The Gardens of Democracy: A New American Story of Citizenship, the Economy, and the Role of Government Read Online Free PDF Page A
Author: Eric Liu
contagious, and that rewarding good with good and bad with punishment is the best way to protect our societies and therefore ourselves. Reciprocity makes compassion not a form of weakness but a model of strength; it makes pro-social morality not just moral but natural and smart.
Win-lose → Win-win or lose-lose
The story that grew out of Enlightenment rationalism and then Social Darwinism had a strong streak of “your gain is my loss.” The more that people and groups were seen as competing isles of ambition, all struggling for survival, the more life was analogized at every turn into a win-lose scenario. But the stories and science of the second Enlightenment prove what has long been a parallel intuition: that in fact, the evolution of humanity from cave dweller to Facebooker is the story of increasing adoption of nonzero, or positive-sum, attitudes; and that societies capable of setting up win-win (or lose-lose) scenarios always win. Robert Wright’s Nonzero describes this dynamic across civilizations. Unhealthy societies think zero-sum and fight over a pie of fixed size. Healthy societies think 1+1=3 and operate from a norm that the pie can grow. Open, non-equilibrium systems have synergies that generate increasing returns and make the whole greater than the sum of the parts. The proper goal of politics and economics is to maximize those increasing returns and win-win scenarios.
Competition → Cooperation
A fundamental assumption of traditional economics is that competitiveness creates prosperity. This view, descended from a misreading of Adam Smith and Charles Darwin, weds the invisible hand of the market to the natural selection of nature. It justifies atomistic self-seeking. A clearer understanding of how evolutionary forces work in a complex adaptive human society shows that cooperation is the true foundation of prosperity (as does a full reading of Adam Smith’s lesser-known masterpiece A Theory of Moral Sentiments ) . Competition properly understood—in nature or in business—is between groups of cooperators. Groups that know how to cooperate—whose members attend to social and emotional skills like empathy—defeat those that do not. That’s because only cooperation can create symbiotic, nonzero outcomes. And those nonzero outcomes, borne and propelled by ever-increasing trust and cooperation, create a feedback loop of ever-increasing economic growth and social health.
Now: what does all this have to do with self-interest?
Everything. Our previous understanding of the world animated and enabled a primitive and narrow perspective on self-interest, giving us such notions as:
–I should be able to do whatever I please, so long as it doesn’t directly harm someone else.
–Your loss is my gain.
–It’s survival of the fittest—only the strong survive.
–Rugged individualism wins.
–We are a nation of self-made people.
–Every man for himself.
Until recently, these beliefs—we aptly call them “rationalizations”—could be backed, even if speciously, by references to science and laws of nature. But now, to anyone really paying attention, they can’t. Today, emerging from our knowledge of emergence, complexity, and innate human behavior, a different story about self-interest is taking shape, and it sounds more like this:
–What goes around comes around.
–The better you do, the better I do.
–It’s survival of the smartest—only the cooperative survive.
–Teamwork wins.
–There’s no such thing as a self-made person.
–All for one, one for all.
Let’s be clear here: we are not talking about a sudden embrace of saintly self-denial. We are talking about humans correcting their vision—as they did when they recognized that the sun didn’t orbit the earth; as they did when they acknowledged that germs, not humours, caused sickness. We are talking about humans seeing, with long-overdue clarity, and with all our millennia of self-preservation instincts intact, a
Win-lose → Win-win or lose-lose
The story that grew out of Enlightenment rationalism and then Social Darwinism had a strong streak of “your gain is my loss.” The more that people and groups were seen as competing isles of ambition, all struggling for survival, the more life was analogized at every turn into a win-lose scenario. But the stories and science of the second Enlightenment prove what has long been a parallel intuition: that in fact, the evolution of humanity from cave dweller to Facebooker is the story of increasing adoption of nonzero, or positive-sum, attitudes; and that societies capable of setting up win-win (or lose-lose) scenarios always win. Robert Wright’s Nonzero describes this dynamic across civilizations. Unhealthy societies think zero-sum and fight over a pie of fixed size. Healthy societies think 1+1=3 and operate from a norm that the pie can grow. Open, non-equilibrium systems have synergies that generate increasing returns and make the whole greater than the sum of the parts. The proper goal of politics and economics is to maximize those increasing returns and win-win scenarios.
Competition → Cooperation
A fundamental assumption of traditional economics is that competitiveness creates prosperity. This view, descended from a misreading of Adam Smith and Charles Darwin, weds the invisible hand of the market to the natural selection of nature. It justifies atomistic self-seeking. A clearer understanding of how evolutionary forces work in a complex adaptive human society shows that cooperation is the true foundation of prosperity (as does a full reading of Adam Smith’s lesser-known masterpiece A Theory of Moral Sentiments ) . Competition properly understood—in nature or in business—is between groups of cooperators. Groups that know how to cooperate—whose members attend to social and emotional skills like empathy—defeat those that do not. That’s because only cooperation can create symbiotic, nonzero outcomes. And those nonzero outcomes, borne and propelled by ever-increasing trust and cooperation, create a feedback loop of ever-increasing economic growth and social health.
Now: what does all this have to do with self-interest?
Everything. Our previous understanding of the world animated and enabled a primitive and narrow perspective on self-interest, giving us such notions as:
–I should be able to do whatever I please, so long as it doesn’t directly harm someone else.
–Your loss is my gain.
–It’s survival of the fittest—only the strong survive.
–Rugged individualism wins.
–We are a nation of self-made people.
–Every man for himself.
Until recently, these beliefs—we aptly call them “rationalizations”—could be backed, even if speciously, by references to science and laws of nature. But now, to anyone really paying attention, they can’t. Today, emerging from our knowledge of emergence, complexity, and innate human behavior, a different story about self-interest is taking shape, and it sounds more like this:
–What goes around comes around.
–The better you do, the better I do.
–It’s survival of the smartest—only the cooperative survive.
–Teamwork wins.
–There’s no such thing as a self-made person.
–All for one, one for all.
Let’s be clear here: we are not talking about a sudden embrace of saintly self-denial. We are talking about humans correcting their vision—as they did when they recognized that the sun didn’t orbit the earth; as they did when they acknowledged that germs, not humours, caused sickness. We are talking about humans seeing, with long-overdue clarity, and with all our millennia of self-preservation instincts intact, a
Similar Books
At the Behest of the Dead
Timothy W. Long
Foul Ball Frame-up at Wrigley Field
David Aretha
North Pole City Tales 02 - The Heart of Frost
Charlie Cochet
Tag Along
Tom Ryan
Murder in Aix (The Maggie Newberry Mystery Series Book 5)
Susan Kiernan-Lewis
Tonight The World Dies
Amber White
Circle of Deception
Carla Swafford
The Citadel
A. J. Cronin
Letters From a Cat: Published by Her Mistress for the Benefit of All Cats and the Amusement of Little Children
Ledyard Addie, Helen Hunt 1830-1885 Jackson