Commercial Culture and The Corporacracy
"...Much mischief has been done in the world by exaggerating the role of scientific metaphor in human affairs. The science of economics provides an example: people have tried to apply a stripped-down version of economics to human affairs, omitting a great many values, a great many things of importance. You get society in service of economics, instead of economics in service of society."
- Murray Gell-Man, co-founder, Santa Fe Institute.
Quoted from 'The Third Culture", compiled be John Brockman.
Toxic Culture, USA (Adbusters)
"[..The 20th century saw...] the collapse of the socialist ideal which in many ways embodied what was the most noble and most compassionate in the political philosophy of the previous century. The clear and disastrous failure of the communist form of socialism has led to the uncontested triumph of capitalism; this in turn has led without a strong alternative to the dominance of economics over every other aspect of life. This threatens the breakdown of community and the destruction of our planet's fragile ecological systems. The triumph of the market is also the triumph of the pursuit of self-interest and the abandonment of the community with our fellow human beings. We need to develop a new political and social ideal that can serve as an alternative to egoism and political cynicism."
-Peter Singer, Professor of philosophy, Monash University,
Quoted in The Australian Magazine, March 9, 1996
Free market capitalism may be a great way to convert monopole societies to economically diverse societies, a great way to accomplish distribution of capital out of hereditary monopoles into quasi-meritocracies. That much it does do. Two problems with this system begin to emerge in the current era along with its apparent triumph, in it's "ideal" undirected state.
The first is that at a certain point, which the USA has passed already, the Economy begins concentrating wealth rather than distributing it. In fact the mass economy, aided by the mass media, acts as a syphon pump, drawing capital "upwards" to the hands of the few. This process has been greatly accelerating recently due to the coming on line of information technology. The "middle class" shrinks, the richest grow richer, more and more people are functionally impoverished. This is another way of saying the entire economy is being used by wealthy entities to increase their wealth at the expense of the community at large.
The second problem is that with the final irrelevance of the religious vision of the world, and with the fatal discouragement of spiritual humanism at the hands of the brutality of the 20th century, there is no overarching context from which to assess and align the increasingly far reaching actions of the corporacracy and its sponsor states.
So selfishness pays, greed is good, and the only 'spiritual' obligation one has is to accumulate wealth. Those who do not are either to be helped, pitied, or left to starve, depending on your political view.With this change, humanity woke from the spell cast by the tapestry of the myriad entities of the mysterium tremendum, and finding itself on a level par with the rest of creation, set about seizing control and domination. An ally of this demiurge has been the non-emotive means of science itself: objective, impartial, disinterested, neutral, abstract.
Thus as a world organized around a "spiritual" reality was replaced by a secular world, with rationalism, laissez-faire capitalism, scientific humanism, and finally free market democratic capitalism taking over the guiding helm, the feats of science were used by whatever powers had the means to harness the enterprise of science: first and primarily national governments, but eventually now, the increasingly powerful corporations of free market capitalism.
The looming era of nanotechnology, offering prodigious feats such as the ~250,000 km high orbital tower(*), and nightmares like Drexler's "grey goo scenario", gives fresh impetus to the question facing us in the post-modern new world order: is anyone taking responsability for our collective well being as a species? Not national governments; not corporations; these are far and away the principal powers in our world- if not them, who then?
Recently, Mikhail Gorbachev, ever thinking big, proposed that we need a Council of the Wise to oversee our transnational affairs, regulate our impact on the biosphere, and direct the necessary remediation program. Many interpreted this as a bid for 'world government' and reacted with fear and loathing. This is, sadly, the typical response when 'world government' is mentioned; presumably we feel after the experiences of 20th century dictators like Hitler and Stalin, that world chaos is still the safer alternative. Furthermore, we are so disabused of the idea that democracy will bring great spirits to the fore, that we find it impossible to imagine endowing even a democratically elected council of the wise with global jurisdiction. Being stuck at this point translates into inaction, neglect, and denial on a huge scale.
- S. Miller 3/96
"Because it taps into that which transcends our cultural, economic and political differences, spirituality becomes an integral part of sustaining globalization." - Soul at DAVOS
" In The Philosophy of History, Hegel discerned a disturbing historical pattern- the crack and fall of civilisations owing to a morbid intensification of their own first principles. Although I have made a fortune on the financial markets, I now fear that the untrammeled intensification of laissez-faire capitalism and the spread of market values into all areas of life is endangering our open and democratic society. The main enemy of the open society, I believe, is no longer the communist but the capitalist threat."
-George Soros, The Capitalist Threat, Read the full article in the Feb. '97 Atlantic Monthly
See also in this site:Gregory Bateson: A Snow Ball in Hell....
Hazel Henderson: Beyond Economics- The Age of LightUNSUSTAINABLE . . . Hanson gopher
Jay Hanson: A Modest Proposal to Save The World
Robert Schultze: The $30,000 Solution
The Biology of Globalization- E.Sahtouris
Guy Debord's strange and astute 1963 critique, La Société du Spectacle
a seminal influence on the events of May 68 in Paris, and a powerful insight into modern society.
"A human being is part of the whole called by us universe , a part limited in time and space. We experience ourselves, our thoughts and feelings as something separate from the rest. A kind of optical delusion of consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from the prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty... We shall require a substantially new manner of thinking if mankind is to survive." - Albert Einstein