On corporatism, the bailout, how the world would look post-corporation, post contemporary capitalism.

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transcript of Rob Kall Interview with David Korten broadcast on Sept 24, 2008.

Our next guest is going to be coming on very shortly, that's David Korten, the author of The Great Turning: From Empire to Earth Community ;WHEN CORPORATIONS RULE THE WORLD and The Post Corporate World: Life After Capitalism, and I'm very excited to have him on. He's a visionary; he's really what we need talking to congress right now. People like him have a picture of what happens after capitalism. And that's a good thing.

Every week I talk about Bottom Up. Bottom Up is the opposite of top down; the universe is bottom up; nature is bottom up; cultures were bottom up until civilization.

With civilization it was convenient for kings and emperors, high priests, slave masters to have a top down control and domination system. Think about it; humans and their predecessors have been around for at least 2 million years. About eight, ten thousand years ago civilization came to the earth. With civilization came domination. Domination led to circumstances where certain people had power and were in charge and the rest, didn’t.

David Korten has written a lot about this. And he's thought about what it's going to look like after it's over. So we're going to be talking to him in just a minute and I'm waiting for him to phone in and we'll get started with that shortly. Meantime, if I may, I'm going to talk a little bit more about what I've been saying.

Korten:  Rob.

Kall: Oh-- David?

Korten:  Dave Korten here, yeah.

Kall:  Great! Good to have you here; I've just been talking a little bit about what you've said in some of your books. Did you get to hear Bernie (Sanders)?

Korten:  Yes, I was listening to the two of you on the web stream.

Kall:  Oh great. So you put together an article; it's really fun, I had a fortuitous opening today, thinking, God, I wish I could get an opening 'cause I would really like to have you on, and I worked to reach you and you tell me you've been up 'til two in the morning writing an article to respond to this (economic crisis) and in a lot of ways—did you ever look at what I wrote?

Korten:  No, I looked at the website, but I didn't find specifically the—

Kall:  I wrote a piece: Reject the bailout, reinvent the lending system to maximize liquidity. What I basically was saying is that we've got to come up with something new. That rewards the companies that did things right, that takes care of people from the bottom up, the small people we've got to take a look at new solutions and we got to have new people talking to members of 'congress: visionaries who know about what things could be and I specifically mentioned you.

Korten:  Well, I appreciate that. I was very struck on Bernie's comments and his realism about what Congress can't do; partly of course, because of the Republican roadblocks and a totally incompetent President, but the other reality is that in that kind of situation of Congress that there's so many issues coming at you so fast from so many different directions, so many competing demands that we really can't look to Congress to step back and take the long term view and ask the kind of questions about what's really going on with our financial system and what do we need to do to create a system that actually works for people.

So I think he's absolutely right and you talked about change from the Bottom Up, that it really depends on citizen movements framing the debate and coming up with a new vision of our possibilities as you know, I'm co-founder and Board Chair of Yes! Magazine and one of the things we see as our mission is to frame the issues of the "New Mainstream" and the possibilities for moving forward beyond the terrible messes that we're in, from healthcare to foreign policy to a totally dysfunctional financial system.

Kall:  And you come to this world your vision, from having a lifetime of experience working all over the world engaging with all different cultures too. Can you talk about that a little bit about some of that experience you bring to us?

Korten:  Yeah, I spent most of my adult career working in International Development. I set up a business school in Ethiopia and Addis Ababa to prepare business managers there, and I was the Harvard Business school advisor to the Central American Management Institute in Central America and Nicaragua, then spent 15 years in the Philippines and Indonesia working with the Ford Foundation, then USAID and ultimately, working with private voluntary organizations.

So yeah, I've seen a good deal of the world the experience of going out in the world initially with the youthful mission to, you know: "We're going to end global poverty by bringing the secrets of U.S. business success to the rest of the world."

I was kind of a slow learner, but eventually I figured out that much of what we were taking out to the world was actually far more destructive than productive; that business as usual is destroying the environment, destroying the social fabric of what once were its cultures and actually enriching a few people, but pushing most people into greater desperation.

So ultimately, I realized the same pattern was going on in the United States and other so-called developed countries, so I came home to work on education here. I'm really interested in this financial collapse which is clearly a very serious moment, but I think we need to recognize that it is a moment that potentially opens up all kinds of issues for serious discussion that otherwise were totally off the table.

