Richard Jernigan -> RE: Happy New Year! (Jan. 4 2012 23:51:06)
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ORIGINAL: Ruphus Oligarchy is unnatural to men. Ruphus Really? You keep giving us examples of people exercising oligarchy with great effectiveness. Please point out any large society, past or present, which has not been organized as an oligarchy. I find there to be no practical distinction between oligarchy and hierarchy, though "oligarchy" may be more often used as a pejorative Or is your statement based purely in theory? In my experience, egalitarianism may persist in small groups, but not in larger ones with complex tasks to perform. I have worked for, and still own a small share of a company that now employs about 50 people. It has intentionally remained small, and it has intentionally grown very slowly, selecting the people it hires with great care. Everybody knows everybody else. Everybody owns part of the company. Your enthusiastic praise of the employee-owned robotics company fits this company precisely. Ironically, you blew off the description of my company, since it is part of the military/industrial complex. I wouldn't be surprised if you blew it off again, but I speak from personal experience. My continued ownership of part of this company seems not to be resented by the present workers, judging from the signed individual greetings of a couple dozen people on the Christmas card I receive every year with my dividend check. They don't seem to see me as an expropriator of their labor, but as a former colleague who deserves my share of the earnings due to the work I did when I was there. I didn't buy my share of ownership. I earned it by working there. When I stop by for a visit, people gather around to exchange greetings and stories. By the way, the company is organized "capitalistically" with shares of stock, a board of directors, a president and other officers. It was the only practical way to organize it under the prevailing legal system. But it works because everybody knows and respects everybody else, and because decision making by the steering committee is transparent and is open to comment and input by everybody. But even here one sees incipient oligarchy in the delegation of a large share of decision making to a group of only 1/5 of the workers. Yet in my experience as a member of the steering committee, the views of all the workers were sought and heeded in decision making. A good deal of effort was made to expose the decision making process to everyone at weekly, monthly, quarterly and annual meetings of the entire staff. Discussion went on until everyone had their say. Everyone knew and respected everyone else. While I worked there, there was no social hierarchy, and it still looks to be the case. I shared my secretary with the company president, whose office was next door to mine. All three of us were social equals. She worked on tasks whose priority was decided by three-way discussions, if necessary, not because one of her clients was the president and the other was not. If we didn't have enough work to keep her busy, she found other work to do. At the beginning of my industrial career, I worked for a company that grew very rapidly from a small company to one with sales of $1-billion per year and a listing on the New York Stock Exchange. The first year I worked there sales grew from $20-million/year to $200-million, due to a single large, high priority contract. I knew personally all the founders of this company, and worked directly for one of them, who became my mentor and lifelong friend. Early in the very rapid growth of the company, oligarchy appeared out of necessity. Most of the company's work centered on a group of closely related projects where the founders were among the world's leading technical experts. There wasn't time to accomplish the externally constrained goals and at the same time implement collective decision making. By the time I left this company, I considered it to be pathological. It exhibited many of the ills of capitalism, as well as some of those of Soviet and Chinese "communism". No bloodshed though, despite most of the employees being Texans. The founders of the company considered it to have developed pathologically as well, despite all of them being men of intelligence, the highest ethics and exemplary goodwill. They willingly sold their stock shares to a successor company when the opportunity presented itself, despite having devoted a significant fraction of a lifetime to building the company. Early on my boss described to me the results of inadvertently hiring a few sons of bitches during the rapid expansion. The results of a few bad decisions on hiring or promoting managers was so readily apparent as not to require comment. My diagnosis was that centralized and necessarily rapid decision making inspired distrust among those who didn't know the founders, or who very seldom interacted with them. Distrust led to an attitude of self-defense, and eventually to an attitude of selfish striving. Oligarchy arose out of necessity, but went wrong. A large component of it going wrong was the founders' mistaken expectation that the employees would all be as intelligent and ethical as they were. Many employees were that virtuous, but the sons of bitches won out in the end. I also had close and long lasting contact with two mega-corporations, Boeing and Lockheed, and was employed by another, Raytheon. Each was a successful oligarchy, but in different ways. Boeing was a pleasure to deal with, but I wouldn't have liked to work there. Hierarchy was enforced in detail, from the highest to the lowest levels. Hierarchy was necessary in the large and highly technical projects undertaken by Boeing. Its enforcement in detail was unusually thorough. It functioned efficiently. Employees were very well paid, and rewarded for their accomplishments. But they were offered opportunities for accomplishment only in accordance with their level in the hierarchy and the tasks they were assigned. In my years of working with them I never had a quarrei with their ethics. I never encountered a successful son of a bitch in a management position. Yet I felt that personally I would have been uncomfortable with the limitations that the strict hierarchy imposed. I much preferred to work for them as an independent consultant, despite