We have just passed a major milestone in human history.
Humans, as a social animal, have a mechanism for societal learning that we know little about. Humans do learn. We learned to plant seeds and organize ourselves to create and maintain irrigation systems. Those of us who learned this have overwhelmed those who didn’t by shear increase in our numbers.
We learned to build societies that could create and use technology and we have left those humans who didn’t learn it to live in remote and difficult environments. Creating technology requires a belief in “improvement, continual improvement.”
The most significant societal lessons we have learned have been in the past five hundred years in coping with commerce. We first learned that societies following mercantilist economic policies (think of Spain seeking and hording gold), could not keep up with societies that favored trade.
We finally learned in the 1930s that using gold as the
standard for currency, which had been done for a millennium, was a bad
policy.
We learned in the 1990’s, after a century of geometric
population growth, that Thomas Malthus was wrong. Humans will not always consume more natural resources than we can discover and create.
Most recently, with the failure of the Soviet Union and the
conversion of China to market policies, we learned the lesson of the whole 20th
Century: that businesses thrive when run by businesspeople and stagnate when
run by bureaucrats. Societies that gave
responsibility for creating and running businesses to business people have
become physically healthier, militarily stronger and the envy of other
societies.
This 20th Century lesson is what I refer to in
the first sentence as: “a major milestone in human history.” Think of business as an element in the way a
society is organized. What we have
learned, with an eighty-year battle that began in Russia in 1917 to create
Communism and in 1933 to create Fascism, is that bureaucrats cannot
successfully run businesses for long.
I use the metaphor of Superman and Clark Kent. Commerce is Superman, nearly indestructible and able to accomplish super human feats such as creating a middle class and economic abundance. Clark Kent is the bureaucrat who can do little or nothing in his gray suit. The lesson of the 20th Century was to let Superman take off his Clark Kent identity and be proud of who he is.