The E.U. on Chinese Online Marketplaces: Different Business Cultures

It is perhaps just human nature to assume that the attitude towards ethical (and unethical) business is uniform from culture to culture around the world, with one's own culture being definitive and thus the default as a standard. But just as far-away cultures can be very different than one's own, so too can far-off business practitioners and even regulators have different beliefs, values and thus expectations concerning how ethical business norms should be than do such people in one's own culture. The E.U./China trade interface provides a case in point. 

In Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith does not exclude a role for government in regulating markets and addressing the externalities of market competition. The emphasis lies in maintaining competitive markets and making up for any societal costs, such as unemployment and even homelessness. What about “mopping up” unethical business practices to protect consumers? Is there a role for government here or is “buyer beware” sufficient because competition in a market will put unethical suppliers out of business? A business strategy of stealth and denial can delay the accrual of negative reputational capital, especially if the pool of potential and likely buyers is not stagnant. The management of a coffee house or lunch place near a large university, for instance, can get away with a lot of unsavory practices without the annual incoming crowd having any knowledge of the sordid mentality of the management or its rogue retail employees. Similarly, nonsupervisory, uneducated employees working at a major retail company’s customer-service telephone room can get away with lying even in telling aggrieved customers, “The managers here don’t talk with customers” and even “We don’t have supervisors in this department.” This assumes that an automated answering “menu” even has an option to speak with a live person rather than with AI, which may not grasp the concept, complaint. Nietzsche’s claim that the will to power is the primary motive even for weak people who are like herd animals and so cannot master their own instinctual urge to dominate applies in spades to retail phone-banks, even at least in appearances to AI answering-machines. The unilateral, even rogue “power trips,” or power-aggrandizement, whether by an actual, small employee or a human-programmed AI phone-system (i.e., machine learning applied to a switch-board), give rise to emotional harm and thus are unethical because such treatment is not justified, especially to paying customers. Paying to be dominated is perhaps another line of business beyond the reach of the present topic. In a competitive market, presumably companies with rude, even hostile customer-service employees get enough of a negative reputation that even repeat customers eventually go elsewhere, but what if rude customer service is the norm in a given industry? A new potential supplier may not be motivated financially to enter the market based on customer-service as the primary basis of competitive advantage. Of course, the intentional (or, looking the other way) sale of illegal, unsafe, and counterfeit products can benefit from the deceit, especially on e-commerce platforms. Furthermore, if unethical business practices are the norm in the host country of such a seller but not where the customers are located, the reputation may be too light for sufficient notice to be taken by potential (and repeat) customers for them to buy from other sellers. This differential, and the typical erroneous assumption that the business ethics in one’s own culture is universal around the world and therefore one is not vulnerable to extremely unscrupulous sellers elsewhere, may be behind the €550 million fine that the E.U. slapped on AliExpress, an online marketplace based in China, on 20 July, 2026.

Even though I have no data to suggest that business practitioners in China were generally less ethical than their counterparts in the E.U., both the magnitude of the fine and the broadness and substance of the Commission’s accusation that AliExpress managers had failed “to adequately assess and mitigate risks linked to the sale of illegal, unsafe and counterfeit products” may be indicative of a very unethical business culture, not only in the company, but also in the general business culture in China.[1]  It may have been that at least as of 2026, even blatant unethical conduct was considered as a regular part of doing business in China, as in the statement, everyone here sells counterfeit. Two years prior, the E.U. Commission had “found that AliExpress failed to establish an effective system to detect and remove illegal products, while underestimating the gap between the number of human moderators available and the scale of the workload.”[2] Failure to establish a system that worked can be interpreted as an active decision to allow, or tolerate, illegal products on the “selves.” So too can the intentional understaffing of monitors in the company. The management need not have admitted to the mentality, for it is possible that its fingerprints were all over the choices actually taken by the managers. The “platform’s product compliance checks were also found to be vulnerable to abuse, with malicious traders allegedly misclassifying products to exploit less stringent requirements.”[3] Establishing an insufficient number of checks can itself be interpreted as being too comfortable with product-negligence and even the existence of malicious sellers. That “large volumes of illegal products—including unsafe toys and dangerous cosmetics—continued to circulate on AliExpress despite moderation efforts, in some cases remaining online for weeks after being flagged” may point to a managerial acceptance of squalid sellers on the marketplace platform.[4] In fact, the E.U. found “that AliExpress failed to properly enforce its penalty policy, allowing stores selling illegal products to remain active on the platform even after receiving sanctions” as if they would suddenly reverse an unethical mentality and organizational culture.[5] Sellers were even “able to bypass safeguards and list fake products” because the company’s brand authorization system “was deemed ineffective and insufficiently robust to stop abuse.”[6] Even the company’s public statement that the company had invested a lot in risk assessment and mitigation, product safety and consumer protection does not touch on how those investments were used, or even whether they were in fact used sufficiently. In fact, spending a lot of money can act as a smoke screen. The failure to acknowledge lapses can itself be viewed as unethical, or at least as not serious. In other words, mendacity can be like smoke indicative of a hidden fire if unethical people are habitually so, especially in covering up their own unethical decisions. Confessions are not necessary.

A company’s foreign direct-investment renders a foreign country’s beliefs and values concerning business ethics (and integrity in general) relevant. Even international trade—even at arm’s length—can cause two different ethics cultures to clash. The people in the more ethical business culture may be vulnerable to worse, and thus unforeseen or unanticipated, unethical practices such as selling illegal or counterfeit products under false pretenses (i.e., lying) rather than merely charging too much or having rude, power-hungry, or product/policy-incompetent customer-service employees.  To be sure, the latter two unethical practices are worthy of disrepute, but then how much more severe, and thus indicative, are the former two. As an admittedly rouge gauge, the difference between the ethical norms in the E.U.’s business sector and those in China’s can be grasped. Cultures around the world can be said to differ even substantially in terms of tolerance for unethical volition, mentality, and conduct and thus societal expectations for ethical conduct. A very large fine may be a quantifiable indication that two cultures differ substantially.

