5
When Social Good Goes Bad
In the process of creating the paradigm for a new way of living, we’ve already examined some of the inherent flaws within the current systems that are in place. The next vital step on this journey is to examine some of the issues that arise in the process of trying to fix these problems. There are many projects and organizations today that are classified as being some form of social entrepreneurship, social innovation, social good, or philanthropy. While these terms can vary operationally from one another, these initiatives all tend to create objectives that involve addressing a pressing societal need that traditional businesses and governments have been unable or unwilling to serve.
In the current era, public awareness and support for social good initiatives is rapidly increasing, which is a great thing for the world. Additionally, traditional businesses are feeling more pressure to develop some form of corporate social responsibility program. Organizations that pride themselves on creating fair trade products, encouraging transparency, engaging in charitable giving, minimizing environmental waste, and paying their employees a fair wage with ample benefits have the ability to gain a significant following. The Lifestyles of Health and Sustainability (LOHAS) market segment, which is essentially a demographic of consumers that focuses on socially responsible purchases, has been estimated to be in the range of $300 billion in the United States alone. Companies who advertise online are willing to pay a premium to get their products in front of LOHAS consumers. Consequently, more organizations are arising that seek to serve the socially conscious marketplace.
There are lots of great ideas, initiatives and social good business models taking root around the globe, and we will examine many of them in more depth later in this book. But from my own personal experiences through the years, I have seen with my own two eyes (and have also heard other first-hand accounts) that self-proclaimed social good initiatives can at times be misleading. If we look below the surface, sometimes there’s more there than meets the eye. As we saw in chapter four, the white shoes theory of eroding values affects many different types of systems, and social good initiatives are certainly not immune to this trend. To quote Shakespeare: “Something is rotten in the state of Denmark.”
As a person who wholeheartedly believes that grassroots social good movements are the most powerful force for changing the world for the better, this chapter is definitely, hands down, the hardest one for me to write and include in this book. I sincerely wish that every organization engaged in the social good realm operated ethically, was in it for the right reasons, and could be trusted and accepted at face value as having done all of the right things; but alas, this is not the case. And so, before we begin to discuss how to create new systems and new solutions, it’s of the utmost importance to bring these inefficiencies to light.
At this point in time, stories of run-of-the-mill oil and chemical companies polluting bodies of water, banks defrauding buyers, and media sources portraying inaccurate views of reality are so well documented that it’s almost redundant to focus on them. The average person walking down the street likely has a pretty clear idea that these things continue to go on, as the side effects of an eroding system. But when a charity or social good organization deceives people, the psychological impact on society can be even more damaging.
Positive initiatives that bring people together to take action and manage resources are arguably one of the most important segments of any society. They are what give a voice to the voiceless, and give us the potential to evolve. So, when a person decides to get involved in the social good realm, there is a heightened level of responsibility that falls upon their shoulders to serve the mission. By doing deceptive things in this realm, it often turns out actually being much worse for the cause than having not gotten involved at all, because it makes people skeptical of supporting other initiatives that actually are doing everything in their power to stand up for the oppressed. A central issue is that the citizens involved in social good initiatives still live and operate within the same competitive, scarcity-based dominant paradigm that exists in our world. As such, when working on projects based upon a social mission, there are conflicts of interest that arise.
Just like we saw with the hypothetical CEO situation in chapter four, when we feel that we cannot meet our basic survival needs for a dignified life without keeping a particular job, it can be very challenging for individuals to choose the social mission over their own personal interests at times when they become separate. I’ve seen this happen first-hand while sitting in a conference room full of people from different non-profit organizations; working to find solutions to water and sanitation related issues in the developing world. During an open brainstorming session, some were unwilling to share their data with the others in the room for proprietary reasons, which prevented the formation of the collaborative atmosphere required to make significant progress. When the intellectual property rights of non-profit organizations become more important than saving the lives of the people they are meant to serve, something is wrong.
The reason why instances like these occur is because the overarching methodology through which philanthropic organizations receive funding contains major flaws. In the United States alone, there are over 1.5 million non-profit organizations, meaning that the battle to obtain funding is extremely fierce. Think about all of the competitive waste that occurs when 100 similar types of organizations all hire grant writers to compete for a prize that 99 will not win. This competitive atmosphere leads to a phenomenon that I call the paradox of social innovation.
