To squabble internally or externally is the question

Correctly describing a problem is well known to be a pre-requisite activity to resolving the problem. This post is an effort to do that.

And since it involves people, there are those who resist correct solutions, and thus strive to obscure the problem. And the need for drama makes the people-stuff not just super-complicated but also can get overly dynamic.

Apparently often through history rulers have struggled with the problem of how to keep their population from getting too squabbling amongst each other, and have utilized the mechanism of arranging war. War seems to get all the squabbling brothers to stop beating up on each other, to instead be working alongside each other to repel imagined invaders by going over and beating up on the neighbors, thus requiring the population to shift from internal squabbling to cooperative interaction against external foes.

It is not just the continuing sectarian violence in the middle-eastern countries that show the problem. It seems a worldwide problem, and apparently has existed throughout history. The Roman Empire used "bread and circus" to mollify its many subjects far and wide. The brutal coliseum violence sports perhaps another type for those closer to home. Here in the US, the sports teams traveling to each others' towns sports arenas to do mock battle between football teams, for example, has long been needed to satisfy some urges among people; not just for the players, but also for the men in the stadium whooping it up rooting for their home team, but also for their women who get into the excitement too, although probably with somewhat different urges involved that also excite the men.

I have often associated it all with my conjectured basic need for "drama," but there may be another force active in the craving for team assaults with each other, on the soccer field or with tanks and airplanes on the battlefield.

America is winding down the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and I think the population is getting restless and there is much stirring of internal squabbling long seething and suppressed in the need to unite to confront the external foe.

The media's focus on the NSA as the villain has recently kept it from doing the part of its job to monitor the many groups of "organized stalkers" operating in America. Thus as it is said "when the cat's away the mice will play" and the organized-stalkers seem to be getting ready to more publicly make the daring moves that satisfy their egos and cover their own misdoings.

Allowing myself only a brief bit of anger at people choosing to squabble and group-assault instead of being responsible to their world and constructive for their civilization, I write this blog post. But I doubt that it will be allowed to be heard, as there are some heavy-duty public opinion spin-masters getting into the game, I sense.

Some kinds of people prefer to engage in games or serious conflicts so as to demonstrate who is superior; another kind of people prefer to engage in building things as their teamwork activity.

The conflict-craving types seem to be needing more visibility in recent times, bread-and-circus not enough for them anymore. The focus on the lone high achiever, predominant such as up through the 1950's in America, has been beaten back by the urge for the teams to take the forefront. The schoolyard bullies that gather their following by setting the example of beating up on the lone high achiever, gets tamed a bit as less violent techniques to stay at the front of a group's attention. When this kind of activity gets controlled in a corporation to have a management chain to produce a fine product or service, it seems about an optimum activity for teams.

However, as America's business-political mode has changed enormously since the 1950's, too often businesses teams will discover that they are more interested in making money than in making a fine product for the consumer. Investors who only look at the bottom-line return on their investment, and do not care what means are used to make that maximum money, increasingly business has found that it is far more efficient to seek out and overwhelm upcoming competition and destroy it, than to invest in better internal R&D to make better products for the customers.

Tripping up the rivals is hardly new, as a means to "win." Spot someone else's fine work being completed, is arranged to be destroyed leaving only one's lesser accomplishment the remaining finest thing. However, although sometimes like the stadiums full of howling fans, where the tripping up of the "other people" is publicly accepted and even required as part of the sport, in business dealings it is generally more frowned upon; therefore using more subtle techniques need to be employed. Those who engage in this kind of thing can be lumped into a general category of "organized stalkers."

These organized-stalkers apparently enjoy the companionship and adventure involved, as motivation, providing membership belonging and status in these semi-secret sub-organizations, that seem to be quite common and hardly new.

With the internet's fairly open communications, some of those who have discovered the increasingly unlikely occurrence of specific kinds of events as they go about their daily life, if they are lucky they learn about this organized-stalker phenomenon which apparently is now stalking them. To hide the originating source of the command to stalk particular individuals, there is said to be a "list" passed around among the many groups of organized-stalkers, and once a person is on that "list" it is a lifelong thing, no way to get off the list. (The implied threat of getting put on that list probably also keeps their members in line, fearing what would happen to them if they choose to not do some particularly nefarious dirty-work for the organized-stalkers.)