To go beyond compensation, the matter of whether as a penalty such a fine can actually change, or uplift, the relatively sordid business culture by somehow incentivizing practitioners in it to behave honorably rather than continuing with corner-cutting expediency seems too idealistic, and thus unrealistic because humans tend to be habitual creatures in conduct and mentalities are not likely to change, given their sheer gravitas, especially if they are oriented to sneaking around a new barrier. A river’s dam that has many holes is not likely to fix itself. Accordingly, the Commission would be wise to set fines as compensation for all of the harm to European consumers, rather than to teach the Chinese a lesson in order to mold Chinese business after European business. To be sure, the temptation to penalize and manipulate towards one’s own culture can be very strong, but being realistic can work wonders in satiating the desire to mold others who are different in one’s own image. Knowing the otherness of the other, for example, and publicizing this domestically in the E.U., could potentially do a lot to facilitate the mechanism of market competition in the weeding out of the squalid sellers in China by informed European consumers. The Commission has a loud-speaker with which to more closely link a company’s reputational capital to the actual business practices that may even be hidden from view.

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1. Vincenzo Genovese, “EU Slaps €550 Million Fine on AliExpress over Illegal and Counterfeit Goods,” Euronews.com, 20 July, 2026.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.

5. Ibid.
6. Ibid.

Transgendered (Male) Athletes in Women Sports

While the 2026 World Cup was underway in North America, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down a ruling, which is to say, a judgment rationally argued, siding with member-states that did not permit “Y chromosome” students in public schools to play in on “XX chromosome” sports teams. Not being a writer who fecklessly evades controversial topics for fear of turning away some readers, I will attempt to tackle the jurisprudence and ethics of male athletes who self-identify as women playing in women sports such as American football in public schools.

Because gender language had become so muddled by enough people in at least some member-states even just for ideological purposes, which is to say, to impose, I resort to reductionism in highlighting chromosomes, which, after all, are empirical facts, and, at least as of 2026 when the Court’s opinion was announced, the “Y” chromosome stays for life. This is not to castigate or dismiss individuals whose respective mental states include a close affiliation and even a group-identification sense of self with the other gender. The cultural stereotypes of the widths of masculinity and femininity had arguably contracted too narrowly since at least the eighteenth century in the West that a young, slender man with long, straight hair and a high-pitch voice in 2026 would likely conclude that he is not masculine and even feminine even though everything about him that is natural/biological would by definition be masculine (i.e., consistent with male hormones and the related Y chromosome). This point should not be taken as reductionistic concerning gender-identification, but I submit that the point is often overlooked.

In ancient Greece, unlike in Rome, bisexual or gay men who felt sexual pleasure in submitting in being penetrated by a penis were regarded as just as masculine as men who penetrate anally or vaginally. Perhaps Carl Jung would say that for the ancient Greeks, both genders were regarded as containing animus and anima, albeit proportioned differently. I contend that a man who is conscious of his anima has a fuller sense of himself than a man whose self-awareness only consists of animus. Again, this is not to explain or account for every transexual person, but, rather, my intent is to widen the discussion even if doing so is beyond the tolerable narrow limits of some ideologues who presume themselves and their partisans alone as entitled to proclaim opinion as fact in contradistinction to the mere opinions across the aisle.[1]

In terms of the U.S. Supreme Court, the anima in a male person and the animus in a woman, is like a dissent to a majority opinion. As a society, we ignore dissents at our peril, especially as several majority opinions, such as “separate but equal,” have been overturned. In her dissent in West Virginia vs. Becky P. Jackson, Justice Sotomayor claims that the majority was “wrong to reject Jackson’s equal-protection” (14^th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution) claim.[2] Sotomayor admitted, however, “We just simply do not know scientifically that transgender students pose dangers,”[3] meaning that such students have physical advantages athletically over biological women in playing in sports like (American) football, where body-size and muscle-mass do matter at the line of scrimmage. According to the Huffington Post, Sotomayor writes in her dissent that the facts show that transgender “women” do not have an “inherent athletic advantage” over (biological) women, but a strident ideology is indeed capable of inventing facts for itself while accusing the other side of ignoring facts.[4] That the X chromosome has over 1,000 genes, whereas the Y chromosome carries only 50-200 genes, including the SRY gene, which furnishes instructions for the development of distinctly male genitalia, suggests that women and men are indeed biologically different in a myriad of ways, so the claim that biological males do not have advantages in the conduct of sport may be dogmatic rather than based on fact. This is not to say that every man is physically stronger, as the 1970s tennis match between Bobby Riggs and Billy Jean King demonstrated.

Perhaps the Court’s decision comes down to the prime facie assertion that people with penises and testicles are by definition exogenous to women sports. Furthermore, the equal protection clause is not violated because nobody who was born with a penis (and still carries the Y chromosome) can be on a women-only (XX chromosomes) team. Just as in labeling a film’s lesbian sex-scene as homosexual, or gay, rather than heterosexual because two vaginas and no penises are involved and the mental states of the persons in the scene go only so far and thus do not alter the label, so too do such states go only so far in terms of whether a person qualifies to play in women sports. Not even if one person in such a scene has had her female breasts (“boobs”) removed and is taking testosterone and sports a mustache—neither boobs nor facial hair counting as sexual genitalia—is such a scene heterosexual, for the sexual genitalia of the two people are the same, which is to say, homo rather than hetero. Similarly, women sports includes only people who were born with the same (XX) genitalia, regardless of how the people have decided to appear externally and what mental state they have. The underlying culprit is ideology, as per its inherently expansive propensity at the expense of even legitimate constraints.

