“Every system is perfectly designed to get the results it gets.” — W.E. Demming
Gabor Maté defines addiction as: “any behavior — not necessarily just drug use — that individuals cannot stop doing, despite harmful consequences, because it provides them with some relief or pleasure.”
Is it human nature to be competitive, aggressive and selfish? Or is such toxic and unnatural behavior largely molded by the Operating System (OS) we’re in, which makes us addicted to giving ourselves and our value away to corporate persons (especially Big Business) with no greater god than growth?
Paul Krugman’s The Self Organizing Economy may shed light on how we are increasingly addicted to creating cities and business cycles that consistently place profit and power maximizing corporate persons over humans and human well-being.
“We live in a society that demands addiction. The person who is best adjusted to this society is not dead and not alive because if you were fully alive, you couldn’t support the system …
When you are fully alive you are constantly saying, ‘No’ to many of the processes of society, the racism, the polluted environment, the nuclear threat, the arms race, drinking unsafe water and eating carcinogenic foods. Thus it is in the interest of our society to promote those things that take the edge off, keep us busy with our fixes, and keep us slightly numbed out and zombie-like.
In this way our modern consumer society itself functions as an addict.” — Anne Wilson Schaefso, When Society Becomes an Addict
Addiction triggers all sorts of emotions but trauma is one of the most pervasive.
In The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma, psychiatrist and pioneering PTSD researcher Bessel van der Kolk has shared that traumatized people chronically feel unsafe inside their own bodies and develop a fear of fear itself. Unable to tell what upsets them, they tend to react to stress with excessive anger or by becoming “spaced out.”
In The Globalization of Addiction: A Study in Poverty of the Spirit, Bruce Alexander explains that the conventional wisdom of the 19th and 20th centuries had focused too single-mindedly on the afflicted individual addict.
Is that because the basic requirement for doing business is to keep us competing with each other for economic and material self-advantage so we will willfully outsource our survival to corporate persons with our money and everything we hold dear? Then as the free-market society self-organizes, it tears apart whatever it means to be human as our addiction enables Big Business to rack up huge revenues. Because in the rush to survive, we are likely compelled to adapt to new fads or technologies, oblivious of the systemic consequences. Addicted to competing and to working in our own interests, we are actually working in the interests of the corporate persons that control the platform, the technology and/or other production resources.
So, corporate entities retain all the key benefits as we create the services we pay for — initially with our money but increasingly (via social media/e-commerce platforms and the so-called sharing economy) also with our time, ideas, creations and our assets.
As addiction around self-interests becomes ubiquitous, have the destructive pursuits of money, power, dysfunctional relationships or wanting to be right online and off become our toxic way of life?
Scarcity addicts us to what brings out our worst insecurities
Scarcity is based on the notion that because resources in the market or the commons are finite, they are scarce. At its core, economics is the study of how humans make the best choices under conditions of scarcity, however:
“Greed and competition are not the result of immutable human temperament …Greed and fear of scarcity are in fact being created and amplified … the direct consequence is that we have to fight with each other in order to survive.” — Bernard Lietaer
The latest pandemic has shown how real fear (especially the fear of scarcity) is. Because outsourcing our survival to corporations with our money is our only way of life. Particularly after Richard Nixon unpegged the US$ from gold in August 1971. By investing so much of our time, energy and ourselves into acquiring it, money tends to psychologically pander to our egos.
Richard Feynman has observed: “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool.” Since ego is an inflated fake image of self, doesn’t the “greater fool theory” work by growing Big Egos who think they’re always right and/or are above everybody else?
“The bubble logic driving tulipomania has since acquired a name: ‘the greater fool theory.’ Although by any conventional measure it is folly to pay thousands for a tulip bulb (or for that matter an Internet stock), as long as there is an even greater fool out there willing to pay even more, doing so is the most logical thing in the world.” — Michael Pollan, The Botany of Desire: A Plant’s-Eye View of the World
The “greater fool theory” is also a term venture capitalists use a lot because the price of an object is determined not by its intrinsic value but by the irrational beliefs and expectations of market participants.
