Thanksgiving Elipsed by Christmas: Will the Offending Businesses Go Extinct?

Even as the business-sourced encroachment of Christmas had all but eclipsed the American holiday of Thanksgiving in 2013 on account of the day falling so late in November (as if four weeks were somehow not a long enough time for gift-buying), the on-going trend (or stampede) of stores opening earlier and earlier on Thanksgiving puts the holiday itself in the cross-hairs of the retail rifles. Thanksgiving may one day be essentially extinct, and, ironically, so too might be the usual suspects--the enterprises themselves.

The full essay is at "Thanksgiving Eclipsed."

Increasing Complexity and More Energy in the Context of Evolutionary Biology

In “the story of increasing complexity and then decreasing complexity,” we find complexity in “privileged localities” where “intense local flows of energy that are dissipated elsewhere, where things are less complex. . . . So increasing entropy in one region seems to allow decreasing entropy—that is to say, increasing complexity—in some very special regions, such as the surface of our Earth.”[1] Differentials in the universe began in the random, unpredictable differences at the sub-atomic level at the very beginning of the Big Bang.  It took 380,000 years for tiny differentials in temperatures and mass-densities to show up in the cosmic radiation background. Since then, much steeper energy-gradients have developed, and these have enabled greater complexity to arise and subsist.

Contemplating the enigma, wherein increased complexity and the associated additional energy required occurs amid a more general entropic process of a flattening out or dispersion of energy in the universe as a whole, can lead to the question of whether the level of complexity now extant in human civilization is a work in progress or a pinnacle. That is to say, will hitherto undiscovered sources of energy boost human arrangements and infrastructure—artifices of human intentionality—to higher levels of complexity? At a much longer temporal scale, will the Milky Way gain in energy and complexity as a result of incorporating a passing galaxy? In both cases, I marvel at the enigma wherein steeper energy gradients serve as more efficient energy conduits on the way to an entropic final destination. 

This history of life on Earth is a tale of increasing biological complexity. A single cell is more complex than is the Sun and our planet. From the Cambrian period, the diversity of plant and animal organisms has expanded so much from the common one-celled ancestor that we can say with Plotinus, "(I)t is a wonder how the multiplicity of life derives from what is not multiplicity, and the multiplicity would not have existed unless what was not multiplicity had not existed before the multiplicity."[2] What we typically forget is that with each increase in biological complexity, more free energy is necessary to sustain it.  

In human history, the capture of energy from the Sun for our species’ use has increased dramatically from the hunter-gatherer days to today. The leap afforded by the Neolithic Revolution, when nomads—taking advantage of “Garden of Eden” conditions—began sedentary, agricultural lives, is dwarfed by the tremendous jump in energy-usage from fossil fuels in the Industrial Revolution. The change in technological and organizational complexity due to the Industrial Revolution far exceeds the increase in complexity that came as a result of the Neolithic Revolution.

Because 95% of our species’ time on Earth was spent in the hunter-gatherer, small clan, social arrangement, the incredible leap in energy usage (now 100 times what is needed for survival, per capita) from fossil fuels whose stored energy far exceeds the potential energy of animals and human labor, and the related leap in complexity in spheres such as business, government, and society (e.g., large cities) during and after the Industrial Revolution makes us fish out of water, evolutionarily speaking. That is to say, natural selection—the mechanism discovered by Darwin whereby a changed environment “selects” mutations that are more favorable to it—has not had enough time to adjust our species to the world that we have created.

For instance, we are “hard-wired” for having contact with up to 150 people because that’s how big clans got during 95% of the time that natural selection has had to fashion our species via incremental alterations or adjustments. We are fish out of water in the cities we ourselves have built. Similarly, natural selection is too long-paced to alter our innate short-sightedness such that we can apply collective learning to obviate the threats to our species’ survival from our energy use, such as in climate change. In short, the increasingly large leaps in the steepness of the energy gradients enabled by our successively rich energy-sources have by now outstripped the energy of our evolutionary biology being able to “catch up.” Put another way, our amazingly complex biology—far from the Cambrian Revolution that led to the diversification of life—is not in sync with the complexity that we have constructed to make our lives easier and even happier.

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[1] David Christian, “Big History” Lecture (2015).
[2] Plotinus, The Enneads, III.8[3]10.

Is Daily Sustenance a Human Right?