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1. A week before the Court’s decision, while I was volunteering to work at the 2026 Gay film festival in San Francisco so I could include some examples of “gay cinema” in a forthcoming book I was writing on philosophy and theology through the medium of film, I casually mentioned to two young women that the film shown had a lesbian sex scene. “That’s heterosexual sex!” one of the young (presumably lesbian) women angrily declared to me as if her fact trumped what was merely an opinion on my part. “No,” I retorted, “a sex scene with two vaginas is not heterosexual.” To my shock, the two women dismissed this fact by stating, as if declaring a fact of their own making, “No, it doesn’t work that way.” Translation: two vaginas as a sex act can be heterosexual if one of the women self-identifies as a man. This simply is not true; a person’s mental state is not sufficient to change the label. What surprised me the next week was how many young people pushed back against my rather obvious claim that a sex scene involving two vaginas is not heterosexual, as if the claim were suddenly disputable without regard to the definitions of the words, homosexual and heterosexual. One young man even repeatedly shouted at me at a coffee shop, “You’re an idiot!” To be so dismissive of definitions may involve an underlying troubled mental state, as well as arrogance and narcissism. Ideological angst and anger do not trump definitions. The sheer presumption, even more than the flashes of anger unleased on me, shocked me, for such presumption is like arrogance on stilts during a flood. Ideology itself had become a problem in the far left quarter of San Francisco by 2026 as evinced by the presumed entitlement to not only overreach, but also lash out in spiteful anger in verbally attacking anyone who is an obstacle to the overly expansive sense of self and the presumption to declare facts out of what is actually ideological opinion as a fact. Postscript on the Gay “Frameline” festival in San Francisco: the vengeance of the two young lesbians led Cicily, who managed the festival’s operations that year to write a hostile email to me accusing me of having spoken inappropriately. She had not even contacted me first to ask what I had actually said to the two complaining, vindictive lesbians. “The film contains a lesbian sex scene” is in no sense inappropriate, especially at a gay film festival! Besides accusing me of having spoken inappropriately during my first shift, Cicily was stupid enough to send me the harsh email as I was en route to my last shift. Accordingly, I was able to write a brief rebuttal and turn back (to my own work!) rather than continue on to the theater to freely give my labor to such a sordid, resentful, and too ideologically-driven group. Saying that a sex scene is not heterosexual because it involves two vaginas and no penises is not inappropriate; in fact, it is an accurate statement. San Francisco “pride” had gone too far, moreover, in its ideological intolerance and vindictiveness against anyone objecting to the "Castro norms" so I voted with my feet the next week by not watching its parade downtown. In the Castro, for example, tips at bars, fast food places, and even at coffee shops were, according to several gay men and at least one harsh employee, required by the very employees who receive them. “It’s the Castro standard,” a young man sitting at a table near mine scolded me before he dismissively walked away from the Poesia coffee shop with his friend while making it clear to me that he was laughing at me for having complained about a barista there who had angrily demanded a tip. Self-righteous immaturity would likely continue in that district. Another “Castro standard” callously and selfishly imposed by many gay men there on their boyfriends and even husbands was the presumed right to have separate sex with other men even with romantic attachment because, as one jejune gay man told me, “everyone here does it.” But even common practice is not itself an ethical rationale according to David Hume; the sub-culture reigning in the Castro (gay) district could simply have been dysfunctional, sustained in its narcissistic pathology by unresolved psychological issues prolonging self-absorbed adolescence. Bad air!

2. Mark Sherman and Lindsay Whitehurst, “Supreme Court Upholds State Laws Banning Transgender Girls and Women from School Athletic Teams,” APnews.com, June 30, 2026.
3. Ibid.
4. Sebastian Murdock, “Sotomayor: ‘Facts Do Not Matter’ to Supreme Court after It Upholds Trans Athlete Ban,” The Huffington Post, June 30, 2026.

On the Startling Pace of Global Warming: Calculus Applied

I went to Yale to study for four years (and then to Wisconsin for four years for post-doc study under a Harvard scholar), after having completed a Ph.D. program elsewhere (and decades later I went to Harvard (including auditing coursework at Yale for one term) for 1.5 years of continued study in comparative theology and ethics, and independent research) because my education at my first university, that of Kansas, was so bad; that university, run by sophomoric Jayhawks, did not heed the value of retaining faculty financially once promoted from the assistant level, and the graduate students who were teaching undergraduates were not trained in pedagogy. Significant to my unsatisfactory education at the University of Kansas was my decision to switch to business administration and accounting “mid-stream” without any regard to the opportunity cost of foregone coursework in the humanities in the liberal arts. When I was teaching accounting on the side while studying at Yale a decade later, I finally received confirmation that I had indeed made a significant educational mistake at KU, for when some Yale College students petitioned Dean Brodhead to create a major in business, he replied in the Yale Daily News, “Let us educate you first; then go out and get trained.” This priority and sequence are both severely eclipsed at “state” or public, universities in virtually every U.S. state, whereas the E.U. does a better job of distinguishing institutionally knowledge from vocational skill. Even the teaching in the liberal arts at the University of Kansas was lackluster, though I probably would have still made the move to business had the teaching been good. In calculus, for example, the graduate-student instructor did not think it necessary to explain that a derivative refers to the changing rate of acceleration rather than to acceleration itself; his exclusive orientation was to calculating so as to get us to arrive at correct answers. We were like trained seals. The graduate-student instructor of Physics, who could barely speak English (but that didn’t matter to the department’s receptionist), also did not feel obliged to explain what the formulae mean. Why does force equal mass times acceleration? Missing from E=MC² was the point that energy can become mass (Higgs would not be discovered for decades though). Whereas questions of physics have remained less than pressing through my adult life, climate change has turbo-charged the significance of the derivative, for the rate of acceleration of climate change, as evinced in the heatwaves in the E.U. during the summer of 2026, had already been positive and was increasing both as a number and in value qua significance. The melting glaciers in the Alps indicated then that the pace of human-caused climate change was much faster than previously expected. My inability to “see the forest” instead of individual “trees” at Kansas regarding my own college education can be likened to our species’ inability (and refusal) to grasp the true significance of climate change as a threat to our species’ very survival, and certainly comfort.

