In the previous posting of Time is Money: A Choice of Paradigms I described the two paradigms of living. One the aboriginal lifestyle where money is not required for life and living, the other community living in cities and nations where money is an essential for life and living. My conclusion in that article skews positively towards the paradigm of the aboriginals. This conclusion is reinforced by my observations of the economic environment of the world presently and the country I am living in currently, Malaysia, where like in most Third World and developing countries labour laws are only good for collecting dust and there is no such thing as minimum wage. However despite my conclusion I know that it is impractical to draw a solution to give up life in the cities for the simplicity of life in nature. In fact with human population now in excess of seven billion it may be impossible for nature to sustain 100's of millions of little colonies. It is obviously much more practical and efficient to bring resources to people in concentrated locations then to have so many little colonies compete for ever shrinking natural resources. Thus living in modern communities as we are today is not a choice anymore. Whatever solution that is discovered to create a more just and equitable society must be found in the context of national lifestyles and economic models.
As a side thought, it is interesting to ponder that for the most part of human history which is figured to start at the prehistoric time of 200,000 years ago, we lived as nomads and in small communities living off the land. It was not until between 6,000 to 5,000 years ago that the first human townships formed in Sumeria (Iraq) and the Indus Valley. The advent of agriculture brought about the development of these first townships in the world. Invariably where the ruins of the first towns were uncovered (in Sumeria and Mohenjodaro-Harappa), currency in the form of metal seals and coins were discovered. These early currencies made barter more efficient. At that time there would have been more aboriginal societies then towns. I can conceive that these first towns may have been experimental and like how even today we take to major innovations with a measure of apprehension, the same must have been true for the majority of the nomadic populace at the time. Obviously the experiment was a success and more and more people began to live in towns, some of which eventually turned into cities and ultimately into nations. In line with the innovation of cities and nations money evolved to its present day status as the purveyor of wealth.
Money of course evolved out of barter trade. It made trading more efficient for obvious reasons, and also allows us to accumulate wealth in a way that barter trade could not. Accumulation of wealth by saving and storing money made quantifying an individual's wealth easy. Therefore the evolution of the classes rich and poor. Entire industries that have nothing to do with necessity but everything to do with luxury have spawned to further define these classes.
Coming back to the thought of creating a more just and equitable society; this is still the inherent goal of all human societies, except that presently this goal has been subverted by the monster called greed. I don't think money is of itself evil, money has simply been hijacked by greed, which if we look at closely is the source of most of the problems infecting human society today. Lack of resources, exploitation of labour, crime, degradation of the environment, inflation–all these can traced to the greedy monster who not only infects those in the upper echelons of power and wealth, but even the lower rungs of society. In general, contemporary human society only pays passing tribute to the humble, virtuous and generous whereas we are totally enamored by the glitzy high life of the wealthy and powerful. For many of our youth the 'high-life people' are their role models of who they aspire to be. Case in point; just about everyone admires Mahatma Gandhi–his thoughts and philosophy are often quoted–but how many of our youth aspire (or are inspired by their community) to be another Gandhi or to live his lifestyle? Compare that hypothetical figure of population to say the CEO of Citibank and you can get a glimpse of why the world is as it is today.
No, I am not a communist. To me communism is a failed experiment in extreme socialism. Communism took the adage "power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely" and proved this truth beyond a doubt. Many of the countries in the world that turned to communism in the early and mid 20th century espousing its ideal of equal distribution of wealth among the population ended up creating some of the most corrupt tyrant leaders in history. They threw away human rights, ruled with iron fists, enjoyed unaccountability and murdered dissidents. When greed infects communism the effects are far more disastrous compared to what we can see happening through capitalism. I am nevertheless a socialist through and through as most monks are, but I am not averse to capitalism in its ideals of allowing people to accumulate as much money as they wish through industriousness so long as there are safeguards against capitalistic exploitation.
Capitalistic exploitation is greed for as much profit as possible with no regard for social responsibility. In modern corporations this exploitation mainly comes from getting away with paying as little wage as possible for employees, using the cheapest possible processes for making products even if they are dangerous and proven detrimental to the long term health of employees and the environment; and dumping polluting wastes from industry indiscriminately to reduce the cost of treating pollutants to make them safe before dumping. Basically greedy capitalism cares only for bottom line profit margins no matter what the cost is to the social and environmental fabric. So much of the problems that we are facing in the world today with regard to livelihood stems from businesses without a heart. When love (or social responsibility) is not present in business and law, the demons of greed and subjugation reign supreme.
