Make no mistake about it: we’ll find something to unite us during a “We.”
Take, for instance, 1933, when we were halfway to the Zenith. The motto of that year seemed to be: “Let’s keep working together for the common good.”
Technological advances included the introduction of intercontinental flights on commercial airplanes, scotch tape, and frozen foods. But halfway up isn’t when we hear Alpha Voices in technology and literature giving us a clue of the new perspective that will soon arrive; those Alpha Voices don’t emerge until the Pendulum is halfway down.
The first six years of any Upswing are beautiful, but then things begin to smell funny as we get our first good whiff of “taking a good thing too far.”
Figure 8.1 The second half of an upswing of a “WE” cycle.
The halfway point of an Upswing of “We” isn’t a time of heroes but of antiheroes. In the mid-thirties in America, it was: “Let’s track down Pretty Boy Floyd, and John Dillinger, and Bonnie and Clyde, and Al Capone. Let’s clean this place up and make everyone start acting right.”
These impulses are the same in every society, but different countries have different ideas about what needs to be cleaned up and who isn’t acting right.
WE |
The focus of every ‘We’ is to identify problems, catalog them, assign blame, and elevate regret. ‘We’ tends to look over its shoulder at the past. |
The year 1933 in Germany was when the book burnings began. Friedrich Schönemann of the University of Berlin spoke at the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations in the autumn of that year. When someone from the floor questioned him about Germany’s books burnings, Schönemann replied, “A tremendous flood of books on nudism and of a general pornographic nature unfit for either juvenile or adult reading had inundated Germany, and these were burned. I am sorry to say,” he continued, “that the authors of many—of a majority—were Jewish.”
According to Kathleen McLaughlin, writing for the New York Times in 1933, “These cheap dismissals were met with more yelling from the crowd, including shouts about the fate of the books of writers such as Helen Keller and Albert Einstein. Schönemann showed he would be swayed neither by emotion nor facts: ‘No foreign books were burned. I think I am correct in saying that none of Miss Keller’s volumes was included.’”1
Figure 8.2 Characteristics of society at the Zenith of a “WE” cycle.
| WE ZENITH CHARACTERISTICS | |
| TAKING A GOOD THING TOO FAR | |
| “WHEN A STUPID MAN IS DOING SOMETHING HE IS ASHAMED OF, HE ALWAYS DECLARES THAT IT IS HIS DUTY.”—George Bernard Shaw | |
• Personal liberties stripped away • Self-righteous • Duty, obligation, sacrifice • Secretly dissatisfied |
• Long for freedom • Regimentation • Process smothers innovation • Claustrophobic and oppressive |
Meanwhile, Franklin Delano Roosevelt called the nation together with the first of his famous Fireside Chats heard on radios nationwide. Roosevelt said, in effect, Gather around, children. We’ll pull through this. We’ll all work together for the common good. Gather ‘round the radio, children! It’s time for a fireside chat!
Cornell library
Here are some excerpts from that first Fireside Chat, broadcast from the White House on March 12, 1933. Notice how FDR speaks to the nation as if to a family of equals and appeals to everyone to work together for the common good. Notice also the absence of bluster and the overall tone of transparency. These are the stylistic hallmarks of an Upswing of “We.”
WE I want to talk for a few minutes with the people of the United States about banking . . . I want to tell you what has been done in the last few days and why it was done, and what the next steps are going to be. . . . I owe this in particular because of the fortitude and good temper with which everybody has accepted the inconvenience and hardships of the banking holiday. I know that when you understand what we in Washington have been about, I shall continue to have your cooperation as fully as I have had your sympathy and help during the past week.
First of all let me state the simple fact that when you deposit money in a bank the bank does not put the money into a safe deposit vault. It invests your money in many different forms of credit—in bonds, in commercial paper, in mortgages, and in many other kinds of loans. In other words, the bank puts your money to work to keep the wheels of industry and of agriculture turning around. A comparatively small part of the money you put into the bank is kept in currency—an amount which in normal times is wholly sufficient to cover the cash needs of the average citizen. In other words the total amount of all the currency in the country is only a comparatively small proportion of the total deposits in all the banks of the country.
What, then, happened during the last few days of February and the first few days of March? Because of undermined confidence on the part of the public, there was a general rush by a large portion of our population to turn bank deposits into currency or gold—a rush so great that the soundest banks could not get enough currency to meet the demand. The reason for this was that on the spur of the moment it was, of course, impossible to sell perfectly sound assets of a bank and convert them into cash except at panic prices far below their real value.
By the afternoon of March 3, scarcely a bank in the country was open to do business. Proclamations closing them, in whole or in part, had been issued by the governors in almost all the states.
It was then that I issued the proclamation providing for the national bank holiday, and this was the first step in the government’s reconstruction of our financial and economic fabric.
Let me make it clear to you that the banks will take care of all needs . . . and it is my belief that hoarding during the past week has become an exceedingly unfashionable pastime. . . . I can assure you, my friends, that it is safer to keep your money in a reopened bank than it is to keep it under the mattress.
The success of our whole national program depends, of course, upon the cooperation of the public—on its intelligent support and use of a reliable system.
One more point before I close. There will be, of course, some banks unable to reopen without being reorganized. The new law allows the government to assist in making these reorganizations quickly and effectively and even allows the government to subscribe to at least a part of any new capital that may be required.
I hope you can see, my friends, from this essential recital of what your government is doing that there is nothing complex, nothing radical in the process.
