Pro Commerce

Glide Memorial United Methodist Church

I was the treasurer and business manager of Glide from 1970 to 1981.  The Internet records about Glide are total nonsense. They are based solely on the self-serving history as told by Cecil Williams. Here are the facts.

This page at Stanford is accurate: “By the early 1960s, …. Glide Memorial, a small congregation with a large endowment in the form of the Glide Foundation, was ready for change. In 1962 Bishop Tippett appointed the community organizer Lew Durham as director of the Foundation. Durham and pastor John V. Moore ('41) began to initiate a more progressive social agenda. The following year, the board established the Glide Urban Center, a new urban ministry that developed programs to counter the Tenderloin's worsening delinquency, prostitution, and drug problems. Rev. Ted McIlvenna was brought on to run the Glide Young Adult Ministry, Rev. Don Kuhn became Glide's publisher and PR specialist, and the charismatic Rev. Cecil Williams was hired as Minister of Outreach. Williams was named Glide's next pastor following Moore's departure in 1966.”

The first organizer to arrive at Glide in 1962 was Lew Durham. (Photo on the right) I wrote a blog post about Lew but it doesn’t do him justice.  He was the manager of Glide from 1962 until he went to live in a commune he started. He left in about 1978.  Lew brought in the three other significant ministers. He himself was a powerful force and supported the other ministers in their work.  He also maintained the needed cohesion and civility.

One was Ted McIlvenna. (Photo on the left)  The blog post I wrote about him covers much of the relevant material. Ted changed the world more than nearly any other person I’ve ever known. He revolutionized the global knowledge and lives of everyone in the field of human sexuality.

Another was Don Kuhn. (Photo lower right)  Don shaped the political future of San Francisco, for better or worse. In the current era of ‘wokism’ San Francisco is a leading source and bad example.  Don, with good intent, was a highly relevant player in that transition.  Don left Glide in about 1975 to be a minister at two churches; one in Oakland and one in the San Francisco Sunset District. The blog post on Don is here.

These three men brought in Cecil Williams to be minister to the congregation in 1964.  The other three went about their work while Cecil took all the glory and after I left, he took over the church, entirely. My blog post on Cecil, which is laudatory, is here.

One of the early blogs I wrote about Glide is here.  It has a few more details.  

I owe a great deal to my time at Glide. The knowledge I gained, the platform to work from and the help of Don, Ted and Lew were immense. The time and freedom to do my own work was of incalculable value. The actual work in my office was very minor; it only required a few hours of work a week. I had a great staff.  Among my major accomplishments at Glide were

• the creation of the Third World Tours, which led directly to the vast modern tour business in San Francisco and the hundreds of walking tours.  
• I forced the New York investment banks and firms to follow my investment practices which gave the freedom and technology for non-profit foundations to invest overseas.
• The creation of Wino Park at 6th and Minna, the first and to-date, only park for people later called the ‘homeless.’

By the time I left Glide I was no longer on good terms with Cecil Williams because I refused to give him and his family the unreasonable salaries he wanted.  I organized my own farewell dinner which was filled with my close friends and dignitaries of San Francisco to make sure my reputation was never sullied after I was gone. I had Cecil say some kind words about me.

Multi-human dynamics

I’m taking a crack at this subject.  No one, to my knowledge, has done a good job.  The subject matter has many names which is evidence that it isn’t understood.  Mass hysteria, Collective action, Mass psychology, Crowd psychology and many other terms.  The best summary, I’ve found, of descriptions and theories is here.

I have personally been in the Dan White riot, many sit-ins, the Diablo Canyon protest and half a dozen protest parades. The most impressive was a protest near the Concord Naval Base where about 40 people, in a crowd of hundreds, tore up 100 feet of railroad tracks, by hand, and piled the tracks and ties in neat stacks with no supervision or tools.

I have also been on the outside of several hysterias where vast numbers of people held contra-factual opinions: 1980’s child abduction view that hundreds of thousands of child abductions were underway, the satanic rituals carried out in nursery schools, the recovered memory hysteria of the early 1990s and the most recent pervasive, long lasting human caused global warming and apocalypse religious movement.

There must be some human form of interaction that relates to these phenomena that needs explanation. It may be one or many processes.

• The first observation in my experience is the 80% rule.  People can not live in an environment where 80% of their own views are inconsistent with the group they associate with.  A Democrat living in a Republican neighborhood will become a Democrat, over time, unless he surrounds himself with many friends who agree with him on most issues. Which confirms the model.

