#1 — Something Is Broken
The Disconnect
Trinity: I know why you’re here, Neo. I know what you’ve been doing… why you hardly sleep, why you live alone, and why night after night, you sit by your computer. You’re looking for him. I know because I was once looking for the same thing. And when he found me, he told me I wasn’t really looking for him. I was looking for an answer. It’s the question, Neo. It’s the question that drives us. It’s the question that brought you here. You know the question, just as I did.
Neo: What is the Matrix?
- The Matrix
“They just want to destroy us. There are big interests behind them. Someone who’s pulling their strings. We never get to see who they are.”
When I met first met Thomas he was running a fruit shop in Kolonaki, one of Athens’ most prestigious suburbs. I’d watch him, each morning open up, from across the street, where I’d be enjoying an early morning coffee with friends and we’d sometimes strike up a conversation.
Greece, a tiny nation with a population that only just beats that of the greater London area in the UK, was holding the world’s financial markets by the balls.
It was a turn of events which few could have foreseen when the country joined the EU at the turn of the century and changed its currency from the drachma to the Euro. Now Thomas was telling me that the way Greece was being asked to cut back on its welfare state economy and increase competitiveness through lower salaries was the result of a global, secret conspiracy.
From a certain perspective, of course, he was not entirely wrong.
At the turn of the century I was one of those who were caught up in a traffic jam on the way to a party. This is a pretty big deal. For the first time in history the calendar was going to change all four digits. Thinking about it now, a little older and questionably perhaps a little wiser, you have to wonder how grown men (and women) could get so giddy about something so trite. We did.
I was in communications working for one of the UK’s leading retailers. The hours were long. The pressure intense. The meetings, deadlines, challenges and constraints never ending. For the entire twelve months prior to Christmas there had been this magic build up, growing slowly, building up steam. A new century was coming. A brand new century and we were going to be in it.
I don’t know what we expected. Whenever the pressure of daily activities left any room for social chit chat in an oblong office, within a branch, which I shared with my small team the conversation would be on how it would suddenly be different. All different. Totally different.
Looking back it sounds like the gibberish of children. How could a new century become ‘different’ just because we changed dates? Why would the very notion of being part of the 21st century be any better when we were prepared to carry on pretty much like before?
With planned celebrations throughout the United Kingdom the Press had been talking about whether there would be enough Champagne to allow us to see the year through in style and which parts of the country had managed to hoard enough supplies.
At the turn of the century nothing appeared to need changing. Nothing appeared to be broken, requiring fixing. Nothing appeared to be in need of any kind of redefining. It really was business as usual, only more so.
The talk, if there was any talk, was of two things: First the year two thousand bug (Y2K bug for those who were there) when computer systems which had been in upgrade since the beginning of the year would either work normally and handle the calendar date change or terminally crash and send us back to the Stone Age. Personally I was weighing up the chances of the latter happening in which case I thought it would be a great time to increase my mortgage. Second: the very serious problem of French Champagne shortage.
With planned celebrations throughout the United Kingdom the Press had been talking about whether there would be enough Champagne to allow us to see the year through in style and which parts of the country had managed to hoard enough supplies.
If that strikes you as frivolous talk, today, imagine how I feel having actually participated in conversations like that.
It was contagious. We talked, we joked, and we worked.
It was work that made me late to the millennial party. The branch I was in was getting ready for the post New Year sales. We had just had a strategy meeting to discuss the possibility that we would open up the day following New Year’s day with no computer systems working, no tills being operational and, perhaps, no way to even take credit card payments.
Should we have enough cash on hand to deal with cash transactions requiring change? Did we need extra security at the branch? Would a countrywide computer crash be a short-lived problem?
Business stops for no man and though we had taken every precaution, ran every patch and upgrade we could, there was still an air of uncertainty on the stability of our systems.
As a precaution I stayed back and supervised the unplugging of my office system from the national network which linked it to Head Office in London.
My team was responsible for bringing out a weekly magazine plus a number of newsletters and PowerPoint presentations.
