You can easily see why most people discard any theories of how the world could be made a better place, if only we all … Well, whatever it is that they see as a solution, be it stopping oil, cleaning up our rivers, insulating our homes or reducing plastic waste. But whatever you seek to change, there’s a massive inertia – not merely a resistance to change, but even a pressure to carry on with the bad habits.
Take any of those big ‘problems’ and you’ll find decades of demand have created massive chains of industry, retail and consumption. And even if lots of people would like to change it, there are huge costs involved in that change, and the product demand that’s driving the whole machine won’t go away.
We want fresh food, for example, but the price we expect to pay for it – driven by decades of optimisation and competition – can only be realised by producing in bulk, on a massive scale. And that then means shipping the product long distances – again in bulk; transporting it, efficiently from field to home. Where a product requires processing – even just cutting into portions – that creates a need for packaging that will keep the food fresh for long enough to reach our kitchens. And of course there have also been decades of optimisation in that area, too.
There’s a wonderful quote from the Mel Brooks film, “Spaceballs” (a not even thinly disguised parody of the Star Wars films). The ‘baddies’ of the film have been in high speed pursuit of the hero, and their ship is travelling beyond hyperdrive, at ‘ludicrous speed’. They have just overshot their prey and the evil commander, Dark Helmet (a loose translation of Darth Vader), yells to his crew to stop. The captain cries back, “We can’t stop! We have to slow down, first!”
There’s just no way we can change the massive forces within the global economy overnight. And that means we can’t “just stop” any of the things that we might, now, realise are harmful to our health or our environment. But those massive forces come from millions – billions – of individual choices. Choices, for instance, to buy packaged meat from a supermarket because it’s cheaper than the local butcher and lasts a few days longer, in the fridge. That input demand – our demand – is what drives those forces of optimisation, and keeps the supply chain making ‘bad’ choices. It’s our bad or lazy choices up front that power the supply chain and sustain its momentum.
But it’s also not as simple as just making ‘better’ choices. That’s the argument of the people who glue themselves to motorways, or otherwise impede the flow of commerce to make their point. “Just make better choices,” they tell us. “Just be prepared to spend a bit more.” But even if we did change our choices, they’d just be powering a different supply chain and a different series of optimisations. And we need to understand, too, that our commercial systems embody a complex balance of price, supply and demand, from which we also get a more or less constant balance between ‘poverty’, ‘survival’ and ‘wealth’. The optimisation is not accidental: it is driven by – and serves to sustain – the latter balance.
Reading back what I have written, I realise that I seem to be saying that it’s rather useless to consider making any fundamental changes, because whatever choices we make, we’ll drive ourselves down a line that largely ignores ‘common good’ and only serves ‘common wealth’. Some might even argue that only autocratic rule can overcome the inertia of the masses. That was arguably Stalin’s vision – his interpretation of Marxist-Leninist philosophy – leading directly to the creation of the Soviet Union. But history illustrates rather ably that there’s no philanthropy in such movements: only a leverage of power.
But there is one factor at the start of the demand chain that can be changed. It’s rather a wild shot, but the root of our economic system rests on the perception of wealth. Not on ‘common good’ but on simple wealth. That perception can be used by political leaders – such as Stalin – to garner support for their use of power. It is the main “sub-narrative” of society, creating a pressure – a desire to move – that aims at the ‘upper middle’ point on the scale. That pressure – the desire for self-improvement on the part of the bulk of the population – causes the competition that drives industrial optimisation. And it doesn’t really matter that the goal-post keeps moving; people feel that their lives are improving, even if any objective measure of their relative social position is unchanged. What they’re experiencing is merely the result of industrial optimisation.
What if we could change people’s perception of relative wealth? What if we could remove the social pressure to move towards a perceived ‘upper middle’ class? Surely one might as well ask, “What if pigs could fly, and take themselves to market?” But just such a change lies at the heart of what religions call ‘enlightenment’ or ‘coming to God’. It rests on a new perception: that social position is a self-taught illusion. It also rests on the precept that ‘wealth’ is a false goal: one that hides – stops us from perceiving – ‘common good’.
I am not suggesting that everyone should ‘get religion’. We’ve tried that, in most parts of the world, at one time or another. It merely shifts the centre of power, from the materially wealthy to the spiritually wealthy. People still yearn towards the upper middle class in the new hierarchy – even as material wealth corrupts that hierarchy. What I am suggesting is that more and more people might ‘wake up’ to what motivates them, and begin to choose ‘common good’ over personal wealth. And as above, I don’t expect that to create any sudden, ‘overnight’ change. We have a lot of inertia in the economic systems that put food on people’s tables, and we have to ‘slow down’ before we can stop. Indeed, we wouldn’t really ‘stop’ at all: we would simply make more balanced ‘world-friendly’ choices.
On the plus side, if I – an ordinary person – am writing in these terms, perhaps change for the common good is already happening.
As the French say, “Le plus ça change, le plus c’est la même chose.”
Steven Wheeler's Blog 