Is it okay to let them lead, help and succeed ? QUESTION.
Few weeks back, I posted a question here at Linkedin. I was anticipating the response, but never did I imagine that the response could be so stark. I asked how fair is to for the CEOs to earn multiple times more than the employees. I do not intend to change anyone's prospective, but I do intend to present a side of the argument.
I do not intent to question those in power, but I do intend to question the legitimacy of their power. I am open to hate comments and criticisms but this being one of the platforms which connects the employers with the employees, this being the platform which talks about the sustainability of the solutions, participatory decisions, and win -win solutions, I have to present this side of the argument. This post has just one purpose, to question WHY ?
As Confucius said once,
So, Question. Question those in Power. I am building up this work from four books, The great transformation (Karl Polyani), The Price of Inequality (Joseph Stiglitz), Capital in 21 century (Thomas Piketty) and majorly Winners take it all (Anand Girdhirdas).
Let's begin by pondering on a very simple question. How different are we from the people who aren't capable enough to use Linkedin ( due to lack of resources or education) ? We aren't different, we just got lucky to be born in the right family at the right time.
Taking the number and statistics into account if we compare the Americans born in 1984 and maturing into adulthood today, whats the reality of the American dream? Those raised near the top of the income ladder now have a 70 percent chance of realising the dream. Meanwhile, those close to the bottom, more in need of elevation, have a 35 percent chance of climbing above their parents’ station. This is why, poor remains poor, middle class remains middle class and rich becomes more rich. The conditions are more grim in other parts of the world. World’s billionaires now grow at more than double the pace of everyone else’s, and the top 10 percent of humanity have come to hold 90 percent of the planet’s wealth.
The only thing better than controlling money and power is to control the efforts to question the distribution of money and power. And thats what is happening. It's an era hard to escape markets vocabulary. The polyvalence of neoliberalism and capitalism has deeply entrenched in the fabric of society. Before even being born we are fed with the ideas of competing in the economy. Parents struggle to send their kids to the best school, for them to take the best jobs and perform in the economy "THE BEST."
This narrative that, they are being targeted because they have been successful, they have worked hard, they made it; and because they made it, they are now the target, that they think they deserve some of my success that you haven’t earned. And what they wanted was for the world to be changed in ways that had their buy-in—think charter schools over more equal public school funding, or poverty-reducing tech companies over antitrust regulation of tech companies. The entrepreneurs were willing to participate in making the world if the world depends on them, the win -win solution.
We live in a complex society. It is complex but not blind, the rich cannot keep on becoming richer without hurting the poor, and the poor would not let that happen and hence, comes the defence mechanism. The fortunate ones try to help out the ones at the bottom of the ladder. Many fortunate people have also tried something else, something both laudable and self-serving. They have tried to help by taking ownership of the problem. They know the problem, and they want to be part of the solution. Actually, they want to lead the search for solutions. They believe that their solutions deserve to be at the forefront of social change.
Oliver Wilde once said,
“Just as the worst slave-owners were those who were kind to their slaves, and so prevented the horror of the system being realised by those who suffered from it, and understood by those who contemplated it, so, in the present state of things, the people who do most harm are the people who try to do most good.”
Wilde may sound extreme. How can there be anything wrong with trying to do good? The answer may be: when the good is an accomplice to even greater and invisible. The initiatives mostly aren’t democratic, nor do they reflect collective problem-solving or universal solutions. Rather, they favor the use of the private sector and its charitable spoils, the market way of looking at things, and the bypassing of government. They know the problem, they propose the solution, but nobody asks the ones in the problem, about their way of addressing it and nobody asks the genesis of the problem. It’s the paternalistic approach of addressing the issue and it is believed the people with the problem know nothing about it or aren’t capable enough to solve it. Its the power that they hold and fundamental structure of society.
There is no denying that today’s elite may be among the more socially concerned elites in history. But it is also, among the more predatory in history. Elite-led change are well-meaning but inadequate. It treats symptoms, not root causes; it does not change the fundamentals of what ails us. They are shirking the duty of more meaningful reform. Elites have spread the idea that people must be helped, but only in market-friendly ways that do not upset fundamental power equations. The society should be changed in ways that do not change the underlying economic system that has allowed the winners to win and fostered many of the problems they seek to solve.
