Cooper: Did you grow up believing the myth that the U.S. is a model of democracy?

Korten: I sure did. In the years following World War II, it was easy to believe that we had the key to prosperity in this country. The U.S. had a growing middle class, within which there was relative equality, and this image gained us the admiration of the world. Years later, when I was out peddling the American way of economic development, the image of the U.S. in the 1950s still lingered and gave the story some credibility. But, starting in the late sixties and gaining momentum in the seventies and early eighties, the far Right mounted an attack on middle-class society. They developed a carefully orchestrated plan to take control of the political system and roll back the gains of the previous decades by giving tax breaks to the rich, cutting government programs, and promoting trade agreements that undermine democracy and outsource most of our well-paying blue-collar jobs to countries where workers are paid a pittance and have no rights.

We need to turn this around, and the change must come from the bottom up, for two reasons. One is that the institutions of Empire are unlikely to transform themselves. The other is that we have to move beyond the old twentieth-century method of revolution through armed conflict. Using violence to compete for power replicates the dominator dynamic we are trying to eliminate. 

Cooper: So this notion that one group of people must dominate another is so deeply ingrained within us that even the revolutionaries fall prey to it. How do we undo it?

Korten: First, we have to convince people that it can and must be undone, and that the most appropriate way to undo it is to create new cultures and institutions from the bottom up. We can’t use violence, because the means have to be consistent with the end. Nonviolence is the only path to a nonviolent world.

What we’ve so often seen is that, even if an armed revolution is successful, the imperial system remains, because the people who lead revolutions generally are not the most egalitarian among us. Once the new rulers get into power, they are sitting on the same old throne, and to stay in power they have to maintain those imperial structures. Sometimes they act benevolently, but more commonly they are as ruthless as the despots they replaced.

Cooper: But we have to have leaders, don’t we?

Korten: Of course, but rather than one leader, we need millions of them acting together through dynamic, cooperative processes of self-organization. The global-justice movement, which is self-organizing, with many thousands, even millions of local leaders, demonstrates the possibilities.

The most dramatic manifestation of this was the February 15, 2003, demonstration against the Iraq War. Anywhere from 10 to 30 million people participated in a unified protest action all around the planet. It was the result of innumerable individual leaders acting independently, but within a framework of shared values.

You could say the demonstration was a failure because it failed to stop the war, but this would reveal a serious lack of historical perspective. A pattern of domination and violence five thousand years in the making and deeply embedded in our cultures and institutions is not going to go away simply because 10 million people took to the streets on a particular day. Change will come only as “we the people” displace the institutions of Empire. We are just beginning to learn how to self-organize and cooperate on a global scale.

Cooper: It sounds like an almost organic process.

Korten: It certainly mimics what I understand to be the dynamics of healthy living systems. When I was first looking for a model for a new economics, I looked to biological systems for the needed organizing principles. Our conventional understanding of living systems is the Darwinian theory of ruthless competition. Modern biologists, however — particularly female biologists such as Janine Benyus, Mae-Wan Ho, Lynn Margulis, and Elisabet Sahtouris — have discovered that living systems are fundamentally cooperative. Obviously there are competitive dimensions; Darwin didn’t make that part up. But life can exist only in cooperative, sharing relationships with other life. Energy is constantly flowing back and forth among organisms, just as it is among the cells of a single organism.

Scientific estimates of the number of cells in the human body range from 30 to 70 trillion. All these individual decision-making cells come together in this extraordinary cooperative enterprise that has potential far beyond that of any one cell. We have the ability to move energy almost instantly from one part of us to another, wherever it’s needed, through processes we don’t fully understand. For the body to work, each cell needs to maintain its integrity as an independent being, yet be devoted to the health of the whole. So it’s constantly balancing the individual interest with the collective interest.

I think this is an apt metaphor for a healthy society. In my generation we were raised to believe that we were limited to a choice between two extremes for organizing human societies: a capitalist system based on extreme individualism, which denies a community interest; and a communist system based on extreme collectivism, which denies individual rights and interests. But healthy living organisms and ecosystems are constantly balancing individual and collective needs. Each depends on the other. That’s how we need to function in societies, and I think it’s the dynamic that’s arising in the new global-justice movement.

And thanks to breakthroughs in electronic communication, we now have the potential to connect every person on the planet in a seamless web of cooperation. Technology has given us the means to build a worldwide movement grounded in universal human values that transcend the barriers of nationality, race, gender, and religion. Back in the early eighties, even domestic long-distance phone calls were a significant expense, and the cost of international phone calls was prohibitive. Now we can telephone around the world for pennies. If we prefer to meet face to face, affordable airfares have made that easier, too. Add the Internet, and the joining of ordinary people in a collective struggle to create a more cooperative global structure becomes a real possibility for the first time in the whole of human experience.

Cooper: You titled your 1995 book When Corporations Rule the World. Are we facing corporate rule right now?

Korten: It surely appears that way, although that title is actually a misnomer. In truth it’s not the corporations that rule the world; it’s the global financial markets that play the tune to which corporations march.

Part of what is so pernicious about publicly traded corporations is that their only real accountability is to impersonal financial markets for which the only measurement that matters is instant profits. Trillions of dollars flow around the world each day, looking for a quick return. That system, in which speculators — euphemistically called “investors” — buy and sell corporations like commodities, has no capacity to recognize any value other than financial gain. Human and environmental costs are totally ignored, as is any other long-term consideration.

Cooper: Robert Hinkley, whom I interviewed for this magazine [“Twenty-Eight Words That Could Change the World,” September 2004], is working on an initiative to change the corporate code so that it reads, “The duty of directors henceforth shall be to make money for shareholders, but not at the expense of the environment, human rights, public health and safety, dignity of employees, and the welfare of the communities in which the company operates.”

Korten: Changing the rules to say profits should not come at the expense of public interests is an important step forward. By most accounts, current law requires corporate CEOs to make decisions that maximize short-term profits for shareholders in disregard of consequences for people and nature. It’s a murky area of law, because there’s not a specific piece of legislation that establishes this principle; it’s more an accumulation of court precedents. Still, most CEOs operate under the assumption that they’re legally bound to maximize profits. Hinkley’s plan is a step beyond conventional “corporate responsibility” initiatives, which press corporations to change specific social and environmental practices, but don’t change a pernicious legal structure that leaves do-gooder corporations at risk of shareholder lawsuits.

Another moral disability of the publicly traded corporation is absentee ownership. Its shares are traded in public share markets, which means they become instruments of speculation by traders, who are simply betting on future price movements and have no interest beyond quick financial gain. Most of the outstanding shares are held by financial institutions, which means the real owners often have no idea what companies they own or what those companies are doing. All they know is whether the value of their portfolio is going up
or down, and the sole demand they communicate to managers is to increase share price. The result is an extreme form of absentee ownership that separates the rights and powers of ownership from any personal responsibility or values. We need to move toward the elimination of absentee ownership.

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