Order-Revoution-Anarchy-Order

Two years ago, I put together a fantasy portfolios of stocks. Included therein was one that appealed to me because a former subordinate is an officer of the company. I looked him up in the financial information for the company and saw that his earnings are in the neighborhood of $10million annually. All I can say is, “Wow!” So I immediately started questioning what the heck was going on. My first thoughts were how much is enough and is he really worth that much? Can’t say that there wasn’t some envy involved but it was quickly dispelled with good reasoning. Besides, “Maintaining a favorable opinion, I remain positive and constructive.”

I know this guy fairly well, or did, and I don’t think the money is the whole thing in his case, it’s large but more as a measure of success. He has worked himself into a position where that’s what it pays. If this corp didn’t pay him this amount they would be paying someone else and conversely if they didn’t pay him this much he would move on to another corporation. It has taken me a long time to rationalize this because it is more than this one instance; it is the landscape of publicly held corps, the medical and legal professions, major league sports, and other few but highly lucrative professions where the bidding for top talent is off the chart. This doesn’t mean it is wrong; corps are making enough profit to pay the execs these salaries and perks and still give the shareholders a good return on investment. BTW, the portfolios and his company haven’t returned to the value they had when I assembled them; thank goodness I kept them as fantasy investments. His value, in options and other stock related pay has taken a hit but it is still more than he could spend.

A couple of lines for the part I have in “It’s a Wonderful Life” as Pop Bailey brought the thing home to me. “What makes you such a hard skulled character Mr. Potter? You have no children, no family; you can’t begin to spend all the money you’ve got.” And, “Potter’s a sick man George, sick in his heart, sick in his soul, if he has one. Hates everybody that has anything that he can’t have, hates us mostly I guess.” These two lines define a character who has allowed money to become the end instead of the means. It becomes a warning to us all; not only money but things. I already have more clothes than I could ever wear, more golf balls than I could ever lose, more books that I won’t read again, and on and on and on. We are all a little bit like Mr. Potter and that’s ok, it’s when it becomes an obsession that it is harmful, as in my story The Ball Hawk. (see the By John Lina Blog or buy a copy of Open Floodgate by John Lina for only $19.95 plus mailing. Drop me an Email and I’ll take your order.)

As for the huge compensation figures, I think we are stuck with them unless there is a disastrous overturning of the hierarchies, one to rival the French and Bolshevik Revolutions. I’ve complained about hierarchies before but we’re stuck with them unless…

This is the role of anarchy, the dismantling of hierarchies and replacement by others, less offensive. There is a crescendo of greed, a revolution of the oppressed, anarchy in the meantime until a structure is put in place to replace the anarchy and one that is agreeable to enough of the masses. We had a mini- revolution in 1994 and we may have another this year. It happened several other times during US history that the electorate was fed up with enough of what was going on in the Federal Government that they replaced incumbents wholesale.

The ballot box is a relief valve but there is none for corporate greed. One may not be necessary for relief from corporate greed but we see the downside affect of it in salaries paid to hierarchies in government, medicine, and legal organizations and these affect all who are paying for these services. The “what about me?” attitude of civil servants, surgeons and lawyers is going to lead to a revolution of some kind; I don’t know how or when but people are beginning to see it for what it is, greed at the expense of their fellows. Heck if I can see it, there are millions of others who do as well. According to Bert it was a factor for anti-Semitism in Europe and look to what that led. The straw is piling up on the camel’s back

These types of feelings, undefined emotional reactions against the “Medical Profession,” may be a big part of what led to Medicare and now Obamacare. Doctors are not the problem, the problem is administrators of practices and hospitals that wring every penny they can out of a patient or his insurance company and dictate to the providers, doctors and nurses, how much time and effort they can spend with a patient. So-called not for profit hospitals can’t spend all the money they make without going to excess for admin salaries, perks, facilities and equipment. Then the reaction of the insurance company is to do the same to the policy holders and even deprive people of inclusion, in effect cut them off from treatment because of the profit and loss implications.

You want the truth? You can’t handle the truth. We don’t know how to do it; we can’t separate ourselves from the greed and trying to have all the money there is. So we are doomed to continue funneling money into the pockets of the MBA’s who have become quite adept raising the compensation levels of just about everybody in an organization who is not directly involved in providing the sold product or service. Bring out the guillotine, pass me my knitting needles.

Hierarchies

No matter where you are going, you must start from here. This is s.t. with which everyone will agree in theory and even principle but violate without thinking when they begin talking. Everything we say and do is couched in how we process and store life experiences. The corollary to this, when you’ve been everywhere on Earth you will be right back where you started; while this is true, we don’t have to go full sphere in our travels; IOW we can stop and stay at any place along the way.

