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Ethics is human, not institutional
Much is being discussed about “ethics” in business, finance, government, education, etc. The biggest misconception of all is to attribute ethics to institutions. Ethics is human, not institutional. An institution cannot be blamed for unethical behavior, their leaders and employees can.
Definition of Ethics:
Many people confuse ethics with social morality, as in religion, belief or cultural behavior. One of the more useful definitions of ethics is provided by wikipedia in the names of members of the foundation of critical thinking: “a set of concepts and principles that guide us in determining what behavior helps or harms sentient creatures”.
If fact ethics refers to “the conscious way we interact with our environment, human and living nature, in a constructive or destructive way”. Ethics is complex as it demand from us the conscious reflection about our progressive behavior and its consequences. Progress has always a destructive and constructive element, when initiated by human beings as well as evolutionary progress within nature. It opens up a large array of philosophical thinking on the extend of responsibility of the human impact on its environment. How ethic is it to destroy a certain natural landscape for our infrastructures, housing, industrial processes or even agriculture? Where does human progressive dominance end to allow room for other species to evolve or is human dominance and its effects on other species part of their own evolutionary challenge? Hasn’t the competitive crises in the human species stimulated our self-awareness in such a way that we became more creative and competitive? Hasn’t the anthropocene affected life of other species in such a way that new genetic variations have appeared that adopted perfectly well to the human dominance and even to human pollution? Isn’t humankind on its own a challenge for nature to react with destructive force to create balance again in living progress? How ethical must the human species be with its environment and what ethics can we expect from our environment?
When we look at the effects of humankind on its environment then this can be considered very high, especially now, in the era that we live in today. On the other hand we see that these effects are lethal for the long term human sustainability. It is expected that climate changes and pollution will eventually reduce humankind to a much smaller population then we count today. Within 40 years humankind may well implode to a size of little more than 1 billion people (as opposed to more than 7 billion today).
Ethics has hence nothing to do with the way we influence nature itself. This will bounce back to us with equal force as what we did to nature. Nature has this unique ability to find balance in all kinds of extremes, even against humanity. So when we refer to ethics we need to reflect on the way we affect nature in the short and long term to produce effects on us. With this type of ethical consideration we place human evolution within the meaning of sustainable human progress. In this sense we do not dominate nature as we affect our surroundings but assume an adaptive attitude around the effects of nature on us. Nature seeks natural balance no matter what effects this has on humankind. We however seek balance with our consciousness (learning process) about our surroundings to provide us infinite evolutionary chances using the environment properly. We become adaptive partners with our environment for our own benefit. Ethics then refers to the level of reciprocal balance we create with our universe in which we assure our health and security at all times by respecting nature for what it is.
So when people debate on institutional ethics we need to get to terms what an institution really is? From an operational point of view an institution is a specialized group of people performing to reach some predetermined team objective. There are many types of institutions that all perform different types of tasks in a human community. From an ethical point of view we can now look at the institution and determine what impact it has on our sustainable human progress from an environmental point of view? The problem we face is the paradigm in which such evaluation takes place.
Institutions have been traditionally registered and founded to become a legal entity that behaves according human, not natural laws. An institution is a legal instrument that allows the grouping of people around certain objectives protecting the integrity of the people against failure of the institution, while allowing the people involved to share the benefits of it. The institution can hence do things that people would maybe not do themselves from a moral point of view. What motives would an institution have to do what it does and can ethical values be attributed, and by who? Yes, we can, but not to the institution, to the people giving direction to the institution. Why?
The institution is a piece of paper. When no-one does anything with that piece of paper it will not do any harm or good. It is just a number. An institution becomes instrumental in the hands of the human being. It is the human being that deals with the institution that needs to be confronted with the ethics of this usage. The fact that an institution is constituted according to certain human laws does not liberate the user of the instrument from applying moral awareness and consider the ethics of its positioning or functioning. In our current society based on capitalist economics the morality of human progress is expressed in financial means. Within this paradigm ecology and human progress are considered a cost. Ethics are valued against the price one needs to pay and the material benefit one gets in return. The overall holistic picture of a universe reacting back to us is not considered tangible enough to be attributed to the ethics of a single institution nor of its leadership. It is the human system that is unethical because it shows a scientifically proven damaging track record against nature itself and especially our own expectations for a healthy future. What is then unethical? The financial system? Money? Capitalist economics? Consumption? Industrialization? Manufacturing?
