The Underlying Cause of Society’s Most Serious Problems — And How To Move Forward

Motivations with Destructive Consequences

Revelations of companies having incontrovertible prior knowledge of negative externalities, for which they are responsible, have become commonplace. While we may become outraged in theory, we’ve become more and more inclined to ignore that outrage in practice. Although specific details may still be surprising — such as firms concealing decades of scientific results concerning the effects of climate change — the basic narrative framework, with its significant degree of deception, has remained largely unchanged. Understanding how actions dramatically detached from the public interest are allowed to occur is essential if there is any hope for a future where we are able to avoid disasters, rather than simply managing their consequences.

Global capitalist-like economic systems incentivize short-term, profit-maximizing behaviour and as a result, sideline longer term considerations. Corporations may judge it too costly to responsibly manage the driving forces behind negative externalities (such as climate change) and instead opt to obfuscate and marginalize the issues to more efficiently serve their primary interests: staying in business and maximizing return.

The modern corporation is structured such that even if there are leaders who seek to act on behalf of the greater good (perhaps by disclosing scientific findings), they are likely to be hastily removed from their roles by the same market forces that act against the public interest in the first place. Given the realities of the systems that guide much of this type of institutional behaviour, the public interest rarely stands a chance.

The public interest rarely stands a chance.

The Domination of Private Interests

The pervasive global influence of corporate-driven society ensures that quiet, indirect preference to private rather than public interests is both deeply rooted and extensive. A few examples include:

• Tax Avoidance — Recently highlighted by the Panama Papers and related investigative efforts, corporations and wealthy individuals use techniques that are unavailable to most, to legally avoid paying their fair share of their country’s tax bill. This results in a greater burden on the general population. In the United States, corporate income taxes represented 32% of federal government funding in 1952. By 2015, federal funding from corporate income tax had been reduced to 10.6%. Tax avoidance intensifies almost every other issue of public vs. private interest, as it’s taxpayer money that ends up being used to deal with the ramifications of unchecked private interests.

• Cigarettes & Tobacco — The industry strategically misinformed and manufactured doubt for decades, contributing to millions of unnecessary deaths and horrendous financial impact on communities and global health care systems (often paid for by taxpayers).
• Single-use Coffee Pods — A specific class of a broader category of non-recyclable, mass-produced, high consumption goods. Billions of single-use plastic cups are made every year. The inventor of the K-Cup, John Sylvan — who is no longer affiliated with Keurig — has stated that one of the driving reasons for starting his own solar company, Zonbak, is to make up for the environmental problem he helped create.
• Privatized Incarceration — The war on drugs and the multitude of private benefactors of that policy and others that are similarly discriminatory (particularly the U.S. prison-industrial complex), is by any rational standard, a moral and humanitarian disaster. In terms of the number of incarcerated individuals, China comes in 2nd-place with roughly 1.5 million prisoners. The United States, with a billion fewer people, has over 2 million people behind bars. It’s not surprising that the nation with an extensive system of profit-driven prisons managed to find a way to fill them (at the expense of the taxpayer). Meanwhile, Sweden is closing prisons due to lack of demand.
• Banking — As of April 2015, the five largest U.S. banks (of over 6,000 financial institutions) controlled 45% of the financial industry’s assets — $7 trillion. Despite the financial crisis and recession of 2008, after which virtually no-one of consequence was held to account, these financial institutions continue to grow, amassing wealth and power, while handsomely rewarding their ranks.

And so on, and so forth…

Presumably, firms act rationally. But they do so in the narrow context of their own goals and perceptions of success and failure. A dedication to the maximization of profit or the individual ambition of a single actor carries no assurance that the public interest is represented. This is true even when the goods or services seem to be in the interest of the individual consumer.

I may opt to buy and use single-use coffee pods. From my point of view, this is not environmentally defensible but it’s a seemingly minor transgression. I use maybe 10 pods per week, but probably not every week — so maybe 400 in a year. You could fit them in the trunk of a car. How bad could it be?

Consider that at this moment there is surely some issue of which the public has no awareness and that could one day affect us, as a global community, in ways we are currently ignorant of. Whatever hidden issues may exist, they are in all likelihood being withheld from public scrutiny in favour of private interests that are almost certainly primarily motivated by profit.

Sources of Authority and The Role of The Public

Disparities between individual and public interests might best be addressed through thoughtfully implemented collective regulation. If we call for the ban of a given product (e.g. non-recyclable coffee pods), it says nothing of the individual benefit we might have enjoyed, but rather that we acknowledge as a community: this isn’t going to be worth it. It’s an unfortunate truth that we can be entirely aware of the destructive nature of a choice in one moment, yet opt for convenience and short-term gain in the next.

