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issue 32
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Forum on Economic
Reform In recent
decades the alliance of neoclassical economics and neoliberalism has hijacked the term “economic
reform”. By presenting
political choices as market necessities, they have subverted public debate
about what economic policy changes are possible and are or are not
desirable. This venue
promotes discussion of economic reform that is not limited to the one
ideological point of view. Greed
(Part II) Julian
Edney
(1) ©
Copyright: Julian Edney 2002-2005
An essay
concerning the origins, nature, extent and morality of this destructive
force in free market economies. Definitions. Paradoxes and omissions in
Adam Smith's original theory permit - encourage - greed without restraint
so that in a very large society [USA] over two centuries it has become an
undemocratic force creating precipitous inequalities; divisions in this
society now approach a kind of wealth apartheid, and our values are quite
unlike Smith's: this is an immensely wealthy society but it is not a
humane society. Wealth and
poverty are connected, in fact recent sociological theory shows our
institutions routinely design inequality in, but this connection is
largely avoided in texts and
in the media, as is the notion that greed is a moral wrong. Problems
created by greed cannot be solved by technology. We are also distracted by
already-outdated environmental rhetoric, arguments that scarcities and
human suffering follow from abuse of our ecology. Rather, these scarcities
are the result of what people do to people. This focus opens practical
solutions. Part I of Greed appeared in the last
issue of this journal and is available at http://www.paecon.net/PAEReview/issue%2031/Edney31.htm The
Pivot What drives this society? We proudly answer
that what fuels people in this nation [USA] is a competitive drive to be
better. The obvious result is inequality, because the intention is
inequality. Competition deserves a closer look. Anthropologist Ruth Benedict summarized her
overseas work saying the most obvious difference among societies was
whether the living was cooperative or competitive. This was the 1930s. She
used the term synergy. A high synergy society is socially cohesive,
cooperative and unaggressive - one person’s acts
at the same time serve his own advantage and that of the group, his gain
results in a gain for all. But cultures with low synergy are highly
competitive and the individual gains advantage only at the expense of
another, aggression is prized, indeed humor
originates from one person’s victory and another’s demolition. Low synergy
eventually threatens the social fabric. Her example was the Dobu of New Guinea, whose daily atmosphere of ill will
and treachery among all made it a showcase of Hobbesean nastiness, and feared among its neighboring tribes. The Dobu
have no chiefs, no government, no legalities and live very close to the
"state of nature" philosophers propose. Danger is at its height within the
tribe, not from without, and the attitude lives that it is prudent and
right to inflict pain on losers to protect your win. Hierarchy is based on
ruthlessness which is admired, and inequality and injustice are believed
to be in the nature of things 43. Benedict pointed out the world’s societies can
be arranged on a continuum from those with the highest synergy to those
with the lowest. In our own society, we love competition and we
promote inequality. A team of sociologists headed by C.S. Fisher 44 has recently tightened this
argument with a treatise that first attacks the Bell Curve explanation
that inherited differences in IQ and natural talent can be used to explain
our unequal fortunes. They summarily deny the economist's claim that
inequality fosters economic growth. Third, they state, our inequalities
are by design, and they are growing. The result is that in the last twenty
years we have become a steeply hierarchical society, and this is with
popular support. We are choosing inequality through government economic
policies that chronically distributed wealth
unfairly. Clearly our own society has lower synergy than
we boast - and it’s falling. Simply, any free market culture that would
rather create a market in a resource than have abundance for all is
creating inequality as it goes. But so long as we can attribute
unhappiness to global limits, or to inherited individual differences, then
nature is to blame. We can hoist a paradox. We can both have our levels of
misery and congratulate ourselves on our modern attitudes and on a humane
society. Manipulation of Hope That last hypocrisy is researched by two Yale
scholars, Guido Calabresi and Philip Bobbitt
45 who argue we practice inequality everywhere while pretending
to equality (it is so close to our notion of justice). This subversion
requires a nest of contradictory customs, a shell game designed to help us
avoid and deny the moral consequences. And a retreat to other standards:
sometimes, conceding inequalities, we will go through contortions to show
that at least we are humane. The cost of all this, of course, is
honesty. Calabresi and Bobbitt argue that instead of universal
abundance, there is perpetual scarcity. We calibrate it so. Society
oscillates between two kinds of decisions. A first order decision is how
much to produce or allow of a desirable good, and a second order decision
is who shall get it. If this process were obvious, we would be outraged at
the insight that there is needless suffering, because the scarcity is man
made. Whether the desirable good is shelter, life-saving medical
treatment, an education, or decent treatment by the police, we
simultaneously manage the perception that all is well when in fact it is
well with only a fraction of the population. Seeing certain medications or
(in war) draft-deferments only go to the rich, or seeing that with our
aggregate wealth, poverty need not exist, we search for reasons that
suffering comes to some people but not others. The focus becomes methods
of allocation. The central insight is to see that allocation by itself is
an act signifying inequality. We realize certain methods of allocation are
"acceptable," meaning they do not morally offend, for instance, the free
market method acceptably allocates hunger because it decentralizes choice
into individual decisions, and we can blame the hungry person. So this
distracts from the scarcity itself. And hope is preserved. But each
allocation method is rather arbitrary. We wonder if, keeping the same
overall percentages, poverty could just as well be allocated by lottery.