This is a time to really urge people to step back and energize conversation about what kind of a financial system do we really need to serve, not speculators and the creation of multi-billion dollar fortunes, but rather to serve main street and the people who play by the rules, who put in an honest day's work, and want to have a decent life. In other words, we've got to create a financial system that serves Main Street rather than the Wall Street speculators.

Kall:  So, how do we do that?

Korten:  Well, the first of all, we start talking about it. One of the things that's very encouraging; it looks to me like this bailout package is "Dead on Arrival" in Congress you've got the far right out there wants to use it to eliminate capital gains taxes, further reduce corporate income taxes, while on the Democrats' side, you've got people talking about limiting compensation and taking an equity share in the companies we bail out. And you have apparently, George Bush saying, "If either of you guys touch it in either direction, I'll veto it."

So, hopefully the Bailout Package is dead. But we need to do what you're doing actually, as Bernie indicated: to start a conversation about what kind of a system we actually need. And the piece you mentioned that I was writing last night is now on the Yes! Website: Main Street before Wall Street and it's an effort to contribute to framing that discussion; it really starts with asking the question "what is money and what is the positive function of money and what's the proper role of a financial system. A lot of people have been framing it in terms of the juxtaposition of Wall Street and Main Street and that's actually a very powerful frame because what's happening here is we're seeing "Wall street expose itself in a way that probably hasn't happened since the...

Kall:  Great Depression.

Korten: great financial collapse of 1929. But what we see behind the curtain is a system that is in fact awash in money; you mention a need to increase liquidity, but what's been going on here is the banking system and the Federal Reserve working together with their power to create money, has been absolutely flooding us with money and liquidity, but it's not been channeled into productive enterprises, or into living wages for real people, it's been channeled into the biggest global banks, eh hedge funds, the private equity funds to all of these institutions in Wall Street that have de-linked from any concern for real productive activity and they're basically creating financial bubbles and debt pyramids partly for the financial returns but an awful lot of it, stunningly, just to create an opportunity to collect humongous fees.

The hedge fund managers take 20% off of any gains they take in and I don't know if you're familiar with this stunning statistic: that the top 50 paid hedge fund managers last year averaged 288 million dollars in compensation EACH.

Kall:  That's unbelievable.

Korten:  You know, that's over half a billion dollars. That's what Wall Street is currently about; it is managed almost exclusively to do that; if it provides any funding to real people or to real business, that's pretty much incidental. And at the same time, we've (you know, there's a very interesting book by Kevin Phillips called Bad Money) and he talks about the huge increases in private debt, and much of it, most stunningly, is in the institutions in the financial sector loaning money to each other.

The financial sector debt, these are just he corporations that played money games; the total debt was 14 trillion dollars in 2006, which was 32% of all U.S. debt and 107% of U.S. GDP (Gross Domestic Product) This is just mind boggling this is—we're creating an economy based on people trading pieces of paper back and forth and we're working under the illusion that somehow this is creating wealth. What we neglect is that the wealth creation function is in Main Street with real businesses; real people using real resources to produce goods and services that people need to have a decent life.

The only legitimate reason for the existence of Wall Street is to provide an orderly flow of money, which is simply a medium of exchange to support the exchanges in the real economy. So what we need to do is step back and say not what do we need to do to patch up the existing Wall Street so it can get back to business as usual; we need to step back and say what would a money system look like if we really designed the system to serve ordinary people, to serve main street?

I noted in your conversation with Bernie, you were talking about your local bank, that's basically the answer before the Wall Street folks started using all their political clout to get themselves out from any kind of public accountability or regulation, our financial system much it's centered on local community banks; we used to have a system of unitary banks.

Banks weren't allowed to merge into big chains, so they remained connected to their community, which means that they took in deposits from people who had savings and wanted to have the savings secure. Then they would act as an intermediary and they would loan that out to other people for buying homes or businesses and so forth so this is what I learned about when I studied economics as a student, that this is what banks are supposed to do; but the biggest banks now—we still have the community banks like the one you mentioned, that are doing that, but they're totally on the periphery….

