Part Five – Every Change is a Second Chance:

Change does occur by chance. Having a readiness for it, on the other hand, requires an eagerness to be fit for the job. Hitting a search engine with the phrase “Theory of Change,” you get something like the mosaic below. My favorite is the Theory of Change website from ActKnowledge and their offer of certification and use of their TOCO software.

Feedback is a response, reaction, or comment when you ask people for one. It is best when it is immediate, given freely, and on occasion fearlessly. The emphasis on this first creates an understanding of behavior changes in people’s education as it deepens knowledge in organizations. My experience has taught me that mission statements (i.e., uprooting poverty, ending the conflict, improving health) should be avoided until the power of evaluation is firm and established. These pools use feedback systems as basic as students working individually, pooling ideas in small groups. Structure from various institutional evaluation sources is available for use and essential to discovering and implementing standards.

In the three mission statement examples above, we can see the importance of these attainment measures. Uprooting poverty became a central component of the Civil Rights Movement. Along with the idea of ending sexual/racial conflict, the rise of Me Too and Black Lives Matter are building institutional coalitions for transformative change. Finally, the idea of improving the health of Americans due to a pandemic put a spotlight on the reluctance (perhaps denial) to examine structural inequality, social and economic conflict, and the health of people as the same.

One and the Same

Successful change agents work with people where they are found. The idea of “where” is locational as in a physical place with a view of something. A more complicated element is how the view includes the desire for outcomes defined by measures of outlook. Without the skills to work the language of outcomes, outputs, inputs, feedback, and some solid interpersonal communication instincts, it is challenging to develop “the same” into something vital.

Therefore, it is best to have some language to describe yourself, your community, and what you want to do to it or have it do to you because if you do not have these insights, this is when change becomes regressive. There are a lot of neat ways to keep from going backward. I like digging into change models, but it is equally important to look internally in the know thyself to know others’ kind of way. There is a “thyself” one you can use for just $50.00 or less in bulk if you are already in a never doubt group. Buying your own Myers-Briggs report allows you to acquire a four-letter MBIT type as listed below. You can explore that idea further (here).

Agreeing to the proposition that you can be one of the personalities listed includes possible combinations because people do change, and we do have differences. Knowing an MBIT type in establishing goal-oriented relationships in the organizational setting is a useful “be open” experience. Being in an environment that sees change as an act that recognizes growth, personal advancement, new skills, and so on is useful, especially among the never doubters. As the mosaic below illustrates, the web and tons of print publications are replete with the fun of using personality types as communication and organizing tools.

If an activity is plausible or even feasible, it can lead to an impact. Knowing the content of that impact comes from your ability to test and confirm actions in short-term, micro-focused cycles. Once in motion, these facts create the long-term result known as a system change. The two search engine mosaics above illustrate a grand range of templates available for guidance. The only missing element is called the first step.

The selection of interventions that take you from the beginning to the middle and the end are changes that should be joyful and hopeful. Understanding people’s knowledge and then in their organizations establish the plausibility of a framework for creating change. Like a good film, there are many connections between the early efforts to begin a story and to start on a path toward something, to get near the end, to sense a climax and a possible denouement, but just like the movies, there is no big “The End” anymore.

Back tp System Change

Part Three – The Box Gambit:

The “rule” of this gambit is to connect all the dots with four straight lines by not allowing your pen/pencil to leave the surface of the page. Solving this graphic riddle will require some thinking and trial and error. Try it four times. Good luck.

When developing a plan, remember this exercise.  We are all in one kind of rock, paper, scissors box, metaphorical or not. Use your experience to identify examples of thinking that explain moving some examples. Next, describe your thinking with other people (dots) as a creative or imaginative game. What examples of thinking or acting to get the dots of your box to work for you? This is a classic “connect” gambit. Use and share this little exercise with friends. Follow the rules four times and four lines. The pen stays on the page. The lines connect all the dots. The answer is at the bottom of this page.

Congratulations on a solution, or before you go for it below, take a moment to think of a problem or issue you/we would like to define. Use the sample questions below to guide a journalist’s six basic questions with some sampling answers. There are boatloads of these things available now. This meets Occam’s Razor test.

Problem Observation

“There are at least three parks in the community in terrible physical condition. They are misused and abused. Then, in the evening, teenagers hang out, sometimes all night, making a horrible noise and a big mess, why I don’t understand how or why, and so on.”

