Everybody Wants To Rule The World

David Korten On Putting An End To Global Competition

Conservative. That’s the word David Korten uses to describe his upbringing. He grew up in the forties and fifties in the Pacific Northwest town of Longview, Washington, where his father owned a music-and-appliance store. In college Korten became active in the Young Republicans and planned, upon graduation, to return home and run the family business. “I had little interest in travel,” he writes, “beyond visiting the mountains and nearby seashore . . . and found it a bit odd that anyone blessed with U.S. citizenship would want to venture beyond our national borders."

His plans would soon change. In 1959, during his senior year at Stanford University, Korten took a class in modern revolutions. Upon learning that communist uprisings grew out of the “desperation of the poor,” Korten decided to dedicate his life to spreading the U.S. model of capitalism abroad. He envisioned a world in which impoverished peoples “could all be rich, happy consumers like us.” He went on to get a PhD from Stanford Graduate School of Business, and, after serving as a captain in the U.S. Air Force, Korten spent nearly three decades working in international development in Africa, Latin America, and Asia.

His time overseas slowly transformed his view of his nation’s role in the world; he saw firsthand the negative impact U.S. business practices and foreign policies had on the economies, political systems, and environments of other nations. As his dismay at the U.S.-led “aid” system deepened, Korten decided to return home to share with Americans the lessons he’d learned. In 1992 Korten and his wife, Fran, moved to New York City. There, in the shadow of the New York Stock Exchange, he wrote his bestseller When Corporations Rule the World (Berrett-Koehler and Kumarian Press), which is now required reading in many college-level business and politics courses.

While writing that book, Korten helped form the International Forum on Globalization, a group of activists who opposed trade agreements that benefited transnational corporations and disenfranchised the poor. Though the agreements were promoted as spreading global cooperation, as Korten and others saw it, they actually put every person and community on the planet in competition with one another for the economic means of survival. Corporate lobbyists called the process “globalization.” A powerful global resistance emerged that became known to its participants and the public as the “antiglobalization” movement. Korten sees the use of this name by many in the movement as a tactical error, because it allowed globalization proponents to brand the movement as regressive and isolationist. In fact the movement favors building inclusive global relationships; it just rejects the globalization of corporate power.

These days Korten lives on Bainbridge Island, Washington. His experience growing up as the son of a local businessman serves him well in his position as a board member of the Business Alliance for Local Living Economies. He also founded the People-Centered Development Forum, of which he continues to serve as president, and is cofounder and board chair of the Positive Futures Network, which publishes the magazine YES! (www.yesmagazine.org). His other books include The Post-Corporate World: Life after Capitalism (Berrett-Koehler and Kumarian Press). In 2001 Worth magazine listed Korten as one of “one hundred people who have changed the way Americans think about money.”

In his newest book, The Great Turning: From Empire to Earth Community (Berrett-Koehler and Kumarian Press), Korten describes humanity as having arrived at a crossroads (www.greatturning.org). The earth’s carrying capacity is reaching its limit, he says, pushing us to a crisis point. “We either transform our social relationships in the direction of community and partnership,” he writes, “or we continue on a basically suicidal path of social and environmental disintegration.” He believes that the key to the turning is to change our cultural narrative — the archetypal stories that define a society’s values.

Cooper: You’ve long been an opponent of corporate globalization. In The Great Turning you’ve broadened your critique to include all forms of capital-E “Empire.”

Korten: Corporate globalization is a contemporary manifestation of a system of Empire that was introduced about five thousand years ago, when the city-state began to take form and, according to Riane Eisler, author of The Chalice and the Blade, the human race went from more egalitarian, peaceful, and gender-balanced societies to ones built on patriarchy, domination, and war. Eisler’s analysis helps us see how, when you move into a structure of domination at a national level, it is mirrored at all levels, including in relationships among people.

Cooper: What led humanity along that path?