Kall:  By the way, the bank that I've mentioned, it's not a small bank. I'm sure it's billions of dollars that it handles. It's a regional bank that's decent sized. But their stock is going up; because they were cautious; they didn't take the kinds of risks.

Korten:  Yeah, well, and fortunately we have those kinds of banks around; so, we should be taking these as the models and if we're having a credit crunch, because of the chaos in Wall Street, we should be looking not to bail out the speculators, but rather, if the banks like your local bank are having a liquidity problem, we need to address that; what's the problem there; and how do we get more funds flowing to those banks--

Kall:  That's what I think, I think what we need to do is reward the banks who are responsible who are doing well and give them more money and just let these other ones just wither and die.

Korten:  Yeah, absolutely.

Kall:  And build the liquidity from the strong banks that did things right, with good judgment, with ethics, with competence and responsibility.

Korten:  You're totally on it and this is the message we need to get out here into the debate; we need to make the distinction between the functional, healthy institutions that are performing a real service and they deserve support, and those that we would frankly be better off without, and why we should jump in to bail out hedge funds and private equity funds which are just simply sophisticated gambling institutions that create huge financial risk and instability, I mean there's no public purpose to be served there.

Kall:  I kind of get the impression, I'm not sure if you said it actually, but that some of the stuff going on here are these "derivatives" and what have you they're money processed and transmuted and "algorithm-ized" in different ways. My impression is that you'd like to see that gotten rid of altogether; making money off of playing with money and what have you.

Korten:  Absolutely. Yeah, there is no financial benefit to that. Here's where—

Kall:  What do you mean, "There's no financial benefit?" Some people are making a lot of money.

Korten:  Certainly there's financial benefit; I misspoke; there's—

Kall: You mean there's no social benefit?

Korten:  No social benefit, no public benefit. Partly, we get caught up in illusions of our mythology we've been conditioned t believe that money is real wealth and that people who are making money, who are creating money, are creating wealth. that's a total fiction, an illusion breaking out of that starts with recognizing that natural capital, human capital, social capital, intellectual capital: these things are all real things of real value that contribute to production.

Money is simply an "accounting chit" that we use to generate a claim against real wealth. Which is very useful as a medium of exchange, but when we get confused and think if we are just pyramiding the creation of money that we're somehow creating wealth. No, that is in fact pyramiding claims against the real wealth of society against the wealth of people who engage in productive activity; it's best understood as a form of theft, not a form of real wealth creation.

If we get through that mythology and start to use real language, stop talking about money as wealth, but refer to it as money, the language-- I just go crazy when I listen to the Market Reports and they say "Investors did this and investors did that." That's nonsense; these are not investors for the most part; they are speculators. We should be talking about, you know, "Speculators today drove up the market or drove it down or did this or the other thing" and acknowledge it for what it is.

Real investment is investing in real enterprises that produce real goods and services. Real investment is long term. Any movement of money that's calculated in fractions of a second does not, (laughs) does not merit being called "investment."

Kall:  So, let's take a step back; we've got what has been billed as a crisis situation here; I'm not so sure it's a crisis. This reminds me too much of the crisis that we faced before we entered Iraq; when they were threatening us with weapons of mass destruction: bio-terrorism, and they used that to scare and bully the Congress—those foolish Democrats who supported Bush's request to go to war and all regretted it. I don't think (47:51) that's going to happen quite this way this time, but again, there's an awful lot of people who say Nancy Pelosi and friends make a lot of noise and then they give bush what he wants just about every time.

Korten:  Well, there is a lot of political pressure. I think you're absolutely right in your assessment of well, "The sky is falling and we've got to act immediately"; for one thing, if the hedge funds and private equity funds and the speculators fall, that's kind of clearing out the trash to open things up so we can start (unintell) the system

Kall:  (laughs) Amen.

Korten:  It's just amazing; it was yesterday, or the day before, I was listening to one of these right wing talk shows. Man, they were just fuming at the mouth that the terrible Democrats are going to destroy our whole country because they've got this bill before them on this 700 billion dollar bailout and they're not passing it TODAY!

