Fig. 20: Periods of quantitative and qualitative growth (highly schematic). Over the last 4000 million years, the expanding life process (A1, A2, A3) was interrupted twice by long periods of zero growth (B1, B2). We are now entering a third such phase. As in the past two cases, qualitative growth becomes the dominating competitive factor. See text. After H. Hass 1981.
(Additional quality gains through technology, Expansion of human technology and economy, Humans increasingly expand their bodies with artificially created, additional organs, economy and personal improvement accompanied by virtually stagnating overall mass of functional or “vitalized” material, Expansion of terrestrial organisms across the continents and islands, Conquest of land, Additional quality gains of terrestrial organisms accompanied by virtually stagnating overall biomass volume, Additional quality gains of aquatic organisms accompanied by virtually stagnating biovolume, Expansion of archaic life forms as well as of uni- and multicellular organisms in aquatic habitats, Origin of life)
 

Roughly estimated, this first quantitative expansion of life came to a halt about 1000 million years ago. The various species and phyla of plants and animals remained locked in their competitive struggle for life, but the key criterion of selection increasingly shifted to “quality”. The overall development had entered a tunnel, as it were, that limited the total volume of the potential radiation: the prize went to those mutants (organisms with altered genetic makeup) who were able to deliver the same capability with less effort, with greater precision, or more quickly. This became their “selective advantage” and automatically boosted the effectiveness of “natural selection”.
Their organization surpassed that of their rivals in efficiency and quality, enabling them to reproduce while others fell by the wayside and died out. Successful species expanded numerically by conquering habitats occupied by others, but the overall space available to organisms was limited and the overall biomass hovered around a statistically more or less constant level that could not be exceeded.

Qualitative growth had precedence in this first period of zero growth, initiating true “higher development” in the various phyla. This boosted the capabilities of certain plant and animal species to such a degree that, 400-350 million years ago, some left the water and conquered new space on the barren land. Although qualitative growth continued to play a role, this ushered in a new era that thrived on opportunities to radiate quantitatively into ever newer areas and niches. The overall organismic biomass increased in leaps and bounds.

Nearly 220 million years ago, the continents and islands that could support life were colonized and the evolutionary process once again entered a “tunnel” that put limits on the potential overall volume. For a second time, the selective value in the struggle for survival shifted to qualitative advances, i.e. innovations and rationalizations designed to achieve the same performance with less effort. Among many other advances, the process this time yielded an organism that used its special mental powers and adept hands to supplement and expand its body with organs made directly of environmental materials rather that of cells (as had been the case up until then). And these advances were no longer based on chance mutations but on conscious insight into cause-and-effect. It was no longer necessary to incorporate these advances into the genetic makeup. Instead, the information could be passed on directly from one individual to the other through language, which was also developing at the time. Through these organs, which could be put aside and exchanged, humans gained considerable superiority over their animal counterparts. The subsequent indirect form of energy gain through bartering and other transactions multiplied our power base and further accelerated our expansion. More and more inorganic material was transformed into functional structures, boosting overall “biomass” to new heights (if we discard traditional interpretations and count our new organs as an entirely natural part of evolution). This third phase of expansion is also drawing to a close, simply because of the limits placed on this development by planet Earth.

According to my estimates, we have recently entered a new , third  “tunnel” that corresponds relatively well with the turn of the millennium. It is defined more by the negative impact of further, unbridled expansion than by any potential biomass increases. Based on the power we have gained and the inherent severity of future conflicts, we may actually face the destruction of the entire evolutionary process – both that of humans and of life on our planet as a whole.

Once again, the chief factor governing competition in the present tunnel is qualitative growth. Competition is still the catchword, whereby structures better adapted to market demand displace less suitable or less attractive products. The potential overall volume is once again limited; this time, however, the limits will hopefully be set by human reason and not be forcibly imposed upon us by environmental constraints. Moreover, qualitative growth is now splitting into two directions. The first, much like in the earlier tunnels, involves improving performance while maintaining the same level of effort, or maintaining the same level of performance with less effort. The development of computer chips over the last few decades is a case in point: every five years their capacity has multiplied several-fold while their cost has decreased several-fold. The second aspect may well be the more important of the two, and its primacy can only increase with time. I am referring to raising the quality of our lives – a phrase whose meaning still remains rather vague and that is open to a broad range of interpretations.

