A World That Explores Our Resourcefulness

Have we not had enough of the “isms” that have empowered the few while marginalizing so many others? After royalism and feudalism came capitalism and communism, and later fascism. Now capitalism has become the end of history. Under Russian communism, the apparatchiks hijacked the country’s “dictatorship of the proletariat”; now, under the current version of capitalism, the free enterprises are hijacking the democracy of free people. Both communism and capitalism are labels for systems that promote undeserved privilege. To reverse a pre-1989 Russian expression, “Communism is the exploitation of man by man. Capitalism is the opposite.”

To paraphrase T. S. Eliot, we need to cease from exploitation so that we can arrive where we started and know our place for the first time. That will entail exploring our resourcefulness, individually and collectively. We human beings are in no small measure explorers—for creative ideas, not just crude oil. In fact, we are quite resourceful ones—to benefit ourselves, to be sure, but also for the greater good. Exploring can also render us more productive because, whereas exploitation exhausts our resources, exploration energizes our resourcefulness. (See the accompanying box.)

The Fresh Air of Resourcefulness

Mary Parker Follett presented a paper in 1925 about three ways to deal with conflict, only one of which she favored.

The first she called domination: the victory of one side over the other. The problem is that the other side “will simply wait for its chance to dominate.” We have seen this way in various revolutions and see too much of it in our current imbalance. A second way she called compromise: “each side gives up a little in order to have peace.” But with neither side satisfied, Follett concluded that the conflict will keep coming back. We have been seeing too much of this way, too.

Follett favored a third way, which she called integration: moving the debate to another place, getting back to basics to find common ground:

Integration involves invention … and the clever thing is to recognize this and not to let one’s thinking stay within the boundaries of two alternatives which are mutually exclusive. In other words, never let yourself be bullied by an either-or situation…. Find a third way.

Follett used a simple example. She was in a small room in a library where someone wanted the window open, to get fresh air. But she wanted it closed, to avoid the draft. So they opened a window in the next room. This solution was hardly brilliant or creative, just resourceful. All it took were two open minds and some goodwill. We desperately need more such fresh air today.

In a robust economy, growth is judged by the qualities enhanced, not just measured by the quantities produced. Such an economy does not merely expand; it develops, qualitatively and socially. So—how to get to that?

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