Me:  Yes, ideas and the experiences behind them are what guide humanity. That is why paradigms are so powerful, why it is so important to be aware of current paradigms and the signatures of new ones. Considering that the current paradigm of finance, that is, Debt/Burden/Additional Cost Only has held humanity down for the entire history of human civilization it’s way over due for a change. And if the concept behind that new paradigm is the concept behind every historical paradigm change…how powerful could that idea be?

RL:  No serious student of history would subscribe to such a view, which is one reason I learn so little in this blog. History is not the study of ideas that guide humanity but of the unexpected and irrationality of historical outcomes that surprise the hell out of people. Nobody entering WWI expected the outcome would destroy Western civilization, except a lucky guesser. We all read them after the events not before. Napoleon said that between a battle gained and a battle lost, there are empires. Winning and losing a battle can be a close run thing, like the battle of the Marne in 1914. If the Germans had won, no fascism, no Hitler, no WWII. No new paradigm.

Me:  With all due respect history while valuable from a rear view mirror perspective is really the study of human UN-consciousness. Wisdom/paradigm perception is the integration of history and full consciousness. It may not be perfect, what human discipline is, but it’s a damned site better than the enforced un-knowingness/unconsciousness of the paradigm of Science ONLY. The proverb applies: The wise man sees trouble and hides himself, the fool goes on and suffers for it.

RL:  Craig, I don’t thing you know anything about how historians prepare to exercise their profession. We spend a great time as history majors and PhD students examining historiography which is all about human consciousness. Guess what, we read Hegel, too, and don’t just accept his dialectic as you seem to do. Get the sort of critical perspective in historiography that historians have.

One of the things historians do is checked out how well people in the past have predicted the future. I did this in the 1980s with a set of predictions about what the world would look like after 25 years (made in 1960) by a group of distinguished men. Result nobody got it right, not even the digital revolution, most of them predicted the triumph of atomic energy. I doubt if we come back and check out your predictions, you’ll do much better. I won’t be here, but some other historian will check you out, unless in your smugness you decide to get rid of historians because of their Unconsciousness.

Me: Robert,

My point is this: Is humanity largely conscious….or unconscious? By conscious I mean self aware, not what is their IQ or how scholarly they are or any other metric except aware that they ARE aware. By that measure the obvious answer is they are almost entirely UNconscious and hence history is largely the study of man’s unconsciousness, or to put it a little more euphemistically the study of his struggles and generally his failures to become fully conscious….due largely to his lack of knowledge and application of the superior (and scientifically inclusive) human mental discipline AKA wisdom. Man is very smart so far as data and logic are concerned and at best an adolescent so far as wisdom/self awareness is concerned.

This has nothing whatsoever to do with religion and everything to do with the depth and quality of our experience and our greater ability to discern truths of all kinds and act with greater rationality.

Given that naturalistic description of wisdom, Is there any reason why the scientific method and wisdom cannot operate concurrently? Of course not, especially as I have posited that wisdom is inclusive of science, and have pointed out that historically the signature of good non-orthodox and inclusive science and of scientific breakthrough has generally been as a result of the integration of the scientific method and an aspect or aspects of consciousness like imagination, creativity, comfortability with ambiguity and strategic illogic in order to exit the mental hypnosis and suffocation of old/current paradigms.

RL:  (In response to a poster who stated that quantity calculus was the only legitimate way of science)

Mike Rother in Toyota Kata notes that “Toyota’s shop floors are not connected to the IT system. Managerial accounting control systems can exacerbate the negative effects of managing from a distance via metrics, since reported data arrives late and leaders interact even less with the reality of the situation. This is why accounting control systems have little or no place on factory floors at Toyota. Factory leaders at Toyota do not refer to accounting report to get an understanding of a situation. p. 167. H. Thomas Johnson, who wrote, with Kaplan, the prize-winner book, Relevance Lost (1987) says the same thing after study Toyota’s Georgetown operations for years. So what is all this number racket versus human behavior.

Me:  Yes, and the wisdom of integrating both calculus and direct present time observation would undoubtedly lead us to a deeper understanding.