The market does not acceptably allocate the draft, so we have to shift to
another method of allocating that inequality. Mistakes in choosing
allocation method pull back the curtain on the fact of the original
scarcities, creating fear and outrage. But the reality is, the scarcity of
doctors, on whom lives depend, is a result of a human decision how many to
train - and not a limitation of Earth's carrying capacity.
Sensation-hungry
Press While we are uncomfortable with the fact that
the market runs an "acceptable" number of auto deaths, cancer fatalities,
or hungry four-year-olds, it allows us to explain each case as personal
misfortune. It will appear there is no other choice, and our morality is
preserved. So while we believe in a strong, happy society, brimming with
progress and good for all its people, we get daily news hinting at our
less-civilized status. The facts are, shelters for battered women are
always crowded, fear permeates some schools, barbarism spreads in our
prisons, and in some precincts it is becoming harder to distinguish police
behavior from that of criminals. Calabresi and Bobbit
continue this argument describing a societal device we use in huge efforts
to preserve this contradiction. The perception of humaneness is crucial. It
tells us our system is both strong and good; otherwise glimpses of
inhumanity are a dangerous hint that things are not working. Two examples:
some years ago, a million dollars was spent on the rescue of a single
downed balloonist in a dramatic, highly publicized race of helicopters and
boats. The drama proved our humanity. We make massive efforts for someone
in distress. What was never publicized was the chronic underbudgeting of the Coast Guard which otherwise
would make such rescues routine. In a second example, heroic amounts were
spent to rescue prisoners from a fire in a penitentiary. But what was
never revealed is that the prison's scarce medical resources meant
hundreds of others routinely went without treatment or died at other
times. This type of rare and heavily publicized humane event, fed to a
sensation-hungry press, creates a "sufficiency paradox", an "illusion of
sufficiency" 46 that the goodness is there for us all.
Generalized, this creates the illusion of abundance. The media deal in
demonstrations of sudden and spectacular humanity. But for every person
who gets the rare benefit, many others do not. A life-saving kidney goes
to one of several people in need, and the life-taking decision about the
others is not publicized. The "illusion of sufficiency" device massively
confuses possibility with probability but on a societal level, it is a
media-promoted and effective manipulation of hope. We too use Potemkin
villages. Kafkaesque What about all the people who lose to scarcity?
People hate themselves for failing, but unless society is honest, they
must absorb the original scarcity plus the anguish of not knowing how they
failed and not knowing what to do. To the loser the frustration and
humiliation of not knowing why, creates "the Kafkaesque cost of being in a
process without knowing how to help oneself" 47. If people
compared our national inequities in wealth with the insight that, through
decided levels of scarcity, the aggregate amount of suffering is
controlled, public emotion could erupt. Calabresi and Bobbitt's point is that we must keep
examining our values. Equality and honesty are prime values. But in these
machinations, they are chronically opposed. We must chose honesty, then we
can begin the struggle to reclaim our real humanity. Corporations Next we bring into this mix the vastly wealthy
American transnational
corporation. Businesses exist to make profit. Corporations
are a type of business association, ones with special legal powers and
durability. They have been a usual part of the business environment since
the fifteenth century. International corporations were the muscle behind
European colonization in the second half of the last millennium, but in
that era of horse and sail, their power was a fraction of what it is
today. Some corporations have now grown gigantic, actually becoming global
forces with more power and resources than some
countries. Actually the largest corporations derive power
not only from wealth but because they can fluidly migrate to whichever
nation offers the least legal restraints, the cheapest labor, the most amenable economies and the friendliest
politics. In this sense they float above the world's constraints.