a few job offers Lockheed Missiles and Space Company was also a successful oligarchy, but its flaws were a little more evident than Boeing's. I won't bore you with the details. Here again, hierarchical organization was absolutely necessary to carry out the highly complex technical projects Lockheed worked on, and the inevitable result was oligarchy. Sons of bitches and idiots occasionally rose to lower level management positions, resulting in oppression and injustice, but the ones I was personally acquainted with were eliminated after a few years, or even a few weeks,, sometimes by the direct intervention of Lockheed Missiles and Space Company's main U.S. Government customer, the Navy Strategic Program Office. Managers at the highest levels could be cold and impersonal, but you knew where they stood, and they were generally perceived as fair and just. I can testify that they were highly competent technically. I hope I have made my point. Hierarchy seems to me to be an innate human talent that arises when large groups engage in complex tasks. The distinction between oligarchy and hierarchy is to me tenuous at best. At times oligarchy is benign and beneficial, all too often it is evil. If your belief that oligarchy is unnatural is based on theoretical grounds, or extrapolation from small groups to large ones, in my way of thinking this is a serious defect. Far and away the majority of us exist as members of very large groups. Our societies carry out complex tasks, that we rely upon for our existence. Hierarchy, in one form or another, is necessary for the organization of these tasks. A major problem with both large scale economic theories and political theories is the near impossibility of setting up a controlled experiment to verify them. The wholesale implementation of political theories in the 20th century proved to be uniformly disastrous and bloody. Yet at the time, they seemed like very good ideas to most of the subjects of the experiments. Large numbers of people even believed the theories were based on scientific investigation. None of the theories was implemented as originally conceived, or even as subsequently revised. In the event, people didn't behave as expected, so the theories were temporarily shelved in order to make people conform to them. They never came off the shelf again. The Nomenklatura continued to describe Marxism-Leninism, in its perverted Soviet form, as science. A large number of them actually believed it was. The approach of the writers of the U.S. Constitution seemed promising at the time. They set out to modify an existing system with an eye to limiting abuse. Unfortunately, one major abuse was left unaddressed, which nearly destroyed the country altogether in the Civil War. Also unfortunately, the economic and political system which the Founding Fathers hoped to improve has evolved today beyond the powers of their institutions to control it. The very institutions they devised to protect us have partly become tools of oppression--not totally, but to a dangerous extent, through the corrosive effects of greed. But at least industrialized bloodshed was not provoked by the gradualist approach of the Constitution--then seen as revolutionary by the European elite, and by the founders themselves. Civil war was provoked by the existence of slavery, and the unbridgeable gap it created. The Founding Fathers well knew that if they tried to abolish slavery at once, the Civil War would have occurred in 1789, while the new republic was weak enough to be re-colonized. Here in Texas, I see people every day on the street, and I'm related to a few whom I see only occasionally, who would take up arms to defend unfettered capitalism. Oddly enough, very few of them are capitalists themselves. Furthermore, any attempt to install a system of education that I suppose you intend, would be forcibly resisted. It's hard enough to keep the popularly elected State Board of Education from injecting creationism into the curriculum. I see the repeated attempts to put in creationism not as some active capitalist plot, but as an expression of the will of a near majority, if not an actual majority. Of course the creationist ideas and the mindless support of the idea of unfettered capitalism (though not its actuality) are the result both of a failure of education and of the rise of ideas that are inherently appealing to the maleducated. But the maleducated are willing to protect the idea of unfettered capitalism and their creationist beliefs by armed force. These people aren't stupid. Far from it. They are very quick to perceive the implications of any subtle attempt to modify their beliefs, and they react vigorously. Sounds like the same is true where you live. How do you propose to proceed? RNJ I'm pretty sure I've given a false impression in my last few posts. I'm not much of a pessimist. Actually my general demeanor is sunny and optimistic. I find the disparity between the way we generally picture ourselves, and the way we look from the perspective of a good age, to be pretty comical. The near future looks pretty dangerous, but I'll only be around for another 20-odd years at most. Being retired, and having raised my children to mature independence, I'm pretty much done with what little real influence I will have on the future, for better or worse. Our race has survived great disasters. I suspect it may even survive the self-induced ones it might experience in the near term. We might even learn something from tragedy. Or we may not. I have written here as i talk to grown children or adolescent grandchildren. I remember my own youth well enough not to expect them to pay much attention. They rely more on their own experience than they do on someone else's bullsh1t. That's why we repeat our mistakes. That's why progress is possible. When I regale them with my grandfatherly talks, I lament the tragedies we have brought upon ourselves, but generally I laugh a lot more at the human comedy. Here you can't hear the laughter. Sorry for seeming so glum. Now I will turn to encouraging Rick Perry to stay in the presidential race. [:D] It is a faint hope, but still it is a hope, that he will eventually persuade Texans to vote for someone else for governor by his continued monumental show of ass on national TV.
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