This one call in show had a stream of callers coming in, all just dittoing the blowhard. Saying "Yeah, those Democrats, they should be responsible and they should pass this and why aren't they passing it today?" It's just hard to believe that people could be so sucked in and so out of touch that—you know, this is an issue that's been building up for a long long time; the issues go very deep and the idea that a Democratic Congress should hand over to the bush administration a blank check for 700 billion dollars which is more than the total amt we've spent on the Iraq war so far, just because they ask for it and said, "The sky is falling!"

That would be the height of irresponsibility. So yeah, we really need to be out there with a message of "Look, it's time to step back, take a longer term look at this and if a lot of firms that have been engaged in high stakes speculation fall, that's probably all to the good, in the long term.

Obviously there are going to be some of disruptions but we've got disruptions any place, and given that the experts think that if we do the bailout it's going to add up to a lot more than 700 billion, more like a trillion; well, there's just an awful lot of other things we could do with a trillion dollars otherwise to cushion the shock while we're working on a complete restructuring of the financial system to make it work.

And to deal with issues like equity: This system is designed to destroy the American Middle Class and create ever growing inequality by concentrating wealth in the hands of these hedge fund managers.

At the same time, Wall Street is fleecing homeowners with misrepresentations and scams on mortgages, and people are not talking about the credit card situation, but we're developing huge credit card debts because the economic policies that favor Wall Street have been holding down wages below the level of inflation, which means people are becoming ever more desperate to just keep body and soul together.

They were responding by taking second mortgages, running up their household debt, but they're also charging it to their credit cards. Which is ultimately a trip to nowhere. As soon as they get overburdened, the card companies are raising their rates to absolutely exorbitant rates up into the 20s, even 30% and tacking on all kinds of fees.

This is just totally predatory; we used to call it "usury"; it is predatory lending on all fronts. Then they securitize these debts and play all these derivative games with them. It's totally insane.

Kall:  You said that the system is set up to destroy the middle class--

Korten:  Yeah, nobody's going to say that that's our intention but it is exactly what's happening, because—

Kall:  Well, there's a war against the middle class and it's been going on for years. But my question is, this new development, this "handout" of 700 billion dollars; you know, the way I think about it, Bush worked out a way to pry off about ten, fifteen billion dollars a month to give to Halliburton and military contractors for the last six years? Five years—with the Iraq war.

Korten:  Yeah.

Kall:  Here he's got a brilliant way to pry off 700 billion dollars all at once and then more after that and it seems to me like this is an unbelievably fast way, if the system is designed to destroy the middle class, this is a way to accelerate the process much further.

Korten:  Oh Yeah.

Kall: What happens then?

Korten:  When we talk about 700 billion we neglect the fact that we've already committed somewhere between 300 and 400 billion for Bear Stearns, Fannie and Freddie and AIG and there's no end to it. I'm also, I'm fascinated, nobody is talking about where will this money come from?

Kall:  You've already told us; they just print more of it.

Korten:  Well, yeah, are we going to borrow it from the same—I mean the way they print it through the federal reserve and the banking system ultimately we would be borrowing it from the same banks that we're using it to bail out. So essentially we're just trading their bad assets for a solid government guaranteed asset, at least if we can still assume that a government as far in debt as ours is, is a solid risk.

The alternative is that we need to borrow it from the Chinese and the Japanese and the Arab Emirates that have dollars to invest, but we're already seeing that they are getting pretty tired of financing an economic deadbeat and they're starting move their assets out of dollars, which is why the dollar itself is falling and it seems that in the end we're going to be borrowing money from the same banks that we're bailing out and just swapping, taking their bad assets and giving them better assets in turn. So much of this is a game of smoke and mirrors.

So, I'm delighted by what you're doing; you're the only place I'm so far hearing of a message asking these bigger questions about the financial system and what are the real deeper solutions.

Kall:  Well, it just seems that unlike any time before the Democrats, and maybe the Republicans too, have an opportunity to look at the situation, see that it's broken and come up with a solution rather than throwing bandage on top of bandage and that's where you come in, because you have answers; you have a vision of a better world and can you spend a little time talking about the post corporate world the way you've envisioned it, the way you have described it in "The Great Turning" and in "The Post Corporate World"?