Most of us still idealize living in a harmonious utopia. Though we have to put up with the whims of Earth's natural grumbling once in a while, we do have the notion that as civilized and intelligent beings, humans can make such a dream come through. We have been trying to do this for eons and it continues to be the inspiration behind the formation of governments. Governments of Nations are usually formed on a base of positive ideals, and invariably one of these ideals is always eradication of poverty. Poverty is the universal devil that almost all politicians whack to drum up support for themselves. However eradicating poverty is a much harder dream (some politicians will secretly say impossible) to accomplish compared to building a multibillion dollar defense system. This makes sense if we understand that in a society infected by greed, the fear of loss is a major concern. Thus spending on defense, even excessively, makes good sense. So is it really possible to eradicate poverty from the face of our planet, or is this just a pipe dream? Many will say dream on, but I believe in dreams and I think it is possible, but only with the help of governments and businesses with a heart; for it is love that makes generosity a joy of life.
Generosity is about having and maintaining contentment in life. A content heart beams in peacefulness, richness in the enjoyment of living, harmony in relationships, inspiration for ideals and dignified self-respect for oneself and others. Generosity is about the giving of effort or sacrificing for greater good beyond self interests. People who are addicted to charity know that the spiritual ecstasy that one attains from the act of giving is its reward. One of the wonderful aspects of generosity is that it has nothing to do with money. Rich, poor, junior, senior, sick or healthy; anyone is capable of generosity of some kind. If businesses adopted generosity they will flourish from employee loyalty, trusted and respected branding, respect and protection from society. Of course they will have to sacrifice some of the bottom line in profit and plough it back to its stake holders (the community the business serves), but what goes around, comes around. Indeed generosity is also about optimizing business by investing in goodwill. This means that the businesses can still flourish and prosper by being generous. Generosity is not about depriving oneself of luxuries if that is what one desires, it is about caring for the society one is in; about not ignoring their needs and interest. It is about working out real win-win situations. This is what generosity in commerce and business can potentially create. It may mean not becoming super-wealthy, but wealthy enough.
Anyone who starts a business has a choice; either they maintain the principle of generosity or the principle of greed. In todays business environment, unfortunately, experts scoff at win-win situations. They say it is impractical. They say the business world is a brutal one, one of fierce competition and cold-hearted uncompromising profit taking and profit keeping–where the more profit the better. The big greedy multinational corporations have even taken greed to a new level. They too acknowledge the benefits of being generous and they don't want to lose out on these benefits. However with greed firmly planted in their organizations the idea of giving up profits is a super taboo. A solution for the greedy appeared when they realized that to get the reciprocal benefits of generosity they don't have to be really generous, they just have to make a show of generosity–enter CSR. Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) is the big buzzword along with Environmental Responsibility.
CSR as an extra-business entity is not required for businesses and commerce with a heart. Community welfare concerns are as important to them as their business, in fact they go hand in hand as part and parcel of business. There is no need to make a big show of doing charity to the community because businesses, commerce and community form important supporting chains within social ecologies that are curcial for balanced and prosperous living as a whole. Giving generously off profits as social responsibility and for goodwill in the form of government taxes, employee benefits and donations are accepted responsibilities of persons or groups getting rich off their community. Compare this to the big corporations that earn profits in the hundreds of millions and even billions but give out paltry sums back to the community. Greedy corporations insist that their sole fiduciary responsibility is to their share holders who are only happy when profits are on the up and up. The stake holder's (read the larger community) welfare from whom they depend on for business is the concern of the governments, not even slightly theirs. When they have to make contributions to their stake holders, usually out of compulsion rather than generosity, they like to make a big deal out of their contributions and command recognition for their feigned magnanimity by insisting that their CSR is a selfless favour to their community. They also milk as much as they can out of their CSR by paying for media coverage (if they can't get if for free!) to turn it to a brand marketing exercise on top of the tax breaks that they can claim from governments (so they are not really spending anything out of goodwill, but simply fulfilling a need begrudgingly). Then to reduce further cost of CSRs even very rich corporations will insist that their lowly paid employees contribute their personal funds, time and effort for 'the good cause'. Thus in adapting with times greed has become more sophisticated as feigned generosity.