But as a rule American corporations differ
sharply from the nation which hosts them. They are alien to the notion of
democratic responsiveness, internal or external. In the universe of
corporations everything focuses on the acquisition of resources, labor, and markets. These are the sources of power.
Inside corporations Equality hides her face. Corporations are not elected, so they are
concerned with nobody's approval. Aside from occasional shareholder
meetings, they never ask the public for ideas or permission. Nor do the
workers elect their leaders. Inside, most business corporations are
steeply hierarchical structures, in which employees' freedom to do what
they want is openly bought for the wage. They are not responsive to the
will of those they employ; some have inner dynamics that are feudal; some
of their hierarchies are also jungles of dysfunction. In democratic
America most corporations are iridescent examples of autocracy, thriving
on soil where the Constitution guarantees everybody's freedom and
equality. Nevertheless, the overwhelming portion of our
population denies any problem. Charles Derber,
among several writing on this topic, believes there are specific reasons
we don't even think about corporations. First, we are all educated to look
elsewhere, for instance to unchecked government, as the primary threat to
freedom. Second corporations make and sell our creature comforts, so we
can't tamper with them without threatening our prosperity. Third, we feel
powerless. The concentration of corporate power is inverse to people's
feelings of personal power. Fourth, we see no alternative 48.
Powers without
Obligation If wealth is the only standard we use to judge,
then we have to admit corporations are staggering successes and everything
to venerate. They absorb people's lives. We consume their products daily,
use their services hourly, rely on them for information. We are dependent.
We compete to work in them. What protects them is that we are taught the
system is rational. We are also taught that the goodness of a society
depends on how well its topmost members are doing, so the higher our
topmost members, the more they are discussed with awe.
The natural foe of corporations is government.
But international corporations are so wealthy they slide over governments.
They have become like tourists in their own country. As they lose national
loyalties, they come close to becoming powers without obligation. As the
largest transnational corporations grow, they
become sovereign and untouchable 49. The
Corporate Personality Roughly there are, I suppose, two kinds of
people. The first divides the world into Good versus Bad. The second
divides the world into the Strong versus Weak. These two types never can
communicate. Among the latter, the concern is never to be caught weak
because hell takes the hindmost, and among them all talk about goodness
and ethics is irrelevant, and every effort is given to staying strong.
This second type infests corporations. They are refractory to talk of
humanity and you can shout all you want and they will not listen; every
ounce of their attention is given to their
competition. Their rules of engagement are Darwinian.
Large scale competition among these massive
corporations is what upgrades greed from whimsical excess to lethal
force. Two
Areas of Corporate Control First, Christopher Lasch points out that private universities depend on
corporations, through investments, grants, or otherwise; and wherever
their money is used, corporations influence state universities too.
Consequently you will find free discussion on university campuses on
almost any topic but one. Academic debate is not used to deconstruct the
corporations that feed them. The
News The second important area of control is
corporation ownership of the media. Through corporate competition, we now live in a
system in which a few colossal media conglomerates dominate the news
outlets. A typical conglomerate owns film studios, television studios,
publishing houses, retail outlets, theaters,
newspapers, music studios, cable channels, and in some cases, amusement
parks. This oligopoly of conglomerates is small. It has overwhelming
financial power, and it is not responsive to the will of the public.
Corporations exist for profit, so the news has
become a commercial product. Largely, the same mentality making decisions
about entertainment is now making news decisions (and the two, according
to Neal Gabler, are increasingly difficult to
tell apart 50). Analyst Robert McChesney 51 says commercialization of the
news has been a slowly growing process, starting in the 1840s when it was
realized that selling news could actually make an entrepreneur money.
