Dragons - Chapter 54 (DRAFT)

That was pretty much a typical day at our Annual Conference. Up before the break of dawn, disappoint just about everyone you come into contact with (most of all yourself), and collapse in your hotel room minutes before or after midnight. I was there for four more days after that first one, and they all went like that.

As the week wore on, however, there were fewer and fewer people to disappoint. The second day of the conference was typically the busiest, when the maximum number of people were there, cramming themselves into depressing hotel rooms by night and even more depressing meeting rooms by day, all for the fleeting chance at something they couldn’t get at home. For most, that was education -- a new perspective, a new way, a new lease on their professional lives. For a few, it was more about what happened between the sessions than in the sessions themselves. It was intense and lonely. Few could sustain it for more than two or three days. By the third day there were noticeably fewer people, by the fourth we were probably down to 60% of the total, and by the fifth and last day we approached actually ghost town status.

And as the attendees drifted away, so did the staff. At the beginning we had practically everyone there, every able body needed for some vital task, pushing registration envelopes into waiting hands or moving banquet chairs from one room to another to match unexpected demands. But with fewer attendees there were fewer such demands, and the company, always looking to save money, made sure no one outstayed their usefulness. Matching the pace of the attendees, a small group was dismissed at the end of the third day, including, much to my relief, Bethany Bishop; and a much larger contingent at the end of the fourth, including, much to my even greater relief, Mary Walton. On the fifth and final day, it’s safe to assume that we had little more than a skeleton crew left.

In fact, there were only four of us. Me, the captain of our tiny crew; Angie Ferguson, my executive officer, the person who actually knew how to run things on our sinking ship; and our two enlisted personnel, the two tasked with the actual bailing, Jeff Hatchler and Caroline Abernathy.

On that last day, our official duties wrapped up relatively early. With no dinner events planned, the conference closed up around 2:00 PM. We had to work a little longer than that, packing up boxes and making arrangements to ship them back to the office, but that didn’t take us long. And that was good, because we were all booked on the same flight back home, leaving Miami International that evening at 7:35 PM.

We had plenty of time to kill at the airport, so after clearing security, the four of us gathered in a corner of one of the airport bars and grill, this one pretending to specialize in Cuban sandwiches.

“Hey guys,” the waitress said, appearing at our table before all of us had even found our chairs. Her hair was curly and black, and piled high on top of her head. “What can I get you?”

“I need a beer,” Jeff said immediately.

What followed was a kind of odd silence. Even the waitress, gleaning apparently from our appearance that we were business travelers and, even more intuitively that I was the senior man on the totem pole, understood that this was a work function. If there was going to be alcohol served, I would need to okay it.

“Me, too,” I said.

Permission thus granted, the waitress began reciting everything they had on tap. Jeff selected one and I selected another. Angie ordered a glass of white wine, and Caroline a rum and coke.

“What about food?”

“Give us a minute,” I said, snatching the menu out of the cardboard six-pack holder that served as both the centerpiece and the caddy for the mustard and ketchup.

“You got it.”

It felt like I had just begun to decipher the menu -- my weary brain struggling with both its font and its phraseology -- when she returned with our drinks.

“That was quick,” I said, this time catching the letters printed on her plastic name tag.

“Most people like fast service here,” Consuelo said, dropping a cardboard coaster in front of each of us before placing each drink. “What time is your flight?”

“Seven thirty-five,” Angie replied, snatching the stem of her wine glass before it could leave a ring on the coaster.

“You’ve got time,” Consuelo said. “Do you want to put an order in now, or wait a while?”

I didn’t even think to ask anyone. “Let’s wait. Come back in thirty minutes?”

“You got it.”

Everyone else kept studying their menus, but I put mine back in the caddy. I had already decided. When Consuelo came back, I was going to ask her which was her favorite item and order that. She looked both trustworthy and like she would have a firm opinion.

“I’d like to make a toast,” I said with mock formality, lifting my frosted beer glass into the air. I waited for everyone to respond in kind, and then, with as much good-hearted sarcasm as my tired voice could muster, I said, “To Miami Beach. May we all someday actually get to know her.”

It was a running joke in our company. It acknowledged what we all knew or eventually came to understand. Despite all the travel and beautiful locations we visited, we never truly spent any quality time in any of them. When it came to experiencing a destination, airports and convention hotels just didn’t count.

We all took a healthy swig of our respective drinks, mine more healthy than most.

“I’d also like to make a toast,” Angie said before any of us could set our glasses down.

“Indeed,” I said, raising my glass higher. “Be my guest.”

“A toast,” Angie said. “To you, Alan.”

“To me?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Because you knocked the shit out of this conference. Short two staff people, and with the woman in the presidential suite rooting against you, and you still managed to pull off a win. You were everywhere you needed to be and you kept the damn thing from running off the rails.”

It was Angie’s way of giving a compliment. There wasn’t a trace of sarcasm in her voice.

“Just wanted you to know that some of us noticed.”

“Here, here,” Jeff said.

I didn’t know what to say. I looked from one of them to the other. Even Caroline seemed to be smiling at me.

“Thanks,” I said finally, reaching out and clinking each one of their glasses. I thought about asking Angie what she meant by the woman in the presidential suite rooting against me, but decided this wasn’t the time or place. “You guys did pretty well yourselves. Dinner is on me tonight.”

