We Shouldn't Fear Collapse.
One thing is true: systems and the status quo will always collapse.
No matter the optimism, the way we work in this era of civilization will come to an end. This is not a doom-sayer conspiracy, it's pure and simple historic fact. No model humans have ever tried within the legacy of economic principle has lasted the test of time. Democracy, we could say, is our greatest achievement yet it's an ongoing experiment where the rules change and there is not a secure baseline to compare to.
Why am I saying this? Because at a time of global uncertainty, those working within the economic system have to do more than worry about it for another day.
Each time a civilization style has entered our majority of population there has been anywhere between 500 - 2000 year "success"; that is, it's maintained some form of order until it hasn't. Normally this happens when the ruling organization grows too big to fail.
Let's backup a little bit. I started thinking about the potential for another great fall after watching Gladiator again. Our depictions of the Greek and Roman Empires are always so lavish and deity-like, it's almost an homage to man's commitment to such a regal ideology. For as long as we know, these great civilizations have been studied and connected too with great reverence.
But when you start digging deeper into the written texts and what is known about the legacy of these Empires, huge cracks in the foundation of that version of democracy start to shine through to our own day. The enormous representational divisions to the over-abundance of ignorance of fringe villages, we can see every day how this cycle is starting to take shape. When such Empires ruled the global population, you had a mast figurehead in some way - The Greeks were unfortunately ruled by non-countrymen for some time, while Romans found solace in a heredity lineage which, unfortunately does not mimic true democracy however, in principle, the Emperor was supposed to be accessible and gain insight into all his Empire. Yet, our modern systems take from these most classic of tropes - from economics and growth, to art and literature. We love thinking about the legacy of these great eras because of the opulence and lasting histories they left.
We make a point of studying all aspects, every single one, but rare do we speak about what caused the fall. It's like when you're listening to a really great story and the guy starts to just trail off to avoid the awkward "AND THEN I KILLED MYSELF BY HAVING A LIGHTENING ROD UP MY ASS".
No one wants to know or hear the truth, but the journey is what made it!
WRONG. In all our studies, even the economists who talk on TV, never talk about similarities to our failures only growth periods. Failures and collapses are what need to happen in the organic cycle of civilization - what comes up must come down to force learning.
When we start to look at the last great era before our common time, we see vast growth and quick growth. By military force the Romans regained regions once contested by the Macedonians to what is now Saudi Arabia. This massive empire was the key to success, and truly not one saw a collapse - the global dominance of their superiority would lead to a world without problems. It was in this arrogance that you saw advantages being taken, and while moralists contribute hedonistic lifestyle to the end of Rome, it wasn't the orgies that did them in. It was the ideologies behind why orgies were so popular that did.
Over abundance leads to poor planning.
I wish I studied this more, because the root cause of any civilizations fall is a wicked read. Normally we can attribute chaos coming from over militarized action, or the BIG RED BUTTON as I like to call it. However, even in the situations that has befallen our ancient neighbours in the Latin Americas, it's not as simple as bloodshed or plague. Why does an otherwise stable civilization all die from illness? How does a global empire go from being everywhere to nothing in less than 20 years? Arrogance.
When we look at the good U S of A, we know there's a lot of people and a lot of money. 2000 people control almost 98% of wealth in the world, and they are not scared of showing it. They own almost everything through complex systems of company lineages in the false mask of capitalism. Capitalism is not a free market system, it's an imperial dominance led by legal loopholes that allow one person to control whatever they want - capitalism just tells us that a person who does this could start out as poor as dirt. Opportunity is a God given blessing. Capitalism in the USA is so closely tied with the religious foundations of the Protestant Work Ethic, that the spiritual advisor to President Trump, Paula White, often evangelizes of God's grace working through President Trump that disobeying him is disobeying God. This style of belief that we are "blessed" with compensation for our money making skills, not only goes against so much of Christianity, it's a way to turn the other cheek to a failing system. True believers of capitalism would say the economy is doing fine because we don't have such great poverty as we did in the 50s, 40s, 30s, 20s, and onward. Our advancements make us better - but aha! It's just a different look on the same old jalopy. Arrogance, because of the lack of need to plan ahead, is creating this dissociative state for certain powers globally, because it's not directly affecting them. Sure, certain parts of the US and Canada have water issues, massive opioid addictions, unemployment, but in the good parts we're booming. Same with previous attempts at utopia, the systems were failing and instead of actually digging it up and trying from scratch the answer is to allow them to deal with it on their own.
