Rousseau: Natural and Artificial Inequalities

In his Discourse on Inequalities, Rousseau distinguishes two types of inequality among people: natural and moral.[1] Natural inequalities, which exist in the state of nature as well as society, result in difference outcomes owing to innate differences in “genius, beauty, strength or address, merit or talents.” Such differences—both in sources and outcomes—pale in comparison with those from “moral” inequalities, such as exist between rich and poor, professionals and the unskilled, and the powerful and the subjugated.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778)

“Now, if we compare the prodigious variety in the education and manner of living of the different orders of men in a civil state, with the simplicity and uniformity that prevails in the animal and savage life, where all the individuals make use of the same aliments, live in the same manner, and do exactly the same things, we shall easily conceive how much the difference between man and man in the state of nature must be less than in the state of society, and how much every inequality of institution must increase the natural inequalities of the human species.”

Wealth is a case in point—the extremes in the American societies, for example, dwarfing the subsistence differences in the state of nature.

“Riches, before the invention of signs to represent them, could scarce consist in anything but lands and cattle, the only real goods which men can possess. But when estates increased so much in number and in extent as to take in whole countries and touch each other, it became impossible for one man to aggrandise himself but at the expense of some other; and the supernumerary inhabitants, who were too weak or too indolent to make such acquisitions in their turn, impoverished without losing anything, because while everything about them changed they alone remained the same, were obliged to receive or force their subsistence from the hands of the rich.”

Moral inequalities are marketed by the “haves” as moral and thus legitimate and even generally beneficial to society, when in truth the inequalities involve much undeserved harm.

“In fine, an insatiable ambition, the rage of raising their relative fortunes, not so much through real necessity, as to over-top others, inspire all men with a wicked inclination to injure each other, and with a secret jealousy so much the more dangerous, as to carry its point with the greater security, it often puts on the face of benevolence.”

The sordid “moral” inequalities are possible only in a civil state, which in turn exists in a society, as such inequalities stem from institutions in business, higher education, and government (among others). For example, corporations may be designed so that executives and board members benefit disproportionately relative to middle managers and “below.” Governments, even if democratic, may fit into a societal system more broadly in exchanging campaign contributions for legislation that would modify the system in favor of increasing economic inequality. 

Moreover, according to Rousseau, society is not simply biased toward increasing inequality; society gives rise to the inequalities. “(A)s there is scarce any inequality among men in a state of nature, all that which we now behold owes its force and its growth to the development of our faculties and the improvement of our understanding, and at last becomes permanent and lawful by the establishment of property and of laws.” To protect these from usurpers, warfare and aggression come to dwarf the pre-existing natural human compassion or empathy for those who are suffering. “(I)t is merely the spirit of society, and the inequality which society engenders, that thus change and transform all our natural inclinations.” Indeed, being in society may transform human nature itself.

Society engenders the “universal desire of reputation, of honours, of preference, with which we are all devoured, exercises and compares our talents and our forces.” Society thus “excites and multiplies our passions; and, by creating an universal competition, rivalship, or rather enmity among men, how many disappointments, successes, and catastrophes of every kind . . .  it is to this itch of being spoken of, to this fury of distinguishing ourselves which seldom or never gives us a moment's respite, that we owe both the best and the worst things among us, our virtues and our vices, our sciences and our errors, our conquerors and our philosophers; that is to say, a great many bad things to a very few good ones.

Most significantly, “the origin of society and of the laws . . . increased the fetters of the weak, and the strength of the rich; irretrievably destroyed natural liberty, fixed [forever] the laws of property and inequality; changed an artful usurpation into an irrevocable title; and for the benefit of a few ambitious individuals subjected the rest of mankind to perpetual labour, servitude, and misery.”  The artificial variety of inequalities can be expected to increase, silently aided by institutional designs, until the people bled dry finally have had enough and revolt. This involves a different sort of state of nature than that out of which society originally arises.

“The progress of inequality: “the establishment of laws and of the right of property was the first term of it; the institution of magistrates the second; and the third and last the changing of legal into arbitrary power; so that the different states of rich and poor were authorized by the first epoch; those of powerful and weak by the second; and by the third those of master and slave, which formed the last degree of inequality, and the term in which all the rest at last end, till new revolutions entirely dissolve the government, or bring it back nearer to its legal constitution. . . . Tis here that everything returns to the sole law of the strongest, and of course to a new state of nature different from that with which we began, in as much as the first was the state of nature in its purity, and the last the consequence of excessive corruption.”