In the economic sector, the internationalization of markets and the ever more rapidly changing market demands mostly affect large corporations. During “bear” markets, their desire for rationalization translated into efforts to cover all operations in-house rather than by outsourcing (haulage, legal advice, sales promotion, etc.). This gave rise to “dinosaurs” that , in today’s economic environment, are too rigid, too inflexible, too high-risk. This initiated a trend reversal in which such giants were dismantled into smaller, more flexible units termed “profit centers”. The creation of “quality circles” reflects the desire to boost internal flexibility and adaptability by deploying small, highly motivated teams. A particularly interesting concept was presented in the framework of an EKS seminar by Gerhard Wilcke, the managing director of Berolina KG in Berlin. The idea involved making employees into independent businesspeople, i.e. setting them up in separate businesses. He convincingly argued that both sides reaped advantages. His experience showed that the required work was done faster and cheaper, the administrative effort was reduced, the newly independent unit paid lower taxes and insurance premiums, and was also able to work for other clients that were not direct competitors. The epitome of this development is the previously mentioned “cybernetic business”: it consists of a single person as a fixed hub, is burdened with no fixed costs, and can temporarily affiliate itself with the appropriate firms, suppliers, etc. to gear up for production quicker than others.

At the same time, attempts to improve quality can also create new dinosaurs. An example would be an ambitious leasing business that successively buys similar companies in other countries and either restructures or enters partnerships with them. Such an expanding business will reap immaterial values from the experience it gains and contacts it makes in the expanded market, while the partners benefit from a more solid financial footing and better access to know-how. The same holds true when companies from different countries enter into a cooperation, enabling each to access the other’s market experience. Such expanded power bases can be used to conduct the expensive research-and-development programs that ensure long-term success.

All such strategies that can ultimately lead to monopoly-like constellations must redouble their focus on the customer and incorporate OBS guidelines. As Eucken already showed back in 1953, when monopolies are established solely to create ruthless power structures and sinecures, they negatively impact the economy, drive prices up, reduce the quality of goods and suppress potential progress. On the other hand, the EKS program also leads to monopolies, albeit on a small scale (market niches), that help the clients and the overall economy. If these systems revert to their old ways and allow semi-predatory practices to gain the upper hand, then competitors operating according to EKS guidelines will eventually drive them out of that business sector.

The rise of new, customer-oriented conglomerates such as the “Migros” chain of super shopping centers founded by Duttweiler in Switzerland are by no means the often vaunted lethal threat to small business. Mewes writes, “Small and medium-sized businesses stare like frightened rabbits at the increasing number and effectiveness of these giants and fail to recognize the new and quite fertile territories in the void left between the mass  consumerism cornered by the giants and the ever more specific needs of individual customers.” “The gap between increasingly standardized services and increasingly individualized demand is growing.” The greater the emphasis placed on qualitative growth, the greater the probability that we can achieve Teilhard de Chardin’s “supradifferentation” in our life strategies and therefore in demand⁵⁴.

Many business sectors have already begun to switch from maximizing profit to maximizing quality. One reflection of this is the establishment of international entities such as the European Organization for Quality. As early as 1983, Prof. Dieter Seghezzi, president of the aforementioned organization and former board-of-directors member of the quality-oriented Hilti concern in Liechtenstein, wrote: “Some companies continue to rely on quality concepts stemming from the 1950s and 1960s, an era of economic upturn, full employment, and the belief in unlimited resources. As everyone will have realized, this situation has changed considerably over the last 10 years. Today, the situation has reversed itself entirely. This calls for bringing every thing and everyone – the structures and methods of quality assurance, the training of management, staff, and quality control experts – up to speed.”
In my opinion, the optimal transactional strategy will most quickly and most effectively gain a foothold in those economic sectors that rely on building a loyal, long-term clientele. After successfully sensitizing one sector, the new approach could successively be extended to other economic sectors, forcing semi-predators to lose ground on all fronts.

This constellation leads to the second aspect that we face as we enter the third tunnel. This aspect may be even eclipse the quality improvements provided by our additional organs. We are increasingly being called upon to decide how to best come to terms with our planet, with the innate “nature” that determines our drives and emotions, and how to optimize the quality of our lives in light of humankind’s great cornucopia of lifestyles. The tunnel analogy is merely meant to reflect the spatial limitations imposed on our future development and is by no means a gloomy scenario. Quite the opposite: it is entirely up to us to build societies that were once considered utopias but that can in fact be attained with a modicum of insight and good will.

In my opinion, the OBS is the first step in this direction⁵⁵. Optimal cooperation is founded in transactions in which each of the partners benefits equally. We all have an innate tendency to be friendly, helpful, understanding, compassionate, and to make sacrifices for the common good. These traits initially arose in ancestral predatory animals and were differentiated and further refined by the intelligence and self-awareness of early humans. Still, these tendencies are insufficient in themselves to serve as a foundation for an ethics of universal partnership in today’s anonymous mega-societies. Much less can they hold together the “global citizenry”. This is particularly evident in the very intensive efforts of major religions, particularly Christianity, which so centrally espoused brotherly love. There always have been and always will be individuals in all four corners of the globe who, through personal initiative, actively stand up to counter the appraisal of humans as beasts that can only be tamed with force; their positive message can help bring us all closer together⁵⁶. In fact, history shows that these messages have always simply been too weak to have the same positive effect in an anonymous megalopolis as they exert in a small village. Preaching “altruistic behavior”, a mantra in every epoch, is hopeless and doomed to failure. The only solid basis for a fundamental reorientation is if we can demonstrate that the “human savage” benefits more by focusing on the advantages of others.

