Ideas by Cordian Riener
After our shared experience of the seminar under Klaus-Jürgen Grün on “Business Ethics” between October, 4th and 7th, I received the following letter from Dr. Cordian Riener.
Dear Roland,
many thanks for your diverse ideas during the seminar. During the train trip back, with my mind on the seminar, I came up with a number of comments I would not wish to forget – so I am making notes on my iPad and sharing them with you.
Firstly, here is how I feel about his definition of sustainability as “no waste“: a short while ago, I had heard about “cradle to cradle” as a new concept of production planning. Apparently, it is quite possible to really reduce the waste to a minimum by prudently defined product cycles and to make used articles the raw material for other articles with a minimum of energy. Especially in architecture, this is getting more and more attention – probably mostly in Holland. This kind of thing would, indeed, be sustainable according to your beautiful definition.
Note by me: I took the definition from Dr. Klaus Töpfer.
If and how these kinds of product cycles can actually be realized purely with market mechanisms without outward control, however, will certainly be an exciting question. During the discussion, you also very correctly remarked that we currently have a lack of responsibility: on the one hand, profits are privatized, on the other hand, the risks and losses are socialized. I liked your argument very much and it also made me thoughtful.
In fact, I actually do have the impression that people (whoever exactly we mean with “people”) try to get rid of responsibility. On the one hand, this might be one of the reasons why institutions telling you which is “the right way” were so successful for such a long time when it came to telling people what they should do. On the other hand, it is certainly also one of the reasons why parts of our society have been marketized: where formerly you said “what God wants is good” has become “what the market wants is the right thing to do” and where formerly the will of the Gods was spoken to us through the mouth of the priests, modern prophets now use quantitative expressions and mathematical formula, along with an army of business priests who will then interpret them for us.
Initially, this might sound like a more or less beautiful analogy, but when it comes to responsibility, you unfortunately discover even more things they have in common: in former times, priests had power over the monarchs, because they were also in a position to take over their responsibility: for instance, if a king caused famine through poor planning, he was on the safe side if there was also an easy way to get out of the responsibility; to be sure, there might be some polemics included here.
I got exactly the same impression while I was doing my practical training at a bank: there was the market; quantitative models discovered the will of this metaphysical entity and the portfolio managers acted according to what the model told them. If things went wrong – and there were quite some times when it did go wrong – the customer (i.e. the bank director) was told that the market had changed its opinion – which was exactly what the models had foretold. I hope this makes some sense at all.
Basically, I suspect that what I experienced quite often (not only as described in the above example) is a very common phenomenon: people are not sure yet have to make decisions. Instead of trusting their “instincts” which – if they have been trained by long years of experience – will come up with the right (best possible) decision, you prefer to rely on things that look more “solid”.
That gives you the advantage that, afterwards, you are not the one who can be held responsible. Instead, you can say there was something like market failure – the market God changed his opinion on short notice. With these considerations, I suspect that your statement was correct when you said that there is a lack of responsibility. And I also suspect that this lack is heightened by our marketized society. As far as this is concerned, I am sure it would be very exciting to take a closer look at our social development on next year’s seminar, wouldn’t it?
With kind regards, Cordian
Well, that was the text by Cordian. Many thanks!
I have now had several more exchanges of ideas with Cordian and am happy to tell you that, in the future, he will also be an IF blog author. This is great – and I will introduce him shortly in the IF blog as a new comrade-in-arms. I already look forward to reading his articles.
RMD
(Translated by EG)
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