Should healthcare, foodstuffs, and shelter be treated as commodities subject to the buyer’s ability to pay, or designated as rights because a person’s survival depends on them? In short, is the innate human drive of self-preservation worthy of being recognized societally as justifying a right to sustenance? In the E.U., this point of view tends to hold sway, whereas in the U.S., food, medical care (and medicine), and housing units tend to be treated as commodities subject to a buyer’s ability to pay. This difference in political socio-economic ideology is as telling as it is significant, yet in the U.S. at least the question is rarely debated directly rather than through ancillary issues. 

The full essay is at "Daily Sustenance"

Israel vs. Gaza: Why Does the World Tolerate Unfair Fights within Countries?

In the very nature of occupation and in particular its attribute of a near-monopoly on military force within a given territory, the superior power is essentially inert to any normative constraints, whether from within or abroad. Such power can be drunk with anger, blatantly ignoring what even allies recognize as blatantly unfair actions. That such power may actually perceive the unfairness as fair to the innocent victims demonstrates just how much cognitive dissonance a human brain consumed with its will to power can muster, let alone tolerate, as a mental shield hiding the naked aggression. To be sure, it takes two to get tangled in a fight, so rarely is either party "the bad guy." Yet major dimensions of a conflict can be sliced and put under the proverbial microscope for close examination. Tolerance for an unfair fight, whether involving a rapist, a school-yard bully, or an occupying state, is problematic in not only the predominant aggressor but also any bystanders. In the case of Israel and Gaza in July 2014, the lopsidedness of the death-tolls stands out, as does the tacit refusal of the international community to step in and stop the fight as a result. 

The full essay is at “Israel vs. Gaza”

Blockbuster Dissolves While Netflix Prospers: Evolutionary, Psychological, and Religious Explanations

In November 2013, the world learned that Blockbuster would be closing its remaining 300 video stores and even its DVD/VHS-by-mail service. Meanwhile, Netflix was making a foray into producing programming, effectively leveraging its streaming-video service. Why is it that one group, or company, of people fail to adapt while another seems to easily ride a powerful wave of change without falling? Drawing on evolutionary biology, I provide a context that distinguishes the two companies.[1] Within this framework, I proffer a possible psychological explanation involving the survival of a human being and the self-perpetuation telos (i.e., goal) of human genes.

At one point, Blockbuster had 9,000 stores. The company made the transition to DVD from VHS, yet both the company’s management and that of Dish Network, which bought Blockbuster in 2011 for $320 million at auction when Blockbuster was emerging from chapter 11 bankruptcy, were slow to grasp the velocity of the next generation as evinced in Netflix’s streaming-video online.[2] Even within Netflix, natural selection seems to have been working its way as the company developed a “mutation” of producing programming to rival—and even potentially replace—the television networks’ own programming. That is to say, a punctuated equilibrium, or evolutionary leap instead of gradual, incremental adaptations via slight mutations, can take place within a company rather than only from company to company to company over time.  

Relative to Netflix, even Dish Network can be viewed as being antiquated in its own mutational innovations. People accustomed to the business model wherein for a fee of less than $10 a month, they can receive as much streaming video as they wish would doubtlessly perceive even Dish’s “Blockbuster @Home” add-on (for an extra fee) available to Dish pay-TV customers and the company’s “Blockbuster On Demand” service available to the general public as strangely antiquated. For example, a business practitioner staying at a hotel while travelling could not but see the “On Demand” feature on the room’s television as rightfully belonging to yesteryear as he or she lays down on the bed, laptop perched on the chest, with a streaming movie from Netflix ready to go.

I submit that it is no coincidence that Blockbuster and its acquiring parent company—two groups of people, really—had so much trouble letting go an existing business model and associated strategy even after changes in the industry as well as the business environment had already begun to incapacitate the mindset undergirding the model and supporting strategy. Moreover, a mindset framing a strategic business model is itself lodged in a broader attitude not just regarding change, but also the self. A narcissistic or egoist personality disorder, for example, can be expected to include a proclivity or inclination to hold onto whatever ideology (consisting of values, beliefs, and basic assumptions), belief system (e.g., a creed), and “knowledge” the person has.

The pull of the self to hold onto itself is based on the unity-of-the-self assumption and the instinctual urge to survive. Survival can include the person’s dignity and how he or she is perceived by others. Where concern for the self is excessive even for the person’s own good, the person’s “field of vision,” or perspective, narrows artificially. As a result, the need for strategic change is apt to be missed. Rather than being oriented to finding a means of attaining a punctuated equilibrium, the person (and persons in the same local culture) finds his or her referent in the status quo—in the self-supporting or enabling “substance” composed of ideology, value, belief, attitude, mentality, and even perspective.

