Kort Explores conundrums of the human condition

We like to think that humans are purposeful creatures. We seek to find purpose within ourselves, and in the world around us. We obsess over finding purpose where there is no reason for it to exist. Most of all, we seek a purpose for our lives, and to live purposefully.

One of the most profound differences between people has always been whether the purpose they seek is internal or external, individual or collective. The nature of the purpose we seek will have a profound influence on our individual world views, and the nature of the societies we form.

We form societies at various levels for a variety of purposes. Some societies are voluntary, while others are imposed by external factors regardless of the consent of the participants. Every society is arguably some mixture of individual and collective, internal and external purposes. Conflicting purposes are one of the most effective ways to destroy a society from within.

There is a common tension that eventually makes an appearance in most societies. On one side are those who are unsatisfied in some way with/by their own participation, and seek to change the nature of society to better fit their vision of what it should be. On the other side are those who resist what they see as unnecessary or even harmful changes. The concept of "purpose" is often at the core of the controversy, but while both sides are fond of the term, their favored definitions are quite different.

The crux of the issue is the purpose of participation. Does society exist independent of the participation of its members, or only as an extension/result/consequence of member participation? Do members participate in order to be part of a collective purpose, or is their participation itself their individual objective? Is the purpose of our participation the collective product of our efforts, or the ongoing individual experience of participating at our own chosen level? Do we exist for our own purposes as independent individuals, or to fulfill a role in a larger collective purpose?

The question of purpose is being raised today at every level, from social organizations like Intertel to national and international levels. Changes in the fundamental nature of societies are being demanded by a variety of factions and special interest groups motivated by dynamics and objectives they often don't fully understand. Some of these demands may be valid. Far too many of them are simply the misguided efforts of those who have failed to learn from history and are determined to repeat the mistakes of the past.

Hi-IQ societies like Intertel provide a useful microcosm of society in general. The myth of intelligence would have us believe that smart people are able to live more intelligently by using their enhanced brain power to overcome the flaws and foibles of lesser minds. To the contrary, most Hi-IQ societies have gone through tumultuous periods, demonstrating that tested IQ doesn't necessarily translate into an ability to apply that alleged intelligence in the real world. The histories of Hi-IQ societies would seem to indicate that tested IQ most often manifests itself as an amplifier of the same human failings that bedevil the rest of humanity. Like enlarging a photograph, the resulting increased dynamic range makes it easier to identify individual aspects, and provides at least the illusion of easier after-the-fact analysis.

It's been reported that societies of all kinds have been experiencing a decline in their membership rolls. Intertel hasn't escaped the trend entirely, although it appears the effect on Intertel has so far been less traumatic than for some other social and professional groups. It appears "gen-Xers" aren't joiners - either social, professional, or political. Natural attrition will eventually doom any society that doesn't bring in enough new members to at least replace those it loses. Intertel's long term future ultimately depends on attracting new members, but its near term future depends on keeping its current members.

It's been suggested that Intertel needs to offer a collective purpose in order to attract members from the younger generations. We're advised that young people today expect any organizations they join to provide them with membership in a larger purpose - to offer them purpose through their membership in addition to supporting their individual purpose as a member.

While the concept seems laudable on the surface, implementing it without compromising the fundamental principles of our society, and the source of our past and current success, has been - and will always be - an exercise fraught with potential traps and minefields.

By definition, Hi-IQ societies are populated by individuals with at least exceptional potential if not deliverable performance. There seems to be an almost irresistible attraction to seeing the collective potential of the membership as an underutilized asset just waiting for the right leader to put it to good use. And yet, nearly every effort to harness this potential "for the greater good" has failed.

Limited association with an appropriate cause is a time honored form of advertising and self-promotion, and one that works on most any level. Mensa has gotten a lot of promotional mileage out of its support of public service programs like MERF, without compromising its internal purpose at the individual level. The public name recognition Intertel would gain through association with just the right collective purpose could easily provide the most cost effective advertising we could ever hope to find.

But even the most limited adoption of a collective purpose is not without hazards. In spite of the best of intentions, some of those hazards can indirectly cause undesirable changes in the vary nature of society, destroying the very aspects they intended to preserve.

To understand the dangers we face venturing down this road, we must consider the kinds of ulterior motives and agendas that are typically drawn to such opportunities. Some advocates of collective purpose are no doubt motivated by only the purest of intentions. Some aren't aware of the subconscious motivations they seek to justify behind a facade of pure intentions. Others have less honorable motivations for intentionally seeking to deceptively manipulate the collective purpose of a group.

Most of us have had some experience with the various attempts at collective internal purposes that have caused such dissension, fragmentation, and even schisms in so many Hi-IQ societies. The Intertel of today is itself the decedent of a splinter group that rebelled against a ruling clique that thought control over the organization would give them control over the members. The original group died when most of the members abandoned it.

