Pro Commerce

Me Alone. Why? Part 2

The question is why I have been able to see the sources of the modern world and why I find no one else has.  It is definitely not my IQ. 

I knew I was a Jew 

When I was 8 years old in El Paso, Texas, where my father was a prominent Liberal rabbi, several (3 or 4) Mexican boys chased me home from school throwing rocks because “the Jews killed Christ.”  They heard this from a ‘Hell-fire and Brimstone’ traveling Franciscan priest.  As a Jew, with a 3,000 year family history, I knew I was not run-of-the-mill.

I had been a Marxist 

I knew since age 11, when I got my Boy Scout troop to read Marx’s Communist Manifesto, that  I was very conscious of the ‘ruling class’ and paid attention to that idea.  

I saw the American hereditary elite fall apart in the early 1960’s, first hand, and was very aware of it.

Raw Data

The Hutchins-Adler Great Books program at the U. of Chicago taught me to always use original documents and data.

My experience on a Kibbutz

At age 19, I spent 3 months learning Hebrew in Israel on a Kibbutz in the Galilee.  Because I had previously read George Orwell’s Animal Farm I was able to see that in reality Marxism was mostly nonsense and that hierarchy was a human norm.

Self directed

For the rest of my life I never had a real boss, except for the few sergeants in my Army service. 

My first traditional job was starting the marketing research department at the Bank of America. I set my own agenda because nobody knew what marketing research was. The same was true at my next job at the Bank of California where I created MasterCard.

My third and last semi-job was as Treasurer and Business Manager for Glide Memorial Methodist Church where I set my own agenda and reported quarterly to a Board of changing members. 

Insatiable curiosity

From the first time I used a computer service in 1962 with punch cards for input and tiny hole-punched printouts, I have used the latest computer tech constantly for the rest of my life. I was always tech-savvy and even published my first book in 1974 on the ARPAnet at the Stanford SPIRES computer.

Saw the inside workings of 2,000 businesses

In 1974, after the publication of The Seven Laws of Money  I became the ‘Finance Guy’ to the Global hippy community.  I started the Briapatch small business community and subsequently consulted with over 2,000 businesses large (including Itochu, the largest business in the world at that time) and small.  I have probably consulted more businesses directly than any other human.

I also founded a business school in San Francisco,  called Noren that lasted 9 years. The Noren classes that I taught resulted in three business books including Marketing Without Advertising, the third most successful marketing book in English (excluding text books.)

San Francisco

Is where I lived continuously from age 21. I had lived there intermittently at earlier ages. Most people have no idea that San Francisco and environs are the source of a great deal (much) of the innovation in America in the arts, ideas and commerce. Ranging from major fashions and music over 150 years to the invention of television. Compiling such an history  would be an encyclopedic effort drawing from a vast body of literature. Someone someday will do it.

San Francisco is overflowing with talented and creative people.  The hippies were not exceptions in creating the greatest wave of innovation as the Baby Boomers from the 20th Century.  I did my part and wrote about the early wave of Baby Boomers from the Civil War who created the ‘Progressive Movement’  (Baby Boom 2) based in San Francisco.  The abundance of art at Burning Man is a testament to artistic richness that is overflowing.

Which gets to the next and last important point. 

Not New York

Many people believe that everything new and important ostensibly originates on the East Coast. Usually New York or Boston. However,  knowledgeable people recognize that this statement is false.  

A 1 ton gold meteorite could crash in downtown San Francisco and not make news.  The next day a 100-pound iron meteorite could land in Times Square and it would be headline news around the world.  News is always about New York, seldom about San Francisco.

I have actually seen this East Coast bias many times with my own eyes.  In 1991 a Korean bartender in a restaurant at 2nd and Geary in San Francisco figured that he could use a Japanese drink called shochu to make strong alcoholic drinks on his beer and wine license. Shochu is 2 to 4 times more alcoholic than beer or wine but is covered under the same license.  The Korean bartender started making shochu cocktails and the lines quickly wound out the door and up the block for his invention.  This invention, shochu cocktails on a beer and wine license, spread rapidly everywhere around the City.