Greed rather than journalistic standards took journalism astray in the era
of the Yellow Press when stories were written for what sold and all the
money came in from readers. Later on, newspaper owners started getting
bigger money from advertisers. Nobody objected, because then as now, the
myth is that the prime enemy of a free press was the government, that
competitive free market capitalism would always keep the media unbiased
and democratic. Missing Topics We do have some control over which media
programs we watch. We still can choose among television channels, but the
overwhelming majority of channels are commercial, and corporations exert
fine-grained control over the consumer's viewing diet. And unlike Canada's
and Britain's, America's noncommercial channels
are not guaranteed by the government. They depend on grants, charity and
viewer contributions. They cannot hope for the stability, size and power
of their commercials rivals. The result? Television news viewers are
carpet-bombed with advertising. Advertisers actually survey for the kind
of news that is interesting to the viewers who have money to buy products.
Advertising firms are so influential that current journalism avoids
antagonizing them and politicians avoid antagonizing them. McChesney says their control extends to blacking out
certain topics. So while education, drug testing, gay rights, religion are
mentioned on commercial television, other topics such as the representativeness of the media system is a topic that
is never aired. Social class issues are avoided. If we live in a society
of inequality, then we can wonder, every time the television shows us the
upper reaches of abundant success, which scenes of poverty have been
excised. Programs about the poor are rare. In effect, says McChesney,"media firms effectively write off the
bottom 15-50 percent of society."52 All of which, he continues, is undermining
democracy. Among McChesney's
remedies: first, make how the media are used a political issue. Second, a
separate 1% tax on advertising would raise substantial revenues (he
estimates $1.5 billion annually) which could be used to subsidize the
nonprofit media. Advertising We absorb from the television, and that is what
advertisers want. We take advertising seriously. Over a hundred
billion dollars is spent annually on advertising. Its goal is to occupy
the drive and psyche of the nation with wants, so that the nation will
spend. But the media are doing much
more. It is decided not to show on television the
varieties of fear in our rooming houses and alleys where people live in
the lowest reaches of poverty. It is decided not to show our hungry people
living in tilting rural shacks. Nor the ranks of exhausted faces in city
sweatshops. Lost, abject, hostile, desperate, these people's glances are
pulled aside by complicit belief that failure is the lot of the damned.
These people are quite available for filming and quite imageable. Instead, television is filled with
cacophonous distraction. Contradictions are withheld in the news. For
instance, new technology is lionized in commercials. But technology itself
is amoral. For example, it is also making torture easier. No one would
mythologize the kind of free market where people made profits marketing
whips and thumbscrews, but a recent Amnesty International investigation
reports that currently more than fifty U.S. companies manufacture
equipment like stun belts and shock batons designed specifically for use
on humans (these devices inflict great pain but leave little physical
evidence) 53. Difficult topics encourage thought, and they take
time away from commercials. War
on Logic Somehow the painful gap that exists between
poverty and abundance must be anesthetized. Television is the means. We
stuff television reality in the gap. Twenty-four hours every day
commercial television is an ongoing polychromatic display of games, short
dramas with gunplay and florid sex, perpetually interrupted by iridescent
advertisements. Television both provokes fear and promises ecstasy in
ultra short attention spans. It feeds a national obsession with beauty,
teasing with glossy bodies, glossy cars, luscious scenery.
What is shown in commercials is overflowing
abundance, specifically in terms of climactic moments. Now a race is run
and now a prize is taken; now a man works for all of a second and a half,
then it's time for beers; now all the cooking has been done, and a
sumptuous meal is ready 54. The troubling theme is that human
effort is noisily trivialized in commercials. This is the narcotic.
Television lathers a bright, noisy blur over anything like sustained
effort, perseverance, focused long term goals, and over a society with
chronic stresses. The evening news systematically distorts normal
time. Downtown riots in Seattle are given less than a minute (some of
which is the reporter's talking face), shift to shots of a dog frolicking
in a fountain, shift to minutes of a freeway chase. The picturesque is
pursued, the serious is trivialized. These are moves in a war against logic. And if
you watch television, you are having your thinking disrupted. The
busy-ness of rapid shifts of focus, the effervescent color, the edgy, dramatic music, all make it difficult
for viewers to build independent ideas. Neuroses But instead of asking what the frenetic
distraction is about, we follow suit, with impulse. It's not just that
advertisers say, you can solve your problems by drinking our wines or
wearing this underwear. It's not just that each product is introduced as
if it was the future of mankind. It's that the commercial saturation has
been effective. No one mentally argues with the advertising. The real loss
is that advertising is now accepted as if it was information.