“So,” Jeff asked me after taking another long sip of his beer and plopping his glass down, a line of foam still on his lip. “Are you my boss now?”

Later, after we had eaten and we were sitting in the gate area waiting for a flight to board, I had a chance to talk quietly with Angie.

“Angie, what did you mean before about the woman in the presidential suite rooting against me?”

She let the crochet she was working on drop into her lap. “You don’t know?”

“I might,” I said. “I just want to hear you say it.”

“Eleanor Rumford,” she said, discreetly looking around to avoid being overheard. “She has it in for you.”

“In what way?”

Angie proceeded to tell me a little story. In this story, a woman named Eleanor Rumford came to her in the time between the mix-up with Dr. Lancaster’s slides and my own discussion with her and Mary before the dinner session, and asked her a bunch of leading questions about the performance and conduct of someone named Alan Larson.

“She was looking for dirt on you, Alan.”

“What do you mean?”

“She wanted me to say something negative about you; about the way you conduct yourself, or the decisions you make, or the things you do. I got the distinct impression she was planning to shoot you and was checking in case I had any bullets.”

“You didn’t give her any, did you?”

Angie picked up her project and started crocheting again, her thick fingers working quickly to stab and tug the yarn with a hooked needle.

“Nah, fuck her. Like I said, you’re one of the good ones, Alan.”

I thanked Angie, told her I appreciated her support, and then excused myself to go use the restroom. On the way I had to step over Jeff and Caroline, both sitting cross-legged on the floor, a couple of piles of playing cards fanned out between them. They might have said something to me. I might have even disturbed their game. I was too preoccupied to think much about my surroundings. Angie had defended me, and that was good, but I knew Angie was likely not the only person Eleanor had asked. As I made my way down the concourse, I found myself counting not my steps, as I habitually did, but the number of people in the company who might have been willing to put bullets in Eleanor’s gun.

+ + +

“Dragons” is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author's imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental. For more information, go here.

This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

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The Culture of Make Believe by Derrick Jensen

If memory serves, I bought this one up at a roadside used bookstore and cafe in Cosby, Tennessee. It was a complete impulse buy. I liked the title and I liked the cover, so I picked it up. What is it about?

In The Culture of Make Believe, Derrick Jensen sets the bar as high as possible, examining the atrocities that characterize so much of our culture -- from lynchings in early 20th century America, modern slavery and corporate misdeeds to manufacturing disasters, death squads in developing nations and the destruction of the natural world.

Interweaving political, historical, philosophical and deeply personal perspectives, Jensen argues that only by understanding past horrors can we hope to prevent future ones. Impeccably researched, The Culture of Make Believe arrives at some shocking and thought-provoking conclusions. As readers of A Language Older Than Words can attest, Jensen is a public intellectual of rare abilities.

That’s the blurb on the back of the book -- and it sold me. It’s big. 700 pages. But yes, let’s do this. Let’s dive right into that world.

One System to Rule Them All

“Monsters exist, but they are too few in number to be truly dangerous. More dangerous are the common men, the functionaries ready to believe and to act without asking questions.”

That’s a quote from Primo Levi, and it’s the first of many that will lead off each of Jensen’s short chapters. It’s also a good one to tease out one of the major themes of his book -- a theme that is eerily reminiscent of the last book I read. Simply put, when it comes to the atrocities that are committed in our society, it is not the individuals committing those atrocities that are finally to blame for them, not unless and until you assess and assign the appropriate blame to the cultural system in which they have lived all their lives.

Jensen first develops this idea when talking about the racial violence perpetrated by the Ku Klux Klan.

But to simply blame the KKK for the violence would be to miss a deeper point, akin to blaming McDonald’s for high blood pressure or Weyerhaeuser for global deforestation. The Ku Klux Klan, like McDonald’s, like Weyerhaeuser, like the United States government, is a fiction created or adapted to accomplish some set of social purposes. It exists only insofar as we believe it does.

This doesn’t mean that violence committed by people who called, or call themselves Klan members isn’t real, nor that membership in the Klan doesn’t encourage certain behaviors on the parts of its members, because, clearly, it does, as membership in any social organization does. I don’t know of many people who, for example, deforest hillsides simply for the hell of it; they do so because they’re socially rewarded -- in this case, paid -- for doing so, Weyerhaeuser being just one of the social forms created to facilitate this social reward.

What this means is that on one hand it’s pointless and misleading -- and thus harmful -- to demonize the KKK (or McDonald’s, Weyerhaeuser, or the United States government), because the impulse to commit atrocities doesn’t so much originate with the organization as pass through and become amplified by it. To merely eliminate the KKK -- no matter how tempting a thought -- would not stop the atrocities.

The power of the system -- or the frame -- to blind us to finding the real culprits in our world is not something easily dismissed or underestimated. One powerful demonstration of this comes from another of Jensen’s chapter-heading quotes, this one from Allan Griswold Johnson.

“It is difficult to believe that such widespread violence (that girls twelve years old in the United States now stand a twenty to thirty percent chance of being violently sexually assaulted in their lifetimes) is the responsibility of a small lunatic fringe of psychopathic men. That sexual violence is so pervasive supports the view that the locus of violence against women rests squarely in the middle of what our culture defines as “normal” interactions between men and women. The numbers reiterate a reality that American women have lived with for years: sexual violence against women is part of the every-day fabric of American life.”