A.  Issue/Problem Defining Questions

1. Who is responsible for the management/maintenance/budget of these parks?
2. What are the causes of poor conditions, noise, and mess?
3. Where are these parks and other recreational places?
4. When do the “misuse” and disturbance occur all the time, often, infrequently?
5. Why do these disturbances occur?
6. How many complaints have been made?

B.  Asset/Opportunity Defining Questions

1. Who are the parents? Who else can we work with to further define this issue?
2. What are the resources available in the short and long term to “x” or “y.”
3. Where should we direct our research or take our first action(s)?
4. When should we get directly involved?
5. Why must I/we work to define and solve this problem?
6. How can we work with park management/maintenance?

The Box Gambit Animated GIF.

A graphic illustration of system change produced by Melanie Rayment is discussed in detail in System Change Part Four: Critical Thinking Pathways (here). When we noticed how Rayment put “system change” outside the description, this example was from our training courses on creative thinking pathways.

Gratitude for all the recommendations and accounts, The Report

Back to System Change

Part One – Discoveries:

System change builds on the psychology of transparency in human relationships. In this openness, we find friends to love and leaders to trust with our tithings and taxes. The chart illustrates a heuristic method for building awareness, trust, and confidence whenever a “never doubt” group decides to change the world.

In 1955, the Montgomery Bus Boycott began the most remarkable system change in America since the authors of the U.S. Constitution finished their work.  Martin Luther King was twenty-six years old when the boycott began. He would have just twelve years and four months more to live. Identifying when a system change will occur reveals an unpredictable set of choices in our history. That means the only thing to do is begin. The only way to discover what you need to know is to act.

Two more examples: on August 18, 1920, the 19th Amendment ratified the women’s suffrage movement. It occurred as a product of 54 ballot measures in 30 states. It took decades of work and hundreds of small-group efforts to produce a national law prohibiting governments from denying or abridging the right to vote on account of sex. After another half-century, the Voting Rights Act (1965) expanded to include the destruction of segregation with the vote’s power. Proof came in 2016, another half-century later. A recent documentary tells another story of system change that involved just six months that changed the world forever (here).

Malfunctions

Tossed up for all to see are the grand assumptions and harmful practices in our world that appear to be malfunctions. We say, “Do something about ending this tyranny or meeting that unmet need.” Democracy is supposed to be one of the best ways to solve a stubborn problem, especially when events threaten many people‘s well-being. But, unfortunately, the argument to “do something” also includes authoritarian structures such as raising an army, running a business, oppressing a people, or ending a pandemic.

At the center of both methods circles the question of efficacy. Is delay due to squabbling and bounded rationality, or is it due to the utter fear of error and power? The discoveries can be positive or negative in our efforts to define problems. Most of our findings concern the value of predicting and mitigating an adverse event’s most probable cause, time, and place. Individual circumstances cannot be assigned effectively in this way, which leads to accepting the unknowable as something more easily attached to an actuarial table of risk in anticipation of a long list of malfunctions assigned to social practices and few natural events. The losses are, therefore, attributed value and paid to victims post-trauma.

It is occurring to us all that more engagement on questions of global impact events demands an entirely new regime. These events are grounded in climate change and the probable recurrence of global pandemic infections, in which there may be other connections beyond comprehension.  The risk to “all” in a post-trauma evaluation is an insufficient duality. Losses are measured in blood and cash, by good or bad locations, as lucky or unlucky, in life or death, for cultural survival or existence as subsistence.  The trauma is further parsed into black and white, rich and poor, knowing and unknowing, educated or not. It divides young or old, able or disabled, using percentages drawn with an unknown, shifting denominator of dissuasions to proportionality. Tossed it up for all to see is the confusion of our times.  (See: Crisis Management)

Still, much of our practical solutions come as a post-trauma payment to reduce future risks. Individual households and governments also pay individually with resources drawn by regional needs. For example, a volunteer fire brigade works in one place, while another site requires a professionalized firefighting force. Predictable malfunctions reveal investments in first responders and a standard set of institutional providers.  In these cases, the assessment of risks and costs and the selection of management protocols establish readiness levels defined by the tools required.

Finding Steppingstones to New Pathways

How can the world move steadily and permanently away from post-trauma payouts toward levels of resilience and enduring sustainability?  How can the extensive democratic debate be grounded with more power in the equally slow and painstaking science rules? Will it be possible to make science lawfully override the procedures used solely to sustain political power? Given these practices, I can accept authoritarian rules to protect us all on the promise of a system change as structured in the Pathways to Malfunction Identification chart below. This is a failing system.