If computers did crash, I was fairly confident that I stood a better chance of getting all our data off a hard drive in a standalone system which did not really care how it handled dates and time stamps. A linked system, on the other hand, relied on network protocols to work properly and there was a good chance that there would be no network to speak of.
That made me late leaving the branch which made late to get on the road and that made me late to “the party to end all parties”.
It was a chain of lateness that was amplified at every step. I left the branch just thirty minutes behind what I had projected. That made it 10.30pm as opposed to 10.00. But the roads were busy and the journey to the party at the city centre took longer than usual. The streets were alive with revellers travelling to parties and the excitement, buzz and traffic were creating their own mix of madness.
The party was at the Hilton. I had to get on the Motorway first, and the slip road was jam-packed with cars and then the Motorway itself was busy, which meant lower speeds and finally, when I got to the city centre the traffic was crawling.
I counted down the seconds to midnight trying to get to the underground car park and by the time I had found a parking space and summoned the elevator that would take me to the suite at the top floor a full half hour had passed.
I made the party at thirty minutes past midnight. Slipping in and trying to blend. Feeling that twelve months of build up had, for me, culminated in an anti-climax.
Why is any of this important? For two reasons. First because it shows just how blind to the coming change we were back then (and I suffered from that blindness as much as anyone else). And second because, in its own way, it illustrates, pretty much the problems we were creating which got us ‘here’ from ‘there’.
And what were these problems? We were in a state of transition. We were taking processes which had grown gradually over the past 100 years, tried and tested in the industrial age, tried and tested in the military, before that. And we were transitioning them into an age where connectivity and computerisation were mixing them fast enough to create new hybrids. Mutations we simply had no idea how to deal with.
We may be frivolous but we are not stupid.
That was not a problem we were aware of at the time. For us, back then, it was a non-existent issue. What was in our sights, presenting itself with a clarity that demanded all our focus and thoughts and energy was dealing with the Y2K bug (which we hoped we had) and the shortage of champagne (which we hoped would not happen).
We may be frivolous but we are not stupid. The world we live in excites us. We all sense, at some level, that there is an underlying promise to it that has not been realised. There is a sense that we are part of something bigger and better than ourselves. Our efforts contribute to its birth, or realization, or actualisation or whatever you choose to call it, because the name is irrelevant. The feeling is irrational. We have nothing to back it up with. Nothing that can show that it’s true, it’s there. Except perhaps the fact that in our most unguarded moments we all share the fact that we feel it. Events make us sense it.
The turn of the year. A historical anniversary. The turn of the century. These are moments that force our mind to work on a different plain, and then we can feel it. The sense of excitement, during those moments, has the ability to make us say and do uncharacteristically altruistic things. Excitement and ideas that lack a point of focus, die. Like a cloud of vapour, if there is no surface presented for them to cling on and become real, they disperse and evaporate.
The most concrete things we have to do, are usually part of our work. Well, mostly they are our work. More than the general concept of life which can become a little imprecise and very messy, work lends itself to being codified. It gets broken down into processes that themselves are analysable. It is able to present itself as a linear progression where things proceed from point A to point B in an orderly fashion. It has the ability to become reducible to a set of steps we can do.
This latter part is the most important. As entities we are drawn to what we can do. And then we are drawn to what we can do easiest. Doing it gives us a sense of purpose and a sense of achievement.
Work then has the ability to do all of that and because it can do it in ways that do not always demand our full mental power and attention, it can become a trap of sorts.
We always focus on and do the little things in front of us expanding the energy that should perhaps go into thinking about the much bigger things behind them.
The problem, is that no one is paying us to think about the bigger things. It’s not our job description to save the world. We are not philosophers sitting beneath the arches of the Parthenon holding open discourse on life and thought and morality and the reality of being.
We get paid to sort out the Y2K bug, to bring out the sales reports, to change the barcodes on a new shipment of goods, to actualize the marketing plan that sales came up with. And maybe to think about whether there is enough champagne to go round at the end of it all. Those are the things we are mostly comfortable doing. And yet it’s the bigger things that excite us and make us think that our job is worth doing. That our life is worth living.