Regarding the impact of human-caused carbon (and methane) emissions on the heat-waves gripping Europe in the early summer (at least) of 2026, Dr. Theodore Keeping of Imperial College London said at the time, “The science of how climate change is worsening heatwaves is settled. Continued fossil-fuel emissions are directly responsible for the disruption people are experiencing this week in their homes, schools and workplaces. The speed of change is startling. Every few years we are seeing heat records shattered in Europe. This year it has been in consecutive months.”[1] That the speed was startling can be taken as a red flag, or very significant warning, that, as an old proverb states, the chickens are coming home to roust. In other words, humanity could no longer pretend that climate change is only an abstraction without “real world” consequences.

Science from World Weather Attribution (WWA) “found that both the daytime highs and overnight temperatures seen during the heatwave in late June, 2026] would have been ‘virtually impossible to occur at [that same] time of year’ as recently as 1976—just 50 years ago. A similar heatwave occurring in that historic climate would [have been] 3.5C cooler.”[2] In that year, in early July, I was a mere boy using tacks to pin an American flag I had made to the wood-front of my parent’s house for the bicentennial, and I don’t recall the heat (other than that which was released by my parents) being all that unbearable then in Illinois, which admittedly is a U.S. rather than an E.U. member-state. Even though the expression, virtually impossible, is itself startling, so too is an increase rate of acceleration, as was evinced in the melting of glaciers in central Europe in June, 2026.

Due to the heatwave that was holding on in Europe, the snow and ice accumulated over the previous winter on existing glaciers in the Alps was expected to have completely melted away by 29 June, 2026. In other words, from that day on, “every additional day of melting” would “shirk the size of the glacier[s].”[3] Since 2000, that point, known as glacier loss day, has usually not been until mid-August. Matthias Huss, the director of GLAMOS in Europe, warned that the glaciers were “shrinking at an unprecedented rate, accelerated by the ongoing heatwave.”[4] Huss stated, “We are three months too early compared to a healthy state” of the glaciers.[5] This all points to, or suggests, that the rate of acceleration of climate change was increasing; the derivative was positive as of 2026. Indeed, the melting of the glaciers had been “relatively modest until recent decades,” and the melting during the first month of summer in 2026 in turn made the rate in those recent decades look relatively modest.[6]

Among the many implications of an increasing rate of acceleration is the likelihood that the climate-change models being used to forecast warming going forward were in need of being adjusted, with dire impacts being predicted as coming sooner than had been expected even in the early 2020s. Another implication is that the continuing increase in carbon (ppm) in the atmosphere really needed to be stopped sooner rather than later. As of 5 June, 2026, the atmospheric carbon dioxide level was at 432.34 ppm, according to the NOAA (measured at the Mauna Loa Observatory), whereas the corresponding figure had been 429.61 ppm a year earlier. Besides the increasing global population, part of the reason for why reductions in overall fossil-fuel usage continued to be so difficult was that not every continent was facing extreme heat, and thus the dire consequences already, so sufficiently broad-based political will was still lacking even though virtually every European in June of 2026 was doubtlessly convinced that global warming is real and that carbon dioxide and methane levels in the atmosphere had already reached unacceptable levels. Similarly, not every place on the planet was at risk of increased flooding from sea-level rise. Italy, California, Greece, Florida, the Netherlands, and New York, for example, can easily be distinguished from Czechia, Illinois, Poland, Colorado, Luxemburg, and Arizona with regard to probable impacts from higher oceans. Fundamentally, both democracies and autocracies are vulnerable to not acting sufficiently in anticipation of yet-unfelt dire consequences; our species is not as rational as we may suppose, and this weakness “comes home to roust” especially amid increasing rates of acceleration.

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1. Liam Gilliver, “Climate Change is Running Rampant: Europe’s Heatwave ‘Virtually Impossible’ 50 Years Ago,” Euronews.com, 26 June 2026, italics added for emphasis.
2. Ibid.
3. Evelyn Dom, “Swiss Glaciers Melting at Alarming Rate in June as Europe Faces Extreme Heat,” Euronews.com, 28 June, 2026.
4. Ibid, italics added for emphasis.
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid.

El Nino as a Distraction as the E.U. Swelters

It is likely due to natural selection having formed our present-day species overwhelmingly in the hunter-gatherer very, very long period of our species 1.8 million years of existence (agriculture just having begun around 7000 BCE!) that we tend to take notice of a foreground and leave the background along because any threats it holds are immediate. Tigers, for example, become particularly dangerous when they are up close rather than several fields away. During the (Northern hemisphere’s) summer of 2026, as the E.U. was sweltering in successive heatwaves, the El Nino current event in which warm equatorial water in the Pacific Ocean moves eastward readily became a target as the culprit producing the heat far away in Europe. In actuality, according to scientists (but what do they know?), the gradual (i.e., background) warming of the planet’s atmosphere, especially in the Artic as well as in Europe, was behind the heat breaking records in the E.U. as well as in bordering sovereign states like Britain, where on 25 June, presumably in London, an all-time-high temperature for the month of June was recorded. Global warming, once safely in the background, was coming home to roust in the foreground.

