Rule of thumb

Corporations don’t care.

A few people live with high integrity, a strong sense of responsibility to other people and the planet, and with joy when possible and perseverance when it’s hard, and always with humility and gratitude. They take satisfaction in being merely and fully human.

Most of us live somewhere in between. We mostly live in servitude to corporations who seduce us with a shiny array of objects, most we don’t need, and many even still which won’t give us true satisfaction. We think we are free to choose, but it is only between choices created by the corporation to appeal to our baser qualities. We have been bought off by the ability to buy ten orange plastic throw-away razors for a buck, 24/7. And we pay with our buck for a few shaves and also everything else the corporation did wrong in the processes of making those cheap razors to offer us that bargain. And then we’re left with waste we don’t know what to do with.

Every dollar we spend is a vote: for soulless corporate economics, or alternatively  for workers we know, or at least people who know the people who care about doing quality work with integrity and responsibility. Ideally we would recognize that we always choose between corporations or a more face to face economy.

The world is a complex place and far from ideal. We will make compromises because we will sometimes want some things more than we want what we should believe in. Somebody will eventually get what we pay for.

It will probably almost always cost us more in dollars buy goods and services that are made the right way, at a fair wage – looking at the whole picture - than the stuff Walmart and Amazon  and Chase Bank would sell us that they don’t even care about except that someone with money in their pocket will buy it.

We humans have tendencies to be greedy and short-sighted. Corporations are designed to take advantage of that for the benefit of the very few. And even those top few aren’t in control of their own destiny. The Corporation will carelessly bring the whole planet down on all of us, powerful and servant alike, for the sake of a higher quarterly dollar profit.

There’s no point beating our breasts. We can only work to be free. To live better tomorrow than we did today.

Wendel Berry wrote to me more than twenty years ago:

The important thing is to be willing to be troubled by these questions. I can’t figure out how not to need some things I deplore, so I certainly understand your dilemma. My own intention is to “Progress” as little as possible and to do all I can to keep my money from going into corporate pockets. This is one of my amusements.”