Society At The Crossroads

1. The Erosion of Ethics

The other day I had an experience that, although minor in itself, caused me to start reflecting on the nature of our value systems. I was explaining to a co-worker that the Internet e-mail program I was using allowed me to download my mail, disconnect and read the messages offline. He asked me why I would bother to do that, when my ISP didn't bill for connect time. It made no difference on my bill whether I read my mail online or offline. My reply was that I wasn't tying up network resources that someone else might use. It seemed like a matter of common courtesy, not economics.

As I thought about his question, I came to realize how many of our decisions are based only on self-interest, not on a consideration of how our actions might affect others. The more I thought about it, the more I saw evidence everywhere that this was indeed the case. In fact, the driving principle behind many people's decisions, I believe, is self-interest alone. And it seems to be increasing. Examples can be found everywhere, at all levels in our society, and in all our activities.

Everyone who drives a car has noticed how rude other drivers have become in the last decade or two. There were always some who refused to merge until the very last minute, attempting to pass as many other people as possible, but now that behavior has been extended to running red lights at the end of the green cycle. I have seen as many as six or eight cars go through a light after it has turned green for the other direction. And these same drivers get offended if anyone has the temerity to honk at them, as if holding up everyone else was their God-given right.

Some examples are downright trivial, like those people who, when waiting for an elevator, stand with their noses right up against the door, never thinking that there will probably be people wanting to get off. Or people who walk through a door and never look back to see if anyone else is coming. I've noticed, incidentally, that women are far more guilty of this than men. Men will quite often look back and hold the door for another person, regardless of that person's gender.

Other examples are far from trivial. Young people hijack cars and kill the occupants for the sake of a few dollars. It makes no difference to them that someone has died. It doesn't affect them (unless they are caught).

Older people vote against school funding because their children are grown, not stopping to think that it was only with the support of childless people in the past that their own children had schools to attend. Nor do they apparently recognize the importance of education to the overall health and well-being of the society.

People collect welfare under false pretenses and think nothing of it. In a case recently exposed here (Washington state), a woman applied for AFDC, claiming her husband had left. She collected benefits for 15 years. Meanwhile her husband was still living there, both of them were working, they owned a home and 8 vehicles!

Televangelists preach righteousness to the viewers while engaging in sexual misconduct and financial ripoffs.

Companies dump toxic waste into rivers and pay the fines, because it is cheaper than dealing with the waste in a responsible manner. They consider it a good business decision, not an ethical issue. Or if the dumping occurred prior to environmental regulations, they defend their actions by claiming that what they did was legal, as if ethics had nothing to do with it. They deny all responsibility. If the community wants it cleaned up, let the community pay for it.

In the 1980's leveraged buyouts were very popular with investors. Borrow enough money to buy a company, raid the pension fund, sell off the assets and pocket the profits. Never mind that a functioning company was destroyed, people were thrown out of work and lost their pensions, and the GDP was reduced. The company's stock was momentarily under-valued with respect to its assets. Investors made a profit. Meanwhile the burden of poverty was thrown onto government agencies, which have since come under increasing pressure to get those "lazy bums" off the government dole.

There used to be an implicit commitment to a community on the part of a company. It saw itself as an integral part of the community, bringing some measure of wealth and a better standard of living to the residents in exchange for their labor on behalf of the company. Everyone benefited. That was the basis of company loyalty. No longer. Companies play off cities against each other to get the best tax breaks and government support (corporate welfare?) while contributing as little as possible to the community. Yet they still expect loyalty from their employees, crying crocodile tears and wringing their hands in concern when they don't get it. They institute slogan campaigns and trivial recognition programs, all the while threatening to take their payroll elsewhere.

This lack of caring manifests itself in our families, too. What are "family values" if not the willingness to care about another family member, the willingness to look beyond one's own self-interest and consider the impact of our actions on others. Those families that lack "family values" fall victim to violence, neglect, betrayal, fragmentation and despair....in short, they cease to function as families. They become simply a group of co-dependent people living in the same house, pursuing their own self-centered desires, seeing each other as obstacles to be overcome or as means to an end.

This image has typically been used to characterize poor people on welfare, but that is a gross over-simplification. This situation can arise in families at any point in the economic spectrum. We have seen many examples of violence, neglect, betrayal, etc. in the wealthiest of families and neighborhoods. Wealth is not an indicator of "family values", nor is poverty an indicator of their absence. The Menendez family comes to mind as an example.

So we observe that self-centeredness is manifesting itself across the spectrums of our society and appears to be at the root of many of our problems. But from where does this attitude come? Do our attitudes shape our values? Is it the other way around? Or is there another source entirely?

2. The Source of Values

What is it that determines our personal values? Is it our upbringing? Is it the media? Is it our peer group? If we have lost our sense of values and are searching for how to get them back, where do we look?

Certainly our upbringing contributes to our values, but that begs the question, because immediately we are confronted with "Where did our parents get their values?" and we are right back where we began.

