The Creation of Conscious Culture through Educational Innovation

Why we need a market in virtuous cultures for the young

The one essential thing is that we strive to have light in ourselves. Our strivings will be recognized by others, and when people have light in themselves, it will shine out from them.Then we get to know each other as we walk together in the darkness, without needing to pass our hands over each other’s faces, or to intrude into each other’s hearts.

Albert Schweitzer, from Rabbi Greenberg’s A Treasury of the Art of Living

There are a number of serious human concerns that are not being adequately addressed by capitalism as we know it. Some of the most serious and thoughtful critiques of capitalism include:

• Those who care about how the appetites, attitudes, and souls of young people are currently being formed.

• Those who are concerned about the increasing propensity of our society to be dominated by commercialism, sensationalism, materialism, and conspicuous consumption.

• Those who care about the invisible virtues, including justice, honor, love, awareness, kindness, empathy, curiosity, wonder, and wisdom.

• Those who seek a world in which all young people can develop the skills they need to have satisfying, successful, professional lives in the highly competitive twenty-first century global economy.

• Those who care about creativity, innovation, and entrepreneurship as a means of creating ever greater levels of human happiness and well-being.

Even those who claim that capitalism can be tamed so that it is not harmful to the environment, as well as those who insist that it can eliminate poverty, are not inspired by the kind of life it seems to promote. We in the developed world are certainly wealthier than any class of human beings in all of human history. And yet few believe that we are significantly happier or healthier as a consequence of our amazing standard of living.

Here I will propose that the reason that capitalism has resulted in such crass consumerism and materialism is, paradoxically, because we do not have enough of it yet. In particular, by managing health, education, and community formation by means of government, we have prevented the most powerful force for innovation the world has ever known from releasing its innovative powers to improve our health, to improve our education, and to improve our communities.

Martin Seligman, a the leading figure in positive psychology, proposes that in order to deepen one’s happiness, we each need to:

• Cultivate positive emotions about the past by increasing gratitude and forgiveness, and by letting go of the notion that the past determines your future.

• Cultivate positive emotions about the future by learning to recognize and dispute pessimistic thoughts.

• Cultivate positive emotions about the present by savoring the moment and practicing mindfulness.

• Cultivate a state of flow.

• Develop virtues that lead toward a sense of gratification.

• Develop your signature strengths in work, love, and parenting.

• Use your signature strengths in service of something larger than yourself.

Without going into Seligman’s detailed description of each of these elements of happiness, it is worth noting that while one could conceivably develop each of these characteristics by means of reading a book, in essence each of them must be internalized as a habit in order to be effective.

It is not enough to read about cultivating positive emotions. The verb “to cultivate” means to nurture and grow. Cultivating positive emotions means developing new intellectual and emotional habits by practicing them on an ongoing basis. As Aristotle, the original philosopher of happiness, knew well, virtues are acquired by means of the habit of acting virtuously.

Likewise, while one can run down a checklist of strengths in a book to identify what your unique, signature strengths are (for example, curiosity, integrity, humility), in order to develop them beyond their present state, it is useful to focus on them and practice them regularly in order to improve them and thereby achieve a state of excellence. And, while some individuals may naturally be focused on applying their signature strengths to something larger than themselves, in today’s busy, distracting society, an individual who is not focused on something larger than himself may need to develop the habit of transcending his usual solipsism.

Can entrepreneurs help individuals develop habits? Is there a market in habituation services? What would it take to create a deep, innovative market that would support the development of serious, sophisticated, ever-improving forms of habituation, one constantly updated for a constantly changing world?

Experts in habit formation suggest that it takes at least three weeks, and possibly three months of consistent new patterning to change a habit. Because it is so difficult, people trying to change habits are encouraged to work on changing just one habit at a time. Clearly this approach may work with learning to remember to floss or even exercise daily. It sounds a bit more challenging if the habit to be developed is moment-by-moment mindfulness, or acting virtuously, or acquiring an entirely new set of mental and emotional habits -- an entirely new way of being in the world.

One could make the case that various entrepreneurs support the development of new habits, including therapists, personal coaches, personal growth trainers, radio show hosts, podcasters, authors, religious teachers, and more. Typically they specialize in either habit-encouragement-by-exhortation or, in the case of personal trainers, yoga instructors, and so forth, the acquisition of new physical habits by means of regular instruction.

While all of these service providers no doubt benefit their customers, and while they may indeed help to improve the happiness and well-being of their customers, Seligman says they don’t provide full-blown support for the development of the diverse habits needed to achieve happiness. Seligman himself sells books and tapes on positive psychology—is that the extent to which entrepreneurs of happiness can serve the public?

The Dalai Lama points out that achieving happiness is not a simple process:

Achieving genuine happiness may require bringing about a transformation in your outlook, your way of thinking, and this is not a simple matter. It requires the application of so many different factors from different directions. . . . Change takes time. . . . But I think that as time goes on, you can make positive changes. Every day as soon as you get up, you can develop a sincere positive motivation, thinking, “I will utilize this day in a more positive way. I should not waste this very day.” And then, at night before bed, check what you’ve done, asking yourself, “Did I utilize this day as I planned?” If it went accordingly, then you should rejoice. If it went wrong, then regret what you did and critique the day. So, through methods such as this, you can gradually strengthen the positive aspects of the mind.