As with any other drug, we need increasing
strengths. The only way to find out what television is doing to you after
years of watching is to turn it off for a month. Turn it on again after
abstinence, and it seems like a television's bid for our attention is like
repeatedly shooting a pistol into a chandelier. Television also grows neuroses in the corners
of its watchers. It grows invidious comparisons in us. Comparison
shopping, comparison socializing - eventually we live life by the method
of comparisons. Television is carefully producing hordes of viewers who
are good at one judgment, namely, whether the neighbor or the person sitting across the room is a
little better or a little worse off. This powerful judgment, 'I'm a notch
better than he; I'm not quite as attractive as she', is what Alfred Adler
diagnosed as a neurotic style 55, with powerful motives to
compensate. Television grows envy in us, and the fix is to acquire. The
result is a powerful narcissism, and an increase in the rates of
depression 56 among watchers who cannot keep up, unable to
match their lives to television's perfection. Greed, like many addictions, is all about the
sudden and spectacular. Advertising is passionately decorative, if thin as
a billboard. It serves the sudden and spectacular. Against images of poverty, fear and hunger,
television also churns routine optimism into its daily programming. All is
delivered in a happy, chatty style. More, each day, television will be
noisily emptied out and reinstalled the same. Sum In a free society, some people's greed
inevitably means deprivation for others. This does not require
environmental limits, it only requires persistent and competitive
self-promotion, and in a vast nation whose economy is two hundred years
devoted to these principles, we now inhabit a society with a small
fraction of astronomically wealthy individuals towering over a growing
mass in poverty. America is arguably now more unequal than any of the
original European cultures, yet we cling to and proselytize a horribly
outdated economic theory which implies equality but actually delivers more
inequality. Greed is the outstanding wrong because it reverses the
utilitarian ethic. It produces the greatest good for the smallest number.
Democracy's founding virtues are freedom and equality, so greed without
restraint, producing great inequalities, becomes an undemocratic force.
This is an amazingly complex economy but we
still raise our young on sleeveless country myths. They never explain a
market's preferences for ensured scarcities, designed inequalities, and
increasingly segregated economic classes. Our schoolbooks teach, after the
demise of communism, that there is no superior alternative to Smithian economics. Adherents believe that free market
capitalism is the end of history. Remedies The reflexive defense, of course, is that we already have remedies.
That we protect our poor with aid and support, that our government
provides a safety net for the least fortunate in the form of welfare and
food stamp programs. These programs are a shambling failure. Reports
detail the thin efforts of our sprawling agencies to get food to Americans
who are now hungry. In California, of the millions who need aid, only 45%
of the eligible are able to get food stamps even when they qualify. The
other largest states show similar agency breakdowns. The hungry are trying
other sources, so demand at food banks is rising 57. But
Americans turning to emergency facilities are too often rebuffed. Cities
are failing to meet an average of 26 percent of requests for emergency
shelter, 30 percent of requests by homeless families. Government safety
nets are simply broken, and at this writing some states are cutting back
further 58. We do not properly protect our poor.
Decades-long efforts in the Great Society program and the War on Poverty
have failed to improve opportunities for the poorest Americans. As an
index of our current concern, consider the national allocation for Food
Stamps. It stands at 0.0017 of the Federal Budget 59. Already
tiny, Federal food assistance allocations actually declined from 1995 to
1999 60. I'll sketch other options that don't
work. What about private charity? Since droves of
homeless people (one quarter of whom are children) still roam the big
cities, since we have unfed hungry, and since it has been that way for a
long time and is not getting better, private charity has obviously been
ineffective. It is too little, or sporadic and unreliable.
What about the churches? Their purpose for
existence includes helping the weak and needy. Curious for numbers, I
divided the number of homeless (conservatively estimated at 700,000 on any
given night, 2 million sometime during the year) by the number of
Christian churches. This nation is filled with churches: the World Almanac
lists over 330,000 Christian houses of worship 61. If each
church took in 6 homeless, there would be no more homelessness. (We are
taught that God and money don't mix. But actually the struggle between
church and capitalism has always been subtle.) What about positive thinking? With enough love
and trust and hope and unity and sensitivity and inclusiveness, will
antisocial greed disappear? Well, we might hope that goliath profiteering
corporations will desist in their exploiting, voluntarily come to their
knees and want to be part of godly world harmony. But they will not.