Korten:  "The Post Corporate World" of course, I wrote it after "When Corporations Ruled the World" where I was focused on how the concentration and abuse of corporate power works and that book of course, was part of energizing the whole global resistance against corporate globalization. Now, many of us realize that just resistance alone: pointing out the bad is not adequate; we need a positive vision what I've come to there and is foundational in my thinking is that we need to create economies that function more like healthy ecosystems;

And the defining feature of healthy ecosystems is not the kind of brutal competition that we associate with Darwinism; it is indeed cooperation, the fact that ecosystems are involved in continuous mutual beneficial exchange optimizing the use of resources and energy to sustain life. They are also rooted in place everywhere, so if we begin to think about this in terms of economies, we start to think about what some of us call local living economies. I'm part of an organization on the board of the Business Alliance for Local Living Economies which is working on actualizing this vision all around the United States and Canada the idea is to grow economies that are based on local businesses that are owned by local people that are engaged in the responsible creation of employment, goods and services using local resources and managing their businesses in ways that are environmentally healthy and stain the local ecosystem on which they and everybody else depends for their long time well being. One of the interesting things if you look into biology: in living systems there is no equivalent of money. Money is totally a human invention; it's not a natural thing.

Kall:  I don’t think it's a part of indigenous cultures, either.

Korten:  No, it's not, and of course, even in a beneficial money economy, certainly in our modern world, money is important, money has a function. But where we start to get really destructive is when we start monetizing and commodifying every relationship, so that everything we do depends on money from raising more of our own food, to every bite that we eat, we have to have money, as both parents go to work, we have to have more money for child care everything becomes monetized, it not only gives extraordinary power to those people who control our money supply which we're now seeing on wall street, but it also breaks down the relationships of caring, of affiliation, that are the foundation of community; and that comes back to the fact…

Kall:  Money is poison for the heart

Korten:  Yeah, "poison for the heart," exactly

Kall: Now, we're coming up on the end of the hour; now, I would love to stay on this conversation with you that will be available for downloads and on a transcript if you can stick around a little bit, I just need to shut—This is the Rob Kall Show, WNJC 1360, and I've been talking with David Korten, can you stick around a little bit, David?

Korten:  Yeah, sure

Kall:  That'll be great! So, we're going to keep going and they're going to shut us off at any moment now!

Kall; Korten:  (Laughter)

Kall:  But not from our end; that'll be our radio listeners, who'll have to download to get the rest of it.

Korten:  Yeah, OK; well, the community thing is really quite amazing as we—you know, one of the themes that I work with in my most recent writing is the importance of our cultural stories. The importance of our "cultural stories". The stories by which we understand what is prosperity, what is wealth, what is security?

Kall:  I have to tell you that-- I know you're friends with Thom Hartmann; I was talking with him last night…

Korten:  Yeah, absolutely.

Kall:  And, years ago, back in the 'Nineties, Thom sent me a novel and I gave him some feedback on it, and I said well, give me some feedback on the novel I'm working on and he did and I liked it and it was useful, he said well, if you liked that you should check out this seminar by Robert McKee he had just written a book on story structure. and it started me on a journey into learning about story and it ended up with me,  in a couple of years, I held a conference, a summit meeting on the art, science and application of story

And I brought together for the first time in history. People from all the different worlds of story: Story tellers, novelists, screenwriters, knowledge management consultants, lawyers, ministers psychologists, it was incredible, I had thirty five speakers from all these different worlds come together, and you know the story of the blind wise men and the elephant.

Korten: Oh, yeah.

Kall: It was one of those moments; everybody describing their experience of story, what it meant to them, how it worked.  So, when I discovered that you were seeing story as a solution; it’s something that I spent six years running conferences on.

Korten:  Aha!  Fascinating.

Kall: Didn’t make a nickel on it, but (laughing)

Korten: Yeah. 

Kall: It was an incredible experience bringing together all the different worlds of story and in the process, what I discovered, was after energy…

Korten: Hmmm-hmmm.

Kall: After the energy business, the story business is probably

the biggest business in the world.

Korten: (Laughs) Yeah, although I think, you know, it’s not clear to me how many people who come from the field of storytelling are fully conscious of the implications of the story themes. 

Kall: Well, it’s not just storytelling, though.  It’s books and movies and...

Korten: Yeah, right.  Of course, of course.

Kall:  Novels and corporate consulting. 

Korten:  Yeah, yeah.

