“Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.” Albert Einstein
Although the most basic human instinct is to survive, has this been your yearning?
“We want to live by each other’s happiness — not by each other’s misery. We don’t want to hate and despise one another. In this world there is room for everyone. And the good earth is rich and can provide for everyone. The way of life can be free and beautiful, but we have lost the way.” Charlie Chaplin
Alas, the concept of happiness has already been hijacked to maximize profits — in October 2018, Market Research reported that by 2022, the self-improvement market is estimated to grow to $13.2 billion with 5.6% average yearly gains (from $9.9 billion in 2016). Nonetheless:
“You can’t really be happy if you are a victim of injustice or exploitation, which is what the technologists of joy tend to overlook. This is why, when Aristotle speaks of a science of well-being, he gives it the name of politics.” Terry Eagleton
76 years after the Bretton Woods institutions came into being, many people today still do not have access to the most fundamental basic needs outlined by Abraham Maslow: air, water, food, shelter, sleep, clothing, reproduction, personal security, employment, resources, health and property.
In The Happiness Industry: How the Government and Big Business Sold Us Well-Being, William Davies explains, “the science of happiness is less a science than an extension of hyper-capitalism.”
Since 2012, the United Nations Sustainable Development Solutions Network has published an annual World Happiness Report and the second SDG Happiness Festival was held in Jakarta in April 2019.
To get back to Chaplin, has humanity lost its way because the US Supreme Court recognized corporations as people in 1886 and “the language of business” — accounting — has helped (the geniuses of mathematics behind) “legal fictions” or /“corporate persons” (aka businesses) measure their power and craft their policies? Particularly after four men in the 1960s — “each obsessed with pinpointing how companies achieve competitive advantage over others” — invented what today we call “corporate strategy?”
One of them — Bruce Henderson, founder of the Boston Consulting Group — even set a trend by dividing BCG “into three minifirms within the firm … and set them to competing with one another.”
“The most fundamental lesson of our study {is that} ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process. Moreover, even when the destructive effects of their work become patently clear, and they are asked to carry out actions incompatible with fundamental standards of morality, relatively few people have the resources needed to resist authority.” Stanley Milgram, (1974)
Let’s not forget “the mother of the modern corporation” is “the original corporate raider” model that emerged from the competition between the various royalty-backed East India Companies during the first Business-As-Usual (BAU) revolution to lay the foundation for a hyper-competing and unnatural world obsessively governed by numbers, from the top down.
Proven on Henry Ford’s factory assembly line, Frederick Winslow Taylor’s simplistic “scientific management theory” firmly anchors the BAU paradigm today. The core of management science remains to increase the work rate and reduce wages to maximize profits. To survive, businesses colonize, commoditize and monetize whatever resources they can and compete to have no greater god than growth.
To get traction for Ford’s model, both Maslow and B.F. Skinner had even advocated that “a biological elite” or “an intellectual elite” be given power.
However, BAU does ensure that rule by an elite or oligarchy is inevitable:
“The ‘Iron Law of Oligarchy’ states that any organization or society will eventually become an oligarchy. That’s because the people who learn how to succeed in the organization gain a competitive advantage. The larger and more complicated the organization becomes, the more advantages the elite gain. Oligarchs only associate with others who share those same traits. They become an organized minority, while average citizens remain an unorganized majority. The oligarchs groom protégés who share their values and goals. It becomes more difficult for the average person to break into the group of elites.” Kimberly Amadeo
Rather than how corporate raiders in the guise of oligarchs tightly control the distribution of resources, why does scarcity underpin economics? To focus economists on obsessively studying the efficient allocation of scarce resources to supposedly unlimited wants and then to repeatedly hawk that message?
“We live in a society where capital is highly concentrated, with most commodity production carried out by companies whose fates are largely shaped by financial investors. The commodities they produce, whether material or immaterial, are made available to us in a global marketplace, delivered through complex value chains in whose operation our own unpaid labor as consumers is increasingly implicated. Information and communications technologies have so affected the spatial and temporal division of labor that for many of us the boundaries between ‘work and private life are inextricably muddled and few relationships are unmediated by them.” Ursula Huws, Labor in the Global Digital Economy
In a price-based market anchored on debt, doesn’t the systemic scarcity of anything (e.g. jobs/goods/status) addict you to competing and not to trust one another?
Is that why you willfully feed yourself and each other into an opaque, insatiable and numerically guided “thought system” driven by Big Business?
Accounting for War authors Michele Chwastiak and Glen Lehman even argue that accounting provides decision-makers with a way to think about death and destruction without actually having to think about death and destruction as it “reduces people, places and things to quantities and lends itself to an abstract, cold and calculating way of reasoning.”
