Distribute to win back
We buy because it is cheap and not because the industry is environmentally friendly or because it pays its taxes and offers good salaries. We buy what money allows, because, far more important than being aware, is making a small salary last the whole month. Dressing your kids is more urgent than worrying about an unknown employee from a factory on the other side of the world who doesn’t even speak your language or knows you exist, but who sews cheap T-shirts.
Rivers and lakes are just as important to our well-being as they are far from the daily lives of most people. Not thinking about ecology is enough to abstain, and this is the best solution for most people who already have too many problems. So, the Amazon burns at the hands of an industry that does not bring the development that its defenders preach, enriching few in exchange for the environmental wear and tear that harms everyone, even the unknown employee, on the other side of the planet.
The industry commits its crimes, but the culprits will always be the consumers, who are also the victims. An unfortunate cycle that perpetuates devastation in exchange for the poor quality of life that the poorest achieve with a lot of sweat, and that are not willing to give up. Still good.
The rich blame their slave ancestors, while at the same time as they plurge on their inheritances. The industry blames governments for high taxes that slow growth, while owing billions to public safes. Consumers repudiate the corruption that destroys the nation, while evading. The problem with pointing out the culprit is avoiding the problem.
I recently talked about it from another perspective:
By avoiding the problem, we transfer the solutions to anyone who is willing to sell them at the best price. Like Jeff Bezos (Amazon CEO) who enriched $ 13 billion in a single day, totaling $ 189 billion or R$ 1 trillion reais. If we distributed his fortune among 2 million people (1% of the Brazilian population), each would receive 500 thousand reais, which is much more than most people can achieve in their entire lives. If each of Amazon’s 840,000 employees owned an equal part of the company, they would all be millionaires (in 2019 Amazon was valued at U $$ 916.1 billion). This is the price of selling the solutions.
People like Jeff Bezos determine what choices consumers will have and rush to monopolize them. Without producing anything, Amazon was born as a successful facilitator by selling books online. Today it is a colossus with control over an important portion of culture, in addition to collecting valuable data from around the world.
Following in his footsteps, Ifood in Brazil, without preparing a pizza or making a delivery, is already worth a billion dollars, making a service that could be perfectly provided by a cooperative more expensive. It monopolizes society’s decisions and concentrates profits instead of properly distributing them among couriers, who are not even considered employees and, therefore, do not have labor rights.
Convenient solutions like these were those that filled our oceans with plastic, sponsored wars, stimulated the concentration of income and made work precarious. Every day humanity advances in science and technology, creates new niches and ways of doing business, without the vast majority benefiting.
Steve Jobs, and even Elon Musk, convinced us that we need a visionary to make great things real and change society (as well as dangerously influencing politics). Perhaps they are right, which does not mean that, on the other hand, these creative brains need to be rewarded with extravagant fortunes and incalculable luxuries. More than that, the innovative vision that they claim to have should not exclude society from big decisions, which only feeds powers parallel to the State (such as banks), far from the control and supervision of ordinary people.
It is up to society to regain control over how these changes affect politics, ecology and society, preventing a few from determining the future of the world, free from the consequences of their actions. Democracy, transparency, taxes on large fortunes, minimum and maximum wages, are some of the ways for society to take control and deal with their problems again, instead of outsourcing them for expensive and convenient solutions for the personal assets of their creators. The world needs less of powerful corporations and gurus and more of cooperatives and micro investors. The time is to distribute to win back.
