Your money or your life

I had to bring this to the table…..fabulous, but long article from Douglas Rushkoff.

Here's a sample

So it’s not just a case of hip, hypergentrified Brooklynites succumb-
ing to market psychology, but people of all social classes making
choices that go against their better judgment because they believe
it’s really the only sensible way to act under the circumstances. It’s as
if the world itself were tilted, pushing us toward self- interested,
short- term decisions, made more in the manner of corporate share-
holders than members of a society. The more decisions we make in
this way, the more we contribute to the very conditions leading to this
awfully sloped landscape. In a dehumanizing and self-denying cycle,
we make too many choices that—all things being equal—we’d prefer
not to make.
But all things are not equal. These choices are not even occur-
ring in the real world. They are the false choices of an artificial
landscape—one in which our decision-making is as coerced as that of
a person getting mugged. Only we’ve forgotten that our choices are
being made under painstakingly manufactured duress. We think this
is just the way things are. The price of doing business.
Since when is life determined by that axiom?
Unquestionably but seemingly inexplicably, we have come to oper-
ate in a world where the market and its logic have insinuated them-
selves into every area of our lives. From erection to conception, school
admission to finding a spouse, there are products and professionals to
fill in where family and community have failed us. Commercials en-
treat us to think and care for ourselves, but to do so by choosing a
corporation through which to exercise all this autonomy.
Sometimes it feels as if there’s just not enough air in the room—as
if there were a corporate agenda guiding all human activity. At a
moment’s notice, any dinner party can slide invisibly into a stock pro-
motion, a networking event, or an impromptu consultation—let me
pick your brain. Is this why I was invited in the first place? Through
sponsored word- of-mouth known as “buzz marketing,” our personal
social interactions become the promotional opportunities through
which brands strive to be cults and religions strive to become brands.
It goes deeper than that second Starbucks opening on the same
town’s Main Street or the radio ads for McDonald’s playing through
what used to be emergency speakers in our public school buses. It’s
not a matter of how early Christmas ads start each year, how many
people get trampled at Black Friday sales, or even the news report
blaming the fate of the entire economy on consumers’ slow holiday
spending. It’s more a matter of not being able to tell the difference
between the ads and the content at all. It’s as if both were designed to
be that way. The line between fiction and reality, friend and marketer,
community and shopping center, has gotten blurred. Was that a news
report, reality TV, or a sponsored segment?

The whole article is here. I feel like I've just been bathed in good old fashioned common sense.
http://rushkoff.com/books/life-incorporated/intro/

Liz

Re: Your money or your life

Liz!

Good stuff here! This guys got an eye for the internal workings most either can't see or see but deny. I read the entire article and found some very valuable points worth considering deeply. But, here's the quote i was waiting for from the moment I began reading this essay:

This is the landscape of corporatism: a world not merely dominated by corporations, but one inhabited by people who have internalized corporate values as our own. And even now that corporations appear to be waning in their power, they are dragging us down with them; we seem utterly incapable of lifting ourselves out of their depression.
We need to understand how this happened—how we came to live for and through a business scheme. We must recount the story of how life itself became corporatized, and figure out what—if anything—we are to do about it.
Like recovering cult victims,we have less to gain from blaming our seducers than from understanding our own participation in building and maintaining a corporatist society. Only then can we begin dismantling and replacing it with something more livable and sustainable.

The corporation is an inhuman entity unto itself whose only goal is to compete with other inhuman entities to increase its self-assertion into the world as measured by profit-value. But are not egos capable of inhumanity?
The corporate is the extreme bastardized ego-self writ large. However, I would say that we have not modeled ourselves after the corporation or internalized corporate values, but modeled the corporation from the worst of our own ego dynamics. This corporative macro-perspective merely provided legitimacy and credence for the ego's micro-perspective and associated methods of negotiating a world of other egos, in which a system of monetary and fiduciary values measures our worth in comparison to other egos.
We are not a product of the corporation but the corporation is a product of us. If the ego continues to experience itself as an isolated individual entity separate and detached from others and the world, it then must become fascist in its relations with the world, since it only seeks to control the world in order to further accentuate itself as existing. For the ego-self, existence requires a qualitative measure, since who wants an increased quantity of existing if that existence is not accentuated by some measure of increased comfort?
it seems to my feeble mind, that in order to understand how we allowed corporate society to rules our social and cultural macro existence, we must first understand how we allow this aspect of egoic dynamics to rule our micro world functioning in relation to other egoic micro-worlds. This is a bottom-up approach as opposed to top-down and will require a collective understanding of personal ego dynamics.