Earlier in June, NOAA in the U.S. had declared “that El Nino conditions are officially underway in the tropical Pacific.”[1] Even though “Super El Nino” was not a scientific category, this did not stop the media coverage of “a so-called ‘Super El Nino.’”[2] At the  time, Ioanna Vergini, founder of the global weather-forecasting platform, WFY24, stated, “The Pacific isn’t in a strong El Nino state now, and even when it is, its direct influence on European summer heat is weak and poorly constrained.”[3] Referring to the successive heatwaves, she added, “This is a classic jet-stream blocking event acting on a record-warm background. The dome is the mechanism; long-term warming is the amplifier; El Nino is a distraction.”[4] Disruption from El Nino is largely in the tropics. Moreover, El Nino tends to temporarily increase global average temperatures by just 0.2C. According to Euronews, “this impact “is not as significant as human-made climate change, which” by the summer of 2026 had “pushed the global surface temperature up by approximately 1.3 – 1.5C compared to pre-industrial levels.”[5] The human-made impact was warming the E.U. “more than twice as fast as the global average, with temperatures up by around 2.5C compared to pre-industrial levels.” In fact, the northern reaches of Europe “extend into the Arctic, the fastest-warming region on Earth, where temperatures [were] rising at three-to-four times the global rate. As snow and ice melt, less sunlight is reflected by the Earth’s surface [back into space], while the darker surfaces that are exposed absorb more heat, amplifying the melting.”[6] In short, Europe, in its successive heatwaves breaking temperature records, was demonstrating for the rest of the world why an increase of 1.5C was selected in 2016 at a climate-change global conference in Paris as the threshold not to surpass. It is not as if delegates had stood by at that conference as someone flipped a coin.

Running up against a threshold that has been reasonably thought out and thus determined effectively moves climate change from the background to the foreground. To be sure, scientists working to ferret out the impact of climate change on a current weather-event face difficulties, but this does not mean that human-made warming of the atmosphere has not become a major factor. The shifting of climate change from a “back burner” to the front of the proverbial stove can be taken as a negative verdict on how governments around the world did in implementing the Paris Accords to keep the planet from warming more than 1.5C above pre-industrial levels. So, part of the motivation to blame El Nino could be to avoid self-blame, which includes not only government officials, but also voters, at least in the world’s republics. In other words, recognizing that climate change has moved to the foreground does not come cost-free. Indeed, quite a verdict goes along with the species risking its own survival.

Even so, perhaps we should not be too hard on our species, for the vast majority of natural selection occurred when a focus on the foreground at the expense of background was necessary for immediate survival. That so much of our species’ natural selection in evolution took place in such a different environment than our own today, together with the glacial pace of evolution, may be why our species goes extinct sooner rather than later if the planet establishes an atmospheric equilibrium that is uninhabitable for humans.

To be sure, we are homo sapiens, the wise species of homo (man), and as of the summer of 2026, the jury was still out on whether technological invention would save the day in reducing carbon and methane from the atmosphere (and the warming oceans). Already, technology was in operation, albeit at too small a scale, to remove carbon from the atmosphere. Additionally, energy from renewable resources was increasing, though not as fast as the increasing global demand for energy so as a consequence the use of fossil fuels was still increasing, at least as of 2025 according to a consultant to BP whose talk I attended at Yale. Our species hope lies not with government officials standing up to the fossil-fuel industry and profit, and not even in evolving to be more attentive to what is in the background; rather, our savior would have to be technology, as per the already extant technological society. The question even in 2026 as the E.U. sweltered as never before was whether the massive scale of the planet’s atmosphere and oceans could be impacted (fast) enough by technology that, at best, was only in the beginning stages of development. This is not to say that human rationality could not have been applied, with sufficient political power, to reduce carbon emissions more since the Paris Accords were adopted.

Resisting slavish attachment to instant gratification is, according to Nietzsche, possible for our species and can even be viewed as the completion of mankind. Whereas a person who is slavishly devoted to momentary pleasure cannot be trusted as a promise-keeper, “the man who has his own independent protracted will and the right to make promises” has “a consciousness of his own power and freedom, a sensation of mankind come to completion. Is emancipated individual, with the actual right to make promises, this master of a free will, this sovereign man—how should he not be aware of his superiority over all those who lack the right to make promises and stand as their own guarantors, of how much trust, how much fear, how much reverence he arouses—he deserves all three . . .”[7]  We are capable of promise-making and promise-keeping—the human will is strong enough for that, at least in principle, and not by relying on a supporting lattice-work of moral constraints issuing out in “Thou shalt not!”  We have seen how shallow mere political protest has been as up against the power that governments have nonetheless had to protect fossil-fuel industries under the subterfuge of saving jobs.

Rather than looking to moral pressure, humanity can look for its fulfillment at the human will as sovereign and thus as capable of self-confident assertion as a dominating instinctual urge (i.e., pride in being able to take oneself, and by others, as a promise-keeper rather than a weakling enslaved to momentary pleasure). Hence the negative verdict; as a species, we have not looked to the strength of the human will to make up for the glacial pace of natural selection. Perhaps the question is whether mankind will reach completion, or be completed as in being made extinct.

Even with respect to people being dreadfully uncomfortable in the European heat and humidity in June, 2026, humanity itself could be seen as having blood on its hands, and yet news of its self-inflicted wound will not have reached the culprit, like light from the farthest star that has not yet reached Earth. Nietzsche uses this imagery on the self-inflicted discrediting of the Abrahamic concept of God, so I adapt the language to apply to the discrediting of our species as yet another self-inflicted wound committed as if the human will had been deactivated and put on auto-pilot.

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1. Liam Gilliver, “’El Nino Is a Distraction’: Why Europe’s Deadly Heatwave Isn’t Down to a Natural Weather Phenomenon,” Euronews.com, 24 June, 2026.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5.  Ibid.
6. Ibid.
7. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, Second Essay, Sect. 2, in Basic Writings of Nietzsche, Trans and Ed., Walter Kaufmann (New York: The Modern Library, 1968), p. 495.

