In my life I've seen just about everything sacrificed on the altar of corporate profits. The environment, public services, even culture itself, everything we once held dear, has fallen before the might of an irrational economic system.
source: Pixabay
Let's say you are the owner of a timber corporation. And let's say you know that trees and forests are the lungs of the planet and all life on it. And you're even aware of the fact that every acre of forest cleared, adds to an already existing global problem. What do you do? Or you're a fishing company and you know your nets bring great imbalance in the ecosystem of the place where all the rest of the oxygen of the planet is produced. You know that all life on the planet depends on the survival of plankton. You know that you participate in the destruction of our shared spaceship. What do you do?
Well you do what all of us do; you do what the law tells you to do. And in case of the corporation this means you do everything and anything within the law, to further the interests of your shareholders. That's what you do when you're (in part) owner of a corporation; if it's profitable and legal to catch that fish or cut that tree, you're bound by law to do it. It's funny really, the shareholders hire a CEO that strictly serves their own financial purpose, which is to be as materialistically selfish as humanly, and inhumanly, possible.
Ah, that's what you get with "out of control government" I hear many of you think. That's funny too. I don't know if it's capitalism's complete irrationality that makes these kinds of reversals of realty so easy, but why blame government for problems firmly rooted in the economy? Especially when you feel that government should let loose, you know, because markets know best, you should be perfectly happy with this state of affairs; the markets are in charge right now, so much even that they control the government.
What's even more funny, and brilliant in a way, is that these same few have made so much of us actually believe that poverty is the greatest motivator to reach greatness. Even the most hardened left winger would never say that "equality of outcome" is a good thing; we almost all agree that "equality of opportunity" is a good thing... Why? Why would people having the same amount of material wealth suddenly make them clones, or lazy? Why is the amount of money you own the only thing that could ever motivate you to do anything meaningful to further society? Is it our possessions that define who we are, what makes us unique, our overarching all important quality? And how is material inequality of outcome not the same as inequality of opportunity? Do children with rich parents not have a head-start in the self imposed human rat-race toward the top of the financial food-chain?
I think often this reversal of reality comes about something like this: schooling as we know it, is a product of the industrial revolution. Large corporations needed scores of people smart enough to operate the machines in the factories, a slightly smaller number of people to manage that workforce and a handful of people to help them with R&D. This may sound cynical, but it's true; even the school bell that rings at lunchtime is part of that conditioning. Really, it should be crystal clear to anyone, that schools are here to prepare people for their part in the economy, and much less for their part in a functioning democracy or republic. Smart enough to operate the machines, not smart enough to start talking back.
Now that we start to recognize the abysmal state of our schooling systems (it's not an American problem exclusively; education is in decline across the board with exception of the far east), who do we blame, almost everywhere? Politics is who we blame. Government has made the decisions that led to this state of affairs, but they did it to please their largest industries. Like I said, everything is sacrificed to economical growth. And in a system where all growth is personal growth this means serving that personal growth. That's why it's the law for a corporation to be as selfish as lawfully possible. They bought the politicians to implement the laws they wrote themselves.
RSA ANIMATE: Changing Education Paradigms
We've sacrificed our sense of community even; we don't want to pay taxes for those schools anymore because we don't want to give our money to a government that only makes schooling worse every year. We blame the government's control over our money, when it's actually money's control over our government. And meanwhile we let money make us believe that it's all government's fault, because it controls the media too. In fact it's the fault of anything that could represent or benefit all of us; instead the miracle of individual entrepreneurship, possibly culminating in a position of exceptional material wealth, and the free financial interactions between profit-seeking individuals are going to save us. Greed is going to save us, say our greedy "saviors". And damn anything that paints us a collective, a people.
Instead, use the flag. Wave the national colors, because we're individuals on a global scale too, and all the other individuals, countries, are our competitors. Our nation's collective material wealth is the only collective we're interested in, as it tells us how good our nation is doing in the international financial food-chain. Damn the fact that we had to move all our major industries to low-wage countries with nearly absent environmental laws and easily controlled corrupt regimes. Damn the fact that these corporations now refuse to pay taxes in the countries that made them big in the first place. That's all irrelevant; as long as GDP looks good on paper, we're fine apparently. Here's the nation and it's population lying on the altar of corporate profits.
Greed is not our sole defining characteristic. How much we own doesn't define who we are. Yet these are the dominating commandments we live by. We are capable of great selfishness, but we're equally capable of great altruism. We do need stuff to survive and to live comfortable lives, but there's absolutely no need for big differences in material wealth; we could all just be rich. "But why would I ever get up in the morning to work, ever again?" If that's what you think... I'm going to go out on a limb here and use religion as a comparison, partly because I believe free market capitalism is today's main religion.
In much of the debates between atheists and people who adhere to some type of religion, an argument often used on the pro-religion side is morality. Their hypothesis is that without an external and divine origin of morality, or I should say "objective" morality, we would all lose our sense of morality, so the observation that we do have morals would be proof of the existence of a God. Some even say they fear that they would start raping and killing people if they did not believe in God. I find that hard to believe, or at least I can't imagine how someone could believe that of him or herself. But it happens. And now people believe that the only thing responsible for progression is the motivation to be found in wanting to have more than your neighbor. And they believe it so strongly that they fear we would all suddenly become lazy and unproductive as a consequence, with the collapse of society soon to follow. I can't imagine why we would believe that. Really.
Technological and scientific progress has nothing to do with people wanting to become rich. It is plain and simple human curiosity that brought us where we are. It's the passion and dedication, bordering on autism, of one person to one specific thing that interests him or her to the degree that it consumes every waking hour. Passion and curiosity, not profit, not greed, not money. And other times pure necessity is the mother of inventions and progress, and in those times we've proven to be exceptionally well equipped to unite around common goals. It was organisation and cooperation that decided our destiny in prehistoric times, according to some evolutionary biologists. We won the competition against the then still present "big fauna" because we were able to organize and cooperate. We moved in packs, made a lot of noise together and killed our food together. Who knows what would have happened, would we have survived as a species, if evolution believed in capitalism and individualism as strongly as we do now?
I don't know. All I do know is that the way we're going now is leading us down a path of ever further alienation from each other and the destruction of much of the natural environment we all ultimately depend upon; we've even shown the capacity to sacrifice a healthy environment for our children and grandchildren on that unholy altar. How long will it take before every human interaction is basically a transaction? I do hope we prevent that from ever happening, but we're close... Ultimately we must ask what world we want to live in; do we want to live in the dog-eat-dog world we're speeding toward, or do we want to live in a world where we know we have to take care of each other, that we have to lift each other up. That we ourselves are the rising tide that lifts all boats...
Richard Wolff: Does Capitalism Actually Reduce Poverty?
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