Metrics — measures of performance or value — drive what we do at every scale, from the small, individual scale to the massive global scales. When those metrics are founded on misconceptions of reality, they contort behavior in such a way as to appear to support those misconceptions. To get back to the natural order of things, away from the artificial reality created by those false beliefs, we must start by reseting our metrics.
I was reminded of this as I perused the Harvard Business Review (HBR) I had purchased for the purpose of inspiring thoughts and reactions. I do not peruse the Review very often, but when I do, I am usually turned off by a large amount of what I find. The price of 16.95$ reeks of self-importance. And the articles overflow with much that I find distasteful in academia and in the broader, elitist culture — the same culture that is currently driving the world to the brink of destruction. But the metrics and implied metrics in the articles got me thinking about the influence of bad metrics, about the models of reality that implicitly encode inequality. Those models are everywhere.
Take the current focus in the news and social media on racism.
The real problem is that racism is an epiphenomena. Looking more deeply, we find the pervasive illusion of organic superiority/inferiority and the (negatively) powerful habits of ranking in all areas of life. These survive only because people can’t tell the difference between (1) powerful (negative) beliefs that become self-fulfilling prophecies and (2) fundamental truths. (While behavior does follow those unhealthy ideas, I am talking about potential here, not the reality created by those self-fulfilling prophecies.)
But to confront the fact that our brains are all pretty much equal, and what really matters is environment and opportunity, we have to face man’s inhumanity to man and our own moral degradation and greed.
And facing that fact is painful and difficult.
Once we begin to understand the effects of trauma of all sorts, of the massive power of emotions — actually, of our entire environment, we begin to understand the observed behavioral data differently. We begin to see that our beliefs in inequality combined with our inhuman treatment of others actually generate inequality. We begin to see that any solution to inequality that does not begin with the understanding that people are, actually, truly born equal is bound to fail.
Because we cannot fix inequality and believe in inequality at the same time.
Though it is a fact that there are organic differences, that there are a relatively small number of (very) basic groups of talents people are born into, any solution to inequality cannot succeed if it does not start with the understanding that these talents are not rankable, but are equally amenable to (even extreme) development.
When this position is taken, we see that inequality is pervasive, that the roots to racism are found in how we treat each other in every environment, including very white environments. In fact, if you were to restrict yourself to purely White Anglo-Saxon Protestant environments (though finding such environments is getting harder), one would find the fundamental disease that becomes racism in other environments.
When we begin building metrics based on the facts of equality, we begin to stand a chance of making a difference.
This brings me back to the HBR articles and their usual conformity to a traditional interpretation of behavioral data.
Of course the mistake the intelligent people who populate academia and the elitist cultures make, is the mistake that scientists often make, of not taking into account the effects of multiple time/context scales in their studies. It is sort of like the Chinese story of the man who lost his horse ( 塞翁失馬 — Sāi Wēng Shī Mǎ) in which what appears to be a good thing or bad thing depends on context that keeps expanding. Not taking all the different temporal/spatial/contextual scales into account, often leads to incorrect conclusions.
To many such observers, the data appears to confirm that (1) unfettered competition and greed are natural and probably good and (2) inequality is organically based. (Note: I am not saying that all competition is bad, only that the current vision for competition is deeply unbalanced and actually unfair to many smaller entities that want to compete.) Of course, the more sophisticated the person, the more polished and palatable their presentation of these ideas. But, as I observed above, the process by which we can see differently is uncomfortable for everyone and painful for most.
So instead, we pretend that the results of greed and inequality are some sort of natural law that we have no power over. And we end up missing the principle that enables us to find richness almost anywhere.
We do not realize that enough is a feast.
I am far from the first to observe that enough is a feast, that aiming for more than enough is wasteful, and that piling up great piles of wealth of all kinds (not just financial) and locking it away literally or figuratively is an obscene crime against humanity. It is just that even though it has been said before, by many others, it seems to be one of those things we need very frequent reminders of.
What I am interested in is a world in which taking time to think has priority over the rush of the over-achiever, where what my family and my dog thinks of me is more important than what my department or academia in general or the National Academy of Sciences thinks of me, where being a fundamentally independent thinker is more valued than status as a “thought leader”, where quiet generosity takes precedence over noisy philanthropy, and success is measured by whether or not I and those around me have enough, not if I have enough money or prestige to supply a small country.
In such a world, where “enough” becomes integral to our metrics, there is enough for everyone. And when this happens the enormous human potential that we have been obscenely wasting is unleashed.
When, as Bryan Stevenson makes a case for in Just Mercy, we understand that healing begins in seeing our own brokenness, we begin to understand why we strayed from “enough” in the first place. We then understand that everything good begins with healing, that, from the humility we gain in that process of healing, every other good thing flows. Then we understand that humility is not so much the opposite of arrogance and the drive for status, as it is the opposite of spiritual blindness.
For blindness was the problem all along. What we needed, what we really wanted, was always at our fingertips. Only our inability to see the true order of things stood in our way.
Accepting this, we are set free to find healing and a rich abundance that has nothing to do with impoverishing others in any way.
Notes, Articles and Books by Kevin R. Vixie 