This is the question I want everyone to ask yourself every single day when you come with something you feel that needs to be done: if not now, then when? And if not me, then who?
—Mick Ebeling
Historically, it seems that in many cases the -ism’s and -ology’s occurred first as a conversation in coffee shops, before eventually becoming formalized in the written word to be debated and discussed by a wider audience. But previous ideologies were restricted to the philosophers, the academics, and those who were classed as the thinkers of the day. Today, the forum for debate is wider, the opportunity to contribute to thinking no longer restricted to the “thinking classes” but to anyone who can think. Temperatism might be an idea that, for the first time in human social history, can be debated, formed, and built upon using the shared values and beliefs of anyone, anywhere. Social media, the World Wide Web, and global communication offer the opportunity for anyone who is interested to join the debate.
Sometimes the theories and concepts explored by writers touch an understanding that makes people stand up and listen. They verbalize what people are feeling and connect an intellectual understanding to create a powerful mix that can change cultures, improve society, and affect the world. This book is being written in response to ideas that are readily available to anyone who cares to research them. The opinions and ideas expressed are as a direct result of watching news programs, interacting on social media, working in organizations, and having a personal curiosity of social humanist thinking. It is also being written as a result of frustration as to why humanity refuses to change course despite the mounting evidence that we are heading for the edge of a perilous cliff that could end our very existence.
The global recession caused by the 2008 credit crunch and continuing sovereign debt issues provide, perhaps, the greatest opportunity for a discussion into the appropriateness of Western capitalism as a global model of human interaction and its associations with democratic values and individual freedom. “We are thus sitting on the ruins of several failed paradigms: the real socialism, the reformed golden age capitalism, the neo-liberal market fundamentalism, the Washington consensus and last but not least, social democracy. Paradoxically, one may draw a positive conclusion from this dismal situation: we are condemned to invent new paradigms for the twenty-first century” (Sachs, 2009). Today, we can look back on a decade of hedonistic pursuit of year-on-year growth enabled by perverse levels of individual, corporate, and government debt, the demise of socialist and communist economic and political systems, and the rise of the knowledge economy and find ourselves in a world that is suffering from a capitalist hangover of global proportions.
Politicians and the public are demanding that the global economy be up and running, that recovery should be happening now, and the fact that it isn’t, a decade after the crunch, is a frustration. The issue now, of course, is not that the economy isn’t doing well at creating wealth; it’s just the economy is not doing well at creating wealth for most of the world’s population. There are plenty of symptoms that all is not well—high living costs, wage stagnation, austerity programs, levels of sovereign and personal debt, etc.—but no one seems willing to pinpoint what the real illness is. We all know that the Western economies are ill, but they are all avoiding the obvious in regard to where to start to make it better.
The gross malfeasance of the banking sector, which led to the 2008 credit crunch, is not surprising when weighing the balance of power, regulation, and the pursuit of growth. Finance, which became so critical to the running of our economic system and has an important role socially, was transformed into a dangerous vehicle driven by fortune, greed, and competition. The circumstances of the recession were made worse by the penetration of financial influence into the realms of political power. Banking powerhouses were wooed by politicians and despite the bank’s aggressive pursuit of personal enrichment were protected from their excesses and yet continue to fail to serve a useful purpose in regard to social contribution. The tragedy of our age is that the players in this game continue to have political influence and exert undue pressure to be allowed to continue their aggressive pursuit of profit and growth, without fear of the consequences and refusing to engage with their critics. There is no debate, only capitalism.
In a world where we expect things to be ready in an instant, it is impossible to galvanize a popular movement when you can’t offer a quick fix to our problems. Politicians are under pressure, because there is an expectation that things should be fixed, more should be done, waiting for recovery is not acceptable. At the same time, the same people who are calling for more also believe that small government and free enterprise is the answer to the economic problems we are facing.
When it comes to electoral cycles and the media coverage of political opponents blaming each other because the promised change hasn’t happened, the public has very often been placed into a position where they are forced to take a back seat driver position. The electorate, unhappy that change hadn’t happened fast enough, doesn’t seem to accept the fact that such deep-rooted problems, which have been decades in the making, are unlikely to have been turned around in a few years. In between elections, politicians tinker around the edges rather than tackling the systemic issues, which are causing the problems in the first place. The opposition and the public complain that the government, which has been in power only for a brief period of time, isn’t “doing enough” to fix things. The problem is that “giving it time” and taking a root cause approach to change doesn’t make a great sound bite for politicians dealing with a nation that is suffering now and wants things fixed.
