Articles arranged by date - Shaman Ross Bishop

Business and the Paradigm of Opposites

by Ross Bishop

Adam Smith's "invisible hand" has been business' guiding social philosophy over the centuries. Corporate people want us to believe that by acting in their own best interests, business inherently buttresses the well being of the larger society. However this doctrine known as Laissez Faire, is amoral. It makes no stand on values or the promulgation of societal well being. The old Charley Wilson quote, "What's good for General Motors is good for the country" was never true. Economists and businessmen have elevated Adam Smith to the status of a business Saint and used his philosophy to rationalize the business community's choice not to have a social conscience. While absolving themselves of social responsibility, the corporate community wields enormous political influence in the society. There is a great difference between the businessmen of Smith's day and the profit driven men at the helm of today's corporations. Smith lived in an age when even businessmen were concerned for the well being of society (within Victorian limitations). Smith would be aghast of the things done since then in his name. It was Smith who pointed out that a society in which there is an abandoned underclass is "ignoble, unlovely, and graceless, whether or not it violates any specifiable precept of justice." Robert Heilbroner writes of a problem Adam Smith posed:

In 1759 Adam Smith published The Theory of Moral Sentiments in which he posed . . . that a 'man of humanity' in Europe were to learn of a fearful earthquake in China - an earthquake that swallowed up its millions of inhabitants. How would that man react? He would, Smith mused, 'make many melancholy reflections upon the precariousness of human life, and the vanity of all the labors of man. He would, too, perhaps, if he was a man of speculation, enter into many reasonings concerning the effects which this disaster might produce upon the commerce of Europe, and the trade and business of the world in general.' Yet, when this fine philosophizing was over, would our 'man of humanity' care much about the catastrophe in distant China? He would not. . . .

But now suppose, Smith says, that our man were told he was to lose his little finger on the morrow. A very different reaction would attend the contemplation of this 'frivolous disaster'. Our man of humanity would be reduced to a tormented state, tossing all night with fear and dread - whereas 'provided he never saw them, he will snore with the most profound security over the ruin of a hundred millions of his brethren.' . . .

. . . What matters is that he has put the question that tests us to the quick. For it is one thing to appraise matters of life and death by the principles of rational self-interest and quite another to take responsibility for our choice.

Ram Dass points out that in India a cataract operation which will restore sight to a blind person, costs $5.00 and takes just four minutes. Think about what you are going to do with your next $5.00. "Well, it's just some Indians over there." What would you do if it was your father that was blind, or an uncle, or a cousin? Perhaps even better, what if a stranger approaches you in the street and says, "Pardon me, but if you'll give me $5.00, I'll be able to see." Our morality seems to be limited by proximity.

Regarding relational proximity, Ram Dass tells the story of a record set he produced some years ago which sold for $4.50. His lawyer father saw the set and said, "Gee, that's a beautiful job. You know, if that was in a store it would sell for $l5.00." "You're right," replied Ram Dass, "but, would a lot less people buy it at $l5.00?" "No," said his father, "I think probably the same number. So, why don't you charge $l5.00?" Ram Dass replied, "Because it only cost $4.50." "Well," retorted his father, "what's the trouble, are you against capitalism? You could do a lot of good with that money."

Ram Dass asked, "Didn't you just try a law case for uncle Henry?" "Yes," his father replied. "Was it hard?" Ram Dass asked. His father answered "I put in a lot of time on that case." "Well, you charge pretty good fees, I'll bet you charged him an arm and a leg," said Ram Dass. His father replied somewhat indignantly "What, are you - out of your mind? It's uncle Henry!"

"Well,"Ram Dass said, "that's where I run into a problem. If you'll show me somebody that isn't Uncle Henry, I'll rip them off."
Can we live as though other people are us? Or does it inevitably get back to "us and them?" The memorial over Ghana's ashes reads, "Remember the poorest person you have ever seen. Ask whether your next act will be of any use to that person."

Joseph Schumpeter was one of the dominant economic thinkers and social philosophers of the previous generation. His insights were also sometimes prophetic. In his Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy he wrote, "Can capitalism survive? No. I do not think it can." He pointed to the inherent flaws in capitalism that will lead to its inevitable failure. Robert Heilbroner comments:

For Schumpeter, however, the villain in the piece was not an unexpected failure of the economic machinery; it was the underlying cast of mind characteristic of a business civilization - rational, calculating, skeptical. Such a mind set served capitalism well when its rise was opposed by the "irrational" privileges of an aristocratic order; but once in the saddle, Schumpeter maintained, this critical intellectuality would be turned against the pretensions of property and would reveal them to be as empty as those of nobility."