We have had a bad banking situation. Some of our bankers had shown themselves either incompetent or dishonest in their handling of the people’s funds. They had used the money entrusted to them in speculations and unwise loans. This was of course not true in the vast majority of our banks, but it was true in enough of them to shock the people of the United States, for a time, into a sense of insecurity and to put them into a frame of mind where they did not differentiate, but seemed to assume that the acts of a comparative few had tainted them all. And so it became the government’s job to straighten out this situation and do it as quickly as possible. And the job is being performed. . . .
I can never be sufficiently grateful to the people for the loyal support they have given me in their acceptance of the judgment that has dictated our course, even though all of our processes may not have seemed clear to them.
After all there is an element in the readjustment of our financial system more important than currency, more important than gold, and that is the confidence of the people themselves. Confidence and courage are the essentials of success in carrying out our plan. You people must have faith; you must not be stampeded by rumors or guesses. Let us unite in banishing fear. We have provided the machinery to restore our financial system, and it is up to you to support and make it work.
It is your problem, my friends, your problem no less than it is mine. Together we cannot fail.2
When I presented the first ninety-minute “Pendulum” presentation in Stockholm in January, 2004, I embedded into my Power-Point presentation the first two sentences of that historic fireside chat in FDR’s own voice. As the glistening voice of FDR faded, I smiled and said, “Let’s hope the American economy doesn’t repeat in 2009 what it did in 1929.” I distinctly remember that no one laughed, not even a chuckle. Evidently those Europeans held a premonition of the financial implosion that would occur due to the mortgage meltdown crisis of late 2008, just one year prior to the eightieth anniversary of the stock market crash of 1929, when society’s Pendulum was in the same position and headed in the same direction as it was in 1929.
When Lehman Brothers and other important financial institutions failed in September, 2008, $150 billion were withdrawn from US money funds in a two-day period. This was thirty times higher than the average two-day outflow. In effect, the money market was subject to a bank run.
Was this collapse avoidable? Absolutely. The reason history must repeat itself is because we pay too little attention the first time.
iStockphoto / magnetcreative
Just to make sure that the values and perspective of the public are continuing in the same direction as they did in 1923, let’s look at the top five best-selling novels of 1933:
Figure 8.3 Popular novel themes moving toward the Zenith of a “WE” cycle.
WE POPULAR NOVEL THEMES: REACHING ZENITH OF “WE” (1933–1943) |
|
| A TIME OF DUTY, OBLIGATION, AND SACRIFICE | MESSAGE |
“Anthony Adverse” Hervey Allen |
Duty and obligation |
An orphan’s debt to the man who raised him threatens to separate him forever from the woman he loves. |
|
“As the Earth Turns” Gladys Hasty Carroll |
Disillusionment and loss of innocence |
A year in the life of a rural family facing the modern world of airplanes, college educations, and city life. |
|
“Ann Vickers” Sinclair Lewis |
Personal suffering while helping others |
| Social worker/prison reformer looks for love with men who abuse her. | |
“Magnificent Obsession” Lloyd C. Douglas |
Duty and obligation, personal sacrifice for the benefit of others |
A rescue crew resuscitates a man after a boating accident. Consequently, the crew is unable to save the life of a doctor, renowned for his ability to help people, who was having a heart attack on the other side of the lake at the same time. The man who was saved decides to devote his life to making up for the loss of the doctor’s life. |
 iStockphoto / lcodacci |
“One More River” John Galsworthy |
The injustice in life, the pain of love |
A young woman flees to England to escape her sadistic husband, falls in love, and becomes hopelessly compromised with a penniless young Englishman. | |
Nope. No big surprises there. All of these novels are about people trying to do the right thing and suffering for their decisions.
Hit Songs of the Era
Let’s look at the final six years leading up to the Zenith of the “We,” as the once-beautiful dream of “working together for the common good” becomes duty, obligation, and sacrifice. Although we try to do the right thing during a “We,” we also whine and moan about it. Notice how the number-one song each year reminisces wistfully about happier days:
Figure 8.4 Popular song themes moving toward the Zenith of a “WE” cycle.
The Zenith of a “We” is when “working together for the common good” becomes
• duty (“Be loyal to your union brothers. Don’t be a scab.”),
• obligation (“You have to be a union member to work here.”), and
• sacrifice (“Yes, union dues are high. But we’ve got to stick together.”).
The power of organized labor in the United States peaked in the early 1940s, wielding unbelievable power and influence. In 1941, 10.5 million workers belonged to a labor union; by 1945 that number had reached 14.7 million.
Likewise, the armed forces enjoyed a surge in enlistments prior to the Zenith of the “We” in 1943. By the summer of 1942, men disappeared in vast numbers from the workplace. More than six million women took wartime jobs in factories or filled in for men working on farms, three million volunteered with the Red Cross, and more than two hundred thousand women served in the military.
“We” is looking for problems to fix. Consequently, the focus of every “We” is to identify problems, catalog them, assign blame, and elevate regret. “We” tends to look over its shoulder at the past.
It would be easy to say, “Well, that behavior was just due to the war effort.” So why do we always feel more justified in a war effort during a “We?” The wars of which America is most proud—the Revolutionary War and World War II—both occurred during the Upswing of a “We.” The wars we barely stumbled through all happened during a “Me.”
Does a war cause the “We” or does a “We” cause the war?
A “We” is merely a hunger to come together and work for the common good. It has no agenda of its own. A “We” can easily be aimed at any problem a society chooses.