Trump’s pledge to Make America Great Again appeals to the needs of the forgotten majority who are exasperated with broken political pledges and what they feel is a broken system. The problem is the solutions offered: build the wall, throw out immigrants, drain the swamp, actually don’t tackle the real problem. The ideological root upon which the system is built is capitalism.
The truth is that capitalism has made us all expect things to happen quickly. Short termism is at the center of our culture. It is extremely difficult to convince people that they should delay fulfilling what they want now, to not indulge for the sake of the long term or even for the sake of others. We want things to be right, right now. The 2008 recession is the worst since the Great Depression of the 1920s. It took 15 years for the world economy to recover from the trading excesses that contributed to the Great Depression. The recession we find ourselves in now is a result of the introduction of new rules that saved capitalism but resulted from New Deal rules designed to stop excess, being redacted. The credit crunch was almost a decade ago and yet we are expecting our governments to have sorted out the mess already. It is not realistic to expect politicians (who were elected after the problems started) to have all the answers and be able to do things that will have an immediate impact. The seeds of the recession were actually planted almost 40 years ago, when Reagan and Thatcher pursued a policy of muscular entrepreneurialism: “massive tax cuts for the rich, the crushing of unions, deregulation, privatization, outsourcing and competition in public services” (Monboit, 2016). This in turn led to the increasing financialization of the Western economies. The City and Wall Street have replaced the nonfinancial industrial and business sectors as the main power players in our society. Political parties and society seem incapable or unwilling to tackle or reform a system that is challenging the very rules of democratic citizenship.
Furthermore, consumers have got used to instant gratification, hence why there have been increasing levels of household debts. We no longer save up for something but rather operate on a see it, want it, buy it process because the new generation does not have the patience to wait to give things time to work themselves through the system. We want results and we want them now. The problem is that instant gratification is addictive. It is not because we don’t want to wait; it is that we can’t wait because the world we live in moves too fast. There is little to recommend in the way of a cure for short-term gratification that doesn’t come with an end point that reads along the lines of “stop it.” But sometimes change is as simple as that. Simply indulging in our base interests and allowing us to be ruled by peer pressure to act with civility can cure many of life’s social ills.
Patience, of course, teaches us the value of delaying gratification, a skill necessary for maturity. Patience can help develop the ability to think through and resolve problems; it counteracts impulsivity and builds self-esteem, helping individuals hold themselves together in the face of difficulties. The value of patience lies in its ability to lead to inner calm and emotional strength of character. Patience helps us learn resilience, fortitude, self-containment, and the ability to avoid self-destructive behaviors. These are qualities needed for emotional maturity and sustainable performance. But patience relies on something more meaningful than simply waiting. It relies on us being in relationship with others, considering the needs of others as well as our own, and corporately changing the behavioral norms that will be necessary for the success of doing good in society. The problem is, of course, even as inhuman treatment and hateful behavior is tackled, it doesn’t disappear; instead it exists in the shadows and then every now and again reemerging to remind us that we are not all that civil or good after all. While huge portions of the human race are exposed to high levels of deprivation and horror, for many of us our lives are dominated by first world problems. It is no good expecting separate individuals in society to deny instant gratification, if their neighbors, friends, family, colleagues, and peers are all indulging in self-gratification. Change will not happen if it is done individually. AA meetings have demonstrated the power of peer pressure in maintaining a change of behavior even for those in the grip of addiction. “Few major societal ills, in fact, are immune. Since our peers shape so much of our behavior, so much of it can be changed with peer pressure. This includes the pieces of what we do that then affect those around us. Peer pressure changes you and in turn you change a community, a bureaucracy, a culture, a government—a world” (Rosenburg, 2011).