None of this is unethical because for every system an alternative system can be chosen. The fact that humankind has self-aware choices makes the usage of instruments that have an unethical impact on our environment unethical. It can be compared with a word. The word itself can never be attributed an emotion or value. It is the context in which the word is being used. The same goes with money. Money has no value, it is the value we attribute to it in a certain context. We can compare it with a hammer. The hammer is a tool that can be used in a constructive way to create a chair. It can also be used to kill. In both cases ethics can be applied, not to the hammer but to the hand that uses it and the purpose it is used for.
So instruments like words, coins, hammers or registered pieces of paper have absolutely no ethical meaning until they are used by human beings for one or another purpose. Right now the ethics of humankind is extremely off course. We are all to blame but those who claim leadership and intentionally keep up the system that is so destructive, should be brought to justice. The problem we have is that ethics has not found its way yet sufficiently in our systems of human laws and that is what is urgently needed. Sustainocracy can be help because it provides the tooling necessary to make a natural selection. It also helps institutions to transform while they still can. The excuse is still that they did not know better, had no choice and were not aware of a new paradigm. Soon no-one will be able to hold with such excuse because new standards are being set. These standards are based on true ethics. When people have a choice they immediately are at fault when their choice is contrary to a true ethical paradigm such sustainocracy. At this stage humankind can not afford to accept unethical leadership or behavior anymore whether we like it or not.
Poverty of old rich changes the world, not money
Geographical poverty
In the world there are roughly three economic “worlds”, the old rich, the new rich and the poor. These can be seen horizontally per region in the world. The old rich regions speculate with value, the new rich countries create some of the value still through industrial process with cheap labor, and then there are the poor that have nothing but themselves. Meanwhile climate changes and pollution of the rich make the globe more inhabitable affecting the rich in their quest for resources using greed, and the poor who are being robbed of their chances for survival. Some try to get to the rich parts of the world by hazardous migration, others just perish, accepting their destiny in some way as inevitable.
This has always been the case ever since industrialization began and even before. Nowadays the old rich suffer crises because they cannibalize on their own wealth, the new rich do not learn the lessons of the old rich and go into the same direction while the poor remain poor, exploited by the rich, die and don’t know much better by lack of reference. What is “rich” anyway? That your children survive beyond age 2 or 5? That you have a car, a house to live in, two TV sets, a mobile phone and access to the supermarket every day? Peace at home or in the street?
Poverty among the rich
Then there is this other way of looking at the same three worlds but vertically, within the confinement of the rich countries. We find the same mix of poverty, wealthy and rich but within the same region. The difference with the general poverty around the world is that this type of poverty has known what it is like to be rich in material sense and sees it around them all the time. In the area of poverty within rich regions we see three ways that people deal with it:
- Solidarity, meaning that fellow people, families, friends and surroundings help the people out voluntarily for their primary needs. Often people who are being helped just need some support because they thrive to be self supported and need no official help. They are the entrepreneurial types of society that do their best. They normally see their situation as temporary and part of life, trusting to be able to deal with it.
- Social welfare, a government caring system to assist people who have entered in some kind of misery until they can find their way back into the system by themselves or through pressure of the government. Often these are people who have suffered a loss, a divorce or whatever mishap. It can also represent a cultural problem of employment diversity. Social welfare is the social cushion that provides them with rest and material peace of mind for a while.
- Criminality and chaos, is when people do not trust the system or themselves anymore and abuse the system through rebellion acts, criminality and chaos, out of mentality or need.
In new rich countries we see governments trying to deal with the newly growing rich, taxation, equality and old poverty through education programs and welfare creation. In the current old rich societies however we see a general raise of poverty that covers all three situations. Yet the mix tends to alter due to the development of the collapsing richness. The crises that the culture and paradigm suffers develops an explosive situation that eventually will provoke a paradigm shift. It is these poor that upset the old system and introduce new conditions for stable progress, but not before some chaos and collapse is created in the community. It is not the money that will change the world, it is the poverty among the old rich.
