Our demise as people, either on a small or large scale, will be due to our refusal to share power and wealth with each other.
Think about that. Our refusal to share power and weath involves the refusal of viewing others being fully human and thus equal to ourselves. And all of that comes from either a sense of entitlement or naked ambition. While the former assumes that we are superior to others in some way, shape or form, the latter seeks to prove ourselves to be superior. Either way, we are refusing to count others as our equals. And so while the former starts with assumptions about ourselves, the latter sees that sense of entitlement as something to be achieved.
Our refusal to share power and wealth becomes our own demise in a number of ways. The first way that it causes our own destruction is that that search for power and wealth eventually causes us to dehumanize ourselves as reflected in how we inhumanely treat others The second way in which we cause ourselves to fall is seen in destruction we visit on others when competing for power and weath. Certainly war is the largest scale on which that competition occurs. And regarding war, we would be wise to continually point our what the Russell-Einstein Manifesto says; that, because of the present or future avaiability of WMDs, humankind has a choice between survival or war. And so the longer we rely on resolving our differences through war, the more inevitable the use of those WMDs becomes. But even if our competition for being superior to others is on a smaller scale than that, the destruction that such a competition involves reduces the victimizer to being that of a temporary king-of-the-hill and the victim to being counted as untermenschen. Here we should remember that no one is king of the hill forever.
The above state is what all mankind faces today. And the quotes of Martin Luther King Jr. listed below not only strikes at and reveals the heart of those who refuse to share power and wealth, it implies an escape from a doomed future (click here for the source):
Quote #1:
'The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just'
Quote #2:
'I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin...we must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered'
We will look at the first quote, we should consider the ramifications if we were to replace the word 'Western' with a fill-in-the-blank. For when we make that substitution, we find that the scope of the claim increases tremendously so that we can experience how that statement can apply not just to any ism or group, but to individuals, even ourselves, as well.
What that first quote targets is the emotional base for entitlement involving ruling over others: arrogance. Arrogance allows us to look down on others. And in that first quote arrogance promotes the idea that our own ism, group, or self are superior to others. That sense of superiority sees others as having nothing to contribute to ourselves, our groups, and our ideologies. Also, that sense of superiority gives us permission, if not a mandate, to rule over others and/or take their resources at their expense.
The striving of our favorite sports teams promotes the idea that we should strive to be superior to others. Only unlike in sports where superiority only pertains to a game, superiority in life leads us to visit injustices on others as we rule over and/or take what is theirs. Arrogance not only makes us feel significant, it drives us to hurt and exploit others.
What should also be noted in the first quote is the all-or-nothing thinking involved. One side has EVERYTHING to teach while the other side can only learn. This all-or-nothing thinking feeds on one's arrogance that persuades us to feel entitled to do what we want to others. And that kind of thinking serves as the cognitive foundation for authoritarianism.
When King spoke of this feeling and all-or-nothing thinking, he was focusing on his own nation and government. He did so not just because of war in Vietnam, but also because of our past foreign policies that saw the U.S. suppress the aspirations of multitudes of people for either the financial gain of its businesses and corporations, and/or for strategic reasons too. And so the U.S. sometimes used proxy leaders to control how some other nations behaved and where their resources were directed. That was true in Iran (1953) and Guatamala (1954) as well as in Vietnam.
Now whereas the first quote dealt with controlling others, the second quote addresses our priorities as a nation and as individuals. It isn't that gadgets, profit margins, and property rights are not important. It is that people should be considered more important than those three items. The more that gadgets, profit margins, and property rights have precedence over the welfare of people, the more transactional both our nation's policies and our own affairs become. King's complaint about how investors would invest in other nations only to squeeze out all of the profits that they could was evidence of a thing-oriented society. To that, we could add the triplets of racism, materialism (which was replaced by 'economic exploitation' in other messages), and militarism could never be eliminated. And we should note that King saw those 3 traits as being unseparable.
Just think that if we lived in a person-oriented society. the maximization of profits would not be the prevailing code followed by most of our publicly owned businesses and industries. And without that maximization of profits ethic, those in the business and financial communities generally exercise a significant amount of self-restraint resulting in smaller differences in the income and wealth disparities both between the classes and the races. We would also move closer to a more environmentally friendly and sustainable future.
That our society is becoming an even more thing-oriented society than before possibly shows one of the biggest failure of our education system especially in the secondary education and high education systems. There we are often taught how to tweak a thing-oriented financial practice or economic system that encourages us to maximize profits. The maximization of profits is a cannibalizing ethic meaning that in order to pursue the highest profits for oneself, one deliberately ignores all other principles and ethics to operate. In addition, such an ethic reduces those who could initially be counted as stakeholders to shareholders. The maximization of profits ethic tells us to ignore how others fare in the system regardless of their plight. And so we are taught to prioritize what is not human over people. We are taught that the only moral principle we are required to follow is that of serving oneself. If we wish to be kind or compassionate, that is an individual choice that many will applaud as long as they are not compelled to join.
The problem is not that we try to tweak a financial practice or economic system, the problem is that we do not include, in many of our economic institutions, how to objectively look at our economy from outside the system. And thus we uncritically continue with the maxmization of profits without realizing that our focus on such an approach encourages us to be selfish and to pursue extreme individualism in an interdependent economic system and world. As a result, those of us who are at least financially comfortable will often look down on those who are in the lower economic classes with disdain and as obstacles to one's own continual pursuit of their own personal profits. Is it any wonder that we have many elected officials who are so vulnerable to the influence of money? And is it any wonder why we have chosen the wrong people to represent or lead us?
In too many instances, our educational institutions have failed us in providing us, and those who are work in the business world, a full education on our economic system. But it is not just those in the business world who have been educationally shortchanged, it also includes almost all of the rest of us.
