There are some implicit assumptions around which the world functions. That an ideal country or corporation should grow year on year, forever, without regard to context or circumstance. In bad times, it is permissible for it to grow a little slower, but grow it must. As indeed must our salaries and the size of our shopping baskets.
We must aspire for more, for without this drive, we will stagnate. The more people come into the world of consumption, the more we will all grow. Of course, we must strive to grow while avoiding greed, for that is an undesirable trait, one that it is human to succumb to no doubt, but otherwise crass and so eighties, you know. As the books we read at airports tell us, we must strive to grow as people, and go on meaningful inner journeys, once we are successful and hopefully , rich.
It takes nothing to argue against greed for it sits up nicely and presents itself as a target with as much juicy ripeness as Donald Trump on Twitter. The trouble is that greed is no longer merely a human vice that some of us fall prey to, but an idea that lies at the heart of the world that we live in. Greed has been democratized, institutionalized and legitimized in every way except the semantic. The construction of our world around this idea is made up of several components, each of them inter-connecting with a satisfying click to ensure that primary meaning is located in the idea of wanting more, infinitely.
The reduction of civilizations to markets accompanied simultaneously by the extraction of markets from society has helped create a space for the market that is an independent republic of desire. A country is summed up by its GDP growth number , one is developed, emerging , breaking out or a basket case based on this metric. Its actions get seen through this lens most of the time, and most of the discussion that springs up around it has to do with its economic performance. The market revolves around corporations which represent greed at its most impersonal; these being structures that feel little responsibility having been programmed to act in their own interest, and conceived in a way that makes the acknowledgement of context an extremely self-conscious exercise. A corporation has to strive to 'understand' consumers , 'follow' regulation and 'do its bit' for society. Detached from human intent and ambition, it needs to have no natural boundaries; by definition nothing can and should ever be enough. The corporation is, if it manages to be, immortal; and what is more, it combines its lack of finiteness with a deliberate myopia that looks at the world through the prism of quarterly performance. This combination means that its impersonal disregard for society is both limitless and reductive. It struggles to take responsibility for anything but itself and sees to it that it cannot by refusing to factor in the future. It backs up its unwillingness to take responsibility by contriving an inability to do so.
There are, of course, corporations that are exceptions, as indeed there are business leaders that try hard to act in the interests of larger, more long-term causes, but the real issue is not one of conscious intent but implicit structure. The system is designed in a way that rewards short-term self-interest. The trouble that the world has in taking serious note of issues to do with the environment come from the structure of greed that has been created; the issues raise too many fundamental questions in too large a timeframe for the problem to be included within existing frameworks.
It helps that achievement speaks in fewer currencies today. Most things are reducible to money and fame, with the idea of celebrity connecting the two just in case things became too complex. The quantification of the world helps ascribe universal value to even intangible pursuits; friendship for instance is now measurable and competitive as is influence. Greed needs a common currency; the grammar of wanting more demands a stilted vocabulary. Without envy, there is no greed, and without common currencies, there is no envy.
The other piece in the puzzle is provided by the growing emphasis on the idea of the individual. By focusing so acutely on the individual as the meaningful unit of society, self-interest gets legitimized in its narrowest possible definition. Correspondingly, the individual gets imagined as having infinite depth, and impossible width. Identity gets relocated externally and becomes a self-conscious pursuit; one has to strive to 'become' oneself, and this involves putting the self together by adding on little bits of persona, achieved largely through acts of consumption. The act of constructing identity is a never-ending process, aided considerably by the dismantling of traditional ideas about sources of identity such as birth and gender. Finding oneself becomes about the search for a needleself in the haystack of plenty. The finiteness of the individual is overcome by the infiniteness of the quest; in a certain sense I can never be me enough.
Human greed is not a new idea, and for all its follies, serves a purpose. Without greed there is no impetus for change, and history becomes soggy and shapeless. But systemic greed is another story, for it heeds neither time nor circumstance. Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell, says Edward Abbey and there is perhaps no better metaphor for the dream that we seem to be chasing today.
Santosh Desai will speak in sessions titled 'The Ease of Being Bad' and 'Mythology as Powerpoint' at the Times of India Literary Carnival on December 7 and 8. For further information, look upwww .timesliterarycarnival-. com
Anda sedang membaca artikel tentang
Growth for growth's sake is the ideology of the cancer cell
Dengan url
http://cegahkeropostulang.blogspot.com/2012/12/growth-for-growths-sake-is-ideology-of.html
Anda boleh menyebar luaskannya atau mengcopy paste-nya
Growth for growth's sake is the ideology of the cancer cell
namun jangan lupa untuk meletakkan link
Growth for growth's sake is the ideology of the cancer cell
sebagai sumbernya
0 komentar:
Posting Komentar