I find myself endlessly amazed that we have not yet grown past the Age of Empire and Ego. It does not require any significant depth of insight to perceive that Empires of might or money are at base really just inversions of (and projections from) that single, fragile and transient perspectival vanishing point of self and Ego. The unrelenting partisan conflict of competing individuals, organisations, companies, nations and those (perhaps inevitable) transnational Empires of force or finance create vast tides and waves of frictional consequence and unmanageable complexity. Our globally interconnected organisations and systems considered as a whole themselves represent one vast meta-system and the significant internal turbulence of this system indicates not only that it barely and only just manages to stay afloat under the weight of its own proliferating inconsistencies and errors, but also that for all its energetic self-assertions of strength and resilient continuity – this is in many ways a very fragile system architecture that might quite easily and catastrophically fall into long-term disequilibrium.
Cooperative, collaborative systems of global organisation both within and between organisations or nations are very likely more logically sustainable and productive over a long-term than ultra-competitive, combative and purely self-interested behaviours and strategies in which the assumption of centrality, power and control are celebrated, incentivised, rewarded. Despite this, the nature of organisational hierarchies is such that they tend to both breed and reward a certain class of sociopathic self-interestedness in their boardrooms and executive offices. The limited perceptions and comprehension of the actual topologies and dynamics of holistic, global systems incurs a significant cost across all shared horizons of productivity, profit and mutual benefit.
A focus on organisational, psychological and subjective singularity, on separation and difference resonates strongly with a short-term profit motive and the propagation of an associated mythology of individual virility, power and purpose. Here lies the main organisational corruption of this world: in the drives, machines and vectors of force and economic (or political) power we currently globally share, there exists absolutely none of the required visionary creativity and intelligence required to dig ourselves out of this deep hole we find ourselves in. Our systems of incentive, reward and collective self-identity (- a shared subjectivity -) in their construction have placed selfishness at the core and this continuously selects for personalities and mind-sets which replicate, support and vigorously invent justifications for this current vainglorious superficiality and thoroughly unhealthy state of affairs.
Daedelus Kite 