Category: Commentary

Our colleague, Herman Wijffels in The Netherlands, just sent me some of his thoughts on how high entropy correlates with many of the distempers and institutional dysfunctions we see around us.

If the analysis has explanatory power, which I suggest it does, then our task is to reduce entropy in culture, society, economics and politics.

Herman is a retired Dutch politician of the Christian Democratic Appeal party and businessman. He served as Chairman of Rabobank, Chairman of the Social and Economic Council and as Dutch Representative/Executive Director at the World Bank Group.

Here is Herman’s email to me:

Dear Steve,

Thank you for sharing this thoughtful paper on entropy with me. I enjoyed very much reading it and agree with your findings. To be honest, my interest in entropy was not so much focused on the personal level, but especially looking at it at different levels of the collective. So, your considerations are a real addition to my understanding of the phenomena.

Let me share some of my thoughts at different levels:

-Energy is one of the most important gifts of Creation/God/Source/Big Bang. Energy is the main input for evolution, for translating potential into reality. By using energy, some of it gets lost, so in the logic of evolution, it has to be used as productively as possible, in a dynamic equilibrium between stability and chaos. As a reference, I would think here of the cosmic path, the harmony of the spheres of the Doa and also of the golden ratio. At this point in time, at the planetary level, we are in a situation of disequilibrium, between mankind and the planet and between people, ecologically and socially. A lot of energy is not used productively, creating chaos, entropy.

-This global situation is reflected at the level of the nation state. Democracies suffer increasingly from polarisation. Parties develop a truth of their own, turn inside and are less inclined to an open dialogue, thus creating entropy and chaos at that level. Energy is wasted in a power struggle, instead of used to further the common good.

-Looking at our economic system, capitalism, the ongoing focus on financial goals, on wealth accumulation, is depleting and destroying natural capital and undermining social capital. Too much focus of energy on internal goals of businesses and too little on external, societal goals is misusing it. Stock buybacks are a case in point.

-Many organizations, as well in the public as in the private sector, are suffering these days from an overload of bureaucracy. Too much energy is needed internally to keep things going at the expense of external orientation and effectiveness.

-All of this is typical for the choices that have been made in the industrial age, ultimately leading to a culture in which egocentrism is a central feature at every level, also at the level of the individual. Unbalanced use of energy and entropy are a logical consequence of this culture at every level, from the planetary all the way down to the personal level.

-Looking at it from this perspective, we are in need of a transition to a new culture, a next civilization, in which common interest and maintaining the ecological and institutional commons do play a more central role. More energy will have to go into sustaining the condition in which life on this planet can flourish.

Here’s the May edition of Pegasus.

In this issue, we include a presentation by our fellow, John Dalla Costa, on the teachings of Pope Francis, which connect those teachings to a multicultural, humanistic framework not limited to confessional adherents of the Roman Catholic magisterium.

I would be most interested in your thoughts and feedback.

I want to share with our global network some reflections on the past year since the death of George Floyd here in Minneapolis while in police custody. His death triggered both protests, some peaceful, some not, demands for restricting formal policing in cities, a remarkable increase in crime and murders in those same cities, a rise in divisive resentments between many in elite sectors and those less fortunate with respect to education and wealth and accusations of a kind of fundamental criminality in American culture – white racism.

The distemper among many Americans contributed, in my judgment, both to the surge in support for Donald Trump in the 2020 election and an opposing turnout for Joe Biden.

Institutions have pivoted to prioritize “inclusion, diversity and equity” in an effort to seek atonement for something for which they may or may not be personally responsible. Many schools have affirmed critical race theory to rejuvenate racist thinking in American culture, only this time, making “whites” the objects of racial denigration.

A year later, one cannot say that there has been any genuine rapprochement between “whites” and “BIPOC” individuals.

There is no convincing evidence that American police are “racist,” as charged. Even the prosecution of Derek Chauvin, the police officer convicted of callously letting George Floyd die, could not accuse him of being a racist. Appropriately, as far as I could tell, since he had married a Hmong wife.

It has just been made public that in the Floyd case, the local medical examiner, under pressure, changed his conclusion as to the causes of Floyd’s death, adding to his original written report the words “compression” of Floyd’s neck from Chauvin’s knee restraint, directly implicating Chauvin in the death. Evidence of this change was not presented to the jury in Chauvin’s trial.

The immediate and impressive rise in the killing of African Americans in their neighborhoods after accusations of systemic police racism and calls to “defund” the police is most depressing. Here in Minneapolis, a couple weeks ago, three little black girls were shot as random collateral damage inflicted by what is believed to be young men with guns. One died. There were no protests over the death, no rallies formed to “say their names.”

In my city of St. Paul, last week, two young men were shot to death in a new, very well built and equipped neighborhood recreation center. The center was built to provide an alternative to policing in turning young men away from guns and violence through new opportunities for friendly sport competition. But rather than have the center change the neighborhood’s culture of violence, the culture took over the center.

