The Unpacking
I will now argue that the paradox that I described in the previous post (corporate-closed-ness) can be unpacked thus:
The corporate world with which we are all so familiar uses the openness that has enabled Western democracy to grow and flourish to firstly promote corporate closed-ness and then ensure that it prevails in our modern world.
I propose that it originated in Europe at the start of the Industrial Revolution – late 18th or early 19th centuries, and has been pursued vigorously, through our political, economic, social, educational and religious systems since then by those who had (and still have) most to gain from it.
This unpacking involves descriptions of what I believe corporate closed-ness to be, giving a few examples, so you will know what I mean.
Corporate closed-ness is the freedom, because of the amount of openness in our society and economy, that allows:
1. Giant multinational corporations draw up international trade agreements, so legalistic that they are almost impossible for ordinary people to understand, that give powers to corporations on a par with or even greater than powers that democratically elected representatives or public servants have.
2. Instant identification of a product through its logo – the logo being so familiar worldwide that it can be recognised by, for example, a person like me even if it is written in Cyrillic or Arabic characters. I don’t speak or read any of the Cyrillic languages, or Arabic but I still recognise the logos! Corporate closed-ness also exploits our love of the familiar or fear of the unknown, as we know that (for example in food and drink) certain brands taste the same all over the world.
3. A giant corporation to penetrate, with virtually unlimited marketing/promotion resources, the economy of a small country and swallow up indigenous companies that may be deemed to be competitors with little or no regard to the individuals or families affected by possible redundancies or the reduction in rights of workers that might follow such actions.
4. Ownership of vast media outlets, spanning print, radio, TV, satellite, internet etc. by commercial interests that very subtly but aggressively promote their own agenda – thereby reducing awareness of freedom of choice for listeners/viewers and consumers in general. (Awareness is the important word here).
5. The pollution of our planet to the extent that, approx. 40 years after it became proven scientific fact, little or nothing has been done about global warming which is threatening the very existence of humanity in our only home, Planet Earth.
——————————–
So, in an open democracy, while we are free to choose, our ability to choose that which is good for individual, family, community and society is severely curtailed by the power of the corporate world to the extent that we don’t feel free to change that which we would like to change.
The corporate world promotes the belief that we have virtually infinite choice – and while in theory we do, in reality we don’t seem to exercise that choice for human-kind’s (which ultimately is our own, and our children’s) long-term benefit.
Part of the reason for this is what is good for us is not generally good for profit for the small number of people at the top who benefit from corporate closed-ness – as will become clear from the paragraphs below.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Examples
It is always good to give a few examples of something abstract to illustrate how it shows itself to us, and I will chose some examples of what I consider to be corporate closed-ness.
Consider, in respect of 1 to 5 below, whether these examples harm rather than benefit humanity in respect of our long-term health and overall well-being, and/or who really benefits, we, the ordinary people or the top tier of the corporate world.
1. World Sport: Sport is universally thought to be good for us – so I’ll spend a little time discussing the corporate aspect of it.
Since its very early days professional sport has been used by the corporate world to promote its products. However, the amount of money that changed hands was relatively human scale until the arrival of TV. (I will attribute this term to Kirkpatrick Sale, who wrote a book many years ago entitled Human Scale – a very interesting book on how to construct the world so that ordinary people will feel part of it).
The certainty of reaching global audiences of millions, or tens of millions, or nowadays even billions of consumers encouraged corporate sponsors to pour more and more money into sport to the level that it is at now. Almost all sports, even our own amateur hurling and football, now depend on commercial sponsorship for their very existence.
Particularly immoral (in my opinion anyway) is the sponsorship of activities that are good for the health of children and young people by companies that promote activities that cause devastation to families, such as drinking alcohol and gambling and the fact that Governments who have responsibility for protection of children do nothing about it. As far as I am aware, and to their credit, sponsorship by alcohol companies has been discontinued by the GAA. It would be great if other sports organisations followed suit.
2. The Motor Car: (I admit you have you be very open-minded to consider this one – but I’ll have a go anyway because as a cyclist it is a bit of a special interest of mine).
The human race got on fine without the motor car for thousands of years. Now, a short 120 years after its invention, it would be almost impossible to imagine a world without it. The combined corporate worlds of oil, steel, rubber and the motor industry itself have been hugely successful in exploiting our desire for comfort and convenience to market products that are highly dangerous to life both directly (car accidents) and indirectly (pollution that threatens our existence).
The motor car must be one of the greatest successes of corporate closed-ness ever!
Why?
Cars have destroyed the quality of lives of billions of people throughout the world in many different ways – undermining the integrity of towns and villages, destroying our clean air, causing gridlock (see below), raising anxiety, harming health and turning vast tracts of land into sterile tarmac. Building motorways and highways to accommodate car travel costs Governments far, far more, in the long run, than the equivalent public transport would cost. And we are happy to allow car manufacturers to make cars that can travel at more than 200 kmph despite the fact that there are an estimated 1,250,000 people killed on the world’s roads every year – more than all wars, epidemics, natural disasters, other transport accidents, and all other accidents combined. (Imagine if a virus was doing this)?
