Do you have the patience to read and learn something new? Therein lies much of our personal and societal problems. We do not have the patience to develop the knowledge base that gives greater understanding. Instead we’re interested in quick, few-word adjustments around WHAT WE ALREADY KNOW. So with that warning let’s see if you can last reading two to three pages of new material, learning new things that would deepen your understanding of life. If I were to bet, I would say you’re already clicking on some other page and no longer here. For the daring few that want to learn new things, as told by a divine being: you’re the ones that would be saving humankind. So, let’s get started.
Every society is built on MANAGER-MANAGED DUALITY. No exception. Every society is built on manager-managed duality where a small group of “managers” manage the affairs of the masses of “managed.” Thus the CEO manages the business, the teacher manages the classroom, the President manages the nation, and Congress manages the society’s many-agree and all-agree positions in everyone’s life. Through thousands of years of experience humans know of no other way of managing the society. The prime purpose of such arrangement is to serve the needs of the masses. And that purpose happens only if BOTH SIDES of the manager-managed duality are active at managing it. If the masses of managed lose the duality’s sense of purpose, managers would often turn into self-serving tyrants. When pointing at the tyrant or a “bad manager,” all we’re saying is that the masses of managed have also gone BAD and are no longer managing the manager-managed duality to the benefit of all. A society does worst when both manager and managed do not understand how the society is structured and works.
To exist in daily life, every individual has to take resources from earth and other humans. It is through RESOURCE TAKING that I get my food, my car, my house and everything else in life, and in turn, everything I do in life is geared toward satisfying the needs of others as resource takers. We are a society of resource takers. No exception. Every society is and has always been and will always be a society of resource takers. Every human is a “resource taker.” The SHARING OF CAPABILITIES to satisfy each other’s daily needs originates in a “society of resource takers.” Every society of resource takers is made of humans that share their capabilities to serve the needs of all. Isn’t that strange? The TAKER acting as SHARER! Without exception “capability sharing” sustains us all. Every aspect of our individual life comes into existence from capabilities shared by millions of other resource takers. Without them no human can exist.
Here is another important observation. The “sharing of capabilities” produces “accumulated shared capabilities,” most visible in the form of buildings, roads, houses, and variety of knowledge bases like how to build an automobile, how to make computers, how to cure diseases, how to farm the land, AND how to live life as described in the sacred texts, and many more. All such “accumulated shared capabilities” are AMPLIFIERS of “currently shared capabilities.” The buildings, houses, computers, electricity, roads, and knowledge bases originating at capabilities shared in the PAST amplify everything we do NOW. The higher the amplification, the more I can do for others, and the more I do for others, the more they get to do for me. The AMPLIFIED CAPABILITY SHARING turns out to be the best way of serving the human individual as resource taker.
This may come as a surprise. All capability sharing and resource taking happens in a “matrix of force.” The force is everywhere. Just look around. Everywhere atoms bound to each other by force, interacting with each other through force, always. Atoms are like the tiniest of resource packets. They sit at the core of the universe’s resources. The force binds them. First the force turns them into molecules, then they aggregate to form all sorts of resource configurations—ready to be taken by those that need them. The universe is built on an eternal dance of force and resources. From this structure of force and resources emerges the platform on which the human life takes shape. The essence of human life is built on managing force and resources. The human as “force applier” must be in balance with human as “resource taker” which must be in balance with human as “capability sharer.” The starting point … always … the management of “brute force.” Since every human is a force applier, and since the human life is founded on capability sharing by many, humans have to share and manage brute force societally. The problem with brute force is that when directly applied to the human, it almost always inflicts harm on the human.
The formation and maintenance of a society always starts in management of brute force. The farther back we go in time, the greater the use of brute force in settling human affairs and managing human interactions. This is how the Stone Age humans, with their spears and clubs, and the Bronze Age humans, with their swords, and the modern humans, with their guns enter the societal scene. For a very long time in history brute force was the primary way of managing human affairs. However, humans ultimately learned that managing life through brute force is destructive—it always ends at HUMANS KILLING HUMANS to get the resources they need. More importantly, a society based on brute force creates the lowest level of capability sharing to produce goods and services to satisfy the daily human needs. If everyone, every day, is worried about exposure to the brute force of others, no one would engage in acts of producing and distributing goods and services beyond one’s own immediate needs.
What is to be done when the universe’s foundation is laid in brute force? Here is the force management technique that over time the human societies have learned to develop and are still trying to understand and improve. They have learned that the individual’s “brute force” can be converted into societal brute force—highly concentrated brute force—which is then shared and used as the basis for developing “the rule of law.” Through the rule of law humans would avoid using brute force directly when managing their daily interactions. In this way only the highly concentrated brute force—which we know and see in the form of police and armed forces—would remain as the foundation that backs the rule of law as the “forcing agent.” HUMANS FORCING HUMANS in acts of resource taking and capability sharing would remain, but would be moved from brute force to rule of law. In this setting every societal leader would function as society’s “force manager” seeking to manage force through “laws” so that fewest humans would be directly exposed to brute force. In human life brute force would never disappear given that every society’s force network is built out of a foundation made of “concentrated brute force.” If the foundation is not managed well, humans would be destroyed by concentrated brute force in acts which we know as war.
