New York City is also premodern. Many of the businesses that seem very postmodern are actually throwbacks to a premodern era of craftspeople and local marketplaces. Small is beautiful, as is large. Part of the diversity is to be found not just in the different cultural, ethnic and racial backgrounds of New York City, but also in the intimate intermixing of premodern, modern and postmodern forums. Like certain other cities in the world that are even older than New York (such as Paris, Rome and London in the Western World), New York City is actually composed in large part of a cluster of premodern neighborhoods. This is part of the excitement of New York City and part of the excitement of a New York City State of Mind—a mixture of premodern, modern and postmodern. A diversity of social structures as well as a diversity of cultures, ethnic identities and races.
At the heart of the matter, however, is the large size of New York City. To be big is to be beautiful and seductive. A big city like New York is compelling. Everyone wants to visit and maybe live there for a little while. The BIG apple attracts new resources and gets even bigger and even more attractive. Chaos theorists talk and write about “strange attractors”—forces that pull in resources from the outside, which in turn fuels further attraction and expansion. The avalanche is a classic example of the strange attractor. The snowpack that is cascading down the mountainside not only gains in speed, it also pulls in snow, rock and debris (including trees) from the surrounding area. We find much more at the bottom of the hill than just the original falling snowpack.
This modern emphasis on BIG is also the source of many troubles both in New York City and in the lives of men and women we coach. To be big is to be arrogant. If you are big then nothing can harm you. Too big to fail. Too big to be bullied around. Too big to be vulnerable to outside forces. There is a tendency for those in a big city such as New York (or those associated with a big organization or government) to assume that the whole world revolves around them. This is the Washington D.C. “beltway” mentality and the distorted vision of reality to be found in many very large technology organizations prior to the dot.com crash and in many financial institutions prior to the Wall Street crisis of 2009.
There is also the alienation associated with being large. To be BIG is often to be indifferent to the plight of those individuals who live and work in the Bigness. We see this alienation, for instance, in the massive housing projects of New York. The city planners of the Bronx and Brooklyn did a nice job of eliminating the decaying slums that were prevalent in these boroughs during the first half of the 20th Century. Yet, these slums were the site of vibrant local neighborhoods. These neighborhoods were often destroyed by the well-intended city planners. In my own work in the Soviet Union during the years of its collapse I saw the same alienating massive housing projects. (Bergquist, 1994) I could have been walking into the housing projects of the Bronx rather than the projects of Moscow or Tallinn. One of my Soviet colleagues wrote about the “stone cities” in his country. He could have been describing the stone cities of New York. BIG is not always desirable or a source of beauty and personal gratification. This alienating factor is important for us to keep in mind as coaches to clients who are in a New York City State of Mind.
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