Reflections and Structures

Intrigued by reports of energetic Chinese moves in business in the recent past, I indulged in reading more on this subject. Beyond Lenovo’s takeover of IBM’s PC division, the Chinese business climate seems to be broadly speaking an enthusiastic one, with people looking forward to the future. They seize opportunities and feel that they know what they are working for. US News reports in their June 20^th issue of this year using a number of facts: “Last year Americans spent $162 billion more on Chinese goods than the Chinese spent on US products.” Or that Chinese GDP has grown from $1.1 trillion in 2000 to $1.6 trillion in 2005. The Chinese economy “growing at 9 percent per year, will most likely become the second largest in the world by 2020, behind only the United States.” In Shanghai, the queue (line) to Ikea’s parking lot is about on hour long, “the norm for a weekend.”

More interesting facts: “Universities in China issue about 160,000 advanced degrees every year—four times as many as in the United States. And they’re not knockoff diplomas. ‘The quality of university graduates is every bit as good as in other countries,’ says Bijan Dorri, managing director of [General Electric’s] China Technology Center.” Many well-educated Chinese simply “prefer China to the States. Chang Wei, an electrochemist, worked at a GE lab in upstate New York for several years, then [went back] two years ago. ‘It’s where the growth is right now,’ he says. ‘It gives me more responsibility and helps me grow.’”

Strange things happen too: the Chinese savings rate is “higher than 30 percent—compared with less than 2 percent in the United States” though “savings may drift down as Chinese consumers learn how to shop.” To be sure, it’s not all milk and honey. Systemic problems can easily be hinted at: the long-time unresolved intellectual property rights issue, or the fact that programmes “to automate parts of the state-owned railroad industry, which employs 20 million people” have not been accepted by the government for social reasons. (Sounds strangely familiar!)

For JCI (Junior Chamber International), a worldwide organization of young entrepreneurs which I am a member of, China has posed an interesting question. The Chinese were very interested in expanding the organization to their country and were prepared to join in very large numbers. So large, in fact, that simply accepting to go to China on those terms would have turned JCI into an organization that was more than half Chinese! Despite the large influx of dues they would have received, the decision was put on hold for the time being, insofar as I know.

Does this teach us anything? To me, it makes one major point: beyond cultural differences and the effects of an oppressive Communist regime which is beginning to give way to individual and collective freedoms (or perhaps because of these factors as well) I read a sense of purpose in the Chinese attitude and frame of mind. One can only imagine the enthusiasm of young Chinese when they see the opportunities available to them and to future generations—to have things they had not dreamed of, comforts and a worldly status achieved through one’s own efforts. Some of these values which Western societies have come to look down upon to some extent for being ‘just materialistic’ are vibrant ideals for newcomers to the world of wealth.

The sense of purpose and meaning is what people perhaps had after the Second World War, when they were reconstructing their world and bettering it, preventing future destruction, using the power of industry to create wealth for the masses. Thus, the baby boom generation happened as well in a period of great optimism that was surely crowned by a sense of meaning and determination. At the individual level life must have often seemed like a quest for a personal cause—a cause that was often shared with others of course, but which was awarded deep personal involvement.

Elsewhere in the world, in the western world in particular, we often complain nowadays about lacking that raison d’être. In Romania the evidence suggests that there is a hunger for such a sense of purpose. A recent Gallup study (2004) indicates that this very need for a “cause to personally believe in” is a major motivation for volunteering among young Romanians (over 53% of young volunteers have volunteered for this reason and 57% would volunteer on the same basis). While volunteering is not a direct measure of the ‘sense of meaning’ in society, the combination of willingness to give one’s own time and the personal involvement in the cause indicates there is much room to work in this direction. Favoured activities to carry out as a volunteer are “information or education,” “training/education within an organization,” “support, care for individuals, including counselling and visiting them,” “fundraising” and other activities such as “restoration of historical monuments” and “book donations.”

I wish we had more conclusive data on the ‘sense of meaning’ variable, but I have not found anything in that regard so far. In any case, the future is Chinese: that awareness combined with the intrinsic factors that lead to what I expect to be increasing happiness in China is something worthy of careful consideration from many perspectives. We will hopefully not put on our fearful, defensive hat—the one that has so often formed the core of our attitude, even in recent times.

This text is another translation excerpted from an article by Catalin Avramescu in a magazine called 22 (no. 804, 2-8 August 2005). I get a weekly series of newspaper and magazine clippings via email, including a ‘no comment’ piece which I find particularly interesting from someone called Alin Cristea. Details upon request. I got this piece as “no comment 33” and it included a photo of an iPod advertisement.

“The young people I saw, 150 in six days of interviews, did not represent the average product of Romanian education but were, most of them, over that level. They had been selected out of almost 200 candidates who applied to one of the most competitive sections at the University of Bucharest, and the interview took place in English. Forty state-funded scholarships were on offer. Three quarters of them intend to pursue a career in diplomacy. We are therefore not talking about your average graduate.