Over time, have you systemically been addicted to self-organize to compete to grow “legal fictions” with your ideas, time, energy, etc. so their rights and freedoms now preside over that of real people?
The Ambrose Bierce’s Devil’s Dictionary defines corporations as “an ingenious device for obtaining profit without individual responsibility.”
Big Business now control the access to most, if not all, of our means of survival.
Similar to the first Industrial/BAU Revolution, when the world’s two largest population groups (farmers and live-in servants) were rushed post-haste to work in factories/offices and unwittingly, to lay the foundation for us to live a “cradle to grave” business plan, we are now being corralled to bridge the virtual economy with the physical, including of our bodies, minds and souls.
Very broadly, isn’t that what the United Nations (UN) has called a “comprehensive blueprint for the reorganization of human society” since 1992?
“The emergence of smart cities and factories, autonomous cars and homes, smart appliances and virtual reality worlds, automated shopping, and digitized personal medicine are transforming the way we live, play, work, travel, and shop. All across the planet, our technologies are breaking out from behind the screen and into the physical world around us. Simultaneously, the people, places, and things in our world are being digitized and brought into the virtual world, becoming part of the digital domain.
We are digitizing the physical and ‘physicalizing’ the digital. Clear boundaries between the real and the virtual are dissolving. Our near-term future has all of the indicators that the technologies that we’ve seen in our science fiction stories over the last century will be realized.” Gabriel René
The World Economic Forum (WEF) has since taken to pitching Public-Private Partnerships to orchestrate their 2030 version of “You will own nothing, and you will be happy” as they covertly work to banish privacy and private property ownership.
The “Fourth Sector” is an emerging sector of the economy that consists of “For-Benefit” organizations that combine market-based approaches of the private sector with the social and environmental aims of the public and non-profit sectors.
“Consider this: What are our financial sector’s two biggest cash cows? Answer: the housing market and pensions. Both are markets in which many of us are deeply invested.” Rutger Bregman
Half a century after Richard Nixon unpegged gold from the US$, the Great Fiat Currency experiment is likely making way for data to become the future of (no) money aka programmable money. From the horse’s mouth (WEF website): Data Collaboration for the Common Good: Enabling Trust and Innovation Through Public-Private Partnerships, a report done in collaboration with McKinsey and Company.
(McKinsey, being the juggernaut firm the world’s most powerful executives call when they have a problem they cannot solve and where Fred Gluck, another of the “four men,” had hailed from).
Does “Public-Private Cooperation” mean a merger of state (public) and corporate (private) power?
“Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power.” Benito Mussolini, the Italian Prime Minister who founded the National Fascist Party
Writing for Mint Press News, Raul Diego shares: “This new face of capitalism intends to function under the aegis of what is referred to as the “Impact Economy” — an idea that arose out of the ashes of the controlled demolition of the global financial system in 2008, which paved the way for hedge funds to replace banks as the dominant force in the world of global capital. That world is currently ruled by BLACKSTONE GROUP Inc., which controls a mind-boggling half trillion dollars under asset management, not to mention having the distinction of being the world’s biggest landlord and, ominously, the owner of the largest private DNA database on the planet.”
Since money (fiat currency) is being phased out, won’t that eventually mean the end of pension schemes and real estate investments?
After all:
“At its core, the social contract is the implicit relationship between individuals and institutions.” McKinsey
Based on the more pro “legal fictions” than real people BAU logic, is piezoelectricity the future of renewable energy as almost 8 billion of us are being geared to co-create the ecosystem for us to become batteries?
“In 2007, two MIT graduate students proposed the idea of installing piezoelectric flooring in urban areas. Dubbed ‘Crowd Farming,’ the idea was to install a flooring system that would take advantage of piezoelectric principles by harvesting power from footsteps in crowded places such as train stations, malls, concerts and anywhere where large groups of people move.
The key is the crowd: One footstep can only provide enough electrical current to light two 60-watt bulbs for one second, but the greater the number of people walking across the piezoelectric floor, the greater amounts of power produced. It’s not beyond the realm of possibility — approximately 28,500 footsteps generate energy to power a train for one second [source: Christian Science Monitor]. Imagine what the combined power of commuters’ footsteps during rush hour could do.” Maria Trimarchi
Is harvesting energy from human movement and how wetware turns humans into technology what Shoshana Zuboff meant by:
“You are not the product, you are the abandoned carcass.”
Or what technocrats like Peter H. Diamandis term as “exponential” and “abundant?”
aka the start of a synthetic biology revolution, orchestrated by Wall Street?