Gridlock (and the usual solution to it) is a phenomenon that might help us in our understanding of how successful the combined industries have been in their pursuit of corporate closed-ness. It happens because too many cars want to travel on, or through roads and junctions that are too small. The solution to gridlock (in Ireland anyway) is almost always to build bigger roads and wider junctions. If someone suggested that instead of spending billions building bigger roads we spent a tiny fraction of those billions designing our cities and towns around cycling and public transport (say building sheltered, nicely designed cycle lanes and a wide variety of cheap and frequent buses) they would not be taken that seriously.
Then we would be dealing with the root causes of gridlock (poorly designed response to the challenge of moving large numbers of people relatively short distances) rather than the proximate cause (too many motor vehicles using roads that are too small).
Why is the common-sense, cheaper option rarely if ever chosen? Is it because of:
The paradox of being human, (that is, the self-destructive quirk in our psyche where we always seem to harm that which could be of benefit to us), or, our planners/politicians bending to the will of powerful vested corporate interests.
3. Obesity in Children: About 10 giant corporations control the world food and beverage industry. They have virtually unlimited resources to push a high-sugar diet on children (and adults too of course). When countries try to impose restrictions on the promotion of foodstuffs that are bad for us the corporations spend tens of millions fighting for their right to poison us with sugar so that they can make more profit.
In a stark example of corporate closed-ness we now have a huge multi-billion industry promoting foods and beverages that makes us fatter and unhealthier and another huge multi-billion industry promoting various health foods, vitamins, supplements etc. that make us thinner and healthier!
Successive governments in developed countries have not managed to face down the power of the confectionery and sugar-drinks industry to protect our children’s health.
This would be a relatively simple thing to do – and would save the exchequer zillions in health costs that are downstream of the detrimental effects of a high sugar diet in childhood.
As I said about the points system in a previous post, Governments could easily ban advertising of sugar-based foods, and even ban the sale of some of them that are particularly high in sugar to protect our children.
And, while I’m on about food, is it not very interesting that it is only since bottled water became a consumer product that drinking a lot of water, sipping away all day, became beneficial to health. I’m not a nutritionist or doctor but surely drinking water when we’re not thirsty must be bad for us. When I was young we drank water from a tap when we were thirsty. And I have no memory of people being encouraged to do it.
Getting back to sugar, given the well-proven addictive nature of sugar-based foods, and the harm that they do to our health, I often wonder what the sugar industry has that the heroin industry doesn’t!
4. Violence in Society: Very relevant to this website is the increase of violence in our society over the past 50 years. The reasons for this increase are varied and complex, and are rooted in many different societal and cultural factors. One causative factor is the increase in violence on TV (and, latterly in games and other media played on what we nowadays call devices).
The corporate world of film and TV know what they are doing all right – they have been softening us up over many decades, pushing out the boundaries of the level of graphic, gratuitous violence that is acceptable on screen, knowing that we will watch it over and over again, as they pull in higher and higher fees for advertising more corporate products – all the while potentially harming our children.
If you have any doubt about the link between continual exposure to violence, and the incidence of violence in society, an interesting book to read would be ‘On Killing’ by Dave Grossman, whose research directly links exposure of children to violence in the media and the willingness of soldiers to kill in war.
Governments who have referendums on protecting children and bringing in mandatory reporting do absolutely nothing about this except (totally ineffective) encouragement of TV stations to put on programmes that contain explicit violence later in the evening, or ban children under certain ages from going to certain films.
6. The Military Industrial Complex: Finally, this is arguably the most harmful example of corporate closed-ness of all. I will not describe it in this post because I devote three posts to it in a later Sub-Chapter starting with this one.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
I propose that the ultimate aim of corporate closed-ness is to get us to part with money to buy things we don’t need with money we don’t (really) have, to keep us permanently in debt, and therefore insecure, and that, (to borrow a phrase from some reading that I’ve been doing) that ‘invention becomes the mother of necessity’ instead of the other way around. (I came across this phrase in a thought provoking and stimulating book by Jared Diamond entitled Guns, Germs and Steel. Well worth reading if you are interested in the history of exploitation, colonisation and similar matters).
Another book (a bit older) ‘The Growth Illusion’ by Richard Douthwaite, is also worth reading if you are interested in the obsession that the modern economic world has with gross domestic product, inflation, economic growth, and such matters, at the expense of ordinary people’s well-being.
Richard thoughtfully challenges us to think beyond the world of economics and focus instead on what is real wealth – i.e. those matters which contribute to quality of life rather than quantities of consumer items sold.