The chart below describes a bubble-up process established as components of local governance composed of “never doubt” groups. As small organizations, they will select a needed change based on self-interests.  Examples are quality of life issues by residents or scientific groups to analyze specific problems. The chart also recognizes the formation of interdisciplinary groups skilled at acquiring and injecting capital resources. It anticipates coalition groups aligning policy and program implementation schemes built on trial and error evaluations. 

The final system change events in this model (upper right) are as unknown as their seminal beginnings (lower left).  They will become known as the initial efforts bubble up, and shared ideas spread like Whitman’s leaves of grass across the landscape of personal change. The bet is a simple one.  People in small groups can pick their experience with a problem, become a never-doubt organization, and build toward a system change of great value to themselves with recognized results. Should the malfunction be shared widely and require a more productive agency for an action, the process acquires funds. It encourages never-doubt coalition groups to seek higher levels of investment that implies a regional area of operation.  Finally, if the malfunction has national effects, the proposed system change will have widespread consensus agreement as it is already in place and well-practiced locally.  

The chart above suggests that social system changes utilize the energy in the “never doubt” idea.  The widespread knowledge of “never doubt” comes from the work and words of anthropologist Margaret Mead regarding cultural transformations or transitions.

Whether the change sought is significant, dangerous, beautiful, or hideous, the cause of a difference (major or minor) can be the work of a relatively small group of people with an idea. The factor often left out is that the change sought could be twelve apostles or twenty violent supremacists. Claims that this is the only way a system change occurs are logical and historically accurate, but it may not be a lasting one in the digital world.  Given the flow of ideas, it is possible to conceive of a thousand groups that might identify and act on a common view of change that will alter everything all at once, whereby the source becomes irrelevant. Rosa Parks knew she was not the first person to be insulted on a public bus in Montgomery. She is known for saying, “I was just tired.” But, it became “one and all” who wanted her to be the last person insulted and arrested on a Montgomery bus. Historians can only speculate why the sit-in at the Woolworths in Greensboro, NC, in early 1960 by four untrained college students set the tone for the decade. Sit-ins at segregated lunch counters are well documented throughout the South, but this one began in February and ended in July.

Therefore, the chart’s purpose (above) is to trust in our better selves. It lays out a belief in discovering malfunctions for two extremely well-known reasons. First, power concedes nothing without a demand. Second, the limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those they oppress. That was Douglass (1849). He was writing about getting more comfortable with change, even if every turn seems to be for the worse. Sensing the end of misery in the world is a powerful feeling and opens the mind to wonderment and recognizing beauty. 

The failures of power occur in its acquisition and thereafter in the keeping of it. Thus, in seeking change, it is logical to examine how public appropriations become private holdings. Here are three widely known global examples:

1. Vast personal capital accumulation among a small percentage of people is now common knowledge. That the rate is fantastically beyond a measure of any person’s productive capacity firmly suggests an economic malfunction worthy of analysis and action.
2. Fossil fuels are irreversibly altering the thin layer of gas encompassing the earth. These added gases are causing climate change and several malfunctions.
3. The endogenous formation of organic molecules capable of endangering all human life as a virus may be a natural occurrence. However, the failure of anticipation, prediction, management, and mitigation might be the most serious malfunction.

GOS-3P RE

The chart has seven letters (GOS-3P RE) in the upper right corner. I developed it to describe a process for defining big problems like the abovementioned ones.  I use them to support the never-doubt group idea with steps that mean something in the immediate sense that can be put to practical use today and shared or joined with others on a similar path. Before this process can begin operationally, the issue must be continuously well-defined and researched. In writing a GOS-3P RE, the “future perfect tense” as a verb form of communication is best.

1. Establish goals that address the problem(s) as defined.
2. Form objectives that will measure purpose (s) as stated.
3. Construct strategies (tactics & activities aiding goal and objective success)
4. Select a broad range of possible projects  (creatively imagine the future).
5. Determine policy (the values and principles that will guide future decisions).
6. Decide priorities (which projects go first? What is the governing policy?).
7. Budget the resource implications of the plan (projects, cost? and;
8. Evaluate (is their measurable progress?)

