Free Your Mind... To Free Your Business
Ever wonder why the most people treat the economy like a zero-sum game, when the most productive leaders and companies act in exactly the opposite way?
Or why the dogma of short-term quarterly returns has become so tyrannical that it led us straight into the Global Financial Crisis of 2008-2009 despite all the risk assessments?
These dysfunctional attitudes have deep roots in our economic history.
Understanding that history gives us the power to realise that things don’t have to be this way.
In school, we learn that our economic system is called “capitalism” and that it’s something that just sort of happened after the Middle Ages.
This, as David Loy’s excellent book A Buddhist History of the West explains, is far from the whole story.
Entrepreneurship, the exchange of goods and services, competition, loans and investment of capital; if you see these as the essential elements of capitalism, then many civilisations have been capitalist before us.
The European Middle Ages was merely a short nap when capital slept, imprisoned by aristocratic landlords.
Even then, Italy and parts of Germany continued to thrive as artisan-merchant economies.
But if by capitalism you mean the “religion” of capitalism, in which the market is nearly worshipped as the highest and defining element of society, the kind of capitalism in which everything is justified in pursuit of profit…
that is a mindset that came out of the ashes of the Reformation.
You see, the Reformation got everyone looking at scripture for the model of what a reformed Christian society should look like.
The trouble was that no one could agree on the blueprint it was supposed to contain.
In truth, looking to scripture for a model of the perfect society was doomed from the start because scripture wasn’t written to answer the question.
It’s like opening a book on the automotive industry hoping to find out how to cook pheasant-under-glass.
The Calvinist Puritans were a major force in the Reformation with serious influence among the urban merchants and the lower gentry in England.
And they were in something of a moral quandary. As Calvinists, they believed that their eternal fate was predestined, that only the elect already chosen by God would be saved irrespective of any good deeds.
This made it dreadfully difficult for someone to take comfort in his religion.
But, they reasoned, God would bless the elect in this life with economic prosperity- you could bet you were going to heaven if you did well enough at work.
This was where the association was made between money and personal moral value. For the first time, money was viewed as a salvific force, a way of trying to fill spiritual lack.
In place of faith, hope and love, thrift and hard work reigned as Puritan virtues, which they imported with them to America when they came.
As the dream of a unified, reformed Christian society faded, people needed new things to put their faith in, new ways to fill their spiritual needs… and money and all that it brought was there to step in.
Where the Reformation had looked forward to a society perfected by Christian values, capitalism simply looked forward…
to the tomorrow of progress that is never sufficient, the GDP that is never big enough, the technology that is never advanced enough, the corporations that are never profitable enough, my income that is never big enough.
In other words, we have created a system of eternal movement which can never reach its goal, can never satisfy our spiritual lack, can never perfect our society, and always creates problems through the insatiable force of the spiritual hunger behind it. Yet we worship the mechanisms of economic change for the change itself, because it makes us forget about that futility.
If capitalism, or rather our version of it, is pursued with religious fervour, that’s because it did historically become the direct substitute for religion.
To sum up, there are four main things to observe about our modern capitalism:
Capitalism is the replacement for both Protestant spirituality and the Protestant search for a perfected society
As such, it is the eternal movement toward a future fulfillment that never comes
For capitalism to slow down long enough to solve the problems it creates is impossible, because it is the movement that distracts us from our feelings of lack
The consuming and exploitative impulse of capitalism is driven by these deep-seated feelings of lack that are inherent in the human ego’s search for safety and validation
The problem is not the fact of the market.
Today, more and more people are realising that the market can be harnessed to raise human potential, encourage human creativity and serve the community, rather than the other way around. From social enterprises to green energy, there has never been a more fruitful time for these ideas.
But to make the most of them, we have to shed the mindsets which make the market harmful to us. Specifically:
We have to realise that because the market proceeds from lack and desire, it creates a false impression of zero-sum games. To grow the economy in non-parasitic ways means finding more and more ways to help other people.
Even in our business, we find many, many ways to cooperate rather than compete with those in the same field, creating mutual benefit and value for our customers. This is the future.
We need to stop seeing ourselves, others and the world’s resources as commodities and instead focus on cultivating community. We need to give ourselves the creative freedom to contribute to the world, rather than fitting into the molds the corporate economy tries to ram us into.
We create the world around us and all its aspects collectively, through our interactions and perceptions.
Just as we’ve collectively created a world full of poverty in the midst of plenty, lack in the midst of abundance and misery in the midst of wonder, so we can create a very different kind of world, one community and one company at a time.
First, though, we have to change our own perceptions…