“Despite all this, what I have heard during this six-day interval does not leave room for any doubt. We are witnessing, in this country—and I am measuring my words—the Apocalypse of education.

“The first thing that shocked me in these young people is that, literally, many of them did not know what is going on. One of the fundamental purposes of any general education institution is to bring people to that state where they understand something about their place in the physical and social universe. However, it was hard to discover even traces of any knowledge of geography among the candidates to a faculty whose subject is politics, a science which studies states, usually. One places Japan in the Indian Ocean, another things Egypt is in Central America. A young lady does not know any cities in France, other than Paris, because she traveled directly to that place by bus, and another, who took part in a seminar organized in the building of the Hungarian Parliament, has no idea whether that location is in Buda or in Pest. And it’s not just physical geography that poses problems. Asked whether she can mention a few of the poorest countries in the world, a candidate suggests Kuwait, Bulgaria and Tasmania. Requested to indicate a few inventions that had an impact on politics in the last century, another candidate opts for the iPod, because the small portable player from Apple “allows us to always take information with us.” We will soon all need one, it seems.

“Even worse is the second thing that I discovered amongst many of these young people, that to them the mental line between reality and fiction is very confused. They seem to live in a world where there is no ontological difference between Napoleon and Pokemon or between Adolf Hitler and Batman. It’s not just that young people do not know history or are not interested in current political affairs. More profoundly, it is a sort of perplexed naïveté when facing the world, a wonder that people lived even before the mobile telephone. A candidate does not know who fought whom in the Second World War. Another states that the Cold War was between Kennedy and Churchill, on the one side, and Japan, on the other. In the Indian Ocean, I presume, but I was not inquisitive enough to ask.”

Two recent books have been “The Zahir” by Paulo Coelho and “Meaning” by Rubin Battino. The first I can simply say I highly recommend, it’s Coelho’s latest and perhaps most wonderful creation. The latter of the two is perhaps less well-known, but the mystery might be cleared to some extent if I add one titbit of extra information: it’s a theatre play on the life of Viktor Frankl, the eminent Austrian psychologist who founded the logotherapeutic school in Vienna. He was a survivor of the Holocaust; one could say that he survived by finding meaning in his life, in his suffering, in the random and not-so-random external events and influences that shaped his life. That meaning is always subject to adjustment and re-evaluation.

It would be far too much to attempt to summarize anything I have learnt from these books in only a few words. They would not do justice to the books themselves, either. I guess many people and many other books say that one should live life profoundly. That thence spring forth life energy and love of being, the sense of freedom, enjoyment and achievements, joy… the strength to love deeply and powerfully, without fear.

The trick, it seems, or at least one of the essential “tricks” is to not accept shallowness. More precisely, it’s essential to seek objectivity and to try and see reality for what it is. Both the reality of one’s own person and inner life as well as the reality of one’s outer environment—loved ones, society, profession, values, works and pleasures. We’ll never be objective and the idea is not to be objective for the sake of it, but to be objective in order to perceive reality with as little self-delusion, cultural bias, and as little distortion due to fear or to desire as possible. Not easy!

How do we do this? We don’t… a lot of the time. Anyway, it’s been impossible (so far) for me to generalize. I can know how *I* operate, and that’s about it—hard enough to do already! At best, I can help one or a few others on the(ir) way, and that’s a really lucky thing for me and for them. To generalize on this topic (to be objective) would be to go into the difficult territory of making a science out of something that is deeply personal. Psychology does a good job of this sometimes, and I have come to love, through personal contact with it, Viktor Frankl’s school.

The fact that in schools our education is primarily intellectual and at best profession-oriented, without emphasis on turning our young ones into “real people” (and here we run into very problematic definition problems) is something that really motivates me towards studying the subject and identifying the solutions available to the plague of un-authenticity that we so often suffer from.

What I mean by “real people” is already the subject of a scientific paper: it’s somewhere in the realm of psychology to identify this, however. People who represent the “Emotional Intelligence” school have something interesting to say about this, as do Frankl’s logotherapists and many others whom I have not studied at all. In everyday life, we tend to “know” or “feel” who is “real” and who is not. We sense a person who is “free” and one who is not, we can often correctly assess who is “happy” and who is not. Average people cannot define what they mean by these words, and I wonder whether even the experts can: it’s something I’d like to find out.

The second step would then be to identify the “how-to’s” that work. How do we shift from an un-real to a real state? From an un-happy to a happy state of being?

Further down the road, the question is how to implement those how-to’s proven to work on a society-wide level. Are there any solutions that can be used at policymaking-level?

If the answer is yes, then one would have to think how to influence policymakers towards taking the action steps that will lead to more real, more intimately free, more love-capable, happier individuals and societies.

Of course, I have started off by assuming that these are desirable things: first, perhaps, we’d need to prove that they are and then prove that they are economically not only feasible but that the economics is such that (economic) benefits far outweigh costs.

I’d love feedback on these thoughts. It’s a path I’m trying to go on, but the future, as always, does not readily reveal itself before the appointed time. How does one take to such a path?