getting fired). And don’t miss the Frontline episode “Heat” coming out this fall. The background music for the trailer is “Burning down the House” written by David Byrne and the other Talking Heads.

Last Saturday morning, my son Bud and I took his 6 year old stepdaughter Beth and 2.5 year old son Tiger to breakfast at the local pancake house. Beth is a great kid but can be a handful. Tiger is well on his way in that regard.

As we were leaving, Beth ran out ahead and Bud hollered at her to wait up. She of course ignored the command. Bud turned to me and said, “I wish I had a tranquilizer gun.”

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That afternoon and evening, I attended a friend’s birthday party at the clubhouse and pool of the condo complex where the hosts reside. After eating a smorgasbord of really good finger food, spicy homemade chicken tamales, birthday cake, and Tums for those who brought them, most of the guests prepared to hit the swimming pool.

There were several small kids there. A neat, outgoing four year old who showed up in her swim suit asked me if I was going swimming. I said no. She asked, “Then why are you here.” I answered, “I’ve been asking myself that question ever since I was your age.”

She didn’t ask me any more questions but rather just looked at me without changing the expression on her face, and immediately left to talk to someone else. Women of all ages react to me the same at most functions I attend.

I don’t do pools because I’m too vane. I told the hosts that if people stayed too long, I could get them to leave by donning a Speedo and walking around the edge of the pool a couple of times. The hosts said no way because they were out of Tums.

This blog is about hope for my kids’ and grandkids’ future. As to the title Dystopian Paradox, there is a line in Reinhold Niebuhr’s Serenity Prayer that reads “Accepting hardships as the pathway to peace.”

That statement is paradoxical and yet it is a universal truth. I want the coming generations to acquire the true grit it will take to make it through the challenges they will face. But I don’t want them to endure lifetimes of dystopian circumstances.

As for me, I’m going by the pseudonym Doug Duck on this blog. I use the name Doug at fast food joints. Giving them my real first name results in looks of bewilderment. My frat brothers tagged me with the Duck moniker, a reference to Daffy Duck. They call me Daff for short. After reading some of the stuff on this blog, you may understand why they came up with nickname.

But again, this blog isn’t primarily about me. My main agenda in publishing this blog is concern for my kids and grandkids and your kids and grandkids. I want them to have a future that provides them with opportunities to fulfill their potentials.

We are now confronted by a perfect storm of dynamic forces that challenge the continued existence of the world as we know it. The dark force of fear-based politics, which has always been with us, now has global warming as its ally. Together they pose the greatest threat yet to civilization.

This blog is about politics. Both god and politics are global terms. Ask five people what either of these terms means, and most likely you’ll get five different answers.

For purposes of the blog, politics will mean the acquisition of power and its use to improve the prospects of those under the power holder’s influence, or its abuse which results in the destruction of those prospects.

A challenge for each one of us is to fulfill our potential and therefor our personal political power, and to use that power to improve the prospects for the future. There are many corollaries to this challenge. They include:

We lose our personal power when we abdicate it in favor of demagogues and their institutions.

We lose our personal power when we do not support others and institutions worthy of our support.

We lose our power when we chose to go it alone and fail to form strategic relationships.

We gain personal power when we find a constructive way to challenge demagoguery

We gain personal power when we support others and institutions worthy of our support.

We gain personal power when we sacrifice personal gain in favor of the greater good.

To sum it up, each of us is a political animal. To deny it is to shirk a responsibility that we have to ourselves and to the betterment of the world at large. For us to deny our political power is to grant the forces of darkness the opportunity to prevail. The forces of darkness are parasitic, which left unchecked result in the destruction of us all including the parasite.

We can also view ourselves as existing in a spiritual realm. I find it useful to think of this realm composed of two opposing spirituals forces, one of love and the other fear. These terms also describe two of our emotions. But our emotions are transient- they come and go, whereas the spiritual realm in the classic sense transcends time and space.

I try to picture myself as being a part of or connected to the spiritual state of love. I still experience fear. A lot of it. And I’m certainly not always loving. But if I let fear become my spiritual state, then anger, hate, greed, revenge and despair will crowd out the light within me.

The symbol of the yin-yang, a circle occupied by two congruent paisley-shaped elements (one white surrounding a small black circle, and the other its opposite- black with a small white circle inside), to me is a visual representation of the spiritual states of love and fear. In the best of us the light predomintates, but if we are not vigilant, that darkness inside will grow. And in the rest of us, somewhere inside exists the light but rendered ineffectual by overwhelming darkness.

Politics operates in the spiritual realm. Our challenge is to make use of our political power in the spiritual realm of love. The first step is to acknowledge this power. The second step is onto an up-elevator that never ends, a lifelong process of learning brought to focus by strategic thinking.The alternative, which is to sell our souls for self gain or to deny our political power, is a trip on a down-elevator with the next dark age its destination.

Randy Pausch died yesterday, July 25, 2008. If you are not familiar with Randy, go to YouTube to view and listen to his last lecture. His heroic battle with pancreatic brought his story and works to all of us. His students at Carnegie Mellon were fortunate to be tested by this man. Randy challegened them to never give up even when they hit the brick wall. Randy met the profound challenge of his life when handed his death sentence less than a year ago. He confronted this brick wall by practicing what he preached and giving of himself to others even as he was dying. The Chicgo Tribune includes a respectful and informative obituary.

I’m a movie fan and several years ago stumbled across the term “dystopian” in reference to a particular genre. Children of Men is a recent example. Looking into its definition, I found dystopia means the antithesis of utopia. Utopia is the title of a fiction Sir Thomas More authored in the 16th century. The book is about an ideal society. Dictionary.com defines dystopia as “a society characterized by human misery, squalor, oppression, disease, and overcrowding.” Corollaries of the definitions of utopia and dystopia respectively are that living in a utopian society assures inner peace and contentment, and existing in a dystopian one guarantees a permanent psychological hell.

But these corollaries don’t always hold true, as stories of great people in history show us. Nelson Mandela, for example, entered prison a violent, angry man. After the dystopian circumstances of incarceration, he emerged 27 years later as a leader not of just the black South Africans, but of all South Africans. Mandela led the country to unification. On the other hand, we all know those who grew up in privilege and prosperity and with an abundance of opportunity but who took the road to self destruction.

A thesis for consideration is that one can achieve lasting inner peace, which is the true utopia rather than a state of external pleasant circumstances, only by passing through hell. This experience is sometimes referred to as baptism by fire. The pain of the hell that the traveler experiences may result from external dystopian circumstances or disintegration of the personality. Either way, the paradox is that misery presents the opportunity to receive and appreciate the gift of inner peace. This reward is not material in nature. Rather peace of mind itself is the reward. An aspect of this peace is the release from the spiritual state of fear.

Even if this thesis could be proved true in principal by direct empirical evidence, there are those who somehow face hardship with a character that some of us cannot relate to. A fictional example is Melanie Wilkes of Gone with the Wind. Real life holocaust survivor psychiatrist Victor Frankl describes how some of his fellow concentration camp inmates coped:

If a prisoner felt that he could no longer endure the realities of camp life, he found a way out in his mental life - an invaluable opportunity to dwell in the spiritual domain, the one that the SS were unable to destroy. Spiritual life strengthened the prisoner, helped him adapt, and thereby improved his chances of survival.

A true test of peace of mind is the willingness to forgive our transgressors. The direction of Nelson Mandela’s post-incarceration leadership is witness to his forgiveness.