Free Will and Moral Responsibility

According to Rousseau, we are born free but we live out our life in chains. Although some people subvert background context and foreground personhood such that the chains are believed to be societally imposed as if people are not sufficiently free to transcend or counter the “binding” external strictures of some institution or society, Nietzsche argues that the sovereign individual is lies at the end of an arduous long process by which our species has become bred to be “to a certain degree necessary, uniform, like among like, regular, and consequently calculable” and thus certain people can be trusted to be reliable in promise-keeping.[1] Such people are free individuals. They are autonomous even against the “Though Shalt Nots” of moral mores, which had their place as virtual societal straitjackets in the development of the species but are legitimately cast off by people who can be relied upon to keep promises without violating them in the heat of the moment. Such people are individuals, but not narcissists, for the latter calculate each moment as to what lies in their self-interest—the feelings of others be damned if they are in the way. It is ironic that moral responsibility applies to the latter rather than to the autonomous individuals because only the free ones can call their “dominating instinct” a “conscience.”[2] Modern society, at least in the West, could use an elaboration on Nietzsche’s description of the autonomous individual in so far as such a person is antipodal to the herd animals on whom moral responsibility should be imposed because they cannot be trusted, for they are not promise-keepers. St. Paul’s dictum to keep the fools at a distance is ironically in line with the second essay of Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals, where the Christian ascetic priest is lampooned for its innate weakness even as it seeks to dominate the strong out of ressentiment.

At the end of human prehistory, and arguably even well beyond that—at the end of a process in which “the morality of mores and the social straitjacket” fashioned the species as being capable of being relied upon and thus of having a memory fortified against the encroachment of legitimate forgetfulness—lies “the ripest fruit,” the “sovereign individual, like only to himself, liberated again from morality of custom, autonomous and supramoral.”[3] Such an individual must be in some sense have achieved regularity, and thus be calculable by others who rely on the promises made. To Nietzsche, autonomous and moral are mutually exclusive.[4] But this does not mean that the autonomous person who is free from one’s own instinctual urges that compete with that of that of conscience necessarily acts immorally. This “emancipated individual,” freed from moral mores, even well-ensconced as custom, that would otherwise be binding and thus hold a person as though in chains, has one’s “own independent, protracted will and the right to make promises.”[5] In this type, we have our species “come to completion.”[6] Free will is not a precondition for external moral customs to be legitimately applied to human beings, and yet it is the autonomous individual who has “the right to make promises.”[7] In such a person, conscience as an instinct is dominate and thus we can say that the morality of keeping one’s own promises is internal and thus consistent with free will.

Whereas Rousseau’s fictional character, Emile, says to his mentor, Lycurgus, “I have decided to be as you made me,” Nietzsche’s autonomous individual says to oneself, “I have decided to me as I have made me,” as being capable of being relied on in the keeping of one’s own promises to others. Such people voluntarily hold themselves to their word. Paradoxically, the autonomous individual “is bound to honor his peers, the strong and reliable (those with the right to make promises)—that is, all those who promise like sovereigns, reluctantly, rarely, slowly, who are chary of trusting, whose trust is a mark of distinction, who give their word something that can be relied on because they know themselves strong enough to maintain it in the face of accidents, even ‘in the face of fate.’”[8] Accidents are things that come along that tempt a person to violate one’s promises. Even though an autonomous individual free of moral custom is free to put one’s instinctual urges that favor satisfying those “accidents” before the urge to keep one’s promises, the person can be relied on to go on putting the promise-keeping urge first. “Here I stand and I cannot do otherwise,” Luther stated as a priest free from Rome; he could have done otherwise, but is inner conscience, a long-standing instinctual urge, was his autonomy. He was free to overcome (i.e., master) his most intractable instinctual urges to the contrary, and strong enough to do precisely that. The output of his mastery were his 95 theses, which he defiantly nailed to a church door. His statement, “I cannot do otherwise,” should not be taken literally as instantiating determinism, but, rather, as a statement of a free decision to go on principle with a resounding force of conscience that follows from a free choice rather than as cutting it off. This is how autonomous and cannot can be viewed as being consistent rather than as contradictory.

The autonomy is inside the “ripened fruit” of our species. The type of moral responsibility that is consistent with this is that which comes voluntarily from within. “The proud awareness of the extraordinary privilege of responsibility, the consciousness of this rare freedom, this power over oneself and over fate, has in his case penetrated to the profoundest depths and become instinct, the dominating instinct.”[9] The power over oneself is one’s will in choosing to treat one’s conscience as one’s dominant instinct, but can an instinct that is dominate over others really be chosen? Is not the outcome of tussling instincts a result of the contending instincts rather than a separate, internal will? Nietzsche states that the strong cannot be other than strong, and the weak are inherently weak, so presumably free will does not apply to the decision on whether to be weak or strong.

Nevertheless, Nietzsche gives the autonomous individual credit for having a reliable will. “The ‘free’ man, the possessor of a protracted and unbreakable will, also possesses his measure of value.”[10] Perhaps then the autonomous individual applies a measure of high value to the conscience, which can thus act as an instinct that is dominant (though Nietzsche viewed the instincts in physiological terms). Kant claims that reason has absolute value because rational beings use reason to apply value to things. For Nietzsche, it seems that the free will—autonomy within a person—has absolute value because it is the will that can assign values to contending instincts if the will is free of even the most dominant of them, but is the will not itself an instinct according to Nietzsche?

The thorny questions on whether the autonomous individual has free will rather than merely being autonomous of moral customs aside, Nietzsche’s distinction between a promise-keeper and a promise-breaker is clear. A pathos of distance naturally exists between the two basic types of people because one is a free agent who can be trusted whereas the other is a slave to himself and thus should not be trusted.  To be able to keep promises, such that “a world of strange new things, circumstances, even acts of will may be interposed without breaking this long chain of will,” and thus to be able “to stand security for his own future,” such a person should “be aware of his superiority over all those who lack the right to make promises and stand as their own guarantors.”[11] How “much trust, how much fear, how much reverence he arouses—he ‘deserves’ all three—and of how this mastery over himself also necessarily gives him mastery over circumstances, over nature, and over all more short-willed and unreliable creatures?”[12] The deservingness with the superiority, and indeed the respect due all distinguish the promise-keeper from the promise-breaker. The mastery of the autonomous individual extends even over nature, such that perhaps in willing the instinctual urge that we call conscience to be dominant, the free individual makes it so physiologically within himself. In utter contrast are “the feeble windbags who promise without the right to do so, . . . and the liar who breaks his word even at the moment he utters it.”[13] Although Nietzsche claims that the free individuals who will themselves to be reliable in promise-making such that the promises are kept are “bound to reserve a kick” for the promise-breakers, I contend that any association would violate the natural pathos of distance that legitimately exists between the promise-keepers and promise-breakers (and liars).