The Internet has the ability to directly connect strangers anywhere and we were even sold on it enabling our living harmoniously in a global village. However, do you click on “I Accept the Terms and Conditions” without reading — let alone keep track of the updates on the apps/platforms you use?
“Since the dot com boom, Silicon Valley has been selling itself to the world as a new breed of global corporation — neutral platforms that sit on top of the world, unconcerned with and totally removed from American geopolitical and national security interests. The public believed it. Even Silicon Valley people believed it. It was the dawn of a new depoliticized corporate internationalism.
It was all about a utopian technological revolution that would connect and empower people, regardless of their nationality or language. Indeed, Silicon Valley was supposed to make “the nation” obsolete. Of course, this was always a transparent sham.” Yasha Levine, Surveillance Valley: The Secret Military History of the Internet
“Cybernetics” comes from the Greek word for “governor” or “steersman” as Plato had used it to reference systems of government in ancient Greece. In the 1940s, Norbert Wiener, a twentieth-century American engineer and mathematician, defined it as the science of communication and control in animals and machines.
The study of control processes and communication in mechanical, electronic and biological systems, cybernetics is the interplay of how complex systems function through information, feedback loops and interaction. At the individual level, it tracks how you achieve goals by planning and reacting to all of the conditions and stimuli in a man-made environment.
When automation, AI, robotics and other technologies ultimately replace most humans, won’t Ford’s model of paying you a salary to buy the goods and services you produce be history as data becomes the future of (no) money?
“What the organization proposed was that the amount of energy that is required to produce every single thing that society needs should be accounted for, and everyone would be given their share, simply by dividing between the population, of the amount of energy over a given budgeting period.
And then when you go into a store, that amount of energy would be deducted so that we could keep track of what’s going where …. You still have to have a feedback mechanism, for instance, so that the warehouses know that their beginning to run out of a particular product and the warehouse can tell the manufacturer they need more and the reason we chose energy is because energy is the most fundamental constituent of anything physical.
In the universe, there is really only two things, matter and energy, and without energy there is no motion and no movement. It requires energy to dig materials out of the ground, it requires energy to turn them into products, and so forth. Most of the time we don’t measure it, but we certainly could.
One of the real problems, too, that you have when we talk about money, … is that money is not wealth. Money is not wealth at all.
Wealth is the chairs they’re sitting in, the buildings they’re sitting in, the houses they go home to, the cars they drive in. That’s wealth. Money is just a pile of paper.” Ron Miller
But doing your job, folding real people into the latest business models as the opportunity of your lifetime and/or being the Greater fool to survive, are you oblivious to the sum of what we each do?
“To us, our path is unique but together we are nothing more than fuel. The fuel that powers the elite. The elite who hide behind the logos of corporations. This is their world. And their most valuable resource is not in the ground. It is us. We build their cities. We run their machines. We fight their wars. After all, money isn’t what drives them. It’s power. Money is simply the tool they use to control us. Worthless pieces of paper we depend on to feed us, move us, entertain us. They gave us money, and in return we gave them the world.” Spencer Cathcart
Imagine a business with its buildings, clients, processes, workflows and key performance indicators (KPIs). They’re all underpinned by a mathematical model for computers to simulate the behavior of the complex systems in real time. By connecting data from sensors in the physical world, a digital-physical bridge is created from inputs like market conditions, simulated accidents, different demands of production.
Each time you surf the web or use a digital/IoT device, the data you generate is constantly fed to the cloud and into new AI and machine learning technologies. As patterns from your digital footprints, behavior and decisions converge to form your digital profile/twin, your future behavior can even be preempted/controlled:
“Everything one does is turned into code. And that code is returned to the user (as Zubhoff writes) through the filter of *intelligent algorithms*. And if that sounds like *smart bombs*, it’s because it is, and that is, to put it mildly, disquieting. Anytime intelligent or smart are used in titles or branding, the opposite is usually true. Much as the use of *freedom* in any NGO title signals State Department front group. But the issue that runs alongside the literal monitoring of everything one does is the now third generation effects of the information age on the young. The bullying of social media is only one symptom.
Mental illness is now almost expected of teenagers. In the U.S. and U.K. in particular the anxiety, paranoia, and feelings of hopelessness are endemic. And of course this cannot be treated by the institutions that have caused it. At best the establishment simply finds new warehousing drugs to give them. The burden to conform is enormous for teenagers and made worse by the pathologies of social media and internet habituation.” John Steppling
As our focus is shifted from supporting the world’s dumbest idea to the world’s most dangerous idea, are you and I also self-organized to be profiled and mined to co-create the twenty-first century’s Tower of Babel?
