Nothing beyond the profit motive or self-interest?

I think I have been to Whole Foods stores three times.  Maybe only twice.  Even those trips were only because of the unique circumstances in a city that I was visiting.  A few months ago, a Whole Foods store opened in town; I don't go anywhere near it.

The founder of that business, John Mackey, has always interested me though.  Because, he seemed to offer a political vision through his business.  A libertarian, Mackey articulated his socio-business philosophy in Conscious Capitalism.  In a blog-post on this more than four years ago, I quoted from an essay:

In Conscious Capitalism: Liberating the Heroic Spirit of Business, Mackey and his co-author, Raj Sisodia, make a case that businesses are at their best when reaching for a higher purpose that ranges far beyond any simplistic notions of the profit motive or self-interest.

The business as a higher purpose that is "far beyond any simplistic notions of the profit motive or self-interest."  This is why even the anti-libertarian limousine-liberals embraced Whole Foods.

Mackey has now sold his business to Amazon, whose socio-business philosophy does not have anything "far beyond any simplistic notions of the profit motive or self-interest."

After initial enthusiasm for Amazon, I have been trying to avoid buying anything through that behemoth.  Because, it is a ruthless business that couldn't care about anything other than to be the biggest and baddest of them all.  I have been increasingly worried about its tentacles into various aspects of life--the more a person shops at Amazon, the more the big-data driven profile of that customer.  My data becomes their dollars, and I am their raw material!  I way prefer to keep my preferences about books and rice-cookers away from those businesses.

And then my worries about the worker-bees at Amazon.

Amazon’s grand proclamations, on the other hand, tend to focus on domi­nation, not on providing any sort of abstract benefit to society outside the lowering of prices and the delivery of goods. The company has never put forth a rosy vision of the future of service labor. Amazon warehouse work is hard, often subcontracted and kept out of sight of consumers. According to a 2015 investigation by The Times, even at the corporate office, the work culture is unapologetically ruthless.

Ruthless is the word!

It is not merely the contemporary situation that Amazon that worries me.  Nope.  What really worries me is that Amazon might be the model as we rapidly enter into a future service economy, in which most humans become easily replaceable workers in a ruthless business environment that helps a very,  very few accumulate all the benefits.

Amazon’s attitude toward labor is emblematic of the culture it grew out of — and an augur of the service economy that’s on the rise today. Other tech companies, in particular platforms like Uber and TaskRabbit, have helped regular consumers grow comfortable with a software-mediated system wherein jobs are sliced into an endless series of assignments, with compensation negotiated wordlessly, instantly and without room for a second thought. Even Starbucks — once a champion of compassionate capitalism — recently began experimenting with pitiless automated scheduling software to assign shifts, before backing off after public outcry.

Yep, it is for these very reasons I have not ever used Uber either.

I wish more people thought about these rapid transformations.  But, apparently most humans do not care for anything "beyond any simplistic notions of the profit motive or self-interest." Even the uber-religious evangelicals who voted for a horrible human being, despite the message of selflessness from Jesus himself!

We are screwed!

What’s in this for me?

I went to graduate school after an undergraduate program in engineering,  An undergraduate program that was devoid of any formal thinking about the humanities and the social sciences.  Come to think of it, I am surprised that the university admitted me to graduate school and, more shockingly, gave me money to come and study!

It was a vast amount of ground to cover--from getting introduced to various ideas with which many were already familiar to even learning how to write.  Keep in mind that this was before the days of the Web--no Wikipedia or Google to help out.

As a former commie sympathizer, I hadn't paid a great deal of attention to selfishness.  The political philosophical discussions, especially in what Robert Nozick offered, were fascinating.  It was in one of those contexts that another graduate student, who was ahead of me in the PhD pipeline, talked about how material incentives worked better than moral incentives did.  The virtue of selfishness.

Over the last thirty years, it has been a struggle for me to understand this fundamental aspect of how we people function as individuals and as groups: What can drive us to do the right thing?

David Brooks writes about it in his latest column:

To simplify, there are two lenses people can use to see any situation: the economic lens or the moral lens.
When you introduce a financial incentive you prompt people to see their situation through an economic lens. Instead of following their natural bias toward reciprocity, service and cooperation, you encourage people to do a selfish cost-benefit calculation. They begin to ask, “What’s in this for me?”

When I think, read, and write about the human condition and empathy--like in the post yesterday--I am convinced that unless there is an innate, humane, moral prompting, we will not be able to create a heaven right here on earth.  Economic incentives that manipulate us into doing the right thing will always turn out be not enough--as kids, we might do the chores for a buck, and then the buck does not feel enough and we ask for more.  As adults, if we are guided only by economic incentives, then we begin to ask for more and more.  As Brooks notes:

Imagine what would happen to a marriage if both people went in saying, “I want to get more out of this than I put in.” The prospects of such a marriage would not be good.

