This is an analysis in response to my comment at a cityam article, especially in particular the last 2 paragraphs within that comment. The last 2 paragraphs may look like the main problem is Amazon, but in reality that is not the main problem. The main problem is the original source, which is human stupidity and irrationality. Amazon is just an instance of human desires. Amazon is just a slave, it become the master of the customers choices. The solution is creating the next social network that will solve the source of the problem. I address in detail in here why is that and why should you contribute to make a world a better place.
Assume Company B exists. Company B is driven by the demand characteristics of group A. Demand characteristics of group A do not realise the conflict of interests with the demand characteristics of group B. Group B must be catered by the needs instead by another system, lets say company C. Company B and Company C work in different purposes, different interests, different domains. And so as a war ensues between 2 domains, except instead of here being concrete like our past world wars, they are abstract.
Although they do not ensure any physical harm, they waste a lot of time like wars do and people are limited to focus only on their own domain, which results in their inability to see the full picture, that is, that both domains in most cases are compatible to each other instead of incompatible.
Let us illustrate an example for demonstration purposes. Let us say that company B is looking at cutting costs, in other words, improving marginal gains. One way is to have a process that automates tasks so people can focus on more abstract concepts, such examples can be using creativity and improving existing processes by looking in depth of how things work, instead of focusing only on manual labor. This idea can become handled in a bad way as in that many companies don’t complete the full process, the full cycle of the benefits automation brings. In other words, instead of earning growth righteously, they take shortcuts and use hack growth. Lets take the most common example that happened a lot in the past within our world, which in most cases we don’t do anything about it: Selling very cheap items out of manual labor done by cheap countries. The profit is consumed by two groups of people: The buyer itself, demanding a product that is cheaper and the company itself, to instead use this profit to transition his employees from manual skills to abstract skills, they mostly use most of their profit on expanding the processes to make more profit instead of investing most to its employees to focus more on abstract concepts. But the huge problem of all is to understand why companies behave in this manner in the first place. I hear all the time that businesses that became successful, all they had to do, was to listen, adjust, and adapt to the needs of the customer. So I beg your pardon for you all, but the source of the problem in most cases is not the company, but the customer and the customer itself. The customer does not always follow the rules of Immanuel Kant categorical imperative, creating an anomaly to our universe by its choices it makes. When a customer goes to a store and buys a product, he does not think beyond the price tag other than how much it benefits him instead of asking the question whether it benefits the whole world. I am not addressing that we should be paranoid for every decision we make, but instead of having an attitude of being rational in a holistic instead of an individualistic level, as well companies whether they should only focus and being a slave on listening all customers or focus on limiting themselves to listen only to customers that follow mostly Immanuel Kant’s categorical imperative. An attitude that both people and organizations express in the sense of doubts and justifications whether we violate or not an anomaly in our world. In recent times, there were a lot of startups that do the unimaginable, but that's how all marriage starts: Setting a product at a cheap price that customers do not understand the implications behind. Cheap prices are not a constant thing we can expect in this world. Like falling in love with the opposite sex, it seems you get all those mesmerized good experiences at a cheap price first, but the whole reason is only a bait to experiment and try the product and nothing else. You then at that point have all the facts and evidence you accumulated by experiencing the product, that leads you to make a better sound judgment whether this product is worth at a higher price tag than you used to pay, which is much better than judging a product with no correlation in your mind to what this product does in the first place. Higher prices for mature products is essential and they should not do extreme hack growths, for do you prefer your date to be one that dresses in class or you want it to be the most flamboyant to stand out only for the purposes of getting the most attention? The latter sounds too good to be true and it doesn’t sound that it can last for long, especially if the individual expects that it can still gain the same attention with the same premises.
And still, we see big companies that are driven only by customers and ignore the human component. That is, mature products, even when increasing prices, they still want to keep the prices low because the customers are driven at it and in order to reach their target goals they have to do big sacrifices. In order to do that, they drain the employee on every drop and sweat to make the maximum value out of the specific domain the company employs, making the human ignore the rest of the domains that makes a human more complete.