“The point of modern propaganda isn’t only to misinform or push an agenda. It is to exhaust your critical thinking, to annihilate truth.” Chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov
“The role of humans as the most important factor of production is bound to diminish in the same way that the role of horses … was first diminished and then eliminated.” Nobel Prize-winning economist Wassily Leontief in 1983
Driven by oligarchs (Big Business) with no greater god than growth/impact (their latest label), what can one do as the form of control shifts to have you voluntarily merge the physical with the virtual so human value is once again turned into exchange value to keep feeding the insatiable BAU beast to grow “legal fictions?”
Today, the Internet is controlled by “natural monopolies” (how economists describe FAATMAN platforms like Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Tesla, Microsoft, Alphabet and Netflix):
“The combined market cap of the FAATMAN stocks is now over $8 trillion. To put it into perspective, that’s about equivalent to Germany, Canada, and France’s GDP combined. Despite their gigantic valuations, the growing topline figures from their SEC filings suggests they are not done yet. So while the current value may appear bloated, no one can quite rule out FAATMAN getting fatter.” Aran Ali
As you do your job, can this be indicative of the unconscious mindset the BAU paradigm of control propagates and reinforces — the need for predictability, control and domination?
“The intent is world domination.”
Sir Tim Berners-Lee on his co-founding the World Wide Web Foundation: supposedly to fight for “a web that is safe, empowering and for everyone” and “to ensure the web serves humanity by establishing it as a global public good and a basic right.”
“In Web 3.0, we will not only create a ‘Digital Twin’ or soft copy of our world and everything in it, but a Smart Twin of everything, with its own unique ID, interaction rules, and verifiable history capable of being linked and synced to its physical counterpart, spatially. Like a Wikipedia for anything, making all the world searchable, allowing for any object, person, process, and system to be updated, quantified, optimized and shared — if you have the right permissions to do so. The applications are endless and the implications, both positive and negative — practically indescribable.” Gabriel René
OR
“Food is power. We use it to change behavior. Some may call that bribery. We do not apologize.” Catherine Bertini, Executive director, UN World Food Program, September 1995
Is this what addicts/governs their thoughts and behavior?
“Governance is not government — it is the framework of rules, institutions, and practices that set limits on the behavior of individuals, organizations and companies.” U.N. Human Development Report, 1999
“AI has already taken over, it’s called the Corporation.” Jeremy Lent
“Data is to Technocracy as blood is to your body.” Patrick Wood
“Technocracy is a form of government in which engineers, scientists, health professionals and other technical experts are in control of decision making in their respective fields. The term technocracy derives from the Greek words tekhne meaning skill and kratos meaning power, as in government, or rule.
Thus the term technocracy denotes a system of government where those who have knowledge, expertise or skills compose the governing body. In a technocracy decision makers would be selected based upon how highly knowledgeable they are, rather than how much political capital they hold.” Wikipedia
Hidden in plain sight, is a new type of global governance taking shape? A new system built on wetware that will transcend all previous systems to create something far more dangerous. Instead of a ruling class operating within a recognized political hierarchy, this new system is grounded on technocracy to govern countries, control populations and to completely re-hardwire humans. If so, wouldn’t government in a political sense become irrelevant as a growing, ever-present, intrusive, controlling and sophisticated surveillance state takes over?
How do you convince a whole culture that all lives matter and that the BAU notion of success based on control and “I win, you lose” dynamics (scarcity thinking) is at the root of all that is wrong with our world?
“It is not power that corrupts but fear. Fear of losing power corrupts those who wield it and fear of the scourge of power corrupts those who are subject to it.” Aung San Suu Kyi
Are all sorts of calls to reinvent money, humans and even to create distributed and decentralized platforms because the powers behind the UN, WEF and Big Business know too well that our deepest problems stem from how the BAU system molds paranoid behaviors to systemically addict insecure people to power, control and wanting to win at all costs?
Because the BAU paradigm divides us, money can be made when we stop trusting each other:
“Rather than address how trust is systemically broken, the crypto/Blockchain people don’t even want you to trust people. Just trust their platform. The machine. After all, the Blockchain, tokens and smart contracts will enable us to outsource our value to codes and to mathematical algorithms formulated and tweaked for powerful interests. To accommodate digitally signed receipts on the Blockchain, Triple-entry accounting will likely replace double-entry accounting.” Betty Lim
Any problems arising from predator/prey “I win, you lose” dynamics will just be left to an Internet court to mitigate — for a sum, of course.
Can we really solve our problems with the same BAU thinking/logic of control used to create them?
