Translators of Human Potential

It's exciting to have a forum where I can mostly focus on excitement. I've always tried to learn about what I find most interesting at the time, and that has made my personal studies fascinating. Blogging allows the same with expression of ideas--rather than spewing whatever uninteresting stuff may be going on in any given day, I can write when I feel that good-vibes daemon and get to know myself as an excited person by looking at what I (choose to) post. I think it's easy enough to miss out on that aspect of ourselves, but it's helpful to see a bunch of this stuff together, this material that involves excitement for me.

In arguing with my cultural diversity and women's studies professors, and in speaking congenially with a few forward-thinking feminist scholars, the point kept coming up that identity politics are interesting but a real sticking point concerning personal and cultural progress. Part of what keeps coming around is that, as people lament the loss of culture and languages around the world, more and more is offered for us as individuals to interact with. The complexity that people were used to seeing in old-school identity politics terms (nations, ethnicities, gender, temperament, etc.) is increasingly recognized to be internal to various groups of people and individuals. In other words, instead of only comparing myself to women, I can get to know my "feminine" qualities to the extent that they're there and could be developed; then they become me and mine rather than "feminine". The same is true with my "Chinese" qualities, although we haven't really used that sort of word choice much. I really appreciate a certain amount of traditional Chinese values, a certain amount of social(ist) cohesion, and an interest in maintaining China's unique place in the world.

My generation was the first in the history of the world to basically have available in book form almost every religion, easily accessible since we were born. We assume that availability. Now, you don't have to go to another country, you don't even have to buy or borrow the books and lug them around in your backpack if you have access to a computer. The next couple of generations will witness a further degree of universal language development (software code and fiber optic communications along with digitization).

When societies bump into one another, cultures get exchanged like glances eye to eye and then bodily fluids as things heat up. Eventually, something new is created. For the last couple of centuries, this happened mostly in a colonial competition. Now, if we can avoid nuclear or world war, it happens economically and technically.

Just as one society may assimilate aspects of another when those aspects are shown to work better, companies do the same. With companies going multinational, or with multinational companies becoming more influential, the interactions of various aspects of differing cultures are no longer primarily resigned to diplomats and armies between potentially warring societies. The interactions are no longer so much about benefiting oneself AT ANY COST to the others involved. It's an important change that even the Bush Administration is capable of recognizing. Why have we not attacked or at least completely ostracized North Korea? It doesn't work.

With the general reluctance to destroy one's competitors that came about with the rise of liberal humanism, the competition changes. You no longer sneak in, commit genocide against your competitors, steal what you can and go home. There is no separate "home" to go back to, and we all know this now. If we shit the bed, there is nowhere else to go to sleep. This world is pretty much it, at least until we can learn to live on Mars. While the USSR and the USA were willing to line up against each other based on ideological differences, destruction was still a major part of the equation, but this competition made the choices obvious to us for the first time--we can destroy each other (and ourselves at the same time) or try something else. The same is true with terrorism. Just try destroying all terrorists and see how long that "war on terror" lasts. You create your enemy with every move you make in that sort of game. Yes, the terrorists create THEIR enemies the same violent way; terrorism is the flipside of perceived oppression, so it can result from genuine oppression or also from entitlement and resentment. It gets interesting when rich, entitled Saudi kids become terrorists and rich, entitled American kids become Presidents.

Violence is bad for business and also for intentional assimilation. It's harder to pick out the positive aspects of Islam when the Muslims you interact with are shouting and shooting (the same is true from the Muslim side). But, in order to do something other than engage in this tribal sort of silliness (and it is silly and unnecessary now more than tragic or horrible, although it is tragic and horrible too), it is necessary to recognize that your opponent/competitor MAY actually do something better than you already do, that they may know something you don't. I am willing to admit that the Muslim countries in this world may do some things better than I do (and it's reasonable to want to see proof).

Companies in competition more often seek to improve themselves than to destroy their competition outright (it's better to assimilate successful competitors than destroy them); this has only come about to the extent that innovations, once developed, will last whether the person or company who created them is destroyed or not. In other words, destruction is no longer the best business, and that is THE ONLY EFFECTIVE REASON for convincing people to limit their competition. There are plenty of other supporting claims, but this is the only one that has been effective throughout history. As long as destruction pays, people will destroy because it takes less creativity and effort to come up with a fuck-you response than getting to know foreigners. Getting to know foreigners can be uncomfortable and difficult, and the economy of psychological motivations comes into play. If I can get away with greater comfort for myself, even if it means destroying others, I just might do it; if I can't remain comfortable and benefit from their destruction, I may as well not--it's distasteful.

So business competition is less extreme or violent than that between colonial empires, but the same cultural assimilation occurs with companies as with adventurers. The amazing thing is that, the less I have to fear about others trying to destroy me, and the less attention I put into devising ways to destroy others, the more I focus on the business at hand. The business at hand has always been and will always be happiness.

The less attention that goes into destruction, the more attention can go into creative improvement. Multinational companies are learning cultural lessons that countries have learned and forgotten since time immemorial. It's better to be creative, easier to sell your products, if everyone involved benefits. In order for that to happen in a functioning, competitive, international marketplace, we have to find out how "creative destruction" applies to business and culture. The best way to understand the psychological economy that drives business interactions and cultural exchange is to understand how creative destruction affects oneself. The better one is able to understand how creative destruction applies to one's own attention and awareness, the more prepared one is to make personal, business, and diplomatic decisions in a globalized setting. At this point in history, every social and ecological setting is a globalized setting.

The flipside of creative destruction (knowing what to let go of and how to dismantle it) is population control. Without population control, every human society contributes to straight ecological destruction.

As people mirror societies and companies, and as different cultures become increasingly more available to individuals from beyond the geographical boundaries of those societies, individuals sample from and introject aspects of those various cultures. Two things happen. The first is that the individual or company or whatever (administration, maybe?) becomes more internationalist, less particularist, more global, more HUMAN, less xenophobic. The second is that the internal possibilities become more diverse. When that diversity is overwhelming, people oversimplify--making the choices seem superficial, stripping culture and experience of its richness--or they fuzz out from not being able to hold all that diversity in mind. But when that diversity can be embraced and engaged, it fills out so much of one's own rich, human potential--much of which is ignored or denied by one's culture of origin or prescribed gender, class values, etc. (prescribed limitations). When that happens, rather than being weirdos in our own cultures or groups, we end up being examples of some strange and fascinating human potential that is largely foreign to our group. We become translators of human potential. This is what every individual and society is--translators of human potential. What are you focused on?