At current level of human knowledge, what is the operational outcome of managing force societally? It creates “nations.” Every nation is a group of humans with a wall of concentrated brute force drawn around it to create a select domain of resource taking and capability sharing for that group of humans. In this arrangement every nation is a “warring unit,” created to apply concentrated brute force against others whenever it deems its own survival as a walled-off unit to be at stake. No nation tolerates the loss of its wall of concentrated brute force and many are willing to fight to the death of all in order to maintain the wall of concentrated brute force drawn around them.
Are you still with me? I have to say I am most pleased that you have stayed with me so far. You have learned things about human life that at present few know. With what you know—with the deeper understanding that you have developed—now we can compare and contrast globalization and nationalism.
Nationalism wants the capability sharing to be conducted primarily within the nation’s wall of the concentrated brute force. Globalization wants the wall lowered or made less prevalent while extending the possibilities for capability sharing with other humans that normally would only hide behind their own walls. The nationalism motto: let us hide behind our walls. In contrast the globalization motto: let us abandon the walls and reach out for capability sharing to address everyone’s needs. It is thus a choice between capability extenders (globalization) and hide-behind-the-wallers (nationalism). Since humans are capability sharers, the question becomes: do we share capabilities nationally or globally? Do we divide humankind with force-defined walls or do we remove the walls to make humankind one? The transition from one to the other totally depends on the ABILITY TO MANAGE FORCE while engaging in capability sharing and resource taking. So long as humans do not manage force well, and so long as the ways of the past have created large resource taking differentials among different groups of walled-off humans, the transition will be slow and the full transition may even be impossible as many walled-off groups will defend their position and would never abandon their walls. A nation that in comparison to others has succeeded in resource taking would always view itself as winner and the other nations as losers. In such view the winners and losers cannot mix to become one. They can only confront and conquer.
For now we would have to relegate to very distant future the question of whether the nations would merge to become one global capability sharing unit. Instead let us focus on an individual nation and see who becomes the loser or winner within the same nation by either hiding behind the wall or partially extending the capability sharing into other nations. The starting point of our analysis would be the “resource taking position” of individuals within the same nation. The analysis would rely on SUPPLY and DEMAND curves. The supply curve represents the producers of goods and services and the demand curve the consumers of goods and services. Both the producer and consumer groups are “resource takers.” The point at which the supply and demand curves intersect is where the producers and consumers reach mutual balance as resource takers. To see this more clearly, consider a simple, hypothetical example in which there is a single demand curve, but two supply curves. One supply curve represents the “national” supply when walled off from the rest of the world and the other, the “global” supply where the walls are open to capability sharing with the rest of the world. What is the difference between the two supply curves? Who is the winner or loser if the society switches from one supply curve to the other?
First let us set aside the global supply curve and focus on the national supply curve. Where would the point of intersection—the point of balance—between the nation’s supply and demand curves be? In my hypothetical example the producers and consumers reach a point of balance when 5 million units are produced at a price of $5 per unit. The nation, walled off from the rest of the world, has producers that produce 5 million units at a price of $5 per unit and consumers that buy 5 million units and pay the price of $5 per unit. Note that the nation has more consumers than the ones buying the 5 million units, but they cannot pay the price of $5 per unit and as a result are excluded from the market.
Now assume that the nation decides to open its wall to the world’s capability sharers. It can now buy from the world suppliers. With the world as supplier, let us first see how the country’s producers are affected? With the nation opening itself to the world producers, the price drops from $5 to $3 per unit. As a result, the national production drops from 5 to 3 million units, a 40% drop. This means a corresponding 40% drop in employment. Any company that previously could produce at price of $5 per unit but cannot do so at price of $3 per unit, goes out of business. They have to close their door and throw out their workers. Only those companies that can produce and compete at price of $3 per unit would remain. The lost employment does not look good. There is the outcry of unfair competition by world producers. The national producers that previously hired workers to produce 5 million units, now can only hire workers to produce 3 million units. The ranks of the unemployed workers swell. The unemployed workers are the losers. Their resource taking suffers as they lose their paycheck and they would be in a dire situation if they cannot find employment elsewhere. This could involve from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of laid-off workers.