One kind of person that finds themselves as apparently on that "list" is the potentially innovative but now unemployed engineer, who might come up with an idea for a technology that could compete with some corporation's products and thus reduce their profits for their investors. Keeping those loose-cannon engineers down in the trenches by increasingly obvious organized-stalking and concurrent intrusion into their residences to do document theft, and by spreading nasty rumors among the people the engineer might connect with like neighbors, are said to be common protocols for the organized-stalkers.

I suppose it must be big fun for the members of the organized-stalker vigillanties in their fantasies of the monsters they are united in harassing, to be great heroes among the teams; quite unaware of what they are actually doing to their targets, that ultimately will come around to lower the standard of living for everybody including the organized-stalkers themselves. No matter; the fun and drama of team belonging and fantasied doing drama, is going on. Staying in the herd is a place of safety even among wild mammal groups, and driving out some member, normally a male, feeds the predators and thus protects those who are in the herd for awhile longer. These instincts still lurk among humans, and sometimes find expression, such as in the teams of organized-stalkers.

So at this point, I somewhat suspect that America is once again at that tipping point where focus against a common "enemy" outside the country, fades away enough so that the possible need for those stalked engineers to get re-hired to produce means to succeed against the nation-external enemy, becomes much less than the urge to snuff out the potentially business-disruptive innovative engineers and scientists, and so the long-prepared triumphant dramas of accusatory courtroom or scared run street chases, gets the go signal.

Part of this nearly overwhelmingly complex people-stuff, is the mode among ostensibly dignified members of society and corporations, to "get something on" the others, and this apparently enables some people to feel secure in their jobs, with the implied threat of the misdoings of those other dignitaries being revealed, if the job is lost. I was quite surprised when I learned about this phenomenon many decades ago. The "getting something on" can also be deliberately arranged by such groups too, even if there is no real adequately severe mistake or misdoing having been done by the individual. The need for a high-achieving Asperger to be accepted in the apparently fun things the groups are doing, often gets them put in the position of being deliberately "left holding the bag" to take the blame for the mischief of the group, the Asperger unable to comprehend all of what is going on among people. Someone who has stumbled into "knowing too much" is at high risk for being such a target, even if not wanting to be involved. Thus there is this mass of all the things "gotten on" each other, as part of the seething people-stuff stewing.

Now, is the declaring of war or doing the equivalent, to punish some outside nation, worth doing to prevent the nation-internal fracas from getting really nasty? Hardly seems fair to me, even though I too have long been one of those technological mavericks potentially too business-disruptive with better technologies than the existing corporations employ, and thus would likely would go down in one of the first internal skirmishes. Although that does not appeal to me at all, the sacrificing of thousands of foreigners in a distracting war, is just not a rightful thing to do to prevent it.

People's health is tied to business profit

We will have a working health system in this country, when the providers of health systems make the most profit when people are the healthiest. Right now, it is sick people that make the health systems the most profit. We are a nation increasingly ruled by business profit rather than people's thriving well being.

Will the profit dollar continue to be more important than the customer

When a switch happens where business development guidance changes from that of providing products and services of benefit to people, to that of making decisions for future approaches to be controlled by the making of the most profit, could be the Achilles Heel of the Free Enterprise System. At that point, the American customer base changes from being a people benefiting by business products and services, to being a monetary resource base to be exploited by business similar to mining the earth for minerals. The nature of the products and services available to the American customer then also changes to that which extracts the most money from them, instead of that which provides them with the best value for the money. Virtual franchise of technology and business territory cinches down the enforceability of this unfortunate turn of events; sometimes even worsened by government agency support for its perpetuation, which sometimes can be reversed by public outrage via widespread petitions against such rulings. Why is it that "it is so difficult to see the forest, because the trees are in the way?" Possibly the grooves of mental processing have been worn deeper on the analytic side via conventional formal educational techniques, so that once we have gone from the overall full picture, to the detailed focus on some particular aspect, we get stuck there in the area of the limited aspect, the grooves are too deep to be easily climbed out of to again attain the full picture of life's needs and opportunities. Will the profit dollar continue to be more important than the people ... and as the people fade in life, so also fades the dollar, as is happening nowadays. (There was an old saying about throwing the baby out with the bathwater; apparently mostly forgotten nowadays.) Is it still possible to switch back to business development guidance being that of providing products and services of most benefit to people, even if not the most profitable? Are there any CEOs that can keep their jobs while doing that; are the investors aware of what they have invested in for their future?

