The Road to Success is Paved With…
lots of detours and false starts, from the looks of things.
I’m already on record as a fan of FlowingData, whose blog I subscribe to. This morning Nathan posted an evergreen allegorical cartoon, originally published in 1913, that blows me away. If you want to study it closer, click to get it in another browser window by itself, then zoom in. (UPDATE 1-31-62 I just learned the company with the copyright produces great reprints and Tshirts).
Scroll past the poster for my thoughts on success and wisdom from the Buddha on healthcare, entitlements and financial reforms.
Macro events on micro successes
This allegorical poster works well across the range of arenas in which people strive to succeed, whether it be spiritual enlightenment, gaining the esteem of family and neighbors, building a thriving business enterprise or artistic mastery. When you think about it, there are really several mountains of success we climb in this life: family member, citizen, profession, avocation, seeker…everyone’s list varies. And none of us is at the pinnacle of all life’s mountains at the same time. Life is full of trade-offs.
The one thing the poster doesn’t account for, however, is the role of macro events in our micro lives. For example, let’s say you created the world’s most precise wristwatch and fashioned it into a gorgeous piece of jewelry at a time when mobile phones have essentially replaced the need for a separate timekeeping device. Your company goes bust, taking down the family and friends who invested in your vision. Does that make you unsuccessful? Depends upon your definition of success, doesn’t it? I had a similar experience, touched upon lightly in this essay published in Charlotte Magazine, Breathe In, Breathe Out.
One thing I hope we’re all learning in this Great Recession, is how interdependent we are. Investors in now-failed enterprises run by managers with the highest moral fiber have suffered alongside those who placed their life savings in Ponzi schemes. And now investors of all stripes are suffering alongside those now unemployed by the companies crumbling around them.
Here’s a story about some Madoff investors now marooned in a RV park in Arizona, because they can’t afford the $2500 to drive home to NY. He was a New York City Department of Corrections officer and she, a computer analyst; hardly the glitterati we associate with Madoff’s victims.
It’s a compelling interview, including this quote by the prison guard, “We have our money in a viable institution and nobody was there to check. I mean, if I went to work every day at the Department of Correction and just left the door open and let the inmates out…. That’s my job to keep them in line, keep them behind the gate. Did anybody do that at the SEC? Absolutely not.”
A third way — between unfettered capitalism and outright socialism
I’m growing deaf listening to the various screaming matches on financial reform and fixing healthcare/entitlements.
To hear those on the far right, Fascists monsters are lurking under our collective bed, waiting for us to fall asleep so they can nationalize all industries and make the US unattractive to capital, thereby plunging this great country into the abyss alongside other empires on which the sun has long ago set. The left sees virtue in centrally coordinated systems that make the quality of life in America less dependent on highly variable, state-based programs. In this vision, we’ll provide for the common weal and wipe out blood money-derived profits, but unless we take swift and broad-sweeping measures to centralize federal control immediately, we’ll be swept into the dustbin of history as another fallen giant.
Interesting that no matter the side, both meet in the middle with their conclusion that we’re headed down the road to ruin.
Look, the desire to organize society around an enforceable ethical code and to take care of the poor, old and infirmed are goals as ancient as the human race. These aspirations separate us from the beasts of the field. Our approach to these goals differs as society matures and technical advances enable us to try new things. So let’s all take a deep breath and look under the bed. With a flashlight.
I’m a fan of Buddhist monk Pema Chodron’s book When Things Fall Apart and think her work provides a useful frame of reference for the dread we feel about the changes now upon us. “We think that the point is to pass the test or to overcome the problem, but the truth is that things don’t really get solved. They come together and they fall apart. Then they come together again and fall apart again.”
When we can accept the falling apart and coming together of all things in life, starting at our personal lives and including our entire world, we might approach financial reform, health care and entitlements with less dread, hysteria and finger pointing.
All these systems met needs pretty well for a time as originally designed and implemented; things came together at those points in time. Times have changed and new tools and social conditions have come on the scene since then; things have fallen apart.
Two examples:
- Things fell apart during the Depression, so we implemented entitlement programs and erected new regulatory bodies. Things came together. I argue that the only reason we’re not in another Great Depression today is the post-Depression social safety nets that now provide unemployment insurance and a baseline of health insurance to our elderly and most financially vulnerable citizens. But since we essentially dismantled Glass-Steagall, and financial mathematicians developed products that were unforeseen by jazz era regulators anyway, we produced fake wealth and things fell apart again.
- Employer-provided health insurance came into being in a different age, too, beginning in the 1930s and quickly expanding as an employee fringe benefit when wage and price controls were implemented during the Second World War. Breathe in. Time for an update — we don’t even drive vintage 1960′s automobiles anymore, so why a ’60′s era healthcare system? Breathe out.
Now let’s all chant Om and get on with finding third-way solutions to financial and social services reforms that work for all of us.