The traditional solidarity of local people goes to their own relatives or close ones. Many rich countries have opened up their borders so much for the entry of cheap labor that foreign poverty mixes with local poverty, both with a different mentality around scarcity. The local poor start to believe that the chances are being taken away from them by the foreigners. The newcomers come for work and see the rich society as something to take their chances no matter what. Some come with a genuine interest to take benefit, others with a hit and run opportunistic attitude towards the abundance in the materially rich environment.
Crime rises among all populations groups simply because of the masses in jeopardy, the distrust between locals and foreign groups and the declining “can do” culture in the region. When social security funds dry up as the old rich country cannot keep up the old standards the welfare support is taken away gradually and causes more poverty. The solidarity in the community slows down and finally stops because people lose faith and ask their people to take responsibility. They do that by finding ways to rise against the inequality through marches, protest or attacks, yet they also develop new pre-paradigms and paradigms. The significance of have lived through different worldviews as an individual is key for progress. Poverty then is a way to let go of the old securities that the remaining rich try to defend. But this defense, even with the powerful support of the law, is not enough to withhold the demanding forces of the people who want to introduce change. We have seen this happen in Northern Africa and the Middle East. We will see it happening across the globe.
The following questions arises:
- When, with what proportion of poverty in the mix, does a stable economy of old rich collapse into chaos prior to renewal
- Can a country take precaution before? Eg by allowing social innovation by the poor instead of defending the situation of the rich
- Is social welfare always an adequate cushion? Or should it be limited only to the new rich while the old rich should focus on paradigm shift through social investment rather than protection?
As poverty in the rich countries grows we general see the difference between rich and poor grow too. The speculation at the top end of the social pyramid is showing economic growth while the bottom is reaching a point of starvation. The differences grow and so does the social stress. Yet the new poverty has the insight, knowledge and education to produce change that can move the old rich into a new phase of development through fundamental changes. The growing rich out of the old paradigm will try to influence change negatively. I also referred to this in the blog entry of the route of least resistance. The only problem any country deals with in this situation is its governance. What side does government chose? The conservative rich out of tax interests and their influential lobby? Or the innovative poor understanding the need for social innovation? Can a middle way exist?
Looking forward to your reactions……
Why people avoid Spirituality
From Sept 21 -23 a group of academic and entrepreneurial visionary intellectuals from 14 countries met for the annual conference of EURO-SPES. The topic was “Spirituality & Sustainability” and the gathering took place in Visegrad (Hungary), 40 km north of Budapest. Our organizing host was Prof. Laszlo Zsolnai.
A beautiful weekend in a beautiful place full of history
Spirituality is a word that in the world of hard materialism is being neglected or despised as being soft or religious. This is a huge misconception and a true mental and practical blockage for development of true sustainable progress. Spirituality has various definitions as participating scientists correctly pointed out but the general description of the word is “the inner quest for the true meaning of our existence”. For people who live the simplified life of materialism such quest is of course a scary confrontation with their own consciousness and certainly something to be avoided. The world of the “having” is exactly opposite of the world of the “being”. Both reject each other like poles of a magnet. The transit from a “having” kind of mentality to one in search for identity (being) is usually referred to as a “crisis”. The process is one of letting go (voluntarily or involuntarily) of material securities and trying to find comfort in the new world of inner feelings and meaning.
In such open field of emotions people start reacting in many ways, some aggressive or depressed, others become artists or find unprecedented hidden forces of leadership. During the conference we were enlightened with views in each of these fields of expertise. Academic research is showing the importance of spirituality for humankind to recover from crises and develop sustainable evolutionary progress through the renewal of true meaning. It represents a combination of rationalization of inner search for meaning and putting the growing awareness into practice in experiments around new ways of organizing ourselves, individually and as a community. This is called the pre-paradigm, a phase before, after or within crises, in which alternatives develop to a reigning paradigm that is falling apart. Such pre-paradigms are always confrontational to the one that is being disputed. A pre-paradigm uses the logic of spiritual consciousness and is usually neglected and even denied by those who are unaware, or intentional to uphold the existing paradigm out of personal or institutional interests. The old paradigm has lawful support while the new paradigm has the power of timeless meaningfulness.