A “never doubt” group can process and implement these steps with the cautions offered by Alasdair MacIntyre, a Scottish philosopher whose book After Virtue (1981) brings insight to our modern problems. One observation remains especially useful now, “Questions of ends are questions of values, and when it comes to values, reason is silent; conflict between rival values cannot be settled.“

In this sense of change, it seems far more reasonable to focus the world on its malfunctions. They can be found among the powerful, among rivals, and even in our regular day-to-day lives. People worldwide joyfully engage problems when confronted with a self-interest grounded in something as complicated as community survival or as simple as improving physical comfort. Before us, the task is to broaden this personalization of our place globally and broaden it with digital communication tools at our disposal.

Communication action is occurring now, every minute and hour of the day. But will these face-to-face experiences spin our lives into the shadows of our home-based comforts? Will they be used to share stories of survival more aggressively? Will they help build the knowledge with the action needed to define and solve common problems?   

From the mathematical genius of interpreting regression to the mean data to the inspirational voices of political activists, we can likewise fall to the floor in laughter at our ridiculous selves in a barrage of satirical media presentations that seem (and often are) far more accurate than a news broadcast. We are awash with the language for change, but finding a pathway to a real change, please think about the Montgomery Bus Boycott or the sit-in at Woolworths in Greensboro, and don’t look back.

Malfunctions are examined in detail (here)

  Part Two: Malfunctions

Part Four – Critical Thinking Pathways:

Research into malfunctions requires the insight of the arts well ahead of the potential political strategies around which there is so much technical sensitivity of a check engine system. Expanding “our reality” through the eyes of others is often too esoteric and not goal-driven. But there are ways to build community.

The visual literacy of our society, on the other hand, is expansive and growing. Because of this, a useful phrase in critical thinking is to say, ‘no one is as smart as all of us.’ Words are used to describe and share what we think we know with others, adding pictures to terms in structured settings will always enrich conversations about change.

We are experienced watchers, but everyone can be a better listener. Another useful phrase to use is “listen to be heard.” The habits of mind that manage ‘your thoughts,’ the sound of your voice, and the voice of others in conversation, represent three distinct wavelengths. Each one of them can block or overwhelm the other, building the skills for a disciplined separation of these frequencies produces a useful conversation.

In discussions of health, the word “critical” describes a “short-term” condition. In economics, the phrase “short term” is a shareholder supremacy issue briefly discussed in discoveries (here). That led to some ideas about malfunctions (here) in the second part. The third part had some fun with creative thinking. This opens to a brief examination of critical thinking that speaks to the origins of the first three building trust and confidence in taking direct actions in the fourth part. These are exhibits of “crisis” under the heading of what I like to call, pick your own malfunction.

I take a brief “readiness” look at ‘thinking’ clearly when selecting a process. There are hundreds of them for sharpening up, so pick one and adapt as needed. Here is a quick exercise to run on yourself with friends, colleagues, and co-conspirators in getting woke on a problem.

1. perspective
2. confidence
3. imagination
4. elasticity
5. inquisitiveness
6. integrity
7. intuition
8. open-mindedness
9. perseverance
10. reflection

There is little need to discuss this exercise as the point is to cause a moment of reflection. If you had a rapid similar word definition response to each one of them, know three things: 1) you have some or all the skills listed below, and 2) if it took even a bit longer than ten seconds, you need more work on them when “critical” thinking is essential and 3) they are just words you can pick your own. Breeze through the following:

1. analyze
   1. break the whole into parts to discover the correlation
   2. list the parts piece by piece
   3. sort the things into things, like with like
2. apply criteria
   1. judge using well-known rules
   2. apply professional and social standards
   3. compare and assess the means
3. differentiate
   1. recognize differences and similarities
   2. rank things together or separate in groups
   3. separate into categories or decern status
4. seek information
   1. evidence
   2. facts
   3. sources
5. logical reasoning
   1. inference stated
   2. conclusions made
   3. basis of evidence
6. predict (if that, then this)
   1. envision events
   2. plan in the future perfect tense
   3. determine possible consequences
7. transform knowledge
   1. changing conditions
   2. converting function
   3. alter concepts

Pick Your Malfunction Caution

An outline like the one above is a fine thing between you and your own head. However, you will need a very different use of your thinking ability if you are contemplating a step directly into the change suggested by No. 6 – predict and No. 7 – transform.

