Wisdom from our Advisory Board member, Terry Mollner,Ed.D. a founder of the Calvert group :
Wall Street and Love
Alan Greenspan, the most respected figure and main financial architect of the Reagan Revolution (“no government is good government”) just admitted before Congress that there was a major “flaw,” to use his word, in his lifetime of economic thinking. He proposed, are you ready for this, that the government consider creating tougher regulations. Maybe the people selling securities, he said, should have to keep some of them so they would be on the hook too, and maybe there should be stronger rules against fraud. “Da!” as our teenager would say. As head of the Federal Reserve Bank for eighteen years up to 2006 he is one of the main leaders who have taken the world off of this cliff, and he is only now discovering the obvious?
What is painful for us to own as a country of people is that so many of us agreed with him back then and still do. What is happening is not just Greenspan’s, George Bush’s, Congress’s, Wall Street’s, etc. fault. It is the fault of us all. So many of us wanted to believe that if we were one of the first one’s in on this chain letter that it was ok that all those many people at the end who would be sending us checks were not being hurt…because they could be one of the first of the next leg, etc. The problem is that in short order we run out of billions of people to provide for the rich at the beginning of millions of legs…because it is those who are good at creating more legs that can’t control themselves from creating more of them. Greenspan said that the current financial crisis had “turned out to be much broader than anything that I could have imagined.” That gets two das. Da! Da! All chain letters end up with far more losers than winners. When the winners are addicted to the possibility of there always being millions more people willing to risk being losers there comes a day when there are no more people and everyone loses on their new legs also and the entire actively comes to a halt. To some degree that is where we are now. The saddest thing is that they are doing the exact wrong thing to solve the problem. The problem is that everyone has too much debt and they are trying to solve it by giving priority to making more credit available. That gets three das: Da! Da! Da!
I am on the board of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream. We got bought by Unilever, the fourth largest consumer goods multinational on the planet. (Please don’t ask how that happened!) It doesn’t make any difference how successful we are as a socially responsible and financially successful business; the top executives always want us to get more people to buy more ice cream so they can make more money…and it never stops. All of us involved are good people who love our children and coach little league teams, etc. But the company is a chain letter. It is not a local business run by people. It is controlled by Wall Street’s rules. The highest priority has to be the financial interests of a few, called the shareholders, at the expense of the rest of us…period, stop, over, done. We are one of the legs of the chain letter. The goal of us on the board of Ben & Jerry’s is to model succeeding as a socially responsible company inside a multinational. We even cut a contract that will allow us to sue them if they do not fulfill their social agreements. As you can imagine, it is tough love at all times.
We live in a country where a majority of people want to become millionaires; so even if they are poor they vote for policies and politicians who they think will make it easier for them to become millionaires. They want to be one of the winners in the chain letter game. That is how we got Republican Presidents who promise to reduce taxes and regulations while reducing the deficit…they then “solve” the obvious impossibility of this approach by greatly increasing the deficit and blaming it on someone or something else. However, we chose these policies by electing these people as our leaders. This begs the question: “What is the fundamental flaw in the thinking of so many of us?”
Competition, it turns out, is the lowest form of cooperation, compromise is a more mature form, agreement a still more mature form, and love the most mature form. They are all forms of cooperation because cooperation cannot be escaped. This means we are able to identify the fundamental rules by which this cooperation occurs. Scientists love finding more and more of them and they use a method that tries to isolate truth from beliefs, myths, and projections. We usually call these fundamental cooperative rules “the laws of nature.” For instance, one of the laws of nature we have discovered is where there is gravity what goes up must come down.
Well, we have become stuck at the layer of maturity that assumes that competition is fundamental in nature. It isn’t. What is going on in the financial markets is a symptom of our transition into “the next layer of human maturation” in the skill of self-consciousness. That is where we give priority to the fact that cooperation is fundamental in nature. This means that when we reach full maturity our freely chosen highest priority at all times is the common good. That, we discover, is the only priority that has us always moving in alignment with the cooperative rules of nature. Throughout history this has often been called “moral behavior.”
Competition does not exist in nature. It only exists in the immature perceptions of immature human beings. When it occurs it is a human made invention. You can’t escape the fact that cooperation is fundamental in nature. A basketball game cannot occur without “agreement” on some “cooperative” rules: “we play within these lines, a basket is two points, etc.” A free market cannot exist without giving priority to “agreement” on some “cooperative” rules: “we will not kill, steal, etc.” Without these cooperative rules being given priority, it would not be possible to build a factory, produce a product, distribute it, and collect payment day in and day out. People would instead give priority to killing and stealing to get what they wanted…and then everyone would do it because “everyone else is doing it so I have no choice!”
A government is also “agreement” on some “cooperative rules” that will be given priority at all times.
It is fine to pursue one’s self-interest fully; however it is only “mature” to give “priority” to the common good while doing both fully. A “government” is the agreements on “the layer of maturity at which we want to operate.” Regulation or no regulation is not a false dichotomy; it is an immature one. A more mature question is “What regulations do we want to give priority as the rules within which we will compete, compromise, agree, and love?” As self-conscious beings we can’t avoid having agreements within which we relate…even choosing to relate is an agreement. We already agree that we want free people and free markets. Now we need to agree at what layer of maturity of cooperative rules we want to operate.
Here is the wonderful thing about giving priority to priorities in our thinking: we can do many things fully at the same time as a result of turning skills into habits. You are probably currently wearing clothes, sitting, reading, etc. all at the same time because they are skills you have turned into habits so you do not have to think about them anymore. You easily and consistently do them because they are mature ways of cooperating with nature: conflict is, therefore, absent and they can remain habits for the rest of your life.
The most important priorities to keep in the right order and turn into a habit are self-interest and the common good. To be a mature human being, with the possibility of continuous happiness as we move through life because our habits are in constant cooperation with nature, these two priorities must reflect the rules of nature accurately. That is done by always freely choosing to give priority to the common good. When we understand the importance of giving priority to priorities instead of “getting this or that now,” we discover we can do both fully. When they are in the mature order of priorities they are naturally in full and effortless cooperation with each other. They are reflecting the rules of nature in a more mature way and we enjoy inner peace.
Let’s hope that the main outcome of this debacle will be that we as a nation of people will grow up to the wisdom of recognizing that cooperation is fundamental in nature. That our “natural highest priority” at all times is the common good and about this we do not have a choice – it is nature. Our only choice is at what layer of maturity we cooperate, that of giving priority to competition, compromise, agreement, or love. That embracing this wisdom as individuals and as a country is the secret to personal happiness. And having “enough” financial income is enough because it allows us to work to help everyone else have enough also. We are all in this together.
What is more important than being a millionaire is freely choosing to give priority each moment to playing the role that we can each uniquely play for the good of us all. This is living at the layer of human maturity called “love.”
Terry Mollner, President of Trusteeship Institute, is a founder and member of the Board of the Calvert Social Investment Funds and a member of the board of Ben & Jerry’s. [email protected]