RL:  But Rother and Johnson and a host of others say they don’t integrate, point final.

Me:  So attempts to integrate observations and truths in different bodies of knowledge is impossible. Nice fragmentary, departmentalizing and ossifying “scientific” point of view that is.

MM:  Wow! This may be the richest RWER thread yet. Very encouraging yet, unless I’m mistaken, there was no valid definition of value. Effective analysis & dialog require accepting the semi-transcendant, often arbitrary but always qualitative nature of the principle of “value” and all the associated causes and effects in our personal & communal realities. There will never be an understanding of any cultural “economy” without recognizing and understanding the actual qualitative issues and causal factors influencing and motivating personal decisions that determine the nature and outcomes of communal activities. Naturally, a science of cultural economies requires consideration of ethics, cultural specifics, characteristic psychosocial dymaics and, for scientifically artistic (effective) results, useful ethical ecometrics. As I’ve claimed in other comments, valid theory and successful practice also require a singular, viable foundation of meta-theory, a logically consistent meta-economics. If I am wrong about any of this, please correct me, convincingly, in sufficient detail. Thanks, sincerely.

Me:  You’re quite right, but you being a relatively new poster here you missed my defining value which is the superior and scientifically inclusive human mental discipline of wisdom and its pinnacle natural philosophical concept of grace whose relevant aspect of Gifting is not only the new monetary, economic and financial paradigm, but the concept behind every human paradigm change.

MM:  Craig > Bravo! Tho not a new commentator on RWER’s blogsite, I was new to this potent thread. So, I’m inexpressively grateful to find your approach, which is definitely axiological. However, I think that we should discuss the issues and details in personal dialog. Ok? I think that we will very soon reach a very productive, co-creative rappore, re: a practical alternative to global misrule by kleptocracy by default. Otherwise, we may as well join the Barnumite Banksters, whose motto is obviously “never give a sucker an even break.” Rite [sic]?

Me:  Heh boy, I appreciate that and you do seem to have a philosophical bent and a lot of the problems correctly identified, but it’s probably just what I don’t need. I already spend too much time trying to elicit paradigm perception and illuminate paradigm change instead of dedicating-ly working on three books at the same time. For now lets see if we truly have an integrative mindset in common via this forum. Thanks again, and after the first 35 or so years of my young adulthood not being an ambitious careerist I might have had thoughts of chucking it all and getting into finance….but I might have gone nuts from not being able to sleep due to the ethical compromise. 🙂

RL:  Craig, I fear you don’t know a thing about the Kata con movement, and, therefore, do not understand attempts to base sustainable business on a scientific basis for the past 40 or so years. Don’t go outside business and industry to find a “science” that explains them, develop the science within their confines, so that the scientific methods and principles have practical application. I don’t know how old you are but I started studying sustainable management over 25 years ago, and wrote about it in my work. It’s shocking that such an important event has passed over you.

Me:  Well Robert I can only say that I’m simply taking the most basic and potent factor in a monetary economy, namely money and its current 5000 year old paradigm, and utilizing wisdom and wisdom’s process to try to decipher and apply the new one based on a study of the signatures of historical paradigm changes. I’m inclined to consider the new paradigm change a couple of mental integrations higher and of more importance than sustainable management of the the present one.

RL:  Craig, if you haven’t investigated any of this, how can you say that studying money is a couple of integrations higher than the study of the sustainability of firms, economic communities, and nations. Maybe sustainability is the new paradigm not the one you are hankering after. If you are not continually immersed in the work world you will not be able to follow sustainability as science. Knowing a scientific discipline is not a substitute for knowing work environments.

Me:  Because money is the supreme factor and deepest problem to solve in a MONETARY economy and we DO live in a monetary economy. Of course managerial problems are important and I’d be the last person to suggest we not integrate study of them into economics. As wisdom is the integrative process integration is “my thing”.

It is a much observed behavioral science and psycho-analytic phenomenon that when a neurotic confronts their most basic conflict virtually all of related and even peripheral neurotic tendencies either disappear or dissipate. As with human beings, so with human systems.

