To the degree a people system harnesses and serves felt and motivating value, that system will depend upon design methods for its success.

To the degree a people system is driven by coercion, that system may be socially engineered.

Most organizations are somewhere in the middle region, maybe 61.8% toward the social engineered side. These organizations use bribes, blackmail and sub-volitional manipulation (aka “behavioral economics”) to turn its unwilling gears.

A better balance would be 61.8% toward design. It would locate the inward resources of the organization — the essential services that flow meaning into the lives of those who are given the conditions to give their gift — to infuse the organization with vitality, and the charisma that naturally radiates from organizations animated by genuine desire to serve.

An example: Schools who hire motivated teachers and manage the school with the goal of supporting the teaching every born teacher naturally does will produce vital classrooms that engage and inspire students to learn and develop. This cannot happen in institutions that assume that teachers must be mechanically motivated, carrot-and-stick style. They “run the organization like a business”, setting quantifiable objectives, establishing rewards for achieving these objectives and punishments for falling short of them. This requires systems for providing visibility to the rewarding, punishing bureaucracy. Schools must “instrument” instruction so compliance to procedure may be monitored and enforced and effectiveness measured and rewarded or punished. All this diverts attention away from the teaching itself, requires hours of off-hours drudgery and causes frustration and eventual burnout. But this is not such a big problem, because the system is designed to run entirely without morale.

But this makes schools into joyless, meaningless places that all but a few students hate. So the students, also must be driven by external rewards and punishments, as opposed to an intrinsic desire to learn. This, too, is ideal for a world where businesses are “run like a business” and employees are driven to goals like stubborn mules with carrots and sticks.

Another example is healthcare. The best nurses are inwardly driven by an innate need to give care. In my own field research, I’ve been shocked at how much resistance and strain this care-drive will tolerate. But if nurses are subjected to excessive commercial, managerial and logistical duties, this depletes them of time, morale and other personal resources required to deliver the care their patients desperately need. They get stretched thin and worn down by tasks entirely unrelated to care. Healthcares facilities run this way become “clinical” — impersonal, dehumanizing, degrading and scary places.

And of course, businesses “run like businesses” are the same way. They harass, coerce, intimidate, humiliate their employees, subject them to utter chickenshit then pour bullshit onto the chickenshit, and then demand in return compelled bullshit from the employees. They must pretend to respect purposeless tedium and to feel bullshit “passion” for soulless drivel no human being could possible care about.

No organization, business or otherwise should be “run like a business”, because this is code for imposition of technik managerialism which masters What and How and the expense of authentic, felt, motivating Why, replacing it with the managerial technik counterfeit: “in-order-to”.

I just talked to Susan about what essential Why is.

Essential Why is utterly non-rational and non-technical. It has no “in-order-to” because it is itself the in-order-to for the sake of which everything else is done. It is the motivation and meaning and purpose that drives everything else.

When someone asks us “why?” of our essential Why, we have no answer. If we are in touch with our own truth, we’ll say, this is what we are about. It is the heart of the value of everything else. It is the meaning of my life. Or we just confess ignorance. “I don’t know. I just love it.”

But if we’re dominated by managerial / technik worldview, we’ll confabulate an in-order-to. We’ll pretend it has a function. “I’m visiting Rome in order to get some R&R so I can return to my work refreshed.” Whatever.

I offered her an old myth I made up. I said the Scientific Revolution made the understanding of nature much easier by focusing solely on What and How, and excluding Why from the problem.

It is a little like picking a restaurant. Two people can easily find a place. Adding a third makes it much harder.

Science has made enormous progress by excluding Why considerations from its problems. A scientist seeking a scientific account of a natural phenomenon asks What the relevant elements are and How they behave together as a system. This has worked spectacularly well. We can now force nature to do many things beyond the imagination of anyone living three centuries ago.

But success can be our worst enemy. We have over applied exclusion of Why to just about every sphere of life, even places like politics and even religion to where Why is essential. Why should never have been excluded from business.

And that is why we are suffering a nihilism pandemic.

We have excluded Why from too many places that most social systems available to us drive us like demotivated mules until we are demotivated mules.

And, despite what young managerials say, this is not “because of capitalism.” There has never been deeper, depressing, cynical nihilism anywhere on this earth than in places where Marxism was attempted.

The problem is the scientism, managerialism, technik, interminable chains of in-order-to, Whyless functionalism that is the root of scientistic, technocratic governance of every soulless organization of every scale, from global bureaucracies, to nation states, to the kinds of loveless marriage this Whylessness makes inevitable.