“In this present civilization, man’s happiness is lost because technological knowledge is being used for the psychological glorification of power. Power is the new religion, with its national and political ideologies; and this new religion, the worship of the State, has its own dogmas, priests and inquisitions. In this process, the freedom and the happiness of man are completely denied, for the means have become a way of postponing the end. But the means are the end, the two cannot be separated; and because we have separated them, we inevitably create a contradiction between the means and the end. As long as we use technological knowledge for the advancement and glorification of the individual or of the group, the needs of man can never be sanely and effectively organized. It is this desire for psychological security through technological advancement that is destroying the physical security of man.” Jiddu Krishnamurti
Or should we explore why we NEED a paradigm shift from control to empowerment? Krishnamurti again:
“the culture in which we have been brought up, is part of us. The social structure, the culture, is what we have created. So we are the culture and the culture is us.”
One of the latest examples:
“More than 50 million people around the world consider themselves creators, despite the creator economy only being born a decade ago. It’s become the fastest-growing type of small business, and a survey found that more American kids want to be a YouTube star (29%) than an astronaut (11%) when they grow up.” Venture capital firm SignalFire on the creator economy
Writing for the New York Times, Taylor Lorenz shares that as the market gets increasingly competitive, creators are devising new, hyper-specific revenue streams:
“One [company] comes in the form of NewNew, a start-up in Los Angeles, that describes its product as creating a ‘human stock market.’ On the app, fans pay to vote in polls to control some of a creator’s day-to-day decisions.
… Courtney Smith, the founder and chief executive of NewNew, said the company was ‘similar to the stock market’ in that ‘you can buy shares, which are essentially votes, to be able to control a certain level of a person’s life.’”
“We’re building an economy of attention where you purchase moments in other people’s lives, and we take it a step further by allowing and enabling people to control those moments.”
“This is the first-wave of creators adopting new technologies to connect with an already engaged fan-base” where “instead of it being one-way and solely transactional, the fans are as much part of the creation experience as the creator.” Jeremiah Owyang, creator adviser to Rally.io
Giving away your DNA is another example:
Nebula Genomics is a “blockchain-enabled genomic data sharing and analysis platform” that will allow companies to pay you for your DNA except that instead of cash changing hands, Nebula plans to use their own cryptocurrency.
Since “to change the structure of that culture you have to change yourself,” have you ever asked yourself, “What is success if Big Business systemically empower instead of control us?”
Most importantly, what can you and will you actually do to kickstart a shift out of systemically having your lives life raided by “legal fictions?”
Power is addictive
“There is no doubt that individuals contribute to addictive systems … Yet addictive systems also have a life of their own and contribute to the addictive functioning of the individual … Addictive systems not only support addictions in individuals, they demand it. Those who are most comfortable and function the best in addictive systems are themselves addicts. Addicts feel most comfortable with other addicts and in addictive systems … we know so much more about individual addictions than we do about addictive systems … addictive processes are the way we have learned to survive in an addictive society. Anne Wilson Schaef
Not everyone wants to dominate and control but those who do can affect the lives of billions. According to Dr. Daniel A. Bochner, Ph.D., power and control is addictive:
“Seeking power indicates the need to overcome an inner feeling of powerlessness. Needing to control expresses a feeling that things in general, and especially other people, are out of one’s control. These traits seem to run rampant in the world around us and there is barely anyone who isn’t upset by them. In fact, those who want power and control are even more upset by others who want power and control than the rest of us due to their competitive nature and their view that there can be only one dominant person.
For someone not afflicted with these desires, the powerful and controlling are irritating because they step on everyone’s toes with rarely any awareness, or even more rarely, any regret. It’s also infuriating that those seeking power and control often achieve power and control and often seem to garner more respect than anyone else.
It is clear as well that those seeking power and control are not mentally healthy. However, their success is intoxicating to them, thus making the possibility of change extremely limited. Power and control are so intoxicating, in fact, that they can be considered to be addictive, and there are many power and control addicts.”
In The Globalization of Addiction: A Study in Poverty of the Spirit, Bruce Alexander has observed how people develop all sorts of addictions to adapt to life in the modern age:
“When addiction becomes commonplace in a society, people become addicted not only to alcohol and drugs, but to a thousand other destructive pursuits: money, power, dysfunctional relationships, or video games. A social perspective on addiction does not deny individual differences in vulnerability to addiction, but it removes them from the foreground of attention, because social determinants are more powerful.”
Consider this — If the cult of scarcity addicts you to systemically keep feeding all and sundry to the insatiable BAU beast to survive, why are individuals always seen to be the problem?
“The addicted process is a learned way of coping” and the most important cornerstones include “the illusion of control, dishonesty, self-centredness, fear, self-will, perfection, ‘stinkin thinking’ and loss of spirituality.”