In traditional Tibetan culture, of course, monks spend many years in rigorous training on a daily basis, beginning at a young age. The Dalai Lama’s own renowned sense of personal serenity is the result of such comprehensive and rigorous long-term training of mental and emotional habits. He did not develop his own deep sense of equanimity and compassion from reading a book and thinking a positive thought every day.

There are a few longer-term experiential options for adults. S.N. Goenka’s network of Vipassana centers, for instance, offer 10-day meditation retreats where one meditates daily from 4:30 a.m. until 9:30 p.m., with only short breaks in between. In order to ensure that the mind stays focused, during breaks there is no talking or eye contact allowed, no reading, no writing, no music, essentially no interaction with the world outside one’s mind except for the minimum needed to eat, groom, and receive instruction in Vipassana technique. All meals are vegetarian, with only fruit in the evening. No payment is required; one pays as one thinks appropriate at the end of the experience.

Even so, 10 days is less than the three-week minimum recommended to change a habit, and realistically relatively few adults are apt to take 10 days off from their routines and responsibilities in order to meditate. Even the Vipassana experience, one of the deeper experiences available to adults interested in an environment in which they can immerse themselves in a situation that supports rigorous training in new mental and emotional habits, is limited compared to the years of training the Dalai Lama and other Buddhist monks undergo.

There are also residential treatment centers for the addicted. Precisely because addiction is so difficult to overcome, they typically provide a regimen that not only prevents an opportunity to relapse but also strives to cultivate new habits and attitudes in the hope that such new mental, physical, and emotional habits will reduce the probability of a relapse into addiction. Youth residential treatment centers are a booming industry, with costs exceeding $500 per day and typical stays on the order of four months or more.Even these behavioral modification programs result in inconsistent outcomes. Moreover, neither addiction treatment nor behavioral treatment for troubled adolescents quite inspires images of entrepreneurs of happiness and well-being, even when such centers do improve well-being.

Brain research is increasingly revealing the physiological challenges to changing habits. It is now clear that habits, in the behavioral sense, are the result of actual neuronal connections that are not only difficult to change, but which revert back to their previous functioning quickly:

Important neural activity patterns in a specific region of the brain change when habits are formed, change again when habits are broken, but quickly reemerge when something rekindles an extinguished habit — routines that originally took great effort to learn.

Once we have certain neuronal firing networks established in our brains, there is always the possibility, even after we have learned a new habit, that our brains could revert back to the old firing pathways, which are still sitting there. They just lie there unused, but ready to be revived.

There is, of course, one portion of our life in which we have the opportunity to develop habits that, if properly designed, could last a lifetime—the first 18 years. What we now know as K–12 education consists of approximately 14,000 hours of education, on which we currently spend almost $200,000 per child.

Malcolm Gladwell’s book Outliers cites evidence that world-class excellence in skill development requires at least 10,000 hours of deliberate practice. Imagine if students spent the 14,000 hours of K–12 education practicing specific cognitive skills instead of simply sitting and listening or sitting and doing trivial exercises. They could develop extraordinary skills. Thus, the issue is not merely one of creating positive habits; the possibility exists of developing extraordinary abilities among far more young people simply through years of rigorous practice.

With most products in the $200,000 price range, we find an extraordinary drive toward innovation. Other than housing, there are no other products or services in the $200,000 price range that are purchased by almost all Americans. And even though housing is a highly regulated industry, with building regulations and federal loan agencies dictating many specific design features, it is still a highly innovative industry with many dramatic changes in materials and design in the past decades. But, of course, in the case of education we do not make the $200,000 purchase—the government does.

In a relatively small, homogenous nation, it might be possible to align on educational principles. Often advocates of public schools cite Finnish public schools as an example to emulate. But Finland is the most ethnically homogenous nation in Europe, with a population smaller than Houston. The U.S. is the most culturally and ethincally diverse large nation in the world, with differences in cultural norms becoming ever more divisive. We need to let parents go their own way.

The one thing that almost all parents agree on is that they want their children to be financially capable of supporting themselves and to be happy and well. With this one constraint in mind, the market in education will evolve in a fundamentally different manner from all other markets. Insofar as all other markets have an interest in pandering to our short-term interests, a market in education has a long-term interest built in: The child’s long term wellbeing.

Let’s allow entrepreneurial value creation to focus on the most important form of value creation: The wellbeing of the next generation. Let’s create a market in virtuous cultures, in conscious cultures, a market in effective forms of self-mastery. Let’s innovate to create new forms of being human together so that the next generation will experience depths of happiness and wellbeing greater than anything previously known to humanity.

Adapted with permission from Michael Strong, John Mackey, et. al., Be the Solution: How Entrepreneurs and Conscious Capitalists Can Solve All the World’s Problems, Wiley & Sons, 2008.