One of my doctoral committee members, Alex Pattakos, blogs for HuffingtonPost and wrote Meaningful Capitalism: Change We Can Believe In. In response to the article and some of the comments, I said:
Organizations pursuing meaningful entrepreneurship are not in strong evidence by the media. We ourselves should become the new news media that changes the emphasis on what gets reported. People learn from success stories, and the meaning of success itself is and will be changing. People’s values will slowly change as their society shows these shifts in many tangible and subtle ways.
We knew this collapse was coming at some point. Capitalism was already being referred to as “late” by many writers and thinkers, over the last decade or so. But one never knows “how late.” Most of us just did not know what to expect, or how the effects would appear on our national and global scene. The Crisis time we’re in now nearly exactly matches the historical theory of Strauss and Howe’s 1996 book The Fourth Turning. And because we are now in a Fourth Turning, a Crisis era, the times are compatible with Alex’s recommendation.
The crisis of capitalism is framed by many as a crisis brought on by human greed. We hear this individual blame expressed by pundits on the right and some otherwise thoughtful people on the left. The notion that extreme greed brought this on is a way to absolve the “system.” But there have been greedy exploiters since before the time of Draco. Certainly Kim Jong-Il can be seen as greedy, it is not reserved for capitalism. And the corporate form is merely a modern organizational framework, and is a structure developed in response to laws and conventions. It can be changed. People bring their values to work and their organizations, and as Americans facing a new crisis and a new era, we need to take responsibility for the redesign of these institutions.