But If you’re squeamish about the linking of the KKK to corporate America and then to the United States government, you’d better stop reading now -- because Jensen won’t be deviating from that line of thought. Indeed, as he digs deeper and deeper into the “system” that bares responsibility for atrocities, he begins by calling it by a familiar name -- capitalism. And on that frame he will make one of the truly meaningful distinctions when it comes to worldviews -- economic or otherwise.

The Tyranny of the Zero Sum Game

Much of the danger of our social system is that, in contradistinction to the majority of human societies for the majority of human existence, it is based not on cooperation but on competition, always on the victory of one at the expense of another.

Yes, the old canard of the “zero-sum game.” When those indoctrinated into it meet people of a different perspective -- let’s call them “win-winners” instead of “zero-sumers” -- there is always and only one reaction. Destroy the infidel! Because, of course, the zero-sum game is a self-fulfilling prophecy.

If you believe that the fundamental organizing principle of the world is competition (or if the fundamental organizing principle of your society is competition) you will perceive the world as full of ruthless competitors, all of whom will victimize you if they get the chance. The world as you perceive it will begin to devolve into consisting entirely or almost entirely of victims and perpetrators: those who do, and those who get done to; the fuckers, and the fucked. Your society will devolve -- not in perception but in all truth -- into these roles you have projected onto the world at large. You will begin to believe that everyone is out to get you. And why not? After all, you are certainly out to get them.

It’s funny how Jensen will come to lay this cut-throat, zero-sum worldview at the feet of capitalism -- as opposed to say, communism -- since, from where I sit capitalism, despite its flaws, is the one system of the two that can actually grow the size of the pie that we all inequitably share.

But as Jensen correctly points out, this misunderstanding of reality creates all kinds of undetected misrepresentations in a society -- some with troubling consequences. But, as he again goes out of his way to stress, even those misperceptions are not some single person’s or class’s fault.

The near ubiquity of this misperception -- that of the poor perceiving others of their station in life to be the source of their misery, a misperception that continues unabated to this day -- is not the product of mass stupidity on the part of members of those great sectors of the population who fall prey to it, nor is it part of a fiendishly clever plot by the rich to consistently keep the poor at each other’s throats instead of their own (although the inculcation in this direction by those who own and thus control the media is literally mind numbing). It is a manifestation of the selective blindness that besets us all. We have been trained, from early on, to be able to perceive only certain threats, to perceive only certain forms of hatred, contempt, violence, and to perceive only certain sorts of people as even potential perpetrators of horrible crimes. We have been trained to perceive the world and those in it in very specific ways.

Yes, the misperceptions are endemic to the system -- not the fault of any of the people subservient to that system. And therefore one should be careful with the language one uses to describe the phenomenon. Jensen says we have been “trained,” but to my ear that implies a “trainer” -- perhaps one of those who “own and thus control” the media. Like evolution, there really is no designer. The journey forward is driven by forces as blind as natural selection.

Slavery to an Idea

As I see it, there are two key problems with Jensen’s argument. Here’s a tight summary of the first.

Our culture has made us all slaves to an idea, and idea that takes precedence over everything, over our own lives and the lives of others. And slavery to an idea is far more dangerous than slavery to a human, because we do not even know that we are slaves. We pass through our days with the freedom of a dog who never reaches the end of its leash, certain that what we see is all of reality, all there ever was, all there ever will be, all that is possible. Having enslaved ourselves to this idea, we then enslave others, passing on the knowledge of how to be a slave from father to son, father to daughter, mother to son, mother to daughter, sibling to sibling, teacher to student, owner to laborer, boss to employee, slave to slave.

In other words, it’s not just slavery to this idea that is the problem, but our very tendency to become slaves to our ideas in the first place. But is there an idea that won’t “enslave” me in exactly the way that Jensen describes? Whether the idea is capitalism, communism, anarchy, or the hundreds of gradations in-between, how does any idea prevent us from being the dog that has not yet found the end of its leash? What idea can transport me beyond the limits of my own understanding, my own abilities, my own finite existence? Be careful, Fido, if you think you’ve found one. From the philosopher’s point of view, some leashes are longer than others, but none of them are infinitely long.

The Blame Game

The second problem has to do with Jensen’s unfortunate tendency, usually after arguing persuasively that there is no one to blame, to assign blame. Here’s another useful quote from the front of one of Jensen’s chapters, this one from philosopher John Lachs.

“The distance we feel from our actions is proportionate to our ignorance of them; our ignorance, in turn, is largely a measure of the length of the chain of intermediaries between ourselves and our acts. … As consciousness of the context drops out, the actions become motions without consequence. With the consequence out of view, people can be parties to the most abhorrent acts without ever raising the question of their own role and responsibility. Wage earners who insert the fuse in bombs can view their activity as but a series of repetitive motions performed for a living. Railroad workers who take trainloads of prisoners to extermination camps can think of themselves as simply providing transportation. … The remarkable thing is that we are not unable to recognize wrong acts or gross injustices when we see them. What amazes us is how they could have come about when each of us did none but harmless acts. We look for someone to blame then, for conspiracies that might explain the horrors we all abhor. It is difficult to accept that often there is no person and no group that planned or caused it all. It is even more difficult to see how our actions, through their remote effects, contributed to causing misery. It is no cop-out to think oneself blameless and condemn society. It is the natural result of large-scale mediation which inevitably leads to monstrous ignorance.”