Essentially, the sole reason why any philanthropic initiative exists is simply to do the absolute best job it can to meet the needs of an underserved group. However, in the current economic climate wherein too many initiatives are chasing too few donor dollars, organizations are stuck between a rock and a hard place. Though an organization’s sole mission is supposed to be about doing what is most effective to empower the recipients of aid, instead, it can become more about doing what the donors believe is best -- regardless of whether or not it is even effective. What complicates matters further is that the larger the amount of funding a donor has to contribute, the more influence they can get. This means that the strategies being created to empower the underprivileged can be strongly influenced by those who are the most out of touch with their day-to-day realities. I’ve conversed with organizations that knew that the work they were doing was not nearly as effective as it could have been, but lived in constant fear that trying to be too innovative and failing would result in the loss of donor funding and their jobs. And so the boldest and most innovative game-changing ideas that we need to experiment with rot away on the back burner, while the money is spent inefficiently, and the constituents continue to suffer.
By nature, philanthropy exists precisely because traditional businesses and governments have not been able or willing to fix these problems. If the status quo systems in place are not working to solve a problem, by nature, it means that novel solutions need to be tested. As a symptom of the paradox of social innovation that emerges in a highly competitive environment, it often turns out that a groundbreaking idea that seems too unfamiliar has a much more difficult time accumulating the funds necessary to take flight. It creates a chicken and egg situation: The innovative idea hasn’t gotten funding because it’s untested, and it’s untested because it doesn’t have the funding.
In addition to creating inefficient operational procedures, the hypercompetitive environment can also lead non-profits to spread themselves too thin, and begin using sly tactics in a place where they should not: In the recruitment of volunteers. I’ve seen organizations that do not accurately portray the type of work and conditions volunteers will be subjected to, which leaves them with a bad taste in their mouths, feeling as if they’d never want to get involved in volunteer work again. However, when non-profits are essentially required to overwork and underpay their staff members just to stay afloat, the likelihood of cutting
corners and deception increases. Likewise, volunteers are also operating out of the competitive paradigm, which can create problems for the organizations as well. With high rates of unemployment and underemployment, volunteers may be willing to sign up as a way to make business connections and gain access to potential job leads rather than being fully committed to the mission, and end up abandoning the project at an inopportune time (causing much more harm than good in the process).
Another major issue in this realm is when some for-profit organizations that are not acting transparently position themselves to appear as socially conscious companies, when it’s actually just a marketing ploy to attempt to generate additional revenue. Some real life examples I’ve personally seen of this include:
1. A media company that hires people to write about social good stories and closing the inequality gap, while paying their workers less than the minimum wage.
2. A coding school that hosts a social good app challenge to build up a following, but fraudulently never awards any prizes that were promised.
3. An event company that promises to donate a predetermined amount of ticket money to charity, and never does it.
4. A social innovation conference that fails to address allegations of harassment and mistreatment at the workplace.
5. An organic dairy company that uses creative language to mask the fact that their cows have received antibiotics.
In other instances, corporate social responsibility programs can become dangerous smokescreens. Suppose a company spends 0.1% of its annual budget on providing clean water to remote villages, and puts that video footage as the main feature on the homepage of its website. At the same time, it also makes billions of dollars by polluting the water supplies of a much larger number of villages. In a scenario like this, the social good video footage can actually be quite deceptive, and do more harm than good -- by discouraging people from digging deeper to find out what’s really going on. If this public relations stunt generates more public support and profits for the company, it essentially will result in even more contaminated drinking water and human suffering, meaning that it certainly isn’t social good at all.
From greenwashing, to fake orphanages, to fraudulent charity websites collecting money after natural disasters, these types of practices represent the dark side of what our species is willing to stoop down to when our self-preservation instincts completely run our lives. Though we may never be able to weed out 100% of these types of activities from the world, we can certainly design better systems that make it exponentially easier for individuals and organizations to make better choices. In a shipwreck, people are far less likely to fight over and steal life rafts from one another when there are more than enough for everyone.
If you’ve noticed, I did not mention any of the individuals or organizations in this chapter by name. This is by design. It is very important to understand the problems that exist, and what causes them to linger, but we cannot let this devolve into the blame game. We must remember that focusing completely on blaming and demonizing other individuals or groups can at times become a distraction that prevents us from identifying the most effective ways to create the changes we desire outside of the short term. When a system goes bad, the best solutions involve changing it from the ground up. If a tree gets sick, and looks like it’s in bad shape, it would not be effective to just cut off the individual branches and leaves that look disfigured. Treating them individually does not truly fix the problem. The best solution involves seeing the tree as a whole, and figuring out the nutrients and conditions it needs to bring the entire working organism back to full health. Any solution that does not consider the system in its entirety, and make that the focus of the change -- will not be much more than a band-aid. Fortunately, the later chapters will describe this form of systematic thinking in further detail.
