As an older person, I have seen technology come from the analog radio, television, and corded land-line telephone to the digital wonders we have today. One of the most intriguing for me is the loss of printed word to the internet revolution. We now all have at our fingertips nearly all the information in the world and yet we are still swayed by simple messages that ‘appeal’ to our beliefs. All through recent human, we have been swayed to do unimaginable things to each other with shockingly rational reasons. The reasons were provided by some hierarchy in its search for more power. That power almost always involved monetary wealth and misinformation designed to inflame our emotional responses to help the elites gain that wealth. Some complex ideas that need discussing, but two can be condensed down to essential basics. First, Those that control the information, control society. Second, no matter how complex a business paradigm may seem, Profits equals revenue divided by expenditures (Profit=Revenue/Expenditures – P=R/E). A third is that in order to see beyond the curtain that hides the controllers of the first two, you need to suspend your beliefs of how you perceive society works. It may sound a little naïve, but as R. Buckminster Fuller said, “Dare to be naive.” Being consciously naïve does not mean you are gullible, but that you are open to a willingness to explore where you have never gone before – to go beyond your experiences and the judgmental rigidity of your ‘learned’ belief structures. Consciously naïve people ask questions about everything, because they are curious and want to learn. Observe a curious two-year old and you’ll see what I mean.
We live our lives enveloped in constant streams of information. What we listen to and what we ignore and/or dismiss is most often a consequence of our upbringing and who we surround ourselves in our daily lives. There are four main sources for most of our information, the mass media, religious institutions, educational institutions, and other people (who use the first three). In the U.S. six mega media corporations, Newscorp, Disney, Time Warner, CBS, Viacomm, and GE, control most of the mass media (at least 90%). While the names may change, these mass media outlets also control most of the worlds information and media entertainment as a business. They are not there as some social service to keep us all informed. They have a singular message: “be a good consumer and don’t rock the boat.” There are still independent outlets of information but they are fast being swallowed up. The one thing the controllers hate and fear is the internet with its ‘net neutrality’ but they are working to control even that! P=R/E drives the whole system as a way to maintain power. Indirectly, the mass media act as a front for mega-corporations that work with established institutional religions and educational institutions to keep us compliant. As a result they have all been set up to dumb us down. This is not conspiracy stuff, but a reality check on how our lives are scripted to fit elite agendas!
Technology is increasingly becoming a way of keeping us distracted and occupied with mundanity, as well as decrease the expenses within a manufacturing system. We keep an interest on what is in pushed in front of us, but with no sanctioned curiosity for anything outside the mainstream narrative. If we are to become a sustainable culture we will have to break away from the control systems that enslave us to this current consumer mindset. The business focus seems innocuous since it provides us with the toys we enjoy in a technological lifestyle. But look at the P=R/E equation. Profit is the end goal for most businesses and especially the bigger corporations. There is a revolution going on promoting sustainability, but more about that later. When we look at how business has changed in the past few decades, we find that heads of the major transnational corporations move around within a closed system. The boards of most big corporations are more like a closed club with the same names cropping up making decisions on how the companies will proceed. The primary focus is profit. That is driven by the need to make more money by either selling more product or making the production more efficient and/or cost effective. As such we see a lot more mechanization (e.g. robotics) to reduce human labor needs, and decreased wages as compliant workers struggle to keep whatever menial work they can to survive within the system. Again, it comes down to simply increase revenue or decrease costs. The easiest way is to decrease expenses (budget cutting), but that can only go so far. Decision makers rarely cut their expenses so it usually comes from the bottom of the process. To increase revenue means selling more, so advertising is geared to that end. The advertisers have decades of experience and knowledge about getting us to buy more things, even when we don’t need any more things. In the U.S. (and apparently in most westernized economies) a fast growing business seems to be storage rental units for people to store things that they cannot fit into their homes. Remember, consumerism is completely about us doing conspicuous consumption. And what sells better and faster than technology we cannot ‘live without.’
Laws that require environmental cleanups decrease profits and so much corporate effort is spent on either weakening those laws or finding ways around not obeying them. Even when corporations are sued and found guilty of creating environmental problems or breaking laws, the profits made are much greater than any fines that might be imposed. Transnational corporations have budgets greater than many countries, and have no allegiance to any country. Many do not pay any meaningful taxes in countries where the head offices are located, because the head office location (for tax purposes) is usually in a tax haven such as the Cayman Islands. The budget streams for most transnational corporations are often bigger than many countries. Indeed, many of these transnationals seem to have immense control over many countries. Corporatocracies are a reality for most countries regardless of what form of government they think they have.
The technology we have today is powerful, yet more often than not, is quite environmentally harmful to produce. We need to discuss what is appropriate technology and what is inappropriate to maintaining human well-being. Just because we can do something doesn’t mean we should. Much of the required discussion would emerge readily if we actually set up goals and objectives for what success means for living a ‘good life’ and not just making money. In earlier posts I talk about this problem as a major area of concern for what sustainability will mean. If money is the focus, everything is geared towards that end-goal. If we make well-being as the end-goal then the whole focus has to change. What we focus on is defined by our beliefs and hence the actions we pursue! The main ethic for most businesses is to maintain profits for investors. Unless investors demand a change in corporate ethics, this will not change the focus of importance for profits only. The creation of profit at all costs has created the modern world we take for granted. There is no way to become sustainable in a purely profit driven world. To repeat a Buckminster Fuller quote, “In order to change an existing paradigm you do not struggle to try and change the problematic model. You create a new model and make the old one obsolete.” The current business model is predicated up on competition so that the dominant ones make the most profit. What is needed, and what seems to starting to occur, is the idea of collaboration and cooperation. This change of focus will not come from the top-down. There are, however, some businesses – usually smaller ones – all around the world that are now changing their own paradigms towards social benefits over profits. This blog post is not an argument against making profits. I have stated this in earlier blog posts. It is about what Adam Smith emphasized as business for social benefit. There now business leaders willing to try and change the model, BUT they need their customers to help them do this. As usual it will come down to us, the enlightened sovereign consumer, to help drive this change from the bottom up. Only a tightly controlled consumer paradigm with a singular profit focus has created the problems we have today. Once we recognize this and become awakened to other options, we can seek and use information to let us make decisions for ourselves that make sense about how we live. When many of us call out ‘the emperor has no clothes’ then change can occur quickly. We can make a system where what is of real value for our well-being is what is measured, and therefore becomes what we measure. In a previous post (Health – Stress/Lifestyle 1) I mentioned the Kingdom of Bhutan that decided to measure its country’s annual success through a ‘Gross National Happiness’ rating instead of GDP (http://www.grossnationalhappiness.com/). Economists may laugh, but once you read through the Bhutanese measures with a new perspective you might start seeing our current GDP system for the flawed one it is! Remember, what we measure as success determines our beliefs and actions. More about new type businesses making a difference in next post.
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