No one in marketing leapt out of bed in the morning humming with the desire to bring out the best spreadsheet report, ever. Yet, millions of us get up in the morning and go to work powered by a belief that somehow what we do is making a difference. We sense that our contribution, the sales report, the spreadsheet, the happy customer, are grains of sand that collectively tip the balance and add themselves to something bigger.
The companies we work for, the governments we vote into power, the processes we help create and the laws we choose to obey, all become part of the fabric of what makes our culture, our civilization. And that fabric, we believe, has a real, deep purpose and somehow we are part of it.
That’s what powers us.
There is however an intuitive divide. As we wake up and go to work we also know that none of us can make an iota of difference in the direction our civilization takes or the quality our culture attains. The mass of what it represents is too large for our minds to ever comfortably contemplate that we can truly affect it through our daily life. The size of the task, the immensity of effort and sacrifice required and the uncertainty that goes with the implied outcome, defeat us. We do not comfortably articulate our goals to change the world except perhaps in a self-deprecating way. When we do our expressions are guarded, prefixed by “perhaps”, “maybe”, “possibly”. Our use of the conditional tense to express hope, frequently hides regret. When it comes to the world sheer scale defeats us.
So we focus on what we can do. We can improve the spreadsheet. We can put together a fantastic sales report. We can make that sales target, we can … we can. The list of things that we can do frequently becomes the mantra anesthetizing us so that we do not begin to question how to do the things we can’t do.
This is a survival mechanism more than anything. My sanity will remain intact the longest if I get up every day, go to work, answer emails, talk to my team, look at the sales figures, put reports together and present them nicely to my bosses, than if I get up in the morning and worry that I am not doing anything to change a world that I feel needs to be changed.
But within that matrix of actions, supporting it and surrounding it lies something tangible much, much closer than a world-changing notion. Everything we do, whether it’s leaving the house in the evening to buy a litre of milk or going to work in the morning to chair a team meeting and put together a sales report is underpinned by a sense of shared values. Something which the entire organisation, company, culture, country supports. It is different perhaps at different levels but in its general orientation it is the same. A company that believes in the homicide of those in its staff who perform poorly as a justifiable means of its executives rising through the ranks is going to find itself at odds in every country in the world. Such is the severity of the dislocation of its values with those of the world around it. That company may have at its core a set of processes, each reducible into clearly analytical, logical and analysable tasks but unless the outcomes to which those processes lead to are compatible within the broader set of values around them, they are unlikely to be acceptable.
Values, shared values are part of our personal worldview and as such have the ability to move us to do great things or lead us down paths where we perform actions that are hard to comprehend.
This is what Chuck Colson, Special Counsel to President Richard Nixon for half a decade, meant when he said, “History is little more than the recording of the rise and fall of the great ideas; the worldviews that form our values and move us to act.”
History is the recording of outliers. The events we see are the extreme expressions of great ideas. They are revolutions and disruptions so severe that they could not be labelled anything but historical. The American Revolution, the Spinning Jenny. Each time they are the result of a chain of events. A series of dots each of which is of little merit in itself but which when joined together become part of a much bigger whole, appearing in retrospect, to be inevitable while in reality, at the time, they were anything but.
These connections are achieved by accident through communication. The greater sharing of information which in itself appears to become the backdrop against which we form shared values. Those arising worldviews of Colson that must appear as personal epiphanies of sorts . So it would be fair then to suggest that the moment the set of shared values has changed it becomes possible to change the worldviews that will then lead to different actions.
In 1816 Thomas Jefferson said “Enlighten the people generally, and tyranny and oppressions of body and mind will vanish like evil spirits at the dawn of day.” He understood better than most that once connections are made and the chain of events has been forged it gains an inexorable momentum that may grind slow but grinds sure.
The cultural backdrop that becomes the seedbed from which spring, like fresh shoots, the set of values that define us is then the first clue we need to discover the ingredients of widespread, far-ranging, lasting change. From these shared values it is that arise the worldviews that power our actions, justifying to our minds what we do so that we can then go ahead and do it.