Kall: I mean, one friend I made in the field worked for the World Bank.  He ran the Africa office for a while.  And then he got into knowledge management and now he does this thing full time, working with story.

Korten: Have you seen the, ah, The Great Turning from Empire to Earth community? 

Kall: Yes.

Korten: Yeah, okay.  So…

Kall: And I know that you finish it talking about the answer is our stories. 

Korten: Yeah, and of course the key there is coming to recognize, you know, how our stories, well, how so many of our really meaningful stories by which we understand ourselves in our world, fall either in the category of Empire stories or Earth Community Stories.  And they’re either affirming the legitimacy and necessity of hierarchy or they are affirming the benefits and importance of community and partnership and our human capacity to be responsible, to be caring. 

Kall: Now, is there a pattern of where these stories come from?

Korten: Well, ah, yeah.  I mean they ah, I mean certainly in our current culture the Empire stories tend to come from our media.  Although, you know, they’re so embedded in our culture that we get them from science; we get them from churches; we certainly get them from the corporate media.  It’s partly because we have been living under empire for so long and we’re so conditioned to empire stories that we never, you know, we rarely step back and say, “Hey, wait a minute!”  You know, there’s a certain set of assumptions that are being, that underlie this set of stories, that don’t really ring true if you step back.  The kind of foundational thing is the story that we humans are inherently by nature violent and greedy and competitive and individualistic.  Now, you only need to step back and think about most of your daily relations with most of the people we interact with… 

Kall: You know what’s interesting?

Korten: …and they’re not that way.

Kall:  Yeah.

Korten: That’s not a true story.

Kall: Yeah, because, what’s interesting is, in working with many

screenwriters who have described the arc of the story that has to happen for a successful movie,…

Korten: Hmmm-hmmm.

Kall:…or novel, generally what they describe is a person going through changes. 

Korten: Yeah.

Kall:  Waking up to discover who they really are.  And when they do, they go from being the Empire-type person you just described…

Korten:  Hmmmm-hmmmm.

Kall:  to being the kind-hearted, warm person… 

Korten: There you go.

Kall:…who cares. And that’s the penultimate story. That’s, if you interviewed twenty different top screenwriters…

Korten:  Yeah.

Kall:…and you asked them, “What’s the story arc, what’s the character arc, because that’s what story is about, for movies mostly. 

Korten: Yeah.  Interesting.  And they are very conscious of that obviously.  Do they think about it in terms of what that tells us about our human nature and about, you know, as a more general thing?  I mean, that of course is the arc of the healthy life journey. 

Kall: Well, it’s an interesting, it’s interesting that it starts, that the archetypal movie starts out in the Empire mode.  I never thought of it that way until we had this conversation. 

Korten:  Yeah.

Kall: That’s really what it is. They start out as these creepy jerks and move to become full people. 

Korten:  Yeah. 

Kall: And I think that’s really what you’re describing as the post-corporate world, too. 

Korten: Well, I think it is.  Yeah, I wasn’t quite so much into that, into this framing at that time..,

Kall: (Laughs) Creepy jerks is not the language you would use. 

Korten: Laughs.

Kall: I’m sorry.

Korten:  Well, of course, you know in, you know, that was back in a time also when I was very focused on the system.  It was very clear in my mind when I wrote "When Corporations Rule the World".  I’m not talking about bad people; I want people to understand the bad systems.  By the time I got to writing "The Great Turning", which was after 9/11, and we were seeing the Bush administration and Enron and all that kind of crap.  Phew!  You know, I got to face up to this.  There are some bad people too.  They got some serious shit going on.  And so, you know, in "The Great Turning", I explicitly talk about…

Kall: Good thing we’re off the radio now and on to the recording. 

Korten: OH, yeah.  You can blot that out. 

Kall: That’s okay when I’m downline. (?)  [not on radio]

Korten: I better be careful when I’m-- when we’re on live radio.  Yeah.  But, yeah, you know, what I see now is that what we’re dealing with is an interplay.  I mean, it’s not really bad people or evil people in a sense, it’s people who are deeply psychologically disturbed.  And whose development never followed through that arc. 

They’re stuck in the early stage of that arc, which, you know, from the standpoint of developmental psychology, is the basic kind of perceptual orientation of a six to twelve year old.  Which, in that age group, is not necessarily bad, it’s just a natural part of our development. 

