Women, Hitler and the Inevitability of Progres

Progress is inevitable.

As someone who loves history I've come to believe that certain things are inevitable. Once the telegraph had been developed, someone would eventually find a way to push voices down the wires and allow conversation. Alexander Graham Bell was the first to file a patent for a telephone and then, hours later, Elisha Gray tried to file a patent for a telephone.  Had neither Bell nor Gray been born, we would still have had a telephone. It was inevitable.

Hitler was not inevitable. No one had to step into power in Europe and derail progress, tipping the world into so much madness and evil. Yet even Hitler illustrates the inevitability of progress.

Hitler killed 6 million Jews. It was one of the greatest horrors of the last century, this systematic killing of a people. But he made it even worse. By far. Hitler - in league with Mussolini and Hirohito - started a war of conquest that killed 50 - perhaps s many as 80 - million people. It was the mass manufacture of death.

Hitler's beliefs have still not completely died. Neo-Nazis are not done killing people, even if it never approaches a fraction of the scale of Hitler's madness.

Hitler was awful, not inevitable, and left behind a trail of destruction.

The Allies response to him? Accelerated progress. Technological and Social.

New products that came out of World War 2 include penicillin, the programmable computer, a jet engine, and radar.

Less obviously, production and quality methods came out of this that helped to raise productivity during the 1940s and probably for the rest of the century. Three of the business thinkers who most influenced my understanding of business and were heard and read by millions - Peter Drucker, Russell Ackoff, and W. Edwards Deming - all were involved in the war effort and carried lessons from that time into work with clients into the 21st century.

Hitler did not just accelerate progress in technology and production processes. He actually accelerated social progress.

In the US, men went off to war and women were brought into workplaces. (Management expected productivity to drop when this happened. Instead it rose. They investigated to understand why and what they discovered was .... when assigned to work on a new machine, women asked questions about how it worked. That was it. That was the difference that accounted for the productivity gain.)

To win the war, the US was eager to have as many able-bodied men as they could. This included minorities and this effort at integration did not end with the war. WWII ended in the Fall of 1945 and by the Spring of 1947, Jackie Robinson began playing major league baseball.

Hitler probably accelerated the development of medical care, aviation, computing, racial integration and women gaining more rights. He arguably caused more pain than anyone in the last century and yet .... even all that seemed to give progress more of a boost. (Let me be clear that we could have done this anyways and far less painfully. Probably not as quickly, though. Once we learn to follow the lead of intrinsic, rather than extrinsic, motivation progress will move along at a good clip and not be in reaction to crisis.)

Hillary Clinton came so very close to becoming our first woman president, losing a marathon race by half a second. Now, in the first election after her loss, there have been a record number of women elected to congress. (And still counting. It looks like the 116th Congress will rather fittingly have 116 women. One can only hope that their progress towards representing half of the 435 won't take another 200 years.) Many of these women were motivated by Trump's election and Clinton's loss. It is distinctly possible that the election of a man who bragged about just grabbing pussy because he was a star will actually lead to more women in power than we might have otherwise had.

Progress has a direction. More people have more freedom to live a life of their own choosing. They get access to inventions technological and social. We invent cool things like church and state, cars and planes. That makes life better. Then we figure out how to let more people use these cool things. Religious freedom and democracy, Ford's factory line and commercial air eventually give the everyday person access to these great inventions that once were tools reserved for the elites. Progress continues to create more  possibilities and then offer those to more people.

I'm more appalled at Trump than most people I know. I think he already has created so much unnecessary grief and could be responsible for far more. That said, if even Hitler could not derail progress, there is no way that a man as simple-minded and emotionally needy as Don is going to. All these women winning elections is just the first good thing to come out of his presidency.

Freud, Jung, Hidden Impulses, the Collective Unconscious, Hitler, Putin, Conspicuous Consumption and - Finally - Community

Freud's Couch Was Sort of a Bed

About a century ago two competing models for modern media emerged in the U.S. and Germany. Using what they were learning about psychology, the Nazis created state propaganda to sway the masses to serve the interests of the state and advertisers in the U.S. used those same insights to serve the interests of the corporation. (A fascinating documentary, the Century of the Self, makes this argument and can be found here.)

