Phylogenesis: The development and diversification of an organism, an ecosystem, or human enterprise based upon natural laws and energetics. We therefore create out of our defined universe, via our human inalienable rights, a world by which we may pursue our created purpose historically defined has happiness.
The historic paradigm of Christianity states that the failure of human capacity to keep the Law, both specific religious laws but also the common or natural laws that govern both the physical world and the common relationships within human culture, is supposed to drive us towards the redemption found alone in the Good News of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.
With the decline of Judeo-Christian ethics around the world and post-modern Christianity’s desire to be just another human law based religion, we have sought to achieve our own holiness through human means. This works its way through the culture by simplifying all laws fulfillment, by our sincerity to want to do the right thing. We are sincerely wrong if we think those attempts will save ourselves or our world.
To this end, we humans have sought to create human urban utopias where reliance on cheap energy and material substitutes have attempted to overcome the effects of true natural laws; by just not acknowledging their existence. Thus with the dawn of 2011 we are shocked when our prosperity dreams have become just that, dreams of wishful thinking.
In our recent writings we have proposed that we have passed through the end of the Industrial Age, and are beginning what we have defined as the Individual Age. What we will rapidly learn from these stupendous changes, is that individual survival is based upon, not our autonomy, but our interdependence within the natural world and our cultures. That interdependence reality is not some grand global salvation, but rather our ability to contribute to historic human families and other small community structures.
Below find the Seven Principles of Business Ecology and Five Natural Growth Curves, first used in the 1980s to describe enterprise happenings and to give a simple management foundation for sustainable enterprise growth and wealth creation. Most of these are what have been historically called common sense, simply because they are true principles of natural law, which we think apply to everyone and everything else, except to us personally.
When first proposed as Principles of Business Ecology, it was hoped that people would truly venture into God’s creation to be apprehended by the reality of personal insignificance and thereby develop a sense of natural grandeur and personal humility. That has not happened, so now our temporal existence will become that laboratory of fearful reality.
A lot could be said about these Principles, but they are best readily understood in their simplicity. The last principle is a direct quote of 1 John 2:17. Over the years I have never found any circumstance in which at least one of the Business Ecology principles did not apply. Following the Principles are Five Lifestyle Curves, the last one also describing a spiritual truth. They again are pretty much self explanatory. The whole concept behind the Principles and the Curves is to design something that you can easily carry in your head and recall in a specific situation in response to a question such as, “I wonder why?” Using the Principles and the Curves you can then readily see that your question’s answer follows “this — these Principles and this Curve,” when what we were really trying to do was to follow “these Principles and this Curve.”
For example, we have been told that for reasons related to the wisdom of specific the elite leaders of the free world of western culture in business and politics, that economic growth is based upon material consumption of globally made kitsch, manufactured where labor and materials are by their definition the most profitable to their construction. What you see when applying the Principles and Curves to that paradigm is not what Adam Smith discussed and has been defined as Capitalism, but really a system that denies the first six Principles and redefines God in their monetary relative terms, a god completely unrelated to any Supreme Being.
Perhaps a better description of what has happened in recent years can be described as follows:
In a world of limited resources, the season of gross materialism has run out of gas. The free lunch, that globalism said it followed, is not based upon true diversity but rather specialization of the lowest cost of production and does not take into account the reality of that change in the culture it says this form of materialism serves. The real god of this world is money and the key to eternity is making as much money as possible, whereby the individual can create a personal legacy.
As you look at the first four Lifestyle Curves which are easily seen in nature, the difference really is not so much the in the up, but the down that leads to death. In that respect looking at the ecology of a Climax ecosystem (See Climax curve below) you see a diverse stability we all seek, in which one type or paradigm of growth and energetics is replaced with another. Only in that true natural diversity is a durable security obtained by freedom of opportunity, not by trying to manage the egalitarian outcome. If we continue on our current path of materialism at all cost, we, like lemmings, are going to run off a cliff, rebuilding a self sustaining economy will be lost, and we will join the lost cultures of human history. Only this time our demise will be done globally rather than regionally.
PRINCIPLES OF BUSINESS ECOLOGY
What was, is and shall be.
Everything eventually runs out of gas.
For everything there is a season.
There is no free lunch.
Equilibrium is maintained through diversity.
Change is the only constant.
The world and its desires pass away but the man who does the will of God lives forever.
FIVE LIFESTYLE CURVES
Business Ecology clipping, INC Magazine, December 1982 (PDF - 1.2MB)
Business Ecology: A Contemporary Management Tabloid, June 1983 (PDF - 7.3MB)