At first, the Super Committee seemed like a great idea. Maybe those super legislators would be able to rise above partisan bickering and actually govern the country. The membership seemed promising: half Democrats, half Republicans, half members of the House, half Senators; the committee was comprised with fairness in mind. And expertise: each member had budgetary experience. The professional stakes had never been higher: more Americans thought communism offered better guidance than Congress. Surely the Super Committee would come to the rescue!
Over the weekend, pundits offered explanations about why the Supers had failed. Ideology is controlling politics, said one commentator. They can’t reason with one another if they don’t operate under the same set of facts, said another. Politicians can’t compromise if they hope to be reelected, pointed out a third. They’ve lost the art of governing, said a political analyst sadly. They only know how to blame.
The problem, however, may be bigger than Congress, deeper than ideology. When it comes to dealing with public resources, people are just plain stupid or, to be more precise, STUPID, an acronym developed by Dennis Meadows, a systems analyst and co-author of Limits to Growth. Meadows wanted to understand why the fishermen of George’s Bank had destroyed their livelihood through overfishing. He determined they had Small expectations (each fishing company just wanted to cover its costs); they were operating under Time pressures (each company operated under the constraints of tides, weather, and markets); they had Untrusting Partners (each company assumed the other companies would work against them); they had an Inadequate understanding of the system (they couldn’t see the aggregate effects of their individual actions); and they operated under Dysfunctional norms (which we might call the logic of a competitive marketplace).
For the past sixty years, much of the work of environmentalists has been to provide adequate understanding of ecological systems so that the norms of the marketplace – individualism and competition – might be replaced by a more holistic worldview. Once you understand how deeply connected you are to the ecology, say authors like Aldo Leopold, you will handle these resources more wisely.
Or not.
Meadows created a role-playing game called Fish Banks, Ltd., which provides players with a first hand experience of how to be stupid. Players are divided into teams (fishing companies) with equal starting pools of money and ships. Each team has to make decisions about how to spend their resources, how much to fish, and where to fish. Computers simulate the effect of each teams’ catch on the fishery. As the teams compete with one another, the fish stocks begin to take a dive until, as happened in New England, there are not much fish left. Having an adequate understanding of the system does not deter even environmentally-minded players from running a public resource into the ground.
So if an adequate understanding of the system doesn’t stop us from acting stupidly, what does?
Increase your expectations and reduce the pressures of time!
Small expectations, the first factor in acting stupid, looks like worrying about the needs of your vessel, or to put it in the context of American politics, the needs of your reelection campaign. The fishermen of George’s Bank destroyed their livelihood because they couldn’t see beyond their private interests. Their expectations were too small. Had their expectations been larger, they would have included the needs of the fishery and the demands of the tides.
Reducing the pressures of time could be as simple as suspending the exigencies of the day. Maybe we don’t need to buy a second boat. Maybe we don’t have to exceed last year’s catch. In a political context, reducing time pressure might look like: taking more time to listen, increasing moments for reflection, putting away smartphones and iPads so that the eddies of conversation can flow uninterruptedly.
Increasing expectations and reducing time pressures may seem foreign to the marketplace but they are common practices in religious and revolutionary circles. Enter a monastery, a mosque or a mountaintop and time expands to the Infinite Now. The self in this expansive space dissolves into the great being of God or Allah or Mother Earth. The next thing you know, the small-minded pressures of ordinary life are a thing of the past. To float in the great sea of this eternal presence is to see one’s place in the order of things: a small place, yes, but one deeply connected to the pulse of life.
Students back from Zuccotti Park speak of a suspension of time pressures and a greater sense of possibility. Freed of the time constraints of a college semester, they spend days in conversation with strangers, learning about the effects of the marketplace on executive souls. When they are at an Occupation, they are less concerned about their futures. Engaged in a revolution, they are less worried about their family’s dwindling assets. Like the deeply religious, these young revolutionaries have been liberated from the constraints of the marketplace.
All of this suggests that our federal coffers, like the North Atlantic fishing stock, will persist only if we think of them as something we all depend on. To have so great a thought, however, requires more time than the day’s agenda usually allows. Since we are the ones who set the agenda, surely we can change it. Not by ramping up time pressures and increasing our partisan expectations but by diluting our petty concerns in the great bath of fragile life. Perhaps as small expectations are dashed and the time to acts slips away, we’ll take the plunge and release ourselves from the dysfunctional norms of the marketplace. The revolutionary and the religious already know the way.
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