Corporations Are Not Humans ; Not Even Close ---- Episode 51

                         THE ECOLOGICAL REVOLUTION
                                            (continuation)

    As a philosophy of science, materialistic monism made possible the scientific and technological accomplishments of the scientific industrial era. As a philosophy of life deeply embedded in modern culture, it has led us to the brink of self-destruction, because it leads so naturally to the embrace of Hobbesian values that alienate us from any higher meaning or purpose.  Having embraced material self-indulgence as our purpose, an appeal to limit indulgence in the interest of economic justice or concern for future generations becomes a call to sacrifice the only thing that gives life meaning. It follows, as corporate libertarians sometimes maintain, that it is most rational for those who have the financial means to continue to enjoy the party for so long as it lasts. If they sacrifice these pleasures and the environmentalists are ultimately proved wrong, they will have sacrificed their reason for living to no end. If the environmentalists are proved right and the party ends in self-destruction, then at least they enjoyed it while they could. 
  Materialistic monism also prepared the way for an economics that, intent on achieving the status of a true science, embraced market prices, which can be observed and measured, as the sole arbiter of human values. It is impossible to understand or explain more than purely habitual human behavior without addressing the values, loyalties, aspirations, love, psychological conflicts, altruism, spirituality, conscience, and even metaphysical beliefs that inform them. Although central to our experience and well-being, they are often difficult to observe, let alone measure. Thus, as science defines itself, the term social science is a contradiction, because we lack the means to directly observe or measure many of the most important "causes" of social behavior. 
   This presses the social scientist to either redefine the prescriptions of scientific inquiry to fit the human reality or strip human beings of the qualities that make us truly human. Intent on achieving the stature of a science,economists chose the latter by postulating a hypothetical, economic man who mechanistically seeks only his own pleasure, defined in terms of measurable economic gain. Whenever a model requires a human decision maker---irrespective of gender---the economist thus substitutes the imaginary, decidedly non-human, economic man, who evaluates every choice on the basis of its financial return. 
   Having eliminated the human, economists then eliminated the behavior. Finding the interactions among people too hopelessly complex and difficult to measure, economists chose to observe the behavior of markets rather than the behavior of people. Market behavior involves prices and flows of money, which are more easily observed and measured. 
   Since a science must be objective and value-free, economics chose to reduce all values to market values as revealed in market price. Thus air, water, and other essentials of life provided freely by nature are treated as valueless, until scarcity and privatization render them marketable. By contrast, gold and diamonds, which have almost no use in sustaining life, are valued highly. The value of a human life is arrived at by calculating a person's lifetime earning potential or "economic contribution." As a cynic once accurately noted, "Economists know the price of everything and the value of nothing." 

   Contemporary philosopher Jacob Needleman suggests that, "In other times and places, not everyone has wanted money above all else ; people have desired salvation, beauty, power, strength, propriety, explanations, food, adventure, conquest, comfort. But now and here, money---is what everyone wants." Why does modern society choose to define itself and its values solely in terms of a quest for money ---a simple number of no intrinsic value ?At first it seems one of the most curious puzzles of our time, until the realization dawns that in a modern monetized society survival itself depends on having money. In the words of Joe Dominguez and Vicki Robin, in their New York Times best seller Your Money or Your Life, money becomes "something we all too often don't have, which we struggle to get, and on which we come to pin our hopes of power, happiness, security, acceptance, success, fulfillment, achievement and personal worth."
   Having accepted our dependence on money to meet our survival needs and constantly bombarded by advertising messages, we easily slip into a pattern of looking to money to provide us with a sense of achievement, identity, acceptance, worth, and meaning---forgetting the simple reality that only forgeries of the real thing are for sale. The real thing must be earned by investing ourselves in loving relationships, being good friends and neighbors, living by ethical principles, and developing and engaging our abilities in ways that contribute to the life of the community. 

   But marketing experts surround us with a different cultural message. They don't sell laundry soap ; they sell acceptance, achievement, and personal worth.  They don't sell automobiles ; they sell power, freedom, and success ---the opportunity to feel alive, connected, and free --- that which we really want. To buy what the markets offer, we need money. As Dominguez and Robin explain : 

     Money is something we choose to trade our life energy for. . . Our allotment of time here on earth, the hours of precious life available to us. When we go to our jobs,we are trading our life energy for money. This truth, while simple, is profound.