Sustainability is exquisitely important. And the only way that we are ever going to fund the research and implement the programs to accomplish it is to make sure we see past the current paradigm of private finance and its elites who tell us it is “too expensive”. As I am trying make the new paradigm of Monetary Gifting the new primary and reigning paradigm that makes it quintessentially important in that pursuit.

RL:  We do live in a monetary economy in anglo-saxonia. But if people want to sustain a manufacturing economy and the communities that accompanied them, they cannot use the tools and methods developed in a monetary economy to do so. Hegel’s dialectic in our context calls for the discontinuities inherent in finance capitalism to be the thesis, but the antithesis, sustainabilities cannot be sought in finance capitalism; they must be found somewhere else. You talk of Wisdom, which is far distant from the Shop Floor. I talk of a science rooted in the shop floor being the antithesis of finance capitalism and the way forward.

Me:  I’m the last person to affirm finance capitalism. The synthesis of finance capitalism and democratic socialism is neither of these, but the thirdness greater oneness of their truths, workabilities, applicabilities and highest ethical considerations AKA Direct Monetary Distributism. When in doubt integrate….and keep on integrating.

DT:  Craig and Robert, the management pioneer Mary Parker Follett’s collected works, “Dynamic Administration”, begin with an essay on “Constructive Conflict” which considers three ways of dealing with it: domination, compromise and integration. Her example of integration features two guys who apparently want different things but find a solution which unexpectly satisfies both of them. The starting point is facing up to there being a difference. Integration requires circular behaviour in which “Employees do not respond only to their employers but to the relationship between themselves and their employer”.

So what’s the connection between this and mathematical integration? The latter adds a dimension (a degree of freedom), but loses (abstracts) some of the original information. Likewise, stepping back from the concrete problem to see the positions of both parties at the same time creates the space necessary to see the solution.

Me:  That’s an excellent illustration of the process of wisdom. Now if we’d just do that on the grand theoretical and paradigmatic levels….we’d be getting somewhere instead of forever ruminating over the entrails of a goat which is the passion and obsession of the current paradigm of inquiry AKA Science ONLY.

RL: I can’t let you get away with such ignorance.

Mike Rother in Toyota Kata wrote, “The way of thinking and acting described here has a potential beyond the business world. It shows us a scientifically systematic and constructive way of dealing with problems, uncertainty, and change, in other words , how we can work together and achieve beyond what we can see” p. xx.

Sustainable management is not about staying ‘in the present one,’ because in the present one, sustainability is not possible. And you are staying in the present one with your assumptions and methods about how the world works, while Rother method’s are designed for us to achieve beyond what we can see–a new paradigm. Read the book damm it, only 292 pages long.

Me:  Robert,

I don’t have to even read it…because if it is truly integrative…I know I already agree with it. I’m NOT slamming integrative managerialism. How you innovate the productive process to make it more efficient and ecologically sane is extremely important. I would completely affirm that. But Research/Data Gathering STILL REMAINS a couple of MENTAL integrations below paradigm perception/paradigm change….which will synergize not only such innovation and management, but by definition every other aspect of economics/the productive process.

I’m on the same page with you, so “Saul, Saul, why do you kick against the sticks?”

RL:  Craig, so where did Hegel’s dialectic lead us, to Marxism, and Fascism. Give us a break from this rubbish.

Me:  Rubbish? Nonsense. Marxism and fascism are MERE reactionary non-integrated dualities as in the (Thesis x Antithesis) (Marxism x Capitalism) (Fascism x Democratic Republicanism) within the integrative trinity-unity-oneness-process….NOT actual integrations let alone the deep and transformative kind AKA paradigm change.

You’re the historian, the oft failure of human societies and civilizations to resolve their major problems and hence rejuvenate themselves ought to be a well established historical fact to you.