But that's just me saying…what say you?
mikeS

Re: Your money or your life

hi Liz and mike
good article.  easy to read.  i like that.

mike - i agree with you that the corporation is a product of ego dynamics.  i would say that there will be no change in the overall current collective corporate view until there is a collective understanding of personal ego dynamics.  so, the questions for me are - how do you educate, or rather  - illuminate people in regard to the workings of their own mind - when so many people aren't even aware that ego dynamics are important/relevant?  AND how do you convince people, motivate people to work for the collective - which may not appear to be as immediately profitable (rather than placing the  individual or single corporation first over other individuals and corporations) as a healthier option for all?
it seems like it is a very slow process - each person making their discoveries piece by piece in relation to others - then relating to others from that “new” perspective - slowly making a change that way… that level of awareness filtering through society.
christine

Re: Your money or your life

AND how do you convince people, motivate people to work for the collective - which may not appear to be as immediately profitable (rather than placing the  individual or single corporation first over other individuals and corporations) as a healthier option for all?

generally speaking, we radically suck at relationships. The one thing that could have the potential to save humanity, and humanity's home, is simply not taught in the schools.

How to effectively be in relationships.

Yet, the schools do teach competition and how to subordinate others in a drive for individual success and success is always what you do in contrast to the failure of others. Little Suzy succeeded in answering the teachers question in contrast to Johnny's failure. Now Johnny realizes, rather traumatically I might add, that he must strive to be better than Suzy if he wishes to conform to the paradigm of success.

One wonders if both Johnny and Suzy were taught how to effectively relate to and engage with one another as equal participants, could that trust negate the trauma of failure?

Teach relationships in the schools. This seems so fundamentally basic as to be laughable. Maybe that's why it's not taught!

Alas, we are left to learn to relate to one another effectively from teachers who may not only may fail to succeed in the world on the world's terms (based on what is taught in schools) but also fail in basic relating skills. These teachers are called parents. Therefore, since most have not even mastered the basics, we are left to make “discoveries piece by piece in relation to other.” Yet, we may not have the luxury of such delay any longer. Current events are beginning to repeat the past.

Relationship 101.

I have written about this and even petitioned the local schools. but alas, I'm seen as a nutcase. Teach basic relating skills?! hahaha! What a maroon!

learning to effectively relate with others, especially in regard to our so-called “loving” relationships (which are our biggest failures) need not be taught as “working for the collective” but simply as necessary and beneficial to the 'self.' Learning to effectively, and even compassionately relate to others, makes ego dynamics readily apparent. It's not freakin' rocket science I'm talkin about here.

My theory is that if we just learned the basics, compassion, kindness, thoughtfullness, sympathy, etc, we could experience an almost instantaneous revision of the social fabric. No, actually, the schools teach and perpetuate the complete opposite of this. Schools have become an egoic battlefield for most kids (especially our public schools).

Geez, I often wonder why our esteemed and revered enlightened masters aren't teaching this? Most likely because if you learn to relate effectively with others, the rewards of that will be exponentially magnified. This would obviously put the “masters” out of business because their proprietary truth might become common knowledge.

Hahaa!
mikeS

Re: Your money or your life

:-D

I think the 'enlightened masters' ARE teaching this… but then, as I've expressed, I wonder about anyone calling themselves an 'enlightened master' who isn't designing what they say not to tell people these things, but to spark the understanding. 

