Can capitalism wake up?

Word, as is its way in the digital age, is spreading fast.

More and more people are spontaneously recommending that I meet and interview others who live somewhere in the overlap between spirituality (defined in the broadest sense of the word) and business.

And that network effect is what led me last week to be sitting in Pastis splitting a Pellegrino with a man who was introduced to me as an “entrepreneurial mystic I simply have to meet”.

The interview was fascinating, as they have all been (and I’ll synthesize more of it in a later post). But the more remarkable outcome of our conversation, which I want to talk about today, was the desire he expressed to be a ‘guinea pig’(his language).

What he meant by this was that he was not just prepared but eager to try out provocative ‘enlightened practices’ in his own business to help experiment and prove out the case that they can directly and repeatably impact the bottom line. He is also, he explained, part of a loose affiliation of entrepreneurs who try to run their businesses along spiritual lines and who (he felt sure) would be equally willing to participate in such a social experiment.

When I first set out on the interviewing process, I was following a raw impulse. I was also consciously using Otto Scharmer et al’s ‘Presencing’ methodology….go with that initial impulse, talk to interesting people in the space, try to feel what wants to be ‘presenced’ into the field of the future through you and the interviews….

It struck me in this week’s conversation that I was hearing a siren call from this field of the future. Here was an entrepreneur telling me how to structure a living laboratory – a prototyping framework for designing, testing, proving, codifying the fundamental principles of enlightened business really…..how they ‘actually work’ to create greater 360 degree abundance.

It prompted me to ask myself “Why does the ‘field of the future’ wants this?”

And I believe in my heart that the answer to this question lies in timing. All of this is happening now, in New York City in 2008, while we are watching the platform of capitalism burn before our very eyes.

It is a market meltdown unlike others that have preceded it in a number of significant ways…at least significant from the perspective of enlightened business practices:

First, The ‘karmic chain’ (that has always been there) is fully transparent and almost real time. You do bad things (like selling mortgages to people who can’t afford them) and bad things happen to you pretty quickly (you go out of business).

Second, the interdependent nature of the situation (which has always been there) is fully transparent…..the ripple is felt in real time all over the planet through an interconnected economic & informational web

And third, ‘I am that’ (which we always are) – ie: who in America is not using credit to over-leverage in basically the same way as the banks did? Can we really say it’s all ‘them doing it to me’, or do we have to look in the mirror and say ‘I have met the enemy and it is me’?

The shockingly high level of fear that we appear to be experiencing is driven partly, I would posit, by the belief that if we’re not careful we are simply going to re-create the same set of circumstances again….that what got us here will not be what gets us out of here.

In essence then, we just may be living at a hinge on the door of modern economic history – a time when there is a sudden great open-ness to very new ideas about how capitalism should be conducted in the future.

Capitalism will not, cannot, should not go away. It may, however, need to wake up.

If and when the economic fires die down, and if the window of desperation is still open, there will be a space into which quite new models can be seeded. And the field of the future my be trying to give birth to these new models, frameworks, principles….models through which capitalism can re-invent itself to run along more enlightened, and therefore more sustainably profitable lines.