There are important lessons to be learned from all this. But really, there is nothing new to learn here. The ancient learning about human nature and how to promote the moral sense in each of us still applies.

Educational achievement for African American students in our public schools has not improved, given the impact of lockdowns and the need for distance learning. If there is in America anything that I see as actually, year-in and year-out, systemically preventing many African Americans from growing up ready to participate in what the country can offer in income and wealth accumulation, it is our inner-city public schools. But we have not drawn the correct lessons from this manifest truth, which is so obvious and all around us.

We have learned that our major media companies, like the New York Times and Washington Post, can no longer be trusted to provide factual reporting and dispassionate judgments. A preference for personal narrative and storytelling without ethical restraint has replaced the professional standards once honored by journalists. Thus, Americans have become unnerved, not knowing what is true or whom they can trust.

We have accordingly retreated back into our own subjective “truths” and closed our doors to dialogue with those who think differently. We do not have even the courage of our own selfish convictions to engage openly and fully with others across our many divides.

We have learned that political divisions have deepened and that reconciliation will not be achieved anytime soon. Accusations of unacceptable ignorance, lying, being toxic, having mean intent, lacking good faith and not deserving of freedom of thought and speech are multiplying. We are experiencing elite failure across the board, but have no frames of thought by which to talk about such collapse. It is unprecedented in our lifetimes.

As was written long ago in the Book of Ecclesiastes:

“What a heavy burden God has laid on mankind! I have seen all the things that are done under the sun; all of them are meaningless, a chasing after the wind. What is crooked cannot be straightened; what is lacking cannot be counted. I applied myself to the understanding of wisdom and also of madness and folly, but I learned that this, too, is a chasing after the wind. For with much wisdom comes much sorrow; the more knowledge, the more grief.”

On April 13, I participated via Zoom in “After Covid-19, New Thinking on Creating Real Value and Financing the SDGs?,” which was a side event on the margins of the U.N.’s Economic and Social Council’s 2021 Financing for Development Forum.

The video of the event can be found here (my comments begin at the 24:45 min. mark).

Other panelists included Professor William Black of the University of Missouri-Kansas City; Professor Steve Hanke of Johns Hopkins University; Professor Stephanie Kelton of Stony Brook University; and Joe Oliver, former Minister of Finance and Minister of Natural Resources for Canada.

It was moderated by Daniel Mitchell, Chairman of the Center for Freedom and Prosperity.

The event is about an hour and a half in length.

It was conducted by the Convention of Independent Financial Advisors and co-hosted by the Permanent Mission of Uruguay to the U.N.

For centuries, Western civilization has relied on “colleges and universities” to create very important modes of social capital. Now, in the U.S., such institutions for forming elite social capital are under stress and are less and less trusted by the middle and lower social “orders” as able to provide “good value for money.”

Recently, I shared with you some comments by Professor John Adams.

Another colleague, Professor Robert Kennedy of the University of St. Thomas, sent me his reflections on what is happening to our institutions of higher education. You can read Bob’s insights here.

Our global culture seems more and more vulnerable to divisions and conflicting emotions and ideals. In the U.S., at least, social media is not contributing to cohesion. Populist nationalism is a global phenomena; conflict in Gaza and insurgency in Afghanistan reflect the passions of crowds.

Professor Doran Hunter, a member of our board and a contributor to our work on ethical principles for government, sent me a reflection on the dynamics of crowd psychology.

At times, I think that an externality of the service provided by social media platforms is the creation of new “crowds,” sometimes called social or political “bubbles.”

Here are Doran’s insights:

A political, religious, social or economic mass movement is led by a leader who mesmerizes and besots a segment of a national population.

Such mass movements exhibit the following characteristics:

1. Personal impulsiveness (sudden desire to believe what the leader is preaching); personal irritability (annoyed, impatient and angry with anyone who disagrees with the leader of the mass movement).
2. Incapacity to be reasonable (capable of making only extreme or excessive judgments and incapable of making sound and moderate judgments); being driven by passions that lend themselves to exaggeration – love, hate, disgust, fear, etc.
3. The unnerving presence of a “devil” that personifies everything the mass movement detests and embodies the reason for the movement to exist and seek victory at all costs.

Earlier this month, our fellows had their quarterly round table via Zoom to share insights into our moment in history. Again, they turned to issues of leadership and courage, in finding a way forward for the common good.

You may read the proceedings of their discussion here.

I recently received from Khun Kasit Piromya, a Thai colleague of ours and a former Foreign Minister of Thailand, a copy of a letter recently sent to the leaders of the countries of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations insisting on a more determined engagement with the military junta in Myanmar. You may read the letter here.

