/2009/03/17/the-end-of-shareholder-value/Andrew Curry's blog on futures, trends, emerging issues and scenariosTue, 24 Mar 2009 12:19:50 +0000hourly1http://wordpress.com//2009/03/17/the-end-of-shareholder-value/#comment-2273Tue, 24 Mar 2009 12:19:50 +0000/?p=785#comment-2273The notion that competition, and thus self-interest, has primacy over cooperation, or related concepts like altruism, is a deeply rooted philosophical notion. The transformation of greed from a vice into a virtue was a bit of philosophical alchemy that occurred just as market-based capitalism was finding its voice. See Albert Hirschman’s brilliant (and classic) intellectual history “The Passions and the Interests,” which tells that story. And now E.O. Wilson has just published a new book called “The Superorganism” in which he argues from a close examination of the altruistic behavior of ants that the evolutionary unit is not Richard Dawkins’ “selfish gene,” but the social unit of the ant colony. And that puts a primacy on selflessness rather than selfishness. In other words, at last — at long, long last — perhaps the time has come for some push-back on the prevailing mantra of our time and for some attention to be given to the sorts of ideas that Gregory Bateson long ago characterized as “the ecology of mind.”

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