Ironically, the inferior person, whose narcissism manifests as pathological lies in order to manipulate other people, is more likely to enforce the distance out of envy and resentment, whereas the promise-keeper is likely to engage with other promise-keepers without a thought to the pathetic losers who find it so easy to break their promises and otherwise lie to get what they want. Such people are those who instinctively obviate commitment by “redefining” a romantic relationship as anything goes, including even separate sex with emotional attachment or romantic connection.

For example, being confronted by an autonomous individual for acting like a “trophy whore,” a narcissist who is enslaved to his most intractable urges (and thus refuses to keep promises, and thus cannot and should not be trusted) will refuse to look within and admit to the validity of the accusation and thus be willing to change.  As though a trapped animal, the promise-breaker and liar will strike out at the messenger, viewing that friend as a threat. People with a vested interest in the promiscuity and even in promise-breaking as if it were a virtue would gladly be manipulated by the narcissist into pushing back against the promise-keeper even though the latter would actually like to see the liar as reliable and thus as being capable and deserving of trust.

In short, even though the pathos of distance may be created by the promise-keeper refusing to trust the promise-breaker and pathological liar, the latter makes sure that the distance is enforced, out of sheer anger. “How dare you call me a trophy whore!”, “I will never talk to you again,” and even, “I’m going to manipulate people I know to run you out of town so I never have to see your disgusting face again” constitute a very different response than, “I don’t like myself for lying and reneging so much; I didn’t realize what I have become. Would you please help me so I might become capable of being trusted so someday I could enjoy genuine friendships and even an emotionally-intimate romantic relationship with someone whom I can trust?”

Sadly, the narcissist who views himself as too weak even to ask for help and perceives wake-up calls as attacks will never change, never be trusted; such a person will go through life in a series of superficial relationships lacking commitment and trust. No promise-keeper would agree to be lied to and betrayed by a person who insists on having his cake and eating it too. Even in locales where having separate sex with other romantic interests is the norm, and even deemed worthy to be imposed in a relationship, narcissists will ruin themselves in refusing to maturate into adulthood. Of course, an autonomous individual would object to such an arrangement as being utterly selfish and inconsiderate, and even hurtful; a pathos of distance would naturally be erected like the wall that separated Eastern and Western Europe after World War II for decades.

Whereas an autonomous individual has the strength and free will with which to face oneself internally and thus to change so as to grow as a person and be capable of emotional intimacy in friendship and romance, people who let their immediate urges rule are static entities that will not change. If the two types try to become friends or even a romantic couple, what begins as a stream between them inexorably becomes an abyss that cannot be crossed because they are like oil and water. I am not suggesting that autonomous individuals adopt a savior complex; that would diminish their internal freedom. Rather, I submit that calling out narcissistic liars is a worthy activity because there is a chance that one day some may change as a result, even if they are likely to retaliate because that is easier than facing their own demons and recognizing that selfless love may actually exist and have been freely bestowed on them without them being able to reciprocate. Because Nietzsche claims that the weak cannot become strong, even with external help, it may that simply respecting the natural pathos of distance that separates the honest from the liars is best. It is sad, though, that potentially reliable people who are otherwise good people, even lovable and potentially deserving of unconditional love, must be lost due to their own stubborn intractability and refusal to look within rather than act on the momentary instinctual urge to strike out as if a trapped wild animal. Primitive animals are not free of their momentary, primal urges, and so they are not free to hold themselves as reliable, and thus as trustworthy by other animals. What a species we are in having bred ourselves as a species by means of moral customs to be reliable and yet to still have in our midst people who are utterly untrustworthy, who even treat commitment as if it were a dirty word and use sex as a weapon so as to inflict pain on promise-keepers as if being reliable, and thus honest, were a crime against humanity. The spite with which the weak resent the strong is something on which Nietzsche wrote extensively. Two different orbits; two different types, yet astonishingly of the very same species!

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1. Friedrich Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals, in Basic Writings of Nietzsche, Trans and Ed., Walter Kaufmann (New York: The Modern Library, 1968), p. 495.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid.
7. Ibid.
8. Ibid., p. 496.
9. Ibid.
10. Ibid.
11. Ibid., pp. 494-95.
12. Ibid., pp. 495-96.
13. Ibid, p. 496.

Intimidation in Retail: The Case of San Francisco

Visuals are an important ingredient in consumer marketing, so it is surprising to come across retail managers who are so purblind as concerns the latent yet obvious passive aggression in some of the visuals that those managers themselves approve in the name of security. The espoused, yet utterly fake claim that customer experience is improved by the added sense of safety—the actual underlying motive lies in loss prevention—is typically outweighed by the very human negative experience from being intentionally intimidated by passive-aggressive visuals. It may be that such managers, frustrated by high rates of in-store petty theft (i.e., “shoplifting”), are unconsciously taking their latent aggression out of the customers as a group. Even if not, the lack of judgment is palpable from the visuals themselves. It is no wonder that an increasing number of customers prefer shopping online. 

The full essay is at "Retail Intimidation ."

Organizational Man: Refined or Repressed?

Friedrich Nietzsche’s ideal is the courageous, ancient Greco-Roman nobility, including the unashamed conquerors replete with self-confident will to power rather than shame at having vanquished formidable resistance. Rather than actually advocating that we return to the raping and pillaging that took place back then, Nietzsche wanted to depict modern, emaciated man as a contrast in order to turn the weakening of man around in Europe. Similar to Sinclair Lewis, who wrote his satirical novel, Babbit (1922) to showcase the utter vacuity of the middle-class businessman in America, Nietzsche laments “the reduction of the beast of prey ‘man’ to a tame and civilized animal, a domestic animal . . .”[1] By that he meant us: modern, enervated, and cultured incarnations of human nature relative to the full, untamed, and resilient lives of the ancient Greco-Roman conquerors. Having no knowledge of the lives that they lived in terms of full, unashamed and unconstrained will to power as will to living life with gusto, we scarcely realize the extent to which our societal institutions and vocational organizations box up our nature to that which is inoffensive and even polite even to competitors.