Lachs here is saying both that it is natural for us to look for someone to blame and how wrong it is for us to do so. Jensen, especially is some of his transcribed dialogues with his colleagues and mentors, seems to focus a little too much on the first point, less so on the second.

For example:

“I’m not talking about a conspiracy here[,” said sociologist George Ritzer. “]Instead it’s simply a system of rewards. There are a limited number of things that any system rewards, and that people within a system -- any kind of system -- want. When we talk about our economic system, we’re talking about people wanting profit, and more deeply, we’re talking about control and power. Now, having control and power as goals -- and as requirements -- leads to the creation of a series of systems, all of which are set up to maximize profitability, power, and control. When we find ourselves either working with those systems or trapped inside of them, we consciously or unconsciously work to achieve that kind of profitability or control. But even when we’re not in those kinds of systems, we may or may not become conscious of the fact that those systems are still exercising that power and control over us.”

See. It’s a system. It’s not so much the people in the system. It’s the system itself. But Jensen responds:

I said, “It seems to me that the problem isn’t that there is a code, as such, All cultures must have codes. All communication involves codes. The question, it seems, always comes down to who benefits.”

Yes. Let’s talk about who benefits.

He answered, “You can’t address that question without addressing capitalism.” … “It’s clear that, especially with the increasing elimination of alternatives, capitalism is rigged in favor of the haves. We have by some definitions the most successful economic system in the world’s history, yet it is a system which benefits a relatively small number of people. The great majority of the people in the world benefit little or nothing by this.”

“Far from benefitting,” I said, “many are killed.”

“And just in the United States,” he said, “a small number of people have grown incredibly wealthy in this great economic expansion of the 1990s while the vast majority have gained little or nothing. So, who gains from all of this? The people in power, the people who control these systems, the people who own blocks of shares in these systems: they gain. It’s part of our mythology in this country -- part of our code, if you will -- that what is good for capitalism is good for the country.”

They. The ones who control the system. They’re the ones to blame, right? To be fair, I guess Jensen doesn’t say that flat out, but I think that’s the implication. But I’m not sure Peter Senge would agree. Senge would say that the people in the system -- even the ones that benefit from it -- are part of the system. They are no more “in control” of it than the raindrop is “in control” of the rainstorm.

And although I think it’s true that income inequality has increased in the United States since the 1990s -- I’m pretty sure that hasn’t been the case throughout the history of capitalism. Take a look at any chart showing the decline in global poverty over the last hundred years and then come back and argue that “the great majority of the people in the world benefit little or nothing” from the system. Isn’t the lower class American better off today than the European serf in the Middle Ages? Or the ancient hunter-gatherer on the African savannah?

The God Standing Behind the God

But capitalism isn’t really the system that Jensen thinks of as the problem. He sees another driving force -- another system -- behind that one. First, he calls it production.

In a nutshell, our culture’s real response to diversity is this: Nothing shall be deliberately or unthinkingly allowed to detract from the central movement of our culture, toward monolithic control, toward production -- which, after all, is nothing but the turning of the living (forests) into the dead (two-by-fours), the living (mountains) into the dead (aluminum cans) -- toward the annihilation of all that is different. In other words, it calls for the annihilation of life. Production is the manifestation in the physical world of the psychic process of objectification. It is the turning of the subject (a cow, for example) into the object (profit on the hoof, as agribusinessmen say). To do so, necessarily kills the subject, first inside the objectifier’s experience, and then in the physical world.

Production, however, is not the end point. Production, deified as it has become, is not the god who stands behind the god. The god who stands behind the god is annihilation. Where does our production lead us? Psychic death. Emotional death. Physical death. And, as should be increasingly clear to anyone paying any attention whatsoever, it is leading us ever more quickly toward the death of every living being.

Admittedly, this is where Jensen begins to lose me. From where I sit, his argument sounds a little like saying that water is bad because you can drown in too much of it. Yes, water can kill you -- can, in fact, lead us “ever more quickly toward the death of every living being” -- but the right amount of water -- for drinking, or bathing, or cleaning -- is actually a good thing. Production itself isn’t bad, even if production taken to certain extremes is very, very bad.

And yet Jensen will go on to describe the worst of all possible cases of production, and thereby imply that all production is bad. Here’s one especially compelling example of his technique, taken from the time of the First World War.