In short, people differ in the degree to which they clutch to whatever appears necessary to one’s self-identity and viability (and ultimately survival). A culture can easily form as a few people who clutch at what they “know to be true” at the expense of being invested in change (not to mention being open to or inclined toward it) share or infect other people close by as though via an air-born pathogen. One such culture tends to gravitate toward another like culture. Hence, Blockbuster and Dish Network. Meanwhile, other cultures form on the basis of the meta-assumption that change is good, even (and especially) when it manifests in a dynamic-oriented rather than static personality. Hence, Netflix.

Ironically, an orientation to, and thus value ascribed to, letting go of what a person takes to be crucial for the self to have substance and a supporting or framing architectonic enables the self to grow rather than starve. At a company level, a culture of such people is necessary to being able to serially adapt—not to mention find a punctuated equilibrium (via qualitative change)—especially when change is the only constant in the business environment (i.e., after the Victorian era). When change itself has become the status quo or default, a company’s very survival may entail such a mentality and culture.

Christians may recognize the paradox by thinking of the concept, agape, which is divine self-emptying love. Through grace, the divine love internal to the person manifests as the self’s voluntary self-emptying. This sort of love differs from that of caritas, which is human love. It is directed, or raised up, to eternal moral verities (Plato) or God (Augustine) and fueled by the same energy that manifests as garden-variety lust. After all, hot air rises. Although sex is no stranger to corporate games, it is not, at least from a Christian standpoint, fueling the movement toward change. From an evolutionary standpoint, however, sex (as well as sustenance and shelter) is very much involved in any adaptive inclination. The Christian explanation is in line with what the Buddhists coined as empty your cup.

Whether as a person or group, being focused on emptying one’s cup because only then can it be filled with new fluid is in turn premised on the assumption or belief that the self itself is fluid—like a river continually of water but never the same molecules at the same place. In contrast, the self of a narcissist is like a frozen mill-pond that suffocates any life within.

Whether from the standpoint of natural science or religion, groups of people can be distinguished by their respective attitudes toward change, which in turn reflect differing felt-understandings of the nature of the self and how it can best be fulfilled, protected, or sustained. The people at Blockbuster had to disperse at the possible expense of their livelihoods (i.e., sustenance) even as (and because) they were able to hold onto their firmly-held beliefs and assumptions. Meanwhile, the people at Netflix were not only sustaining themselves, but also prospering; they did so by prizing adaptation and, relatedly, a fluid, and thus adaptive, notion of self that in turn reflects favorably on their own selves, whether from an evolutionary, psychological or religious perspective.  

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1. In taking this approach, I am following in the path-breaking footsteps of William Frederick. See William C. Frederick, Natural Corporate Management: From the Big Bang to Wall Street (Sheffield, UK: Greenleaf Publishing, 2012).

2.Roger Yu, “Blockbuster to Shutter U.S. Stores, “ USA Today, November 7, 2013.

The U.S. Government Shutdown: A Future of Clogged Consolidation?

Stalemate. A government shutdown. Well, not actually completely shut down, but significantly enough for many people to suffer as a result. Resisting the temptation to expound off the media reports, I proffer an alternative hypothesis altogether: The continuing impact from natural selection through 70,000 years when the homo sapiens species was in the state of nature manifests even today as an innate proclivity to a sort of wandering myopia. With tigers as predators of man and no available refrigerators for food, natural selection favored an orientation to one’s immediate surroundings and needs. 

The complete essay is at "Is the E.U. a Federal System?"

Are Science and Human Nature at Odds in Climate Change?

“Climate change is the greatest challenge of our time,” says Thomas F. Stocker, co-chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the United Nations-sponsored group of scientists who presented their rather definitive report on September 27, 2013. “In short,” Stocker observed, the anticipated change “threatens our planet, our only home.”[1] Not only are the stakes painfully high; human nature itself must come through, perhaps beyond its very nature, for homo sapiens species to make it through the twenty-second century.

