THE PACIFIC-RIM CONCEPT
By Dr. Stephan Schwartz, a talk on Spirituality and Business at the A.R.E., 1987
I had a bunch of people come up to me during the break and ask me about the "Pacific-Rim", and what I meant by that. It is a historical reality that the center of gravity of the planet, if I may use that metaphor, moves; and in most of our lifetime, in the early part of our lifetime, it was in Europe. It was not until 1914 that the New York markets became more important than the London markets, had a larger volume. It has been moving towards the East moving west, and the thing that is significant is that the cultures that it is moving into are cultures which have for thousand of years been able to maintain the ability to orchestrate the "Mass". That is, these are cultures in which the individual, the concerns of the individual are subordinate to the concerns of the whole. In the future, in the next 20 to 50 years, as this process continuous and these markets come on-line we are going to see, because there are so many people, a quarter of the human race lives in one country; as these countries come on line, and become competitive and become technological, the forces that work on the world stage will change.
The strength of our culture is its entrepreneurship and innovations. We need to do those things and support those things in our culture; in our society which strengthen this ability to create because there is no way we're going to be competitive at the level of production. We don't have enough people and we don't have enough raw materials and most of all, we don't have the national consciousness for it. American workers are very good workers much better than the press gives them credit for and much of the Japanese management techniques that have been so highly praised are nothing but American techniques recycled through the system. If for instance you read the biography of the man who started SONY, he is quite forward about this; they just took good solid American management techniques, reprocessed them through their system and used them.
But we need to acknowledge that two things are going on. One is, we are increasingly living in an epoch of history, the gene pool annihilation epoch in which war as a world wide confrontation is increasingly improbable but that the impulse that lies behind war is still present within the psyche of each culture and that it is instead expressing itself economically. And as the economy shifts to the cultures which are mass-oriented, that the strongest thing we can do to see that our spice in the mix remains present is to support those things that we do the best and for which we have the best track record and that is innovation. It is not that we are smarter; it's just that we have chosen a cultural setting which allows individuals to come forward. So the reason I keep stressing this thing about the Pacific-Rim, what is properly called the Pacific littoral, all the countries that lie along the Pacific ocean, is, that that is were the economic future of the planet resides. It increasingly does not reside in the Caucasian Western cultures, and we need to acknowledge that and begin to plan and prepare for it because it is a historical reality. That's what I am thinking about when I bring up the Pacific-Rim.