At the same time Tom Lamont [of the J. P. Morgan Company] was articulating the abstract monetary rewards that would accrue “if the war lasts long enough to encourage us,” people were dying in Europe: “Men had lost arms and legs, brains oozed out of shattered skulls, and lungs protruded from riven chests; many had lost their faces and were, I should think, unrecognizable to their friends. … One poor chap had lost his nose and most of his face, and we were obliged to take off an arm, the other hand, and extract two bullets like shark’s teeth from his thigh.” While Lamont spoke of becoming “lenders on a really stupendous scale,” a frontline nurse spoke of other, more tangible topics: “I pushed the clothes back and saw a pulp, a mere mass of smashed body from the ribs downwards; the stomach and abdomen were completely crushed and his left leg was hanging to the pulped body by only a few shreds of flesh. … The soldier’s dull eyes were looking at me and his lips moved, but no words came. What it cost me to turn away without aiding him, I cannot describe, but we could not waste time and material on hopeless cases, and there were so many others waiting.” At the same time that Jack Morgan, having fully internalized Thomas Mellon’s advice that a man may “be a patriot without risking his own life or sacrificing his health,” served at home -- either his fifty-seven room home on two hundred and fifty acres near Long Island (twelve bedrooms, twenty-five bathrooms, eighteen marble fireplaces, sixteen-car garage, and gymnasium), or his “unexpectedly light and spacious” home in New York City (forty-five rooms, twenty-two fireplaces, and a dozen bathrooms) -- others were being killed far away from family, home, and any friendly face: “Those who could walk, got up and followed us; running, hopping, limping, by our sides. The badly crippled crawled after us; all begging beseeching us not to abandon them in their need. And, on the road, there were others, many others; some of them lying down in the dust, exhausted. They, too, called after us. They held on to us; praying us to stop with them. We had to wrench our skirts from the clinging hands.”

See what he did there? Production enables war. War is bad. Therefore, production is bad. And profiting from the production that enables war is especially bad. That could all be true -- but aren’t the men who profit from the production that enables the war and the men who are killed and maimed in that war part of the same system? The House of Morgan may have profited from the First World War, but did the House of Morgan start the First World War? Did they bring it about so they could profit while other men died? That, I think, is what Jensen would have us believe, which leans us back toward to conclusion that someone -- not something -- is to blame for all this death and horror.

But Jensen’s argument will go even farther than this. It’s not just the bad men in the system, and it’s not just the system -- capitalism or the production that fuels it. The real enemy is something even more diffuse and fundamental than that.

Our culture’s deep foundation of competition creates waves of rage and hatred. Not only does this anger get misdirected because it’s easier to express it against the powerless, and not only because we are routinely pitted against others of the powerless, but, most especially, because, if we were to focus on the real sources of that rage and hatred, we would soon find ourselves questioning our very identities. Because so many of us have identified ourselves so deeply as civilized, as producers, consumers, workers, engineers, bakers, writers, soldiers, policemen, teachers, we have forgotten that first we are human beings. And what is that? We have no idea. To identify so deeply with the system of production that permeates the deepest recesses of our bodies, just like dioxin from manufacturing, like radiation from fallout, like heavy metals from mining, is to identify with the founding processes of civilization: conquest and repression. To recognize that our lives are based on the processes would -- if we reject instead of embrace them -- set us adrift in unknown territory. Who would I be and how would I live if I were not part of this system?

When I first read passages like this I had a hard time wrapping my head around what Jensen was talking about. He’s not saying civilization itself is the problem, is he?

Get rid of civilization? I can hear you say. That’s your solution? The hatred that characterizes so much of our system -- the hatred I’ve described and analyzed in this book -- is not a product of biology. People are not fundamentally hateful. Our hate is not a result of several billion years of natural selection. It’s a result of the framing conditions under which each of us are raised. It’s a result of the unquestioned assumptions that inform us. If we want to stop the hate, we need to get rid of the framing conditions. Until we do that, we’re bound to fail. So, yes, that is precisely my solution, we need to get rid of civilization.

Yes, he is. Civilization is the god that stands behind all the other gods.

But I think Jensen makes a fatal error here. You may be able to convince me that conquest and repression are the founding processes of production, and later of capitalism, but you aren’t going to convince me that civilization itself (not “our civilization,” but “civilization itself”) is based on them. Civilization began when humans started growing rather than hunting their own food. Growing food meant staying in one place rather than moving around, and the relative abundance that it created allowed different people in the culture to take on different roles. No longer did everyone have to be always dedicated to the acquisition and preparation of food, now some, as Jensen correctly says above, could be “engineers, bakers, writers, soldiers, policemen, teachers.” It was agriculture and this division of labor that first created civilization in its modern sense. Only later, when different cultures began rubbing uncomfortably against others did things like conquest, repression, production, and capitalism come into their own.

But that distinction seems lost on Jensen. He wants to throw the civilized baby out with the repressive bathwater.

The Solution That Wasn’t There

And how are we supposed to do this? How are we supposed to get rid of civilization? Does he want us to go back to being hunter-gatherers? We’re not going to do that. Never. Isn’t there some other path -- some middle path -- that we could take? What is your solution, Jensen?

How do we bring down civilization? I cannot tell you.

How do I describe how unbelievably frustrating it was to get to the bottom of page 603 only to be told that all I have been reading is a diagnosis without a prescription? Jensen doesn’t know how we get rid of civilization, but more than that, he hasn’t done enough to convince me that we even should. Throughout his text he wavers back and forth between blaming the system and blaming the people at the top of the system. In fact, a handful of pages before this disappointment, he passionately lays out the many-layered challenge that his “civilization system” represents. For this section, it will be helpful to understand who Jensen has previously defined as members of his four groups.

Group 1 = the elite
Group 2 = the upper class
Group 3 = the lower class
Group 4 = the invisible people

What will the great holocausts of the twenty-first century look like? It depends on where you stand. Look around.

