There’s a saying that “what doesn’t kill us makes us stronger.” Every living thing is gamed externally by competitors for food and reproductive rights and is gamed internally for its accumulated resources by other competitors we call parasites and pathogens. Successful individuals and species adapt to being gamed in both spheres; those who don’t die young. Gaming also challenges businesses, governments and all other systems in human societies, requiring adaptive responses from those which intend to endure.
Parasites and pathogens weaken or kill some of us as they use us for food and shelter, but our biological and social responses to their gaming have systematically improved our average health and improved the staying power of homo-sapiens by evolving sophisticated immune systems and by developing sophisticated medical systems. But it is an unending arms race, for as we adapt to them, the parasites and pathogens adapt to us in their relentless quests for rich sources of food. They game us for food, we game them to improve our health and survival rates; neither side attempts to benefit the other, yet each side inadvertently does so by stimulating changes that elevate health and survivability and by punishing lack of change with extinction.
Parasites and pathogens are neither bad nor good; they are just competitors for vital resources. However they become assets when we adapt to them and become our mortal enemies when we choose to ignore them or to respond inflexibly.
Continually adapting consumes vital resources and energy, which makes living systems, and immune systems less efficient but more robust and longer lived. For living and non-living systems (like cars and computers) there always comes a point beyond which the more efficient a system is the more fragile it is and the shorter its life expectancy.
For us as individuals, the most efficient, but least durable personal tactic is to borrow to the hilt and to pursue life, liberty and personal happiness without paying taxes for our share of infrastructure, protection and communal benefits and without saving for a rainy day. This “maximum borrowing, lower taxes approach” pretty much describes what we’ve been doing in the USA for the last 35 years or so. It’s a wonder that it has taken this long to undermine the fabric of our society.
For our economy, the most efficient and most fragile system is one dominated by global behemoths in banking and business who are loaded with parasites and unable to adapt; this is the economic system we’ve been pursuing under the banner of a “global economy” and it has the shortest life expectancy.
As business enterprises grow larger and older they sacrifice their capacity to adapt to external or internal gaming; they use size (and other efficiencies of scale) to control or to eliminate marketplace competitors ―who actually may be better, but too small―and they usually ignore their internal parasites and pathogens because their immune response is compromised by the parasites; somewhat akin to AIDs!
When we, as outsiders, discover that large, dying business enterprises such as GM or Citibank are loaded with parasites and pathogens, our first instinct is to be furious with the parasitic people, as though they shouldn’t exist. We resent having to deal with them because it is unpleasant and it consumes resources; we simply want to be rid of them. That is an unrealistic and counter-productive reaction! The appropriate reaction, which I’ll outline later in this post, must strengthen healthy businesses, eliminate parasitic ridden behemoths and strengthen our economic system. It’s what we must do instead of putting sick and dying behemoths on perpetual life support.
First, before we get too mad at the parasites and pathogens, let us recognize that we are a parasitic and pathogenic species within the web of life. Like parasites― in our quest for food, security and fun― we deplete pools of resources that took living systems millions of years to acquire; fossil fuels, fisheries, animal species, reserves of fresh water, etc. Like pathogens we dump our toxic wastes in land air and water and thereby weaken or destroy eco-systems. Overall, we are seriously weakening the web of life without making any serious efforts to balance what we deplete with enhancements and what we poison with purifications. We expect natural systems to adapt (or go extinct) while we go on mindlessly exploiting them. Yet, we are just doing what is in our nature and we feel no collective imperative to change or need to feel guilty. In that response we emulate all those human parasites and pathogens who inhabit economic enterprises: for the most part they feel perfectly justified in what they do, they have rationalized their exhorbitant compensations and readily find a support community within and outside the corporation and see no need to change.
When we compete in a marketplace, we game one another for jobs and resources. Advocates of free-market economies believe this gaming improves our competitiveness and strengthens the economic system; and I concur. However, we are instinctively prepared to become parasites. We know that if we gain control of a pool of resources for our own use, or access to a pool of resources formed by a bank, business or fund, the size of the pool will give us a competitive advantage that reduces or eliminates our individual need to adapt. So our strategy is to guarantee our control over or personal access to as large a pool as possible; get rich or run a large company. The advantage of scale also starts an arms race of growth and centralization in marketplaces that weakens and sometimes destroys the free-market (long before the monopoly stage is reached, I might add) but reduces the need for us to adapt to external competition.
