Rage Against the Machine (Not the Man)

As entrepreneurs and business people, we must design our super-human creations to remain in our service. Nature tells us how.

Today we see a confused reaction to recent tragic events, unable to ascertain how to frame such violent actions from an otherwise anonymous technical professional against a prominent business leader.? Clarity in this situation is crucial, and rationality is key. ?

We must recognize that much of the machinery of business that we have created to be ever-more impervious to human error and imperfection, has become dissatisfactory to the people who operate it, to the people who invest in it, and to the people it serves, despite economic appearances of success. It is time that we as the architects of business take control of our machines from inception, and align them with the natural evolutionary laws that will keep them in the service of mankind more than the service of their own growth, to everyone's mutual benefit.

Below is an excerpt from the first chapter of my recent book, "Evolving Energy", which I feel is highly relevant to unpacking this event, and preventing more like it in the future. I very much welcome your insights and thoughts in the comments below!

"The Bug in the Code

When we are not in a state of stress or fear, we naturally seek to help and provide for others, particularly if we have accepted help from others in the past. Unfortunately, many of us find this quality of community and inclusion declining in recent years despite the overall wealth of humanity measurably growing. Capitalism and free markets have been wildly successful in expanding humanity’s growth despite the difficulties of housing and feeding an increasingly crowded population. Declining poverty levels, alongside rapid advances in transportation and instant information accessible to most of humanity, would seem to indicate a rising quality of life. Yet many of us ask why we are not feeling more fulfilled, more connected with our neighbors, and more hopeful.

This disconnect between apparent and genuine happiness is not an inherent problem with buying and selling in free markets or using money. Instead, the problem arises when the driving forces propel society and form its codes narrow to a single rule for what wins preference in all decisions: maximization of self-gain. To succeed to maximum potential in modern society, at least in our American culture, one must live aligned to this as the Prime Directive. This Prime Directive of self-interest has broadened to include more than just money; it is also the dominant drive for status and “likes." ?

Our actions and reactions adapt to serve this imperative, requiring us to achieve a state of being that can maintain this disposition naturally at all times. The state of being that best maintains a constant priority on self-interest is a state of fear. Fear places self-preservation above all else. It keeps us at high output but in constant stress. It also keeps our driving motivations low on Maslow’s famous hierarchy of needs, far from self-actualization, stuck in a primitive, reactive life of survival and continuous struggle, surrounded by the trappings of comfort. Our last 200 years of rapid progress can easily be attributed to humanity being in constant fight-or-flight mode, driven by the profit motive above all other values.???

ESG and Expanding the Prime Directive

The fight-or-flight culture created by a narrow focus on profit can be perpetuated indefinitely by codified systems and can grow increasingly resistant to change over time. Aligning the corporate model to support society's needs and those of investor profit requires intentional changes to the corporate model. Stakeholder capitalism, through the last decade's Environmental and Social Governance (ESG) efforts, shows a new desire to evolve the corporate model, guided by the belief that when you care for all your stakeholders, not just investors, you become more profitable.?

These efforts arise from investors seeking to answer growing public concerns about the lack of accountability of corporations for the collateral damage from the business they conduct. While these efforts stop short of breaking the allegiance to profit as the maximum priority, they may help to show a pathway to align and synchronize the corporation's actions with the needs of the communities that support them if done earnestly. The evolution of the ESG model is already underway, as disinterested investor groups criticize ESG for its lack of ability to amplify the Prime Directive of profit.?

Even as the popularity of such ESG initiatives wanes in the public sphere, they are beginning to attract new partnerships of corporations with nonprofit and social justice groups. The expertise in these nonprofits can enhance the effectiveness of ESG efforts, creating an improved system that benefits from the “DNA” of the parent systems. The system adapts to the pressure of external forces through something akin to sexual selection, guided by the values of society as embodied in the ESG mandate. We could see even further effectiveness in new incarnations if investors keep faith in continuing to develop this model, with the ultimate goal of putting environmental, social and governance goals on equal footing with profit. ?