Korten: Eisler says it began with the invasion of settled agricultural societies by more-nomadic warrior cultures. She doesn’t go into great detail, but Toronto author Brian Griffith, in his book Gardens of Their Dreams, provides an extraordinary analysis of how that transition probably took place. What’s fascinating to me is the connection with the environment. You see, most of the deserts in the Middle East were once fertile, habitable land. But, Griffith explains, a combination of climate change, misuse of the soil, and overpopulation brought a transformation from lush savanna to desert. Societies built on natural abundance became forced to adapt to scarcity and hardship. In the abundance societies, we think women played significant roles in agriculture and religion, as evidenced by the worship of fertility and earth goddesses. But as the desert spread, farming became less productive, and the men had to venture farther and farther on hunts. Ultimately this led to raids on societies that had maintained their abundance around oases or along rivers, and then to the conquest and occupation of those areas. Griffith shows how similar dynamics in other regions of the world also led to patriarchal societies based on domination.

Cooper: What got you thinking about the deeper roots of the problem?

Korten: In the nineties the global-justice movement was primarily concerned with free-trade agreements, the outsourcing of jobs, outrageous CEO compensation packages, and so on. After the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, however, the Bush administration successfully branded any kind of resistance or opposition to trade as support for terrorism. This threw the movement into disarray and created the need for a new organizing framework.

In the summer of 2002 I met with Indian environmental activist Vandana Shiva. We were talking about the turmoil within the movement. What the Bush administration had done after 9/11 was go back to the use of naked military force to impose order and promote U.S. interests. This strategy was hardly new, but it was not part of the organizing framework of the global-justice movement, which had arisen in opposition to global free trade. Since the movement had begun, the military had operated largely in the background, and economic domination had been the primary tool for consolidation of imperial power. Shiva noted that, in response to this new development, we were beginning to hear explicit talk of U.S. empire among influential policy analysts. That made me think of Eisler’s book.

Cooper: You use the word empire a little differently than historians do. What is your definition?

Korten: I use Empire as a generic label for the dominator model of organizing human affairs — any system in which one person, people, or nation dominates another. It is a way of thinking and being that has held human societies in an insidious trap for the past five millennia. Andrew Schmookler, in his book Parable of the Tribes, says you may have twelve peaceful societies living in harmony with one another, but if you have a thirteenth that mobilizes to dominate its neighbors, it upsets the whole balance. The others have to adapt or die.

The competition inherent in the dominator system creates a hierarchy in which you have a few on the top and a majority on the bottom. If you’re on top, it works out very nicely; you can simply deny the humanity of those on the bottom by defining them as lesser beings who are therefore not entitled to positions of power.

Cooper: But we have evolved since those days.

Korten: We have evolved, but a whole lot less than our history books would have us believe.

Another trait of the dominator society is that it expropriates the majority of its resources to maintain the systems of domination: military, police, symbols of power, and so forth. For most of recorded human history, monarchy or its functional equivalent was the favored system of governance. Then came the American Revolution, and the Founders created the prototype of a modern democratic state. But the original Constitution — which didn’t include the Bill of Rights and other later amendments — was written by white males of the owning class, and they created a document that institutionalized the power of white, male property owners. The legalization of slavery was written into the Constitution, for example. Women didn’t get to vote until 1920.

The Declaration of Independence had been a revolutionary document, appealing to the masses, who had already begun a rebellion. But when it came time to write the Constitution, which would dictate how the country would be run, the Founders built in safeguards to protect a privileged ruling class. For example, they left decisions regarding the process of selecting senators and representatives and electors, who would choose the president, in the hands of the state legislatures, most of which limited the vote to white males with property. Our history since then has been a long struggle to undo those inequalities. We’ve made progress, but we need to get rid of the myth that we started out with a perfect democracy. Much of the limited democracy we have now has been achieved only through persistent popular struggle. One good thing George W. Bush has done is rub our noses in just how limited and fragile our democracy remains to this day.

The Founders did make two extraordinary contributions to democracy by ending monarchy and theocracy. Most of the original North American colonies were founded as theocracies — governments whose laws are based on religion. The law in many of these colonies called for the execution of those who failed to observe prescribed religious practices, like attending church on Sunday. When the Right says we were founded as a “Christian nation,” they are really referring to this early colonial experience. They generally neglect to mention the execution part.

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