“When we are self-centred, we lose touch of ourselves. We forgot who and what we are … We can become so lost in our addictive self and our imaginings that we lose sight of reality. We can become so absorbed in our distorted perception of truth that we fail to be open to the valid and sometimes conflicting truths that are all around us.”
“When we feel fear, we try to control. When we try to control, we realize that we are involved in a losing preposition since we cannot control everything and we feel defeated and more fearful … The more we try to control, the more fearful and controlling we become … Fear can also be used by an addictive organization to try to keep people in line and try to exert its illusion of control.” Anne Wilson Schaef
Then as scarcity systemically brings out the worst of insecurities:
“The disease creates distortions in thinking, feelings and perceptions, which drive people to behave in ways that are not understandable to others around them. Simply put, addiction is not a choice. Addictive behaviors are a manifestation of the disease, not a cause.” Dr. Raju Hajela
In a BAU paradigm where corporate persons (especially Big Business) are benchmarked against having no greater god than growth/impact, isn’t this an (un)holy grail that’s at the expense of everyone and everything else?
A Parody of how BAU Normalizes Greed, Systemically?
“Greed has poisoned men’s souls, has barricaded the world with hate, has goose-stepped us into misery and bloodshed” … “victims of a system that makes men torture and imprison innocent people.” Charlie Chaplin
In a lauded 1976 satire titled Network, a veteran news anchorman for UBS, a fictional television network, discovers he is being put out to pasture because of poor ratings. After threatening to shoot himself on live television, Howard Beale launches into an angry televised rant that turns out to be a huge ratings boost.
In this scene, the television network’s chairman of the board lectures Beale that corporation-led global dehumanization is not only inevitable but is good:
“You have meddled with the primal forces of nature, Mr. Beale and I won’t have it. Is that clear? You think you merely stopped a business deal — that is not the case! The Arabs have taken billions of dollars out of this country, and now they must put it back. It is ebb and flow, tidal gravity, it is ecological balance!
You are an old man who thinks in terms of nations and peoples. There are no nations! There are no peoples! There are no Russians. There are no Arabs! There are no third worlds! There is no West!
There is only one holistic system of systems, one vast and inmane, interwoven, interacting, multi-variate, multi-national dominion of dollars. Petro-dollars, electro-dollars, multi-dollars, Reichsmarks, rins, rubles, pounds and shekels. It is the international system of currency which determines the totality of life on this planet! That is the natural order of things today.
That is the atomic and sub-atomic and galactic structure of things today! And you have meddled with the primal forces of nature, and you will atone! Am I getting through to you, Mr. Beale?
You get up on your little tawny one-inch screen, and howl about America and democracy. There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and ITT and AT&T and Dupont, Dow, Union Carbide and Exxon. Those are the nations of the world today.
What do you think the Russians talk about in their councils of state — Karl Marx? They get out their linear programming charts, statistical decision theories, minimax solutions and compute the price-cost probabilities of their transactions and investments just like we do.
We no longer live in a world of nations and ideologies, Mr. Beale. The world is a college of corporations, inexorably determined by the immutable by-laws of business.
The world is a business, Mr. Beale. It has been since man crawled out of the slime. And our children will live, Mr.Beale, to see that perfect world in which there’s no war or famine. Oppression or brutality — one vast and ecumenical holding company, for whom all men will work to serve a common profit, in which all men will hold a share of stock, all necessities provided, all anxieties tranquilized, all boredom amused.”
In the BAU paradigm of control, is success even “natural?”
“Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men.” Lord Acton
“There is not a more perilous or immoral habit of mind than the sanctifying of success.” Lord Acton
“We’ve bought into the idea that education is about training and ‘success,’ defined monetarily, rather than learning to think critically and challenge. We should not forget that the true purpose of education is to make minds, not careers. A culture that does not grasp the vital interplay between morality and power, which mistakes management techniques for wisdom, which fails to understand that the measure of a civilization is its compassion, not its speed or ability to consume, condemns itself to death.” Chris Hedges
In the current BAU paradigm of winners and losers, are you a predator, prey or someone in between?
Has the BAU notion of success cast a spell so binding that you willfully embrace a constant battle of perpetual stress to prove that to be “successful,” everyone else has to lose?
Do you put tremendous effort and energy into blindly follow what a guru or someone close may have impressed upon you about success?