Of course, that’s why we need parents.  To provide us with guidance, but if people remain stuck in that mode into adulthood, then you’ve got your George Bushes and your Dick Cheneys and Ashcrofts and all these characters, who absolutely should not be in positions of power.  But are the ones who are most willing to engage in the absolutely brutal competition to achieve those positions of absolute power. 

Kall:  And it’s this competition, as compared to partnership, that is one of the key differences that you describe in the post-corporate world, though, I think. Right?

Korten: Um, well, yeah. It’s much more clear in "The Great Turning", but yes, absolutely.  Um…

Kall: I mixed them up. 

Korten: Yeah.

Kall: The two of them.  "The Great Turning" is kind of an embellishment and a fleshing out of a lot of the ideas that you had, I think, in the post-corporate world. 

Korten: That’s true, yeah.  It’s putting the whole sort of corporate issues into a much clearer and larger framework, but yeah. 

Kall: You know, I discovered, um…I’ve known about your work for years.  And I kind of rediscovered it.  I’ve started working on a book with the working title, “Bottom Up.” 

Korten: Hmmm-hmmm. Excellent.

Kall:  And it kind of came to me because I read Paul Hawkins’ book Blessed Unrest and I had some conversations with Joe Trippi about how bottom-up internet technology changed the nature of politics for all time to come. 

Korten: Hmmmmm.

Kall:  And it works out that there are a decent number of books in the business and the internet world that talk about bottom-up kinds of concepts.  One of the newest ones that just came out is Crowd-Sourcing: Why the Power of the Crowd is Driving the Future of Business by Jeff Howell.  Or Clay Shirkey’s book, Here Comes Everyone.  Then there’s The Long Tail and The Wisdom of the Crowds by James Surowiecki.  There’s a lot of them that are out there on the internet business side of things, but you and Riane Eisler are one of the few that have actually written about this from a cultural point of view. 

Korten: Hmmmmm-hmmm.

Kall: I think. And a…

Korten: Well, on one, of the folks you’re talking about from the business world, I assume what they’re trying to do is figure out how to control those phenomena or to profit from them to maintain their Empire businesses.

Kall:  Ah….That’s interesting.

Korten:  I mean, I don’t know; I haven’t read the ones you mentioned, so I may be wrong.

Kall:  Ah, they’re looking at the phenomenon, seeing how it’s playing out on the internet.  Ah, last week I went to my first internet business conference.  Web 2.0 Expo.  Do you know about Web 2.0?

Korten:  Yeah, hmmmmmm-hmmmmm.

Kall:  And, ah, one of the main speakers, one of the keynote speakers, his company sponsors this, is Tim O’Reilly. 

Korten: Okay.

Kall: O’Reilly publishes tech books.  And he really came across in just the right way I wanted to hear.  Do things that matter.

Korten: Aha.

Kall: That was the message that he said. 

Korten: Hmmmm-hmmm.

Kall: And it was really good to see him talking to business people.  He publishes the books and he’s one of the leaders in the field

We digress and talk about something that really isn’t relevant to the interview.

Korten: the other, the other frame for the bottom up, of course, is self-organizing.  Which is, you know the kind of system frame on that.

Kall: Tell me more about that. 

Korten: Well, you know, I mean, actually this goes to living systems.  Living systems are extraordinarily self-organizing in the sense that there is no central control in our own bodies, of course they’re, I mean, I talk about this in The Post-Corporate World that, ah, and The Great Turning, that you’ve got these trillions of cells, and there’s no, I mean, we’re sort of conditioned, well the brain is controlling everything, but that’s not true.  I mean, the brain controls certain aspects, but the whole system of cell function and cell organization, you know, these are all individual living beings that are in intense inner-communication and continuous adaptation to maintain both their individual health and vitality, but as well the health and vitality and function of our total organism.  And, you know, that’s the same general principle in any kind of an ecosystem.  There’s no central authority saying, “Okay, you go here.  You do that.”  Or you know, setting the direction…

Kall: What I’m saying in the introduction in my book is that nature is bottom up.  The universe is bottom up.  The way the World works is bottom up. 