That we need justification is self-evident. Without a worldview to power our actions and make us fit in the machinery of processes that we fancy make the world go round, we become outliers ourselves. As non-conformist as the organisation that has murder at its heart as a means of career advancement. And about as likely to find ourselves marginalized, emasculated, ostracized and condemned.
No, worldview is everything. And worldview arises out of shared values and shared values arise out of culture. Is culture then ground zero? How does culture come about?
James Davison Hunter, tenured professor of Religion, Culture, and Social Theory at the University of Virginia, suggests an answer when, in an authored paper, he says that culture is manufactured out of four distinct characteristics:
- Culture is a resource and therefore a source of power.
- Culture is produced through the action of the network.
- The propagation of what constitutes cultural values is a dynamic connection between those at the centre of cultural development and those at its periphery.
- Culture becomes world-changing when the values of those who are the champions of change align with the values of the institutions they lead.
There is an underlying assumption here that Hunter makes explicit. And that is that any significant shift to the world view starts from the top and filters down to the bottom. Even where the network effect is cited as a means of propagation of cultural change. The network in question is one of elites. The network is at the top, rather than the bottom. At the centre of things rather than the periphery.
Hunter uses the examples of the past, from Martin Luther and the Reformation to Wilberforce and the Clapham Circle to make his point and the data is irrefutable. Seismic cultural shifts, indeed, seem to happen when a figure in authority champions them to an extent that they become popular amongst some of his ‘elite’ peers.
Correlation does not always mean causation. Every set of data examined introduces a limiting factor of its own. Past performance, as investment institutions so much like to remind us, is no guarantee of future success.
What happened in the time leading up to the turn of the century cannot be held up as an indication that this is how things will continue. Just like the Y2K bug and the shortage of champagne due to celebrations, the turn of the century introduced a maturation of processes, practices and technology that in itself added one more layer to the mix. Something unprecedented, unexpected, radical.
Do Hunter’s four points hold fast? Is culture then, indeed, a manufactured product that comes about as the direct result of the action of elites who themselves have something to gain, some sort of capital whether it be in money, fame or reputation?
If that were the case then Thomas’ worldview would be fully justified. The crisis in Greece that was squeezing the entire country dry of resources, limiting the money supply, reducing wages and impoverishing a population suddenly struggling with high unemployment and low incomes, was manufactured.
Some group of elites, somewhere, had planned the entire global credit crisis in order to make life difficult for Greeks. Bring their county to its knees. Dent its national pride. The conspiracy indeed would be afoot then. The picture clear as day. Provided of course you were willing to believe that change in the 21st century moved along the lines of change in the 19th and 20th and even then you’d most probably have to focus towards the beginning rather than the end of the 20th century.
That things were changing even then is testified to by an account given by Adam Kahane, a former Shell analyst who found himself helping achieve lasting change at the birth of two new nations: post-Apartheid South African in 1991 and Guatemala in 1999.
“The people I have met who are most effective at changing the world,” Kahane says, “have two qualities. On the one hand, they are extraordinarily committed, body and soul, to the change they want to see in the world, to a goal larger than themselves. On the other hand, they are extraordinarily open to listening to what is happening in the world, in others, and in themselves.” He is talking about personal worldviews and shared values. He is talking about underlying cultures, a change that had happened both in South Africa as it moved out of apartheid and in Guatemala, as it moved towards democratic elections after years of totalitarianism.
Change then is possible. There is a mechanism that drives it. That mechanism can be produced and guided (perhaps) in a way that allows us to steer it towards the desired outcome. So what’s stopping us? Why do you or I find it still, so difficult, to change the world each day? Why does the desire to change the world buzz at the very back of our brains like an irritant that won’t go away and yet we find it so hard to articulate it into actionables that have a tangible result over time?
What is stopping us?
Ask the right questions and you begin a journey that will lead to the answers suggests Michael Hyatt, former Chairman and CEO of Thomas Nelson Publishers. He was speaking from his perspective as the head of the seventh largest trade book publishing in the U.S. and he was pointing out that a question, framed correctly, contains the seeds of its own answer.