It was shown that such human evolutionary patterns of obsolete but reigning paradigm, crisis, pre-paradigm development through spirituality, and the opposition between old and new paradigm, are a natural evolutionary phenomena of a self-aware species. Even the dramatic consequences of a powerful yet obsolete paradigm, that could cause death and destruction, can be seen as a universal natural disaster hitting humankind, forcing ourselves to renew our spiritual awareness and develop a new evolutionary cycle. But this natural phenomena is of course not an excuse for those who are aware of it to let it happen just like that. The force of reasoning and new paradigm development is nowadays, thanks to many modern elements of peaceful reflection, education and opposition, capable of overcoming a forthcoming crisis without the natural need for or potential threat of a mass destruction.
Academic intellectuals, artists and entrepreneurs from 14 countries meet for the paradigm shift
Sustainability was explained from an existential and practical point of view, using also nature as a point of inspirational reference. Various presentations coincided about the forthcoming mayor crash, a melt down of the world order of economics after decades of exponential growth and speculation. For the first time academic financial specialists looked at the broader picture and showed the unsustainable truth of current economic materialism. Not many presentations could pinpoint yet a solution. Some were still tempted to use economic instruments that were contrasted by others, including me, as “decades too late” and at this stage unrealistic and equally obsolete.
Solutions needed to be found in the inner world of reflection, awareness and consciousness, not the external worlds of old material securities. My own practical presentation of sustainocracy was well received. As I was one of the very first to present my case I had three more days left to get some deepening reflection about it with those who connected with the complexity of my line of thinking and my practical proof of concept that already went beyond the phase of pre-paradigm. During the questioning rounds after each presentation the power of my own model of human complexities proved its worth for my own inner guidance for reflection and interaction with the others.
The psychology of change in a paradigm shift is the true transformative challenge of humankind
The complexity of the current global situation was also beautifully shown through expressions of art around the world, presented by academic scientists, and available to create awareness in a difficult world of opposition, apathy, ignorance, commercial over-communication, fear and manipulation. The surprising beauty or challenging intellectual creativity brought forward in all kinds of artistic disciplines was mind blowing. Speakers could pinpoint where the problems were in the unbelievable massiveness of humankind in the world today, but also that solutions were not easily at hand. Humankind was expecting solutions from the external material world while all agreed that the real solutions needed to be found in the inner world of meaning through spirituality and structural renewal of our civilization’s organization around life and evolutionary essentials.
Many presentations therefor referred to the necessary inner quest for reason and meaning, not just as an individual but also as an organization and entire civilization. Many also referred to the powerful explosive potential that spirituality has when it hits the individual and the masses. “Water must flow freely” (biologist and journalist) Janos Vargha stated when he explained his decades of battle against the system of political and economic madness when the Danube was nearly doomed for exploitation with damaging effects beyond repair. He won!
In the red circle the “monster of the Danube”, artificial remains of human institutionalized madness
And so will spirituality as this too must flow freely. The dam that was going to affect natural life, including human’s, in and around the Danube, is now a metaphor for the blocking forces of artificial institutionalized economic and political interests that stand free flow of awareness and reason in the way. Public opposition builds up powerfully and eventually breaks through the dam with force. Right now we are all like Janos in the 80’s, claiming the free flow of meaningful reason and renewal in a peaceful but demanding way, before damage is irreparable. We have time at our side, those who try to uphold their unsustainable power position do not. This personal reflection should give us trust, no matter what happens:
“Spiritual meaning will eventually win as it always has, simply because it has eternity on its side while the temporary power of the self proclaimed mighty dies with those mortals that try to uphold it in their lifetime”.
The encounter was very powerful indeed and finalized with people who found each other in meaning, reasoning and purpose. Friendships were born, alliances too, and solutions were shared that went beyond the stage of experimental pre-paradigm. During that weekend in Visegrad along the Danube bend of Hungary the cultivators of a new human future shared seeds to sow across the world. The new paradigm of sustainable human progress exists and will grow there where true spirituality meets with purpose driven leadership and entrepreneurship.
Sustainocracy, the new democracy 