Given that we have two moral syndromes to take and trade sustainably over thousands of years sometimes there arise monstrous hybrids: entities that try to mix or pick and choose between the two syndromes. These are usually short lived because the two moral syndromes are opposites and the advantages that come from mixing them damage their foundations and longevity making them unsustainable. Two monstrous hybrids the author brings up are The Mafia or any organized crime syndicate and Marxism. Both are primarily guardian entities that pick and choose from the commercial syndrome. As an example of how they undermine themselves consider that both are willing to force trade which undermines the traders desire to trade freely. Eventually there is insufficient productive free trade in the territory to support the monstrous guardian (communist government or Mafia). The same thing happens when commercial minded people get control and exercise the power of guardian government: free trade (at all levels) becomes forced trade which undermines the sustainability of both systems of survival. A monstrous hybrid may last hundreds of years but cannot ever be permanent. The Catholic Church and organized government are good long term guardians. Markets that have existed for thousands of years are good commercial enterprises. Communism has effectively died out. The Mafia is less than a hundred years old and likely on its last legs; most organized crime networks can be wiped out and prevented from being reestablished.
Although there are unsustainable monstrous hybrids there are also sustainable anomalies of professions that can exist in both without mixing the moral syndromes. The author gives three examples: law, medicine, and agriculture. In these cases it is critically important that syndromes not be mixed in individuals or companies and so in law we distinguish between guardian barrister, D.A. and Crown/Public prosecutors and commercial lawyers and solicitors. In medicine a public doctor has a different boss, so to speak, than a private doctor. The public doctor follows the direction of the guardians. If they are corrupt you get a corrupt doctor with the resources and protection of the state. A corrupt private doctor (one whose interests are not the wellbeing of the patient) is easy to remove or discipline. Farming and agriculture have traditionally been guardian activities but seem better suited to commercial enterprise.
The author makes a comment that activities motivated by love or art, “Like sports, games, music, dance, story-telling, painting, costumes, and other decorations didn’t come into human life and activity as a way of making a living at all.” So these are outside the “making a living” moral syndromes in her book.
The author then introduces the notion of casts of mind which are the basic prejudices that reveal our current moral bias. The following common expressions or attitudes as examples of the two casts:
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Love of money is the root of all evil |
Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely |
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History is about war and conquest |
History explains how material & social condition have changed |
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War and conflict is the natural human state |
Peace and cooperation is the natural human state |
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Humans are the weapon using animal |
Humans are the tool using animal |
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Knowledge is power |
Knowledge is a tool |
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Intelligence signifies knowledge of the enemy |
Intelligence means learning and reasoning well |
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Natural resources are fundamental wealth |
Knowledge and skill of a population is fundamental wealth |
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Taxes and borrowing should depend on public need |
Taxes and borrowing should depend on what businesses can bear |
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The economy must be brought under control |
The economy must be de-regulated |
And so on…
The author defines systemic moral corruption as: “Any significant reach of a syndrome’s integrity – usually by adopting an inappropriate function – causes some normal virtues to convert automatically to vices, and still others to bend and break for necessary expedience….these syndromes fall into the great category of self-organizing systems. They arose existentially as events and activities required them and tested them. I’m now arguing that when integrity is significantly breached, these self-organizing systems become self-disorganizing.” She gives the example of the Ik a people who were excellent hunters, renowned for their traps, cunning, and elaborate deceptions in hunting. These people were rounded up and forced to settle down as farmers – although they were given the knowledge, the tools, and the support they could not adapt. Their former virtues were vices that corrupted their entire culture and now corrupted the adjacent cultures. For example hunters hunt only for what they need at that time but farming requires foresight of a year or more. So when they didn’t farm enough they raided their next door neighbours and then the adjacent tribes – who now had to respond in kind. Further to the story, an anthropologist who studied the Ik and who was permitted to live with them on condition that nothing bad would happen to them if he did came to the conclusion that their culture created their miserable state. He agonized when he realized that the only way he could see to save the Ik was to take their children away to destroy their culture.
The author tells several other similar stories about significant breaches of syndrome integrity including: military cost plus contracts, the buy in contract, the military industrial complex, the leveraged buy-out, price fixing and insurance in the hands of guardians. Then she makes two points: “First, in every case the integrity of the appropriate syndrome was lost….Second point…there is no decent way out of these intractable messes. No just solutions exist for setting them right.”
All of these bad and sad cases do not mean that there is not any new good syndrome friendly inventions. The author sees the micro-loan industry as a great recent innovation in commercial moral syndrome because it argues for and makes practical the notion that access to business credit is a basic human right – the next evolution of the commercial law that created human rights. On the side of the guardians she notes with delight the way that Taiwan got rich: guardians tried to control the economy in a new innovative way. They set goals for the economy and gave the market the freedom to achieve it anyway they wanted. Guardians setting ends but not means is a new way for guardians to run an economy.
“Experience offers two methods for protecting integrity of the syndromes while at the same time affording symbiosis….Neither method operates well over the long run. But they’re what we have. At one pole is a rigid caste or class framework. At the other pole is what I’ll call knowledgeable flexibility. There are many gradations from the one to the other, but a given society at a given time uses one of the other as its basis, adjusting it pragmatically. Our society bases itself on knowledgeable flexibility.”
The caste system has trouble adapting and fails when the castes or classes are in too much isolation from each other. The knowledgeable flexibility method dies slowly with each minor corruption that becomes the norm in society. It does have the flexibility to adapt in a crisis without breaking the society but there is never a guarantee that it will succeed.