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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already-outdated environmental rhetoric, arguments that scarcities and human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 www.paecon.net/PAEReview/issue
31/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 ___________________________ |