A friend sent me a private email protesting my characterization of Monsanto employees as people who think of themselves as good guys. I remember writing this, but I can't find it in the most recent Monsanto post. I must have deleted it. BUT I do remember writing it. My motivations were twofold (at least). I said that because an old friend, a member of my writers group in St. Louis worked as an underling at Monsanto. I don't remember exactly what his job was, but at that point Monsanto wasn't yet in the seed business: it was (and still is) in the making really dangerous chemicals business. He made an effort to make clear he wasn't involved in the Agent Orange, etc. stuff. He also talked about kids and mortgages and health insurance and so forth. This is what I think a lot of people who are not the bosses think about. I imagine in times when it is hard to get jobs, hard to transfer jobs, hard to uproot, hard to sacrifice a pension, people will say to themselves, "But I'm a good guy. AND I don't work in the bad areas." BUT that is almost beside the point. Here I would like to modify what I said. I think Monsanto bosses and owners and stock owners have plenty of self-justification which probably has little to do with thinking they are good guys. But I don't imagine they think they are bad guys, either. Some of the things I imagine they believe might include:
- I deserve what I get.
- It's a dog-eat-dog world.
- It's all about the bottom line.
- They deserve what they get.
- I'm better than most people.
- Most people aren't as human/worthy as I am.
- I don't understand other people's claims that they suffer because of what I do. If they do, it's their own fault.
- Capitalism (the free market system, whatever) is the greatest system in the world and it exists in the greatest country in the world and I am a champion in this world.
It seems to me that people who rise to the top in our ruthless environment can only do it because they have ruthless personalities that fit beautifully with the current dominant ideology.
In the world of the West, especially the US, our national ideology has not only enabled but elevated ruthless activity as if it was a supreme good. This ideology makes for the conversion into enemies of people who stand for the true common good.
It has created a peculiar group of measures of success in virtually all areas of public life leading to and justifying social and environmental harm that I believe is as profound as any caused by more conventional corruption. Since it has so permeated our society, it is hard to figure out how to combat it.
It is all the more important to do so today because damage caused by its beneficiaries and advocates can spread so rapidly and so profoundly: for instance, Monsanto's seeds permeate the planet along with its power to disrupt local cultures, livelihoods and environments.
Some of the values that make up this ideology include notions such as:
- Maximum profit is the greatest good.
- Efficiency trumps everything in just about everything. A particular and peculiar example: the stripping-down of work places of anything management thinks of as distracting, including windows.
- Human beings' welfare is secondary to corporate efficiency and profit-making.
- One can evaluate the success of any undertaking in terms of "the bottom line" and the business methods which improve this.
- People can be seen as socioeconomic units.
It's as if forgotten is the fact that economic activity is for improving the lives of people, not that the lives of people exist to maximize the money-making aspects of economic activity.
Some of the institutions and fields that have been dramatically affected by free market fundamentalism and its language and methods include:
- Health care
- Universities
- Religious institutions
- The military
- Government civilian services including, among others, transportation, postal services, and tax collection.
- School systems and their curricula and measures of success.
It's not that services shouldn't be run efficiently and well, it's that they are not necessarily doing what they're supposed to be doing when they have to try to make a profit. Some services serve society best when they don't make a profit, quite a surprise to some.
So basically I think we face the necessity of challenging our current basic national values in order to address the problems of our society and our environment and our planet.
Since people hold these beliefs more strongly the more they benefit from them, it is hard to figure out how to do this. I think yelling isn't working. I also think maybe efforts to chip away at the business model in medicine may prove a good start. To this end, here are links to two posts by physicians which do just this. You can find more on the blog and on the web.
This first link leads to an article by Philip Caper, MD which gives an excellent short history of the change in medicine from non-profit to profit-making. The second, by a physician named Marya Zilberg challenges forcefully the suitability of a business model for medicine. My father, as I've mentioned before, was a physician who would be absolutely horrified at the idea of medicine as a for-profit business.
Perhaps through a close look at health care, we can start to remember our humanity.