Societal “efficiency”.

Before you begin reading, be warned – this post is likely to disturb you.  It certainly did me, proof of which is in how I wrote it over ten weeks ago and simply could not bring myself to post it – it just felt so “wrong” in how it raised questions about things I’d previously held sacrosanct, and therefore above question.  In the weeks that followed its writing, I’ve expanded my thinking to consider other things which had previously escaped my scrutiny for similar reasons – you know, the things that are so obvious we don’t even need to think about them…  The results of those troubling thoughts begin below and will continue into further posts, as I find the energy to write and release them. And now, the first troubling post.

Corporations aren’t interested in people, they’re interested in profits.

In this post, I’ll discuss the three revelations that prompted this thought.

On my morning commute, during which I drop off my two youngest kids at school, we sometimes talk about odd things.  I say sometimes, because my son, like the vast majority of teenagers, is not a “morning person” – so most mornings we talk very little.

On this particular day we discussed the operation of garbage trucks.  The conversation began with me commenting on how impressive the claw hands on its side were.  This led into a reflection of when garbage trucks were operated by a driver and two or three men on the rear who manually picked up the trash and dumped it into the truck.  Turns out that impressive claw on the side of the truck eliminated several jobs.

A bit further into the trip we came up behind a school bus.  Since we seldom see school buses in the morning, I commented on this.  My kids put me straight – we were running a couple of minutes earlier than normal.  This led into talk of summer break, and how bus route planning happens.  I explained that schools spend a small fortune on bus routing software that has a single intent – the elimination of buses by consolidating, and thereby eliminating bus routes.  This efficiency brings substantial savings by eliminating vehicles and their drivers.

The third revelation came after I’d dropped our kids at school and my thoughts turned to work, which had been horribly busy the entire week.  I’ve been working at the same company for seven years – when I joined there were seven full time techs. Over that same seven years I’ve seen our department slashed to three – yet we support the same number of customers we did seven years ago.  Incredible improvements in efficiency, right?  Wrong.

The three “corporations” in this post are the privately owned waste removal company, the school systems of the USA, and the small company (less than 50 employees) for which I work, of which there are hundreds of thousands across the USA.  All of these entities reveal the same ethical sub-standards – kill jobs in the interest of efficiency.

Have the people stripped of their livelihoods improved their lot in life?  I ran into the first engineer who lost his job about a year later – he was still looking for a new position. So, not only do the people lose their income, many of them are stripped of their dignity as well.  In my opinion that’s an even more devastating blow to their self-worth.  How many people do you know who take pride in knowing the work they once did has been relegated to a machine, or deemed so valueless they’re simply not needed since the post they lost has never been replaced?

About now I’m sure you’re thinking (as I did when writing this post) that all of those people could improve their lot. Why they can study, get further qualifications, and do bigger and better things!  That apparently laudable thought has some flaws.

The first is that it assumes the displaced people are somehow inferior, and can “do better”.  Think about that for a moment.  Precisely what makes someone who works in an office better than someone who works with their hands?  Where did that strange little misconception arise? {By the way, before you ask the pointed question, I work in an office at work, and with my hands at home.}

Another flaw is how it assumes all people want to improve, with the generally accepted definition of “improve” being… making more money.  More money grants them access to more things, and if they don’t want more things… well there must be something wrong with them.  How and when did the inherent value of greed as a worthy and desirable character trait come into existence?  {There is a post on that subject somewhere else on my blog.}

Possibly the most damaging flaw in the “everyone can improve” logic is how it assumes society is a stratified place comprised of layers and levels – kind of like a pyramid.  You start life on the bottom level, “improve”, climb up a level, improve, climb another level, improve and so on – until you eventually get to the top.  The problem with pyramid schemes is that they’re immoral, unethical, and unsustainable – the only people who ever win are the first ones in.  A societal pyramid is only sustainable for as long as those on top can continue to convince those on the layers beneath them that this is the way things should be.  In reality only the very rare exception manages to climb the pyramid and get to its next level, and they must displace someone in order to do so – if this wasn’t true then the pyramid would soon be upside down, with everyone on the top and no one on the bottom.

That just doesn’t happen.

Yes, people do move around in the societal pyramid, but it is almost invariably laterally – they achieve promotions that somehow manage to keep them just about where they were before. How does it feel when you realize you’re part of a monumental pyramid scheme that’s been so effectively marketed you’d never even question it?  I believe this is precisely what modern society has become – a gigantic scam.  Me, I don’t feel good about it at all – people are not paving stones and I have no desire to walk on anyone. Furthermore I have no desire to be stepped upon, and very little tolerance of people who try to walk on me.

By the way, unless we’re on the bottom tier of the scheme, the layer we happen to occupy is largely irrelevant – most of us are standing on the shoulders of those beneath us, while frantically struggling to climb the legs of those above. Occasionally the media throws us a bone and a glimmer of hope by headlining how some lucky person achieved something extraordinary, and shot far up the pyramid.  Those incidents are pretty much like winning the lottery, except a whole lot rarer – after all the lottery gets won every couple of weeks, while spectacular success stories like Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg and J. K. Rowling appear years apart.  However, when they do we see a great deal about them on TV, in the papers and on the Internet which encourages us to hold them up as positive icons to our children by saying things like, “They are proof – anyone can achieve anything. If they succeeded, well you can too.”  By so doing we’ve become a pawn in the propagation of societal lies, and what we’re really doing is selling our children false hopes of impossible dreams.

I’m not saying we shouldn’t give our children aspirations of success. {Every single child is already great, and every parent should be reinforcing that.}  What I am saying is that telling our children they can do anything they set their mind to is the worst sort of lie. It’s a lie that sets them up for failure in their own minds – when they don’t attain their dream, they must be the ones who fell short.

So, where does this leave us?

Trickle down isn’t much fun, unless you’re on top.

To me an efficient society is one where there is an equitable place for all its members.  Society isn’t a corporation whose only motivation is profit. Society should not be a place where the disparity between the top and the bottom of the pyramid is measured in light years and those in the bottom layers are disposable in order to gain measurable and sale-able “efficiencies” for the next quarter’s results.

Society, is people, not profit.  Corporate efficiency is profit, not people. Don’t fall into the trap, and the widely held belief, of thinking societal efficiencies meld with corporate goals – they do not.

I believe that for society to survive and be sustainable for more than a ten-year corporate forecast {let alone a quarterly one}, everyone needs to be a fulfilled, contributing member.  Corporations aren’t bound by societal norms of decency and ethics, and corporations couldn’t care less about people – their only concern is profit.  In the case of public institutions like schools, politicians run them – and most politicians seem to have adopted the philosophies of amoral corporations.

Don’t try to twist my words into shapes they don’t hold, and things they don’t say. I don’t want a portion of the person in the tier above me, but I’m not willing to give them a piece of me either – and right now, the ones on top of the pyramid are getting their pound of flesh from every rank beneath them. That has to stop, governments have to work for their people, or their people will make those failing governments fall.

Is your government working for you? Or is it in the back pocket of the corporations who fund its re-election?

Personally, I’m sick of corporations.  I want to live in a decent society, in which people take precedence.  If any of you know such a nirvana, please let me know – till then, I’ll dwell in my dreams, in a place stripped bare of most everything I believe renders humanity inhumane.

That place, is my literal world – Malmaxa.

{When the next post in this thread will come, I can’t say.  However, I must warn that words such as these are as difficult to write, as they are disquieting to read – so don’t anticipate a rapid turnout.}