Capitalism with a Conscience

Article Tools

Print

E-mail

Comments

RSS

And well they should. Business is just another word for trade, as author, entrepreneur, and activist Paul Hawken said to me recently, and trade has always been a civilizing activity because it is based on trust and breaks down barriers. The inherent flaw of capitalism, as opposed to trade, is that it is less expensive to destroy the earth than to take care of it. When corporate structures are designed to make the growth of capital an exclusive ideal, money becomes the measure of life flow, and life, inevitably, loses.

As the realities of our vulnerability to climate change (and the causes and effects of the war in Iraq) begin to trickle up to mainstream consciousness, the lines between good guys and bad guys get blurred. Ilyse Hogue, a RAN campaign director, tells the Ecologist, 'We forget corporations are made up of human beings, many of whom have children and who are as concerned with the future of the planet as we are. Also, the people at the top of these companies don't get there by accident: They are some of the brightest, most creative minds in business, so we often find that once we've alerted them to the actualities of the issues, the brutal facts, many of them can become very motivated.'

According to one interpretation of Hindu scripture, we are at the end of the Kali Yuga or iron age, a time of decadence, despair, and destruction. The end of the world as we know it. The good news is that the Kali Yuga is followed by the Satya Yuga, a golden age of paradise on earth. Hawken wryly observes that capitalism, because its nature is to speed things up, is the perfect system to hasten us into the Satya Yuga.

The question is how we get from here to there, and how much suffering we must endure along the way. But there is a certain elegance in the possibility that the speed of capitalism, which has contributed so mightily to bringing us to this precipice, may also help provide the momentum to make the shift.

RSS | Comments | E-mail | Print