Americans — The Box People

Americans love boxes. Theirs is a geometric world, measured, defined, everything contained, and stacked.  The world is not round, it is square.

The earliest settlers built stockades to box in the boxes that were homes, store rooms and the like. Quite different from the Indians. Oh yes, the Indians built boxes too – long houses and the like. But since they were hunters and gatherers their boxes were temporary. And they thought of their territory as a circle, or a bubble, which expanded and contracted relative to the circles or bubbles of other tribes.

By contrast, the settlers saw everything in straight lines.  The homes and the walls they build around those homes were designed to be permanent – more than that,  to define property and territory. “This is mine!”

There was a psychological element too. I and You. Us and Them. Walls separate people. They are naturally discriminatory.  And American walls define Walls  groups of people. according to class and value.  The people behind the walls of a gated community are one kind; those behind the walls of a jail, another.

The settlers’ villages were the first gated communities.  And they were quick to build jails.
The Indians had no jails.

To some extent every box is a jail, metaphysically at least, in the sense that it restricts movement mentally and physically.

So boxes belie freedom and democracy.
The Indians were remarkably democratic. And in fact, many of the concepts and institutions of American democracy were borrowed from them just before the Republic set out on its continental policy of extermination and genocide. The Indians, after all, were outside the walls, outside the box of American society, so did not have a right to exist.  The Founders of the Republic, with a few exceptions were box thinkers and they didn’t understand freedom or democracy, which were to them more slogans than realities.

The Americans spread out across the continent, measuring the land, and building more boxes of all kinds, everything rectangular, roads and streets, buildings, fences, walls, killing men, women and children enthusiastically.  They liked color coding — white, good — other colors — not so.

American established a kind of order, recapitulating Rome and the kingdoms and empires of Europe. Ah, but we are free, they said. Only, nothing was for free, except that that could be taken from the Indians and Mexicans.

Now, we boxes on top of boxes. We call them office buildings. We have boxes for everything. For food, entertainment.Information . Everything is enclosed.   Your life is in your computer, in your cellphone.  And the goal of every American should be a “home” — another box.
And more recently we have gated communities.
As I have said, the gated community is a throwback to the stockades of the early settlers. Those outside the stockade are savages – they represent a reality that is threatening to the extent that it is unpredictable and unknown. Gated communities also face inwards like  the Roman house and Roman cities — just as vulnerable to the onslaught of barbarians, who, since they think “outside the box” will always find a way in.

Nature abhors rectangles.  All celestial objects are globes that move in circles.

Why The Future Belongs to Europe

Despite all the gloom and doom stuff in the US press about Europe, I am (hesitantly) optimistic – as I am about China – to the same extent that I am pessimistic about the US.

The US is like New Orleans was before Katrina — a beautiful place with history and tradition – and an accident waiting to happen. There were plenty of warnings but they were ignored. You ignore “fundamentals” at great risk. But then the US is “one nation under God”. It favors Faith rather than Facts.

Europe on the other hand is not “one nation” under anything, much less God. While it takes longer to create consensus, which makes Americans, the Fast-Food, Quick-Fix Nation nervous, Europeans nevertheless are on the right road. They are working to rein in the banks, prohibit short selling of government bonds, ban credit swaps and similar flakey financial instruments.

Nor are ordinary people in Europe, the so-called “working class” and the “middle class” as quiet and docile as their American counterparts. In Greece and Spain and France people take to the streets when they feel their rights – civil or economic are infringed upon. The elites in Europe have had to fear the “people” ever since Louis XVI lost his head.

The US by contrast is owned by a tiny percentage of its people – who fear nothing. They have never had a real revolution — the the much celebrated event of 1776 was not an insurrection, it was a tax revolt by rich merchants and land owners—pre-industrial corporatists marking out territory.

The “survival of the fittest” — competition in nature – depends on adaptation. But there is no adaptation if an organism is not responsive to its continually changing environment. All monolithic cultures and their similarly monolithic institutions resist change. “Out of many, one”. From the melting pot, you get a single and singular product – America. Its people may have diverse origins, but in the end the country is one thing and a subtle feudalism is needed to maintain order. That makes the US less responsive than Europe, which is multicultural and multicentric.

So it will take time for Europe to create consensus – but adapt it will. The decline and fall of the American Empire is its greatest incentive and its greatest opportunity.

The Banality of America

Are the people at Goldman Sachs evil?

Yes.

Some disagree. One of my American friends wrote me “not evil, just amoral”.

“They are like wolves – it is just in their nature.. And it was the fault of government that it did not regulate them to prevent them from doing what they are programmed to do. “

First of all, this is an insult to wolves, wonderful and beautiful animals who form highly cooperative groups, with clear and consistent values, that often put human beings to shame. In any case, wolves hunt when they are hungry and to feed their pups. You never see a fat wolf.

By contrast, there’s a lot of fat on WallStreet. Not just fat bellies – but fat salaries, fat homes, fat cars, a fat lifestyle. Wolves hunt from necessity. Wallstreet predators hunt out of sheer greed. Not need – greed.