Korten: Well, yeah, I mean…Yeah, it’s just a different term.  You could use the same term, self-organization, and it would actually put you more directly in sync with the system literature.  Not that the concept’s different, but just the terminology. 

Kall: And, then the other thing that you bring up and that you talk about is that it was civilization, empire, that turned things around. 

Korten: Well, that’s, yeah…

Kall: The way close to two million years…

Korten: That’s semantics.  The thing I make out of that is that the historians equate civilization, which, you know, we assume is a good thing, with the beginning of empire.  One could say, I mean it’s all definition, that if you’re talking about, you know, organized human activity, with some kind of sense of culture, and so forth, that that goes way back before empire.  But, we’re not supposed to recognize those guys as civilized.  (Laughs) 

CLICK.

Korten: You still there?

Unfortunately, the connection ended there and we couldn’t reconnect.

End of recording.

Transcribed by Jay Farrington and Paula Sayles -- October 3, 2008

Authors Bio:

Rob Kall is an award winning journalist, inventor, software architect,
connector and visionary. His work and his writing have been featured in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, CNN, ABC, the HuffingtonPost, Success, Discover and other media.

Check out his platform at RobKall.com

He is the author of The Bottom-up Revolution; Mastering the Emerging World of Connectivity

He's given talks and workshops to Fortune
500 execs and national medical and psychological organizations, and pioneered
first-of-their-kind conferences in Positive Psychology, Brain Science and
Story. He hosts some of the world's smartest, most interesting and powerful
people on his Bottom Up Radio Show,
and founded and publishes one of the top Google- ranked progressive news and
opinion sites, OpEdNews.com

more detailed bio:

Rob Kall has spent his adult life as an awakener and empowerer-- first in the field of biofeedback, inventing products, developing software and a music recording label, MuPsych, within the company he founded in 1978-- Futurehealth, and founding, organizing and running 3 conferences: Winter Brain, on Neurofeedback and consciousness, Optimal Functioning and Positive Psychology (a pioneer in the field of Positive Psychology, first presenting workshops on it in 1985) and Storycon Summit Meeting on the Art Science and Application of Story-- each the first of their kind. Then, when he found the process of raising people's consciousness and empowering them to take more control of their lives one person at a time was too slow, he founded Opednews.com-- which has been the top search result on Google for the terms liberal news and progressive opinion for several years. Rob began his Bottom-up Radio show, broadcast on WNJC 1360 AM to Metro Philly, also available on iTunes, covering the transition of our culture, business and world from predominantly Top-down (hierarchical, centralized, authoritarian, patriarchal, big) to bottom-up (egalitarian, local, interdependent, grassroots, archetypal feminine and small.) Recent long-term projects include a book, Bottom-up-- The Connection Revolution, debillionairizing the planet and the Psychopathy Defense and Optimization Project.

Rob Kall Wikipedia Page

Rob Kall's Bottom Up Radio Show: Over 400 podcasts are archived for downloading here, or can be accessed from iTunes. Or check out my Youtube Channel

Rob Kall/OpEdNews Bottom Up YouTube video channel

Rob was published regularly on the Huffingtonpost.com for several years.

Rob is, with Opednews.com the first media winner of the Pillar Award for supporting Whistleblowers and the first amendment.

To learn more about Rob and OpEdNews.com, check out A Voice For Truth - ROB KALL | OM Times Magazine and this article.

For Rob's work in non-political realms mostly before 2000, see his C.V.. and here's an article on the Storycon Summit Meeting he founded and organized for eight years.

Press coverage in the Wall Street Journal: Party's Left Pushes for a Seat at the Table

Talk Nation Radio interview by David Swanson: Rob Kall on Bottom-Up Governance June, 2017

Here is a one hour radio interview where Rob was a guest- on Envision This, and here is the transcript..

To watch Rob having a lively conversation with John Conyers, then Chair of the House Judiciary committee, click here. Watch Rob speaking on Bottom up economics at the Occupy G8 Economic Summit, here.

Follow Rob on Twitter & Facebook.

His quotes are here

Rob's articles express his personal opinion, not the opinion of this website.

Join the conversation:

On facebook at Rob Kall's Bottom-up The Connection Revolution

and at Google Groups listserve Bottom-up Top-down conversation