Last week, in his column in The New York Times, Thomas Friedman wrote about two competing theories explaining the OWS movement and other similar protests around the world. “When you see spontaneous social protests erupting from Tunisia to Tel Aviv to Wall Street,” he says, “it’s clear that something is happening globally that needs defining.” Friedman isn’t content with a small idea—with saying something like “Many reasonable people have had it with an economic system that seems rigged in favor of the rich and powerful.” Instead, he offers us two big ideas purporting to explain what’s going on—the theory of “The Great Disruption” and the theory of “The Big Shift.”
The theory of “The Great Disruption,” derived from an eponymously titled book by Paul Gilding, an Australian environmentalist, argues that global social protests stem from the breakdown of institutions in growth-based capitalism. Global market capitalism led to large corporate profits and a plethora of filthy rich individuals, but it also gave us ecological catastrophes, profound disillusionment and a loss of wealth and hope—not merely for the poor, but for the middle class as well. This is why people are protesting.
The “Big Shift Theory” derives from the work of John Hagel III (co-director at the Deloitte Center for the Edge, a research institute whose Web site says it “helps senior executives make sense of and profit from emerging opportunities on the edge of business and technology”) and John Seely Brown, whose Web site lists him as “the independent co-chairman at the Deloitte Center,” as well as “Chief of Confusion.” This theory argues that people are protesting because we’re in the “early stage” of a “Big Shift” where institutions aren’t able to keep up with “the flow”—the “huge global flow of ideas, innovations, new collaborative possibilities and new market opportunities.” On this account, growth and prosperity are around the corner. As Friedman puts it, the “Big Shift Theory” says that all we need do is “tap into this flow effectively,” with “every company and individual … constantly growing their talents.” Friedman ends his column by saying he can’t decide which theory is right, asking his readers to decide.
In pondering Friedman’s challenge, I thought about how easy it is, even for experts, to miss what’s most significant about our own times. Which is simply a way of saying we need the hindsight of history in order to understand the present, and that without it, much of what passes for thinking is simply fancy guessing. Take the example of Eli Whitney’s invention of the cotton gin, in 1794, which everyone knew from the start marked a stunning technological breakthrough that would lead to an enormous increase in productivity. What no one foresaw is that down the road it would also lead to a dramatic increase in the demand for child and slave labor. That nettlesome law of unintended consequences has a nasty way of inserting itself into just about everything we human beings do.
Sometimes, you don’t need big theories or newly published books in order to understand what’s going on around you. You certainly don’t need to listen to someone who would feel the need to prove he’s clever by calling himself “Chief of Confusion.” And you don’t need to wait for history to help you out, either. Some things are eternal truths. I vote to reject both theories. Instead, to understand what OSW protesters are about, I propose people simply listen to a few lines from “Everybody Knows,” sung by the smokey-voiced Leonard Cohen:
Everybody knows that the dice are loaded/Everybody rolls with their fingers crossed/Everybody knows that the war is over/Everybody knows the good guys lost/Everybody knows the fight was fixed/The poor stay poor, the rich get rich/That’s how it goes/Everybody knows
