Posted at 3 Quarks Daily
Studying about company greed and depredation over the previous few years, I maintain getting caught on the identical query: Don’t these individuals have grandchildren?
How can company decision-makers spend their days actively working to destroy the setting, pollute the water, kill off the animals, soften the glaciers, and incinerate the biosphere? Even when what they care about probably the most is making more cash irrespective of how a lot cash they have already got, don’t they care in any respect in regards to the world they’re leaving for his or her children?
I’ve arrived at a idea. However first I have to again up a couple of steps.
Readers of 3QD could also be aware of the mind fungus that causes “zombie ants” to go away the security of the forest flooring and climb up the stalks of vegetation to die. Or the parasite that causes mice to lose their concern of cats. In each circumstances, the parasite has advanced to hijack the mind of the host and trigger it to behave in methods which might be suicidal to the host however helpful to the parasite. The behaviors the parasite causes are sometimes exquisitely complicated and specific. It appears inconceivable that one thing as primitive as a fungus might be the reason. However evolution has give you plenty of comparable methods. She may be very intelligent. She doesn’t have a way of honest play or sportsmanship. If a habits will increase the possibilities of getting the genes of 1 era reproduced within the subsequent, it succeeds. Nothing else issues. And she or he has heaps and many time to experiment.
In order that’s the primary concept we’d like – the fungus that hijacks the mind of 1 species to enhance the reproductive success of one other.
Then we’d like the thought of cultural evolution. Human beings don’t have to attend for genetic evolution. Now we have advanced the power to get data from one era to the subsequent with out having to attend for it first to be encoded within the DNA. We don’t have to begin from scratch with every era, and we don’t need to proceed by trial and error. Now we have tradition, language, and conventional practices.
Within the fashionable world, I don’t need to know the way something works. I don’t need to know the way automobiles or computer systems work, for instance, or construct them. It’s sufficient for me to know drive and sort. So long as someplace in my tradition there are individuals who know the way automobiles and computer systems work and construct them, I can off-load that accountability to them and spend my time on different issues.
Yet one more concept and we can be prepared for my idea. That’s the thought of a meme. A meme is to cultural evolution what a gene is to the organic variety. It’s the unit of switch, the essential constructing block. Cooking is a meme. When the thought of cooking enters right into a tradition, plenty of issues change. Individuals dwell longer as a result of cooking releases extra dietary worth from meals. Individuals get greater and stronger. Their tooth get smaller. Jaw muscle mass get weaker and on and on.
The company is a meme. It’s a authorized invention, a authorized fiction, when you like. Companies don’t exist in the best way that tables and chairs exist. They don’t have weight or take up area. They don’t have any pure life span. A few of them are a lot older and vastly richer than any individual. They will personal property, enter into contracts, sue and be sued. And, because the US Supreme Court docket resolution in Residents United and associated circumstances, they will donate limitless quantities of cash to the political causes of their alternative.
I quote right here from The Handover: How We Gave Management of Our Lives to Companies, States and AIs, by David Runciman:
The 18th century jurist Edward Thurlow famously complained: ‘Companies have neither our bodies to be kicked, nor souls to be damned; they subsequently do as they like.’ Sentient beings with our bodies and souls disappear contained in the group as soon as it has acquired its personal identification. They will shrug their shoulders because the victims of the group’s selections come on the lookout for justice. In the meantime, the group has no shoulders to shrug.
Mitt Romney famously stated, “Companies are individuals, my pal.” However he was profoundly improper. They don’t seem to be individuals. Companies are a mind fungus. They act to learn themselves. They usually hijack the brains of the individuals who work for them and trigger them to do issues no sane individual would do.
That’s the reply to my query. Companies can act the best way they do as a result of they don’t have grandchildren. The individuals who make company selections to poison the earth accomplish that as a result of their brains have been hijacked by the virus. Partly that is achieved with easy bribery. Company CEOs are awarded huge salaries and ridiculous compensation packages with a purpose to blind them to their human duties. However that alone will not be ample. The mind fungus additionally works at a extra delicate stage. It convinces the company resolution maker that he’s half of a bigger system, and that it’s the system that’s accountable for ethics. On this view, he (it’s virtually inevitably a he) doesn’t need to know something in regards to the ethics and morality of his selections. He can offload that accountability. His job is to extend shareholder worth. It’s the job of the political system, the regulation, or the market to impose restraints. The mechanism is a bit of fuzzy, however what’s necessary is that there’s a division of labor. “You simply consider producing income,” the fungus whispers to the CEO. “Different elements of the system will fear about defending the biosphere.”
It is a corollary to Upton Sinclair’s well-known dictum. It’s straightforward to get a person to consider one thing when his inventory choices rely upon his believing it.
Attorneys are embedded in a system with the same structure. That is the adversarial system I mentioned in an earlier 3QD put up. Beneath the adversarial system a lawyer’s responsibility is to his consumer. If the consumer is a greedhead scumbag, properly, he’s a greedhead scumbag. The lawyer’s responsibility doesn’t change. His job is to offer zealous advocacy. The job of seeing to it that the scumbag will get what’s coming to him is off-loaded to the bigger system. I don’t suppose that’s a good suggestion within the authorized context, and I don’t suppose it’s a good suggestion within the context of the company.
Quoting from Runciman once more:
How, for instance might multinational oil firms have spent years suppressing and distorting the proof that fossil fuels had been accountable for harmful ranges of local weather change? We would select to consider that the individuals working for these corporations are particularly dangerous, reckless, irresponsible, egocentric. However they don’t seem to be: they’re, on the entire, simply individuals like the remainder of us. It’s the company that selected to pursue this path and the individuals concerned, as a result of they’re like the remainder of us, adopted, as a result of following a company resolution is the trail of least resistance. It’s greater than seemingly that most of the individuals concerned knew that what they had been doing was improper. However the company didn’t as a result of the company isn’t sentient.
This means there could also be a sliver of hope. All of us have a number of roles. In his company position, the CEO of a fracking concern is a zombie host mindlessly obeying the dictates of a parasitic mind fungus. However he has different roles. He’s additionally a human being and, seemingly, a grandfather. The planet might need a future if one thing or somebody might shake him from his zombie trance and remind him of that. It’s not ample to go away the way forward for the world to the workings of the political system, the regulation or the market. The accountability to behave morally can’t be off-loaded. Get up and consider your grandchildren!
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