The fact that such a re-orientation is possible – even without insight into the underlying biological causalities – has been clearly shown by no-nonsense businesspeople adhering to EKS guidelines. I once said in a lecture that EKS-followers could be distinguished by the sparkle in their eyes and their good conscious. Sparkling eyes because they were successful, a good conscious because their activity helps others.

Mewes, who never tired of repeating his motto, “Your strategy is wrong,” over the media and in personal discussions, sought a scientific foundation for his economic school of thought and aired a number of interesting concepts. The psychosplit phenomenon, which so dramatically impairs lofty progress in interhuman matters, has finally solved the mystery of why we oh-so-clever humans happen to falter and go astray in a field as important as business.

Ever since Konrad Lorenz’s book “On Aggression”, we have held our “aggressive drives” to be largely responsible for the defective side of humans. This curious drive, which is directed at our fellow man, probably lies at the core of many an unfriendly moods or predisposition. In the ranking of instincts, however, it is rather subordinate. Despite having a certain selective value in defending “territories” as well as in hierarchical fights for dominance in social animals, it can by no means be compared with the significance of feeding instinct; the drive to gain energy is rooted in the origin or life itself and remains the prerequisite for all other drives. Since cannibalism in humans is extremely rare, it was difficult to imagine why the feeding instinct should direct itself against our fellow man. The psychosplit, however, triggers precisely this phenomenon. Note that our additional organs represent a much more desirable booty for thieves than meat. These organs can be used “as is” to empower their owners, without first being eaten and digested. Selling them means conversion into instant cash – the ultimate magic wand.

Simply because the predatory behavior of our ancestors remains deeply engrained in our subconscious, why is it such a problem to eliminate the psychosplit and its effects and why is it still part of the semi-predatory world? Detective and Wild West films enjoy such high ratings because our instincts yearn for the “lost homeland” and wish to return to that setting, at least in our fantasy. In my opinion the fascination lies less in the much vaunted struggle between “good” and “evil”, but in the archaic milieu of the robber/predator we all enjoy returning to on celluloid. Why else would ruthless, powerful, even criminal persons exert such a magnetic attraction on the general public? Why do we cheer for or even follow evil potentates or clever scoundrels more than the conscientious “do-gooder.” In my opinion this is why many semi-predators, who apply predatory tactics to conduct business, will be difficult to win over to the OBS and EKS strategies, even if this unwillingness to “convert” ultimately diminishes their success. Strategic uprightness is simply too boring for them. Risk, instant success and overpowering others – either physically or intellectually – provides a greater sense of happiness than direct profit.

Another area in which OBS can be applied is human behavior in the family and social setting – “private life” as it were. Countless interrelationships define happiness and satisfaction, and there must be 1001 different transactions in this realm that do not involve money. This would also be a fruitful field to study whether focusing on “others” might not be more profitable than focusing on “me”.

Recapitulating: Science tells us that animals – as primitive and different as they may appear to be – are the organisms from which we arose and where we remain anchored despite all our superiority. Our egocentricity would have the plant kingdom and all the creeping and crawling animals serving our every need. It would also be fruitful to study whether underlying transactional processes that fall under the OBS guidelines are at work here as well. Until today, we continue to confront living nature with a predatory attitude that borders on sheer, unbridled carelessness. The pendulum, however, has begun to swing in the other direction and the many negative repercussions are coming to light. The human race is beginning to assume a new attitude, albeit for the time being only when it suits our immediate interests. Today’s “environmental protection”  continues to reflect our semi-predatory approach and will require considerable modification before a “fair balance” and partnership are established.
An additional balance, which has preoccupied philosophers over the ages, is that between humans and their possessions (additional organs in our vocabulary). How many possessions can an individual cope with? When is the “human dimension” transcended? When ever more possessions lead to less satisfaction, then something is clearly amiss⁵⁷. In my opinion, modern economic thought, whose mantra is to increase turnover, stumbles into the pitfall of the semi-predator’s logic and suffers the full brunt of the psychosplit.  It is poorly compatible with qualitative growth.

Human impressive behavior – part of the inventory in our social drives – adds fuel to the fire. When a house or a dress loses value as soon as our neighbor builds him or herself an even more beautiful residence or the neighbor’s wife buys an even more elegant dress, then, again, something is amiss. This yields a final research topic in the balance between our instincts and our true, personal interests: does this behavior contain transactional elements amenable to evaluation by OBS criteria?

Several decades ago a young American burned his passport and founded a “global citizenry” movement. He attracted more followers than he could handle. Perhaps our development has progressed to a point where this experiment could be repeated with even greater success.
 

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