“We’re living in a world that needs to be reinvented from scratch,” answers Antonio Scarponi, founder of Conceptual Devices. And therein perhaps lies the problem. If the change that’s upon us is required at global level rather than a local one it is both diffuse and pervasive. Varying in intensity and depth.
When the requirement for change is such a constant that it overloads our senses we suffer from an inability to actualize a plan for it to happen. When change is required everywhere there is no model you can apply because no model exists that can be emulated.
The American Revolution was inspired by values that had been spread from the Old World, ideals first articulated and refined by the French Revolution, fell on fertile ground in a land that could already visualize what it would be like without the British.
The Reformation had hundreds of years of ecclesiastical history to fall back upon where change had been effected by those who were willing to critically re-examine existing dogma, albeit at a heavy price.
But this is something new. New in scale. New in scope. The pervasive sense that the world needs to change stems from the equally pervasive sensation that the world is, somehow, broken.
This in itself is new ground. The uncertain territory of the traveller reaching the horizon and using just his senses to articulate the thought that perhaps the Earth is not flat. Centuries of wisdom, aeons of folklore are wrong. Something else is going on.
There is a requirement to debunking popular wisdom that makes the task inherently unfair. While accepting it requires little more than acquiescence. The imperceptible nod that means, yes, I agree. Going against the crowd now requires hard evidence. When everyone agreed the Earth was flat there was little study required to turn the assumption into a science. The moment we suggested it was round we found the need to explain it, theorize about it, study it, prove it and understand it.
There is something defining about the word broken that invites visualisation. The images conjured up are defining. Function has stopped. Form is no longer adhered to. Shape is destroyed. Whatever situation the word is applied to barely rises above that of the smashed window, the broken glass. Broken implies irrevocable change because whatever the subject of the sentence is, is now deeply affected.
Words do not arise unintentionally. Broken is used because its meaning is strong. But when applied to a system like the world, or institutions like education, government, banking, it barely seems credible. It creates another disparity. The systems here have not stopped functioning. And we have not stopped supporting them. Banking is fed by our deposits the way it always has. The education system continues to function as it always has had (and even more confusingly for us it continues to be refined and updated), governments are elected as always, by some kind of popular voting system in democratic countries and by whatever means suits the reigning regime’s purpose in non-democratic ones.
Viewed from afar the world then continues pretty much as it always has done. Things get updated, processes speed up, improvements are made, problems are solved and more problems are encountered as the great world goes hurtling down Lord Tennyson’s “ringing grooves of change.”
Broken hardly seems to be a fitting or even apt form of visualization here. The description seems to be at odds with the evidence. It’s like a lie we tell ourselves in order to avoid saying (or seeing) something else entirely. We mention that this or the other of what we have seen or experienced is broken and we get back figurative nods of agreement that bolster our sense of knowing that something is, indeed, destroyed beyond repair.
We are a species that’s born to spring into action. We thrive on creating higher order out of chaos. We use our energy, ingenuity and enthusiasm to break the second law of Thermodynamics, swim against the tide of nature and battle against entropy. The lowest stable energy state is not good enough for anything we dream of, or want to be associated with. Perhaps instinctively we are hardwired to act so, evolution has done that much for us. Or maybe we subconsciously associate the lowest stable energy state with stasis. Death. And in our all too-brief lives fight resourcefully against it.
The broken we tacitly agree with is like the Flat Earth argument. We sense that it must be so therefore it is so right that we hardly need to exert ourselves to prove it.
Why?
Is there something so fundamentally wrong with our world that we feel obligated to unacknowledge it, articulate it only in a form that itself lends evidence to its refutation?
Perhaps reality is broken. Game designer and author Jane McGonigal suggests as much in her book by the same title. In a revealing passage that itself asks questions that suggest the very answers we seek she writes: “Where, in the real world, is that gamer sense of being fully alive, focused, and engaged in every moment? Where is the gamer feeling of power, heroic purpose, and community?”
