Corporations Are Not Humans : Not Even Close --- Episode 55

                                                        THE GOOD LIFE

   By organizing societies around the pursuit of material gratification, we have made a virtue of social dysfunction and diminished the quality of our living. Humans are complex creatures. We have a demonstrated capacity for hatred, violence, competition, and greed. We have as well a demonstrated capacity for love, tenderness, cooperation, and compassion. Healthy societies nurture the latter and in so doing create an abundance of those things that are most important to the quality of our living. Dysfunctional societies nurture the former and in so doing create scarcity and deprivation. A healthy society makes it easy to live in balance with one another, whereas a dysfunctional society makes it nearly impossible. 
   Whether we organize our societies for social and environmental health or for dysfunction is our choice. To a considerable degree, it is a choice between organizing for the human interest and organizing for the corporate interest. By devoting ourselves to creating societies that enhance the quality of our living rather than the quantity of our consumption, we move simultaneously toward sustainability and a better life for everyone.  What are the possibilities ?

               CARING FAMILIES AND COMMUNITIES 

Although a competitive instinct forms an important part of our nature, there is substantial evidence that competition is a subtheme to the more dominant theme of bonding, caring, and cooperation. As with all species that depend on social bonding for their survival, humans evolved to belong and cooperate as well as to compete. According to cultural anthropologist Mary Clark : 

     The early human species could not have survived without the expanded social bonding beyond parent and offspring needed to protect helpless human infants --- a job that mothers alone could not accomplish. Social bonding to one's group was a biological necessity --- for adults as well as infants. 

Things haven't really changed so much. Social bonding is as essential to the healthy functioning of a modern society as it was to more traditional or tribal societies. Harvard University political scientist Robert Putnam refers to the bonding that characterizes a strong civil society as "social capital" and has shown its importance in a study of local government effectiveness in Italy. 
   Beginning in 1970, Italy created twenty regional governments. Their formal structures were identical. There were dramatic differences, however, in the social, economic, political, and cultural context in which these structures were planted. The localities ranged "from the pre-industrial to the post-industrial, from the devoutly Catholic to the ardently Communist, from the inertly feudal to the frenetically modern." In some localities, the new government structures were "inefficient, lethargic, and corrupt." In others, they were dynamic and effective, "creating innovative day care programs and job training centers, promoting investment and economic development, pioneering environmental standards and family clinics." 
   Professor Putnam found only one set of indicators that consistently differentiated those localities in which government worked from those in which it didn't. These were indicators of a strong and active civil society, as measured by "voter turnout, newspaper readership, membership in choral societies and literary clubs, Lions Clubs, and soccer clubs." Localities high on these indicators had what Professor Putnam called a highly developed social capital. Rich networks of nonmarket relationships built a general sense of trust and reciprocity that increased the efficiency of human relationships. 

We have given too little attention to the importance of social capital to the healthy functioning of societies and rarely consider the impact of economic structures and policies on its formation or depletion. How about your community ? Does it contain small local shops run by merchants you know by name, or only on mega-shopping malls and large retail chain outlets that send their profits elsewhere ? Is there a thriving farmers' market where you can get to know the people who produce your food, or only a supermarket selling food imported from thousands of mies away ? Are farms small, individually owned, and family operated, or are they controlled by huge corporate enterprises and worked mainly by itinerant landless laborers ? Do people devote their free time to Little League baseball, community gardens, local theater, community choirs, community centers, and school boards, or to watching commercial TV ? Are there credit cooperatives and local banks, or only branches of large urban banks that package local deposits into loans to international hedge funds ? Do residents consider the area their permanent home, or are working and professional people largely itinerant ? Are productive assets owned locally or by distant corporations ? Are local forests harvested selectively and sustainably by local firms to provide materials for local industry ? Or are they being stripped bare by huge global corporations that export the raw timber to distant lands ?
   The answers to such questions are powerful predictors of the sense of dignity, freedom, responsibility, prosperity, and security of local people and the extent to which relationships are characterized by trust, sharing, and cooperation. 

                        UNDEVELOPING THE SUSTAINERS 

Some 80 percent of environmental damage is caused by 20 percent of the world's population ---1.1 billion overconsumers. These are people who organize their lives around cars, meat-based diets, and the use of prepackaged and disposable products. Meanwhile, another 20 percent of the world's people live in absolute deprivation. However, there is another point that is generally neglected : roughly 60 percent of the world's people are presently meeting most of their basic needs in relatively sustainable ways. As members of the world's sustainer class, they travel by bicycle and public service transport ; eat healthy diets of grains, vegetables, and some meat ; buy few prepackaged goods ; and recycle most of their wastes. Although their lifestyles do not correspond to our vision of consumer affluence, neither do they evoke a vision of hardship, and in a properly organized society such lifestyles can be richly satisfying.