This is a description not an explanation.  The explanation is tribalism. Humans are tribal animals like other animals and need the tribe for survival. It may be a learned function or a genetic function. From observing animals, including domesticated animals that become feral I lean towards a genetic explanation

• From my social thought work I have found that all institutions are built on over-riding metaphors.  The most famous metaphor is that markets are guided by an ‘invisible hand.’ Thus when free markets are observed there is an automatic human assumption of an active principle at work.  Many institutional metaphors are based on ‘the family’ with a parent as the top leader and protector.

This again is a description not an explanation.  The explanation is that the human mind has many worldviews that are largely cultural and these worldviews have a hierarchy of sub-views.  When a group accepts the overarching worldview then the members subscribe to the inherent sub-structures.  Thus, the global warming religious worldview has sub-views that lead to recycling and bicycle riding as moral imperatives.

Social thought is a structure of our mind, part of the way we are trained to think.  Much as language has a part of our brain (Broca’s cluster) so the brain has similar parts that organize worldviews into structures with defined sub-structures.  Our culture provides these worldviews and structures.

• Our vocabulary has a structure as well.  George Lakoff explains this in his book Women, Fire and Dangerous Things.  The word ‘over’ contains the concepts of ‘up,’ ‘across,’ ‘on top of’ and ‘finished.’  The word ‘above’ is a cone such that a satellite can be ‘above’ the Golden Gate Bridge as it moves through the cone at 200 miles in space.  

Thus our language gives us structures that we use in constructing our worldviews.  Words give us directions and metaphors including the words ‘seize,’ ‘burn,’’loot’ and ‘riot.’

• Our reptilian brain gives us directions in the simple form of ‘fight or flee.’ Which can combine in dangerous behavior in a crowd during a fire in an enclosed space. Fellow humans can be trampled.

The reptilian brain, the basal ganglia, is directly in control of bodily movements. 

The amygdala is another part of the brain that contributes directly to behavior, paranoid behavior according to Dr. Ronald K Siegel. Paranoia is often part of human collective behavior.  

All these parts of the brain, (basal ganglia and amygdala) seem to play a direct role in collective behavior and probably play a role in communicating with other people nearby.  As in a crowd.  The brain is shaped to a large degree by genes. There is also an overlay of restraint that comes from our culture.

When we look at a crowd we can see the people as individuals but the reality is that there is a collective culture in which these people are embedded. That culture provides hierarchical worldviews with associated metaphors, language with an implicit conceptual structure and biological imperatives that are built into our brains and genes.

Multi-human behaviors should not be surprising or hard to explain. We are very much alike and we have myriad conscious and unconscious ways of communicating with each other.

We don’t really know much about our unconscious forms of communicating that allow crowds to function collectively.  

The only confirmed form of unconscious communication that I know is eye-blinking.  Higher status people blink much less than lower status people.  Higher status people can see this but lower status people can’t. Higher status people can recognize each other as a consequence.

Horses, dogs and other domesticated animals can put humans in the role of their alpha leader. There are signals that make this possible, animals respond to these signals but we don’t know the signals.

There must be many similar human forms of interpersonal communication that make collective behavior function.  We don’t know much about them at present.

Summary: Unsurprisingly humans in a multi-human situation have a vast common identity to direct their behavior as evidenced by our knowledge of social thought and language. How that communication occurs remains unknown.  When it is known we shall find collective behavior to be readily understandable.

Innovation

I just finished reading Matt Ridley’s book on innovation. An excellent summary of the issue. How innovation occurs and, importantly, how it is continually opposed and stifled.

I’ve spent many decades as a business consultant for a large number of businesses, mostly small.  I have lived in the innovation capital of the world, the San Francisco Bay Area.

I‘ve personally been an innovator in a dozen realms. Best known as the father of MasterCard, the source of the first international money.

There is very little to add to Ridley’s work. But I do have several things to add.

Let’s begin with reality.  Some things are physical impossibilities where popular misconceptions intrude on invention.

The airplane was modeled on the flight of birds, which is the dominant metaphor of flight. But butterflies also fly and can fly many miles just by riding on the small wind shear and turbulence near the surface in the lower atmosphere.  That turbulence is why personal flying devices don’t work, even though they were forecast every year of my life. The turbulence in the atmosphere near the surface keeps turning the man with a jetpack on his back upside down.

Ridley doesn’t see that diversity is an important ingredient in innovation. I don’t mean the stupid diversity of melanin, the real diversity of insight and experience which is what urban areas genuinely contribute to and what is found in abundance in immigrant societies like America and Israel.  

