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    Cooper’S Constant
    Cooper’S Constant
    Cooper’S Constant
    Ebook195 pages2 hours

    Cooper’S Constant

    By Robert Cooper

    ()

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    Coopers Constant answers fundamental questions about human folly. Why did an Alabama man go to the police station to complain about being cheated in a drug deal? Why did an Idaho woman request that the highway department remove the Deer Crossing sign on her road because too many deer were being hit by cars? The Peter Principle and the Dilbert Principle attempted to explain incompetence in organizations, and Warren Buffett spoke of the three is of the business cyclethe third i standing for the idiots, who screw it all up. Unfortunately, Dr. Peter, Scott Adams, and Warren Buffett failed to ask, "Why are so many peoplethe idiotsincompetent in the first place?" This book furnishes the answer: Coopers Constant. It introduces the reader to the mindless M-type and the M-organization, or MORG.

    Dont read this book unless you are willing to change your view of humanity.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherXlibris US
    Release dateFeb 8, 2018
    ISBN9781543481150
    Cooper’S Constant
    Author

    Robert Cooper

    Robert Cooper is one of Britain's most senior diplomats. A former special advisor on foreign affairs to Tony Blair, he is currently Director-General of External and Politico-Military Affairs for the Council of the European Union. He is the author of The Breaking of Nations: Order and Chaos in the Twenty-First Century (2003).

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      Book preview

      Cooper’S Constant - Robert Cooper

      Copyright © 2018 by Robert Cooper.

      Library of Congress Control Number:      2018901175

      ISBN:                  Hardcover                      978-1-5434-8114-3

                                  Softcover                         978-1-5434-8116-7

                                  eBook                              978-1-5434-8115-0

      All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

      This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

      Rev. date: 02/07/2018

      Xlibris

      1-888-795-4274

      www.Xlibris.com

      771001

      TABLE OF CONTENTS

      PART I

      COOPER’S CONSTANT

      Chapter 1     DR. COOPER, GENIUS

      Chapter 2     COOPER’S CONSTANT

      Chapter 3     HOW DR. C DISCOVERED THE CONSTANT

      PART II

      THE M-TYPE

      Chapter 4     THE MINDLESS M-TYPE

      Chapter 5     THE HIERARCHY OF M-TYPES

      PART III

      WEEVILS AND MEEVILS

      Chapter 6     BEWARE THE WEEVIL AND THE MEEVIL

      PART IV

      MANAGING M-TYPES

      Chapter 7     THE CARE AND FEEDING OF M-TYPES

      PART V

      THE M-ORGANIZATION

      Chapter 8     HORRORS!—THE MORG

      Chapter 9     THE MORG QUINTET

      Chapter 10   IS SANITY POSSIBLE IN A MORG?

      PART VI

      TIME TO PANIC?

      Chapter 11   PERISHED ILLUSIONS

      Chapter 12   THE M-TYPES GO BERZERK

      Chapter 13   WHAT’S A MOTHER TO DO?

      Chapter 14   DESPERATE EXPERIMENTS

      AFTERWORD

      APPENDIX (UNIVERSALITY OF THE CONSTANT)

      GLOSSARY

      SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

      PART I

      COOPER’S CONSTANT

      CHAPTER 1

      DR. COOPER, GENIUS

      A few years ago my uncle Oscar Cooper, a mathematical anthropologist at Harvard, made a highly original observation which he substantiated with numerical exactitude and which I, a young and adoring nephew, dubbed Cooper’s Constant. My uncle discovered that human beings possess two key brain circuits: one for thinking and one for imitating. Each person tends to favor one over the other. For every three people who favor the thinking circuit there are 97 who prefer the imitation circuit. This led my uncle to Cooper’s Constant:

      3% of the people do 99% of the thinking.

      Cooper’s Corollary followed:

      97% of the people do 1% of the thinking.

      Certain that this discovery had profound implications for mankind and Nobel potential besides, I encouraged—entreated is a more accurate word—Uncle Oscar to organize his data and write a book, or at least a paper, presenting his Constant to the world. I could see the headlines in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post…

      You do it, Bobby, he would say to me blandly, I’m far too busy and anyway you’re the English major. And off he’d trot to Nigeria or Truk or Bolivia.

