|
 Peg's
Polemic
Every
month, philosopher Peg Tittle casts off the calm, measured and qualified
style of her profession to deliver her opinionated and impassioned
column, exclusively for the TPM philosophy café...
Number
33. Vested
Interests and Cancer
'Vested
interest.' It sound so solid. So respectable. So endowed with authority.
Like a three-piece suit with a watch on a chain. But what does 'vested
interest' mean? It means 'self-interest' A vested interest is nothing
less than a self-interest. And nothing more. But say 'vested interest'
and, well, say no more. Literally. If I object to a zoning bylaw
change that will probably lead to more traffic and tourists because
that will destroy the silence and solitude of where I live, well,
I'm just expressing my own personal interests. But if the guy who
runs the gas station says the change should be approved because
it will be good for business, well, that's different. He has a business
- he has a vested interest in the zoning bylaws. So suddenly his
opinion, his desires, count more. It's magic. It certainly isn't
rational.
Because
it isn't different. I want silence and solitude; he wants money.
We're both expressing what we want for ourselves, what we're interested
in - we're both expressing self-interest.
"But
he has all that money invested in his business!" Which just
means he spent a lot of money expecting a certain future. So? I
did too. I bought a house, expecting a certain future. 'Invest'
is just a three-piece suit word for 'gamble' - you do X hoping for
Y in the future.
But
say 'business' and the red carpet rolls out. (Rather like saying
'religion' or 'kids'.) "I've got a business to run!" can
legitimize almost anything. Business is important. Business gets
special treatment. It gets the right of way. Quite literally - we
are to step aside and let business proceed unimpeded, unchallenged.
I
think this is partly because business has this 'social good' thing
going for it. Business is good for the economy. It creates jobs.
It provides us with much needed goods and services. Yeah right.
Business 'provides' jobs the way people 'provide' labour. There's
no charity or social service on either end. Business people expect
to be paid for those goods and services. They don't contribute their
stuff to society; they sell it. So business isn't doing anything
for the social good, for society - it's doing for the self. Despite
attempts to convince us otherwise.
For
example, "We're just following consumer demand". But society
is not just a conglomerate of consumers, so even if you are just
following consumer demand, you're still not acting for the social
good. (And note the use of 'demand' - it's far more compelling than
'desire', implying that resistance, their resistance, is futile,
implying that they are without power here, and hence without responsibility.
So even what they do is correctly identified as self-interested,
well, they can hardly be blamed.) And of course consumers 'demand'
lots of things, but companies provide only those that generate profit
for the company - that is, for the owner/s of the company. (And
there's another one: "Our shareholders demand high returns."
It's yet another way of saying hey don't blame us, we're just doing
what's demanded of us, and we're not doing it for ourselves, we're
doing it for our shareholders. As if you don't own any shares? As
if pleasing shareholders isn't in your own interests...) Actually,
companies provide things that they expect to generate profit even
if consumers don't demand them: if people really wanted product
X or service Y, companies wouldn't (have to) spend millions of dollars
on advertising (to persuade them to buy it). Quite simply, many
of those goods and services are not 'much needed'.
The
CEO of a bank once said "Return on equity is [an] important
measure of a banks' success." Not the amount of good it does,
not the amount of happiness it creates, no, these things don't matter.
Success isn't even justice, it isn't even getting back what you
put out, no, success is getting back more than you put out. Self-interest.
Literally, interest. For the self.
The
same CEO also responded to a question about the obligation to create
and maintain jobs with "If we are to attract ... we need to
create exciting new job opportunities ... to keep top talent ...
and move forward ..." Embarrassing is his assumption that the
question referred just to his bank - he understood 'obligation'
to mean obligation to the bank, to the interests of the bank. I
don't think the phrase 'society as a whole' is even in his vocabulary.
Lurking
somewhere in here is the notion that those with a vested interest
in something will take better care of it, and that's what justifies
the greater weight to such interests. But first, that assumes a
very ego-centered view of human beings; some of us are capable of
taking good care of things for others. Second, it assumes a certain
wisdom on the part of the self in question; there are a lot of people
who don't take good care of stuff even when it's their own. Third,
self-interest tends to be short-term interest, if only because the
self is a very short-term enterprise. And much of what we're talking
about is long-term stuff, like natural resources, so taking good
care of it requires a long-term perspective that by definition is
precluded by self-interest. For example, that same CEO referred
to "every stage of the life cycle" as "right through
to start-up and then growth". Excuse me? What about stasis?
What about decline? They are stages of the entire life cycle. Unless,
of course, you're a cancer.
.
Peg's
Polemic will next be updated early November 2003
Previous
polemics
32.
31.
30.
29.
28.
27.
26.
25.
24.
23.
22.
21.
20.
19.
18.
17.
16.
15.
14.
13.
12.
11.
10.
9.
8.
7.
6.
5.
4.
3.
2.
1.
|