My best example of diversity of experience is Mr. Yuzawa, a middle-aged man who worked as a perfume salesman in Tokyo. He came to me with an observation; one particular scent was not in the Japanese perfume repertoire but was common in American perfumes. Mr. Yuzawa had lived overseas for many years. He personally liked the scent and wanted to know ‘Would the Japanese buy it?’ 

I had him concoct and bottle it and try it out in a high-end Shinjuku department store with a wide selection of perfumes and known for its diverse clientele.  He did and it quickly became a major selling scent copied by all the big Japanese perfume brands.  

Three lessons here.  

• The man knew his domestic products and he knew the international market too. Diversity of experience.
• The new product was introduced at a high-end store. Many products start among high income customers and work their way down the social gradient. 
• Openness to novelty is more likely in a diverse product array than in a brand or chain store model.

In a similar vein; three 1970s San Francisco women opened a shop to market their own distinct body products with their own hippy designs.  Along came a British woman who stole the whole kit-and-kaboodle, names, products and designs, turning it into a successful international network of stores: the Body Shop.  She later bought the rights from the three women.

Ridley does see freedom as an innovation element. But it isn’t freedom, it is the absence of social oppression.  San Francisco and the Bay Area have generated hundreds of major global businesses, not just in the digital world, because San Francisco, in particular, has a very weak government and the social hierarchy has always been feeble, compared to Boston and the East Coast.

Ridley sees openness and cross fertilization as a source of innovation.  I found it to be much more: cooperation is the transcendent value involved.  

When the open, ideologically ‘loving’ hippies came to me for business advice I helped them form a network of similar open businesses, the Briarpatch Network. Ordinary start-ups have a 20% survival rate over three years.  The Briarpatch Network of cooperating, open businesses had an 80% survival rate over five years.  Virtually all the early Briarpatch businesses were innovations.  Some became national and global models, most remained local and their innovations didn’t propagate. That is the nature of innovation.

The most important ingredient in innovation that Ridley senses but doesn’t discuss is the absence of an hereditary elite class. America always had a much weaker class structure than anything in Europe and greatly benefited from the vast opening of the West.  An hereditary elite  has maintained the status quote as a survival necessity.  Europe from the 1600s in Holland to the 1800s in England had a colonial empire where the Dutch and English (and French) innovators could escape to for experimentation and where innovation could thrive.  

My own views on the nature of commerce which emphasizes openness, diversity and cooperation is in a book I dramatically called The Most Important Book in Human History.  I called it this because I see the real elements of innovation and successful commerce in serious jeopardy in the current American political and cultural milieu.  

Summary

My friend and editor, David S., has been sending me libertarian reading material.  And I have read a lot.  A major focus, recently, has been on the way the Global Internet may make libertarianism more salient.  Bitcoin has added to the tumult.  

I disagree.

My adult life has been focused on how social systems work. You can see some of my work on my 300 public radio programs; Social Thought, free.

There are weighty problems with libertarian thought.

First, we are all raised in a culture, usually by parents. We are pretty much formed by early adolescence in a particular culture.  Nearly all of us stop learning by age 23, we have been formed by that time, because we are simians. We can move to a different nation state before adolescence and usually adjust to the new nation state and much of its culture. Child rearing is an institution that is central to our being, our core identity.  The child-rearing institutions can not be discarded or changed by political intent.

Second, the vast institutions that we call ‘America’ are the cumulative development of many refinements and evolutions over many centuries; millennia.  We are not aware of 98% of them. The child-rearing institutions can not be changed and modified by volition.

I have suggested some minor modifications to ‘America’ in the form of a sortition form of political selection. That would change the type of characters who manage our government.  Important but not major.

Third, our current American ruling class disaster, ‘the swamp’ is the by-product of a change that occurred in the period 1955 to 1965. Politics can’t reverse it.

We lost the hereditary elite that moderated our ruling class before that period.  The free form melange that we were left with, after 1965, allowed meritocracy to thrive but simultaneously promoted the second most powerful American organization, unions, that then ascended to power.  The triumphant union values are anti-meritocratic and anti-individual. Anti-American.

Fourth, the brief reign of Donald Trump showed that the most vital missing ingredient in our current society are pro-commerce values.  Trump has shown us that the majority of Americans support a pro-commerce value system.  But our dominant current political system, the ‘swamp’ is antithetical to commerce.

Trumpism is what we need today.  It is not a political ideology.  It is a worldview that is outside the current political spectrum.

Summarizing, we have in America a finely evolved social system; equitable, innovative, vigorous and vital for human well-being.  What we need today is not political change or new politics. We need a pro-commerce world view.