If you’re in group one, the decent White men, your postmodern holocausts will be, at most, barely visible, and, at least, a price you’re willing to pay, as Madame Albright said about killing Iraqi children. The holocausts will probably share similarities with other holocausts, as you attempt to maximize production -- to “grow the economy,” as you might say -- and, as when necessary, you attempt to eradicate dissent. This means the holocaust will look like a booming economy beset by shifting problems that somehow always keep you from ever reaching the Promised Land, whatever that might be. The holocaust will look like numbers on ledgers. It will look like technical problems to be solved, whether those problems are increasing your access to necessary resources, dealing with global warming, calming unrest on the streets, or figuring out what to do about too many unproductive people on land you know you could be put to better use. The holocaust will look like houses with gates, limousines with bulletproof glass, and a military budget that can never stop increasing. … The holocaust will feel like economics. It will feel like progress. It will feel like technological innovation. It will feel like civilization. It will feel like the way things are.

If you’re in the second group, you will continue to be co-opted into supporting the system that does not serve you well. Perhaps, the holocaust will look like a new car. Perhaps it will look like eating a bar of chocolate. Perhaps it will look like lending your talents to a major corporation -- or, more broadly, toward economic production -- so you can make a better life for your children. Perhaps it will look like working as an engineer for Shell or on an assembly line for General Motors. Maybe it will look like basing a person’s value on her or his employability or productivity. Perhaps it will look like anger at Mexicans or Pakistanis or Algerians or Hmong who compete with you for jobs, and who, of course, because they don’t live like fully human beings, can afford to work for less. Perhaps it will look like outrage at environmentalists who want to save some damn suckerfish, even (or especially) if it impinges on your property rights, or if it takes water you need to irrigate, to make the desert bloom, to make the desert productive. Maybe it will feel like continuing to do a job that you hate -- and that requires so little of your humanity -- because, no matter how you try, you never can seem to catch up. Maybe it will feel like being tired at the end of the day, and just wanting to sit and watch some television. …

If you’re in the subsection of the third group, who might some day resist but don’t know where to put your rage, the holocaust might look like armed robbery, auto theft, assault. It might look like joining a gang. It might look like needle tracks down the insides of your arms, and might smell like the bitter, vinegary stench of tar heroin. Or maybe it smells minty strong, like menthol, like the sweet smell of crack brought into your neighborhood at the behest of the CIA. Or maybe not. Maybe it’s the unmistakable smell of the inside of a cop car, and a vision through that rear window of a little girl eating an ice cream cone, with the knowledge that never in your life will you see this sight again. Maybe it looks like Pelican Bay, or Marion, or San Quentin, or Leavenworth. Or maybe it feels like a bullet in the back of the head, and leaves you lying on the streets of New York City, Cincinnati, Seattle, Oakland, Los Angeles, Atlanta, Baltimore, Washington D.C.

If you’re a member of the subsection of group three, already working against the centralization of power, against the system, then, maybe, from your perspective, the holocaust looks like rows of black-clad armored policemen, and it smells like tear gas. Maybe it looks like lobbying a Congress you know has never served you. Maybe it looks like the destruction of place after wild place, and feels like an impotence sharp as a broken leg. Maybe it looks like staring down the barrel of an American-made gun in the hands of a Colombian man wearing American-made camo fatigues, and knowing that your life is over.

For those of the fourth class, the simply extra, maybe it looks like the view from just outside the chain link fence surrounding a chemical refinery, and maybe it smells like Cancer Alley. Maybe it looks like children with leukemia, children with cancer of the spine, children with birth defects. Maybe it feels like the grinding ache of hunger that has been your closest companion since you were born. Maybe it looks like the death of your daughter from starvation, and the death of your son from diphtheria, measles, or chicken pox. Maybe it feels like death from dehydration, when a tablet costing less than a penny could have saved your life. Or maybe it feels like nothing. Maybe it sounds like nothing, looks like nothing: What does it feel like to be struck by a missile in the middle of the night, a missile traveling faster than the speed of sound, a missile launched a thousand miles away?

Maybe it feels like salmon battering themselves against dams, monkeys locked in steel cages, polar bears starving on a dwindling ice cap, hogs confined in crates so small they cannot stand, trees falling to the chainsaw, rivers poisoned, whales deafened by sonic blasts from Navy experiments. Maybe it feels like the crack of tibia under the unforgiving jaws of a leghold trap.

Maybe it looks like the destruction of the planet’s life support systems. Maybe it looks like the final conversion of the living to the dead.

This litany becomes either increasingly compelling or increasingly ridiculous, depending on your point of view. To me, it underscores the wild complexity of it all, and the untenableness of the notion that someone, or some class of people, is to blame for it. It is a system -- one that is likely endemic to our reality. It may be the ultimate system, and there is no larger system that one can ascend to in order to get a better grasp of all its interlocking pieces.

As much as I cannot help but see the similarities between prisons and concentration camps, it seems to me a grave error to count on Zyklon-B-dispensing showers to mark the new holocaust. Perhaps the new holocaust is dioxin in polar bear fat, metam sodium in the Smith River. Perhaps it comes in the form of decreasing numbers of corporations controlling increasing portions of our food supply, until, as now, three huge corporations control more than 80 percent of the beef market, and seven corporations control more than 90 percent of the grain market. Perhaps it comes in the form of these corporations, and the governments which provide the muscle for them, deciding who eats and who does not. Perhaps it comes in the form of so much starvation that we cannot count the dead. Perhaps it comes in the form of all of these, and in many others I could not name even if I were able to predict.