Does the media influence our values? Yes, I think it certainly contributes. In ancient cultures there were myths that illustrated and communicated shared values within the culture. The Greeks, the Romans, the Vikings and more all had their heroes and villains that taught life rules from generation to generation.

Today we have the "entertainment industry" to communicate our value systems, but there is a significant difference. The myths of ancient societies did not change from year to year. The myths were stable. They represented core values of the society. Our movies and videos change constantly, responding to market pressures and consumer trends. We now determine the myths which our society presents to us. They are a mirror in which we see a reflection of ourselves, not a goal to which we aspire. We watch them because they give vent to our feelings and frustrations. As such, they have become an amplifier of our current state, not a guide out of our trouble. We can't blame the mirror for what we see.

A large part of our set of values comes from our peers. Immediately that brings up images of friends and family, but our work environment really constitutes a much larger (and stronger) peer group. After all, this is the source of our income, without which we find it very difficult to survive. So we learn to adopt the values of those who control our incomes. A person who fails to act according to his employer's desires will soon be unemployed.

Our reward systems have a profound influence on our values. And what is rewarded in this society? Wealth, primarily. Who are our icons? Donald Trump. Ross Perot. Michael Milken. Kirk Kerkorian. Elizabeth Taylor. Movie stars, Corporate CEO's, deal-makers. Other cultures respect the older members of their society for their wisdom. We sweep them under the carpet when they are no longer "productive", in other words, no longer making a profit. Even our religious "leaders", from our mainstream churches to Billy Graham to Jim Bakker to Bagwan Shree Rajneesh reek of wealth. When we get an occasional real religious leader like Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., we kill him or at best ignore him.

We claim to be a religious nation, but we are really the most materialistic society that has ever existed. We place no value on spirituality or morality. Oh, we give it lip service, but we do not reward it. We hardly even recognize it. Who we are and how we are viewed in this society is determined by how much money we can accumulate. If we are poor or unemployed, it is viewed as something to be ashamed of. Have you noticed that women's self-esteem has been improving since they started working for money? Never mind that caring for our children is probably more important than any "paying" job. It acquired no wealth, so it wasn't valued.

We have made the mistake of letting an economic system, capitalism, become our value system. We became so focused on the ability to acquire material wealth that we let everything else go. Of course this didn't happen overnight. We never consciously said "Let's scrap all our moral values, all our ethics, and just see how much money we can make." It happened over time. And it happened primarily in this country.

We are all immigrants, really, except for the 0.8% that are Native American. Since our ancestors came from different countries, they had no common heritage, no common mythology to guide them as a society. Most of them arrived here in poverty, searching for a better life. The belief was that in America, the streets were paved with gold.

So the one common element became material wealth. The American Dream was to work hard and become rich. And capitalism is very effective at rewarding that behavior.

The problem is that capitalism only rewards one thing: the ability to make a profit. It doesn't reward love, it doesn't reward caring, it doesn't reward ethical behavior. It does not recognize internal values. Like any economic system, it only deals with the exchange of goods and services between economic units. The only time ethics are considered is when the lack of them becomes so offensive to a customer base that market share (profit) is lost. Then "ethics" are applied, but only to the point that market share is restored.

If you aren't in the game, you don't count. In fact, you are made to feel guilty if you aren't playing. You aren't fulfilling your "obligation to society." A poor person convicted of robbing a 7-11 is likely to go to jail, after which he will find it even more difficult to get a job. He will be excluded from the game.

On the other hand, if you are winning in the game, almost any transgression is forgiven. Michael Milken was reporting income of $60-80 million a year in 1986-87 while actually making $500 million through insider trading. After taking a brief "sabbatical" in a federal country-club facility, he is now teaching at Stanford.

The intrusion of economics into what should be our moral and ethical life can be clearly seen in the recent trend to evaluate proposed laws in terms of their economic impact. The issue is no longer one of right or wrong, the issue is the impact on profits.

3. Capitalism As A System of Ethics

The essence of capitalism is competition. Worshipping at the altar of the free market concept, the devotees of capitalism assure us that removing all laws regulating business behavior will solve all our problems. They invoke the name of Adam Smith, the patron saint of the free market.

In reality, Adam Smith did not advocate a totally free market. The market restrictions which he opposed were the protectionist trade tariffs of the time, which contributed a significant proportion of each nation's budget. He recognized the power of the market system, and he also recognized that an unregulated market system could well damage society. He felt that greed was a serious danger that had to be mitigated by proper mechanisms and structures, in order to achieve his primary goal of "universal opulence," a far cry from the increasingly unbalanced distribution of wealth which we are now experiencing.

The fact that capitalism has become our value system has led us to adopt competition as our model for all behavior. All our systems, from politics to sports to the legal system to business, are based on adversarial relationships. We do not approach a conflict with another person in a spirit of mediation, we go for the conquest. I win, you lose. I survive, you don't. As the saying goes in sports, a tie is like kissing your sister.