The very fact that there is such a thing called CSR shows just how removed commerce and business are from societal welfare. It used to be natural for the rich business community to be magnanimous in charity without need for recognition because they understood that the if the giving stops the getting will eventually grind to a halt and bad blood will result between the business people and community at large. Today large corporations can get away with lots more greed through their multinational operations where the can hide their greed by exploiting corrupt governments in other countries where human rights laws are negligible. When you live in a Third World or Developing Country you can see this very clearly. Since there is no such thing as minimum wage, apart from super-well-paid top administrative executives, other white and blue collar employees are squeezed for effort with as little pay as the corporations can get away with, notwithstanding their growth in profits.
Greed of course is not a sustainable mechanism in any ecology. Over collection and hoarding of resources concentrated in a small elite group who disassociate themselves from the greater community will eventually become detrimental to the elites themselves. When a tipping point is reached in exploitation, uprisings occur in communities that are unfortunately brutal and anarchist against the elites. This scenario has played out countless times both in ancient times and even today–the Arab Spring Revolts are all simple working class people trying to uproot the greedy and cruel out of their society.
It is without a doubt that greed will eventually strangle itself, especially now with the cry of the exploited becoming deafeningly loud as populations increase and resources become more and more limited. In the end the greedy will have to ask themselves, how else and where else can they hide all their excesses. To date we still haven't discovered another habitable planet that one can escape to, instead our world is getting smaller with larger populations and connectivity created by technology. Eventually even the greedy will have to acknowledge that they are part of a social ecology that can only thrive if equitable balance is achieved. No matter how much wealth the greedy have at their disposable they cannot, try as they may, stay apart very long from this ecology.
The bigger question is what would we replace the current systems that encourages greed with? We must acknowledge that all the current economic systems that is in place can easily be exploited by greed. It is useless to have painful revolutions only to replace one set of greedy elites with another who can get corrupted by money and power under the same system. Granted that the current economic models available to us, when used according to their ideals can be the solutions, so instead of 'reinventing the wheel' we simply use the current models with some modifications so elements that represent generosity are factored in place with their ideals better guarded and implemented. The solution must also be global and not given to choice by National governments. A global solution will require some sacrifices in the convenience of business and commerce. However if we are committed to a utopian future we will realize that sacrificing for the greater good of community which is a cornerstone of generosity, are sacrifices worth the effort. If we can accept this, then the battle is already half won and a brighter and more equitable future is on the horizon for our kind.
In the next article on Time is Money I will give my humble two cents on a solution that has been brewing in my ponderings.
As a side thought, it is interesting to ponder that for the most part of human history which is figured to start at the prehistoric time of 200,000 years ago, we lived as nomads and in small communities living off the land. It was not until between 6,000 to 5,000 years ago that the first human townships formed in Sumeria (Iraq) and the Indus Valley. The advent of agriculture brought about the development of these first townships in the world. Invariably where the ruins of the first towns were uncovered (in Sumeria and Mohenjodaro-Harappa), currency in the form of metal seals and coins were discovered. These early currencies made barter more efficient. At that time there would have been more aboriginal societies then towns. I can conceive that these first towns may have been experimental and like how even today we take to major innovations with a measure of apprehension, the same must have been true for the majority of the nomadic populace at the time. Obviously the experiment was a success and more and more people began to live in towns, some of which eventually turned into cities and ultimately into nations. In line with the innovation of cities and nations money evolved to its present day status as the purveyor of wealth.
Money of course evolved out of barter trade. It made trading more efficient for obvious reasons, and also allows us to accumulate wealth in a way that barter trade could not. Accumulation of wealth by saving and storing money made quantifying an individual's wealth easy. Therefore the evolution of the classes rich and poor. Entire industries that have nothing to do with necessity but everything to do with luxury have spawned to further define these classes.
