Profit is Our Most Important Product

Argument about oil spill
leads man to threaten girlfriend
with meat cleaver.

Perhaps you remember the years Ronald Reagan spent shilling for General Electric, with the famous slogan “Progress is Our Most Important Product,” the years before he was fired for criticizing TVA, perhaps his first public attack on “Government,” that was to later make him famous in the eyes of the simple-minded, but notorious in the minds of more thoughtful people. Giving them the benefit of the doubt, there may have been a grain of truth in their boast of progress, they did sometimes improve refrigerators, stoves, and such, if that truly can be regarded as progress. It is doubtful they had any but purely pecuniary motives even during those relatively halcyon days, but “progress” was universally regarded as “good,” and thus their appearance was so framed.

It has become increasingly obvious their motto should have more fundamentally, realistically, and honestly been, “Profit is our one and only motive.” This is not, of course, unique to General Electric, but is the basic mantra of all U.S. businesses and corporations, the very foundation of unregulated capitalism. You might well say contemporaneously, “Profit is Our Most Important Product.” As Margaret Halsey warned us years ago, the United States has become a single-institution society, and that institution is business. It is true, I believe, that over the years business has insidiously insinuated itself into all corners of our life: our schools, medicine, military, entertainment, news, agriculture, science, and even religion… everywhere. We have allowed the profit motive to take over our culture to the point where concepts like the “public good,” or “public welfare” have virtually disappeared, along with ideas of “community,” “fraternity,” and “equality.” If a culture is to survive over time the citizens have to come to want to do what they have to do (that is, to live in harmony, provide themselves with shelter and sustenance, law and morality, prescriptions for ethical behavior, a common ethos, and even a sense of esprit de corps). Government plays a crucial role in allowing this to happen. It is, in one form or another, no matter how simple or complex, an absolute necessity for human life to continue over time. Long ago, and still in some places even now, this is accomplished through ties of kinship, friendship, seniority, community, tradition, a common history, face to face contacts and social solidarity. But for those of us living in more presumably “advanced” cultures these ties have largely been replaced with legal contracts, casual contacts, temporary arrangements, multiculturalism, diversity, and the more traditional ties have either disappeared entirely or importantly weakened. This can nowhere be more true than in a culture that has profit as its primary motive. If what people want to do is merely make a profit there is no foundation for successful human society. Profit is made only by exploiting others (labor) or the environment. Thus it is inherently anti-social, yet imposed upon a species that must be social to exist. It may well be the case that capitalism helps promote innovation and entrepreunership as is commonly argued, and perhaps a tad of profit may help toward that end, but unregulated profit-making over time encourages the rape and pillage of the population and environment, eventually puts all the wealth in the hands of a very few, and is inevitably destructive of the social fabric. If it is possible to have institutions “too big to fail,” it is also possible to have cultures “too big (and too greedy) to succeed.” I strongly suspect we may have reached that point. Neither socialism nor communism has demonstrated any success in managing the affairs of human beings. Unregulated capitalism has been a dismal failure as we are now experiencing. So far the most successful systems seem to be the social democracies that exist in Scandinavia and Europe, where the ravages of unregulated capitalism are carefully controlled by the state. This can never happen in the U.S. as long as citizens, a la Reagan, believe that government is “evil,” an idea so far-fetched, so absolutely contrary to social life, and so bankrupt and even evil in its own right, as to make one wonder how it could have been accepted in the first place. Sadly, I think Ronald Reagan was simple-minded enough to actually believe in such nonsense.

LKBIQ:
For what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?
Bible

TILT: The long-beaked echidna is the largest egg-laying mammal in the world.