A major problem with the modern regulatory theatre is that while governments may have a monopoly on the implementation and enforcement of regulation, corporate actors and wealthy interests have a monopoly on the attention and direction of governments. When a government is structured as a representative democracy such as in Canada or the United States, the public will must pass through layers of representation that may potentially be benign, but rarely are.

For example, consider Canada’s controversial security Bill C-51 from 2015. Like many others, the vote was divided perfectly along party lines. Not a single Liberal or Conservative member of Parliament voted against the bill and not a single NDP member voted for the bill. In a genuinely democratic society, how can it be possible to enshrine policy in opposition to significant public disapproval? Who is being represented? The voters — in this case, elected members of government — serve geographically defined ridings on the basis that they faithfully represent their constituencies. If an elected member of a representative democracy aligns their vote with interests that unambiguously oppose the will of their constituents — such as voting on behalf of a political party — the basis of casting that vote is by definition not democratic.

The point here is not to take issue with any particular political party, elected official, or topic, but to point out that the root causes of the disparities between government action (such as regulation) and public will are systemic in nature. And systemic problems will require systemic solutions.

Systemic problems will require systemic solutions.

How specific reforms might be determined and proposed, and whatever form they may ultimately take, is at present unknown. But without any concerted and organized popular effort, there should be no expectation of meaningful change. The starting point is neither abstract nor a blank slate, it is simply the world as it is. There is no single resolution that, if only urged strenuously enough, could produce the scale of reform necessary to see our societies truly reflect the full range of public interests. There should be no illusion that the way forward will be anything other than a series of strategically selected, hard-fought, incremental gains.

It’s tempting to quip that the kind of movement required to bring about such systemic social progress is that of “a marathon” and “not a sprint”, but even the metaphor of a marathon is too conservative. We’re talking about revising and engineering societies at scale and in opposition to deeply entrenched systems of power. We can only expect a multi-generational “relay-race” where progress made in a given year, decade, or generation, is enjoyed and built upon in the next. A genuine project of creating a better society — by capitalizing on successes while learning from failures — can only be open ended.

Thinking Forward

A general public that feels powerless or void of hope can stand to learn a great deal from resolute segments of the population that have successfully advanced specific and well-articulated interests. Consider one case: the LGBTQ community. In Canada, same-sex sexual activity was only decriminalized in 1969. In 1977, an immigration ban on gay men was lifted. More recently, in 2005, Canada became the fourth country in the world to legalize same sex marriage. For decades, an active and organized community waged a war of attrition against the ideas, attitudes, and the institutions that previously failed to grant them recognition or support. Victories of public interest often lack the cinematic grandeur we’ve come to enjoy in popular entertainment. But in the real world: real action, towards real objectives, led to lasting and meaningful change.

Any movement determined to reform existing structures of power and the seemingly immutable institutions and conventions that maintain them, must first seek to understand. Given a specific failure of the public interest (such as climate change) we must ask ourselves:

• What roles have various individuals and institutions played, actively or passively, in this failure?
• Has the journalistic community served their investigative and critical function?
• Have elected officials accurately represented their constituents?
• Have taxes, tariffs, and other instruments of economic tuning helped or hindered the problem?
• To what degree has foreign influence worked against our domestic, public interests?

It’s easy to direct contempt towards a given individual, company or industry for their lack of consideration of the public good, but of real consequence is the question: Given what we (the population) know and believe, how could this have been allowed to happen?

Questioning and critically examining the issues that define our society is the responsibility of every citizen. Developing one’s own positions, ideas and opinions should include well informed, good spirited debate and discussion. The notion that it’s somehow impolite or untasteful to ‘talk politics’ is bullshit — it’s irresponsible and indefensible not to. We need to acknowledge that, at some point, an opinion or position we may hold will not be shared by the majority of the population. The role of the democratic citizen is not to win every debate or achieve every goal — it’s to be meaningfully and accurately represented in general, and such representation is achieved through participation.

The notion that it’s somehow impolite or untasteful to ‘talk politics’ is bullshit — it’s irresponsible and indefensible not to.

The greatest challenge we face isn’t climate change, tax evasion, pollution, or even inequality — as these are merely symptoms of underlying systemic failures. What these issues have in common is that they were, are, and continue to be permitted by systems of power (governmental, economic, and otherwise) that fail to appropriately address the conditions that reliably lead to these types of problems. Without publicly driven, meaningful, structural transformations to the systems from which power and authority are derived, we can only ever expect narrow revision. Where there is public will, there should be political will — the latter simply being an expression of the former. Until we begin to make such a system a reality, we will only ever be approximating democracy.