What's the business?

I'm reading the latest installment of the Daniel Quinn series related to that sage-like Gorilla, Ishmael. It's called My Ishmael. There are some really good points in this novel, but some stick out to me more than others. I want to talk about one or two ideas that really struck me so far.

In our culture of totalitarian agriculture, everything is product based. Even services are considered to be products, just ask my friends in the economic field. Food is locked up and one has to perform a certain amount of work to buy that food. There are laws against growing your own food and having animals, except for within certain limits. Fees or fines are assessed when you violate the law. Life even has a valued product, in life insurance. Furthermore, the laws we have are laws that one, if thinking rationally, would expect to be broken. Humans have been acting despicable on an individual level since the beginning of time. This is not a secret. Punishing them for things that they have been doing and always will do is absurd. Setting laws that assume people will eventually become better and more proficient at living with each other, is absurd. This only happens when a culture is allowed to evolve on its own. That idea of setting new limits on old data only works in business, with numbers, when you devise a plan for the next few quarters based on the bad performances of the past.

What I just described is a system that works very well for business. It hardly works for PEOPLE, at all. People need to earn and spend social capital. This is where true fulfillment comes from. Have you ever volunteered to help someone or mentored a child? Even if you've just had a good time with your family members or friends from time to time... you know how the energy that is being passed around invigorates you and gives you more of the will to live that already exists in you. This is the kind of society hippies tried to create in the sixties to rebel against the corporate American dream.

Hippies knew that it wasn't natural for people to get and education, get a job, retire and die. Marriage is usually included in that, but even tribal peoples have marriage ceremonies in many cases. Those people just knew that there wasn't just one way to proceed, as the people of our culture believe. Many different people, many different affinities for different lifestyles. People should be allowed to live they way they want to. When someone infringes on someone's right to be, a solution should be worked out, from that moment on. You can't make a ridiculous law and expect people to obey it. People are not numbers. They won't fit into some perfect profit-building equation. This is how business operates. That's not how we should "govern ourselves". The thing is, that you have to KNOW there is an alternative to the "Taker" way of life. If you want to break out of this prison, holler at me.

More later...