Dwapara Yuga - Falling barriers

It took the shortages of troops in the Korean War to force the US military to integrate blacks and whites in the 50s.

Today, the Iraq and Afghanistan wars are forcing the US military to drop it's ban on gays and lesbians, again because of troop shortages, leaving behind the ambiguous "Don't ask, don't tell" policy in favor of good soldiers whatever their particular background. It is proposed to have mixed crews on submarines, once the favored example of the impossibility of integration.

The US is hardly alone in this, joining Israel and the United Kingdom who already allow men, women, blacks, whites, gays and lesbians to serve, from similar pressures and drawing from increasingly diverse societies wherein fundamentalist, nuclear families are increasingly minority groups.

Perhaps one of the greatest barriers still remaining in early Dwapara Yuga is that of age discrimination. Most companies are set up to hire young people from schools and colleges, train them briefly and then work them for twenty or thirty years before forcing them into retirement. With less and less baby boomers coming up, a more appropriate program would be more retraining during careers, with later, more carefully managed retirements that do not empty armies and companies of their knowledge in favor of young turks, either home grown or recent immigrants.

Older workers are particularly vulnerable to the French syndrome, mimicked by good 'ol boy networks in the US where a "have" class of professionals command permanent, powerful, well paid posts but at the expense of "have nots" who are either unemployed or underemployed in precarious interim roles no matter what their actual talents and qualifications.

In the recessionary period, much mid career retraining has become hopelessly expensive with the $100 to $160,000 of fees required for an MBA from a top tier US school being hard to justify when recent graduates are either unemployed, or forced to beg for their old positions at the same or lower salaries while carrying years of crushing debts.

In a wider sense, Yogananda suggested an answer in simple living and high thinking -- living inexpensively, close to the land, leveraging meditation, general culture and education to work remotely or at a small scale not subject to the huge swings and pressures of industrialized society with it's sudden need followed by lack of need for armies of programmers, engineers, architects etc.

Aside

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The recent book quants, about the mathematical trading strategies on Wall Street, describes one ultra rich young quant (mathematician or physicist employed at hedge funds/I banks for smarts rather than the more usual family, political or regulator connections) so unfulfilled by the great wealth nearly effortlessly realized that he took to playing a portable keyboard in the New York Metro.

One of the very few quant driven hedge funds to make money during the meltdowns of 2008-9 was Renaissance. The author feels that a large part of that was due to the concept of the "second forty hours". Employees were expected to accomplish all their regular activities in the first forty hours and were then free to be creative in any area of the firm in the time beyond that. Most other firms were based on a handful of senior people using strategies often decades old with others relegated to grunt work and the original founders living prima donna lives more focused on poker tournaments and showy purchases than their funds, the markets, or investors.

In a nutshell, the regimented approach, shared downside and limited upside along with non sharing of information characterize the majority of poor work environments and consequently poor performance. To the author's mind, wherever bright people's creative energy can be channeled harmoniously we see bursts of genius whether in finance, hitech, dance, military operations, music or teaching. It's a lofty goal, one requiring inspired rather than pedestrian leadership -- more the question of a Napoleon - "Are you lucky?" than the bureaucrat ticking off boxes and pulling in "yes" men like surface pond weeds, choking off all oxygen to the bright fish below.