6
Why We’re Afraid to Change
Have you ever looked up the definition of life in the dictionary? I don’t know if anyone even sells old school dictionaries anymore. Nonetheless, a quick search engine inquiry brings back this answer:
Life, n.: The condition that distinguishes animals and plants from inorganic matter, including the capacity for growth, reproduction, functional activity, and continual change preceding death.
That’s interesting. Most notably, the part about “continual change preceding death.” In essence, life cannot exist without continual changes; many of which can happen without warning. The weather patterns outside of our homes are in constant fluctuation (unless you live in southern California), the cells of our bodies are constantly regenerating, and my hairline is receding faster than the polar ice caps. Whether we like it or not, changes are going to keep happening as long as we are alive.
As we referenced earlier in this book, perhaps the biggest reason why we instinctually fear change is because we fear the unknown; which has the potential to cause pain, suffering, and death. So, we generally tend to avoid change whenever humanly possible, even in some instances where change has the potential to bring about far superior results. This is engrained into us so strongly that we often don’t even notice how many of our daily activities are done unconsciously, on autopilot. I can remember times in the past when I was driving somewhere, and then realized: “Where the hell am I going?” Often times, when not paying attention, the body will just follow the default patterns that are most familiar to it. Not surprisingly, on more than one occasion, I’ve accidentally started driving towards my high school long after I’d graduated -- because it just happens to be the place that I drove to most consistently when I first got my driver’s license. When my mind is lost in thought, the unconscious part of my brain takes over, and says to itself: “I have no idea where this guy wants to go today, but I know that we used to go to this one place all of the time -- and I’ve never seen a polar bear jump out and try to eat me on that road -- so let’s just stick with that path for now.”
Our resistance to change makes us creatures of habit. Our ways of being, thinking, and living get set up a certain way, and we have a very hard time breaking out of those patterns. Sadly, this resistance to change can cause us to butt heads with people when a situation arises wherein one or the other will have to make a major change. At this point, communication breaks down. The debate becomes less about thinking about what is best for the entire group and situation as a whole --less about facts and reality -- and more about a battle for supremacy. It becomes about trying to highlight the parts of the debate that benefit our own side, while trying to dismiss and disprove the arguments that make the other side look good, even if we know that the other side is actually making valid points. We place more importance on the ability to create quick, catchy, clever remarks than on the ability to deeply analyze a situation from multiple perspectives, in order to create the optimal outcome for all parties. We stoop down to utilizing intimidation, deception, or any other tactics necessary -- as long as it results in the outcome of us not personally having to make changes. It takes a lot less effort on our part to raise our voices or create some white lies than to get ourselves to make fundamental changes to our ways of living. Most of us go into arguments not looking to discover the truth, or what’s actually right in the situation; but rather to bend the truth -- in order to create an outcome whereby we have to make the least amount of uncomfortable changes to our own lifestyles. Even though it’s not very rational, it’s a primal tactic that we often use out of the instinct to survive.
Though our habits can help us avoid danger and stay alive in some ways, developing bad habits can be a dangerous trap. The negative effects of a bad habit can pile up like compound interest when it continuously takes place thousands of times throughout our lives. If we are raised as kids to become accustomed to eating unhealthy foods, even though we don’t have a clue that this is the case at that time, it can be one of the hardest patterns to break out of. When a habitual system like this starts rolling, the primal instinct that wants to prevent us from changing is no longer
helping us to survive for the long term, and is actually having the opposite effect. In a very similar way, we’re reaching a critical time in human history in which our collective habits and lifestyles have created a mess of this planet, and we’re having a hard time figuring out how to advance in a manner that is more aligned with humanitarian and ecological needs. In order to create positive changes in the world, we must first understand how to make changes to the bad habits we’ve created in our own individual lives. When we don’t know how to change, or are simply unwilling to do so, we end up in childish situations where we yell at other people to change, they yell at us to change, everyone gets angry, and nothing changes. When we know how to consciously change our own patterns of thought and behavior, we can take the lead on sparking new ideas and projects that not only improve our lives, but also inspire others to take action as well.
We humans are social creatures. Starting from infancy, many of the predominant thought patterns and behaviors we partake in simply mimic what we see going on around us. If a two-year-old starts cursing, the parents can become shocked; seemingly unaware that the child learned these words directly from observing them. But this doesn’t stop at childhood. In the same manner, when one celebrity starts wearing a different type of sunglasses, or gets a new type of haircut, hordes of people begin to copy those behaviors. If we want to be able to truly change and direct our own lives, one of the most important aspects of this conformity that we need to understand is how much of an impact it has on shaping our belief systems.
It's All My Fault: How I Messed Up the World, and Why I Need Your Help to Fix It Page 6