This type of poor planning leads to what we see now. Recently Johann Rupert did instruct a conference that within the scope of the recent unrest, this type of fear of being opulent causes more problems. "How is society going to cope with structure unemployment and the envy, hatred, and the social warfare? We are destroying the middle classes at this stage and it will affect us. It's unfair. So that's what keeps me up at night". The owner of Cartier is absolutely right. Not just about how no one will want to buy diamonds if we. live in a destroyed world, but the fact that if no solutions are made we are headed down the wrong path. Business can't succeed in the way it does now if no one is there to support the society which fuels it. If the current rest of the world is not supported by clean water, repairs infrastructure, living wages, decent work environments, and fair decisions by political leaders, then it all goes to shit.
The lead pipes in Ontario should have been ready to be changed the first day the world decided to ban lead pipes.
Success makes us blind to negative effects
When we have everything we need, we don't worry about not having. We get whiney when we don't have the right kinds of fizzy water, instead of just drinking some damn water. A disconnect to reality forms and we dissociate further from the majority of society. A bubble forms, and we stop caring about what else is happening. In the above quote by Mr. Rupert, he knows that a global scale of inequality will lead to dismay. This was in 2015. What we are seeing now is the effects of obvious blind spots in the way we conduct our political and economic exercises. Countries like Chile need to increase revenues, yet pushing transportation fares up ended up in a nation-wide uprising with little recourse from Politicians. We we start to believe "I'll be fine", we stop wondering if "we" will. Coming into modern business practices the effects of an EVP making a decision can cost thousands of jobs to ripple into catastrophic outcomes for entire regions. But the EVP gets a boost because he cut costs. Not to go all "love the world" on you, but effects of the current IPO culture have truly come to a point where people don't matter. They are just people. Not shareholders.
Within history cartoonists make fun of Kings and Queens for being out of touch. Old elitists for not knowing or caring about their servants. And those in the serfdom being too eager to please while shitting in a bucket. Yet, here we are. Praising a system that even single business owners are being failed by, yet will spend thousands to hear someone talk about the "Power of Success" without any real education on formal model re-envisioning whatsoever. How are we any different than the Greeks or Romans who tried (and failed) to set up a utopia for all peoples?
When you take away the reality from the model, it all looks great. So many ideological systems seem great on paper and maybe the math could work - but people are not math. Absolute power corrupts, absolutely; and regardless of bad cliches and tagline these are sayings that we ourselves in business and politics need to heed. Power and money are interchangeable but respect and leadership are not. Human compassion has a relative seat at the power table because it's a logical element to look at whether you really care or not.
When we forget the daily functions of non-elitist life and when we don't factor in our own stupidity in ego, whether it's a business or economic model, it's going to fail. When you stop worrying about the what ifs and worry about shareholders for the next week, you're going to make decisions that will lead to massive failure.
You can't fight failure, so accept it.
There is not way to escape failure. Maybe in your lifetime, but not in your successors. Ego and division can make matter worse, but failure is sadly key to invention. Desperation creates the best solutions because we have to fix a problem. First though, we have to accept there is a problem. The problem is we don't want to change, and the current system, while it had a good run, may need it. Luckily, we don't have to wait for it to fall and a dystopia to surround us to fix it years after the robot dogs kill half of us. We can start now. We can listen to the psychology and methods behind human neuroscience to understand how to increase our vast work-world's life. We can choose to move away from massive IPOs, and keep manufacturing on-shore, and choose to give back to the people who make our companies run instead of the people who run them. Simple model adjustments to our revenue systems and re-investment goals from trading on futures to planting trees and building schools, it sounds like some kind of socialist nightmare but this is how capitalism worked in the days of Ford, Johnson, Eisenhower and more. Taxes didn't exist because companies directly invested in the people and services around them, so maybe we should do a #tbt to a model similar to a fair social network where companies and people co-exist?
For myself, the companies I work with reach a point where I can smell the problems over the phone. At that point I do have to walk away because the red flags of ego are there. The models are failing and they want to avoid it. I can try to convince them all they want, but how if an SMB owner won't recognize the potential hazards of door-to-door selling how could anyone tell the most powerful of us? Sometimes, like our mothers, we have to let the failure happen, the people come crying back, then process while nicely telling them "no more xbox FOR LIFE.
If we don't start looking to the past for the issues happening now, history is doomed to repeat itself.