It seems that Schumpeter's assessments were accurate. Although exhaulted by the disciples of reason, rationality is really a poor substitute for natural knowing. It is a powerful but limited form suited for important, but mundane, undertakings. The rational mind is a mind of definitions, labels and opposites. In rational theory everything is given a name, a definition, and is plugged into a proscribed category (remember high school biology?). Black is black, white is white. What is true is true, and vice versa. Unfortunately life does not fit neatly into categories. White is not always white, and this is not always that. Sometimes it is, sometimes it isn't. What is true, or fair, or ethical in one situation may not be so in another. What is good for the goose may not be good for the gander. Life is not only messy, it is experiential; therefore it defies definition. Rationality is essential for balancing checkbooks and for mathematics and chemistry but these are limited functions as they are devoid of spiritual significance. The limits of the rational mind restrict consciousness to the boundaries of its definitions, its paradigms. Ken Wilbur comments:

Have you ever wondered why life comes in opposites? Why everything you value is one of a pair of opposites? Why all decisions are between opposites? Why all desires are based on opposites?

Notice that all spatial and directional dimensions are opposites: up vs. down, inside vs. outside, high vs. low, long vs. short, North vs. South, big vs. small, here vs. there, top vs. bottom, left vs. right. And notice that all things we consider serious and important are one pole of a pair of opposites: good vs. evil, life vs. death, pleasure vs. pain, God vs. Satan, freedom vs. bondage.

So also, our social and esthetic values are always put in terms of opposites: success vs. failure, beautiful vs. ugly, strong vs. weak, intelligent vs. stupid . . . Our world seems to be a massive collection of opposites.
This fact is so commonplace as to hardly need mentioning, but the more one ponders it the more it is strikingly peculiar. For nature, it seems, knows nothing of this world of opposites in which people live. Nature doesn't grow true frogs and false frogs, nor moral trees and immoral trees, nor right oceans and wrong oceans. There is no trace in nature of ethical mountains and unethical mountains. Nor are there such things as beautiful species and ugly species - at least not to Nature, for she is pleased to produce all kinds . . .
The peculiar thing about a boundary is that, however complex and rarefied it might be, it actually marks off nothing but an inside and vs. an outside . . . But notice that the opposites of inside vs. outside didn't exist in themselves until we drew the boundary of the circle. It is the boundary line itself, in other words, which creates a pair of opposites. In short, to draw boundaries is to manufacture opposites . .
And the world of opposites is a world of conflict . . .

Now our habitual way of trying to solve these problems is to attempt to eradicate one of these opposites. We handle the problem of good vs. evil by trying to exterminate evil. We handle the problem of life vs. death by trying to hide death under symbolic immoralities . . .

The point is that we always tend to treat the boundary as real and then manipulate the opposites created by the boundary. We never seem to question the existence of the boundary itself. Because we believe the boundary to be real, we staunchly imagine that the opposites are irreconcilable, separate, forever set apart . . .
Thus we suppose that life would be perfectly enjoyable if we could only eradicate all the negative and unwanted poles of the pairs of opposites. If we could vanquish pain, evil, death, suffering, sickness, so that goodness, life, joy, and health would abound - that, indeed, would be the good life, and in fact, that is precisely many peoples' idea of Heaven. Heaven has come to mean, not a transcendence of all opposites, but the place where all the positive halves of the pairs of opposites are accumulated, while Hell is the place where are massed all of the negative halves: pain, suffering, torment, anxiety, sickness . . .
. . . for in seeking to accentuate the positive and eliminate the negative, we have forgotten entirely that the positive is defined only in terms of the negative. The opposites might be indeed as different as night and day, but the essential point is that without night we would not even be able to recognize something called day . .

Although relatively unknown in the West, the great Chinese sage Lao Tsu, was one of the most insightful men that has ever lived. His verses in the Tao Te Ching contain a depth and wisdom unmatched since. He wrote of dualism:

Under heaven all can see beauty as beauty
only because there is ugliness.
All can know good as good
only because there is evil.

Therefore having and not having arise together.
Difficult and easy complement each other.
Long and short contrast each other;
High and low rest upon each other;
Voice and sound harmonize each other;
Front and back follow one another.

Therefore the sage goes about doing nothing,
teaching no-talking.
The ten thousand things rise and fall without cease.
Creating, yet not possessing.
Working, yet not taking credit.
Work is done, then forgotten.
Therefore it lasts forever.