Pathways to Justice

Not being curious enough is a problem. Inquisitiveness will take on the full exercise of your intuition on how to run some inference, demand integrity, and put contextual change in the imagination of ordinary people. Perhaps the language used becomes more demanding or visually inspiring to help people hear better and be heard well. Perhaps direct actions and experiences help define and solve problems more directly because they can be given by the people who share them. In these cases, the process forces sharing experiences with reflection to lead to knowledge and getting better at new questions.  

Observers of this concept are encouraged to share the use of the Pathways Design. The one above is by Melanie Rayment. The design was published (here) and inspired the “never doubt” design on identifying malfunctions in parts two and three in this series. Be encouraged to share its use as part of the Creative Commons approach to social change globally, as has the Social Design Pathways network. Who knows, perhaps this, too, is a system change.

The chart captures the process perfectly. It is one of the easiest-to-read graphic illustrations of system change I have seen. It is the inspiration describing system change using malfunction identification in part two (here). Social Design Pathways offers its use, with attribution and the hope that changes and adaptation in initiatives are shared with them.

Closing Thoughts on Critical Thinking

Just after the election of POTUS45, the message about the need to produce change at the local law level was a loud one. The term system change is not often used, but ideas like “ranked-choice voting” could become law in the cities and expand to county and state legislatures. The proponents can then argue for it to become part of a national election system as federal law. On the other hand, in localities throughout the nation, the conservative idea of “resentment” or that something’s being taken away leads strongly to a “ends justifies means” set of policies concerning regulations governing voting and voting districts.

The system change example given most often was the demand to make laws governing marriage far more inclusive. The changes began locally but rapidly across the United States, concluding with a Supreme Court ruling. Marriage, women’s rights, voting, health, banking, consumer rights, and so on have important actionable components that go from local to national or global.

The progressive changes tend to get the most attention, less well known, and impact are changes in law (or new law) that alter or remove environmental, financial, and business accountability and liability regulations. No effort toward a more civil society vs. a free one goes unchallenged in law or legislation. They all require the leadership needed to demand improvements in civil discourse and faith in laws that protect people, not just values.

System Change Part Five: Pick Your Malfunction is next. As an added source of motivation, I offer the following twenty-six minutes as a parting thought for reflection.

The writer’s exhaustion as an agent of change is described in a post submitted in January 2019 (here). This post attempted to seek writers on the future of democracy. The post reviews Ta Nehisi Coates, David Runciman, Stein Ringen, Philip Coggan, and David Post. It also looks at one hundred billionaires who may live in the altered state of blind anticipation of goodness, write a list of hot buttons, and fade into exhaustion.

Back to System Change

Part Two – Introducing Malfunctions:

System changes occur in an environment of malfunction. Four were recently recommended to “The Albemarle Report” for exploration. They are developed only partially below and in more detail (here).

The response to the Great Recession of 2008 reveals errors compounded in the govern m ent sector response to the Pandemic of 2020. Both failed to activate critical thinking skills at the highest levels, and those who did and reported warnings were squelched. The first crisis occurred due to highly over-leveraged bank entities (35 to 1) using derivatives drawn from the insured but hideously unregulated and suspect (NINJA) mortgage market. All well-known pre-crisis facts. The solution became a sloppy private-sector bailout of $700 billion

No Income No Job Applicants NINJA

Investopedia

The 2020 crisis analysis will take more time to conclude, as we are in the midst of it. However, the CBO 2021 report of the 2008 bailout should be fascinating. Early signs from early 2020 economic impacts suggest a reversal of shareholder supremacy might occur because 2008 was highly predictable and poorly resolved.

Profit-taking on a crisis is the thematic first serve culprit in the 2020 crisis based on similar failures to respond before it was too late. Uncomplicated Health Care 101 resources could not succeed for the lack of a clock and trigger and a national testing regime. An Ounce of Evidence  (is worth thousands of pounds of opinions) by Ashish K. Jha will be an excellent place to return for useful facts and recommendations.

The Atlantic and ProPublica are outfits that like to walk us through the weeds careful; journalistic documentation errors can be helpful as well. Nevertheless, the dizzying structure of facts will more than likely, spin into history and fall throughout the American landscape into little piles of hopelessness. For this terrifying reason alone, I think the facts’ importance is secondary because we expect them to become as invisible as a greenhouse gas or a virus.

Like 2008, observers of 2020 will offer a valid list of avoidable errors available for review that will only encourage the MEGO effect (“my eyes glaze over”) that regularly clouds accountability with details far too complex for ordinary voters. The reviews will say we knew the answers for an effective response and didn’t let go with anything remotely resembling a system change capacity. That is the problem to dig into because we are dancing around the facts with the wrong music. The following is an argument for pulling out the dissonance, malfunctions, and blockages of system change.

