The Ceramic Vs The Organic Worldview

Today in Sunday Letters, I am revisiting a topic I have written on before, an updated version of one I published in Nov 2023. Broadly speaking, there are two ways of viewing the world: the Ceramic (or hydraulic) view and the Organic view. The Ceramic worldview is individualistic and sees the world as concrete, solid, measurable, and definable. The world and everything in it, including people, is mere stuff to be manipulated. It can be collected, owned, bought, sold, killed, stuffed, put in boxes and hung on walls. Trophies that mark the exploits and successful adventures of men (because it's nearly always men). The ceramic view is characterised by fear, alienation, isolation, suspicion, and narcissism. It represents an idea of self as a lone entity in this universe.

The Ceramic Worldview

According to the Ceramic worldview, there is nothing beyond the physical world. Therefore, you must protect and control its spoils because there is always someone out to take what's yours. There must be a boss, and the boss must tell everyone else what to do and when to do it. Otherwise, people will be disorganised and unproductive. In this top-down approach, control and productivity are the keys to success. Data is how the ceramic worldview appraises your efforts, and your effort is the measure of your value to them. If you do not put in the effort, society will push you to the edges, and you will barely have the means to live.

The squeezed middle is where most people find themselves. On the rat wheel, constantly proving themselves worthy of existence, chasing the illusion of success. It's not that success is impossible, it's just that most of us follow someone else's concept. By default, we enter the workforce well-schooled on what it means to be a worthy member of society. In this rat race, if you cannot rent your body and mind to the system, to work your bollocks off for the best years of your life, then you do not deserve to have a roof over your head, good healthcare, food in your belly, and a sense of security. You are an input producing outputs and this drives the majority of human activity in Capitalism. Most people do ok, but this group is getting smaller and smaller as more people are pushed to the fringes.

“We should do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian Darwinian theory he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living.”

Richard Buckminster Fuller

The Organic Worldview

There is an alternative view, however; the Organic worldview. It is a collectivist view that sees the world and everyone in it as self-organised, self-sufficient, and self-supportive. This idea recognises that if left to our own devices, we will figure it out in the most optimal way and support one another in the process. The Organic worldview sees humans as inherently motivated toward the good life, creative and innovative. Given the right environment, we discover solutions to problems that benefit humanity as a whole and the wealth produced is shared by all. Buckminster Fuller wrote and lectured extensively on this idea and described Capitalism as fearfully-contrived wealth games of the powerful.

According to the organic view, there is nothing to lose and everything to gain. There is always enough for everyone. You lose today, you win tomorrow. There is no need to hoard, to manipulate, to steal either legally or illegally. In the individualistic ceramic worldview, however, everyone is a threat. If you don't get yours first, someone will get there before you. It's kill or be killed, and every man for himself. This is counter to the philosophy of Buckminster Fuller, who said, “nature is a totally efficient, self-regenerating system. If we discover the laws that govern this system and live synergistically within them, sustainability will follow and humankind will be a success.” And so, the Organic worldview sees benefit in the effort in and of itself rather than in the promise of reward, and competition is both unnecessary and detrimental to the collective.

The 22 Self Disciplines of Buckminster Fuller

Cognitivism Vs Behaviourism

In the Organic worldview, there is no boss, no bodied or disembodied entity motivating others through threat of punishment or reward. There is no single entity making it all happen. Cause and effect, the idea that someone or something must have initiated the process, that something triggered it way back in the beginning, are concepts of the ceramic worldview and linear thinking. Ceramic thinking is a primitive concept that sees the objective outcome and seeks a linear cause in time. It seeks the most simplistic answer ignoring the inherent complex nature of things. This idea played itself out impressively through the Behaviourist movement in the first half of the Twentieth Century.

Spearheaded by B.F. Skinner, the basic Behaviourist assumption was that cognition was irrelevant in human behaviour, language acquisition and personality formation. Instead, it was the environment and the threat of punishment or promise of reward that formed our being. Skinner argued that through principles of reinforcement, children acquired language and based his theories on experiments with caged animals such as pigeons, cats, and dogs, etc. Seems remarkable to us now that we could take seriously a theory of language or any other human behaviour formed on the basis of animal experiments, but there you are.