William James published what some argue was the first textbook on psychology - the Principles of Psychology - in 1890 and Freud published The Interpretation of Dreams in 1900 and Civilization and its Discontents in 1930. If you visit the apartment in Vienna where Freud pioneered psychotherapy you don't just see that the Freudian couch was actually a bed. (Freud thought that a bed was a safe and  cozy place from which to free associate but perhaps the preponderance of sexual references would have given way to a preponderance of food references had he instead used a kitchen table.) What you get from the museum that once was his office is this very exciting sense of the mind as a new frontier. Rather than blame spirits or madness for weird thoughts and behavior, these early psychologists were taking a scientific approach to the mind, hoping to better understand the impulses that seemed to lay below the seemingly thin veneer of our civility. Jung's concept of the collective unconscious might be suspect but it gets to the reality that something binds us that is almost mystical and that these impulses could be tapped to sway large groups to do strange things - like drive to the mall on a sunny day or shout angry slogans at political rallies.

These insights were exploited with new and transformative technology of that time. The radio was the first technology to allow people across an entire nation to hear about the wonders of the Third Reich or nylons and electric razors and it was quickly followed by TV.

Obviously it made an enormous difference whether a community used these powerful new media technology to promote the interests of the state or the corporation. Someone once said that the book most likely to change minds in the Soviet Union would be the Sears Catalog. Magazines, newspapers, radio and TV shaped minds - and thus communities - as only churches and sacred texts had before. And it was no coincidence that the state and corporation undermined the dominance of the church last century.

This century's transformative media is the internet and the social media it has enabled. The shift in advertising revenue from newspapers to the internet has shattered old business models and forced a scramble to discover new audiences and sources of revenue for reporting and commentary.

And curiously, the choice about whether this model will be funded by the state or the corporation, by advertising for political interest and shared values or great values on products you'll love, is still in question. This week's senate hearings with the social media giants Facebook, Twitter, and Google gets to the question of how social media has been used to manipulate voters and thus American policy rather than merely focus on getting us to buy more goods.

It's worth noting that this is social media.

About the same time as the emergence of the radio and television, a third really powerful technology emerged: the telephone. This was intimate and personal and allowed two people to communicate and in the process strengthen relationships. I think it's telling that so much of the internet is experienced on a phone. Even though actual talking on the phone is not even in the top ten activities people do with their phones, what they're doing is closer to what was done on the phone last century than what was done with TV and radio. They're creating and feeling part of a community.

Community is a third goal, different from the goals of consumption and propaganda. I think one thing we're seeing in the success of Twitter and Facebook is the strong impulse to belong. You can dismiss this as tribalism but I think it speaks to communities of the mind and shared values, to what it means to be human and feel the part of something larger. It's worth noting that the strength and vulnerability of these brands is that they are platforms. Zuckerberg doesn't make editorial decisions about what posts your Aunt Leola or cousin Curt should make on Facebook. They do. Your friends are rarely selling goods or trying to win votes for the political party they are starting. (Although I admit I would be interested in seeing the posts of someone who was starting a new party; that sounds like an interesting person.) They are simply connecting, sharing what they are proud of, what impresses them, what they are worried about and what made them laugh. The third way beyond media as a tool for conspicuous consumption or political propaganda is media a tool for creating communities of the mind, of shared interests and simple friendships. It's not novel that people would do that; it is novel that people could do that across distances, with a tool more inclusive than the phone or the kitchen table.

What Hitler Taught Trump About Rallies

It's worth remembering that Trump had a book of Hitler's speeches by his bed. Here's one of Hitler's quotes about speeches at rallies.

A mass rally is designed to switch off the thinking process. Only then will the people be ready to accept the magical simplifications before which all resistance crumbles.
-        Hitler

Trump is offering to chase imaginary monsters like economic carnage and out of control crime and immigration. One beauty of getting people to agree to chase imaginary monsters is that you can - at any time - just turn on the light and claim victory. "Look! The job market is now healthy!"

Medieval Relics, From Baby Jesus to Hitler

In the medieval world, miracles were still common and religious symbolism was not symbolic.  Wilsnack is today a tiny town of about 2,000, halfway between Berlin and Hamburg and yet because of reports that during a fire the Host – the holy bread used for communion – not only survived but bled, it was the fourth most popular destination for pilgrims (Rome and Jerusalem being first and second on that list). [1]  Monasteries attracted pilgrims with claims that they items like pieces of the crown Christ wore on the cross, his baby teeth, or umbilical cord (a double relic, of both Jesus and Mary).

The statue of St Longinus byGianlorenzo Bernini sits
above the relic in St Peter's Basilica

Even the pope’s own treasury of relics included the holy prepuce cut away when baby Jesus was circumcised. “Saint Catherine was often painted with Jesus putting a ring on her finger in a mystical marriage, but she said in letter after letter that the true marriage with Jesus was sealed with the ring of his circumcised flesh on the spouse’s fingers.” [2]

These beliefs did not die quickly. To give some appreciation of the degree to which Hitler tried to turn back time, after he had invaded Austria, Hitler quickly stole the Spear of Destiny. This was the spear reportedly used to pierce Christ’s side when he was on the cross. Since the time of Charlemagne, leaders of the Holy Roman Empire had held this spear with the apparent belief that possessing it gave one power to rule. (In their defense, they presided over an empire that lasted – in various forms – for roughly 1,000 years, from 800 to 1803.)  It was a relic that held magic that Hitler trusted, and this less than a century ago.