Coming back to the thought of creating a more just and equitable society; this is still the inherent goal of all human societies, except that presently this goal has been subverted by the monster called greed. I don't think money is of itself evil, money has simply been hijacked by greed, which if we look at closely is the source of most of the problems infecting human society today. Lack of resources, exploitation of labour, crime, degradation of the environment, inflation–all these can traced to the greedy monster who not only infects those in the upper echelons of power and wealth, but even the lower rungs of society. In general, contemporary human society only pays passing tribute to the humble, virtuous and generous whereas we are totally enamored by the glitzy high life of the wealthy and powerful. For many of our youth the 'high-life people' are their role models of who they aspire to be. Case in point; just about everyone admires Mahatma Gandhi–his thoughts and philosophy are often quoted–but how many of our youth aspire (or are inspired by their community) to be another Gandhi or to live his lifestyle? Compare that hypothetical figure of population to say the CEO of Citibank and you can get a glimpse of why the world is as it is today.
No, I am not a communist. To me communism is a failed experiment in extreme socialism. Communism took the adage "power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely" and proved this truth beyond a doubt. Many of the countries in the world that turned to communism in the early and mid 20th century espousing its ideal of equal distribution of wealth among the population ended up creating some of the most corrupt tyrant leaders in history. They threw away human rights, ruled with iron fists, enjoyed unaccountability and murdered dissidents. When greed infects communism the effects are far more disastrous compared to what we can see happening through capitalism. I am nevertheless a socialist through and through as most monks are, but I am not averse to capitalism in its ideals of allowing people to accumulate as much money as they wish through industriousness so long as there are safeguards against capitalistic exploitation.
Capitalistic exploitation is greed for as much profit as possible with no regard for social responsibility. In modern corporations this exploitation mainly comes from getting away with paying as little wage as possible for employees, using the cheapest possible processes for making products even if they are dangerous and proven detrimental to the long term health of employees and the environment; and dumping polluting wastes from industry indiscriminately to reduce the cost of treating pollutants to make them safe before dumping. Basically greedy capitalism cares only for bottom line profit margins no matter what the cost is to the social and environmental fabric. So much of the problems that we are facing in the world today with regard to livelihood stems from businesses without a heart. When love (or social responsibility) is not present in business and law, the demons of greed and subjugation reign supreme.
Most of us still idealize living in a harmonious utopia. Though we have to put up with the whims of Earth's natural grumbling once in a while, we do have the notion that as civilized and intelligent beings, humans can make such a dream come through. We have been trying to do this for eons and it continues to be the inspiration behind the formation of governments. Governments of Nations are usually formed on a base of positive ideals, and invariably one of these ideals is always eradication of poverty. Poverty is the universal devil that almost all politicians whack to drum up support for themselves. However eradicating poverty is a much harder dream (some politicians will secretly say impossible) to accomplish compared to building a multibillion dollar defense system. This makes sense if we understand that in a society infected by greed, the fear of loss is a major concern. Thus spending on defense, even excessively, makes good sense. So is it really possible to eradicate poverty from the face of our planet, or is this just a pipe dream? Many will say dream on, but I believe in dreams and I think it is possible, but only with the help of governments and businesses with a heart; for it is love that makes generosity a joy of life.
Generosity is about having and maintaining contentment in life. A content heart beams in peacefulness, richness in the enjoyment of living, harmony in relationships, inspiration for ideals and dignified self-respect for oneself and others. Generosity is about the giving of effort or sacrificing for greater good beyond self interests. People who are addicted to charity know that the spiritual ecstasy that one attains from the act of giving is its reward. One of the wonderful aspects of generosity is that it has nothing to do with money. Rich, poor, junior, senior, sick or healthy; anyone is capable of generosity of some kind. If businesses adopted generosity they will flourish from employee loyalty, trusted and respected branding, respect and protection from society. Of course they will have to sacrifice some of the bottom line in profit and plough it back to its stake holders (the community the business serves), but what goes around, comes around. Indeed generosity is also about optimizing business by investing in goodwill. This means that the businesses can still flourish and prosper by being generous. Generosity is not about depriving oneself of luxuries if that is what one desires, it is about caring for the society one is in; about not ignoring their needs and interest. It is about working out real win-win situations. This is what generosity in commerce and business can potentially create. It may mean not becoming super-wealthy, but wealthy enough.
Anyone who starts a business has a choice; either they maintain the principle of generosity or the principle of greed. In todays business environment, unfortunately, experts scoff at win-win situations. They say it is impractical. They say the business world is a brutal one, one of fierce competition and cold-hearted uncompromising profit taking and profit keeping–where the more profit the better. The big greedy multinational corporations have even taken greed to a new level. They too acknowledge the benefits of being generous and they don't want to lose out on these benefits. However with greed firmly planted in their organizations the idea of giving up profits is a super taboo. A solution for the greedy appeared when they realized that to get the reciprocal benefits of generosity they don't have to be really generous, they just have to make a show of generosity–enter CSR. Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) is the big buzzword along with Environmental Responsibility.
