Civilization
began the first time an angry person
cast a word instead of a rock.
Freud
When
two elephants fight
it is the grass that suffers.
Swahili proverb
We
begin with the primordial unit of the tribe and then the amalgamation
of tribes, which evolved into the more stable entity of the
community. The members of the tribe or community were,
of necessity, neck deep in the business of survival -- as hunters,
foragers and fishermen -- doing whatever (beyond good and evil)
to survive. The plastic moral codes that emerged took their
shape from the imperatives of survival, and not the other way
around. If the protocols of protein (survive or starve) meant
cannibalizing the enemy, the tablecloth was stretched to fit
the occasion. Monogamy was a nonstarter. The alpha male enjoyed
the first choice of everything: the best or only food; le
droit de seigneur -- the Middle Ages equivalent of feudal
lord’s first night insemination rights. He would also
be the first to walk the line in defense of territory and natural
resources.
To
ensure survival of the fittest genes, the distribution algorithm
was a function of hierarchy where the relative size of the winners’
and losers’ circles mirrored the wealth (or lack of) the
community.
From
the disciplines of biology, anthropology and sociology, we have
a fairly clear if somewhat reductive picture of what to expect
of human behaviour in times of scarcity. What is also clear
but of considerably less interest is tribal conduct in times
of surfeit, when simply being a member of a tribe or community
precluded certain rights and expectations which were inviolable.
In times of plenty, those whose participation was not required
in the means of production (the hunt or the gathering) were
not ostracized or excluded from enjoying the good fortune enjoyed
by the group as a whole. For the alpha male to deny the epsilon
his share in times of plenty would have constituted a punishment
for which there was no just cause, since all the members of
the tribe were known to each other and were in it together,
for better or worse, in feast or famine.
So
how do we explain or account for the fact that the exact opposite
happens today, that in times of plenty employees are routinely
let go, not allowed to participate in the prosperity of the
company they helped grow? When a company, usually registered
as a corporation, determines that its production and profit
margins can be maintained or increased with a smaller workforce,
it is self-obliged to ‘retire’ a percentage of its
workers to the effect that instead of being rewarded for his
effort and contribution, the good soldier is punished, turned
into a have-not and left to fend for himself. From the company’s
perspective, sold as an accounting detail, the employee’s
contribution has been duly counted but he no longer counts.
Contrast his fate to that of even the slave who, in times of
plenty, was at least allowed the basic necessities of life.
If
caring for others united in common purpose and not caring at
all are both outcomes predicted by human nature, how did the
original impulse so quickly morph into its opposite? What caused
the instinct to care to undergo the equivalent of bee colony
collapse syndrome?
For
most of man’s history that, according to recent
paleontological findings, begins 1.8 million
years ago, the social contract that bound tribal members together
in their struggle to survive was underwritten by mutual care
and cooperation. But when communities grew too large for everyone
to know each other and money
became the medium of barter,
the rules of the game changed dramatically; modern man discovered
that he could act independently of his group and not suffer
the consequences.
Much
like the Internet’s effects in our century, the introduction
of currency (coins) by the Lydians in 700 B.C. brought about
a tectonic shift in the manner in which individuals relate to
each other concerning the accumulation of wealth and its distribution,
a shift that is directly responsible for a state of affairs
that has, on our watch, 1.5 billion people (more than half below
the age of five) living below the poverty line. Prior to legal
tender, deprivation (going without) did not exist in times of
surfeit or prosperity. Prior to money, there were quantifiable
limits to the satisfaction conferred by wealth. The vainglorious
hunter might dream of bringing 100 kilos of meat to a tribal
feast but never a hundred thousand because he is subject to
a natural (physical) satiation point, otherwise known as the
law of diminishing returns, which totally breaks down when applied
to abstract wealth because there are no limits to the number
of zeros you can add to a figure or bank statement. The wealth
of Bill Gates Incorporated, expressed in compounding zeros,
exceeds that of many countries, which makes Mr. Gates a very
wealthy, that is powerful man.
We
usually think of power and command as the endgame of politics.
We also know -- bloodier than well -- that power corrupts, and
to such a degree that beginning with Locke (government by consent)
and then Montesquieu, separation of power clauses were preemptively
written into constitutions as checks against the brute instinct.
But despite significant changes in political behaviour, man’s
craving would not go gently out of sight and mind. Instead,
recognizing the likeness between money and power, he quickly
learned how to finesse the restrictions that attend the political
realm by making the comparatively speaking unregulated economic
sphere home to his operations and ambitions. It’s hardly
a secret that taxation (14,000 page tax code) and anti-trust
legislation are at best blunt instruments against the iniquitous
accumulation of wealth (power) since each has been significantly
suborned by the medium it seeks to control: money.
In
the 1950s, the tax rate for the rich was 91 percent.
It’s now 35 percent. For the past 80 years, the laws of
the land have allowed for the existence of offshore tax havens.