Thus, an individual or enterprise with a pool of resources is gamed by other individuals (employees, investors, suppliers, customers, crooks) seeking to acquire some of those resources for themselves while putting in as little effort as possible; in large, public corporations, the primary gamers (parasites and pathogens) are the overcompensated executives and over-benefitted workers who have secured access to the pool of corporate resources― stockholders don’t have direct access ― and are draining far more from it than they contribute to it. By the way, the most effective parasites and pathogens in nature and in business are careful not to kill their hosts although accumulated loads eventually do; it’s not in their best interests.
TARP and temporary compensation caps won’t rescue the financial system― though it might prolong the death throes of mortally ill behemoths and keep our economic system on life support for a while longer― because they merely gives these institutions more resources from which ensconced parasites can feed and multiply. Trying to eliminate all parasites and pathogens isn’t practical either: we would have to exterminate the human race.
In the future, to maintain a healthy economy, large businesses must build ever more sophisticated, ever adaptable immune systems in concert with a society which builds ever adaptable and sophisticated “medical” systems to help them. Society’s systems would include proactive laws to promote economic health (such as term limits for corporate charters, limits on regional and national growth, and market share limitations) and reactive laws with enforcement teeth to cure sicknesses and constructively dissolve the terminally ill. As it is today, there are fatal flaws within corporate immune systems (for example the incestuous Executives-Board relationship, or in managers who can throw corporate money at people instead of managing them), in contract law (for example early employees can legally obtain guaranteed benefits that later workers must pay for) and in corporate law (for example unlimited lifetimes for corporate charters) and the tax code (which encourages oversized companies and parasitic compensations with low tax rates) that cry out to be corrected.
Note well: for sustained economic health, businesses, their immune systems and the legal systems in which they operate must all continually adapt and respond to gaming from within and without. In response to the Great Depression a set of taxes and banking laws was put in place and worked fairly well for 40 years or so, then the parasites and pathogens found out how to game the laws, in part by inventing new institutions and financial vehicles (such as Credit Default Swaps and Hedge Funds) and globalizing institutions to get around these laws. The parasites also used their resource pools to game lawmakers into passivity, and in some cases into dismantling laws and enforcement institutions that had formed the first lines of defense. Their cover-your-ass excuse was to ever improve business efficiencies.
Individuals, governments, the legal system and even our Constitution are also gamed from without and within and need to develop far more sophisticated, and ever adapting, immune systems and”medical” support systems. In future posts I will describe some of the gaming processes and how to develop effective and adaptable immune systems for them.
Edwin Lee, June 12, 2009
I agree with many of your points; however, there is a modified approach that places greater emphasis on the interplay of competition, cooperation, and emergent knowledge. Sure, simpler organisms rely on programmed codes; however, those with more sophisticated minds rely to a greater extent on stored knowledge and projection (computers may help). Those in the ‘game” may compete but may begin to envision the benefits of cooperation, of win-wins based on learning. Wisdom is knowing when there are sufficient benefits to engage in cooperation, and the persuasive talent to convince others to participate. However, not only do brains emerge, but so can cultures.
I am thinking of a basketball team. You compete to make the team. You then compete to make the starting five (and continue to do so). But you have to perform as a team; if the coach is wise he will reward not only individual performance but good team work. Next scale up, the team competes against other teams in the conference; the best make the final four. But there is another level; competition between players and teams sharpens the whole. The tournament is very exciting, and the fans rush to get their tickets. Then there is the role of governance: smart league administrators know that they can’t allow cheating (e.g.via bribes, steroids, bets, and the likes).
In the era of deregulation; the referees are asleep or worse, the league executives are busy feathering their own nests, the Universities have forgotten about academic standards, the best players are hollow and spoiled, and the poor kid looking for a role model, well…..
Hank:
Thanks for your comments and your basketball metaphor.
You might be interested in an essay I wrote years ago, while still in the throes of competitive battles in hi-tech, titled “Do You Compete With or Compete Against?” ( http://www.elew.com/competit.pdf) It falls in line with your thinking, and still forms part of my core belief system.
Ed Lee