The Necessities of Death and Sex

Corrections to the corporate model, such as ESG, can be helpful, but to align with natural processes of evolution, we must incorporate the purification that only death can bring. Mortality is a key design component to evolution, which can be a difficult requirement for any designer to accept. While we may see an increasing amount of killing and dark imagery in American pop culture, death is maintained as an abstract concept, favoring the pursuit of eternal youth and idealizing a life free from pain and loss. Death and aging are to be avoided at all costs when materialism is the guiding principle.

In the natural world, death is the necessary opening to evolution - in evolution, sexual reproduction and death are intertwined. Death allows new superior generations to supersede the limitations of the older generations. The most successful organisms do not keep extending their individual lifespans but rather create successively improved versions of themselves as older ones die and younger, more advanced organisms take their place. Without death, older organisms with inferior capabilities can crowd out a superior but younger organism, taking up disproportionate food or space or overwhelming them with their waste. Advantages in older organisms simply from accumulation over time can prevent younger organisms from maturing and properly competing.

With death clearing the oldest organisms away, newer versions of an evolving organism become superior through sexual selection; that is when organisms self-identify the traits best suited for success and create new organisms by mating with the organisms best expressing those traits. Antlers that win mating competitions lead to more animals with bigger antlers,? for example, just as a high cultural value on tallness can lead to a very tall population if this value is sufficiently pervasive. When an evolving entity finds qualities that will improve its success and the success of its children in a mate, and a mate also finds such qualities in that entity, the child they create together has the best chance of having more of these traits than either of its parents. That child will be more successful so long its parents' “tastes” in picking these qualities matched the qualities best for their survival and propagation. The child will have advantages over older versions if it can grow and mature to a state of competitive strength and if what its parents find attractive also helps it succeed and find a mate to propagate these traits even further.

In applying this concept of evolutionary improvement to our codified systems, it is crucial that we intentionally choose the characteristics that we want to succeed in the sexual selection process, such as environmental compatibility and social equity. In social interactions, we find that our shared social values directly affect our human sexual choices; in the same way, these values must drive the sexual selection that advances our codified systems. When we cannot specify the laws that will assure a perpetual state of universal love and pain-free existence, we can keep nurturing systems and laws that better achieve these goals and propagate the most successful codified systems with other codified systems. As older systems die and new systems are born, they become increasingly more capable of achieving traits that have helped them succeed.

A species can adapt to radical environmental changes through death and rebirth and transform over time to suit the changing world. Mortality allows natural selection through real consequences, separating those that benefit their environment from those that don't, creating greater variety and greater strength. A South American fox will never thrive in the Antarctic, no matter how long it lives, but through the processes of death, rebirth, and natural selection, we find foxes thriving in both places.

We increasingly find more kinship between civilization and the natural world through the increasing popularity of design concepts derived from natural processes. This new design paradigm includes biomimicry, which is engineering based on solutions found in nature; regenerative agriculture, which is full-cycle, self-sustaining food production; and permaculture, which is the holistic incorporation of all of these natural processes for self-sustaining communities. In the same way, we can benefit greatly from incorporating the idea of mortality into our economic systems. When organizations span multiple human lifetimes, they can become self-serving, transforming from tools to help people to near-autonomous growth machines. ? We can see this in organizations whose activities are dominated by the maintenance of the organization itself. This inherent immortality is precisely the architecture we must avoid in the new infrastructure of AI. It is imperative that all controlling algorithms and laws that we create, and all of those created by it, follow the fundamental natural evolutionary laws of sexual selection and mortality to remain healthy and supportive of our ever-changing society.

There is precedent for this approach, and this example shows the fantastic capability of the evolutionary process in business to rapidly innovate and adapt to new conditions. Venture capitalists embraced this approach and built the internet we know today. In the next chapter, we will look at this remarkable approach to technology incubation and development from these bold financial pioneers and how they applied it to rapidly growing and adapting companies and technologies in clean energy. We will also look at how this fertile process led internet developers to create the toxic and extractive online environments that are corroding our society today and find a new, more human-centered approach to guide this evolution to harmonize with our living world."

And - for the "win-win-win" solution to achieving corporate mortality (which I assure you exists) please read Chapter 7 of "Evolving Energy", available now on Amazon!

https://a.co/d/7o9SbEH

(C) 2024 Empowered Intelligence Books