CSR as an extra-business entity is not required for businesses and commerce with a heart. Community welfare concerns are as important to them as their business, in fact they go hand in hand as part and parcel of business. There is no need to make a big show of doing charity to the community because businesses, commerce and community form important supporting chains within social ecologies that are curcial for balanced and prosperous living as a whole. Giving generously off profits as social responsibility and for goodwill in the form of government taxes, employee benefits and donations are accepted responsibilities of persons or groups getting rich off their community. Compare this to the big corporations that earn profits in the hundreds of millions and even billions but give out paltry sums back to the community. Greedy corporations insist that their sole fiduciary responsibility is to their share holders who are only happy when profits are on the up and up. The stake holder's (read the larger community) welfare from whom they depend on for business is the concern of the governments, not even slightly theirs. When they have to make contributions to their stake holders, usually out of compulsion rather than generosity, they like to make a big deal out of their contributions and command recognition for their feigned magnanimity by insisting that their CSR is a selfless favour to their community. They also milk as much as they can out of their CSR by paying for media coverage (if they can't get if for free!) to turn it to a brand marketing exercise on top of the tax breaks that they can claim from governments (so they are not really spending anything out of goodwill, but simply fulfilling a need begrudgingly). Then to reduce further cost of CSRs even very rich corporations will insist that their lowly paid employees contribute their personal funds, time and effort for 'the good cause'. Thus in adapting with times greed has become more sophisticated as feigned generosity.
The very fact that there is such a thing called CSR shows just how removed commerce and business are from societal welfare. It used to be natural for the rich business community to be magnanimous in charity without need for recognition because they understood that the if the giving stops the getting will eventually grind to a halt and bad blood will result between the business people and community at large. Today large corporations can get away with lots more greed through their multinational operations where the can hide their greed by exploiting corrupt governments in other countries where human rights laws are negligible. When you live in a Third World or Developing Country you can see this very clearly. Since there is no such thing as minimum wage, apart from super-well-paid top administrative executives, other white and blue collar employees are squeezed for effort with as little pay as the corporations can get away with, notwithstanding their growth in profits.
Greed of course is not a sustainable mechanism in any ecology. Over collection and hoarding of resources concentrated in a small elite group who disassociate themselves from the greater community will eventually become detrimental to the elites themselves. When a tipping point is reached in exploitation, uprisings occur in communities that are unfortunately brutal and anarchist against the elites. This scenario has played out countless times both in ancient times and even today–the Arab Spring Revolts are all simple working class people trying to uproot the greedy and cruel out of their society.
It is without a doubt that greed will eventually strangle itself, especially now with the cry of the exploited becoming deafeningly loud as populations increase and resources become more and more limited. In the end the greedy will have to ask themselves, how else and where else can they hide all their excesses. To date we still haven't discovered another habitable planet that one can escape to, instead our world is getting smaller with larger populations and connectivity created by technology. Eventually even the greedy will have to acknowledge that they are part of a social ecology that can only thrive if equitable balance is achieved. No matter how much wealth the greedy have at their disposable they cannot, try as they may, stay apart very long from this ecology.
The bigger question is what would we replace the current systems that encourages greed with? We must acknowledge that all the current economic systems that is in place can easily be exploited by greed. It is useless to have painful revolutions only to replace one set of greedy elites with another who can get corrupted by money and power under the same system. Granted that the current economic models available to us, when used according to their ideals can be the solutions, so instead of 'reinventing the wheel' we simply use the current models with some modifications so elements that represent generosity are factored in place with their ideals better guarded and implemented. The solution must also be global and not given to choice by National governments. A global solution will require some sacrifices in the convenience of business and commerce. However if we are committed to a utopian future we will realize that sacrificing for the greater good of community which is a cornerstone of generosity, are sacrifices worth the effort. If we can accept this, then the battle is already half won and a brighter and more equitable future is on the horizon for our kind.
In the next article on Time is Money I will give my humble two cents on a solution that has been brewing in my ponderings.