Universal tolerance will not stop transnational
corporations wringing their profit from the sweat of laborers' faces. And these bromides do not create
change, just a lot of weary smiles from well wishers. On the topic of
attitude, we'll treat smiling rationalizations the same, such as the
rationalization that 'greed is the sin that's good for the economy'. This
sort of solution is just a delay which will float us over relatively good
times. At present we have relatively high employment, so the vast majority
of Americans are at least earning some amounts of money. But this is like
a tide risen high, which covers all manner of unsightly things on the sea
floor. They are not gone. Should the tide go out, they will reappear.
Opines business professor Jim Johnson, "If you ask where all this could be
heading, in the event of an economic downturn, we could see another 1992
civil unrest." 62. Stopping the Gap from Becoming
Wider Harvard's John Rawls 63 has a way to
repair a whole society skewed into these inequalities. Rawls asserts the
misery of some is simply not made acceptable by having a greater good, as
proposed by utilitarianism, because that violates the principle of
justice. First Rawls insists that in addition to freedom and equality,
there must be a prior value in democracy, justice. And that economic
rationality and justice should forever be opposed. Rawls insists on a shift in focus. We should
not judge a culture by how its topmost members are doing, but by how it
treats its lowest. His solutions follow. First, this society should decide
how low any member can go. That establishes minimum rights. It requires we
identify the least-advantaged person in society, and draw focus to him.
Next, the very op and the very bottom of society should be (and all
intermediate levels should be) connected, as if by a loose linked chain.
Then if the top rises, it pulls the bottom up with it. If the bottom moves
up, that closes the gap toward equality. This arrangement does not prevent
any upward rise; but it establishes consequences on movements at the
top. Other Remedies We must look down. Even Business Week pointed
out that if the current wave of prosperity recedes, America's many social
ills, with hunger and homelessness, could return with a vengeance,
editorializing that the Federal Reserve and Congress should be guided in
their policy actions by what's happening at the bottom of society, not by
the bubble at the top 64. The mystique of poverty has to be cracked. A
television series 'Lifestyles of the Broken and Hungry' would not top the
popularity charts, but my point is that if media paid attention to the
bottom rungs with one-tenth the insistence in our commercial advertising,
remedial changes would occur. Further, public service messages
resurrecting the concept of the common good, would be a
beginning. Actually remedies for greed do not have to be
expensive, nor big, organized programs. Primary education depends on the
skills of individual teachers, and if talented educators can reinstall the
Golden Rule (Do as you would be done by) in their primary classrooms, some
of the damage could be reversed. We need preventatives. Greed has to be
reinstalled as a moral wrong, and in religious circles, as a sin.
Up the educational ladder, remedies will be
resisted. Here lives the fashion for nonjudgmentalism. An extension of moral relativism,
this trend to universal acceptance is a couple of decades old and "Who am
I to judge?" is now the standard of the gentle classes and educated elite,
even spreading to exotic healing practices and 12-Step programs where it
is thought that to suspend judgment of self and others is for the
betterment of society. This is nonsense. Comfort only brings inaction,
nonjudgmentalism is moral vacuum 65,
and eventually we will have no conscience to stop what is happening.
High on the academic ladder, of course, is
economics but our best economic theory has delivered us contradictions and
reverses. Volumes produced by economists, all written with graphite
dispassion, seem to promote opposites, and you wonder if a coup was
carried out by those adept at complicated thought. Just drive through any
big city, you will see newsstands sporting magazines with glossy coverage
of billionaires, these newsstands adjacent to people living among girders
and sewage drains, alleys, scaffoldings and grates. Among the social sciences, psychology may
provide a specific remedy. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental
Disorders (DSM IV) 66 is a standard used by all
psychotherapists. It is a compendium of all mental illnesses and it is
used as a diagnostic tool in training psychiatrists, clinical
psychologists and social workers. This book has been expanding through
succeeding editions as more and more mental conditions have been described
(which has expanded the domain of clinicians so far it is now said that
about half America's population could be diagnosed with some mental
pathology or other 67). It is time that greed be listed in DSM
IV. With well directed psychological research of course greed will turn
out to be a personality trait with a distribution in the population, and
personality tests will be able to screen for extremes.