Malfunctions

The lack of critical thinking in the private and public realm regarding these two global instances (2008, 2020) is evident. I believe a sharp focus on malfunction and not the details of every rolling crisis should be at the core of this kind of thinking. The corners and edges of the American economy have become troubled assets, subject to a relief program, again. How do you set a piece of paper on fire? Edges and corners, shocking, I know, the because feds threw TARP on the 2008 fire, but it still keeps burning, albeit quietly outside of the nation’s corporate boardrooms. The Great Recession critics warned us to develop much higher sensitivity to the malfunctions of capitalism, often referring to it as the American-style.

If this the “sensitivity” at the edge is acquired, how can it be more useful? Perhaps this is the time for a band of writers to create improvements as a never doubt group. I would ask individual writers to leap among the language art professions to build a reservoir of ideas so beautifully stated that it will uplift the American-spirit.

I started my own list of writers (here – excerpt below) to search for that language and not wait for it to arrive. I am adding more names, finding those who are building the conversation, publishing “the papers,” and producing the literature for the never doubt groups throughout America that are help bent on good changes. Read them deeply, and watch them find ways to make the data yield results and where truth can mean something again.

“All journalists need to be understood in the context of action demanded in the vitally important vision of the world held by Ta Nehisi Coates. I spent some time with Vann R. Newkirk II, Adrienne Green, Adam Harris, Reihan Salam Gillian B White, and Matt Thompson. I cannot speak to Ta-Nehisis Coates’s experience. I can read his books or any essay and fully understand the power of his voice and my hope for his influence.  Meet him here 2018 and here 2017.“

From Writer’s Wanted

Since We are Waiting:

The facts show financial service companies, insurance corporations, and a million families went underwater on bad loans and poor judgment. The facts show, millions of people became sick with a virus that killed a high percentage of the most vulnerable due to lung infections and other underlying conditions, and they died alone.

The national to local response 2008 and 2020 to fix the “money” problem focuses on the wrong problem. Americans are confronted by comprehensive “health” concerns affecting the cells of their bodies; there are shortcomings in the entire cognitive outlook. Exploring the reasoning skills of Americans is what should dominate the argument and the conversation. That is where the malfunctions will be found. The money is important, but it crowds out critical thinking on a long list of concerns. Here is a 2008 example.

In 2008, Wall Street won the case – use federal funds and reestablish aggregate demand, sustain liquidity for global trade, keep employment up, but income marginal (paycheck to paycheck) in a high percentage of households. Attack tax rates, government interference, and expose public incompetence. Hide wrongdoing and continue to reduce mechanisms for public oversight into private financial practices and kill debate. These globalists arguments are persuasive and claimed by the strategic financial practices of the Federal Reserve System on down to your 401(k) fully exhibit a malfunction.

Recently (April 2020), several hundred other private businesses and publicly traded companies dipped into that malfunction. However, Shake Shack and that steak franchise didn’t return a combined $30 million in 0% interest loans to reduce public outrage. Assuring all workers’ employment on the government dime is distasteful to investors as it does nothing for a balance sheet or the tax code and lacks flexibility. As billion-dollar companies, they know the only way to recapitalize during a full-blown depression of unknown duration is to wait and reduce payroll far more quietly down the road. The bonus is to align the business with American values of freedom and independence that still takes blood to establish and use them to get good public relations.

Despite the depth of the 2008 and 2020 global economic tragedies, other questions that attempt to define and identify the malfunctions of sound reasoning in America go unaddressed. The financial crisis of 2008 and the health and economic crisis of 2020 has one word that tends to deaden discussion of system change, and that headliner is “money.”  Failing to understand alternatives to money is a malfunction of American cultural thinking.

For example, why is it so uninteresting to wonder out loud if the world could operate as if wealth is not the only means of meaningful communication? Is becoming an outlier, a monastic monk, or an entire monastery the only pathway to sustainability? What are the alternatives, where are the well-celebrated successes? Some many places and events have proven capital to be meaningless in the achievement of human dignity. Those four college students had just a few dollars between them at the Woolworths’ lunch counter when somehow they galvanized an established, ongoing “sit-in” movement across the South.

