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.

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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