Graduate Econ:  The Secret of Secrets

 

It was a grey late December afternoon. The Pittsburgh airport was succumbing to darkness as the sun set, the corridors and gate waiting areas in 1968 not quite insulated against the cheek reddening cold as the doors to the tarmac swung open periodically, and the hard plastic chairs by the doors offered position support but little else.     A grouping of bundled people were variously waiting for the flight to Miami, and warmth.  As I reached the area, thinking of the college winter-break I was heading toward, bundles and books resting against my scarved tan Pea-coated chest, I found only one seat left to fall into, and wait the hour before departure time.

With all else that was going on in my life -- turmoil about career choices, family matters, grades, love, et al -- I thought this was a moment of quiet lull.   Instead, it was about to become the singular lesson of life.  I had spent twenty some years preparing the soil, nurturing conceptual insights, exploring ideas, intuiting and sensing the relationships that could define the underlying dynamics of why organisms and complex systems behave the way they do.  But it hadn't clicked yet, there were pieces but no cohesion.   Energy, information, symbiosis, entropy, enthalpy, fundamental forces, econiches, evolution, simplicity vs diversity, statistical curves, trends and tendencies, philosophical perspectives of all sorts ... and a host of other ideas bubbling in the stew.  There were tantalizing tastes and flavors to what goes on in the world, but no name yet, no single picture.

The presentable grey haired gentleman sitting quietly on my left was a man in multiple transit too.  His eyes hinting at thoughts being viewed and reviewed, examined, puzzled over - anticipation mixed with resignation, or should I say, unexpected frustration.  He too had cartage -- a tattered well used (and loved) brief case nested close by his legs.   I don't recall how it began, but at some moment we started to talk.  Pleasantries then information.  I was a student at Duquesne University, he a retired/ing electrical engineer from one of our country's most esteemed industrial corporations.  And somehow, we got on to talking about accomplishments in life.  This is when this alert bright time weathered man, heading toward a life removed from the commerce of intellectual challenge, pulled his precious folio to his lap, reaching inside to bring forth collections of papers -- proof that he had done something special in life.   

It seems that he had invented a product - in an era when the world was becoming aware of the future limitation of fossil fuels - which could conserve energy, yet preserve the service provided by the product it was replacing.  He produced from the briefcase paper after paper identifying him as the originating patent holder, detailing the device, research and calculations, extolling its undeniable achievement and utility.

But amongst those papers were others, too.  Contracts and binding agreements, signed years earlier just for "formality's sake ", when the carrot was a secure job and a future to raise a family on.  Rendering ownership - and thus control - of an individual's professional creativity to the employer.  Now that was - and remains - common practice in the world. Signators resign themselves to knowing that the companies they work for have the financial resources to bring new ideas and products to market, to benefit companion mankind.  And that accomplishment - contributing to the betterment of the world - supplying needed sufficient satisfaction when "achievement" is the goal of the psyche. 

But here, something else had happened.  A simple wonderful creation - freely thought of, freely readied, and freely offered - was squelched.    The corporation would not allow this improved product to see the light of day, and a man was given swift unavoidable notice that his pinnacle intellectual achievement (and pride), was evaluated as inappropriate, even an embarrassment, a problem needing to be hidden from existence.  He fumed as he spoke about the whole sequence of events, angry yet poised, like a sculptor of a large clay form working out in the elements under the open sky.  It begins to rain.  And with no overhead protection from the beads droppng here, then there, then quite over there, runs from place to place trying to keep the form intact as relentless raindrops hammer than melt then weaken and mis-shape his creation.  Until nothing remains but ... memories and time to think on them.

In this case, the corporation evaluated the 'improvement', the better product, as a threat and a problem.  To manufacture and market this product would undermine other businesses (and other lives that depended on them) that were already up and running.  There were potential impacts and ramifications that could possibly extend far beyond one company, one man, one profit margin.  They squelched the idea altogether.

I listened to all he had to say, commenting and questioning him from time to time.  He deserved respect, to say the least.  Any one of us would want the same.  And so I made sure my words expressed that to him, among all else.    I recall speaking with him briefly on the plane, then at baggage claim at our destination, and as we parted.  Physically.  But as you can tell, I've carried him in my thoughts and heart to this day.  Because my intellectual inquisitiveness clasped onto what he went through and tried to make sense of it in regard to my own works, efforts and ideas.

And at some point it gelled.  I recognized in his story of creativity, struggle and competition the heirarchies and interrelationships of organs, organelles and environments.  (Even atoms and particles).  Competing for benefits -- which are sometimes "mutual" and other times "not".  Why what is "best" may not really be so.  Control, compromise, access to acheivement, timing - factors for individuals jostling with similar factors for groups.  Same dynamics, different goals.  An integrated coordinated potpouri enmeshed so beautifully that the obvious - lost in the flood of so many examples - was there all the time, hidden right in the open:    plural entropies, multiple frames of reference, opportunities based on the factors of energy/information control, and the channels and spaces to enact in.

