KLEPTOCRACY
I recently finished reading Jared Diamond’s book “Guns, Germs, and Steel.” A chapter that I found quite interesting from a servant leadership prospective was the one called “From Egalitarianism to Kleptocracy”. The chapter basically is about how our human societies evolved from small bands of closely related groups of people that naturally interacted with each other in caring ways, to huge populations that were “lead” by leaders who dictated and controlled the citizens to keep the peace and profit from the masses at the same time. One major reason for this change in leadership style had to do with the number of people that began to exist in communities because of the change from hunter gathering societies to societies sustained by agricultural practices.
Diamond writes about the smallest unit of organization, the tribe, where “the number of people is still low enough that everyone knows everyone else by name and by relationship.” He goes on to write, “One reason why organization of human government tends to change from that of a tribe to a chiefdom in societies with more then a few hundred members is that the difficult issue of conflict resolution between strangers becomes increasingly acute in large groups. A fact further diffusing potential problems of conflict resolution in tribes is that almost everyone is related to everyone else by blood or marriage or both. Those ties of relationship binding all tribal members make police, laws, and other conflict-resolving institutions of larger societies unnecessary, since any two villagers getting into an argument will share many kin, who apply pressure on them to keep it from becoming violent”.
Later in the chapter Diamond writes, “chiefdoms introduced the dilemma fundamental to all centrally governed, non-egalitarian societies. At best, they do good by providing expensive services impossible to contract for on an individual basis. At worst, they function unabashedly as kleptocracies, transferring net wealth from commoners to upper classes. …The difference between a kleptocrat and a wise statesmen, … is merely one of degree: a matter of just how large a percentage of the tribute extracted from producers is retained by the elite, and how much the commoners like the public uses to which the redistributed tribute is put.”
Not to pick on Wal-Mart, but since Trevor has posted several times on the organization it seemed fitting to fit that organization into this discussion. In Trevor’s March 7 post, he mentioned Wal-Mart recently hiring a Director of Global Ethics to be responsible for "ensuring that ethics is embedded into key business processes." When I hear about such ventures I am skeptical that real change can come about until an organization realizes that until it attempts to scale back the size of its organization and services, it will likely just be one more attempt at kleptocracy.
The other challenge this concept brings out for me is how do we go back to the natural more caring egalitarian relationships we used to have before we forgot how to interact with each other in our large organizations?
My thoughts on my new word for the day, kleptocracy.
Diamond writes about the smallest unit of organization, the tribe, where “the number of people is still low enough that everyone knows everyone else by name and by relationship.” He goes on to write, “One reason why organization of human government tends to change from that of a tribe to a chiefdom in societies with more then a few hundred members is that the difficult issue of conflict resolution between strangers becomes increasingly acute in large groups. A fact further diffusing potential problems of conflict resolution in tribes is that almost everyone is related to everyone else by blood or marriage or both. Those ties of relationship binding all tribal members make police, laws, and other conflict-resolving institutions of larger societies unnecessary, since any two villagers getting into an argument will share many kin, who apply pressure on them to keep it from becoming violent”.
Later in the chapter Diamond writes, “chiefdoms introduced the dilemma fundamental to all centrally governed, non-egalitarian societies. At best, they do good by providing expensive services impossible to contract for on an individual basis. At worst, they function unabashedly as kleptocracies, transferring net wealth from commoners to upper classes. …The difference between a kleptocrat and a wise statesmen, … is merely one of degree: a matter of just how large a percentage of the tribute extracted from producers is retained by the elite, and how much the commoners like the public uses to which the redistributed tribute is put.”
Not to pick on Wal-Mart, but since Trevor has posted several times on the organization it seemed fitting to fit that organization into this discussion. In Trevor’s March 7 post, he mentioned Wal-Mart recently hiring a Director of Global Ethics to be responsible for "ensuring that ethics is embedded into key business processes." When I hear about such ventures I am skeptical that real change can come about until an organization realizes that until it attempts to scale back the size of its organization and services, it will likely just be one more attempt at kleptocracy.
The other challenge this concept brings out for me is how do we go back to the natural more caring egalitarian relationships we used to have before we forgot how to interact with each other in our large organizations?
My thoughts on my new word for the day, kleptocracy.
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