Walden Pond Here We Come!

Alan, let me respond to the EPIC article first.  It is classic "throwaway widget" thinking on the part of the company power elite.   Hire them burn them out, throw them overboard. 

Peter F. Drucker argued that the healthy organization of the future would be a path to self-actualization, not throwaway exploitation.  To use the language  of Abraham Maslow's classic "Hierarchy of Needs," healthy organizations help its members self-actualize.  They also define expectations and help employees to meet them through appropriate training, coaching, mentoring. 

Of course, we are talking about Drucker's organizational ideals, not the realities of "use them up and throw them away" of our "free agent" society, economy, politics.  The response more and more will be an awareness that these systems exploit, and folks will no longer buy the idea that money defines success.  Of course, we need basics; we are moving into a time when more and more people will define success as "time for themselves and for each other."

 Higher education, in effect, serves as a priesthood for the religions of Wall Street and "economism" (the idea that nothing has value unless it produces, sells, or buys, as A.J. Nock defined it).  Daniel Pink captured this dynamic in his classic Free Agent Nation.  Or as Immanuel Kant put it, people are ends, not means.  Amen.  It is, as my late sainted uncle liked to say, "same tune second verse," sadly. 

Yes, more and more folks are going to step back to pursue authenticity, not running the rat race of success as defined by the ruling class, and, yes, America has a class structure, although people do not like to face it.  Walden Pond here we come!  Paul