Just to clarify, I’m not anti-social entrepreneurship. Social enterprise has positive and negative aspects, as I explore further elsewhere, especially here.

However, the qualities of social enterprise taken in themselves are a distraction from the systemic problem that is my primary concern: a fundamental lack of understanding of who we are. A recurring symptom of this system flaw: turbulent swings in collective identity as we redefine ourselves in terms of—-or against—-the latest markers of success.

This is, to use the latest cliché, unsustainable. It’s also counter to what social enterprise claims to represent. Civil society, the welfare state, NGOs, scientific philanthropy—the previous fads and bubbles in do-goodery all shared the same flaw.

Calling attention to this problem is not anti, at least not from my perspective. Rather, it’s part of a rigorous SWOT analysis, a feature of business planning at which social enterprise all too often sucks. As a punny corporate speaker might say, take out the weaknesses and threats from your strategic thinking and all ya got is “SO?”

Of course, the social enterprise movement isn’t the only culprit here, any more than so-called traditional nonprofits. Indeed, the commercial world shares the same problem, as does the human race. Studying social enterprise in relation to—-not as inherently superior to—-other attempts to model human behavior provides the best hope for discovering what they all represent.