So, is it possible for us to evolve? Can we begin to break the political gridlock? Where do we even begin? Is capitalism the answer? Is socialism the answer? Is communism the answer? Is something else the answer? What is the answer?
Whenever I’m faced with a complicated problem, the first thing I like to do is to try and simplify it as much as possible by eliminating the choices that are least attractive. So, let’s get this out of the way: A collapse into violent anarchy is something that is best avoided for all people whenever possible. This is the last refuge for societies that contain large numbers of people who do not have their basic needs met.
When social unrest arises, it comes as a desperate charge by individuals who feel that nothing can ever improve within the confines of the current systems, and feel that they have nothing left to lose. Normal, healthy people who reach a stage where they feel that they cannot provide food and shelter for their children can quickly become very dangerous people. So, regardless of whether we are poor, rich, or middle class, it’s safe to say that everyone would benefit from being a part of a functioning system where we can all meet our basic needs. This means that, at the very foundation, we can clearly understand the collective need to evolve. To evolve on a large scale, we’re going to need to work together; and to work together -- we’re going to have to do some things differently than we have in the past. We’re going to have to try some things that seem uncomfortable and foreign in the short term.
By consciously choosing to evolve, we’re going to have to go upstream against years upon years of human conditioning that wants to prevent us from changing. We need to understand that words and labels are only imperfect representations of concepts; just mere placeholders that we use to do our best to describe people, places, and ideas. We need to leave some space for ourselves to more clearly see what lies behind those labels, and learn to be more patient, rather than rushing to negatively judge and write off a group of people or ideas before we fully understand them. Perhaps there are a few ideas out there that really are good, mixed in with some other ones that could use improvement -- and perhaps by not dismissing everything that is unfamiliar or unpopular to those around us, we can actually make some real progress. By combining some positive aspects of one system with some positive aspects of another, perhaps we can create something even better that has never existed before.
We need to attempt to face our problems more objectively, and become fully conscious of the biases that arise from our self-preservation instincts that prevent us from seeing eye to eye. It’s very hard for us to be able to take a step back and realize that something that we may rely on for survival is actually hurting others, in order to find a way to rectify it. Often times, when we discuss politics and economics, there is a strong emotional charge attached to the conversation, because we are discussing beliefs and policies that have a major impact upon our lives. It’s the equivalent of being on a plane that is about to crash with hundreds of people, with only one parachute, and asking: “Which one of us deserves this parachute, and why?” Obviously, it would be very hard to see things objectively there. But in the world we live in, there are more than enough parachutes for everyone. There is a way for everyone alive today to be able to receive their basic needs to live a dignified life. However, this is only possible if we are willing to overcome our emotional and egotistical biases in order to see things as they really are, and cooperate in order to break down the complexity and eliminate the friction that prevents it from happening.
Though I live in the United States of America, and was born and raised there, I understand the importance of not allowing this to blind me from seeing some of the processes that need to be improved within it. Though this system has given me the ability to gain access to great thinkers and ideas through the internet (which is a product of this very system), there is still much injustice, and much room for improvement. The financial realm is certainly one the areas worth looking at. When money was first created, it was designed as a tool to serve us and make life easier for us. If I have some tomatoes, and you have some firewood, it’s easier to just exchange pieces of paper that represent the value of our goods than to go looking for the exact person who needs what we have, and has what we need. Through the process of the white shoes theory, once again, money has become something very different from its original intended usage. Rather than a paradigm where money serves us, we now serve money. While currency was once based upon finite resources such as gold and silver, today the U.S. dollar is not backed by anything. Money can be created and destroyed at will by the Federal Reserve, a private corporation. Members of Congress spend much of their time fundraising for their next campaign, pandering to the wishes of those whose pocketbooks are the biggest. Lobbying has become a term that is synonymous with legal bribery.
The ways in which businesses operate are heavily affected by the corrupting influence of money in society. In a competitive paradigm that places profit as the only primary goal, a number of large-scale problems arise to plague us. For example, in the food industry, many of the products we consume are overloaded with unhealthy ingredients that are cheaper to produce. In the banking industry, deregulation such as the repealing of the Glass-Steagall Act played a role in facilitating conflicts of interest that left the entire industry on life support in 2008. Charles Ferguson’s 2010 documentary film Inside Job displays the extent of this corruption in full detail. It includes documentation of an Ivy League professor who essentially received financial perks in exchange for publishing false information into the textbooks that misinformed students who paid a lot of money to attend business school. This creates a situation whereby the leaders of tomorrow go into the world with a faulty understanding of how these complex systems actually operate. By intentionally teaching students false concepts, it can create future situations that end up being even worse than if they’d had no higher education at all.
