The Use & Misuse of Loyalty & Goodwill to create a SOCIETAL SUPER-DISRUPTOR

A companion piece to 'Machines' Inhumanity to Man?' and part of the Earthquake Series. What is the likely new shift in human behavior? And why?

We are currently going through a once-in-every-few-centuries fundamental shift in human nature.

This time the upheaval is global but specifically targets Western civilization. The civilization that led the way into modernity through rationalism, science and capitalism is now re-cast by many as the Devil incarnate. An Elite Class (as Matt Goodwin labels the politicians, unelected experts, commentators and others who now run Western countries), who are least affected by the changes that are occurring, see it as advantageous to side with the proposed New World Order. This has meant that, for the past three decades, Western governments of all shades have persistently broken promises that they made in order to get themselves elected.

Everything that is happening has been enabled by a new communications system that I’ll outline shortly. First, however, just consider for a moment the meta environment that has emerged since around 1990.

It all represents a fairly general pile-on, but some of the features and consequences of the upheaval that we are confronting are particularly clear to see. They include:

• an extraordinary expansion and availability of knowledge, information and entertainment … which may also be viewed as a never-ending avalanche of ‘stuff’ that may or may not be true and may or may not be well-intended;

• screen-based lives, with access to, and participation in, all of that knowledge, information and entertainment … which may also be viewed as the most effective means thus far created to disconnect and fragment everyone in relation to the world around us;

• globalization, with the positive ability to harness, better care for and share global resources … which may also be viewed as the biggest threat yet to long-established human connections, and a generator of dissatisfaction, civilizational friction, migration and potential conflict on a global scale.

All of which is to say we are in the midst of a huge reinvention of human experience and, potentially, human nature.

Self-evidently, this is a big deal. A very big deal indeed. As a consequence, we, as a species, are experiencing a broad spectrum of heightened emotions, including some of the most uncomfortable feelings like confusion, uncertainty, anxiety and outright terror.

This is completely unsurprising. Why? Because we ain’t ever been here before!

The question is, is there any way that we might alleviate the discomfort, and avoid any potentially disastrous wrong turns?

Well, the human race has faced similar (but different) challenges before via the once-in-every-few-centuries fundamental shifts that occur in human thinking. Perhaps looking back might help us look forward? Let’s give it a try.

Plus, this is intimately intertwined with some of what I included in the first part of this tale, Machines’ Inhumanity to Man. There, I promised to expand on “the mindset changes that are linked” to each of the fundamental shifts in human nature that I christened Drucker Transformations, in honour of twentieth-century management guru Peter Drucker.

So, here goes …

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Only communication can communicate - NOT bodies or minds!

Here are the opening lines of a play by Georg Büchner (1813-1837 - the poor chap died from typhus aged just 23). The play is Danton’s Death and the script is an updated version by Howard Brenton, first performed in 2010 at the UK’s National Theatre. The play is about the French Revolution, a cause close to Büchner’s heart because the young man did consider himself a revolutionary. The play opens with Georges Danton and his wife, Julie.

Danton and Julie. He is sitting at her feet.

Julie Darling Georges, do you trust me?

Danton How can I tell? We’re lumbering, thick-skinned animals. Our hands reach out to touch, to feel, but the strain’s pointless. All we can do is blunder around, rubbing our leathery hides up against each other. We’re very much alone.

Julie But you know me, Danton.

Danton I know your dark eyes, your curly hair, your fine skin, and that you call me ‘darling Georges’. But! (He points to his forehead and eyes.) Here, here, what lies behind here? Our senses are crude. We’d have to crack open our skulls to know each other, tear out each other’s thoughts from the fibre of the brain.

There’s the point … each of us is an isolated, sealed unit. In particular, our brains are, quite literally, sealed units.

Your brain can access the world only via your eyes, ears, nose, mouth and touch receptors. We use our senses to assess what another person believes and the purpose and quality of how they feel and act … but it’s all second-hand - or, perhaps more precisely, ‘second-brain’.

That’s it, folks. That’s the point. We are only ever able to interpret the ideas, thoughts, statements and actions of others rather than actually knowing for certain what is felt and intended.

What, you may ask, about empathy and compassion? The point is, when we attempt to understand and/or align with another’s situation and feelings, we are only able to do so from the basis of our own feelings and experience.

