- people's value priorities change,
- people make different decisions because they now have different priorities,
- people then do different things, and
- society embarks on a fundamental transformation--a new culture has its beginnings.
Alan Greenspan in his role as Chairman of the US Government's Federal Reserve shaped the Global Economy for over 19 years. He was our world's economics guru. Anyone who had anything to do with economics or the Market hung on his every utterance. That's what makes the following admission1 of the failure of his own world-view so astonishing:
WAXMAN:2 "The question I have for you is, you had an ideology, you had a belief that free, competitive—and this is your statement—'I do have an ideology. My judgment is that free, competitive markets are by far the unrivalled way to organize economies. We have tried regulation, none meaningfully worked.' That was your quote. You had the authority to prevent irresponsible lending practices that led to the subprime mortgage crisis. You were advised to do so by many others. And now our whole economy is paying the price. Do you feel that your ideology pushed you to make decisions that you wish you had not made?"Dr Gunther Weil has developed a model3 which directly relates people's monetary decisions to key values associated with their world-view:
GREENSPAN: "Well, remember, though, what an ideology is. It’s a conceptual framework with [sic] the way people deal with reality. Everyone has one. You have to. To exist, you need an ideology. The question is, whether it is accurate or not. What I am saying to you is, yes, I found the flaw, I don’t know how significant or permanent it is, but I have been very distressed by that fact."
WAXMAN: "You found a flaw?"
GREENSPAN: "I found a flaw in the model that I perceived is the critical functioning structure that defines how the world works, so to speak."
WAXMAN: "In other words, you found that your view of the world, your ideology, was not right, it was not working."
GREENSPAN: "Precisely. That is precisely the reason I was shocked, because I had been going for 40 years or more with very considerable evidence that it was working exceptionally well."
If you know which of the seven generic world-views are closest to a person's world-view it will come as no surprise as to how they choose to spend their money.
World View Philanthropic Values & Motive Alien/Threatened Survival & Security Family/Social Family tradition, care/nurture, status/image Organizational/Transactional Financial metrics & accountability, productivity, efficiency Self-Actualization/Service Self-discovery, empathy, altruism, service Collaborative Social justice, innovation, collaboration Symbiotic Society transformation, prophetic vision, wisdom & spirituality Global Transformation Global transformational, human rights, global ecology, macroeconomics
If you know the world-view of the people responsible for setting economic policy, you will know what type of economic system they will put in place.
Your world-view comprises a set of assumptions about "how the world works". If your model of the world no longer seems to be working, you can either move to a state of denial about the assumptions on which it is based, or you can as Alan Greenspan did, recognize that the assumptions on which it is based are flawed, and build a new world-view. Your very survival may depend on it:4
How valid are the assumptions underpinning your current world-view?
Notes
- From a transcript of a hearing before a US Congress House Committee hearing in 2008 reported by Raj Patel in The Value of Nothing, pp. 5-6.
- Henry Arnold Waxman (born September 12, 1939) is an American politician. He has represented California's 30th congressional district in the U.S. House of Representatives since 1975. Waxman, a Democrat, is considered to be one of the most influential liberal members of Congress. His district includes much of the western part of the city of Los Angeles, as well as West Hollywood, Santa Monica and Beverly Hills. Before his election to Congress, he served six years in the California State Assembly. With the Democrats' victory in the 2006 midterm elections, Waxman became chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, the principal investigative committee of the House. Source: Wikipedia.
- Source: http://joi.ito.com/weblog/2010/06/18/how-to-raise-fu.html
- Drawing by Ted Key in Keyes, K. 1975, p. 115.
References
Keyes, K. 1975, Taming Your Mind, Living Love Publications, Coos Bay, OregonPatel, R. 2010, The Value of Nothing: How to reshape market society & redefine democracy, Black Inc, Melbourne
2 comments:
Thank you Paul and Company
Great example provided regarding Greenspan and his world view and the need to reflect on the underlying assumptions and limitations. It took Greenspan 40 years to challenge the underlying foundations.
I wonder if this foundational challenge could have happened earlier, if Greenspan had developed the internal software to critically challenge his underlying assumptions or (as the case highlights) does it depend on a crisis to surface the underlying cracks in our foundations?
Eugene, most often it does take a crisis to surface underlying false assumptions. However, it's vitally important that people in authority, particularly the policy makers who affect us all, have permanent processes in place to question underlying assumptions. As was highlighted in the movie Sister Kenny , "It's the stuff we 'know' that ain't [sic] so that matters."
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