Social Capitalism ...

Good Morning Folks, It seems to me that we all want the benefits of big business. Personally I want to be able to continue to turn on the lights in the evening in my home. This requires a substantial business to provide for the production and delivery of electricity to my personal residence and to maintain the infrastructure that allows for that. I also understand that getting there sometimes requires an investment by the local community or the larger society like when we dam a river to provide hydro-electric power with public funding, or when we give a private company the option to build a nuclear plant on a public waterway and use that water for cooling and steam generation. And many times in those cases because of the recognition of public investment these businesses are subject to public review. Yet it seems that all businesses trade off of public resources ... our oceans, our waterways, our skies, our roads ... just to name a few. And that a disproportionate share of the value created by these businesses operating in part due to the access of public resources are being diverted to a very limited number of well-placed individuals. One of the newest arenas where this has proven to be the case has been in the massive successes of those using public airways for the transmission of media ... super gains to a few far-seeing individuals using a limited public resource. So the argument for Social Captialism begins with asking a different set of questions premised on a different kind of thinking than we've used in the past. Virtually all consideration of past formulas have been based on the patterns established during the era of the great civilzations where a ruling class literally owned what we now think of as public resources ... land, water, etc. ... and controlled in an absolute way the ability to conduct business of any kind. In the era of monarchies and empires this ruling class controlled the flow of all commerce and the collection of all taxes and tariffs for themselves. And in many ways our social systems today remain a patchwork of laws and regulations designed and developed to serve these older systems of govenment and rule. So the outstanding question I have been wrestling with for some time has been:

"What will it take for us as a society to make the leap from the established systems that emerged during the Agricultural and Industrial Ages to a new system appropriate for a Biological Age?"

See ... I think that despite what many pundits have proclaimed as the emergence of a new age of technology or information, these advents are extensions of the Industrial Age. In fact I'd go so far as to say that technology and information are ways to extend the reach of the Industrial Age for a few more years. If we look at the path of history we could speculate the following pattern:

Pre-Agricultural - 4,000,000 BC to 3,000 BC

Agricultural - 3,000 BC to 1700 AD

Industrial - 1700 AD to Present +/-50

That means that the Pre-Agriculture Age lasted about 4,000,000 years vs. the Agricultural Age, which lasted about 5,000 years and the Industrial Age, which may run as long as 400 years (or 1/10,000 as long as the Pre-Agricultural Age). The significance of this among all else would include the idea that our fundamental nature evolved in relation to our ability to succeed and prosper in pre-agricultural times (hunter and gatherer days). We are biologically best suited for a pre-agricultural existence in many ways, although our ability as species to adapt to wide ranging environmental and societal systems truly astounds me when I think about it. Yet, I'm speculating that we are in fact evolving to a new Biological Age, one defined as much as by anything else by the desire to establish steady-state systems on a mass societal level. The will see a revisioning of the current economic models based on growth and/or compounded growth. Instead there will be growth of a much more precise and specific nature, especially in regard to our economic entities like businesses. I can envision a day in the not too distant future where we will legislate steady-state systems as matter of public law, and limit both the kind and the extent of growth for any company that operates within these systems. My favorite author in terrms of exploring this idea as fiction has been, Ernest Callenbach the author of both Ecotopia and Ecotopia Emerging, both on my must read list. Both of these books explore the philosophy and speculate about the science of a sociey built on steady-state principals. My favorite authors in terms of exploring this idea in practice would be, Paul Hawken in books like Ecology of Commerce. and Ray Anderson (the CEO of Interface, Inc., the largest manufacturers of modular carpeting in the world) in Mid-Course Correction. The entire idea suggests that we build our economic, social and political models around establishing sustainable biological steady-states. What I find so powerful in this suggestion revolves around how I think these models are more matched to us biologically as well, and will put us into social systems more suited to our essential nature in biological terms.

For instance, rather than building huge social systems designed to manage and integrate the activities of tens of thousands, or even hundreds of thousands of people in the interest of economic production and delivery, we will be building systems of a maximum of two to five hundred people, and as small as ten to fifty people, and these economic pods will link together to form a network that produces and delivers the economic goods in the Biological Age.

Of course whole new systems will have to be conceived, designed and constructed to accomplish such a radical change in the way we do business. However, this may likely coincide with entirely new businesses that will also evolve in the Biological Age ... genetic engineering, exo-farming (off-planet agriculture), bio-machines ... many for which the essential ground work has already be laid. As we continue to unfold the complexity of the basic biology of the planet and begin to recognize the interconnectivity of this complexity we are finding ourselves faced with the daunting task of releasing ourselves from many established beliefs and practices ... i.e.: how we know the world to be.

Yet I also see this as the dawning of a new age where the entire premise of what I'm referring to as Social Capitalism comes into its own, and those businesses that are most ready to operate within the paradigm of Social Capitalism are also those that are most likely to succeed ... and succeed wildly.<

Well enough speculation for one day ... and I am looking forward to the transformation of society, capitalism and business as wel know it ... Best regards, Joseph RIggio, Social Ontologist Princeton, NJ