How very much our very nature has been contorted so as to fit within the modern straitjackets that we moderns ourselves have constructed. We have cut off our limbs and yet even as we still hold the knives, news of our deeds has not reached us, like light from a distant star has already happened but has not yet reached our planet. Nietzsche uses this imagery in explaining the death, or, more accurately, discrediting of the Abrahamic conception of God—Gott ist tot. Anticipating Freud, Nietzsche liked to remind us that we don’t really know ourselves as well as we think we do. In grizzled suits sitting in an office—something utterly unknown to the Roman conquerors!—are we not purblind when facing a mirror at “the repellent sight of the ill-constituted, dwarfed, atrophied, and poisoned?”[2] Who is aware of being poisoned when each dose is small and the course of weakening is of long duration? In fact, “the ‘tame man,’ the hopelessly mediocre and insipid man, has already learned to feel to feel himself as the goal and zenith, as the meaning of history, as ‘higher man.’”[3] Like arrogance on stilts during a flood, modern man speaks of progress while ignoring the weakening impact of creature comforts in sedating our will to power as will to experiencing the fullness of life into something like a will to comfort.

At this point in Genealogy, Nietzsche writes as only he has—vintage Nietzsche. “At this point I cannot suppress a sigh and a last hope. What is it that I especially find utterly unendurable? That I cannot cope with, that makes me choke and faint? Bad air! Bad air! The approach of some ill-constituted thing; that I have to smell the entrails of some ill-constituted soul!”[4] Elsewhere in his writing, Nietzsche refers to the bad odor of the weak, voluntarily impotent creatures whose inner bird-of-prey nature has been replaced by spite and resentment of the strong under the subterfuge of polite society.

Modern man knows passive aggression all too well; university faculties specialize in it under the cover of calmness. To be not calm, but to shout at the betrayal of a friend—this we have almost lost. Stuffing feelings can diminish direct communication that is unashamedly honest. Even though direct, unfiltered communication of especially strong feelings is generally considered indecent in public, such communication clears the air by flushing toxic residue away so genuine human connection can finally exist or the combatants can separate cleanly and forget each other. This advice applies of course to romantic relationships, but also to co-workers in the workplace. How shocking it would be to Babbit to hear two workers shouting at each other in a workplace that has been designed to remove all but a pallid version of human nature in its fullness! Of course, the need for monetary compensation to cover rent, utilities, and food makes employees reasonably fearful of bringing their full human nature to work. My point is that the ubiquity of passive aggression in the workplace means that too much of our innate nature is repressed in the business world; perhaps two angry employees could take their argument outside, escaping the overly disinfected office space for a bit.

In an emotionally-fearful society of banal convenience, a person can be unaware of how “much one is able to endure: distress, want, bad weather, sickness, toil, solitude. Fundamentally one can cope with everything else, born as one is to a subterranean life of struggle; one emerges again and again into the light, one experiences again and again one’s golden hour of victory—and then one stands forth as one was born, unbreakable, tensed, ready for new, even harder, remoter things, like a bow that distress only serves to draw tauter.”[5] How different such an expression of human nature is than that which is permissible under the tight watch of security cameras. So much of our nature is proscribed by organizational policies—as if policies were laws and subcontracted security guard were police. In utter disgust at modern man having become “thinner, more good-natured, more prudent, more comfortable, more mediocre, more indifferent,” Nietzsche yearns for even just a glimpse of a person “wholly achieved, happy, mighty, triumphant, something still capable of arousing fear! Of a man who justifies man, of a complementary and redeeming lucky hit on the part of man for the sake of which one may still believe in man!”[6] Nietzsche wanted to believe in our species but found a downward trajectory from strength to weakness—a “diminution and leveling.”[7] Nietzsche would likely claim that the hierarchies that exist in social/religious, business, and governmental organizations pale in comparison to natural hierarchies that enable a pathos of distance between the now-rare, strong breed that values and acts out ancient noble virtues such as courage and honesty and the now ubiquitous weak breed of timid, emotionally-vacuous organizational humanoids.

The modern woman who is attracted to the insipid corporate type sufficiently high on the corporate ladder has lost her way, Nietzsche would no doubt say, and is denying her primal nature; not so the woman who is instinctually attracted to a passionate, dominate male who lifts weights and is not ashamed to be vocal in overcoming resistance from a rival and even from her, and who wrestles or maybe even street-fights from time to time when provoked rather than calls on police to intercede, thus subcontracting his basic instincts. So distant the corporate man is from raw human instinct, and yet modern society counts business executives as powerful and of high standing in society. It is as if we all have been fooled into taking weakness for strength. Business ethicists lash out at business managers with “Thou Shalt Not!” as if the managers should be ashamed of the power that they wield, but this assumes that corporate power evinces Nietzschean strength as self-confident pride rather than timidity in overcoming obstacles. So very pallid is corporate speak, and yet how very many nonsupervisory, uneducated workers on the margins, such as at call centers, use the tone and lingo as a club as if from a position of strength rather than weakness. The weak who seek to dominate the strong—think of a call-center employee on the phone with a legitimately aggrieved customer—are not strong enough to master their most intractable instinct, Nietzsche claims, which is to feel the pleasure of power even by dominating if necessary. The strong need not dominate, for their self-confident power overflows. Confidence is attractive, whereas dominance, which Nietzsche theorizes manifests from weakness, is ugly.

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1. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, in Basic Writings of Nietzsche, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: The Modern Library1968), p. 478.

2. Ibid., p. 479.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid., pp. 479-80.
5. Ibid., p. 480.
6. Ibid.
7. Ibid.