It is surely self-evident to even the least politically astute
observer that neither the butcher nor the baker is responsible
for the above mentioned tax favours that would have never seen
the light of day if the money man hadn’t figured out how
to reconcile the nuisance of a moral conscience with his gene-driven
lust for wealth and power.
To
obviate the potentially unsettling effects of a guilty conscience
(he had to have his cake and eat it, too), the ever resourceful
entrepreneur decided to introduce a business model that would
allow for the unrestricted accumulation of wealth=power while
absolving him of any moral responsibility for decisions taken
on the model’s behalf. We now recognize this brave new
business concept as the prototype of the corporation whose emergence
would rival the invention of gun powder in its effects.
The
corporation, in its present (dis)guise, is an entity that is
legally considered a person in that it can act like a person
without any regard for actual people. Its blood runs inversely
as cold as its production heats up. Its structure and organization
are determined by profit. All its operations and decisions are
underwritten in consideration of profit. The CEO and members
of the board are sworn to uphold the objectives of the corporation
and are self-rewarded and punished according to their ability
to fulfill the corporate mandate. In pursuit of its aims, the
corporation maintains a standing army of lawyers and lobbyists
whose job it is to draft and push through legislation that facilitates
profit making. When
a corporation decides it can retire 25 percent of its ‘redundant’
workforce, it cites profit as the reason, knowing full well
that disgruntled ex-employees can not affect or overturn a decision
made by an entity.
Joel
Bakan, author of The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit
of Profit and Power, compares the corporation to a psychopath
incapable of responding to “the feelings of others; an
incapacity to maintain enduring relationships; a reckless disregard
for the safety of others; a pattern of deceitfulness; an incapacity
to experience guilt; failure to conform to social norms with
respect to lawful behaviour. This is the institution that we
allow to govern all aspects of our lives.”
As
such, the corporation is the force that through the green fuse
drives government. When the latter decides to wage an especially
dubious war, it is usually at the behest of those corporations
that stand to gain by it. That men and women are needlessly
sacrificed for the glory of the bottom line is consistent with
the raison d’être of the corporation for
whom profit is more valued than the health and well being of
the individuals and environment (planet) that provide for it.
As
it has increasingly concentrated power unto itself -- crushing
and bending human will and enterprise to serve its ends -- the
corporation can be said (as predicted by both Huxley and Orwell)
to be out of control because it is in total control. That Thomas
Friedman can look at a creature-cum-insatiable appetite whose
tentacles are everywhere and conclude that the earth is becoming
economically flatter beggars credulity. What chance do the rest
of us stand against an entity that devours equally people and
human resources if a mind as fine as Friedman’s can be
so easily destabilized by the bogus utterances of corporate
doublespeak under whose auspices
the hegemonic designs of globalization have been refashioned
into a slick, proletariat-friendly, all purpose economic balm
that promises a fairer distribution of the world’s wealth
as trade barriers fall and corporations become more productively
intertwined and interdependent. For the actuaries and bartered
accountants whose numbers corroborate the fraud, the rewards
are more than most can refuse. But despite the numerology, the
gap between the haves and have-nots continues to widen, the
conventional middle class (one wage earner per household) has
all but vanished and during the past 50 years real wages have
gone down. “You assist an evil system most effectively
by obeying its orders and decrees,” writes the Mahatma.
If
our planet in peril is to survive its defective institutions,
if we are to avoid the fate predicted by Cree prophecy -- after
the last tree has been cut down, after the last river has been
poisoned, after the last fish has been caught, only then will
you find that money cannot be eaten -- the corporation
will have to will itself, based on insights that can only come
about through huge self-examination, to rewrite its purpose.
And
there can be no circumventing the inconvenient truth that we
(self-delusional par excellence) are the corporation,
seismically implicated in its schemes and purposes. Reduced
to the sum of its (mis)behaviour, is not the corporation the
stealth extension of human nature -- uncouth and flawed -- turned
into convenient bogeyman?
I propose
that the challenge of our times is nothing less than righting
something that is so wrong it cannot be righted. Short of reconfiguring
our DNA, how do we instruct and command ourselves to care for
and be kind to strangers? How do we extirpate the rot from institutions
we have designated to care on our behalf? Did we or did we not
give birth to the corporation and raise it in our image? Did
we or did we not trash its hopes and promises and turn them
into betrayals? If not I and I, who is the hallowed be thine
ass fallen back into its hole?
As
far back as 1854, George Bancroft, a political theorist, could
confidently predict that “the good time is coming, when
humanity will recognize all members of its family as alike and
entitled to its care; when the heartless jargon of over-production
in the midst of want will end in a better science of distribution.”
Perhaps
the real clash of civilizations is the battle being waged in
the dark gray matter of the species: best intentions struggling
to best human nature.
And
how is this likely to turn out, you ask? Lacking the soothsayer’s
vision and vanity, I restrict myself to the modest proposal
that if when looking hard into your crystal ball it cracks under
the pressure of your anxious gaze, take comfort in the fact
that "that’s (where and) how the light gets in.”