We tenaciously cling to our opposites. When we are ungrounded spiritually, dualities give the uncertain world a sense, albeit a false one, of order, of certainty. Unfortunately, something always comes along to pull the rug out from under our opposite-defined perceptions. As Nietsche said, "It is man who puts values on a valueless universe." The limitations of rational men, locked into their ideas (paradigms) of the world and unable to see over the horizon and imagine what might be, are legendary. Although their pronouncements are almost humorous in hindsight, we need to remember that these are the voices of the establishment, and they wield considerable influence in society, even today. You will find views such as these in the news every day. Here are a few notable examples from the past:

"The ordinary 'horseless carriage' is at present a luxury for the wealthy; and although its price will probably fall in the future, it will never, of course, come into as common use as the bicycle."
Literary Digest, October 4, 1889

Just after W.W.I a management consulting firm told General Motors to dump its Chevrolet division because the company could never hope to make a success of the car.

A Midwestern utility offered Henry Ford a good job if he would stop working on his gasoline engine and devote himself to something useful.

In the 1840's the bathtub was denounced as an Epicurean innovation from England. The medical profession warned against it "as a producer of rheumatic fevers, inflammatory lungs and all zygotic diseases."

"Flight by machines heavier than air is unpractical and insignificant, if not utterly impossible." Simon Newcomb, astronomer, 1902.

In the very year that the Wright brothers first flew, the patent offices were refusing applications for flying machines. And, in that same year Congress passed a special bill forbidding the Army to waste any more money on trying out flying machines. It seems that Langley of the Smithsonian Institute had used Army money to build an unsuccessful plane (which was later proved to be capable of flight).

"Train travel is impossible, because passengers, unable to breathe would die of asphyxia." Dionysus Lardner, Prof. Natural Philosophy & Astronomy, University College, London, 19th century.

"The Grand Canyon is, of course, altogether valueless . . . Ours has been the first, and will doubtless be the last, party of whites to visit this profitless locality. It seems intended by nature that the Colorado river . . . shall be forever unvisited and undisturbed" Lt. Joseph C. Ives, Corps of Topographical Engineers, 1861.

". . . even if the propeller had the power of propelling a vessel (a ship), it would be found altogether useless in practice, because the power being applied to the stern, it would be absolutely impossible to make the vessel steer." Sir William Symonds, Surveyor (Chief Engineer) of the British Navy, 1837.

A U.S. District Attorney accusing Lee DeForrest in his 1913 fraud trial asserted, "DeForrest has said in many newspapers and over his signature that it would be possible to transmit the human voice across the Atlantic for many years. Based on these absurd and deliberately misleading statements of DeForrest, the misguided public, Your Honor, has been persuaded to purchase stock in his company."

"We hope the professor of Clark College (Robert H. Goddard) is only pretending to be ignorant of elementary physics if he thinks that a rocket can fly in a vacuum . . . Of course he only seems to lack the knowledge ladled out daily in high schools . . . " Editorial, NY Times, 1920 (retracted the day Neil Armstrong walked on the moon).

Lord Rutherford, once the world's leading expert on nuclear physics maintained until his death in 1937 that the idea of releasing atomic energy was "pure moonshine." Admiral Wm. F. Leahy commenting on the proposed atomic bomb to Pres. Harry Truman said, "That is the biggest fool thing we have ever done . . . The bomb will never go off, and I speak as an expert in explosives."

If we cannot stem the tide of rock 'n roll with its waves of rhythmic narcosis and of future waves of vicarious craze, we are preparing our own downfall in the midst of pandemonic funeral dances. Dr. A.M. Meerio, Assoc. Professor of Psychiatry, Columbia University, 1957.

The restrictions of rational thinking did not start in the 20th century. Cyprian of Carthage wrote in 250 AD:

The world tells its own tale and in its general decadence bears adequate witness that it is approaching its end. There is less rain in winter to encourage the growth of seeds; springtime is not now so enjoyable or autumn so fruitful; the quarries, as if from weariness, give less stone and marble and the gold and silver mines are already worked out . . . Everything these days is rushing to its doom.

William Berkeley, the British Governor of Virginia, probably holds the record for Patrician elitism. He gives good insight into the roots of the American Revolution. He wrote in 1670:

I thank God there are no free schools, nor printing, and I hope we shall not have them these hundred years; for learning has brought disobedience and heresy and sects into the world, and printing has divulged them and libels against the best government.