The Death of Empathy and Archie Bunker's Million Miles of Rough Road. Break them UP!
President Theodore Roosevelt's Square Deal revolved around the three C's, conservation, controlling corporations and consumer protection “when I say I am for a square deal, I mean that I stand for fair play under the present rules , but I stand for having those rules changed so as to work for more substantial equality of opportunity and reward for equally good service.” He also said,”the representatives of predatory wealth,” are guilty “of all inequity from the oppression of wage workers to unfair and unwholesome methods of crushing competition and to defrauding the public by stock jobbing and the manipulation of securities. (1908) Teddy didn't know tech companies nor analytics nor the how agile corporations would get in 1980's to the 2020's. The corporate raw deal seems to be always in play.
He definitely knew inclusive, as all people and companies are forever linked.
Capitalism is based on individual competition. People form companies that innovate but corporations buy up innovation not produce it.
Scott Galloway (book the Post Corona:From Crisis to Opportunity) said on Smerconish CNN that the Covid-19 pandemic is causing the acceleration of trends both upward and downward. Things that were going up are going up with greater force and the the things going down are going down with equally great force. Today there is an “idolatry”of the innovator ( I would say the tech genius is more accurate) over people and companies are “weaponizing,”elections, destroying jobs, avoiding taxes, causing depression of our teens.”
The answer, break them up.
Galloway says “Capitalism doesn't survive if it is not farmed on a bed of empathy.” We are “harsh with people, and generous and loving with corporations.” There is a real need to protect people and not companies. Breaking up the big tech companies will cause them to thrive as they are better equipped to innovate in small spaces than big ones. American Anti Trust history proves breaking up big companies creates more innovation and more jobs.
Ride and food delivery services create an “underclass” and companies that avoid minimum wage laws.
Covid-19 may cause the race to the bottom to finally arrive.
Does empathy bring people together or pull them apart? Is the lack of empathy fostered by corporate thinking and leaking down stream to the general public harnessing it's distrust and creating false trust in politics gone corporate,taking down news media and science in it's wake?
In this age empathy is missing,that did not start with Donald Trump, greed has been good since Milton Friedman said it fifty years ago. “It's just business” a common refrain by every cost cutter. Now the influence of the multi national company has worked it's way into society with the average person's struggles and begins to treat others the way they have been treated by corporations.
People begin to adopt the terminology of corporations into their everyday live. We got to“downsize” and that “Sh/T travels down hill.” “It's just business.” The struggling and descending middle class begins to downsize itself. It sees from the grass roots that inequity can be achieved in the descent just as much as ascent. The anger builds as political parties ignore the casualties of globalism and embrace a not really emergence of the digital space, technology and science. The damage to everyday life has been done and the past can never return and the future is making no promise with climate change and more strife in the world moving large migrations to safer places. The media villainizes this base of working class ,non college educated , who has seen nothing but decline for decades and now sees it crashing on their children. Children who are now college educated,under employed and still living at home. The university system is being undercut by selective job based immigration. By taking the smartest people from developing countries is causing a brain drain there were it is most needed. There is a big mining company advertising on the business channel a map of Africa where investment opportunities are present, ironic is these locations are the areas of the most strife on the BBC news channel.
Re-enter 1970's Archie Bunker a TV character who was a WW2 veteran, loading dock worker and part time cab driver for extra money faces the uncertainty of high inflation, high gas prices,downsizing de-industrialization, multi national corporate control, and unable to even understand what is happening to him. His view is macro, down looking up at elites who say he is a casualty of progress. Trumps army of “deplorable s” (a modern liberal term) turns out to be big enough to elect him once and very nearly twice with record voter turnout for both the right and the left.
There is a big problem here. It is numbers, it is the science of these numbers too soon to dismiss.
Is the Archie Bunker character rising again in the Trump base. Norman Lear created Archie Bunker to be a “lovable bigot,” and to look , “unhip,” a person , “bewildered by the new rules of political correctness,” but many in the TV audience of the time “didn't get the joke.” (quotes from How Archie Bunker Forever Changed the American Sitcom by Sascha Cohen for SmithsonianMag.com March 21 2018.
My take is Bunker was searching for certainty in uncertain times. The things he was brought up to believe were slowing and surely crumbling. Racism is kind of interesting,he is a bigot, but lives near the Jefferson's. George Jefferson also a bigot. They dislike each other in a benign standoff. A kind of New York turf war, mostly noise and little fury. Both families are very tolerant of each other as their kids are college educated and part of the demographic change in thinking from the the 1960's simultaneous and head spinning ,Civil Rights, and Feminist, Anti War , music, movements.
Bunkers desperately grabs at personal certainty not facts nor science. A smart person recently said, “in the face of facts,it is emotionally necessary to disagree.” It is the use of “un-logic.”
Today the liberal and media view is to jump to extreme polarization because corporately it is good for rating and good for revenue, even though it is bad for the country. This is a description of corporate media and also corporate thinking that goes back to Teddy Roosevelt's warning at the turn of the 20th century echoed many during technological upheaval and there have been a few. The digital age is just the latest. All needed harnessing by government.
What happens when the president comes from the corporate sphere and the desperation of a near majority has noting to lose. Add, other frenemy countries interference,cyber attacks and an out of control social media space. Time for a square deal. Opinion by Ken Gigliotti
Topic: The Death of Empathy and Archie Bunker's Million Miles of Rough Road (Read 1181 times)