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Galileo And Kepler
To reinforce my anti-corpocracy UCB (Unshakeable Cognitive Burden), I just finished reading “The Age Of Heretics: A History Of The Radical Thinkers Who Reinvented Corporate Management“. It’s the second time in the last few months that I stumbled across the Galileo-Pope Urban story. The first time was in W. L. Livingston’s forthcoming “Design For Prevention”. Here’s a snippet from “Heretics”:
Why does Galileo Galilei have the reputation of a heretic, while his seventeenth-century fellow scientist Johannes Kepler does not? Because Kepler evaded the Church. Galileo sought to change it. The professor from Pisa spent the last third of his life arguing, with increasing fervor, that the Christian doctrines and even Bibles should be rewritten to conform to the realities he had seen through his telescope. Many of the cardinals and Church officials who censured and imprisoned him recognized the validity of the new cosmology and physics that Galileo championed, but they didn’t want to shake up their system too quickly. Too many monks and village priests clung to Ptolemy and Aristotle. The “people” would rebel at any sudden revision of the “truth.” Galileo didn’t care. Like many other heretics, past and present, he thought at first that the truth would set the institution free. He only had to show people what he had seen, and they would naturally adapt. When people doubted observations that to him were obvious, he lost his tact. He made enemies (some said needlessly) of the Jesuits, who fought bitterly to see him condemned, and he closed one of his notorious tracts, the Dialogue on the Great World Systems, with a snide lampoon of the views of Pope Urban VIII. Until then Urban had been his patron and champion. Ten months after publication in 1633, Galileo was on trial in Rome.
Here’s a snippet that is written further along in the book:
Even the Roman Catholic church eventually admitted that Galileo’s cosmology was correct—after 359 years.
Bummer. Behind the illusory cloak of modern civility, irrational and insane institutional behavior hasn’t changed much over the years. Heretics are still reviled by the bozos in power who will do whatever it takes to retain that power, and more importantly, the personal riches that automatically go along with it. Today’s well meaning but unconscious corpocrats are simply much more clever at veiling the methods that they use to annihilate heretics, even when individual heretics arise from their own ranks. Kepler rules!
Forgive Me
If you have read many of my posts, you may have formed the opinion that I’m rabidly against bozo managers who are members of a hierarchically structured organization. That’s not quite right. I’m not against them as individual persons. I’m against the behaviors that they are compelled to manifest and the decisions that they have to make because of the archaic structure that they are an integral part of. It doesn’t matter who the particular individuals are in a command & control hierarchy. Unless they are enlightened (and very few are), they will auto-behave in ways that are detrimental in the long term to customers, owners, and employees. Not detrimental to themselves and their brethren, of course.
A colleague who dogmatically worships at the alter of corpo-man recently told me that I was jealous of hierarchs. He said that I wanted to be “just like them”. Hmmm, interesting opinion, no? Since nothing is impossible, I guess that could be true. Deep down I just may be an imposter and a fraud 🙂 . In Thorstein Veblen‘s “theory of the leisure class“, he proposes that the middle class in “developed” countries doesn’t hold hierarchs accountable for the havoc they wreak because the middle class wants to be “just like them”.
I’ve often thought of what I would do if I was offered to be knighted by a hierarchical corpo king. Whenever I think of that possibility, it reminds me of the Galileo and Pope Urban story. Galileo, as you probably know, subscribed to the Copernican theory that the earth was NOT the center of the universe. In the all powerful eyes of the hierarchical church and its rabid followers, any such thinking was sacrilegious blasphemy – curiosity was a sin. Before Urban was given the papal throne, he was a friend of Galileo’s. Urban was intrigued by Galileo’s logic and compelling evidence that the earth revolved around the sun. Bingo, as soon as he became pope, Urban instantaneously flipped into a corpo droid incapable of independent thought. He gave Galileo a tour of the torture chambers and placed him under house arrest for the last years of his life. Uh, so much for friendship.
Ironically, in a standard command and control corpo hierarchy, the only way anyone has any chance of changing things for the better is if he/she secures a corpo title from the sitting politburo. Since I think I could possibly make a positive difference, I’d actually be tempted to take on an institutional title and become a corpo man. Alas, I don’t think I’d do it because I don’t have the psychological strength to withstand the corpo peer pressure to flip – just like pope Urban didn’t have. Bummer 😦
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