This insight, so succinctly expressed by Büchner (and Brenton). was lighted upon by German sociologist and philosopher Niklas Luhmann (1927-1998) and used in his pioneering work on function systems. Here, Luhmann outlines the idea as it applies to ‘a communication system’ …

Within the communication system we call society, it is conventional to assume that humans can communicate. Even clever analysts have been fooled by this convention. It is relatively easy to see that this statement is false and that it only functions as a convention and only within communication. The convention is necessary because communication necessarily addresses its operations to those who are required to continue communication. Humans cannot communicate; not even their brains can communicate; not even their conscious minds can communicate. Only communication can communicate.¹

This paragraph is mind-blowing. To my mind, anyway :-)

For a start, think about the first phrase: “Within the communication system we call society”. Wow! Society defined, not as a group of like-minded people, but rather as a communication system. That, in and of itself, is surely fascinating, challenging and important.

Luhmann’s thesis rests on the identification of various ‘function systems’ and the way that they evolve. Which happens, he proposes, through a process he calls autopoiesis …

… a neologism made up of two ancient Greek components autos (“self”) and poiesis (“production”) …²

Autopoiesis is the basis of operation of many biological functions and Luhmann posited that the same mechanism is at work in other existential systems.

A crucial feature of Luhmann’s thinking is that the various function systems are discrete - operationally closed. If this is the case, it follows that the automatic evolutionary developments of autopoiesis happen within operationally closed systems.

The implications of this are profound. Not least, it means that ‘Minds’, ‘Bodies’ and ‘Society’ are actually separate.

Take, for example, that which you are now reading. In and of itself it evidences the fact that I cannot communicate with you directly with my mind or brain. Rather, I have to do it via a communication - and I am only able to do that via a ‘communicative operation’ which, in this instance, is the written word.

Luhmann’s theory leads to the conclusion that there are three types of system:

• systems of life (bodies, brains etc.)

• systems of consciousness (minds)

• systems of communication (social systems)

Each of the three systems operates within the environment of the others, but each is operationally closed. When changes are made in any one of these three systems the outcomes are likely to be profound: unquestionably so when changes to the communication system are involved. And that’s what’s happening right now.

So, can viewing things from this perspective illumine anything extra about the overall situation in which we currently find ourselves? I investigate this topic below but, before doing so, let me reintroduce the idea of periodic changes in human nature.

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New comms tech really messes with the societal status quo …

In an earlier post I introduced the idea of the ‘Drucker Transformation’. Here, again, is Drucker’s 1990s quote that gave rise to my affectionate labeling of the every-few-hundred-years events that bring radical social change:

Every few hundred years in Western history there occurs a sharp transformation. ... Within a few short decades, society rearranges itself – its world view; its basic values; its social and political structure; its arts; its key institutions. Fifty years later there is a new world. And the people born then cannot even imagine the world in which their grandparents lived and into which their own parents were born. We are currently living in such a transformation.³

I subsequently concluded that there are three ingredients in any Drucker Transformation (DT):

• A new technology (T)

• A socio-moral shift (S)

• Censorship (C)

And here is a thumbnail list of DTs:

1. The Axial Age - (T) ? … (S) human consciousness of ‘being’ … from mythos to logos, from gods to God. (C) religious diktats. Effect fully experienced from, say, 500 B.C.E. in China, India and the West.

2. The Individual Age - (T) the printing press with movable type … (S) the Protestant Reformation … (C) religious censorship. Effect fully experienced from, say, 1600 in Europe.

3. The Age of Enlightenment - (T) the telegraph & steam engine … (S) from Georgian to Victorian values, “from Merry England to Busy England”⁴ … (C) hypocrisy & cant. Effect fully experienced from, say, 1800 in Europe and America.

4. The Digital Age - (T) the internet & iPhone … (S) an end to anthropocentrism and reassessment of Western history … (C) a kind of ‘secular religion’ & ‘wokeness’ … Effect fully experienced from, say, 2020 (?) globally.

If we go along with Luhmann’s thinking it seems to me that, specifically, a new communications technology is likely to be disproportionately disruptive because of the impact on the communication system that is Society. Here is Luhmann again:

The relationship of the accommodation of communication to the mind and the unavoidable internal dynamics and evolution of society is also evident in the fact that changes in the forms in which language becomes comprehensible to the mind, from simple sounds to pictorial scripts to phonetic scripts and finally to print, mark thresholds of societal evolution that, once crossed, trigger immense impulses of complexity in a very short time. It took only a few centuries for the effects of the alphabet to become apparent. The same is true for the introduction of printing in Europe, and an equally radical change was accomplished with the transmission of printing to other cultures in less than a hundred years.

In the classical Darwinistic evolutionary scheme, these kinds of radical breaks in continuity are difficult to explain when compared with relatively long periods of only slight structural change. The theory of autopoietic systems provides the foundation for new possibilities. The possibilities for complexity in autopoietic systems are subject to quick and abrupt change when the conditions of their operative and structural linkage with the required environment change; or in our case, when communication’s formation of the mind creates new possibilities for itself.⁵

Note that last point: “when communication’s formation of the mind creates new possibilities for itself.”