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[1] Gary Willis, Why Priests? A Failed Tradition (Viking, New York, NY, 2013) p. 35.

[2] Gary Willis, Why Priests? A Failed Tradition (Viking, New York, NY, 2013) p. 39.

Heil Leader

Richard J. Evans writes in The New York Review of Books:

Almost as soon as the Nazis came to power in Germany, they made the greeting 'Heil Hitler!' a compulsory part of national life. Civil servants were legally obliged to sign documents with it, and anybody writing a letter to officialdom would have been well advised to do the same. Schoolteachers had to greet their classes with a 'Heil Hitler!,' raising their right arm stiffly in the 'German greeting' as they did so; train conductors had to use the greeting when they entered a compartment to collect tickets from passengers.

I can't help but wonder if we aren't doing something similar at this stage of elections.

The election is, for me, coming into the boring period. Gone is the plethora of choices that I found so interesting. Even when they weren't choices that I liked, I liked the fact that, for instance, the Republicans had such a wide variety of characters, I mean candidates, who represented very different segments of the American right.

But even worse than the sudden lack of variety is this deification stage of the election process. The right has to continually defend an old conservative who likes to pretend he is a maverick; the left has to defend a young liberal who likes to pretend he's led something before. These are real people and real choices (not even bad choices), but Obama and McCain are as far removed from flawless as the rest of us. And yet their supporters see fit to elevate their candidates, gather in circles around them, and then chant like primitive natives before the god of volcanoes.

"Modern politics is a chapter in the history of religion," John Gray writes in the opening line of Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia. Sadly, it doesn't seem as though we have to put in place true despots to feel compelled to deify leaders. There is something more tribal or religious about this stage of elections than rational and open.

We carry our psychoses into every arena we play in - from family to business to community; I suppose that there is no reason that politics should be excluded from this weight. But does politics have to be based on such psychoses? It just seems to distract from the larger and more important question about what kind of world we want these leaders to help us to create.

I suspect that one of the reasons we do this is that if we could convince ourselves that these leaders really are omnipotent, we won't have to take responsibility for our world. And in this cycle - deification, disappointment, and vilification of leaders - we have the electoral process that never once forces communities to be accountable for creating the world that we all love to complain about.

Re-discovering the Individual in a World of Massive Interdependency

How do we reconcile these two realities that seem to seriously clash? On the one hand, we have the reality of our need for autonomy, intrinsic motivation, and motivation that comes from pride and a strong sense of linkage between what we do and the results we get. The importance of the individual. On the other hand we have the reality of massive interdependency, an economic and social reality in which the individual is noise in the signal, static in the crowd. Our own personal experience tells us quite loudly that we’re unique, irreplaceable, and essential. Yet the world continues with the loss of any one individual – whether that loss is to discouragement, distraction, or death. What does progress look like in a world in which individual autonomy and social interdependency have seemingly come into conflict?

The reality seems to be what’s described by systems thinkers – we live in a world that arises out of the interaction of millions and billions of people and can be traced back to no one individual. Yet the societies that have tried to build on this realization have turned into socialist nightmares – exercises in the denigration of the individual that have not only turned out to be spectacular social failures but have invariably crushed the individual.

Hitler’s secretary Taudle Junge shared this about the man. “He didn’t think in human dimensions. Humanity was never of any importance to him. It was always the concept of the superman … the nation, always this abstract image of a vast German Reich, powerful and strong. But the individual never mattered to him. Though he always said he wanted to make people happy – he started a variety of welfare and recreational organizations in the Third Reich – personal happiness was never of the slightest importance to him.”

Happiness of the individual has to matter. Liberation leadership – leadership that leads to the discovery and realization of the self – has been the leadership that has gradually, steadily and surely triumphed over the model of controlling leadership that denies the individual’s experience and need for autonomy.

And yet, societies are emergent realities – products of the interaction of lots and lots of individuals who must, by definition, be expendable, replaceable, ultimately unimportant to the integrity of the whole.

Specialization has meant that we’re increasingly likely to find ourselves a part of some greater whole over which we feel as though we have little or no control. If you are an employee of IBM, you are one of 366,486; at HP, you’re one of 156,000; at Wal-Mart, you’re one of 1.9 million. It’s terribly difficult to make one’s mark, to feel engaged in making a difference, in such loud and crowded places.