But, society has even operationalized that through the marriage prenup.  Unlike what Frank Sinatra sang, love and marriage do not apparently go together like a horse and carriage!  

Whether you are a teacher serving students or a soldier serving your country or a clerk who likes your office mates, the moral motivation is much more powerful than the financial motivations. Arrangements that arouse the financial lens alone are just messing everything up.

Yes, the self-interest based arrangements are messing everything up.  I do not mean to suggest that the world has become awful, and I bet neither does Brooks.  Plenty of measures--from life expectancy to peace to prosperity--will easily show us that we live in much better times than in the past.  But, there is something missing in all that.  Happiness, contentment, empathy, and all those aspects of the human condition do not seem to be around as much as I would like to see.  More than ever before, people seem to be constantly searching for happiness and contentment, without realizing that these come from the long-neglected moral motivations, and do not result from selfishness.  Empathy, of course, is all about the other, which requires us to minimize the self-interest.

At the end of it all, one thing is clear: The answers to these are not easy.  If only more people will think about all these, instead of madly rushing around propelled by their selfishness.

Steinbeck is not the Saint of Sardines?

Only a few pages into the final one in my deep reads for this summer and I am left wondering why I hadn't read The log from the Sea of Cortez before and why it had to be in the final third of my life.  I suppose there is always a time for everything!

Keep in mind that the book first came out in 1941 when you read the following lines:

In time of peace in the modern world, if one is thoughtful and careful, it is rather more difficult to be killed or maimed in the outland places of the globe than it is in the streets of our great cities ...

It was just before World War II snagged the US also.  Since then, as Steve Pinker has documented, life has never been so peaceful.  The number who die in the US every year from gunshots and automobile accidents is vastly greater than the number who died on that fateful 9/11. One would, therefore, think that people will worry about the death and violence in their own backyards, so to speak.   Yet, we don't worry about our streets and our homes!  In a post a couple of days ago, I, yet again, expressed my disappointment that people do not seem to be want to spend time and effort on more pressing questions and complained about the supremacy of entertainment in our lives.  But then this human behavior is not anything new.  Steinbeck writes in the context of fishing and fishermen:

Hitler marched into Denmark and into Norway, France had fallen, the Maginot Line was lost--we didn't know it, but we knew the daily catch of every boat within four hundred miles.  It was simply a directional thing; a man has only so much. ...
This was not a matter of ignorance on their part, but of intensity.  All the directionalism of thought and emotion that man was capable of went into sardine-fishing; there wasn't room for anything else.

There is only so much that we can be bothered about.  As many students have often commented, while they fully understand that the issues and ideas that I bring to their attention are urgent and important, well, they are maxed out.  It is not that they are ignorant nor are they apathetic; according to them, there isn't room for anything else in their lives.

Of course, if everybody went about doing their own thing, then the world could be a better place.  However, the question is whether all our thought and emotion that we are capable of is dharma.  Or, as Spike Lee put it, "do the right thing."  But, we don't always do the right thing.

All the energy and emotion into fishing led to the collapse of the fishing industry in Stenibeck's own backyard.  That intensity and emotion hit even harder, resulting in this a few months ago, in early spring:

Federal regulators on Wednesday approved an early closure of commercial sardine fishing off Oregon, Washington and California to prevent overfishing.
The decision was aimed at saving the West Coast sardine fishery from the kind of collapse that led to the demise of Cannery Row, made famous by John Steinbeck’s novel of the same name set in Monterey, Calif.

Source

Of course, what happens to sardines is not restricted to sardines alone:

“We have been seeing the impacts of a collapsing sardine population on sea lions and seabirds for years now,” said Ben Enticknap, Pacific campaign manager and senior scientist with Oceana.“Sardine are also prey for recreationally and commercially important species like Chinook salmon and albacore tuna, so the effects of a lack of sardine could have much wider impacts.”

The virtue of selfishness and self-interest, which is the cornerstone in an economic system that has a global appeal, comes with its downside as well because doing the right thing is not about self-interest.  Dharma requires us to make room in our lives for more than the singular directionalism to which we direct all our energy and emotion. Not even the Saint of Sardines can convince a few more people and a few more students about all these, right?

Snake-charming Indians we are not!

"Did you see that snake on the road?" I asked.

We had taken a country-road, a back road, instead of the highway.  After the tasty picnic-lunch by the lakeshore, when exiting I saw a board that indicated this other approach to the destination.  Of course, I was immediately tempted to take that route instead of driving on the freeway.  But, not driving alone meant that I had to poll the rest and factor in their views.  Damn this democracy! ;)

Every once in a while, democratic approaches do yield good, and correct, results.  The people agreed. We were off on the country road.