Which is exactly what has happened in the current instance: we are experiencing a radical break in continuity, an abrupt change, a giant leap, enabled by unleashing the burgeoning powers of digital technology.

It is not surprising. After all, courtesy of the smartphone, for the first time in human history, a majority of people in the world have access to current and ongoing visual and textual information about … well … the world.

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… to the extent of triggering mutations in human nature!

So what’s the result in human terms? In a word, profound. It is surely hardly surprising, therefore, that we are currently experiencing some dramatic shifts and disruptions in human behaviour.

Let’s try to put things in some kind of sequence.

From the start of the Axial Age and through until around the year 1600 in the West, we humans classified ourselves in terms of, so to say, position. You were what you were born to be. From peasants to kings & queens, and every step between, you were part of a fixed panorama, and would be judged on the basis of your performance in your assigned, immutable role.

SINCERITY

The measure of performance in the above scenario became labelled Sincerity. The definition of Sincerity had to do with ‘truth’, ‘integrity’, ‘purity’ - it was normal, back then, apparently, to refer to, for example, ‘a sincere wine’. (Trilling)

But, then, around the year 1600, there was a shift. And it happened after the major comms tech revolution led by the printing press with movable type. This really stirred things up because a) it enabled the spread of information of all kinds and b) prompted people to undertake new ways of thinking and doing things.

The shift prompted by Gutenberg’s press (1455) led to the human mutation around about the year 1600.

As an aside, it occurs to me that this may help explain William Shakespeare’s success. He had the genius to somehow comprehend what was going on, allied with an unparalleled skill to re-present it.

The printing press enabled a cascade of huge changes. Take, for instance, the invention, in England, of capitalism. Printing enabled and supported new business practices, and those practices led to capitalism:

[T]he capitalist era dates from the sixteenth century, for ‘the circulation of commodities is the starting-point of capital, and so the modern history of capital dates from the creation in the sixteenth century of a world-embracing commerce and a world-embracing market: this is the ‘manufacturing period’ which lasts from the middle of the sixteenth to the last third of the eighteenth. England was seen as the first European nation to take an economic path that others would follow.⁶

So, a communication system initiated and enabled truly major change and, inter alia, it opened up the possibility that a human might not be locked into a predetermined role but, rather, might adopt a different role or, of course, several roles.

SINCERITY >  AUTHENTICITY

This prompted American literary critic and academic, Lionel Trilling, to argue that the human mindset shifted from Sincerity to Authenticity⁷. Trilling sums Authenticity up as follows:

It is a word of ominous import. As we use it in reference to human existence, its provenance is the museum, where persons expert in such matters test whether objects of art are what they appear to be or are claimed to be, and therefore worth the price that is asked for them - or, if this has already been paid, worth the admiration they are being given.⁸

As time passed, authenticity has, to an ever greater extent, implied a deep dive into the self. If one’s role is not predetermined, who and what the hell are you?

To answer this question, here’s another voice, one that brings the topic right up to date and prepares the ground for the next big shift:

In authenticity, along with its inward turn on the quest for identity, a shift from role ethics to an individualist ethics takes place. Now, the dignity and rights of the ‘single individual’ are of prime importance. Is he fostering the unique individuality of his children? Is his work original? The current human rights discourse, with its focus on personal freedom, reflects this turn to authenticity. For sure, values of sincerity are not entirely neglected, but they tend to be regarded as problematic when they do not make room for pursuit of authenticity. A regime of authenticity requires constant concern with and emphasis on uniqueness, creativity, and autonomy. One must not only strive for these values but also voice one’s support for them. Otherwise it is difficult to find recognition, to distinguish oneself, and to accrue moral value of one’s identity.⁹

The above comes from the pen of Hans-Georg Moeller (he, note, of the explication of Niklas Luhmann’s work) and Paul J. D’Ambrosio.

SINCERITY >  AUTHENTICITY > PROFILICITY

Moeller and D’Ambrosio draw on, inter alia, the Luhmann canon to reach their conclusion that the latest shift in human nature is to what they label Profilicity which they introduce as follows:

Today, society has switched almost entirely to second-order observation. This means, in line with sociologist Niklas Luhmann’s usage of the term, we do not simply look at people or issues directly but rather at how they are seen publicly by others. To judge a restaurant, we look first at its reviews on Yelp! - and later judge our experience in reference to what we read. We have developed the ability to judge products in terms of brands, and people in terms of their profile.¹⁰

Well, that sounds plausible to me. And it acknowledges the fact that only communication can communicate, and that the twenty-first century version of the communication system we call society presents extraordinarily different opportunities and challenges to anything that has gone before.