In the technology industry, there are companies that create red-light camera technologies for intersections that illegally shorten yellow light times, in order to increase the amount of traffic tickets. Sadly, this also increases the number of accidents in pursuit of profit. The development of private, for-profit prisons in the U.S. began in 1984, and creates an obvious conflict of interest within society -- these organizations depend upon the existence of a certain minimum number of criminals in order to stay in business. At the same time, the United States has the highest incarceration rate of any developed country in the world, and many of the people locked up have not committed any violent crimes.
Another major flaw in the system is the heavy reliance upon exploitation to create the material abundance that exists. It is often the people in the worst working conditions, who receive the lowest pay, who do so many of the vital jobs that allow society to function. If a company cannot afford to pay their workers a living wage, or utilizes inhumane sweatshops, then their business model is not sustainable. I personally cannot envision a scenario in which the profits of a thriving company of mine would go towards excessive luxuries for myself before meeting the basic survival necessities of my dedicated workers who make the success possible.
We may attempt to act as if business and humanitarian endeavors are separate realms, but we cannot escape the fact that the negative consequences of a cutthroat business paradigm can and do affect our lives. When an organization dumps toxic chemicals into a region’s drinking water in an attempt to cut costs and raise their stock by a fraction of a point, it creates an ecological and humanitarian crisis that we cannot opt out of. Sadly, the way our businesses and economy are structured almost guarantees that these types of unscrupulous actions will continue to occur until we reevaluate our objectives and priorities within the big picture. Let’s look at a hypothetical situation to understand the psychology behind what creates the pressure that leads to these situations.
Imagine that you are named CEO of a publicly traded, multi-billion dollar pharmaceutical company that manufactures a type of medication for people who ar
e diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). What this means is that by law, you are obligated to do what is in the financial best interests of the shareholders, which is to maximize profits. If you do not comply, you will likely be fired by the board of directors, and sued for damages by the shareholders in a class action lawsuit.
So, the only way for you to keep your job is to continue to grow the company financially. Your primary allegiance is not to the customer’s best interests, but to the shareholders. Regardless of whether or not there are more children who have severe, unmanageable difficulties with concentrating next year, you must continue to turn a profit if you want to stay employed. The good news is that you have a massive marketing budget with which to achieve your goals. What tried and true industry strategies might you consider using?
1. Bombard parents with television commercials about their child’s irregular symptoms and need for medication, pressuring parents to medicate children who might not necessarily need it.
2. Lobby (bribe) the FDA to approve untested drugs that may cause more harm than good (note: the number of people who die from taking legal medications as prescribed by their doctor in the U.S. is estimated to fall within a range of tens of thousands to over one hundred thousand people per year).
3. Fly doctors out to all expenses paid educational seminars in tropical resort locations, and have attractive sales representatives explain the benefits of your product (this became such an obvious conflict of interest that it was finally made illegal a few years ago).
4. Educate (bribe) those who create the curriculum of medical schools to engrain your propaganda into the minds of young med students very early into their careers, so that they’re more likely to think it’s normal to overprescribe your medication for the next 40 years.
5. Lay off large numbers of employees, force them to take pay cuts, cut away their benefits, or coerce them into working unpaid overtime.
6. Use creative accounting methods to find loopholes that allow you to evade billions of dollars worth of taxes.
You have a choice to make: Use the above strategies, shut up, and live a life of luxury -- or speak up for what’s right, get vilified, destroy your career, lose your income, and struggle to find another way to survive. What would you do?
The way this is set up, it takes an extreme amount of courage to do the right thing, and so many simply don’t do it. People often feel as if they have no choice but to sweep it under the rug and try to pretend as if their daily actions do not contribute to making life harder for other people. Of course, this can take a major toll on a person’s self image, and the guilt can drive them to become addicted to anti-depressant meds or other substances, further exacerbating this cycle.
Scenarios like these are not just built into any one particular industry, but are often the rule rather than the exception. In the realm of big business, it is a rare thing to discover an organization that truly practices ethical, honest, genuine and transparent behavior at every level. In an ultra competitive environment, some form of dishonesty and insincerity is often baked into the DNA of the business practices, regardless of whether it’s in the realm of pharmaceuticals, finance, insurance, real estate, food production, media, advertising, oil, or almost any other industry you can think of.
Though these challenges and issues are very real, and have caused great harm at times to humanity and the world, I do not wish to use the words in this book as a means of demonizing specific individuals who have partaken in these actions. My intent is to identify the major flaws in the system, in order to be able to utilize our time and energy most effectively to create a better one. Assigning blame to individual people alone will not solve all of our problems, because there is plenty to go around, and we humans for the most part are often only mimicking and reinforcing the dominant behaviors that are present in our environments. We’re very susceptible to peer pressure.