The desire to restructure the internal dynamics of society to achieve externally defined goals appears to be one of humanity's most common flaws. Artificial manipulation of group membership, arbitrary restrictions on the nature and/or content of events and publications, and power struggles for control of "leadership" positions, are all well established tools for manipulating the nature of member participation in order to advance a collective agenda.

But internal purposes are only part of the collectivist spectrum. The advocates of collective purposes will often join forces to promote a competitor's agenda in the hope that they will be able to substitute their own variation in the future. Just opening the door to the possibility of adopting a collective purpose can result in a relentless assault from all directions that eventually wears down the resistance of even the most ardent opponents. The greater the value members place on their membership, the more useful control over it becomes as a means of extorting cooperation. Any collective purpose must be clearly defined and carefully limited so that it doesn't turn into a monster later on.

Ideally, a collective purpose will attract the attention of prospective members, who will be even more attracted to our society on an individual level once they become aware of us. But by establishing a public association between our society and a collective purpose, we risk attracting those who will want to turn our limited collective purpose into the primary focus of our society. We also risk attracting those who think our acceptance of a collective purpose implies acceptance of a means of exerting control over individual members, or are driven by the misconception that the Intertel membership is an exploitable collective resource.

Assuming there is at least one collective purpose somewhere that is so impeccably positive and appropriate that it would be freely supported by all of our present and future members, it's a sure bet that that singular purpose won't be the first choice of those most aggressively seeking to define our collective purpose. The single most consistent aspect of collective purposes is the desire to employ the potentials of the group to accomplish the desires of the advocates.

Some advocates seek greater purpose for their own participation by attempting to redirect the productive efforts of other members into the service of what they personally see as "a good cause". A somewhat less honorable variation on this theme is the desire to exploit the assets of a passive larger group (name recognition, credibility, reputation, revenues, etc.), to serve the objectives of a smaller group of activists who are unable or unwilling to create such assets for themselves. Even less honorable advocates seek to deceptively manipulate the collective purpose of a larger group in order to use the assets and potentials of others to achieve goals those others would not otherwise be willing to support.

On another level, those individuals most eager to become participants in a collective purpose can contribute their own distortions to the dynamic. The least problematic of those seeking to actively participate in collective purposes are probably those who simply seek to amplify their own capabilities by combining them with those of a group of like minded individuals. They seek to become more than they can be as an individual by becoming part of something larger than themselves. However, since their goal is to use the group to become more than themselves, this type of participant can come to resent what they see as the failure of other members to apply their full potential to the common cause. Anything less that total commitment diminishes the maximum potential of the group, and thereby the maximum potential of all those participants seeking to use the group to amplify their own potentials.

Far more problematic are those who come to see the group as an extension of their own self-image. A collective purpose encourages this process by further diminishing the role of individuals in the organization. Changes in the group's collective purpose become threats to such individuals' self-image, and any divergence of the group from the self-image of the individual becomes a crisis. They may feel driven to seek control in an effort to force the group to comply with their internal image of "how things should be done", and to protect their ego investment in their personal view of the group and its collective purpose.

Beyond the inherent conflict between advocates seeking to enlist others in a collective purpose, and individuals intent on pursuing their own personal purposes, these very different objectives dictate very different perspectives on the nature and structure of society.

A society that primarily serves the internal purposes of individual members will tend to attract a self-selected self-regulating membership. The participation of each member at any given time becomes a function of that individual's immediate situation and objectives. The essence of society becomes the sum total of the voluntary interactions of the individual members, and ideally becomes at any given moment whatever its members want it to be at that moment. Attempts to manipulate the group tend to fail due to a lack of cooperation by members intent on their own personal purposes.

A society serving the individual purposes of its participants is also constrained to respect the lives and rights of its individual participants since they are the source of its own purpose. Self-destructive socio-pathologies become largely self-defeating since their effects are limited in scope to the self-destructive individual and those who allow themselves to be drawn in on a personal level.

It takes a lot more rules to provide a collective purpose than to provide the basic infrastructure for members to pursue their own individual purposes. Rules are meaningless without an authority structure to administer them. The more rules a society adopts, the larger the authority structure it must create to administer its rules. The greater the power vested in the authority structure to enforce the rules, the greater the potential for abuse of that power. Abuse of power inevitably leads to resistance to the bureaucracy, and contempt for the rules it seeks to enforce - which inevitably leads to demands for ever greater concentrations of power to deal with the growing resistance of individual members.

A collective purpose establishes a critical separation between the individual participant and the purpose of society. Individual participants are reduced to the value they provide to the collective purpose, and their lives and rights become secondary to the collective purpose. At the extreme, individual participants become disposable if their loss will advance the collective purpose. The intentional sacrifice of an individual becomes a valid means to an end when the end becomes more valuable than the individual.

In larger societies, governments are created to administer the rules. Governments quickly become a means of compelling compliance with the vision/agenda of those able to control the government. The greater the coercive power of the government, the more attractive it becomes to those who would use that power in the service of their own agendas.