Moral Inertia So there is a moral cause here. But the average
person hangs back from active protest. The problem is, even if we are not personally
greedy, we have connections to corporations that are. We are happy
consumers. Challenging the company we work for - would that be hypocrisy?
Second, activism, we think, is radical action,
and what about all that street rant "if you're not with us, you're against
us!" - but we cannot rebel because our corporation is also our rent, and
we enjoy the good living we make, and we're not giving that up.
Perhaps that explains why our most articulate
writers are so quiet on this topic. They also look within. So, bluntly, we
need a whole new strategy for change, in which a person who feels he is
part of the problem may also be part of the
solution. Enter some new thinking. Max Bruinsma is a sharp critic of the damage wrought by
contemporary advertising in the service of relentless acquisition. But
times have changed, he says, and he argues the polarizing slogans of past
social revolutions (you're either with us or against us) don't apply.
We're in a historical shift. The modern activist is different. The
rationale: culture today is driven by commercial advertising. In it, a
particularly worrisome new trend is for advertisers to soften up our
thinking with billboard-size paradoxes. Building-size ads fill our view
and state that buying a very mainstream computer (Mac) is 'thinking
different'. Across the street another billboard shouts that acquiring a
glossy SUV is a singular act of rebellion. Bruinsma quotes more examples: "Sometimes you gotta break the rules," (Burger King), "Innovate,
don't imitate" (Hugo Boss), "Be an original" (Chesterfield cigarettes).
The central insistence of these is that conforming = rebelling. And we
remember the Orwellian slogans, Peace = War, Slavery = Freedom which, in
1984, reduced a future society's minds to value-free mush.
Well, we can follow suit. We can generate our
own examples of contradictions. So, perhaps, commercial success and social
responsibility are not incompatible anymore. Everything is possible if you
use self-contradiction; you are able to both work for a company, and rebel
against it. Corporate rebellion = loyalty. This leads to a technique a 'Sixties activist,
Rudy Dutschke, once called "the long march
through the institutions." It is a long term and less bloody strategy. Go
in, behave - and take over. The new culture agent is stylishly dressed,
well paid, and works in an plush ad agency, designing resplendent ads
which promote the return to honesty and social justice, humaneness, equity
and the common good 68 . The next revolution will be inside
corporations. Conclusions As the rich get richer and the poor get poorer
we drop our pretenses to humanitarian democracy,
instead salute material excess, accept Darwinian business ethics, and pin
up as our national polestar the most powerful corporations.
Money and effort maintains a particular way of
seeing and evaluating our society; we focus on the topmost members, cover
current inequalities with a rotating blur of nearly a trillion dollars of
advertising a year, and by not paying attention to the lowest, we deny
them. But they are there. Inevitably, as our economic tree reaches up, its
roots grow further down. It is not enough to say hopefully we accumulate
layers of experience from error and progress. Technology will not deliver
us equity. Logic has not delivered us equity. We want our morality
back. Nuts For readers thinking these themes overwrought,
I'll describe a small game in which you can watch greed in the person
sitting next to you. Three people sit around a kitchen bowl. You, the
fourth person, with a timer, start off placing ten small items in the bowl
- quarters, dollar bills, or nuts. Tell the three players the goal is for
each of them to get as many items as they can. Tell them one other thing
before they start: every ten seconds (you have your watch ready) you will
look in the bowl, and double the number of items remaining there, by
replenishing from an outside source ( a separate pile of quarters on the
side). In the original Nuts Game, I used hardware
nuts, and the players were college students. You would think the players
would figure out that if they all waited, and didn't take anything out of
the bowl for a while, then the contents of the bowl would soon get very
big, automatically doubling every ten seconds. Eventually they could each
divide up a pot that had grown large. But in fact, sixty percent of these
groups never make it to the first 10-second replenishment cycle. They each
grabbed all they could as soon as they could, leaving nothing in the bowl
to be doubled, and each player wound up with none or a few items. This can
be an energetic game. I've seen the bowl knocked to the floor and I've
seen broken fingernails in the greedy melee. In the original game, players
are not allowed to talk. Even when they are allowed to talk, not all
groups collaboratively work out a patient, conserve-as-you-go playing
style, necessary for eventual big scores. They don't trust each
other. This makes a good classroom demonstration of
what greed can do. Actually mathematicians have designed a variety of
these games, microcosms of the free economic process 69. Behind
them all is a problem always nagging at Adam Smith economics. In the short
run, what is good for the individual is bad for the group. The game is a
microcosm of a community sharing a slowly regenerating resource (clean
water, timber, whales) and individual greed can actually destroy the
common good. The game involves two opposing rationalities: what is
rational for the individual vs. what is rational for the group. And the
resolution has less to do with reason than building a shared
morality. Details of The Nuts Game. http://www.g-r-e-e-d.com/Nuts%20Game.htm Notes 43.
