Free How by Dov Seidman Page A

another study, conducted by LRN/Wirthlin Worldwide in 2003, 71 percent of Americans polled said that “none,” “very few,” or “only some” corporations operated in a fair and honest manner, despite the fact that relatively few had transgressed. 5
    The disappointments we felt came not only from the lapses in the business world and failures in the economy; we began to feel the revealing power of technology throughout the culture. Every facet of society seemed suddenly laid bare, flaws exposed for all to see. Scandals in the Catholic Church, fabrications by college football coaches, professional athletes on steroids, reporters for the New York Times inventing stories; icons at every level of society seemed suddenly vulnerable. These were the people and institutions we looked up to and held as paragons of meaningful life. People who could normally be trusted had let us down. As the foundations of their success became exposed, we saw that many successes were built on the same Just Do It habits of expediency and short-term values. The instruments of society that gave us our emotional center began to crumble around us, filling us with doubt about the structures of our beliefs. It is against our nature to accept that long-term success can be built on a corrupt foundation, but in such a world, on whom could you rely?
    And then the World Trade Center towers fell, ushering in a series of global attacks against civilians—Madrid, London, Bali, and others—that, coupled with destabilizing regional wars, left much of the world uneasy. The needs and procedures of physical security suddenly intruded into the day-to-day lives of many who had long felt safe.
    This was by no means the first time a confluence of events had rocked the three legs of the stool. World War II, the Vietnam era, Watergate, and the Mideast conflict and oil crisis of the 1970s, to name a few from just the previous half-century, all brought similar disruption and instability. Boom times, tough times, corruption, and fraud were by no means new to us, but the deeply dislocating difference this time around lay in our startling new ability to see it all in real time. Much of what happens around the world is now present in our daily lives. This flood of undigested and unprocessed information bombards us minute by minute, giving us little time to regain our footing. When our stools wobble, the Certainty Gap grows, and when that happens, we reach out for reassurance, for things that can stabilize us and give us confidence to go on. We look for something to fill the gap.

    THE LIMITATIONS OF RULES
    To pursue our endeavors and achieve our desired success, we need certainty, consistency, and predictability, a hard floor from which to take a leap. Basketball players can jump higher than beach volleyball players can because they play on a hard wooden floor. It is much more difficult to leap high with the sand shifting beneath your feet. The Certainty Gap describes not only our internal relationship to sureness, but also our relationship to the societies in which we live. In democratic societies, we look to rules—in the form of laws—to provide the certainty, consistency, and predictability we require. In the days of fortress capitalism, we got very good at writing rules, but as the century came to a close, we began to sense that rules were letting us down.
    There are good reasons for this. For one, the way we write rules often makes them inefficient when governing human conduct. Rules, of course, don’t come out of thin air. Legislatures and organizations adopt them usually to proscribe unwanted behaviors but typically in reaction to events. They lower speed limits after automobile accidents become too frequent, regulate pit bulls after a series of dog bites, or institute new expense-tracking procedures after someone is caught trying to get reimbursed for their new iPod. Rules have been established for a reason, but most people are out of touch with the rationale and