Natural Democracy

    Effective natural democracy and natural governance will need the help of technology designed with human nature in mind. Industry can supply that technology.  These new forms of governance will also require education that teaches young people how to take control of how their genes control them instead of not being in control of how their genes are controlling them.

    I  had an opportunity to test natural governance at Polaroid Corporation from both the education and technology perspectives.  Right after the assassination of  Martin Luther King, Jr., I visited a public school in a black neighborhood in Washington, D.C.  I drove through riot-burned neighborhoods, smashed storefronts, with devastation everywhere.  Then I came to an oasis: a public school with classrooms filled with children who were writing stories of what had happened.  They had taken instant pictures with Polaroid cameras and were using them to help tell their stories.

    I came to the desk of a girl who had a picture of herself with a bed sheet pulled up above her nose with fear in her eyes.  I asked if I could read what she was writing.   She wrote that her mother had taken the picture after she had been out in the middle of the riot.  She wrote about how afraid she had felt.  She had been to a candy store and was on her way home when ( here I read), "I saw people with baseball bats swinging at store windows, fires starting everywhere, sirens were screaming.  A big policeman came up to me.  He said, "-- too dangerous for you out here -- Where do you live?  I'm going to take you home.""

    At the next desk a boy wrote how a policeman had helped him find his father in the riots. He wrote -- "My daddy said "What are you doing here?  You go home."  My daddy said, "This didn't need to happen if white folks had treated black folks better."

    Another girl was writing about how her teacher had helped her understand why it was all happening.  She had a picture of the teacher with her arm around her.

    Those instant pictures were used by the teachers to help the students enhance their perception of the social forces around them, to help bring meaning, allowing faster learning, bringing emotional strength, helping the students to share their feelings and whatever else was on their minds.  Here was an example of technology that worked because it was consistent with natural democracy.  In effect, these students were getting practice with the life-enhancing epigenetic rules:  the use of the instant pictures allowed children to make integrated assessments of the effects of the riots.  They could see commonalities between what they were learning and what was happening in the world outside the classroom. Their dialogue with their teachers was enhanced as they shared their photographs in the classrooms. This sharing process increased the meaning of the events outside.  While understanding what was going on, the children could gain a sense of competence and control over their lives.  The caring of their teachers inspired the students to export this empathy into the community. Our technology had proven its increment of value again.

THE  INSPIRATION  FOR  EMPHASIZING  EDUCATION
 
    What had inspired us to work toward getting our product into education?  Several months before the riots, E. H. Land, president of Polaroid Corporation, came back from a high level meeting in Washington and told us that the country was about to explode over civil rights.

    Earlier in his career, he had given a commencement address at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.  It was titled "On Entering  the Majestic Stage of the American Revolution: An appeal for the engineering profession to design a new kind of industry for people who vary in abilities".   Land had tabulated what he called unifying noble purposes:

1. Sense deep human needs.
2. Review engineering knowledge available to satisfy the needs. 
3. Review known science that can be applied.
4. See what gaps in science need filling.

    To achieve these purposes, he pictured thousands of small organizations, each being culturally variant from the others, each its own experiment to answer such questions as: What is worth making? How should it be made? How should people gather together to make it?

    His questions continued: "How are people to be involved in the research exploration for the product, and its design and manufacture?  How can these organizations create a dynamic relationship among people -- people who have missions -- so that people are always learning, always growing, steady with a sense of progress, warmly enthusiastic at participating in a future which unfolds day to day with rich intellectual and aesthetic rewards?"

    Land was confident that our nation was moving rapidly into the next great stage of the American revolution -- the stage in which Americans would be intellectually alert, incessantly creative, highly individualized and happily cooperative.
 
    But along with his confidence, Land was deeply troubled by what he saw going on  at that time in America.  The disintegration of our cities, the unemployment of our youth, the frustration of millions of citizens who felt bored and ineffectual, by-products of the American dream, rather than the product.  He saw two Americas and challenged us to take action, to be guided by the dream he had expressed at MIT.

    With this challenge, we worked with him to envision two synergistic aims for all of us at Polaroid.  Together, they defined the purpose of our company.

    The First Aim was to create products that help our customers and others (for example, school children) become all that they could be. Land stated the first aim in this  way: "to make products which are genuinely new and useful to the public."  He described it this way: "Each of us will have the satisfaction of helping  to make a creative contribution to society."

    The Second Aim was to create relationships that encouraged everyone in Polaroid to become all that we could be.  Land described it this way: "to give everyone working for Polaroid personal opportunity within the Company for full exercise of his or her talents, to express opinions, to share in the progress of the Company as far as his or her capacities permit, to earn enough money so that the need for earning more will not always be the first thing on our minds -- opportunity, in short, to make our work here a fully rewarding, important part of our lives."

    Land described the organization of worklife at Polaroid by what he called "the sun satellite principle."  Each person in the organization acted as a sun of creative energy.  At the same time, each person attracted satellites, other fellow employees who could do more for each other and the company through their relationships with the other suns.  Each person could do more than just being a sun.  An example was how Polaroid developed the color negative. It was an extremely complex task involving many people, and was accomplished by using this organizing principle.

