PLAGUE 4: MANAGEMENT AS MAGIC

OR BELIEVING THAT

WE HAVE A FORMULA FOR CONTROLLING OUR WORLD

It was called 'The Age of Enlightenment'; yet it led to darkness. At first, you could understand why it happened. By the 1700s, in Western Europe, centuries of war, political persecution and religious bigotry had turned many people towards the view that: 'Man will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest.' (Variously attributed to Jean Meslier (1664 – 1729) and Denis Diderot (1713 – 1784).

The Age of Enlightenment preached that Mankind was to get rid of superstition and take control of its own destiny: by basing society on equality, tolerance, and above all: reason. Yet new societies, whose official philosophy was supposed to be based on such human rationality, resulted in the bloody paranoia of the French Revolution, the Soviet Gulag, the Maoist starving of millions and the Killing Fields of Pol Pot (among others!). Although they had got rid of kings, priests and superstition; there was still plenty of war, persecution and bigotry, and not much freedom.  Yes, and although the Founding Fathers of the United States spent much time devising a constitution that would create and control a fair and equal society, it took a nasty civil war to abolish slavery, while still resulting in a society in which many African Americans, even today, do not consider either fair or equal.

So was that the end of this mirage of human beings believing that they could succesfully determine their destiny through the application of reason alone? You might think that we don't need yet another disastrous revolution to finally realize that the theories of the Age of Enlightenment don't work. Yet the principles of the Age of Enlightenment continue to deceive us human beings into believing that we are masters of our own destiny, which we can fully know, understand and control. We assume that we know:

• Where we are now

• Where we would like to be

• What we have to do to get there

- in short; we can choose what will happen when we attempt to manage our own future, that of an organization, or the future of society.

So let's look at the assumptions behind this belief. Knowing 'where we are now' and 'where we would like to be', implies that we human beings really understand who we are and what we truly desire. For this to be so, we would have to ignore how we are being deceived by the Psychology as Religion, enslaved by the Time Tyranny and seduced by the Goddess of Nature. Our study of these plagues reveals that we are often not even aware of that they exist, let alone being able to counteract their effects on us and our beliefs. Meanwhile, we continue attempting to solve problems and make improvements to our societies and the way that we live. Let's see what these attempts are, and why they don't work, by first considering:

ATTEMPTS AT MANAGING OUR WORLD —>        MANAGEMENT BELIEFS AND VALUES —>         WHAT MANAGERS THINK THAT THEY DO —>