      It’s true that I was an English major, and in a way still am—I teach the subject at a small college in Michigan. But I am also, to use the felicitous words of C.P. Snow, a classical one-culture person—I am ashamed to admit that I am a mathematical idiot. My uncle’s equations and proofs and regression analyses might as well have been written in his beloved Swahili. Though I would have been delighted to introduce the world to Cooper’s Constant—a truth that is probably more important even than the theories of evolution or relativity—I felt myself ill-equipped and unequal to the task.

      Today the matter stands unchanged. Mathematics is still obscure to me and we are still threatened by Cooper’s Constant. My uncle is nowhere to be found. Nine months ago, during October of his sabbatical year, he wandered off to study the Bukus of upper Namibia, and has not been seen or heard from since. He has not updated his website or touched his Facebook page. Zero text messages or tweets. I feel like a nephew of Charles Darwin who, hearing that Alfred Russel Wallace plans to steal his uncle’s thunder by presenting a rival theory of evolution at the Royal Society, cannot contact his uncle because the great man is on a long voyage studying giant turtles.

      I feel that I have no choice. Mathematician or no, I must write this book before someone else—some latter day Alfred Russel Wallace—stumbles on the Constant. I would like to remind the reader that according to Uncle Oscar, for every assertion in this book there exist both biological and statistical substantiation. I fervently hope that when he returns from Namibia I will be able to convince my uncle to publish the technical version of Cooper’s Constant.

      CHAPTER 2

      COOPER’S CONSTANT

      I have discovered the missing link

      between the anthropoid ape and civilized

      man. It’s us!

      —Konrad Lorenz

      Human beings have long noted the reluctance or downright refusal of fellow humans to employ their intellectual faculties—to think. Because of this unwillingness, human folly abounds:

      • While clinging to a sheer wall a California free-climber (no safety ropes) fell to his death while sending his girlfriend a text message about what he wanted for supper

      • A Pennsylvania man who hired an arsonist to torch his business went to jail because he claimed the arsonist’s fee as an income tax deduction

      • A prisoner in Louisiana escaped from jail on the eighty-ninth day of a ninety-day sentence

      • The marathon race measures 26.2 miles. In 2016, the organizers of the PNC Milwaukee Marathon plotted the race course half a mile too long—but they corrected the blunder in 2017 by making the course eight-tenths of a mile too short

      • A midwestern medical journal sagely stated that The death of the patient terminates the physician-patient relationship.

      How do we account for such foolishness? There is now a cogent explanation: Cooper’s Constant.

      A few years ago Harvard Professor of Mathematical Anthropology Dr. Oscar Cooper discovered that only a small percentage of human beings do any real thinking, while the majority merely imitate the thinking of others. The imitators he labeled mimesians, or M-types. Immediately he sought to determine the precise ratio of Thinkers to M-types—of any hundred human beings, how many are Thinkers and how many are imitators? The magic number turns out to be:

      3.1416…%

      That’s right, Pi. That Pi and Cooper’s Constant are apparently the same number is one of the Universe’s amazing coincidences—and mysteries. Cooper’s Constant: of every hundred human beings, only three are thinking! The implications are staggering:

      COOPER’S CONSTANT

      3% of the people

      do 99% of the thinking

      COOPER’S COROLLARY

      97% of the people (the M-types)

      do 1% of the thinking

      M-types look like Thinkers, feel like Thinkers and interbreed with Thinkers, but they are not Thinkers. Why? Because they do not think like Thinkers. In fact they scarcely think at all. Usually they only imitate thinking.

      At any given time, past, present, or future, for every three Thinkers in the world there have been, are, and will be (without drastic measures to prevent it) 97 M-types.