But now let us have a look at the consumer side. With price dropping to $3 per unit—a 40% reduction—more people become capable of buying the product and every consumer pays a lower price. They are all gaining in their resource taking position. The consumption increases from 5 to 7.5 million units. Of the 7.5 million units only 3 million are produced by the nation and the remaining 4.5 million are imported. If we assume that each consumer buys one, then there is a 50% increase in the number of consumers. More humans not previously capable of buying the product can now do so. All consumers benefit from the lower price of $3 per unit. Those that previously bought 5 million units at $ 5 each for a total of $25 million, can now buy the same for a total of $15 million, thus saving $10 million that can be spent on other needs in life. The millions of consumers are the winners. So what is the conclusion? One side of the society the consumers are benefiting. On the other side of the society, the producers, not. Millions of consumers are having a better resource taking position while tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of workers do not.
This raises the inescapable question: where is the point of balance between serving the producers of goods and services and the consumers of goods and services? Since the primary question here is the extent of capability sharing, 1) should the society keep its wall rigid and keep tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of workers employed while millions of consumers pay a high price for goods and services and millions more cannot afford to buy the product? Or, 2) should the society side with having millions pay a lower price and millions more have access to goods and services while tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of workers are laid off and many might remain unemployed for a long time? From what we have learned previously about capability sharing to serve the human needs, the answer is neither of the two. The correct answer: the society—every member—must remain focused on DEVELOPING CAPABILITIES when the current capabilities no longer match the goods and services that everyone needs in daily life.
In fact, without globalization, the same unemployment situation can happen to a walled-off nation when there is a change in technology—a change that comes when the society’s knowledge level changes. When a walled off nation that produces carriages faces the situation of factories being set up to produce automobiles, those that were used to building carriages become unemployed and cannot claim that the society is “unfair” in what it does to them. Such a view is the wrong way of seeing “capability development and capability sharing.” The right way would be the mindset that recognizes the current capability for carriage building has gone obsolete and that the human capabilities must now DEVELOP and BE APPLIED in a new and different direction.
So let me get back to the question of “Where the real fight is?” The real fight is not at globalization versus nationalism. The real fight is at “capability development.” When a human develops his or her capabilities at the level of tightening nuts and bolts and does that for years without ever thinking of developing other capabilities, that individual—even though he or she looks like a human—has turned into a fixated machine. And when the factory throws that individual out and automates the nuts and bolts tightening, that human becomes incapable of adjusting his or her capabilities. At that instant BOTH THE INDIVIDUAL and THE SOCIETY have failed. The society fails by placing a human in a machine-like repetitive position of fixated capabilities. The individual fails by seeing the machine-like repetition of fixated capabilities as the only capability one needs to develop for life, never putting oneself in the position of continually developing new capabilities—at minimum regularly reading books to expand one’s knowledge base.
So whenever you hear the words globalization and nationalism are setting the battleground for human interactions, see the real argument pointing at the national and global deficiencies in “DEVELOPING and sharing capabilities.”
Here is another insight. It is SO EASY to act as a machine that repeats the same capability day after day. It is SO HARD to continuously remain a “developer of capabilities.” The human as developer and sharer of capabilities creates life. The human as machine-like repeater of fixated capabilities mixes dying with life and gets surprised when “dying” shows up in the form of being thrown out of the society’s capability sharing system.
I hope we would learn to fight where the real fight is taking place. Otherwise, we will constantly get surprised by human lives wasted and lost than shared in order to benefit all.
If you want to learn more about the management of force, resource taking, and capability sharing, I have two suggestions. First read my book The Sucker Punch of Sharing to develop a deeper understanding of force management, resource taking, and capability sharing. Second, read two other books The First Rung and The Unexpected Unseen to apply what you have learned to the most critical aspect of human life, namely the transition between the earth’s two versions. At present the knowledge of earth’s two versions is most uncommon—least known—even though it is most significant for humankind’s well-being and survival. It requires the HIGHEST LEVELS OF CAPABILITY DEVELOPMENT SKILLS in human societies. The fundamentals are well-established. Earth 1.0, the one in which we currently live, and Earth 2.0, the one to come, repeat in a 100,000 year cycle. Earth 1.0 lasts around 15,000 years and Earth 2.0 about 85,000 years. We’re at the back end of Earth 1.0 and about to enter Earth 2.0. In my books I GIVE YOU THE CORE OF MY KNOWLEDGE of the foundational aspects of human life. In The First Rung I introduce the modern science of Earth 2.0. In The Unexpected Unseen, written as a science novel, I focus on ancient eyewitness accounts of Earth 2.0 within the framework of modern science’s knowledge base. In my other books, The Sucker Punch of Sharing and The Choice Maker, I outline the operational foundations that every society must adopt in resource taking and capability sharing if it wishes to manage the capability development processes that fit the transition from current earth to Earth 2.0. You can read about them on www.savinghumankind.com.
I hope you continue on the path of learning about “capability DEVELOPMENT and capability sharing” as they are the foundation of human life. At present, so few do.