Benedict, R. Patterns of culture. 1934/1989 Boston: Houghton Mifflin. The
concept of synergy appeared
inunpublished lectures Benedict gave in 1941 and
all references are derivative, such as
M.M. Caffrey: Ruth
Benedict,l989 University of Texas Press. p. 308-309. 44. Fisher,
C.S., Hout, M.,
Jankowski, M.S., Lucas, S.R., Swidler, A., Voss,
K. Inequality by design.
1996, Princeton N.J.Princeton University
Press. 45. Calabresi, G. and Bobbitt, P. Tragic choices. 1978.
New York: Norton & Co. 46. Ibid, p.
134. 47. Ibid. p.
132. 48. Derber, C. Corporation nation. 2000. New York: St
Martin's Griffin. 49. Lasn, K. and Grierson, B.
American the blue.Utne Reader , September 2000.
p.74. 50. Gabler, N. Life: the movie . 1998. New York :Vintage
Books. 51. McChesney, R.W. Corporate
media and the threat to democracy. The Open Media Pamphlet
Series.
1997. New York, Seven Stories
Press. 52. Ibid..
p. 23. 53. "Torture
is accelerating globally, report says." Los Angeles Times. October 18,
2000. Part A. p.
10. 54. Leonard,
G. Mastery. 1991. New York: Penguin Books. 55. Adler,
A. The neurotic constitution. 1926/1998. North Stratford, N.H., Ayer Company
Publishers, Inc. 56. See
footnote 18. 57. "Foodstamp program is failing in California." Los Angeles Times
28 April 2001. p. A 15. A second
report is "Manymiss out on food stamps" Los
Angeles Times 23 June 2001. p. B 1. The second
article quotes the average food stamp allocation at $73 per person per
month. 58. "States
cut back coverage for poor." Los Angeles Times. 25 February 2002. p. A
1. 59. Food aid
programs are administered by the Department of Agriculture. In 2000 total
Federal receipts
were $1,956,252million of which $274,448 million went to all food
programs, of which the Food
Stamp program is one, for which the outlay was $3,392 million. Statistical
Abstracts of the
United States. U.S. Census Bureau, 2000. 60. U.S.
Food Assistance (domestic) The World Almanac and Book of Facts, 2000.
Mahwah, N.J. Primedia Reference, Inc. 2000. 61. The
World Almanac and Book of Facts, 2000. 2000. Mahwah, N.J. Primedia Reference, Inc. 62. Quoted
in "Study finds widening gap between rich, poor" Los Angeles Times October
20, 2000. Part
B p.3 63. Rawls,
J. A theory of justice. 1999. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Revised edition. (The
first edition is better, in my opinion.) 64. "The
poorest are again losing ground." Business Week 23 April 2001, p.
130. 65. "If I'm
OK and you're OK, are there any bad guys?" Los Angeles Times, 27 January
2002 p. E
1. 66.
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (4th. Ed.)
Washington D.C.: American
Psychiatric Association, 1994. 67. J.W. Kalat, Introduction to
psychology. 6th Ed. Pacific Grove, CA: Wadsworth.
2002. 68. Bruinsma, M. "Culture agents: For closet rebels in the inside
game, it's time to speak out." Adbusters , Sept/Oct2001. (Adbusters is
unpaged). 69. More
recent experimental work focuses on the effects of personal reputation
among players: (1) C.
Wedekind and M. Milinki, "Cooperation through image scoring in
humans," Science, 2000, 288,
850-852, and (2) M.A. Nowak, K.M. Page, K. Sigmund, "Fairness versus
reason in the Ultimate
Game," Science, 2000, 289, 1173-1175. This essay was originally
published at http://www.g-r-e-e-d.com/GREED.htm Author contact: julianedney@aol.com ___________________________ |