By focusing too much upon blaming individuals, we lose focus of the most important mission: Creating new systems and sub-cultures that make it easier for people to do the right things. When a full cycle of the white shoes phenomenon nears completion, it represents an opportunity to leap into the next phase of growth. As we zoom out into the big picture, we can understand that this is the way practically every human system ever created has gone thus far. Each system lasts for awhile, and serves its purpose for the era in which it lives, but each system will inevitably run its course. This is how humanity progresses from one period of time to the next. We can soak up the lessons and wisdom from generations past, and act as a conduit to build upon it and pass it along; enabling a more harmonious existence for the beings that will arrive long after we’ve gone.
Has it hit you yet? Can you see what needs to shift in order to progress into the next paradigm -- the paradigm of abundance for all of humanity? I’ll give you a hint: It involves our relationship with money.
While money makes our lives easier in many ways, and will likely continue to play an integral role in our everyday lives for the foreseeable future, the biggest problem we have right now is that we have become so reliant upon it that we cannot complete even the most basic human functions in modern society without it. In the realm of business negotiations, there is a very powerful concept that states: Options equals power. In a negotiation, whoever has more options controls the power, and dictates the flow of that negotiation. A highly coveted athlete who has many teams trying to sign them gets to choose what city they go to, what perks they want, what salary they want, and so on. A poker player who has the lion’s share of the chips can afford to be more aggressive and skew the percentages in their favor. On the other hand, a person who needs to pay for their mortgage in a bad job market can easily become victimized and exploited by an employer who knows that they have no other options. If you have a pack of cigarettes, and run into a deprived tobacco addict in the middle of the Sahara Desert, the price of that pack is pretty much whatever you ask, because the addict cannot walk away. When one of the two parties within a negotiation is in a desperate position where they feel as if they cannot walk away, and must accept any deal, the other side has free reign to take advantage of them, and often does.
The way to counteract this type of situation is to create a method whereby we remove the conditions that create the element of desperation, which results in more options and a more equal position of power for the oppressed. The primary reason why so many of us work at jobs we hate, accept second class behavior from employers, and perpetuate unethical business practices is because we feel as if we need the money from those jobs for our basic survival needs. In the negotiation of us versus money, money has us in a complete stranglehold, and can tell us to do anything it pleases. We don’t know how to do hardly anything for ourselves without money anymore, and this is the root of why we feel powerless to change things.
In this post-industrial era, we are raised to believe that our main objective is to become an expert in one particular skill. That one skill can be exchanged for money, and we use money to provide ourselves with all of the other things that we don’t know how to do for ourselves. But the problem is that by doing so, we are putting all of our eggs into the money basket. The money we are depending so strongly upon for survival is not backed by anything. It is susceptible to wild fluctuations, volatility, inflation, corruption, and unequal distribution mechanisms, all of which are largely out of our control. The more money you have, the easier it becomes to make more; and the less money you have, the harder it becomes to make more. But what if you could reduce your dependency on money for your basic survival needs by 50%? What if you could raise that number to 75%, 85%, or 95%? Would that change the way you view this world and operate within it? Would that change the way you approach your choice of career, and what type of behavior and practices you expect from people at your workplace? Would that give you more time to learn about the things that are important to you, analyze your own behavior, and become a more peaceful and self-actualized being?
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sp; What if every impoverished person worldwide was given the opportunity to be in this same position? What would the world look like? How would it be different? What problems would suddenly vanish into thin air?
Imagine, for just a moment, that every country had their food and energy needs met. How many less international conflicts would exist right now as a result? How much grief and fear could be avoided? How many resources could be reinvested into other arenas that significantly increase the quality of life for billions of people?
This scenario is entirely possible. It will surely require some big changes to be made in order to properly execute it, but the benefits gained as a result will easily outweigh them by several orders of magnitude. This new paradigm will include different ways of living that we’ve never experienced before, creating exciting new lifestyles that will integrate the best aspects of 21st century technological marvels with pre-industrial revolutionary self-sufficiency. It will bring rise to new types of cities that are more robust and lively, more aligned with the environment, and chock-full of edible landscapes; wherein nearly every single plant that grows within the city limits produces fresh fruits, vegetables, beans, or nuts that create more than enough food for every person who lives there.
In this new paradigm, free time to explore, adventure, create, discover one’s passions, and self-actualize will be held in the uppermost regard, as humanity begins to awaken. We will come to understand how much more valuable these things are to creating a fulfilling life than just attempting to acquire a never ending pile of material goods that keeps us chained down in cleaning, protecting, storing, moving, organizing, repairing, accessorizing, replacing, and paying for them. In this new paradigm, people work primarily because they feel a strong desire to harness their full creative potential, and want to utilize it to add value to the lives of those they care about. The later chapters of this book will explain the next steps in bringing this vision to life.
It's All My Fault: How I Messed Up the World, and Why I Need Your Help to Fix It Page 5