Our impact on the whole, our contribution to society, is not some abstraction – it comes through a very real and intimate part of our lives: our work. Einstein changed the world through his work in theoretical physics. Edison changed the world through his work in technological invention. John Lennon changed the world through his work as a singer and songwriter. It is through our work that we do or don’t change the world and as our tools for doing our work become bigger and more unwieldy – as the tools we use are social constructs as massive and full of specialization and process as a corporation – we lose room for self-awareness and realization that seems to precede the acts of genius – or the inspired moments that even the most banal of us experience – the acts that have moved us forward.

The reality is one of massive interdependency – ask anyone who has tried to get a building permit, or make a change to processes within a corporation or tried to change behaviors of groups as varied as gangs prone to violence and consumers prone to carbon emissions. Yet the reality is also one of individuals struggling to hear and be heard, generally resigned to having little or no impact on their world – and by extension the very definition of their lives. Every individual is outnumbered 6 billion to 1.

The beginnings of a reconciliation of this will necessarily come from within the corporation. The corporation is the dominant institution of our time and any significant social change will begin there. Further, the corporation is now the place where the individual most consciously chooses to contribute – the tool for work. Yet this has been made backwards, and too often the individual has instead been expected to be the tool for the work of the corporation rather than the corporation being a tool for the work of the individual.

A large part of what is missing an awareness of systems and systems dynamics. The corporation is a complex system that is, too often, the product of pronouncement and top-down dictates. The West has tried this before, this reliance on dictatorship: the medieval church, the renaissance-era nation-state, and the bank of the era of JP Morgan. Such dictatorship work for a while – for as long as a genius like Rothschild or Henry VIII is creating a social construct and hasn’t time or ability to bring along the masses whose confusion would only slow the process. But once these institutions are living, breathing, essential parts of our daily life, societies next step for progress is the step of dispersion – dispersing the power over these institutions through revolutions like democracy and disintermediation. The corporation has reached a similar place, a place where the genius of founders must become the common sense of the masses – the very definition of civilization and its progress. (Think of the genius of Isaac Newton to have invented calculus and the progress of civilization that now depends on millions of children each year gaining the same tool of calculus. Newton showed genius by creating calculus, but society has massively benefited by its popularization.)

Banking disintermediation – the process of dispersing the power of powerful bankers across the population – relied upon a number of innovations. Computers, fiat money, central banks, monetary policy, Keynesian theory, and credit cards were all essential to reaching the point at which credit was the choice of the individual and not the banker, a world where labor has become the capitalist.

The transformation of the corporation will be similar, reliant on a variety of changes, shifts, and new technologies. No one thing will transform the corporation, yet one technology that will prove essential is technology to better enable the individual to see the global impact of his or her local actions. The absence of such technology today is glaring in its omission. Because it is missing, management cannot trust the individual to act upon individual interests. In lieu of visibility and clear consequences we have control. No one wins in this scenario.

There are some systems tools already, tools that help the individual to see her part in the whole. And this is the paradox: we’re social animals and we can’t realize our individual potential without realizing our place in the whole. Niels Bohr, the Nobel Prize winning contemporary of Einstein, said that atoms had always been thought of as things but perhaps should better be thought of as relationships. Desmond Tutu said that “A person is a person through other persons.” Perhaps we, too, should be thought of as defined by relationships. We are wired to compete but less obviously, we’re wired to cooperate, to hold open doors, to feel joy at the accomplishment of others, to see our joy in life echoed in the eyes of another, an echo that amplifies our own.

We’ve woken up in a world of massive interdependency, a world in which we depend on others beyond our line of sight. Major parts of our lives have disappeared beyond the horizon. The response to that is not to retreat back into worlds of our own making. Nor is it to cry out for control over behavior from strong leaders who will save us from our own selfishness and petty interests. Rather, it is to enhance our capacity to see, and enjoy or suffer the consequences of, the ripple effects of our actions.

Individuals need linkage between their actions and the outcomes. Barring this, they become disengaged. Corporations have become places where the game is not so much about the linkage between individual action and outcome as it is the politics of recognition, a game that swings in and out of phase with the larger game of making a real and positive difference. Once corporations put in place tools that allow the individual to choose actions without being coerced, enjoying or suffering the consequences just like an agent in a market economy, the corporation will have begun the transformation towards becoming a tool rather than treating the individual as the tool. And as individuals again gain autonomy and control over their own lives, the individual will thrive. And as happens every time the individual is allowed to become more, society thrives in unpredictable and amazing ways. On the surface, this transformation of the corporation will make it seem as though we’re entering a time of great change. In fact, it will merely be proof again that social transformation begins as it always has – with individual transformation.