Organizing Principles

In his article “The Down to Earth Economy” in the Winter issue of yes! magazine, David Korten maintains that, “extreme individualism, greed and violence are pathological and a sign of physical, developmental, cultural and/or institutional system failure.”  He contrasts the organizing principles of Wall Street with those of nature and concludes that we must “restructure our institutions to conform to life’s favored organizing principle of radically decentralized, localized decision-making and self-organization.”

Different Organizing Principles

Wall Street’s defining value is money.  Its primary dynamic is competition to maximize self-interest.  Power is top-down, centralized and concentrated.  Focus is placed on immediate returns, financial capital as a measure of efficiency, and the notion that infinite growth of money and material consumption is, not only, possible but desirable.

Nature’s organizing principles center on life’s abundance, health, resilience and creative potential.  Cooperation is required to optimize self and community interests. Decision-making power is local, bottom-up and distributed.  Focus is shifted from immediate returns to sustained yield and diversity.  Growth is not a means to an end, but a stage in life’s endless regenerative cycles of birth, growth, death and rebirth.

Increasingly, we are beginning to understand that, as part of Earth’s ecosystem, our survival is based upon the prudent stewardship of our natural resources.  By organizing our societies on the “quick profit” principles of Wall Street instead of  the “sustained yield” principles of Nature, we are devastating productive lands and water and putting ourselves and future generations at risk.

David Korten points us to a piece titled “Listening to Natural Law” in the anthology Original Instructions:

Our instructions, and I’m talking about for all human beings, are to get along…with [nature’s] laws, and support them and work with them.  We were told long ago that if you do that, life is endless.  It just continues on and on in great cycles of regeneration.

He summarizes:

We are living out the consequences of our collective human failure to adhere to the original instructions — the organizing principles of healthy living systems readily discernible through observation of nature at work.  These are the principles by which we must rethink and reorganize human economies.

Related articles

• Ecological Governance: Organizing Principles for an Emerging Era (taehyonchoi.wordpress.com)