Someone asked me this week if I thought we could dig
ourselves out of the current financial mess that the country was in.
I said no.
I guess that answer needs a little clarification. We can’t fix it from within its own
paradigm and those in control are disincented to change the paradigm. In other words, it can’t be fixed without
first fixing the conflict between personal benefit and collective benefit. Once one single person is a
wealthy as Carnegie or Vanderbilt, our morality insists that besting the last
guy is more important than the costs associated with it.
The failure of our society to self-regulate has resulted in corporate
mission statements that are applauded for focusing the entire sum of the
company’s efforts on “maximizing shareholder value”, which is financial-speak
for “make money”. The once-present
statements regarding sustainability and social responsibility – even if mere
window-dressing – are now relegated to the marketing department.
This collective deterioration both reflects and fuels our
individual deterioration into a consumption-fueled despair that leaves us
unwilling to participate in the greater good.
Hoover’s Presidential campaign slogan in 1928 “a chicken in
every pot and a car in every garage” - clearly a collective wish – transforms
into 1984’s “Are You Better Off Than You Were Four Years Ago?” Eisenhower and
LBJ somehow become Gordon Gekko and Carl Rove and the cycle of deterioration is
acclaimed as beneficial.
Do you feel better?
You won!
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