Patience is also necessary in organizations where projects are expected to deliver results immediately—quick wins are important for any project or intervention that is delivered. But often the real prize may take months if not years to appear. But if the project doesn’t deliver in this financial reporting quarter, it is deemed to have failed. In organizational and governmental life, old projects are rejected before they are embedded and new projects are started. In truth we no longer know which projects are delivering what results because we don’t wait around long enough to let success show itself. When success comes, we can no longer be sure what has delivered the success because we have started and rejected so many projects in the time between “then” and “now” that there is no clear path to demonstrate cause and effect.
The current focus of organizations and governments and the capitalist system is the result of what Douglas Holmes refers to as “Fast Capitalism” (Holmes, 2002). The pursuit of short-term goals and the market reaction to quarterly results have replaced long-term measures that benefit people, the organization, and society as a whole. Investing in skills and developing people’s potential is ignored because people become little more than arms, legs, and body that have tasks to do, a number on a spreadsheet that can be slashed with a tap on the keyboard. The pursuit of quick profit means that fast return on investment is demanded, but the delivery of short-term goals means no resource is given to projects that add value in the long term, and the end result is profit returns today are made at the expense of long-term prosperity.
The fundamental issue to these systemic pains is that currently no alternative argument or any reason exists for capitalism to stop, since the accumulation of wealth and acquisition of material goods has no end. There isn’t an argument to finish what has been started when the global agenda and political, social, and economic arguments remain centered on profit and self-interest. In a world where “if it’s good enough for me, it’s good enough” is the central tenet of our existence, there is no need for a new ideology, or for us to seek out change. However, “the unbalanced structure of economic growth over the last decade has fed straight through to a disastrous social geography, bypassing the least advantaged in ways that they have done nothing to deserve while indiscriminately rewarding the wealthy” (Hutton, 2011). The problems that we are experiencing in the world, economically, socially, and politically, are a direct result of our pursuit of a finance-centric society that began with the foundations of a free-market economy laid during the Reagan and Thatcher years. What has emerged since then is “the exponential growth of the financial services industry,” which has not only “created a financial-driven business environment,” but also impacted our political, economic, and social culture to focus and be “dominated by its financial purpose to generate money and purely financial value” (CIPD, 2012).
The very dynamism and adaptability of the capitalist system makes it a slippery eel that relies on its beneficiaries destroying and discrediting any attempts to promote social change and an end to consumerism. However, there is a moral and human argument that the continual pursuit of profit and growth regardless of the way in which they are achieved is no longer sustainable. “Moreover, ‘degrowth’ is not a solution as long as poverty and exclusion remain pervasive. A redistribution of income and wealth is practically impossible in the absence of growth. Even those who rightly advocate as a paramount goal of development a ‘civilization of being’ recognize as a precondition the equitable ‘sharing and having’, a situation which is far from being achieved” (Sachs, 2009). Ryan Avent suggests that mass digital prosperity, which involves “redistributing resources from the people, firms and countries that are able to capture a large share of gains from to those that are not . . . will require social consensus that redistribution is both necessary and just” (CIPD, 2017). It would seem that the 99 percent that the Occupy movement suggested they represented are now determined to make their voices heard and demand that their value be fully accounted for and rewarded. Whether the current populist movement in Western society, which is demanding change, can grapple the power from the hands of the few into the service of the many is yet to be seen.
A New Ideology
It is within this context of instability and destructive demand for change that I seek to propose a new ideology, Temperatism, offering an exposition of a set of ideas based on a socio-humanist value system. In presenting these ideas, values, and beliefs as a manifesto of change based on the Temperatist ideology, there is a second purpose, to provoke a debate regarding the political, economic, and social systems, which govern our lives.