One of the beautiful things about our mind is that it isn’t spherical but universal, i.e. it is boundless like the universe. The farther we go the more there is to discover out to infinity. The evolution of our thinking in terms of physics, for example, continues to go through advancing theories; each supplanting the last and we still haven’t arrived at the truth.

Richard P. Feynman, a winner of the Nobel prize in physics, adhered to the belief in science that in order for s.t. to be true, it has to be observed and proven through repeatable experiments. While this is a noble statement it doesn’t address what I am sure he realized, that imagination is the starting point and everything else is a by-product of it.

It is also not as much fun as believing in ghosts; saints, re- incarnation, ascension, assumption, heaven and hell. There aren’t many things, if any, in religion that will stand the test of the scientific method. Priests and others who rely on the donations of the faithful for their daily bread will tell you that it requires faith; that certain beliefs are from inspired sources; that at least one man is infallible. When one looks at it through the cold eyes of everyday experiences, it goes quickly into the pigeon hole labeled preposterous.

Religions, and here I am being all inclusive, give people a roadmap for making behavioral decisions. It became clear to me, upon doing my own research, that one can reach conclusions that support legal, ethical, and moral behavior without the benefit of a Bible, Koran, or other “inspired” text. Yet religion gives those who are mentally lazy, careless, or otherwise occupied, a convenient source of “good” behavior and doesn’t require much personal involvement. And to this extent religions are important because many/most people have more to do than concern themselves with learning the what’s and whys of these areas of their life; sort of like using a calculator instead of learning to take a square root. You get the right answer either way, as long as your calculator is functioning properly. One could retort that a person can make a mistake doing a square root calculation as well but this is the learning experience, not abdication.

The problem is when religion (the calculator) takes over and starts telling you what to think and do. The priests, et al, often go out of bounds in their preaching and interpretations and we get ridiculous dogmas, or an inappropriate jihad mentality. This is not a unique or uncommon phenomenon; it has been happening since we gathered together in groups larger than family. A self-perpetuating autocratic hierarchy develops and it has to be supported by the rank and file, sort of like governemnt and taxes, only the constitution that governs this hierarchy is not subject to question, amendment, or interpretation without it being that of the hierarchy; and woe to him/her that may disagree, to wit Galileo or the victims of the Inquisition. There are plenty of examples in Islam and other religions who have a governing hierarchy.

This autocratic hierarchy phenomenon is strictly a human, i.e. not inspired by spiritual forces, and can be seen in any large organization. Companies, churches, service clubs, brotherhoods, sororities, and philanthropic organizations, all have hierarchies. Those who aspire to leadership in these hierarchies are those who satisfying their vanity as job one. These govern by fiat and pronounce what’s good and not so for the membership. Members OTOH are following some set basic principles and meeting their need to belong to social groups and couldn’t care less about the pronouncements of the hierarchy. They are only affected when the collection basket comes around.

The hierarchy invent all sorts of important sounding issues to keep their jobs; to keep the donations flowing so they can feed their egos while the basic tenets upon which the organization is founded are rendered unimportant because they are easily understood and there is, in fact, no need for the hierarchy. Witness the end of the aristrocratic hierachy with the French Revolution. This bloody purge occurred when it became the pre-eminent reason for its own existence instead of remembering that it was secondary to the subjects of the king.

The existence of hierarchically organized religion can be tolerated when it doesn’t affect the affairs of those who don’t subscribe. The French realized this in 1905 and completely severed any religious references in government affairs. They recognized that the influence of religion on the regulation of the population in general is something inherently bad.

Hierarchies do some good; they allow the small contributions of many to aggregate into amounts of money that have critical mass for accomplishing goals. This is good where the leaders are volunteers, i.e. don’t get any of the donated money. They should be allowed to exist only when (1) the organization is audited annually by independent third parties and the results of same are public record, and (2) that they recognize and fully obey the letter and spirit of the laws of the jurisdiction and country wherein they are.

These two things alone would end much of the abuse. It has worked well for publicly held businesses; it wasn’t practiced when the bishops of the Roman Catholic Church protected sexual predators. As it is now, show me a hierarchical organization without these controls built into its operation and I’ll show you a scandal about to happen.

So, I’ve gone high and wide of my opening but this self-perpetuating, autocratic, hierarchical phenomenon is on my mind. It is vanity gone wild; a distraction of the imagination. Go back to square one, recommence; learn from this lifetime to develop farther in the next.