By 1997 I saw the first article about the brilliant new invention of exciting cocktails invented in New York and rapidly proliferating with a shochu base.

Unless my ashes are scattered in New York, my work may never be discovered.

Me Alone, Why? Part 1

I think I am alone in understanding the creation of the modern world. 

Many people have done a good job in looking at the elements and the significance of separate historic developments. I include Niall Ferguson, Jonathan Israel and Matt Ridley among those who have done the best job.  There are many others who have contributed to our understanding.   Many have seen the central importance of empirical thinking, reading, writing and the legal underlay; and many have seen the significance of the sequence of innovation from wind power, water power, steam power to oil power.

But I seem to be unique in seeing the stifling impact of hereditary elites.  Only in the right circumstances of a diverse urban population with strong social networks, laws and a culture of tolerating innovation can the absence of an hereditary elite allow modern commerce to thrive.  

We didn’t get modern commerce in China which had all the other scientific, intellectual, urban, and diversity ingredients but also had the stifling hereditary ruling elite.  Nor did we get it in the culturally homogeneous Arab, Indian or Latin societies with weak elites.  Tribes had to be largely dissolved, as well, as in Britain, France and Northern Europe.

Modern commerce grew first in the British Empire where the hereditary elite and primogenitor were disrupted in overseas dominions and most importantly in the United States of America where diverse immigration was extensive, and the wide open ‘West’ made it possible for the younger sons to escape the thwarting influence of the elite East coast families. 

Hereditary elites stifle all innovation to preserve their power.  Only in Japan was the hereditary elite able to absorb innovative individuals without totally stifling it; but there was a lack of cultural diversity needed to create modern commerce.

Why am I unique in seeing the whole picture? There are definitely many people smarter than I.

For me to understand my own functions I have had to discover several general human attributes.

The three most important attributes we homos have are (1) adulthood, (2) culture and (3) brain limitations.

I stumbled on the first, ‘adulthood’ entirely by accident.  My girlfriend had an affair with Lyall Watson a few years after we broke up. She introduced him to me. He told me about the 100th monkey story and I interpreted it to mean that only in the juvenile stage of animal development is learning possible. For humans, I calculated that the juvenile stage ends before age 23. New original learning and genuinely new thinking does not occur in most humans after age 23.  From a cursory survey of my friends, I guess that exceptions occur in about 1 out of 300 cases.  

In my case I became part of the 1 in 300 because I went to Israel at age 19, lived on a kibbutz and had my entire worldview totally overthrown by that experience.  The juvenile door for learning remained open.

(2) Culture is another fortuitous experience.  At age 32, I took a trip around the world as my own prerequisite to joining the board of Point Foundation. Dick Baker Roshi, who had spent 3 years living in Japan, did a little to prepare me.  When I got there I only saw the Japanese as small Americans who worked harder than Americans and did many things a little differently.  But it was different enough for me to begin to see what culture was. (‘Culture’ as anthropologists see it.) I resolved to pick a culture and study it.  I picked Japan as a comfortable place to study; I liked Japanese food, cleanliness and its long isolated history. I visited Japan every year for the next 50 years, staying from one month to  three months.  I traveled the country and became involved in business, politics and the arts.

Lastly, (3) brain limitations.  I have long thought about the human brain capacity.  Kinsey said that he started teaching knowing the names of 30,000 moth species.  Each time he learned a new student's name he forgot one moth species.  That started me thinking about the brain.  The largest functioning word memory is about 100,000 words.  I concluded that the human brain, in computer terms, can only contain a few million bytes of information, much of it compressed for fairly fast retrieval. 

I concluded that most of our intelligence resides in the many knowledgeable friends we have. We store knowledge and information with each other.   I have had many brilliant and diverse friends which has been my source for a broad worldview. 

Grandfather of Burning Man

In January of 1978 Carole Rae and I were driving in San Francisco.  Carole wondered why something wasn’t being done about all the dead Christmas trees on the street corners.

I suggested we rent a large moving van, fill it with dead trees and burn them at Ocean Beach.

The next Saturday,  Carole phoned our friends and invited them to the beach burn. My mother and one of my children filled up the rented truck with over 40 dead Christmas trees.