      Without a doubt, Cooper’s Constant is one of the most significant discoveries in the history of mankind.¹

      Why do some people routinely think while others only imitate thinking? To find out, Dr. C arranged to have the brains of many Thinkers and M-types scanned with the latest neuroimaging technology. Every human brain has separate circuits for thinking and imitating, and scans revealed that, even though everyone possesses both circuits, each person tends to favor one circuit over the other—and that 97% of the population favors the imitation circuit. Why this preference? Because, says Dr. C, most people would rather leave the thinking to someone else. But again—why? Evolution, says Dr. C. "Consider hunter-gatherer tribes. How did they survive in a hostile world? Answer: each tribe was led by only two or three Thinkers—a highly adaptive arrangement. Just imagine an angry herd of woolly mammoths bearing down on a tribe consisting entirely of Thinkers. Everyone tries to lead—they pull in a hundred directions—this paralyzes the tribe—they are trampled into crepes. Indecision has killed them off. Obviously, this won’t do. With such behavior human beings would never have survived into the 21st century. Mutation and natural selection therefore tinkered with the human brain until it evolved an effective ratio of leaders to followers: just over 3%. For primitive humans this made perfect sense. Unfortunately, for a person in a modern democracy it does not."

      Cooper’s Constant answers many nagging questions about man and society. Laurence J. Peter asked himself why organizations are riddled with incompetence. His answer, the Peter Principle, stated that, In a hierarchy, every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence. An offshoot, the Dilbert Principle, maintains that the most ineffective workers are systematically moved to the place where they can do the least damage: management. The Oracle of Omaha, Warren Buffett, spoke of the Three I’s of the business cycle—the Innovators, the Imitators, and the Idiots, the first two of whom create and enhance companies, products and services, and the third, the Idiots, who screw it all up. Dr. Peter, Scott Adams and Warren Buffett were on the right track but never got to the station because they failed to ask, "Why are so many people—the ‘Idiots’— incompetent or ineffective in the first place? Cooper’s Constant furnishes the answer: So many people are incompetent because 97% of them are M-types who imitate instead of thinking."

      Each year fools receive Darwin Awards for removing their dysfunctional selves from the gene pool. For example, the welder in Russia who won a 2017 Darwin Award for sticking a fire extinguisher in the barrel of a retired artillery piece and, after adding a propellant, stood in front of the cannon while firing it. Such boneheads do eliminate themselves from the gene pool, but the real question is, "Why do they do away with themselves? Again, Cooper’s Constant furnishes the answer: They eliminate themselves from the gene pool because they are M-types who have gone so long without using the noodle that their thinking circuits have atrophied from neglect—and when they suddenly try to think the results are fatal."

      Dr. C has investigated the implications of Cooper’s Constant for society—in particular, for organizations. In so doing he made another momentous discovery—the M-organization, or MORG. An organization dominated by M-types, the MORG is not only ineffective but represents an extreme hazard to society.

      A MORG is the department in the New York City government that distributed a three-page illustrated memorandum on how to split muffins. A MORG is the department in the Albanian government that issued a stamp commemorating 12-pack-a-day Ahmed Zogu, the world’s greatest smoker. A MORG is the CIA department that hatched a scheme to discredit Fidel Castro by sprinkling his shoes with a chemical to make his beard fall out.

      This book presents Dr. C’s findings about the M-type. Part II describes the M-type in detail, while Part III introduces the Weevil and the Meevil—the world’s twin sources of evil. Part IV tells how Thinkers have learned to manage M-types—somewhat. Part V defines the five types of MORG and explains how a Thinker must behave to survive in one. Part VI warns about the extreme danger to individuals and society posed by the M-type, but concludes by showing that there is hope—aided by Dr. C and his colleagues, mankind may be able to survive this most terrible of scourges.

      But first things first. How was Cooper’s Constant discovered?

      CHAPTER 3

      HOW DR. C DISCOVERED THE CONSTANT

      Nature never makes any blunders. When she makes

      a fool, she means it.

      —Josh Billings

      SKULLWORK—INTIMATIONS OF THE CONSTANT

      Dr. C had intimations of the Constant long before he actually discovered it. As a mathematical anthropologist, while not attending conferences he crisscrossed the world studying other cultures, past and present. The first inkling of the Constant he discovered at the famous Olduvai

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