A couple years ago I received a phone call while I was driving in Santa Fe from a friend who had just read D. H. Lawrence’s poem “Under The Oak” and felt a sudden and irresistible urge to share it with me. I’d actually never read the poem before and it really pierced me. Surely my well-meaning friend had no idea that my driving under the influence of art was reckless at best.
Under the Oak
Have you ever been stalked by beauty? Have you ever had a magnificent work of art continuously revisit your life like a persistent recurrent dream? A symphony, a painting, a novel, a few lines of calculated prose…you know, that stuff that speaks more than the words which sometimes compose them…I have. There’s a poem by John Donne entitled “The Expiration.” I came across it one fateful undergrad day in the university library as I was vigorously searching to find that would-be rekindler of my love for Western poetry…a love that had swiftly faded since I started courting the likes of Rumi and Hafiz.
I opened it to The Expiration and remember being virtually paralyzed. I think I must have read it about 20 times before I shook my head and came to my befuddled senses. Of course, when you see a work of art that affects you like that you don’t just memorize it. You taste it, you swallow it, it flows in and out of you and in a real sense it becomes part of who you are. You know when you look at a painting and you can feel your brain stretching as that work of art, itself informed by that raw creative energy that intoxicates so many of us, changes your perception of how you view reality? I totally felt that. But the damn thing kept coming back to me.
For the last 8 years I have been informally investigating some of the underlying organizational principles of the human body and using some of those “truths” to inform my consulting work within a business environment. Though I have been mostly a lurker on the economics forum I mentioned in a previous post (and here is to show that lurker learning is one of the value propositions of an online forum) I have been greatly inspired by the dialogue to formalize and systematize this personal exploration. Last week I reached out to a former medical school colleague of mine (whom I used to compete vigorously with mind you) and we have begun meeting on a regular basis to discuss elements of biology, physiology, embryology, etc and to attempt to use some of these principles to help us understand the dynamics of our societal systems much like a physician would use his knowledge of these fields to understand the state of a patient. We are capturing our musings on what is, for the time being, a private wiki. I wanted to share a few minutes of the conversation we had this last week while we were discussing the functioning of the cell.
As I’m sure all of you are aware, the most commonly held view of the functioning of the cell is that the nucleus, floating within a nuclear membrane within the cytoplasmic matrix full of marvelous cellular machinery, operates much like a military HQ base wherein DNA (or some other mysterious force) will issue commands and, within the confines of this relatively isolated, buffered and protected environment, will determine the course of the future of the cell (i.e. what proteins are produced, how fast the cell grows, etc). Over the course of the last few years there has been an increasingly compelling body of evidence that seems to be hinting at what both of us had felt for a long time…that much of the executive functioning of the cell happens not at the level of the nucleus, but rather at the periphery and in the membrane of the cell. Furthermore, that the ability for the membrane to become conscious of the reality of its environment (through the production of channels, receptors, etc.) is directly proportional to its ability to survive within a changing environment. That is to say, that if the environment outside the cell changes, the nucleus won’t necessarily know. Rather it is to the extent that the membrane has gained awareness of the change in environment that it is able to issue, through cascading chains of protein modification and such, commands to the nucleus to produce the structural changes necessary for progress and survival. If, indeed, many of the executive functions of the cell are held at the periphery and not, as was once thought, at the core, this could have profound implications on the way we structure organizations and systems.
I’m thinking I should start every blog post from here on out with a pitiful guilt-laden apologetic opening bemoaning my failure to consistently blog YET AGAIN (notwithstanding yesterday’s post). It can kind of be a theme of sorts. I may have actually found my blog title. The failing blogger…another non-blog…ya…maybe I’ll just raise my head stoically, march on and try to do this first thing in the morning from here on out.
So I’ve been thinking a little about how we are often expected to trace the origin of an idea…especially in academic thinking. This idea seems umm….ridiculous perhaps? insane maybe? Its as if an idea were a pillar of a number of neatly stacked bricks creating a nicely defined, clean cut, very traceable origin where each brick built upon the previous. That seems totally delusional to me. What makes up my ideas? Pieces of conversations, the memory of something I read long ago that shaped my thinking whose origin is now long forgotten, an eavesdropped coffee shop comment by the overly pierced leather wearing dude to my left…and that’s only what I am AWARE of! We are constantly being informed by sources we’re not even consciously aware of that our mental models sift and order. Yet despite all we have this notion of property…intellectual property.
I have recently had the opportunity to participate in a forum wherein the participants have been exploring the foundation of the current global economic system and challenging some of the basic assumptions that may not represent our current understanding of reality. Though I think virtually everybody on that forum is far more qualified and capable of providing meaningful input to the discussion, I wanted to share some thoughts that I posted on my blog.
My own formal training in economics was only at the undergraduate level, most of the time of which I was fairly intellectually comatose. My interface with our economic system has instead been mainly as an entrepreneur. In doing so I feel and daily taste the fruit of our system but I find that I rarely take the time or energy to think deeply and penetrate the assumptions underlying such a system. As such I feel it is helpful for me to start from the most fundamental assumptions that I believe to be true, state those assumptions explicitly, and work my way from there. I unfortunately don’t have much of a toolkit for this type of thinking, so unless I start from the absolute basic underlying assumptions of what we know to be true I find time and again my thinking gets hijacked by largely unexamined patterns of thinking that, because I have been thinking this way for so long, become my go-to default modus operandi. I hope that the following provides some useful and relevant content for the ongoing discussion surrounding the current global economic situation and that it is not too basic or elementary. If so I hope you bear with my attempt and I very much welcome any assistance in ways that I can improve my approach or thinking on these topics.