By
Graham Strachan
July
23, 2002
NewsWithViews.com
In
a bid to prop up investor ‘confidence’ as global corporatism is
increasingly being exposed as rotten to the core, President Bush has
called for ‘a new ethic of personal responsibility in the business
community’. He must be kidding. There seems to be something about the
modern mind that lacks the ability to connect dots, to put two and two
together and relate effects back to causes. First of all, take the word
‘ethic’.
The
ethic of global big business is ‘economic rationalism’; and while most
new-generation economists still believe ‘rational’ means ‘sane,
sensible, not foolish absurd or extreme’, it means ‘acting on reason,
to the exclusion of emotions’. But the devil is in the definition:
‘reason’ in that sense means complete callousness in the pursuit of
profits, while the term ‘emotions’ includes social and ethical
considerations.
In
my book ‘Globalisation:
Demise of the Australian Nation’ I wrote: “By excluding those
(emotional) elements, economic rationalists claim to exempt themselves
from the requirement to act morally in economic matters. Economic
rationalism is ‘a-moral’ - without morals - economics” (p.42).
The
predictable result is the irrational belief that nothing done in pursuit
of profit can be bad, no matter what it is, and regardless of its effect
on the human race or the environment. Such behavior includes peddling
pornography to children as ‘entertainment’, cloning humans for body
parts, knowingly selling faulty and dangerous products, feeding the public
genetically-modified foods before proper testing, forcing people to eat
hormone-treated beef and milk whether they want it or not, and causing
long-term damage to the environment. Add now: falsifying accounts to
overstate profits and understate losses, and bribing, blackmailing or
otherwise corrupting accountants, brokers, bureaucrats and politicians so
they either turn a blind eye, join in the fun, or pass enabling
legislation.
All
of this was predictable by a mind able to relate effects back to causes.
Official assurances that the rot is limited to ‘a few bad apples’ is
pure damage control; the very nature of global corporatism means that the
rot cannot stop at ‘a few bad apples’. As the German economist and
sociologist Max Weber pointed out, “An individual capitalistic
enterprise which did not take advantage of its opportunities for
profit-making would be doomed to extinction.” Once those
‘opportunities for profit making’ come to include dishonesty that can
be got away with, the entire ‘business community’ has to follow suit
or go the way of the dinosaurs. It is in the nature of Capitalism (as
opposed to privately-owned enterprise) that either all have to be
honest, or none can afford to be honest.
The
experience of history, if anybody bothers to look, is that when
governments abdicate their responsibility to protect the public interest
against the otherwise unregulated greed of big business, widespread
dishonesty and corruption is the result. That was one of the reasons
government supervision of ‘free markets’ was introduced in the first
place: big
business is incapable of self-regulation. Which brings us to the second of
Bush’s exhortations: ‘personal responsibility’.
The
novelist/philosopher Ayn Rand - now falsely being held up as an apologist
for corporatism – pointed out (For the New Intellectual, p.10) that,
“In any given period of history, a culture is to be judged by its
dominant philosophy.” Not only judged: the nature of a society is the
result of its dominant philosophy - a connection the globalist Third
Wayers don’t want to make.
Today’s
dominant philosophy preaches that there are no objective moral standards;
that morals are all a matter of personal opinion and anybody’s opinion
is equally as good as anybody else’s; that ‘good’ is whatever
‘feels good to you’; that right is whatever makes you feel
‘empowered’; that the only real ‘wrong’ is to exercise moral
judgment - to be ‘judgmental’; and that nobody should be held
responsible or accountable for their actions - we must ‘put that behind
us and move on’. Above all, there is the belief that all those notions
can be instilled in children through the ‘value-free’ education
system, yet somehow they can still turn out to be morally responsible
adults.
But what a
society sows through its dominant philosophy, so it reaps in the kind of
society that results. So when the morally relativistic children as fathers
sexually abuse their own daughters, it is no good expressing outrage. It
‘felt good to them’, so how can it be bad? If as priests they abuse
their position of trust and sodomise the altar boys, it shouldn’t come
as any shock; in their view it was okay, and to disagree is to be
‘judgmental’. If as politicians they swear oaths to act in the best
interests of their countries, then systematically turn them over to global
ownership and control, what more is to be expected? And if as corporate
executives they cook the books with the help of their accountant and
broker mates, it’s no good exhorting them to adopt ‘a new ethic of
personal responsibility’. They have been conditioned not to know the
meaning of the words.
© 2002 Graham Strachan
- All Rights Reserved
Born in
Queensland, Australia, in 1941, Graham graduated in Science from the
University of Queensland in 1965, and went into Animal Husbandry
research. After a few years, he joined a large corporation as a
personnel/safety and training officer, then a multinational
consulting firm where he trained, then worked as a production
management consultant, putting costing and incentive schemes into
factories, helping large companies establish operator training
departments, and the like.
In his forties
he went back to university, this time the University of New South
Wales, and obtained a law degree while moonlighting as a pianist in
Sydney clubs. He was admitted as a barrister in NSW (1984) and
Queensland (1985), and practised for a while from chambers in George
Street Brisbane.
After another
stint at music, he set about researching, writing and
self-publishing books on globalisation and world affairs. Out of the
books came offers of speaking engagements, and today Graham devotes
his time to writing and speaking. Web Site: GrahamStracham.com
BOOK
GRAHAM AS A SPEAKER
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