The natural human proclivity to seek a (schizogenic) maximum rather than be content with sustaining an equilibrium steady-state had been all too evident in production management alone during the industrial revolution. So too was the human approbation of instant gratification, including attempts to obviate the costs incurred. Accordingly, the 2013 report provides the rather unwelcome news that “(h)uman influence has been detected in warming of the atmosphere and the ocean, in changes in the global water cycle, in reductions in snow and ice, in global mean sea level rise, and in changes in some climate extremes.”[2]

                                                     The red and purple areas saw increases in avg. temps. Image Source: IPCC

In fact, the report claims, “It is extremely likely that human influence has been the dominant cause of the observed warming since the mid-20th century.”[3] Reflecting advances in the science (e.g., the models), the report “finds a 95 to 100 percent chance that most of the warming of recent decades is human-caused, up from the 90 to 100 percent chance cited in the last report, in 2007.”[4]  Even as the confidence in these findings is improved by 5 percent, such clarified empirical knowledge does not necessarily translate into a brighter future.

 

The likely consequences, according to the report, is a range of potential warming of between 2.7 and 8.1 degrees Fahrenheit, should the carbon dioxide level double from the amount in already in the atmosphere in 2013. According to the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in the E.U. the 2013 report is more conservative in its underlying assumptions than the previous report in 2007.

“To stand the best chance of keeping the planetary warming below an internationally agreed target of 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit (2 degrees Celsius) above the level of preindustrial times, . . . no more than one trillion metric tons of carbon can be burned and the resulting gas released into the atmosphere,” according to the 2013 report.[5] Just over half that amount had already been emitted since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, and at the rate energy consumption was growing, the trillionth ton would be released somewhere around 2040.

That as of 2013 more than three trillion tons of carbon were still left in the ground as fossil fuels set the human species up for a confrontation with its own nature along the following lines: Can we keep our paws off the cookies freely within our reach that would make us sufficiently obese that we could die from our overeating? Moreover, just how strong is the species’ self-discipline as against the lure of the pleasure garnished from additional albeit baleful consumption? That 2012 saw record carbon emissions into the earth’s atmosphere suggests a rather dramatic disconnect between what the scientists report and how policy-makers, business practitioners, and consumers react. Incredibly, the two were going in opposite directions!

The flaw is likely in human nature itself. Specifically, the disproportionate worsening of an on-going, un-rectified situation receives too little weight in the human decision-making process on whether to engage immediate correctives (or even damage-control). “Continuing rapid emissions now is kicking the climate can down the road, leaving climate change for our children and grandchildren,” said Christopher B. Field, a scientist working at the time on another intergovernmental study on climate impacts. He added that the can “gets to be bigger, heavier and harder to move with each kick.”[6] Why would rational human beings kick the can nonetheless?

The answer could simply be that for the homo sapiens species through roughly 60,000 years, natural selection favored those humans who focused on the next meal or running away from the tiger closing in. Cognition and perception being limited, attention to solving problems that would turn harmful only much later could be expected to suffer. Put another way, for the vast majority of the species’ existence, societal problems inflicting only or primarily long-term harm did not exist because complex social living arrangements did not exist beyond the intimate relations of a small clan. We cannot expect natural selection to “turn on a dime.” After tens of thousands of years, suddenly humans live in large nations and work in big corporations. Our very design, while being well-adapted to the hunter-gatherer “stone age” human existence, has not sufficiently adapted (yet) to the radically changed agricultural and urban ways of life.

The sapiens name of our species means “knowledge” or “wisdom” in Latin. Such a prideful label notwithstanding, it is worth pondering whether human reason can compensate sufficiently for the lag in adaption. Does reason discount long-term costs (especially those that are low-probability but severe), or is human desire, still oriented to hunter-gatherer needs, as if still going forward even though the species only recently quickly turned left, performing the task? Nietzsche would likely point out that reasoning is simply contending instinctual urges striving to overcome each other. Unfortunately for modern man, the urges have been born and raised in a very different context and are behaving as though they were still in it. It could be that the quick (reckless?) development of complex social arrangements (politically, socially, and economically) will turn out to be our species’ undoing. That is to say, the sheer magnitude of the discounted long-term harm of our own doing could easily come about well before the process of natural selection will have had sufficient generations to effect enough adaptation to rid us of the tyranny of an antiquated human nature.

 

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[1] Justin Gillis, “U.N. Climate Panel Endorses Ceiling on Global Emissions,” The New York Times, September 27, 2013.

[2] “Climate Change 2013: The Physical Science Basis,” The IPCC Fifth Assessment Report.
[3] Ibid.

[4] Gillis, “U.N. Climate.”

[5] “Climate Change 2013,” IPCC Report

[6] Ibid.