There are elements here, in the questions, aplenty. The seeds of the answers we seek are hidden in plain sight, leaping out at us with an obviousness that probably makes some of us ignore them: fully alive, focused, engaged, power, heroic purpose, community.
We understand the concepts and those who play online games or do offline contact sports or chase adrenaline rides (or dives) know what they mean, but as an ensemble of words applied to everyday living they fit in about as much as the destructive imagery thrown up by the word broken, described the functioning world we live in.
There really is no smoke without a fire. For short distances the Flat Earth model perfectly describes the reality we experience. It’s only when we go past the horizon that things become different. We agree that things are broken because we sense something is. We sense that something is not quite right. At a time when we are awash with information. When the collective sensemaking ability of mankind is just a couple clicks away from us, when we communicate across the globe at the speed of light, travel across time zones with a click, can visit almost any place that has Google street view and can exchange ideas, opinions and thoughts, asynchronously as well as in real time, the sense that something is not right should not be ignored.
Or dismissed.
In the digital age the perceptions that form our value judgements, just like those who agreed that the Earth was flat, come from many tiny sources, collecting in the dips and crannies of our subconscious and emerging unexpectedly. Only when our guard is down.
The system is broken. It sounds like a battle cry. Or a warning. It’s both.
“You can’t see the wood for the trees,” says the proverb in English, American and Australian idiomatic variations. It’s common enough to defy an easy etymology and those who use it intuitively know what it means. What we see is not what we sense. What we sense is too big to be seen from where we stand. There is a disconnect between our apparent reality and our sensed worldview. Something clearly does not fully add up and we are beginning to feel it.
It’s time to take a few steps back. Gain a new perspective.
Clay Shirky, who’s made a career out of watching and talking about the web, says that “old systems get broken before people know what’s going to take their place.” There is the implicit suggestion in his statement that systems can break down without being noticed (but perhaps they are being felt?) and without being taken out of use.
This is a new definition of breaking that breaks with tradition. Applied to a window setting we continue, perhaps, to use it to peer out through and keep drafts out but sense it has become increasingly bad at doing these things, now.
The analogy is sophistry of course, by design. Windows are not like complex systems. Their function is circumscribed by their form and the two are so closely tied together that when one breaks so does the other. The evidence becomes irrefutable.
But systems are not like that and the world certainly isn’t. Breaks in form in complex systems are usually catastrophic. The planet cracks, governments topple in bloody revolutions, buildings collapse. These are events where we can all agree that the system is broken.
The reason we create complex systems in the first place is because we use them to shore up the world that’s powered by our worldview. If we believe in justice, for example, we set up a justice system. We tell it that to kill someone is wrong and to help someone in need is right and we let it work for us across our growing society.
But as society grows so does our need for justice which itself evolves from black and white, life and death issues to various shades of grey. So we make justice dynamic. We base its workings on specific rules and legal precedent and lines of authority that clearly define who can do and say what within it. We create a system that uses internal logic to grow and evolve and at some point we use the precedent of what went on before, and logic to find holes in the system because it serves our purpose and this act creates more precedent that can be used to find new holes.
It may sound like the system of justice is subverted to serve our personal needs but from the system’s perspective it is what has always happened. When justice was black and white, either-or, it was set up to serve our needs back then. Nothing has changed. Our needs have grown and, as our numbers have and as our societies have become more complex, fewer and fewer of us speak with “one voice”. The system cannot discern whose voice is best to listen to so it listens to them all, equally, with the logic that this is the best way to deprecate individual value and create a level playing field. In this arrangement the voice that gets to be heard best is the one that understands how the system works. How it functions. Where it has to raise its pitch, or lower its tone, for greatest effect.
The perspective we gain the moment we step back is that systems evolve into mechanical entities that obey their own laws first and ours second. And as we become more and more adept at using the tropes of each system we set up to make it do what we want, the transition begins from systems set up to serve us to us, ending up serving the systems that surround us.