    As I look back on this time, this was Land's and our way of living by natural governance.  In effect, he and we had discovered ways of putting natural governance to work in business. We had created the conditions that induced reciprocity within the company and between us and our customers. We hoped this reciprocity was radiating all over the world. Hopefully, as the seeds which we planted in children's education would sprout and help them later to use natural governance in their communities.

    Let me restate the Two Aims in terms of this book:  The First Aim is to create products that induce reciprocity and other life enhancing epigenetic rules and emotions in the world -- products that serve as tools for helping people to move to self piloting.  The Second Aim was to create conditions that induce reciprocity within a business organization, within industry -- to be self piloting partners in its success.

    The "sun satellite principle" provided for close proximity in our working relationships with many opportunities to exchange favors.  The benefits of the exchanges were always greater than the costs because the exchanges resulted in products that were in demand and earned a profit.  Each employee received a share of these profits that came naturally as the products induced valuable reciprocities.  At Polaroid, we developed ways to both teach reciprocity through the use of our products in schools and encourage reciprocity's spread in the world.

THE  SECRET  OF  INSTANT  PHOTOGRAPHY'S  UNIQUENESS
 
    We brought the insights about human nature to the task of understanding what happens when an instant picture is taken. We studied the feelings and behavioral differences between what happens after a picture is taken with an instant camera, compared with what happens with a conventional camera.  We realized that what people say and feel as they examine an instant picture which has just been taken of people, is likely to become associated with that picture in both the picture-taker's and the subjects' memories. For example, I take a picture of a woman. Then I truthfully say, as we look together at the finished photograph, "What a wonderful picture of you!" That complement is likely to be relished again when the subject looks at her picture in future times, as happens with album-stored photographs. Technology has created an increment of appreciation which is there for a lifetime.

    I labeled this "context building", defined as causing emotions and behaviors to be elicited and building memory of them into the picture.  A picture-taker who makes use of this power of instant photographic technology has gained an increment of freedom in choosing which thoughts and emotions are likely to be associated with photographs.
 
EXTENDING  CONTEXT  BUILDING  INTO  OTHER  SCHOOLS

    Providing instant photography in the Washington, D.C. schools was the start of  the spread of context building in education.   As previously described, the students took pictures of the riots.  The deep emotions in the riots were captured in the instant pictures.  As the pictures were brought back into the classrooms, the emotions in the imaging were still there to inspire the story writing by the students.  When provided with a camera, the students had built context naturally.  Then the words flowed freely on to paper.

    All sorts of reciprocal exchanges were taking place.  The students were sharing important stories with their classmates and the teachers.  The teachers nurtured the story writing process by their questions.  They even nudged the corrections in grammar and spelling by pointing out the importance of having everybody in the school understand the stories.
 
    When I retired from Polaroid, Maureen Harrington, my secretary for many years, took over the task of spreading the use of instant photography in education.  She loved students and she loved teachers.  In partnership with them, she catalyzed the development of curriculums that used instant imagery to reinforce life skills -- goal-setting, team-building, cooperative learning, conflict resolution, building the foundations of self esteem.  Each student created a personal vision, a vision that incorporated positive values into a  personal honor code and a set of expectations for how students would like to be treated.

    In making the honor code, each student identifies qualities she or he admires and aspires to possess.  The teacher encourages each student to select significant and important qualities for their own honor code.  Then the students take turns photographing each other.  Each picture-taker instructs the fellow student to look the way she or he wants to look in their photograph after they have achieved the qualities they have selected to possess and become.  Pride shows on each face.  This picture was mounted on the student's honor shield.  Around the picture, the student draws and writes descriptions illustrating their goal attributes.  For example, "I won't let anyone tell me I can't do something if I believe I can."   These codes get posted and each student has a chance to say how they are doing in living by their honor code.
 
    This honor code encourages each student's efforts towards self piloting.  And teachers who understand the conditions for inducing reciprocity can use both the code and the conditions to mentor that progress.

    Maureen Harrington and her former associate at Polaroid, Charles McCrea, are taking the first steps to teach about human nature at the college level at Lyndon State College, one of the four state colleges in Vermont.

    A full page ad as a testimonial to the accomplishments of the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities showed a Polaroid picture of a young girl with a large grin. (It appeared in the News of the Week Section of the July 18, 1999 Sunday edition of The New York Times.) Her face was made up as a Halloween clown.  The caption beside the photograph read, "Kids with this mug shot hardly ever get the other kind."  The signers at the bottom of the testimonial were over 100 board chairs and chief executive officers of major U.S. companies.

    The message was clear: combine the arts and the humanities to help students become all they can be.  Land, if he had lived a while longer, would have felt gratified about both the message and the photograph.  E. O. Wilson calls Natural Democracy a field manual for how to combine the arts and the humanities in "practical" ways.  This photograph illustrated that practicality.

    So technology can catalyze reciprocity.  Technology can facilitate learning.  Technology can induce self-piloting.  Technology can help us to be able to choose how our genes control us. Technology can be a major tool for natural governance.