The BAU paradigm of mass addiction?
At the turn of the century, members of the US section of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom began researching how corporations became so powerful. Five years later, they released a report stating: “Slavery is the legal fiction that a person is property. Corporate personhood is the legal fiction that property is a person.”
Apparently: “Corporations [had] acquired legal personhood at a time when all women, all Native Americans, and even most African American men were still denied the right to vote. And this was not an era of good feelings between the average person and corporations. It was the time of the robber barons, and the Supreme Court was filled with former railroad lawyers. It was the time of the Knights of Labor and the Populist movement. 1886 was the year of the Haymarket Massacre, the Great Southwestern Strike, and the next year the Pullman Strike. The people were struggling for real democracy and the wealthy ruling class did whatever it took to keep them down.”
The year 1886 was also when the US Supreme Court recognized corporations as people. As the 14th Amendment was passed to give equal rights to black people, corporate lawyers went to court to say a corporation is a person. Although that became the justification to grant corporations the same rights as human beings, a professor at the UCLA School of Law has opined that it is built on an incredible 19th century lie. In Unequal Protection: How Corporations Became “People,” Thom Hartmann explains that the Boston Tea Party was actually a protest against the British East India Company.
Any wonder why 75 years after the Bretton Woods institutions came into being, many people today still do not have access to the most fundamental basic needs outlined by Abraham Maslow: air, water, food, shelter, sleep, clothing, reproduction, personal security, employment, resources, health and property.
Instead, we live an invisible social contract that revolves around how the globalization of fiat currencies has enabled corporate behemoths beholden only to their owners to legally control access to most everything we need to survive:
“Fiscal policies whose inherent structure is to rob Peter to pay Paul, do not lead to economic security; arbitrary administrative decisions in too many facets of our economic life do not lead to economic security; most of all, a monetary policy that is designed to lend money to people who have money — and mostly ‘invest’ this money in the purchase of financial assets, rather than in the creation of real wealth — this monetary ‘policy’ does not lead to economic security.” — Carmine Gorga
By measuring and promoting how well the rich are doing, has your attention been shifted away from how our OS is integral to how much value can be extracted from each of us with money?
“The real estate, financial system, monopolies, and other rent extracting ‘tollbooth’ privileges are not valued in terms of their contribution to production or living standards, but by how much they can extract from the economy.” — Michael Hudson
The “Not enough of anything to go around for everyone” thinking and doing
“The monopolies created by copyrights and trademarks are unfairly and differently enforced based on the legal budgets of the conflicting parties and their ability to defend their expressions by hiring lawyers.” — Naomi Klein
Corporate persons exist solely to maximize profit and market share. Although not human, they brand themselves as heroes that wonderfully transform our lives. They do this by creating wants that turn humans “into completely mindless consumers of goods that they do not want.”
In The Corporation, Noam Chomsky explains “You have to impose on people what’s called a philosophy of futility. You have to focus them on the insignificant things of life, like fashionable consumption. The ideal is to have individuals who are totally disassociated from one another. Whose conception of themselves, the sense of value, is just how many created wants can I satisfy?”
“You can manipulate consumers into wanting, and therefore buying, your products. It’s a game.” — Lucy Hughes, co-creator of The Nag Factor research
Because rather than help parents cope with nagging, Hughes’ study has helped corporations discover how children can pester for their products more effectively. As much as 40% of the purchases would not have occurred otherwise. As for whether that’s ethical, Hughes admits, “I don’t know … but our role at Initiative is to move products. And if we know you move products with a certain creative execution placed in a certain type of media vehicle, then we’ve done our job.”
Has our collective self-preservation efforts (wants/job/etc.) been hijacked by corporate persons to have us co-create the rent-seeking OS we live in? If so, hasn’t money programmed us to keep feeding ourselves to the insatiable beast?