For much of the last century the ideological debate centered on socialist and capitalist ideologies. It has been argued that “capitalism has now broken every wall of resistance, penetrating societies and nations as never before imagined. Even nations like India and China which were once time sworn enemies of the pure capitalist system have finally succumbed to the political ideology of capitalism” (Ukpere and Slabbert, 2008). At the end of the first millennium, Blair offered the UK a “third way,” which turned out not to be a third way at all, but a sacrificing of socialist ideals to win power in a market-dominated system. “Social democracy was reduced to a husk. Public action—like education and training—could be attempted only if the markets welcomed it. There could be no sustained expression of public purpose, social justice or reform of economic institutions if this went against the prevailing orthodoxy” (Hutton, 2011). In truth we live in a state where entrepreneurialism and piratical corporatism is the only socially acceptable condition, even for those with socialist values. You can say that you believe in fairness, but there is no mechanism left in order to fight for greater equality and putting social good first. For a long time and even more so now, any criticism of capitalism has been denounced as an attack on individual and the true reality of the negative aspects of the capitalist ideology are “intentionally obscured by the dominant parties,” namely, commercial organizations and Western governments (Nienhueser, 2011). Monboit (2016) argues that neoliberalism offers freedom not for the man who needs protecting but from the strong in society; “freedom from trade unions and collective bargaining means the freedom to suppress wages. Freedom from regulation means the freedom to poison rivers, endanger workers, charge iniquitous rates of interest and design exotic financial instruments. Freedom from tax means freedom from the distribution of wealth that lifts people out of poverty.” No matter how many recessions and crashes society is subjected to, capitalism bounces back, promising a way out of our woe, promising abundance and good times ahead and so the relentless pursuit of profit and competitive advantage continues unchecked, unashamed, and unabated. The theory and the eloquence of the free market are what have contributed to the current recession. The many imperfections of the system are ignored, as capitalism remains protected from its excesses by the political and economic elite. Too many of the costs that are incurred by society are dismissed by organizations in the accounting of their operations, and short-termism dominates the thinking of those who are in a position to make changes for the long term.
Dan Mayer (2007), in his paper “Corporate Citizenship and Trustworthy Capitalism: Co-creating a More Peaceful Planet,” outlines five “mistaken mental frameworks” that our society has accepted as universal truths:
- “Corporations do not make war—governments do;
- Corporations are effectively governed or restrained from antisocial actions by the public sector and are subject to rules of the game set by public authority;
- America stands as a beacon of liberty and democracy, a peaceful republic that promotes freedom and free trade as a way to bring other nations into the fold of peaceful, trading nations;
- American free enterprise and corporate governance are the best available models of corporate efficiency and optimization of human and natural resources; and
- The modern corporation maintains a social contract with societies in which they operate, providing jobs, products and progress” (Mayer, 2007).
Although Mayer is commenting specifically on America, the mental models apply to Western capitalism and the pursuit of wealth creation through “free” trade. Capitalism has embarked upon decades of irrationality, where the maximization of profit today replaces the concerns for the future. There are organizations that do pursue a more socially and environmentally friendly purpose, but these are in the minority and are compromised by participation in a system that punishes the lack of quick profits. Most organizations and institutions are impacting the world negatively and at greater degrees as time moves on. However, because of the cultural beliefs of Western democracies, anything that challenges, or differs from the mental framework that Mayer outlines, is attacked vigorously. Temperatism does not propose that we begin to pursue an antibusiness course of action; rather it seeks to challenge the accepted mental model regarding the very role of organizations in society. It places under the microscope the pursuit of the profit agenda and seeks to replace self-interested short-termism with a doing good framework and organizations that purposefully seek to make a positive impact on the society and wider environment in which they operate.
The furious backlash to Obamacare in the United States is one recent example of how ideological propositions that go against capitalist thinking are blatantly described in emotional language of gross infringement of individual rights and government wrongdoing. Republicans, seeking to repeal and replace Obama’s Healthcare Law, have described the current law as a “Ponzi scheme that would make Bernie Madoff proud,” a “job killer” that “puts the federal government between you and your doctor” (Guardian, 2012).
The reason for proposing Temperatism now is that I believe that the core of what makes us human has been twisted out of all recognition and is under attack. Values and attributes that are core to what makes us human, including kindness, respect for others, inbuilt liberalism and democracy, social consciousness, and a sense of meaning and purposefulness to our lives, are being weakened, to the point that to demonstrate such values is met with suspicion and derision. There exists a backdrop of vacuous opposition to anything that does not align itself with the market-led capitalist ideology. This book and the ideas, beliefs, and values outlined offer a forum for sides to be formed. There will be those who disagree with the proposed Temperatist ideology and those who support it. Whatever side of the fence you fall, and the hope is that you will fall off the fence, as long as you are debating the world in which we live, then you become part of something bigger.