But, this I know. The pattern has been of increasing efficiency in the destruction, and increasing abstraction. Andrew Jackson himself took the “sculps” of the Indians he murdered. Heinrich Himmler nearly fainted when a hundred Jews were shot in front of him, which was surely one reason for the increased use of gas. Now, of course, it can all be done by economics.

And, this I know, too. No matter what form it takes, most of us will not notice it. Those who notice will pay too little attention. We will follow the rules laid down by Noah and his remaining sons and we will walk backward to not see our father’s nakedness. It does not matter how great the cost to others nor even to ourselves, we will soldier on. We will, ourselves, walk quietly, meekly, into whatever form the gas chambers take, if only we are allowed to believe they are bathrooms.

I guess that’s one way of looking at it. But another is to realize that, as cruel and inhumane as it all seems, there are really no dragons to slay. There are only systems to reform. And although I am reminded of the philosopher’s words about the master’s tools never being used to dismantle the master’s house, something along those lines may be the only rational way we have out of this atrocious mess.

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This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

Dragons - Chapter 53 (DRAFT)

The glowing red numbers on the bedside alarm clock told me I got back to my hotel room at 11:17 PM that night. It had been a long and difficult day, but I was too tired to beat myself up over all the stupid things I had done. Tomorrow was just a few hours away -- I would need to set that damn alarm clock for 4:30 AM so I could tackle the second full day of the conference. If I remembered, I told myself, I would at least try to do fewer stupid things.

I quickly got ready for bed, taking time only to fold and hang my slacks carefully so they could be worn again tomorrow without ironing. The rest of my bedtime routine was done as quickly as possible, knowing without caring, for example, that as long as the majority of my teeth got brushed it would be good enough.

When I sat down on the edge of the bed I picked my cell phone off the end table in order to turn it off and connect it into the charging cord that I had already taken the time to plug in at the outlet behind the bed. The same stray thought that always entered my mind did. Why on earth was the only spare outlet in these hotel rooms hidden behind the bed? Forget about the needs of us weary business travelers, doesn’t the housekeeper need to plug in her goddam vacuum cleaner?

I looked at the small screen on the outside of my phone. 11:29 PM. One bar left in the battery indicator and it was flashing.

I flipped it open and began typing a text to Jenny. It was too late and I was too tired to call, but I should at least let her know that I had called and made a positive connection with Quest Partners. As my thumbs were working the tiny keys, the phone buzzed in my hands.

U STILL UP?

It was an incoming text from Bethany Bishop.

I looked at those letters for what felt like a long time, imagining Bethany sitting, probably not terribly far from where I sat, like me, on the edge of her hotel room bed in her night clothes.

Eventually, my heart racing, I shut down the phone without responding.

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“Dragons” is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author's imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental. For more information, go here.

This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

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The Fifth Discipline by Peter M. Senge

I got a lot out of the classic work -- but I continually got confused about the title. Even now, reflecting back on the experience of reading it, and thinking about composing this post, I’m left uncertain. What was the Fifth Discipline again?

The book’s subtitle -- The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization -- is also misleading. After a quick review, including a trip to YouTube to find someone else’s three-minute summary of the book, it seems clear that “Being a Learning Organization” isn’t the Fifth Discipline, although the way that title and its subtitle are paired would ordinarily make one think so. Instead, the book describes five disciplines that, if practiced, can help create learning organizations. Those five disciplines are: Systems Thinking, Personal Mastery, Mental Models, Building Shared Vision, and Team Learning.

This is the order that they are first presented in the book -- which would make one think that Team Learning is the Fifth Discipline, because it comes fifth on that list. But it isn’t. As you progress deeper into the book, it becomes clear that Systems Thinking is actually the Fifth Discipline, and that the other four disciplines are all part of that larger concept. They are not, in fact, five disciplines, they are four facets of one discipline, and that discipline, placed first because of that primacy, is therefore the First Discipline, not the Fifth.

Confused, yet? I was. But that’s okay. We’re better off just chucking all that terminology and hierarchy and just focusing on the subject that the book covers really well -- Systems Thinking.

Learning Disabilities

The argument for adopting this “discipline” is compelling. In one of the opening chapters Senge describes seven “learning disabilities” that typically keep people and companies from adopting a systems perspective. Among the most compelling for me is The Fixation on Events.

Our fixation on events is actually part of our evolutionary programming. If you wanted to design a cave person for survival, ability to contemplate the cosmos would not be a high-ranking design criterion. What is important is the ability to see the saber-toothed tiger over your left shoulder and react quickly. The irony is that, today, the primary threats to our survival, both of our organizations and of our societies, come not from sudden events but from slow, gradual processes; the arms race, environmental decay, the erosion of a society’s public education system, increasingly obsolete physical capital, and decline in design or product quality (at least relative to competitors’ quality) are all slow, gradual processes.

Another is The Parable of the Boiled Frog.

