The Role of Productivity in Community Success: The Jesuit-Guaraní Cultural Confluence

(Note: This material appeared previously in "Chum For Thought: Throwing Ideas into Dangerous Waters" by the same author.)
This historical essay, drawn from the deepest jungles of Uruguay in South America, examines the creation of a flourishing culture and economy that lasted for almost two centuries. It explores the guided development of a virtuous web of social and economic controls that mixed the philosophy of Catholic Jesuit missionaries with the traditions of the native Guaraní peoples.

An unprecedented experiment in progressive community-building may have once created that rarest of cultural treasures – a functional and stable utopia... ended only by outside pressures of conquest and exploitation.

This is a living parable for our changing world, now suffering from seemingly-intractable political, cultural and economic turmoil… and struggling to be born into a tenuous future on uncertain threads of hope and despair. Rapid introduction of technology, educational systems, health care systems and social order have succeeded before – balancing competition and consumption in a new kind of community – and might be made to work again as we seek to create our own "new economy."

In this startling synthesis, Mr. Satterlee brings together and introduces:
• historical records,
• the social theories of the Catholic Church,
• the management theories of Peter Drucker,
• the psycho-social theories of Don Beck’s Spiral Dynamics Integral, and
• the economics ideas of William Lewis and the McKinsey Global Institute on “the power of productivity.”