Socially minded financiers at Goldman Sachs seek to change the world through “win-win” initiatives like “green bonds” and “impact investing.” Tech companies like Uber and Airbnb cast themselves as empowering the poor by allowing them to chauffeur people around or rent out spare rooms. Google and Facebook, could do well and do good, and at the same time accumulate a level of power—over information and news in a free society, over people’s private details and whereabouts and the content of their every conversation. Regardless of the fact that they may have caused serious societal problems as they built their fortunes. Are we ready to call this a participatory democracy, and to declare these other, private forms of change-making the new way forward? Softwares can figure out who needs which shoe size and then protrude images of the same to the expected consumer, and those in power and those who exercise those power aren't sure of the numbers when it comes to the intensity of the inequality in developing societies ?
If everyone is working hard, who is responsible for the rising inequalities of income, wealth and opportunities; few take the most ; limited progressivity of our tax systems; corruption and capture of politics and institutions by vested interests; lack of transparency and participation by ordinary citizens in decision making; and the degrading environment, who is responsible for all of this ?
"And what about others ? What about the unintelligent, poor, indigent, unmotivated, would they just left behind? The people who don’t like change will be left behind. The people who like suburban small towns will be left behind. The people who don’t want to work twenty-four hours a day will be left behind. The people who don’t live to invent and create and can will be left behind ?"
Many of them believe that they are changing the world when they may instead—or also—be protecting a system that is at the root of the problems they wish to solve. Very few people are willing to make a big financial sacrifice to do good. The majority of millennials want to have a job with meaning, but they’re not willing to sacrifice having a good income for it. And it's not their fault.
Today’s challenges are more complicated and interconnected than ever before and cannot be solved by a single actor or solution. Social Justice is a concept hard to fathom. People interpret social justice in different ways, often as win-lose thinking. Some people think social justice is taking from the rich and giving to the poor. Some people say social justice is giving to people who didn’t earn something. If no one questioned the entrepreneurs’ fortunes and their personal status quo, they will be willing to help. They liked to feel charitable, useful. They liked the chance to sign off on the help that the poor received, not to have that help organised through democracy and collective action. If the view is I took it from you, versus you gave it, it changes the entire dynamics of conversation.
If we do enough redistribution, if we handle minimum standards of living for everybody where they work when they want to work, not because they need to work. Redistribution could cost people dearly, in the form of higher taxes. It is no longer rich versus poor but rather people who claimed to belong to everywhere versus people stuck somewhere.
People don't talk about topic like land reform or the concentration of wealth in a handful of families.Who would call out elites for their sins; or call for power’s redistribution and fundamental, systemic change; or suggest that plutocrats might have to surrender precious things for others to have a mere shot of transcending indecency. Where do we go from here? Is somewhere other than where we have been going, led by people other than the people who have been leading us. We need a systems-change model. Real change often demands sacrifice, and these days, not that many people are really putting themselves at risk. Real change may compel trade-offs and the necessity of choosing your priorities.
They may be sponsoring a loan forgiveness initiative for students, but they are choosing not to prioritise seeking a tax code that would take more from them and cut the debts. They talk about unlocking trillions of dollars’ worth of women’s potential, but it is choosing not to stop lobbying against the social programs that do not let the women participate in the patriarchal system properly.
The world clamours for structural and systemic changes now. When a society solves a problem politically and systemically, it is expressing the sense of the whole; it is speaking on behalf of every citizen. But this mode of change becomes dangerous when it becomes, private, voluntary problem solving without any accountability. It’s this idea that you can support a health initiative in Nigeria on the Niger Delta to reduce disease or diarrhea or whatever, and you can also make an investment in a company that is a polluter in the Niger Delta.
People and politicians talk about making the world a better place, they focus on their plans to reduce poverty and help the person standing last in the queue. Even so, they come nowhere near the concepts of equality and justice and power; land reform or the concentration of wealth in a handful of families. Instead, they speak of making it easier to do business. They forget that they are responsible for greater good. They forget they are also responsible for global issues and hence the world suffers from lack of true international cooperation.