Maladaptation to gradually building threats to survival is so pervasive in systems studies of corporate failure that it has given rise to the parable of the “boiled frog.” If you place a frog in a pot of boiling water, it will immediately try to scramble out. But if you place the frog in room temperature water, and don’t scare him, he’ll stay put. Now, if the pot sits on a heat source, and if you gradually turn up the temperature, something very interesting happens. As the temperature rises from 70 to 80 degrees F., the frog will do nothing. In fact, he will show every sign of enjoying himself. As the temperature gradually increases, the frog will become groggier and groggier, until he is unable to climb out of the pot. Though there is nothing restraining him, the frog will sit there and boil. Why? Because the frog’s internal apparatus for sensing threats to survival is geared to sudden changes in his environment, not to slow, gradual changes.

Even though the reality of this “boiled frog” phenomenon has been pretty well debunked, the idea persists because of its explanatory power. How many of our organizations, and how many of us, are slowly boiling frogs, succumbing slowly to existential threats that happen on too long of a timescale for us to perceive for the dangers they are?

This, above all, is the primary argument for changing your thinking -- from one focused on events to another focused on systems.

Rules of Systems Thinking

Systems thinking is a discipline with several hard and fast rules -- eleven of which Senge describes in the early chapters of his book. Each will likely challenge you and the way you traditionally think about things, but which, from a systems perspective, make perfect sense. Among the most compelling for me is: Cause and effect are not closely related in time and space.

By “effects,” I mean the obvious symptoms that indicate that there are problems -- drug abuse, unemployment, starving children, falling orders, and sagging profits. By “cause” I mean the interaction of the underlying system that is most responsible for generating the symptoms, and which, if recognized, could lead to changes producing lasting improvement. Why is this a problem? Because most of us assume they are -- most of us assume, most of the time, that cause and effect are close in time and space.

When we play as children, problems are never far away from their solutions -- as long, at least, as we confine our play to one group of toys. Years later, as managers, we tend to believe that the world works the same way. If there is a problem on the manufacturing line, we look for a cause in manufacturing. If salespeople can’t meet targets, we think we need new sales incentives or promotions. If there is inadequate housing, we build more houses. If there is inadequate food, the solution must be more food.

[But as we] eventually discover, the root of our difficulties is neither recalcitrant problems nor evil adversaries -- but ourselves. There is a fundamental mismatch between the nature of reality in complex systems and our predominant ways of thinking about that reality. The first step in correcting that mismatch is to let go of the notion that cause and effect are close in time and space.

This is fundamental to systems thinking. Stated even more forcefully, we can turn to another of Senge’s rules: There is no blame.

We tend to blame outside circumstances for our problems. “Someone else” -- the competitors, the press, the changing mood of the marketplace, the government -- did it to us. Systems thinking shows us that there is no outside; that you and the cause of your problems are part of a single system. The cure lies in your relationship with your “enemy.”

This may be the most profound and essential thought of the entire book. There is no outside. Everything is part of the system, and if you don’t see that, you inevitably need to expand your view to take more parts of the system that is surely there into account.

Putting It Into Practice

There are several passages in this book that resonate with me strongly -- not just because they seem to provide unique insights into the general aspects of better strategy and execution, but because they seem to be addressing actual roadblocks in my actual organization.

Systems thinking is especially prone to evoking defensiveness because of its central message, that our actions create our reality. Thus, a team may resist seeing important problems more systemically. To do so would imply that the problems arise from our own policies and strategies -- that is “from us” -- rather than from forces outside our control. I have seen many situations where teams will say “we’re already thinking systemically,” or espouse a systems view, then do nothing to put it into practice, or simply hold steadfastly to the view that “there’s nothing we can do except cope with these problems.” All of these strategies succeed in avoiding serious examination of how their own own actions may be creating the very problems with which they try so hard to cope. More than other analytic frameworks, systems thinking requires mature teams capable of inquiring into complex, conflictual issues.

I run a trade association. Many of our KPIs are dependent on participation rates in specific programs by our membership. Fifty percent of our members, for example, should be sending at least one representative to our Annual Conference. Some, like this example, are tough for us to meet, but we rarely take a systems approach to the problem, or, if we do, we fail to include our own creativity and efforts in the system. Our systems only ever include the tried and true marketing tactics that have worked for years in getting the most engaged of our members to sign up for another conference.

But even though success depends on our getting some of the lesser engaged members to attend, we don’t alter our tactics and try to connect with them in some other way. Our system is defined by the newsletter announcements, emails, websites, and social media posts that are enough to remind and/or convince the base that it’s time to register. For some significant portion of our membership, those tactics are never going to convince them to attend -- and yet our strategy always and only doubles or triples down on these tactics.

What’s needed is a broadening of our defined system to include not just our established tactics, but our creative brains and personal influence as well. Pick up the phone. Ask a non-registered member why they aren’t attending, and use that information to design new tactics or, more likely, new value propositions that would convince them to attend in the future.

Things like that aren’t done because they’re not part of the system we’ve defined. And rather than recognize that and adapt the system, we fall back on several of the traps that Senge describes in his book. It’s the member, we might say. He’s the one making the decision to attend. There’s nothing I can do to change his mind.

For this and many other challenges I face, viewing the challenge in the context of an interactive system in which I play a key role, would likely bring needed insight and new action.

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This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.