I realized that this weathered life companion I had met had struggled face to face with the friction between "benefits for one vs benefits for the many" and had survived, but just barely.  And both competitors had won.   The corporation wasn't some idea sucking insensitive enemy (though no one could convince my travel companion of that), it was merely a competitor interested in it's own survival as well.  It had the momentum of an existing product line, of suppliers, consumers, marketing strategy et al to consider.  All weighed in vis a vis "best benefit" all around.  The new "better" product would disrupt as much as it would improve, maybe moreso. To end up doing unacceptible harm ... at that moment in time.   The potential to produce and use this product would always be there now, just not actively pursued until conditions changed (which they did indeed, one day). 

And that's when I realized the secret of secrets, in the midst of a planetwide cultural philosophy which touted the "unquestionable" benefits of more - more money, more knowledge, more power, more determinism, more everything.  I realized that yes there are improvements and behavioral gains to be acheived from more of those things than if there were a dearth.  But, balancing that is something that was sensed as far back as the 1600's when John Dryden wrote about the virtues of the "noble savage", echoing in the writings of Rousseau, Voltaire, Thoreau, et al, extolling innocence and the freedom it implied.   "Ignorance" could be a happy condition, indeed bliss as the old saw said.  Striving for (or melancholy for)  innocence is good because there is calmness, purity, incorruptness . . . and potential,  intrinsic there.   The unfettered freedom to go and do and become.   Yet striving for knowledge (non-naiveté) and control is desirable too because there is surety, reliability, consistency.  No surprises, especially harmful ones.   Survival requires both qualities, both techniques.

The stability of a system . . . it's ability to remain a functioning competent whole . . . requires composition and content and the spacetime to function in.  Poise, not at some singular nodal "best state" - which the laws of Physics (and now fractal-math in the 1990's) seem to stress, but a range of conditions, balancing dynamically, changing from moment to moment, between too-little and too-much.  Systems are healthy when they are in control of their resources and when there are the skills and option space choices to appropriately enact possibilities . . . including the exploration of the new. 

Wonderfully, even primal physics systems can be evaluated in these ways.  Quantum states, electron shell energy levels - are not just predictably patterned and restrictive states . . . they are opportunities.  Given a change in energy, they are resonances -- option spaces -- where electrons could move into and remain viable vis a vis the wholism of the atoms they helped configure.

Healthy systems fail from over determinism and from over stochasticity -- absolute uncoordinated  independence.  Viability -- for any/all systems -- occurs in a plateau region  nestled through the bulk of the Gaussian curve(s), not out at extremes and not solely at supersensitive peaks or valley nodes.   As conditions change and events occur, viability moves adjustively along the curve(s), even forming new gaussian groupings, new range- plateus which open up and allow for even more opportunities. Existence is the coordination of hosts of systems, blending all their local-frame-of-reference entropies, consistently and continually interacting out vast streams of seemingly deterministic states and behaviors, which congeal out of all the allowed possibilities.  Deterministic and statistical at once.  Not either/or.   The self-ness, the viability, the integrity, of systems being an intricate coordinated dance endlessly occurring.

Survival becomes a refinement, an expansion, of the early Darwinian notion "of the fittest".  Where once "fitness" had been thought to confirm the correctness of the "more" philosophy . . . power, strength, endurance, etc. (total control; event superiority), survival really occurs when systems are structured and energized to cope with energy encounters -- of all sorts and kinds.  It is as true for subatomic particles as it is for animals in the wild as for galactic masses as it is for a man, his family, his company and their separate intertwined personal, financial and commercial concerns.

Fitness includes all skills and abilities of a system - nascent & active.  Systems can endure by avoiding disruptive harmful encounters, and/or, by having the competence to encounter and endure -- by adjustment, incorporation, adaptation, evolution.  Rebuffing or channeling  encounterable energy.  By repeating past safe-behaviors, and, by being prepared to deal with future perturbations.   Determinism and probability.  That is the essence of "fitness".  Preparative capacity to deal with companion existence.  "More" still plays a role, but not the premiere one.  What 'more' simply does is give access to future behavior options.   (As does 'untried' or 'untested' states of being.)  A faster prey can avoid a fast predator.  A learnéd person has a larger repertoire of information from which to make choices and act on them (given social/environmental circumstances).  Yet, a humorous story is best appreciated by the person who never heard it before.  Atoms with open electron shells can interact with more atoms than the noble-gasses.  Techniques, mechanisms, forms, organisms and assemblies -- all enacting the diversities and examples of a universally singular relational dynamic: Competence in the moment, presaged by potential competence in any future option spaces and/or insulation from them.    Levels and entropies, individuations and pluralities, companion extants supportive of mutual existence in an ever enlarging abundance of forms and capacities.   A man with goals and dreams in the same arena with a corporation that has its own goals, concerns and aspirations.  An extensive intertwining of behavior options, some identical, some opposite, yet driven by a singular underscoring relationship which they both are examples of.

The secret of secrets.

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