About big corporations– I would call them entities devoted, currently, to coloring people's basic beliefs about choice and possibility, in order to tap into people's desire to control their future and change their lives while keeping their lives just the same.  By controlling people's choices on a micro-level, (I eat mcdonalds, I clean my house with a swifter, etc), on a macro-level the people will control themselves. 

But I wonder, is this control an isolated occurrence in human history?  Did it start with corporations, or did it start earlier?

Re: Your money or your life

Isn't this somewhat the ground of Fascism?  Where corporate power infiltrates the government and then into day to day lives?

John F. Kennedy Jr (c. 2005):

“The biggest threat to American democracy is corporate power.  There is vogue in the White House to talk about the threat of big government. But since the beginning of our national history, our most visionary political leaders have warned the American public against the domination of government by corporate power. That warning is missing in the national debate right now. Because so much corporate money is going into politics, the Democratic Party itself has dropped the ball. They just quash discussion about the corrosive impact of excessive corporate power on American democracy.”

The horror has been the plastic credit industry, which turned too many people into sharecroppers.  You are always beholdin' to “the man” and what he charges you to overpay for goods and services through the company store.  The mom and pop cannot compete against the corporate power and we ask our doctors if Lily's new pharmaceutical is right for me, even though the side effects may include heart failure, kidney failure, liver failure, blindness and seizures. 

Doesn't corporate power simply marginalize people?  If you haven't got the means or the credit, are you then consigned to the sidelines of watching the world go by and unable to participate?

Peace~

Re: Your money or your life

hi Alan and mike
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Virtues_Project

here is one program used in some schools in my area - it was very popular about 10 years ago.

it was taught in the little semiprivate school my kids attended (which placed relationships as central importance) and overall the experience was an excellent influence and example for my children.

then of course there is the mixed bag of all of the other influences that our children swim in… conditioned parents, friends, tv, consumer mentality… etc etc…
so i think the process will take a very long time.  at least a couple of generations - that is if the young adults that emerge from childhood are paying attention…

of course - compassion and the other “virtues” are common knowledge - or more basically - common experience… the experience of depth of relating… and every one of us has this experience…
yet the me-and-you relating seems to have been, to varying degrees, covered over with a sort of asphalt of me-me-me … making the “ground” hard - and depth of relating more difficult … making the soft ground of relating more difficult to see … making the virtues not so relevent for a self absorbed individual.
so that even when there is a me-and-you relating - it is often in context of ME.  MY lover, MY children, MY house, MY security, MY power, MY immortality.

i am just restating some things we are talking about here - in my own words… thinking out loud.

It is out of this hard surface ME context (rather than the soft ground of me-and-you where depth is possible) that seems to be so engrained - the preservation of the individual self at all costs… creating continual tension, conflict and competetion… THIS hard surface of ME is where the current corporate system arose out of - a larger expression of ME.

It seems hard and solid - but really it is a thin shell of what appears to be important… and that soft ground of relating - along with it's depth is always just right there… in everybody - all the time.  compassion, etc  - there are pockets of it in all people and everyone seems to know what it feels like even - but with the limited contexts of the view of ME…

mike, in so many posts  - you bring up the “masters”.  and that's fine.  i think that i see your view to some extent and have at least some understanding of why you say what you say.  i appreciate your perspective even though in my view it is a partial perspective… part of the story.

and Alan - i agree that some masters do teach compassion etc…  and i would add that i have met a couple of them who teach formally - but also just live it… for example, helping children and women in their own countries in very practical ways.  and in regard to their students - they do their best.  different relationships arise - but that is the nature of being human - working with relationships with our various degrees of awareness of the workings of our own mind.

and in regard to “masters” who desire power and money for their “services”… i think, there is in them, as with everyone else - these pockets of virtue as part of their motives… and that it gets mixed with that ME perspective to various degrees.

so, a slow process indeed.  the breaking away of this shell.  it is a frightening idea for most people i would say.  i am reminded of something i read last night - by Longchenpa in a piece called ” the precious treasury of the way of abiding”  - he speaks of how “worthy of compassion” we all are.

regards
christine