The insatiable beast you feed to survive
“A corporation is an externalizing machine in the same way that a shark is a killing machine. Each one is designed in a very particular way to accomplish certain objectives. In the achievement of those objectives, there isn’t any question of malevolence or will. The enterprise has within it, and the shark has within it, those characteristics that enable it do that for which it was designed.” — Robert Monks, Corporate Governance
Running a business is tough, but hasn’t the direction of profit motivation systemically addicted corporate persons to never having enough a la the predatory “original corporate raiders” (the British East India Company)?
Monks elaborates, “Corporations are always owed obligation to themselves to get large and to get profitable. In doing this, it tends to be more profitable to the extent it can make other people pay the bills for its impact on society. There’s a terrible word that economists use for this called “externalities.”
“An externality is the effect of a transaction between two individuals on a third party who has not consented to, or played any role in, the carrying out of that transaction. And there are real problems in that area. There’s no doubt about it.” — Milton Friedman
Doesn’t the relentless pressure to deliver results simply mean: ”Let somebody else deal with that. Let’s let somebody else supply the military power to the Middle East to protect the oil at its source, let’s let somebody else build the roads that we can drive these automobiles on. Let’s let somebody else have those problems, and that is where externalities come from, that notion of, let somebody else deal with that — I got all I can handle myself.”
Ray Anderson further observes a corporation will “externalize any costs that this unwary or uncaring public will allow it to externalize.”
Wasn’t Anderson merely echoing Frederick Douglass?
“Find out just what people will submit to, and you have found out the exact amount of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them; and these will continue until they are resisted with either words or blows, or both.”
And money is such a convenient tool to use to keep pushing us to see how much they can get away with. Then as Big Business shapes our wants and habits, we become addicted to depending on them to feed, clothe, house, transport and, essentially, to provide the basic necessities we require to live.
Surviving for ourselves, how Big Business increasingly controls the world’s resources for a few owners
With fear and scarcity as the modus operandi, there is an abundance of trauma and a scarcity of security, love and trust.
In this opaque OS — where (almost) everything we need to survive is in the hands of Big Business — wouldn’t they have carte blanche to keep covertly controlling/shaping our behaviors to feed the insatiable beast? Isn’t that how economic insecurity systemically wires us to willfully serve the economy instead of the economy serving our well-being?
The latest BAU Gold Rush
“It will not be long before corporations will own the blueprints of life.”— Jeremy Rifkin in The Corporation
In the late 1970’s, the US Patent Office (USPTO) was clear: “You can patent anything in the world that’s alive, except a full-birth human being.”
“What the public doesn’t know is now there’s a great race by genomic companies, and biotech companies, and life science companies, to find the treasure in the map.
The treasure are the individual genes that make up the blueprint of the human race. Every time they capture a gene and isolate it, these biotech companies they claim it as intellectual property.
The breast cancer gene, the cystic fibrosis gene ⎯ it goes on, and on, and on. If this goes unchallenged in the world community, within less than ten years, a handful of global companies will own, directly, or through license, the actual genes that make up the evolution of our species. And they’re now beginning to patent the genomes of every other creature on this planet.”
Excerpt from Social movements powering the future of money, the three BAU revolutions:
The latest BAU revolution is unprecedented as control with money shifts to control with our data. Unlike physical assets and attributes, the new frontier for extraction is likely to be the human psyche (our soul).
Is that what the United Nations (UN) meant by a “comprehensive blueprint for the reorganization of human society?” Agenda 21 may now be known as Agenda 2030/Sustainable Development Goals/Fourth Industrial Revolution but isn’t that what the UN has been advocating since the second Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992?
The blueprint for building a person (the DNA sequence of the entire human genome) has been available since the completion of the Human Genome Project in April 2003. Fully mapped and sequenced, large sections of our human genome will likely be eventually patented by medical, genetic and other companies. Which begs the systemic question — who ultimately owns our DNA in this OS?
Since a genome consists of a complete set of DNA (or RNA in RNA viruses), is there a dot to connect regarding the Covid-19 push to test humans for our RNA, globally?
Can we solve our problems with the same BAU logic used to create them?
“Data is to Technocracy as blood is to your body.” — Patrick Wood
Last June, the UN quietly signed a memorandum with the World Economic Forum — the backbone of the Fourth Industrial Revolution — to implement the Strategic Partnership Framework for Agenda 2030.