Marx cobbed Hegel’s dialectic in an ideological attempt to justify his labor theory of value which has been fairly well if not completely invalidated by Steve Keen. Socialism as well as capitalism have separate truths, workabilities and applicabilities that can be integrated in order to attain a thirdness greater oneness and when that thirdness greater oneness is guided by the unimpeachable NATURAL philosophical concept of grace as in monetary gifting and its
aligned policies of a universal dividend and 50% discount/rebate policy at the ending/tipping point of retail sale….there you go….paradigm change.

I know simplicity is anathema to the merely scientific minded, but wisdom which includes the scientific method (a trinitarian process itself) leads to good science and scientific breakthroughs:

[ ( Hypothesis —> (dualistic process of determining empirical truth or falsity) ]

[ (Science x Wisdom) —> Wholistic/Integrative Mindset ]

RL:  Marxist socialism denies all of this and Marx was one powerful thinker. Did you ever actually try to understand how Marx stood Hegel on his head to derive dialectical materialism, a concept that has been a power force in moving peoples minds.Labor theory of value was refuted by marginalists in the 19th century not Steve King, as were theories about the inevitability of proletarian revolt, Bernstein’s revisionism, for example. I’m sorry Craig, anybody with any knowledge of modern capitalism and socialism would hardly think their “truths” could be amalgamated. Its a bad idea.

Me:  Your whole post shows why you’re not understanding me: It’s reactionary and invalidative….instead of being integrative.

Of course marxists deny this….they’re more interested in being right in their own minds than pursuing the integrative greater truth.

“I’m sorry Craig, anybody with any knowledge of modern capitalism and socialism would hardly think their “truths” could be amalgamated. Its a bad idea.”

An amalgamation is NOT an integration. Mixing water and oil is an amalgamation, taking two elemental factors and combining them so that a synthesis/thirdness greater oneness is the reality….is an integration. THAT is a good idea. In fact it is the supreme scientific ethic of objectivity and pursuit of temporal universe truth….enabled by and included within wisdom which is the superior human mental discipline.

Wisdom/paradigm perception is the method and result of integrating essence (the single concept that defines a paradigm) and pattern (where the effects of essence take place).

How scientific is that? The adverbs supremely and enlightening come to mind.

RL:  Craig, I tried to get you to think outside the box, when I stressed the importance of new involvement of people in sustainability management. I’m sure you know nothing about it, but you brushed my suggestion aside as if it were unworthy of your lofty thoughts. You’re wrong but your mind is closed to learning why.

Me:  Brushing it aside is a mis-characterization. I believe in an integrative ethic. I may have said (or meant) that sustainability management as a subject was of lesser urgency and importance than deciphering and implementing the new monetary, economic and financial paradigm….so that finance
was no longer THE unnecessary stumbling block TO sustainability, but, being integrative, I would never say that they couldn’t be done concurrently.

I’m on your side, so give me a little bit of a break, ok?

RL:  Of course I’ll give you a little bit of a break, even a big bit of a break. We both agree that we are in a crisis era in our Western Civilization, and that finance investor capitalism has provoked this crisis. I just am emphasizing that it is not what economists say that matter, in their spats, but what they actually DO to defeat finance investor capitalism, and much of what they DO, although not in the US, involves working in sustainability, continuous improvement management.

Me:  Agreed.

RL:  What about government contractors in times of war?  Certain branches of the armies pre-1789 were contracted out, e.g., artillery, and during the Napoleonic wars private contractors supplying the armies made very large fortunes. In the midnineteenth a large mass manufactuer of iron rails, Forges and Foundries of Alais, received orders for canons for the war between France and Austria, 1859, but the CEO felt that the disruption war brought to the iron rail business could not be offset by these canon orders. So this CEO was not favorable to wars, because they disrupted business. A complicated business at all times.

Me:  It is complicated, but inverting the enforced monetary scarcity we all live in within the equally enforced monopolistic paradigm of Debt Only…with the new paradigm of Abundantly Direct and Reciprocal Monetary Gifting will eliminate the most underlying reason why nation states and empires go to war….because their domestic economies are unstable due to that monetary scarcity and so require the pillaging of “enemy” nations for their resources…..in a wasteful human and monetary effort….that fails to achieve stability anyway.

How long can we go on with such idiocy before we choose the new paradigm?