A moment’s consideration will lead to the conclusion that the military commanders who have forcefully taken control of public authority in Myanmar are not following the ethics of moral government, as set forth in the Caux Round Table (CRT) Principles for Government.

The generals do not see themselves as trustees of a trust to serve all the people of Myanmar. They do not accept personal responsibility to serve the public as a worthy community, but rather would impose their own priorities on the people as subjects of a regime and not as citizens possessing rights.

However, in the history of humanity, getting those with power to live up to good ideals has not often been achieved. Conflict between rulers and the ruled has been too much the norm.

Roughly speaking, it has only been with the rise of middle classes and mass education that has permitted the emergence of more responsible governments, respecting the people and accepting constitutional norms. That social reality, which facilitated the rise of more fair and responsible governments in the modern era, was made possible by capitalism and its generation of the industrial and post-industrial economies.

Though reforming bad government is never easy, I believe we must always speak decency to power and set standards for those who hold political power. This is the course taken by the CRT to foster conditions in which moral capitalism may more fully be achieved within just political orders.

I have just learned that today – May 5^th, 2021 – is the 200^th anniversary of the death of Napoleon Bonaparte, for a while Emperor of France, in exile on the island of St. Helena.

It is said that history is written by the winners.  This is especially true about Napoleon.  He is well known and contributed much to modern France and Europe, but he left life as a prisoner.

But once he did, as Shakespeare said about Julius Caesar, “Bestride the narrow world like a Colossus.”

Once, I had occasion to read some of his writings.  I also, at the University Club of St. Paul, on a dusty bookshelf, stumbled upon several volumes of his biography written by Adolphe Thiers.  Thiers included many of Napoleon’s official communiques and memoranda.  His mastery of bureaucratic administration was impressive; his mind was attuned to both grand ideas and the minutia of getting things done with expeditious decisiveness.

To me, Napoleon took the scientific rationalism of the French Enlightenment and gave it sovereignty over a centralized bureaucracy, as professionalized by the Bourbon monarchy, to create a process for socially engineering society to conform its thoughts and beliefs with some normative “general will,” as had been recommended by the moral philosopher, Jean Jacques Rousseau.

This model of the state led by a master mind creating society has been the goal of socialists of all sorts ever since.

In Latin America, Spanish monarchical colonial governments were replaced by Napoleonic states by revolutionaries such as Simon Bolivar.  Since then, the political conflicts in all the countries once under Spanish rule have been rivalries between conservative elites who resist a powerful state and liberals or leftists who want to subordinate local and patriarchal hierarchies to regulation by the state on behalf of the common good.  We can see the Napoleonic state at work today in Venezuela, Bolivia and Cuba.

To some extent, the Napoleonic state is found in all the social welfare states in the European Union.

Napoleon left a precedent of relevance to the Caux Round Table.  He invented the modern field army – with a commander in chief with staff sections reporting to him; three corps; three divisions to a corps; three regiments to a division; three battalions to a regiment; three companies to a battalion; three platoons to a company; and three squads to a platoon – all in one command and control hierarchy, from the commander on top, to all the soldiers at the bottom.

This formation of combat power and the strategies and tactics to enable it to win battles was taught to young American officers at West Point and used by the federal government in its Union armies mobilized and deployed to crush the Confederacy.  After the Civil War (1861-1865), many of these officers, trained in the Napoleonic way of running a large organization, brought the decision-making structure to the new railroad and other corporations then being created as the managers of these new forms of private enterprise.

Thus, Napoleon’s command and control hierarchy was brought to capitalism and has become the global norm for corporations – CEO centric and focused on “winning.”

His role in human history, therefore, should not be forgotten.

Nor have his aphorisms lost their relevance:

“Music is the voice that tells us that the human race is greater than it knows.”

“The best cure for the body is a quiet mind.”

“Men are more easily governed through their vices than through their virtues.”

“Nothing is more difficult, and therefore more precious, than to be able to decide.”

“Ability is nothing without opportunity.  I had rather my generals be lucky than able.”

“Victory belongs to the most persevering.”

“I can no longer obey; I have tasted command and I cannot give it up.”

“The battlefield is a scene of constant chaos.  The winner will be the one who controls that chaos, both his own and the enemies.”

“Imagination rules the world.”

“Great ambition is the passion of a great character.  Those endowed with it may perform very good or very bad acts.  All depends on the principles which direct them.”

“You become strong by defying defeat and by turning loss and failure into success.”

“There are only two forces that unite men – fear and interest.”

“If you want a thing done well, do it yourself.”

“Take time to deliberate, but when the time for action has arrived, stop thinking and go.”

“Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.”

“Until you spread your wings, you’ll have no idea how far you can fly.”

“A leader is a dealer in hope.”

“Riches do not consist in the possession of treasures, but in the use made of them.”

“The fool has one great advantage over a man of sense; he is always satisfied with himself.”