Intuitively, this is obvious. You may hate having a regimented life but you need to get up at seven each morning, have breakfast and commute to work because that’s how the system works. Your ability to hold onto your job is predicated by your being there on time, presentable and professional.
Indentured servitude may have ended in Britain in the 9th century and the 20th in the USA but a mortgage that holds you hostage for 25 years does not feel that much different any more.
There is a remorseless logic behind the notion of indentured servitude that on paper, at first, it’s hard to argue against. You take a scarce commodity (work, land or an expensive passage to America) and you make it accessible by allowing those who want it to trade for it with what they have plenty of (years of life).
In theory it would allow impoverished youths from Britain, for example, to travel for free to the American Colonies in exchange for a fixed number of years of labour at an American plantation or farm. The bond, upheld legally by the courts, would be purchased by the plantation owner from the same captain. The latter would act as the middleman, taking all the risks (presumably picking who he let on his ship) and selling them their years in the New World in exchange for money.
The indentured servants received free passage, employment at the other end and, once their time was up, the opportunity to make a new life for themselves.
The reason this doesn’t work is that it creates an inherently asymmetrical relationship right from the start. We know that slavery is unfair because one person has wilfully deprived another of his liberty. But indentured service is entered into willingly in the form of a commercial agreement. It should work, except it fails to take into account the needs of the indentured servant. Having no say in the matter once his rights have been signed away he is no better than a slave, albeit for a much shorter time. As a matter of fact his value, though purchased, is less than that of a slave because there is a clock ticking on his status.
Plantation owners saw slaves as their property and took care of them to make them last as long as possible. An indentured servant, on the other hand, was going to be available for a short time only. As a result economic logic made them target for longer working hours and harder work assignments and more severe punishments, all designed to maximise the return on the investment for the plantation owner.
Commercial relational exchanges are all about two things that act as counterbalances to each other: profit and risk. The entire indentured service idea was created by the Virginia Company, the brand name given to a pair of English joint stock companies chartered by James I on 10 April 1606 with the purposes of establishing settlements on the coast of North America.
Because the entry level cost for owning a business or a farm in the Colonies was so low, farmers, plantation owners and shop keepers found it difficult to obtain labourers. And that’s when things got interesting?
In the 18th century, wages in Great Britain were low [DA2] because of a surplus of labour. The average was about 50 shillings (£2.50) a year for a plowman, and 40 shillings (£2) a year for an ordinary unskilled worker. Ships’ captains negotiated prices for transporting and feeding a passenger on the seven- or eight-week journey across the ocean, averaging about £5 to £7, the equivalent of four or five years of work back in England.
European capital market institutions could not lend to the workers, as there was no effective way to enforce a loan from across the Atlantic, rendering labor immobile via the Atlantic due to a capital market imperfection.
To address this imperfection, the Virginia Company would allow laborers to borrow against their future earnings at the Company for a fixed number of years in order to raise enough capital to pay for their voyage. Evidence shows this practice was in use by 1609, only two years after the founding of the Company’s original Jamestown settlement. However, this practice created a financial risk for the Company. If workers died or refused to work, the investment would be lost.
By 1620, the Company switched to selling contracts of “one hundred servants to be disposed amongst the old Planters” as soon as the servants reached the colonies. This minimized risk on the company’s investment to the 2–3 months of transatlantic voyage. As the system gained in popularity, individual farmers and tradesmen would eventually begin investing in indentured servants as well.
What sounds like a perfectly reasonable transaction creates an expendable commodity out of the lives of people. Left to its own devices a system continues on its path, unchecked.
What stopped indentured servitude was a change in trading conditions: “Several acts passed by the American and the British government fostered the decline of indentures. The English Passenger Vessels Act of 1803, which regulated travel conditions aboard ships, attempted to make transportation more expensive as to stop emigration. The American abolishment of imprisonment of debtors by federal law (passed in 1833) made prosecution of runaway servants more difficult, increasing the risk of indenture contract purchases.”
With increased risk it became viable to look for alternatives. Change, some times creeps in looking like necessity.
##Should I go on? — Let me know.