Some people would claim that this is a very natural model, based on the facts of Darwinian existence. Such competition improves the breed and will inevitably lead us to a better existence. But that application of natural selection is too extreme. In nature, animals only eat as much as they need to survive, and they rarely fight to the death among their own kind. They compete enough to establish a hierarchy, but no more, and the distinction between the top and bottom in that hierarchy is often quite small.

Only in mankind do we have examples of boundless greed. The accumulation of wealth is highly addictive, more so than any drug, and leads to even greater harm to the society. A heroin addict may steal a tv to feed his habit. A corporate executive may knowingly expose his employees (or customers) to materials that will kill them slowly and painfully, suppressing the evidence in order to preserve profits.

In the end this all-out competition will result in a fracturing of the structures of our society as we fail to cooperate on any level. We are seeing the beginnings of this now, from our fractured families to our fractured Congress. If we somehow survive the disintegration of our structures, we may devolve into a feudal society of a few ultra-rich surrounded by masses of peasants living on the edge of starvation, as was the case in the past. We will have thrown away hundreds of years of human development and many of our natural resources with it.

4. Is There Another Way?

The most recently proposed alternative to capitalism has been, of course, Marxism or communism. Karl Marx saw the abuses of capitalism and tried to address them by eliminating private property, a rather extreme solution. Even so, some of his tenets were ethically defensible. For example, "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need" says that everyone will contribute what they are capable of and each will have all his needs met. What more can we ask of any individual than to do what he or she can?

However, this approach was doomed to failure from the start because it didn't convince people that their needs would really be met. A Russian acquaintance of mine observed that communism was very good at redistributing wealth but it was very poor at creating more.

The root of greed is the fear that what we need may not always be there. Therefore we compete for food, shelter, etc. Why don't we compete for air? Air is more necessary to our survival than food or water. We can survive days without food or water; we will die in minutes without air. We don't compete for air because there appears to be an adequate supply (if we continue to pollute and simultaneously deforest the planet, this may not be true in the future).

So we start by competing for resources that may be scarce, using wealth as our storehouse. But the addiction sets in and we accumulate far more than we can possibly use. For example, why is Kirk Kerkorian, a 77-year-old billionaire, concerned because Chrysler isn't paying as much in dividends as he wants? Is he afraid he might run out of money? Unlikely. Is he afraid that if he quits playing the game he will be seen as having less value? Possibly. Is he simply addicted to the game? Probably. And since the only "ethical" system we have is capitalism, he sees nothing unethical in his behavior.

We need to adopt a new model for values, for our view of ourselves, that will allow us to meet our needs while discouraging behavior that is detrimental to the society as a whole. This model should emphasize cooperation, not competition. And it should see excessive accumulations of wealth as a detriment to the society, not something to be proud of.

Where would we find such a model? Does such a model even exist in nature or is it an impossible dream in a cold, cruel world?

Perhaps we should look at our bodies. The cells and organs of our bodies are specialized; they don't all contribute the same "value" to our quality of life. I have been getting by without my tonsils for over 40 years and seem none the worse for it. I think I could happily do without my appendix (many people do), but I would prefer to keep my legs, my sight, etc. And yet the heart pumps blood to all these parts regardless of perceived "value." My lungs process oxygen in and carbon dioxide out, without asking which cells are going to benefit from this action.

Doesn't seem very Darwinian to me, but it seems to work. It is the model for all of nature. Can we adopt such a model for our society? Might it work better than our current one?

It probably would, if we could get over the stumbling block of unfulfilled need. How do we convince ourselves that we can have our needs met under such a system? I don't think that is really necessary. All we need to do is recognize the fact that we are far more likely to achieve that goal under this model than under the current one. And as the current one causes more disintegration in our world, it shouldn't be a hard case to make.

Can such an ethical system coexist with capitalism? Yes, it can, but not with unrestricted capitalism. The excesses of capitalism run directly counter to such an ethical construct. I am not advocating the abolition of private property. Mankind may never evolve to that point. But just as we have always put limits on human behavior, outlawing murder and other crimes of violence, we need to establish limits on economic behavior. A cell that goes out of control and starts growing in an unrestricted fashion threatens the existence of the body. It is called "cancer" and it must be treated or the whole body will die.

Some will argue that we already have limits on economic behavior. My response is that we have a few laws governing specific business practices, but none on economic behavior. And until we start to base our actions on a value system other than capitalism, we will continue to suffer all the problems we see in our society.

Attempts to implement (or even discuss) such a new model will be met with strong resistance from the current "addicts." After all, they are benefiting from the current game and they have no will increase to the point where the ultra-wealthy will be vastly outnumbered. Such situations are not without precedent in history. Sometimes the result was a radical change in the role of government and taxation. Sometimes the result was violent revolution. While these may have effected a temporary redistribution of wealth, the underlying system was not changed, so the cycle simply began again.

I will not try to enumerate and rebut each individual objection that will be raised to such a proposal. If we keep in mind the true basis of capitalism, the objections should reveal their own hollowness. I don't know what steps will need to be taken to break the current addiction, but I believe it is imperative that we begin to see the world and ourselves in a new light.

Email me at "me@gordon-glasgow.org"