Thankfully, Cognitivist ideas began to take over academic thought on human behaviour, largely due to people like linguist Noam Chomsky. In the late 1950s, he rebuked Skinner's behaviourist ideas in 58-page paper titled A Review of B. F. Skinner’s Verbal Behaviour. Chomsky suggested that Skinner’s behaviourist framework failed to account for the complexity, creativity, and structure of human language. In his scathing critique, Chomsky said children acquire language rapidly and without explicit reinforcement, often generating novel and grammatically correct sentences they have never heard before. There is, therefore, a more complex aspect to language acquisition.

The Ceramic & Organic Worldview at Work

And so the dominance of behaviourism began to recede, but not disappear completely. The Organic worldview recognises the inherent complexity in the universe and in the matters of human life. It understands that it doesn't need to find the answer, that the answer will come of itself. In contrast to the ceramic worldview that trusts nobody, the organic worldview is inherently trusting. But we shouldn't confuse this with naivety. On the contrary, the organic worldview understands complexity and allows things to unfold naturally. It is the fear-based and materialist Ceramic worldview that is naive.

At work, this idea is vital to understand, especially when it comes to hiring people, forming teams and leading an organisation. Because you can't watch everyone all the time, or even some of the people some of the time. Research has shown that the performance of individuals at work can suffer dramatically when they are aware that someone is watching, surveilling, or micro-managing them. The Hawthorne Experiments demonstrated this fact one hundred years ago, and subsequent studies have continued to highlight it. There is an exception, however.

If tasks are simple and repetitive, surveillance may be effective. For example, where workers put widgets in boxes on an assembly line. However, if tasks are complex, such as creating improvements to the assembly line machinery, surveillance often has a negative impact on performance. This is because complex and novel situations require creativity, time, consideration, and often teamwork. If the pressure is on, minds don't have the comfort and space to create. Creativity is spontaneous, and human beings cannot be spontaneous on purpose and on command. This is a conflict of terms, can't you see? Besides, it's exhausting not to offer trust, and without it, there is no team. There is no collective energy moving in the same direction. Instead, lack of trust breeds a culture of individualism.

The workplace, as we have largely constructed it, is a fake plastic environment where people pretend. They put on a show, and sometimes they do a “good” job of it. They may even fool themselves most of the time that it's wonderful to work there. However, they do not really invest themselves because they preface their day with the unconscious need to protect themselves from criticism. You'll come to know this when the shit hits the fan, because when it does, your people will be incapable of solving problems. Surveillance and micromanagement have quite literally trained people to simply execute on command. The psychological, emotional, and intellectual capacity to come up with solutions to the novel problems that shit hitting the fan creates will be absent.

In summary

Not only in the workplace, but everywhere people come together with a collective goal, we must cultivate an environment of trust, one where people are autonomously motivated and supported, where they feel competent, and a part of something worthwhile. Without that, we are merely automatons and AI enabled robotics will replace us sooner or later. To do that, we must somehow unwind from the materialist mindset of Ceramicism.

The universe is self-organising; we don't need to force its conformity. That said, I understand it may be hard to conceive given where we are. But I don't think we have a choice if we are to survive as a species. Arguably, some cultures understand this and work well, but I think our societies have become to large and impersonal. We live in cities with millions of people yet we walk past each other in the street, competition everywhere, immersed in our own drama. In contrast, in the countryside where people are fewer, they are friendlier and look out for one another. Ironic really. In our large densly packed cities, so many of us and we are alone.

I think we have hit a wall in this last one hundred and fifty years or so. We have become more proficient at killing people, we are creating more waste than ever, and climate change is well-underway. There may be no way to reverse things, but I'm optimistic nonetheless. Optimistic because I think we will eventually have to wake up to the fact the life is organic, self-generating and self-supporting, not material and mechanical. The psychopathic, narcissistic human mind that believes that competition is necessary for survival will eventually die off because it is primitive.

What do you think?

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