The pleasure of driving slowly, on a sunny pleasant day, in a setting with scenic views, far exceeds anything to be gained by speeding along with the masses.  Taking in things slowly, we notice the world around us that we certainly would not otherwise.  And even then, it all depends on where we are and what our window is to the world.  I had the front seat view, which gave me a perspective that was different from the passenger in the rear looking out on the sides.  It is a wonderful metaphor, by itself, on why our respective takes on various aspects of life also differs, right?

Thus, I saw the snake on the ground that the rest did not.  I am sure there were plenty that they could have observed that I would have missed out on.

None of the other four in the car had noticed the snake.  I had to show them that, even though I have an intense dislike for snakes.   I hate them.

A quick u-turn.

"It is in the middle of the road. Do you see that there?  Maybe a vehicle already has gone over it and it is dead now" I said as we watched from the safe shoulder space by the road.

And then it slithered.  Damn creepy it was!

As vehicles rushed by, the snake, which was smack in the middle of the road, seemed to want to get away from the danger to its life.  Of course; it is about survival. That instinct to survive which is in all of us.

The snake hating crowd we were, well, we started to worry about the snake.  We saw how one wrong move and it would be dead.  We started yelling loudly and were even shouting out instructions to the snake on where it should go, fully knowing we were of no help at all.

The snake, meanwhile, hissed at the passing vehicles.  The head often rose up and angled as if it wanted to bite the potential attacker.

The tension in all of us was way more than what we had bargained for.  It was clear that we did not want to witness the impending gory death.  Another u-turn and we were on the road again to enjoy the pleasant afternoon.

"Is there anything that we can do to help the snake?" asked one.

"I'm sure it is roadkill by now" I said.  "Every other week, I seem to see a dead deer by the roadside when I drive to campus.  This is what happens when we humans invade their territories."

We build roads.
Construct dams.
Dig up the soil.
We do everything in order to pursue our self-interest.
Roadkills are in plenty, literally and metaphorically.
If only there were a better way for that pursuit of happiness!

Self-interest and collective outcomes. Morals from old Indian stories.

Most of the stories that I read back when I was a kid had what was referred to then as "the moral of the story."  In the elementary schooling years, we even had to write specifically about "the moral of the story."  Thus, the story of the milkmaid who daydreams away only to trip and fall and spill the milk might have a bottom-line guidance of stay focused on the task and quit the wishful thinking.  Aesop's Fables that we read, of course, had moral guidelines as well.

We also read a number of "Indian" stories.  Often they featured benevolent kings who tried to shape good behavior among the subjects.  In one story, a king (was it Vikramaditya?) gets pissed off (ok, that was not the language used in the story) that people are lazy and selfish, especially when doing something for the common good.

So, the king devises an experiment in order to teach them a lesson.  In the dead of the night, he has a hole dug in the main thoroughfare, buries precious jewels, and covers that with a huge boulder.  The obstacle in the middle of the road would be a nuisance but one person alone would not be able to move that boulder.  A few people would have to get together and remove that.  If they did, on their own out of the goodness of their hearts in order to help others, then, of course, they would then see the jewels buried there, which would become their reward as well.

It turns out that the king's view was confirmed.  His people went around the boulder, all the while complaining about it.  Selfish as his subjects were, they did not want to pool their strength and get rid of the rock that was inconveniencing everybody, including themselves.

So, yes, the moral of the story was all about how unity is strength and that cooperation is better than selfishness.

Decades after studying that in the elementary school curriculum, and after formal explorations into understanding self-interest and collective outcomes, I now wonder if that story says a lot more about India than I would have otherwise thought.

It is a land where, to a large extent, there hasn't been a long and sustained history of powerful individuals or institutions compelling people to behave in a certain manner.

Hinduism's gazillion gods mean that unlike with the Judeo-Christian traditions, there is no possibility of a hierarchical institution that shaped people's behaviors.  Even within different regions, there wasn't any continuous dynastic powerful monarchies that shaped human behavior. And, in the modern era, the democracy there permits a great deal of pursuit of narrow self-interest in many ways.

Thus, there has never been a fear of god, or fear of the king, or a fear of the state, employed as a tool to shape human behavior in order to attain targeted collective outcomes.  Therefore, even following the rule is not a part of the Indian psyche, leave alone coming together to do something good for all?

Nothing comparable to the phenomenally evil and powerful ways in which the Catholic church enforced rules. Nothing comparable to how Russia's rulers or the murderous Soviet system enforced rules. Nothing comparable to the centuries of Chinese social organization in which monarchs have simply been replaced by the Party.

In the absence of a compelling reason of a fear of a greater power, are we humans more likely than not to behave in ways that only furthers our own self-interests, perhaps even by flouting the rules, and even if that means that there will be inconveniences for all including our own selves?