At the beach that night, there were 200 people, who unloaded the truck and built a pile of trees about 15 feet high.  Somebody lit it and the flames were over 40 feet high. The crowd went wild, dancing around the fire and running into the ocean.

We did it for a second and third year.  The second year the Park Service Police were standing next to the truck and gave me a $15 ticket for an unpermitted beach fire.

One of the attendees, a lawyer, Gary Near, demanded that I protest the ticket with his help.  We did and the judge waived the fine but demanded that I not do it again.

I did it one more year but hid the truck immediately after unloading it.  From that date on, San Franciscans have been burning their own family trees at the beach in January.

I may have gotten the idea for the tree burning from seeing a 30 foot high pole in a clearing in the forest near Kyoto during the Summer Obon Festival. The event had pine shavings on top of the pole which were lit by an arrow.  The shavings fell off the platform like a burning waterfall.

One of my close friends, John Law, created his own version of my burn at the nearby China Beach. The overlap in people was largely the Cacaphony Society (Suicide Club at the time).  John built The Man at the top out of neon; John’s profession is neon signs. Years later after again being banned, the fire was moved by John and Larry Harvey to the Nevada Desert for an August event known as Burning Man.  

John has always given me credit for the event, as its grandfather. In many ways I am the grandfather to countless events in the San Francisco Bay area because the area is so fecund with artists, crazies and original people who only need a suggestion to do something original.

I Understand the Rejection of the Modern World

I was sitting with my first cousin and her Arab husband, smoking his hand rolled cigarettes and drinking his Turkish coffee while watching two of his grandchildren running around having raucous fun.

He lamented life in the US. without a big family and the wonderful feeling of being surrounded by family members all the time. When he visits his Arab family back home he always stays for a month and enjoys giant family meals with dozens of cousins and dancing and singing nearly every night.

Family life and tribal membership is something that we Westerners don’t understand.

I’ve traveled the world and found that a big family and being part of a tribe is the greatest feeling of comfort that can be found among several billions of people.  I’ve heard this from an Oxford educated Indian in New Delhi, from a Harvard educated woman in Mali, in Guatemala and dozens of other times.

I tried to start a global organization in 1992 to help Western people understand that our efforts to modernize most of the world is not appreciated or welcomed.  I failed miserably. Couldn’t find even a few Western people who agreed with me.

I had an Egyptian immigrant explain to me the day after the 9/11 twin towers slaughter that it was done to tell Americans to stop destroying traditional societies.

Almost no one understands the following fortuitous sources of the Modern World that non-moderns find so distressing.  

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Humans are not as smart as many animals. But humans can communicate by voice over a large range of subjects.  This facility may only have existed for a few tens of thousands of years but it allowed for extensive social organizing.  Humans learned to write and read only a few millennia ago and only in places like China, Babylon, Greece, Japan, Egypt, Persia, India, Israel and a few other places. Many of these places developed schools to transmit the written material.

All the societies that had writing and reading also had hereditary elites that suppressed innovation.  The exception was the Jews.

In 100 BCE the Roman Army attacked and dispersed the Jews, who had writing and reading. The dispersed Jews then developed small surviving clusters of Jews centered around a rabbi who created schools to debate their inherited writing. The debate focused on the writing in order for it to conform to reality. (The records of the debates are called Talmud.) These hundreds of clusters of Jews had teachers as leaders not an hereditary elite.

This dispersed but connected society was the first worldwide network of readers and debaters. They stayed in touch with each other.

By 1500 the Spanish and Portuguese dispersed the Jews again. Many went to Holland, the first neo-democracy in the modern world with a very egalitarian population; at the same time that book printing expanded in Europe and the Catholic Church order of Jesuits started studying Hebrew and the Talmud.

This European locale was the source of science and empirical study. It was the core of modernity.  It challenged mysticism, tribalism, miracles and alchemy.

The final touchstone of the Modern World was the creation of the United States of America, with its vast open West, diverse immigrant population and a weak hereditary elite.  All the ingredients that created the modern world after the Civil War.

People who hate their lives and the modern world, often blame the Jews.  Which is historically accurate. The Roman Army and the Spanish Inquisition deserve some credit too.