For instance:
“How do you observe a tree? Just a tree. How do you observe it? Do you see it through an image, the image being your knowledge of a particular tree, that it is a mango tree or whatever it is? Do you look at the tree with an image that you have about it, which is the knowledge that you have?” Jiddu Krishnamurti
Let’s review “the image” of how some “successful people” define success:
“Success is 1% inspiration, 99% perspiration.” Thomas Edison
“The secret to success is to own nothing but to control everything.” Nelson Rockefeller
“Success is going from failure to failure without losing enthusiasm.” Winston Churchill
“Success is not measured by what a man accomplishes, but by the opposition he has encountered, and the courage with which he maintained the struggle against overwhelming odds.” Charles A. Lindbergh
“I’ve never run into a guy who couldn’t win at the top level and didn’t have the right attitude, didn’t give it everything he had.” Ted Turner
“The idea of lying on a beach as my main thing sounds horrible to me. I would go bonkers. I like high intensity.” Elon Musk
“Success is liking yourself, liking what you do, and liking how you do it.” Maya Angelou
“Success is a lousy teacher. It seduces smart people into thinking they can’t lose.” Bill Gates
“Too many people measure how successful they are by how much money they make or the people that they associate with. In my opinion, true success should be measured by how happy you are.” Richard Branson
“The key is not to worry about being successful but to instead work toward being significant.” Oprah Winfrey
“Success is always dangerous, and we need to be alert and avoid becoming the victims of our own success. Will we influence the world for Christ, or will the world influence us?” Billy Graham
Will Big Business Ever Empower Us, Systemically?
“There is a growing recognition that the society or system that we have developed over the centuries is a dysfunctional, entropic system that is not good for the people in it or the planet.” Anne Wilson Schaef, Addictive Systems
“The Great Lie is that it is ‘civilization’. It’s not civilized, it has been literally the most bloodthirsty brutalizing system ever imposed upon this planet. That is NOT civilization that’s ‘the great lie.’ … or if it does represent civilization and it’s truly what civilization is; then the great lie is that civilization is good for us.” John Trudell
“If a man relied only on his own ability to satisfy his desires, power would be a synonym for personal ability. Any achievement would be the result of one’s performance, but this is seldom the case. In order to bring about intended effects, people need other people; they must exert an influence on them so that the latter will help attain the desired results.” Silvano Arieti, The Will to Be Human
As data becomes the future of (no) money, the BAU paradigm of control that we’re stuck in, built on rent-seeking through aggregating our fear, will not disappear because we keep on repeating the same habits.
So, instead of “legal fictions” paying salaries/fees, will humans increasingly volunteer (and even pay) to support growing influencers/creators, get votes and ratings, etc. and ultimately, to build a human stock market on the various distributed and decentralized platforms of Web 3.0?
Apart from the new technologies, there’s nothing new in the predictable BAU paradigm of control as “legal fictions” had evolved from the original corporate raider.
Since many already volunteer their time, ideas, energy and even money on platforms/apps, is that Voluntary Servitude 2.0?
In 1550, Étienne de la Boétie, an 18-year-old law student at the University of Orleans, responded to Niccolo Machiavelli’s The Prince with The Politics of Obedience: The discourse of voluntary servitude.
“To him, the great mystery of politics was obedience to rulers. Why in the world do people agree to be looted and otherwise oppressed by government overlords? It is not just fear, Boetie explains in the Discourse on Voluntary Servitude, for our consent is required. And that consent can be non-violently withdrawn.” Murray N. Rothbard
But unlike governments, have platforms/apps addicted you to using them, regardless of their terms and conditions, so humanity will unwittingly co-create the Global Commons in the Global Brain?
“…such technological changes and their socioeconomic consequences signal the emergence of a global metasystem (i.e. control organization beyond markets and nation-states) and may require a qualitatively new level of political organization to guide a process of self-organization.” Cadell Last
Can we really solve our problems with the BAU logic used to create them?
“We have tried, scientifically, to understand the world and explain its mysteries by analysing the smallest, smallest particles of things that exist. Enquiring down, down, down. What is this thing we call ‘flesh’ or call ‘steel’ or ‘stone.’ What is it made of? Go down to the midst of it and that’s given us a certain understanding but only half of the understanding. Equally important is not ‘What is the tiniest particle’ but ‘In what context is the tiniest particle?’ You see — In relation to what is it?” Alan Watts
“Official truth is not actual truth.” Lord Acton
Since we interpret what we see based on our beliefs and/or experiences, we tend to reason, examine, investigate or even mechanically repeat our habits. In that sense, our memory is conditioned by the culture/paradigm we live i.e. by responding to the past.
If so, won’t your incumbent thinking impede how we may all kickstart a way of living that’s truly different?
One’s that’s pro real people instead of “legal fictions” as all of us drive co-creating a paradigm that brings out our best by empowering each other through understanding, love and true abundance.
As denoted by this simple chart, control and empowerment are polar opposites.