Such companies created with their specific domains a world that requires skills of specific specialization, not letting people to see the world in other domains beyond the company itself, for the less focus on the domain they are forced to work, the less they add value to the company they are employed. People cannot focus on other domains, such as families, hobbies, contribution on other fields, what makes us live in the gestalt, in the same way how our world is physically globalized. Instead, we are forced abstractly to live only in one country, one domain, and make the rest as an enemy of our time. People’s nature is not that way and some will conform to it and some will see its anomaly and can see its insanity on it.
When an anomaly like that happens and we don’t have a solution on our current paradigm, we treat it as nature’s way, a paradox, like an agency detector telling us that we have to blame it on a supernatural thing we cannot comprehend (such as nature, the forces of evolution are always a mystery what it selects or not). Losses of words come in my head, as this is normal science as Thomas Kuhn has described, it is a figment of people’s wishful thinking in order to retain our current normal science, our current paradigm. We try to conceal that anomaly because this anomaly is consistent so far and because it is constant all the time and repeatable, people mistake it to represent the truth, but the real truth behind all that is it created by our own self, by our own halo effect. Our choices, which currently is made out of our natural impulses instead of thinking in terms of the big picture, creates the “effect” of the organizations, institutions, and companies that surround us in the first place. Because we choose cheap price, the companies that will last and grow the most are the ones where its employees focus on the most within that domain. Other companies that lets treat its employees in a more holistic manner will not be able to do that because the costs will be too much to keep the prices low. They don’t have the competitive advantage when other companies sacrifice the human component to make those humans put all their effort into one specific domain.
These abstraction wars used to exist separately between developed and developing nations. That notion is starting to blur, as families now can invest indirectly (such paying money for something) on a very successful service that forces people to work on a limited domain where their brothers and sisters work. This subconscious and silo fragmented thinking in our head is so prevalent, that even the employee who works there may buy products for that service itself. The tragic irony to that is stark like the ones of Homer.
In summary, companies have a new master, the customer. Companies are slave to the customers, and unlike economics want to predict that humans by default are rational creatures, they usually can easily be manipulated and regulated still by our own embodiment, a part how we used to work in our childish mindset during the stages of Piaget development. We are controlled by the stupidity of people, as Einstein labeled them. The reason we are stupid and don’t see the big picture is because nobody teaches us about it and we never practice it in our daily life as to be our current paradigm, like the scientific thinking we have these days.
My solution is the creation of the next social network that will transition humans from their natural impulses to instead looking at the big picture of the world and make our society a better place. This will not be the biggest impact if this is done only with on hands and face to face experiences, as we will not be able to see the full picture what is going within our world around us, as well we will not be visible enough for others to give feedback to us. You can get a lot of hints from mental symmetry website , natural cognitive theology, a summary of cognitive styles, a summary notes of Thomas Kuhn Scientific Revolution, the executive paradigm diagram I draw in correlation with mental symmetry , the common abstract implications of black box thinking which are very closely correlated with mental symmetry.
I am thinking the first prototype will be with the help of some people that are new to this theory on bringing some feedback and direction. So I am entertaining you here with a reason to drive in this theory as you have nothing much to lose. I am confident that you will learn in here something much better that will add meaning to your life than what you learned in school or other books. This is a better theory than the fictional one we immense in multiplayer games where we focus only on the concrete external actions instead of the abstract internal principles that life drive us. If you have done charity before, this is the best charity that you can give to your own self.
The research is kind of done on convincing myself that mental symmetry is a solution to an existing flawed paradigm. Now is time to polish and research the market on how this next social network can fit as a better alternative to existing social networks. What is ahead on our radar is convincing and making this idea practical.
I need your help on that, so follow me and send me a direct message on my twitter account along with your blog or personal profile so I can know more about your character. It is time to venture on ideas on how to make this idea a reality, as it is all up to our choices whether we want to still live in this same reality or to change it.