So how is the business world moving forward with all of this sustainability stuff. To read the mainstream news and publications would suggest it is well on its way. The reality? The main driving force seems to be the business worlds perception of how the customers view sustainability. It is seen more as a feel-good thing. In research looking at worldviews and attitudes, what becomes clear is that people overall want a clean, healthy environment, and a lifestyle that promotes health, happiness, and well-being – no big surprise there, BUT for most it is something they want other people to create. Until we recognize how our consensus belief systems are hijacked by big money and powerful people, we will merely keep obediently running the corporate treadmill. What I have concluded after many years of studying sustainability systems is that sustainable change is literally here if we wanted to choose it. It is, however, held up by major big money power brokers who have other agendas (and probably no imaginations for getting out of the current equivalent of the stone age). If you delve in to this and many other aspects of control you get the conspiracists and the debunkers – I resist the use of the term skeptics for this latter group because debunkers simply answer people with hard questions as morons and idiots without any further discussion – this smacks of rigid belief systems (controlled by big money?).
I have often talked about a steady state economy, often referred to as ‘ecological economics.’ Neo-classical economics on which our modern businesses rely is predicated on endless growth. I discussed in earlier blogs the idea of steady state where we live in harmony with the natural world, not because we love nature (although that would be great and a necessary objective) but because there is no other way to continue living on this planet. It is really ‘living within our means’ – literally. In our business world we can living beyond our means by the inventing money to create artificial wealth predicated upon the notion that there is always more of anything that we can buy if we only have more money. We have to get our minds around the concept of money – it is simply a tool. Nothing more, nothing less. Yet, we have made it a god to be worshipped, and an end goal all until itself. Imagine that instead of money being the tool, we had hammers. You could warehouse and protect hammers and run global currencies of hammers, trade on the hammer stock exchange to get more hammers, and go to war to protect your hammers over your rival’s hammers. People would brag how they had ten more hammers than their neighbors and demand respect and control of everything we do. Yet, in the end if you wanted to pound a nail into a plank of wood, all you would need is one hammer – the tool, not the virtual concept of a hammer. When businesses first began, it was probably some craftsperson who made great products, like say a chair. Now a chair is a better and more comfortable thing to sit on than a rock or a log, so people would have bartered something they had more of to obtain one of these chairs. Don’t forget, that a rock or log is free, but the craftsperson had a product that had gained value through his particular imagination, skill and effort and deserved to be rewarded. So it doesn’t take much effort to imagine how this system could expand with multitudes of gifted craftspeople producing all manner of things that made life a little more comfortable. We are human after all, and anything that makes life easier and comfortable is of value. As the system grew so did the hierarchy that maintained and controlled the system. We have that word again – hierarchy. The businesses affected how we lived and influenced our lives in multitudes of ways. Today, we accept their influence and manipulation as part of our normal way of living, but remember these businesses cannot get us to buy their products unless we want them – even with all this control, we still have consumer sovereignty. They need us, we don’t necessarily need them. Let’s ponder all this more in the next post.
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