No, the Wall street animals are not wolves –or any kind of natural predator –  if anything, they are psychopaths. They understand morality quite well – they just don’t care. They are without conscience.

And this absence of empathy is destructive. The economy tanks. People go bankrupt, lose their homes, their jobs. You get divorces, suicides, murder even. People die.

Add up the suffering. Great atrocities are often banal, as is, of course, evil.

Adolph Eichmann didn’t kill anyone directly. He was just a bureaucrat. He just did his job.

During his imprisonment before his trial, the Israeli government sent no less than six psychologists to examine Eichmann. Not only did these doctors find no trace of mental illness, but they also found no evidence of abnormal personality whatsoever. One doctor remarked that his overall attitude towards other people, especially his family and friends, was “highly desirable”, while another remarked that the only unusual trait Eichmann displayed was being more “normal” in his habits and speech than the average person   (Wikipedia

When one looks at photographs of the SS people who worked at Auschwitz in their time off, what strikes one is how normal they look.

So do we excuse Goldman Sachs people because they look like “ordinary people” , because they are “just doing their jobs”, just “doing what they must do”.

It is quite clear that, regulations or not, the movers and shakers of Wall street were breaking numerous laws and committing felonies. Fraud. Insider trading. Various forms of conspiracy. Look carefully and you see a lot. Even so, they will probably get a free pass.

Too big to fail goes hand in hand with too important to prosecute.

Yes, GS is evil.

And America, amoral – for when we get down to it, America has two sets of laws–one for the powerful. another for the weak, which really means no real law at all.

We send a poor black man to jail for a couple of years for smoking a joint or getting a blow job from a girl he didn’t know was 17. We excuse William Calley for blowing the heads off babies. We go on to set up a rule that no US military person can ever be tried for a war crime – they are merely “stressed out” by the demands of service. And of course their commanders are never, ever responsible either.

Should a soldier refuse to fight for reasons of conscience, we pack him off to the brig. Our highest officials, including George Bush commit impeachable offenses. We look the other way. We execute people we know are innocent on legal technicalities. “That’s the system”

There is no morality here. And, in the end, a lot of evil.

America, alas, is terribly banal.

Cubicle Thinking

Cubicle Thinking

Posted on April 29, 2010 by zenetics

Big Government is held to be bureaucratic. But Big Business is even more so – much, much more so!

Where does the “bureau” in ‘bureaucratic” come from anyway? It comes from a word for the  cloth covering for a desk with drawers.  So, you can think of bureaucrats as “desk people”. Or, maybe “drawer” people. They can be either – or both.

In Japan, most offices are “open area”. Desks are often set up in rows, so there is someone right next to you and across from you with no dividers, which allows for little privacy. Everybody can see what everyone else is doing – or not doing.     You can also talk across your desk conveniently, not just about work –but inevitably about other things too. A Japanese office is not just a workplace – it is a community, and on the face of it less efficient than an American office.

Ah, it figures you say — the Japanese are a nation of conformists. Monkey see, monkey do.

Not like us Americans (or Canadians, or Brits, or Aussies, ad infinitum).

Americans are proud of their individualism.  And so no open area offices for them.  Instead, they love their  cubicles.  Privacy and creativity say the Management Consultants, each so very his or her “own person”.    But in reality, cubicles are about isolation — and regimentation and dehumanization.  Companies want people working at their desks without distraction — mechanically.  Productivity is carefully monitored — you guessed it — by computer.  The In Box. The Out box.  Everything in boxes.     American office people  are “box people”.  Cubicles are little jail cells.  The aim is control. Not privacy. Not creativity. Certainly not individuality, which can only be understood in relation to something else. . If you want to talk to the guy next to you, you have to stand up and be conspicuous, which is not the way to go in a corporate world where you can get fired for your “tweets”.  Most people just do what they are told.  Shit in. Shit out. And go home to another kind of box to a boxed community.

The Japanese are known for doing things better. Why?  Oh yes, they too are conformists.  But they make a conscious separation between social conformity and individual freedom.  More, if they are cogs, they also understand they are the machine itself — and its purpose. They will succeed or fail together. So — no cubicles, no walls.  In Japanese companies, responsibilities must overlap and so must accountability.   Creativity?  That’s just another word for solutions.  And they work on these together.   They see creativity as a group thing.

“Group think” can suppress individuality and creativity – if the priority is conformity. If priority is given to finding solutions to problems and if there is good leadership, it is another matter.  Then “Group think” means interaction and argument .

Japanese businesses are famous for the amount of time spent on meetings, which are messy but effective.

Americans like to pretend that they are not conformists. But you cannot function in a company or in a society without some degree of conformity, so American posturing in this regard is simply dishonest.  In fact, American society is highly regimented, authoritarian, and hierarchical.

How do you pretend to be free when you are not? — don’t look outside the box.