These questions and events exhibit an ingredient of enormous importance to life. A clear dividing line separates a private marketplace solution for serving a human need from those in the public realm that want to create change. The line that says on this side of it, the use of debt as a cost of money, is irrelevant, where the purposes of care keep us all well and sustaining the simplicities of life are priorities that reign supreme above all others?

For Fairness and Equity

The last two hundred years of American-style capitalism is about growth. The next century will need to observe fairness and equity more accurately. This fight requires a search for leadership that Democracy should be best in finding.  Only one modern American hero has a national day of remembrance for the courage it took to lead a fairness and equity challenge. His pain became ours, and his name was Martin Luther King.

King’s interest in justice with equity held the U.S. Constitution to account first, but this did not extinguish his view on capitalism’s economics.  His demand for change is based on two facts. An economic system built on slavery and imprisonment will not change the rules. Change must, therefore, come from changing the system.

“I am now convinced that the simplest approach will prove to be the most effective – the solution to poverty is to abolish it directly by a now widely discussed matter: the guaranteed income…”

Martin Luther King –Where do We Go from Here? 1967

Resisting the pressure to create change weakens your outlook and idles your voice, yet the sadness built into this silence is a powerful force in creating a new and powerful narrative. For those whose interests lie in connecting the dots with visible lines between the confluence of the 2008 and 2020 crisis will gather their strength by recalling the heart of King’s outlook – that the arc of human history may be long, but it bends toward justice.

The concept of equity in the minds of most people is a good place to begin. Any accountant will explain “equity” as a combination of assets and liabilities. One of the first sources of wealth in the world and pre-eminent in the United States has been to support individual families’ acquisition of assets. Homeownership, with the help of mortgage guarantees, is the prime example. It also formed the perfect storm for converting government-insured mortgages into derivatives in bundles of mortgage-backed securities. Confidence and trust in each household and the economy in which they function is the one fantastic thing that makes the liability expressed by a mortgage possible.

In the post-2008 recovery, millions of families realized they were sold a dream, but not a house. The narrative used said they just tripped into the caveat emptor bucket where all of American-style capitalism’s inequities are poured. That is not the malfunction. The third malfunction is far more disturbing. It was how easily and rapidly a vast amount of capital shifted into serving rental housing demand. It was as if the purpose of the crisis was to slice yet another sizeable chunk of households out of the ownership market, but who will put equity into the pockets of the housing investor-class.

Trust

The fourth malfunction’s signal worthy of exploration is a failure of the senses to hear the beep. All of us have the ability to know when someone “feels” trustworthy, a person in whose recommendations you would feel confident following based solely on initial impressions.

Confirmation bias is a proven human behavior. It is as if there was only one emoji for every expression. It is illustrated repeatedly in the communication between people – it is documented with race, religion, age, a whole set of facial expressions, and all kinds of body language. American’s are a highly sophisticated, visually literate group of people far too easily siloed and willing to stay there.

I say it over, and over, the meaning of everything is found in people, not books, newspapers, or TV reporting. Meaning is putting trust in the instincts we have about the people we give power over our thinking-lives, and therefore we are entitled to a judgment. Where is the narrative, the journalism, and reporting that openly explores the hair-raising ease with which the writer and reader are privately manipulated into being managed per story?

There is “same room,” empathy, but never one that could be hand-to-hand in visual reporting. Judgments are, therefore, personal. The following are mine, no one else. In the discussion of economic recovery policies, I find one group of leaders exhibit a distinct arrogance with a hint of condescension (Mnuchin of Treasury and Ross of Commerce, for example) and other groups who are recommending preventative treatments and therapies for me and the nation exhibit authenticity and sincerity. Dr. Fauci, the face of COVID-19, and Adams, our Surgeon General, come to mind.

I think all can see a sharp difference between these leaders and their styles. Those with extensive experience in managing unimaginably massive amounts of capital in their personal lives and those with extensive experience in managing services and policies that protect human health represent our society’s bifurcation. I can take these impressions as personal and symbolic as a guide to strengthen my critical thinking skills.

For example, I have a positive sense regarding Warren Buffet, even Bill Gates, that yields the humanitarianism that I give to Dr. Fauci. Mr. Buffet also freely acknowledges selling 100% of his substantial holdings in airline stock, and in the same March 2020 breath, he is widely quoted for saying, “Never bet against America.” Mr. Gates’ charitable experience with spending millions fighting infectious diseases in the world led him to practically yell out unequivocal warnings regarding lack of readiness to respond to pandemics. I argue that their humanitarianism is not enough as it fails at system change by changing nothing. What are we missing?