These are early days in the new era and yet some of the effects of the abrupt changes to our human operating systems are clearly in evidence. Our human evolutionary mechanisms are no match, in terms of speed anyway, for these abrupt changes. In particular, the problems they are causing for children and young adults, have been identified, and are being responded to by Jonathan Haidt and others.

But it is not just young people who are affected. There is surely a more general discombobulation epidemic - a sense of confusion and discomfort for many.

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So how might we bring everything together?

If the new communication system inevitably constitutes our New Society, why do so many people feel such discombobulation?

Certainly, one answer is that the new features of our social landscape have been installed at the expense of our ability to communicate in the moment. How so? Because many of the interactional clues and triggers that our human system has relied upon for millennia have, perforce, been jettisoned.

Which is a good place for me to introduce my colleague and friend, Dr. Olaf Hermans, who describes himself as concerned with “Safe engaging conversations with each about the whole moving forward”. I like that.

I’ll expand on this topic, with, I hope, direct contribution from Dr. Hermans, in an upcoming post. In the meantime, right now, here’s a snippet from him:

People are having emotions, the full range of emotions, because people have no clue. Our emotions are our survival system. We don’t know what to think. Stuff is coming at us, true and not true, and our range of emotions goes all over the place because we are in survival anxiety mode.

Plus, it’s not just ‘stuff’ that is thrown at us – it’s also the uncertainty about where the others are - “Where are the others in all of this?”. There’s a synchronization issue.¹¹

Dr. Hermans’ dissertation was about relationship quality and loyalty in a customer-supplier relationship setting. But it did not come to what were the ‘usual’ conclusions of the time.

This was 2018 and I had already passed the normal retirement age following a several-decades-long career in Sales & Marketing. By which time I had long since become wary of Marketing’s tendency to make claims all wrapped up in a word soup of Customer-this and Customer-that.

Maybe the term Customer Service started it all. Very matter of fact. But then, in the 1980s, Customer Value (CV) came into vogue. Around the millennium, enter Customer Relationship Management (CRM). Then Customer Experience (CX) and, latterly, Customer Advocacy (CA), Customer Success (CS) and Customer Health (CH). Alongside all this, companies were encouraged to be Customer-focused, Customer-led, even Customer-driven and, at all costs, Customer-centric.

And, throughout all of this, one term that figured high and proud was Customer Loyalty. This, folks were assured, was a key to business success.

But what was Customer Loyalty? Well, to a large extent, it was simply a customer’s predisposition to ‘buy more of our stuff’. And that was supposed to be a capacity that one ‘built’.

Well, okay, but then along came Dr. Hermans and persuasively showed that Loyalty happens in a different way than we marketers had spouted for years.

How embarrassing.

More than that, Dr. Hermans’ work persuaded me that Loyalty is a component, much more broadly, of our best capacity as humans. And to that he added another virtue - Goodwill.

So, he persuasively argued, Loyalty and Goodwill are fundamental drivers of human success in life generally, not just in the business world.

And this is where, until a couple of days ago, I would have ended this post. But then I read this:

FROM DECOLONIZATION TO ISLAMISM: CIVILIZATION UNDER SIEGE?

Reading it, and a great deal of my local UK news, I pondered where the Loyalty and Goodwill of our political overlords lies. Based upon recent events in the UK it seems that the Elite Class is backing the New World Order. (See also the Matt Goodwin link early in this post.) So much for democracy.

Let’s face it, you know things are pretty weird when this headline can appear: Russia offers safe haven for people trying to escape Western liberal ideals.

Thanks for reading. By the way, any political opinions expressed and implied in this post are mine and mine alone.

1. Luhmann, Niklas. How Can the Mind Participate in Communication? In Materialities of Communication, edited by H.U. Gumbrecht and K.L. Pfeiffer. Stanford University Press, 1994.

2. Moeller, Hans-Georg. Luhmann Explained: from Souls to Systems (2006)

3. Drucker, Peter. Post-Capitalist Society (1993)

4. Wilson, Ben. Heyday: Britain and the Birth of the Modern World (2016)

5. Luhmann, Niklas. ibid.

6. Macfarlane, Alan. The Origins of English Individualism (1978)

7. Trilling, Lionel. Sincerity and Authenticity (1971, 1972)

8. Trilling, Lionel. Ibid.

9. Moeller, Hans-Georg and D’Ambrosio, Paul J. You and Your Profile: Identity After Authenticity (2021)

10. Moeller & D’Ambrosio. Ibid.

11. Dr. Olaf Hermans and the author in conversation 17 August 2024.