Blind profit will lead them both into the ditch

Big trouble is brewing when a business group (eg, a corporation) drifts its prime focus from creating the best product for the customer, to instead creating the most profit for the business group owners & stockholders. One may idealistically believe that the two are the same; yet as product franchise takes root, virtual territories are formed via several mechanisms, and it becomes effectively impossible for others to compete via a better product creation, because the established corporations control the marketplace by means other than having the best product. From then on, it is a process of making most money with least effort, for efficiency; and the creation of customer-optimum product drops further down the list of corporate priorities. And thus the customer is deprived of the optimum product innovations, having to settle for whatever business will make available to the customer.

Part of the difficulty may be the formation of an in-group "political correctness" around a social mechanism such as "free enterprise" that soon forgets the original idealistic implications of the slogan, "free enterprise" in this case. The active suppression of potentially upcoming technologies that could obsolete a powerful corporate complex, is likely far more profitably efficient than by the path of harmonizing with the new technology, for example, and so the principle of maximizing profit for expenditure made, goes for the "suppression" option if it can be done covertly enough or by somehow implying credibility gap between the established old workable versus the potential innovative new useful.

When the relatively few who are focused on controlling power and wealth processes become entrenched in a business-political system, the "customer" becomes merely a resource base that may be more efficiently controlled by a large variety of methods other than by providing the optimum products for the customer. They lose sight of the forest by becoming totally engrossed in the fun & games of playing the trees.

For examples, imagine a nation's overall transportation system that had been created guided solely by maximizing functionality, time and energy efficiency for all the users of the nation; and a health system that had always been guided by a principle of maximum health for the population, instead of guided by maximum profit for the suppliers and practitioners. Amazing difference! Is there a way to head back toward being on track? Corporate structure and resources are well fitted to creating products and services; it is the guidance criteria that creates the problems. It must be a profitable concern to survive, true; yet the difference between optimum product for customer along with somewhat less profit margin, might be only a small amount; it would need to be rationally justified in reference to its probable integration by the customer base into the model of the world situation environs in which it will function in practice during its useful life and eventual removal. Improvement as projected into the big picture ought to be able to justify some level of lessened profit for the corporation, to provide a better product or service to the customer. Anyone heard of the saying that "what goes around comes around"? Think corporations and its people are immune to that principle?

In pure politics, the "customers" can vote out the "management," but in a corporate system, the only vote possible is that of buying, or not buying, the corporate product. But the customer can only buy from among that which is available, in the corporate-controlled marketplace, options that are controlled not by optimum usefulness to the customer, but often instead by maximum corporate profit. Management that would choose otherwise, are likely to lose their jobs, as the stockholders typically are also far from sight of the forest in which they exist and upon which they depend for enduring life.

When the nation of customers is thereby deprived of having optimum functional products for fulfilling their needs, a similarly increasing dysfunctionality grows. If the customer base of the nation is not identical with the stockholder base (that is, where the customers are not equal and identical to the stockholders) it is likely that drift will occur from the "reality" of optimum functionality, to a "virtual reality" of maximum profit. Virtual meals are not nearly as nutritious as real meals are.

Even for those who have long ago lost the big-picture-purpose focus, by instead increasingly focusing on amassing great wealth and power via an endless plethora of behind the scenes manipulation of others' lives and events big and small, money cannot buy that which is not availably created. Although in fewer instances than for the rest of us, they too eventually will go away either empty-handed or only with an inadequate item that won't quite fill the need, can't do the job.

The customer can only obtain that which has been created, and the most functional product for the customer is not at all necessarily the product that makes the most profit for the powerful corporation. Blind profit will eventually lead them both to fall into the ditch, as it is said.