Confidence in Change

Recently, the idea of retaining the world’s confidence in the United States was expressed by none other than the American Enterprise Institute in a map they tweeted to the world. The map is used to illustrate one message for all to see — your wealth belongs here. Illustrating the GDP of individual American States in relationship to fifty other countries in the world is designed to make people confident – to trust the systems that are in place now.  Before you read the next paragraph, I call your attention to Wisconsin on the map below.

This BEA/IMF map is blatant public relations. It was published in the April 2020 phase of the pandemic as an unabashed claim of massive economic power, nothing else. Frankly, I know not where this thinking lands on the index of malfunctions. The following is how I am trying to work it out.

In response to the pandemic, a “system change” relationship between public and private equity is something Europe understands and Denmark in particular. I have one example of why Wisconsin should have no difficulty in system change if they were more like Denmark. Hartland, WI, for example, is known as the nuclei of one of the most important regions of Danish immigration in the United States, but there is a stronger point to be made.

The Denmark government stepped forward to continue paying wages for their people even when they are not working. People kept their jobs with their employers and stayed home. Denmark retained some businesses and most family income and stopped the virus from spreading with efficiency. The policy maintained the nation’s cultural status quo with steady, confident anticipation of ending the crisis. The employee’s program is the arrow program’s tip from a full quiver of medical and economic tactics. The system change is rapid. It allows business activity and production to restart with as little cost and disruption as possible. Instead of a half-baked business paycheck protection program, this was a well prepared Protect Denmark strategy.

Please spend a few minutes with Mette Frederiksen, Prime Minister of Denmark, introducing her nation’s work opening the Climate Summit in Copenhagen (here) and New Zealand’s Jacinda Ardin on COVID-19 (here) then (here) then Trump on Climate (here) via NBC. There was a surprise until the NBC video told me that he could read a prompter well – so stay with it long enough for proof. I leave it to your cognitive dissonance and confirmation bias instincts. Mette’s every word rings with truth to me that Trump ends with the testimony of a bait and tackle shop owner from Port St. Lucy on ending toxic tide is the only part that rang truthfully.

Remember Port Huron

Consider the four malfunctions summarized below and remember Port Huron if you are of a mind to develop more detail. All of the above brought to me a recollection of the Port Huron Conference because the answers were there and beautifully identified a half-century ago. (here). I am stunned, by their revelations.

First, fully recognize and prepare a narrative that describes how America has a comprehensive health problem that includes the inability to use our wealth far more effectively in self-study. Second, figuring out the importance of equity for all Americans requires a system change that clearly shows equity flow. The “one percent” copy line has failed to capture the imagination or the curiosity of people. Third, capital is more fungible today than in the entire history of civilization. Ordinary people like me barely understand how quickly markets change. A specimen, such as a variable stock holding, can be mutually interchangeable (replace or be replaced) at the speed of light solely for the holder’s benefit in charge of the change. The pensioner will not notice what was taken until it is gone forever. The fourth and most perplexing malfunction examines how trust and confidence are broken as agents for change. Is it for the lack of a hard “in what?” do I trust, and in whom am I confident? Could it be a failure to face the clear signals of confirmation bias and cognitive dissonance? Is there no one helping the American people figure it out?

Aside from my deep belief that the purpose of time is learning how to get the next moment right, the serious malfunctions in communication and, therefore, persuasion will not self-solve. Courage will be required. Examine our country’s health as a cognition issue, that the perception of all people, from the homeless veteran to the owner of a hundred Manhattan towers, should agree to one central point? The creation of equity for both comes at the cost of the other that the vet’s pain is removed when the powerful owner becomes a partner in a change to the system. What could make that happen?

Recognize the malfunctions sketched out here are not the “have vs. have not” situations that shaped the lives of these two people. It was for the lack of a system change that eliminated inequities between the “knowing” and the “unknowing” of them both as they look out over the landscape of their country.

Thank you for reading System Change, Part Two: Malfunctions. Comments are appreciated on these ideas, references to other readings, and the practical steps needed to bring them into sharper view. Conference recommendations and notifications are appreciated giving that it has been far too long since the insight of Port Huron and the work of Writers Wanted.

I have offered a brief gambit in Part Three. It is a bit of instruction from the teacher in me, but if you still want to know what that is, click (here).