“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new lands, but in seeing with new eyes.” Marcel Proust
We are the culture and the culture is us
All of us have the solution inside of us but will anything change unless you realize:
The BAU paradigm/system molds unnatural “I win, you lose” behaviors on scarcity. This brings out the worst insecurities as it addicts “successful people” to keep wanting to win at all costs.
“Legal fictions” are evolved from the original corporate raider.
We live a “cradle to grave” business plan to keep feeding all and sundry to the insatiable BAU beast.
So, just more of the same — Business-as-usual — from the top down?
Tackling the Inequality Pandemic: A New Social Contract for a New Era, United Nations
The Social Contract in the 21st Century, McKinsey Global Institute
The New Social Contract, FleishmanHillard
Do you yearn for empowerment based on understanding, love and true abundance? If so, even if we are not organized like “successful people” who tell us their plans to have their “legal fictions” raid us with new technologies, can you ask yourself and the world:
“What is success if Big Business systemically empower us?”
To start a new way of thinking and doing, how about spreading the message that Control is passe? Or TRY to filter what you have lived through to self-explore:
- Are you a cog in the BAU machine, dehumanized to live a “cradle to grave” business plan?
- Do you trust too easily?
- Are you compelled to want to win at all costs?
- When you feel wronged, do you take that personally and respond with fight, flight, freeze or do you fawn?
- Do you often feel threatened/traumatized/helpless/broken? Why?
- When making an important decision, do you mainly focus on costs (numbers)?
- Are you living a life of scarcity or abundance? How so?
- Are you aware of how the BAU system/paradigm of control molds behaviors through scarcity?
- Do you still think within national borders?
- Is the global governance system (of accounting) transparent and its context, readily available/understandable?
- When the Internet can directly connect us, why do platforms compete to be the new middlemen of control?
- Do your peers and (the people behind) businesses typically do what they say?
- Why are we even governed by “legal fictions?”
- Is your character/behavior natural — are you still human?
- Does BAU hyper-normalize evil?
As you become aware of the above, seduce us with how BAU controls/addicts you or an imaginary you through scarcity. Perhaps, even as a Greater fool. Succinctly describe through writing, drawing, songs, videos or whatever mode you most prefer, the dilemmas and contradictions you had felt.
Describe yourself/your experiences with the types of behavior the BAU system of control perpetuates e.g. with predators who want to win at all costs.
This is “all the meat.” Keep an eye on the fact that you are telling your story. Then, tantalize with possibilities of how Big Business may systemically empower humanity, including:
Measurements are not necessary for empowerment
How they walk the talk of empowerment (instead of the Iron Law of Oligarchy)
Truly stop the BAU titanic of having no greater god than growth/impact
Wean “successful people” from being addicted to wanting to win at all costs
Stop our lives lives from being raided by “legal fictions”
Bridge the gap between control and empowerment
Instead of what laypersons do, focus on how Big Business expedite how our world may legally be pro real people. To generate awareness, I hope you can share this article or your version of it.
Twenty years ago, I embarked on a voyage of self-discovery to self-actualize.
After spending the first decade or so developing ideas/mini portals to catalyze a very different world (one that brings out the best in us), I realized the incumbent BAU paradigm of control is too strong and no one person can kickstart a paradigm shift alone. I’ve been writing to explore how Business-as-Usual molds behaviors since.
If you have self-actualized, you will know that unlike what Maslow had tried to advocate, work in the BAU paradigm of control can never be “a temple of self-actualization” because “legal fictions” take after “the original corporate raider.”
I hope to step back soon so you may adopt this emergent experiment to kickstart the shift from “Control” to “Empowerment”:
“When we share together there is no speaker at all, there is no person. The thing that we are examining together matters; you or I do not. Please do penetrate into this feeling of togetherness. We cannot possibly build a house alone; we need to be together. That’s why it’s very important to understand the meaning of communication, which is to create together, to understand together, to work together.” Jiddu Krishnamurti
Success based on empowerment will require a paradigm shift in thinking and doing — where systemic benefits are shared with all instead of hoarded by a few.
Then through understanding, love and true abundance, everyone co-creates a world that empowers everyone to be our best for all:
“Each of us has the perfect gift to give the world … if we are able to each give what’s so uniquely ours — won’t we be able to create magic for and with each other?”
Will strangers anywhere rally everyone to unite so Big Business will expedite how they walk their talk for a world where all lives matter? The culture we are in is us so an empowered world that’s truly pro humanity will depend on YOU and all of us!
P.S. If you would like to explore collaborating on a book about Self-Actualization, I’ll love to hear from you — gmail cobundance. God willing, we can embark on that in 2023 or so.