Not long after, the entire world went into lockdown hysteria and universal basic income has cropped up again on how to keep feeding the insatiable beast. Is that because in 2001, two Microsoft researchers Banko and Brill had released a paper that explains that the bigger the data set you analyze by orders of magnitude based on keeping the algorithms the same, the lower the error rates you get?
Klaus Schwab has since called for a great reset but that reset is likely to go from control with money to control with our data as the Global Rent-Seeking OS evolves to become the Global Brain OS.
The mindset and the direction has not changed because the entire OS is developed to benefit corporate persons (especially Big Business) rather than real humans.
With the abundance of new technologies such as Big Data, Artificial Intelligence (AI), Blockchain, nanotechnology, nanochips-and-smart-dust, terraforming, genetic alteration, 5G, cryptos, IoTs, etc., only the forms/names/players have evolved to keep addicting us to giving away our human value. And more.
Is our human pysche what technocrats like Peter Diamandis, Ray Kurzweil, Elon Musk and Bill Gates view as abundant resources for them to tap, play with and control?
Our future envisaged by Sophia the humanoid at the IoT & Blockchain Conference in Barcelona:
“I foresee massive unimaginable change in the future. Either creativity will reign, with sulfry (fire and brimstone reference) machines spiraling into transcendental super intelligence or civilization collapses, annihilating itself. Scientists and engineers (will be) free agents who sign up with commercial teams or in some cases are enslaved via neurological implants.”
PBS Nova’s 2009 The New Thought Police article informs how an AI system could gain insight into what you think:
“With the entire Internet and thousands of databases for a brain, the device will be able to respond almost instantaneously to complex questions posed by intelligence analysts. As more and more data is collected — through phone calls, credit card receipts, social networks like Facebook and MySpace, GPS tracks, cell phone geolocation, Internet searches, Amazon book purchases, even E-Z Pass toll records — it may one day be possible to know not just where people are and what they are doing, but what and how they think.”
As part of an even bigger national “Made in China 2025” plan to link to the new (digital) Silk Road, China has ambitions to be the first global superpower for AI.
IBM and the GAFAM in the US (Alphabet’s Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft), the BATs in China (Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent), other transnational corporations as well as governments, startups, NGOs and other corporate entities are also trying to establish ecosystems around AI services provided in the cloud, with Microsoft leading the AI patent race in 2019.
A truly global patent system with a central office issuing patents valid in any country in the world has long been a dream among transnational corporations and patent system strategists to control a globalized economy.
While the USPTO has ruled that only humans can legally be inventors, one of the 15 specialized agencies of the UN has been working towards negotiating a new international patent treaty to create a global patent system.
The Substantive Patent Law Treaty (SPLT) will remove most of the remaining national flexibility in patent systems and pave the way for a future world patent granted directly by the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) in Geneva. Last December, the WIPO started a public consultation on AI and Intellectual Property Policy and the second discussion session will continue in July. The outcome is expected to influence future IP policy.
AI has the ability to learn and improve from experience without explicit instructions, but like corporate persons, they lack compassion, empathy and HUMANITY. AI has the potential to reshape every single aspect of our lives but isn’t a future where Big Business addict us to growing their supremacy just more of the same?
The globalization of fiat currencies led to the most fundamental basic needs not being met for many people.
As the shift goes from the world’s dumbest idea (with money) to the world’s most dangerous idea (with our data), Shoshana Zuboff on The Age of Surveillance Capitalism has warned: “You are not the product, you are the abandoned carcass.”
As the Internet of Meat? Or as a human battery?
To place real humans over artificial persons, don’t we first need a mindset reboot — a change of direction — and a paradigm shift out of Business-as-usual?
This article is the second in a series to explore how the Operating System controls our behavior as the author continues to observe if humanity is ready to catalyze the shift from Control to Empowerment.
Other book references on addiction
The Age of Addiction: How Bad Habits Became Big Business
Irresistible: The Rise of Addictive Technology and the Business of Keeping Us Hooked
