{"id":21055,"date":"2019-01-25T20:49:46","date_gmt":"2019-01-26T04:49:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dminlgp\/?p=21055"},"modified":"2019-01-25T20:49:46","modified_gmt":"2019-01-26T04:49:46","slug":"polanyi-and-pinball","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/polanyi-and-pinball\/","title":{"rendered":"Polanyi and Pinball"},"content":{"rendered":"

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There is an old arcade game, Pinball, in which the player stands at the machine and shoots a ball into the playing field which is filled with barriers, obstacle forces, and point giving opportunities. The idea is to keep the ball in play as long as possible while scoring the highest points achievable. This crude metaphor kept coming to mind while reading Karl Polanyi\u2019s, The Great Transformation. <\/em>His historical account of the development and idealism of the self-regulating market with the economic and political playing fields seemed eerily familiar to pinball. The tensions between democracy and capitalism, the market systems and counter-movements, the political repression and protective legislation resemble the ball being batted around at the will of the player who is out for personal gain. Rather than the markets being a tool for society\u2019s advance they become the player and through commodification, humans become the ball. Polanyi described these concepts in 1944 and now seventy-five years later we have further evidence to consider through recessions, and the recent credit crises of just a decade ago, not to mention mounting legislation and regulations.<\/p>\n

Polanyi is considered by some a \u201cforgotten thinker\u201d whose basic ideas argue that \u201cthe autonomous, self-regulating market is neither natural nor central to society.\u201d[1]<\/a> Polanyi\u2019s ideas are set at odds with Adam Smith\u2019s as he sees the ordering principles of society as reciprocity, redistribution, and householding rather than Smith\u2019s \u201ctruck, barter, and exchange.\u201d[2]<\/a> Polanyi leans into humanizing principles rather than mechanistic thinking. He shows grave concern for every move of political and economic gain at the expense of the most vulnerable of society and shows that the trickle-down effect is rarely realized. It was his description of the commodification of humans, land and money that most caught my attention. It sounded very much like the influence of the industrial revolution upon organizations and leadership and technology upon virtual reality and artificial intelligence by dehumanizing people, making land currency, and money god. Polanyi shows that the hoped for utopia of a self-regulating market is impossible to achieve as the tensions between personal gain and societal well-being are at direct odds with one another.<\/p>\n

Margaret Wheatley, author of Leadership and the New Science,<\/em> says, \u201cI believe we have been kept apart by three primary Western cultural beliefs: individualism, competition, and a mechanistic world view…Our concept of organization is moving away from mechanistic creations that flourished in the age of bureaucracy. We now speak in earnest of more fluid, organic structures, of boundaryless and seamless organizations\u2026We discard mechanistic practices, and learn from the behavior of living systems.\u201d[3]<\/a> Humanizing humanity, protecting and giving the land back to its organic self, and seeing money as a resource for the good of all rather than a master over some, these are the ideas thinkers like Polanyi, Wheatley and others seems to be advocating. Their warning signals are similar to those being sounded by current thought leaders like Andy Crouch regarding becoming \u201ctech-wise\u201d families in this digital age. Crouch states, \u201cIncreasingly sophisticated algorithms are created helping apps manage the number of nudges received so you never get tired of responding to them.\u201d[4]<\/a><\/p>\n

Commodifying dehumanization comes in various forms from economics and politics to organizational structures and practices, to even the smartphone in our pockets. We are not the pinball to be battered around by the very systems we create, rather human beings are created in the image of God to live in, care for and subdue the God-created worlds made for us to thrive. May we listen to history and pay attention to lessons learned and do our part to be the player, not the pinball.<\/p>\n

[1]<\/a> Walter J. Kendall, III, “The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time.” (The Indonesian Journal of International & Comparative Law: Socio-Political Perspectives<\/i> 2, no. 4, 2015), 847.<\/p>\n

[2]<\/a> Ibid.<\/p>\n

[3]<\/a> Margaret Wheatley, Leadership and the New Science <\/em>(San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc., 2006), Kindle Loc. 2436.<\/p>\n

[4]<\/a> Andy Crouch, The Tech-Wise Family <\/em>(Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2017), 34.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There is an old arcade game, Pinball, in which the player stands at the machine and shoots a ball into the playing field which is filled with barriers, obstacle forces, and point giving opportunities. The idea is to keep the ball in play as long as possible while scoring the highest points achievable. This crude […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":112,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[4],"class_list":["post-21055","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-polanyi","cohort-lgp9"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21055","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/112"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21055"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21055\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21059,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21055\/revisions\/21059"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21055"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21055"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21055"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}