America is today facing a crisis of purpose as a nation. Founded as a nation of individuals, during its first 2 centuries America achieved unprecedented prosperity by providing a unique environment where individuals could seek their own internal purpose. The external collective purpose of American society was understood to be limited to defending the right of individual participants to remain unencumbered by involuntarily imposed external collective purposes.

Demands to alter the basic nature of American society have been accelerating since the 1860's. There has also been a marked decline in the perceived value of the individual liberty the founders considered worth risking their lives and property to establish, and the nature and functioning of the government they designed.

Americans today increasingly look to their government to provide them with purpose and direction in their lives, even as their understanding of how their government actually operates degrades into a peculiar form of urban mythology. Paradoxically, their personal participation in the operation and direction of their society tends to markedly decline even as they increase their demands for society to provide them a purpose in which they can participate.

It isn't that America lacked a collective purpose in the past. America's association with individual freedom was once an inspiration to oppressed people around the globe. Promoting the principles on which our nation was formed provided just the sort of impeccably positive and appropriate collective purpose that all Americans could support - without interfering with their own individual purposes.

Association with the wrong collective purpose, or badly fumbling claims of supporting the right purpose, can result in more negative publicity than can ever be overcome. Many individual Americans continue to support freedom, and some even continue to believe that the collective purpose of America remains the defense of individual freedom. But as we've abandoned our traditions of individual freedom at home, we've similarly abandoned our collective purpose of spreading individual freedom elsewhere.

The manipulation of America's collective purpose should provide a warning to all societies. The hard reality is that America's collective purpose was long ago hijacked by legions of nameless faceless bureaucrats, who have been using America's wealth and power to pursue objectives that directly contradict our nation's stated objectives.

Those who now control America's collective purpose find free thinking individuals an unwanted complication in their obsessive need to organize and regulate every aspect of life into a predictable, structured system that conforms to the paperwork in their filing cabinets. Bureaucrats are only comfortable when dealing with other bureaucrats. As a result, they've used their control over our national collective purpose to undermine freedom movements both at home and abroad. America's foreign policy has routinely demonstrated a strong preference for supporting the established and predictable chain of command offered by despotic tyrants, while aiding in the destruction of the decentralized uncertainty and unpredictability of freemen militias fighting for their own freedom.

The American people have done a lot of real good around the globe, but in the minds of much of the world, America's good works are overshadowed by the evil that has been done in our collective name. Thanks to the corruption of our collective purpose, the American people are now far more strongly associated with assisting despotic tyrants in suppressing individual freedom, than with advocating and supporting individual freedom.

The histories of both Intertel and human civilization indicate that those societies that most favor the individual purposes of their members are most successful at achieving both individual and collective purposes. Those societies most focused on collective purposes impose the greatest hardships on their members, and rarely if ever achieve more than immediate short term purposes before collapsing.

According to Intertel's bylaws and America's constitution, both societies exist primarily to facilitate the individual purposes of their members. The founding documents of both societies place strict limits on collective purposes. Some members may actively participate in cooperative arrangements with other members to the extent such participation suits their individual purposes. Others may see participation as simply being carried along by the motivations and enthusiasm of others. But an individual remains an individual even when voluntarily associating with other individuals.

A collective purpose can only achieve its intended goal without introducing significant adverse side-effects if it reflects the shared interests of all members, and remains secondary to the individual purposes of the members. A collective purpose must also be tightly constrained to resist being subverted by those who will inevitably be drawn to any artificial concentration of power.

Lacking a better means of connecting with prospective members among the younger generations, it appears that adopting some sort of collective purpose - if only for the public relations value - is inevitable if Intertel is to survive. Finding a collective purpose that will attract young members, without compromising the individualism that has long been the core purpose of our society, will be a challenge worthy of our alleged intelligence.

Intertel needs to start seriously thinking about the issue, but time is already running out to implement a rational solution on the national level.

With the "guilt value" of professional welfare parasites fading in effectiveness, the collectivists in our government are gearing up to employ the time tested tools of war hysteria and fear of the unknown to emotionally bind the citizenry to their "new and improved" collective purpose. "Domestic security" has become the favored emotionally charged buzzword intended to distract the public from our government's actual collective purpose of stripping individual citizens of their remaining real freedoms in return for empty promises of freedom from danger.

Those who control America's collective purpose will soon succeed in turning the collective against the individual - using America itself to destroy the individualism that has always been America's primary purpose, and source of its greatest strength. The news media relentlessly features compliant citizens demanding that "domestic security" become the primary collective purpose of all patriotic Americans. Collectively informing the security police of any "suspicious behaviors" by our individual neighbors is being actively promoted as the definition of a "good American".

Solving the conundrum of purpose at the Intertel level will be trivial compared to the difficulties of solving it on the national and international levels. The survival of both Intertel and Western Civilization depend on finding appropriate solutions to this critical conundrum.

Most of us aren't even trying to solve the right question.