The Maholian Way - Part Two: The Maholian Way in the lives of two

At home he felt tired and listless much of the time, his contact with his children was incidental, and he wondered where the spark had gone from his and Tracey’s relationship. When he looked to the future, he saw nothing but more of the same.

Tracey also felt disappointed about the state of their relationship, and found herself questioning whether it would last. Life’s issues seemed so hard and relentless, and she had no sense of where change might come from.

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The lives of Carla and her neighbours would be regarded by many as ‘problematic’ or ‘dysfunctional’, whereas George and Tracey would tend to be seen as successful, with their intact family, ‘good’ jobs, large new house, cars, and the absence of any publicly visible problems (other than, perhaps, those Samantha faced). But as we have seen, the lived experience of George and Tracey left much to be desired. They were both weary and unsatisfied in their personal lives. At work, George was a functionary in a system producing stressed, unhappy workers and needless consumption and debt, while Tracey also felt unfulfilled and frustrated in her job. And their home life and work places were environmentally unsustainable.

Tracey and George and Carla and Josh and you and I and about six and a half billion other people occupy this Earth together and share the land, air, water, plants, animals, raw materials and artefacts it contains. We need, therefore, to determine how these are going to be distributed among us. And our highly complex ways of life require us to cooperate, divide up tasks, and develop specialised knowledge for our particular tasks. Moreover, we need to ensure that people by and large do the right thing by their fellow humans, and don’t – out of error, selfishness or malice – do the wrong thing.

We therefore require organising systems to manage this process, and the two most commonly discussed organising systems in modern times have been the market and government. Both of these systems do two things. Firstly, they give guidance about what we need to do in the world, when, where, how and for whom. And secondly, they provide a series of incentives (or disincentives) that motivate us to do those things.

Ostensibly, the incentives built into these two systems mean that we don’t have to rely on good will or fellow feeling towards our neighbour to motivate us to act appropriately. Looking first at the market, its advocates have from the time of Adam Smith claimed that by self-interestedly pursuing our own gain in the economic system we can collectively promote the common good. As Smith himself succinctly put it, ‘It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interests.’

. It’s claimed to work like this. Price signals act as an ‘invisible hand’ that channels goods, services and labour exactly where they are wanted, in the kinds and quantities demanded, and at optimum efficiency. The governmental organising system, on the other hand, is seen to work as follows. Governments implement programs through rational bureaucratic systems administered by professionals whose careers depend on doing their jobs properly; they pass laws that citizens can be punished for disobeying; and they implement services and programs (funded through compulsarily acquired taxation) that shape how many things are done in society. In democracies there are periodic elections and citizens can lobby their governments, but these governments nonetheless have great power to guide, direct, reward and punish people. Thus, both organising systems tell people what they should do and provide incentives or disincentives to get them to do it.

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