In short, the sort of inequalities that society and its various species of institutions create and perpetuate clashes with natural right. The exceptional inequality of incomes between CEOs and workers in the U.S. is simply not natural, given the human nature that happily exists in the state of nature. Put another way, the tremendous inequality of wealth both results from and encourages a transformation of natural inclinations that could alter even human nature itself into something much uglier than what it was in the state of nature. The “kind of inequality which obtains in all civilised nations . . . is evidently against the law of nature that . . . a handful of men should be ready to choke with superfluities, while the famished multitude want the commonest necessaries of life.” This is bound not to end well for the human race, whether through society’s impact on the planet (e.g., global warming) or something within the human race, such as nuclear war or a plague.

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1. All quotes in this essay from Rousseau are taken from Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on the Origins of Inequality, Harvard Classics, Charles W. Eliot, ed., Vol. 34 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,1910).

Rousseau on Inequalities in Society: An Instance of Kantian Enlightenment?

Kant defines enlightenment as “man's emergence from his inability to use one's own understanding without the guidance of another.”[1] By making public use, Kant means “that use which anyone may make of it as a man of learning addressing the entire reading public.”[2] By sufficient freedom, Kant means that ideas that threaten the power of the guardians of institutional or societal rules are not excluded.

Immanuel Kant, an 18th-century philosopher famous for his duty-based ethics.

For example, an enlightened Roman Catholic priest would publish ideas questioning and even criticizing Church dogma when he is acting as a scholar, even though he would fulfill his duty in his conduct as a priest by defending those very teachings. A priest could thus go public as a heretic as long as he does so on his own time as a scholar and member of society, and an enlightened bishop would tolerate the scholar’s freedom to think and publish outside the box.

Rousseau would object to Kant’s prescription for how to become enlightened and Kant would object in turn to Rousseau's preference for the state of nature over society and the associated expansion of reasoning. Does Rousseau fit Kant's concept of enlightenment even though Kant would object to some of Rousseau's ideas?

Rousseau was a “heretic” of sorts. Writing to people living in societies, he was critical of the very existence of society itself, and thus of the power of its guardians. In his essay on inequality, he contends that the unnecessary, or artificial, sources of inequality stem from humans living in society rather than in the state of nature. “Every inequality of institution must increase the natural inequalities of the human species.”[3] Accordingly, “the origin of society and of the laws, which increased the fetters of the weak, and the strength of the rich; irretrievably destroyed natural liberty, fixed for ever [sic] the laws of property and inequality; changed an artful usurpation into an irrevocable title; and for the benefit of a few ambitious individuals subjected the rest of mankind to perpetual labour, servitude, and misery.”[4] By thinking freely and publishing the results, the citizen of Geneva aimed a lethal arrow at not only human society, but also its guardians. Rather than coming from the guidance of guardians, his ideas on the impact of them, as well as the defended institutions, properties, and laws arose from his own reasoning. He was free thinker, enlightened in Kant’s sense of the word.

This is not to say that the content of Rousseau’s essay on inequality conforms to Kant’s prescriptions for how more people or a people can become enlightened. For example, Kant laments that the constrained use of reason that had become second nature to the vast majority of people in his day who astonishingly were “virtually incapable for the time being of freeing their use of reason.”[5] According to Rousseau, however, the increased use of reason stimulated by living in a society instead of in the state of nature engenders self-love, and therefore pride, jealousy, and increased as well as technologically more severe warfare. Antipodal to society itself, “it is reason that makes man shrink into himself; it is reason that makes him keep aloof from everything that can trouble or afflict him; it is philosophy that destroys his connections with other men.”[6] Living in society is self-contradictory with respect to the impacts of the expanding and more complex reasoning.[7]

In short, the Prussian professor claims in his essay that a greater use of reason is part of becoming enlightened, whereas the citizen of Geneva advocates in his essay a reduction in the use of reason to that level and simplicity that is natural for human beings (i.e., in the state of nature). That Rousseau's published ideas on reason conflict with the significance of reasoning in becoming enlightened does not mean, however, that Rousseau's reasoning about reason in the state of nature versus in society is not an instance of enlightenment. That is, Rousseau's own use of reason can fit Kant's definition of enlightenment rather than the lesser reasoning that Rousseau prescribes. Put another way, Rousseau was a philosopher who claims in his essay that philosophy destroys a philosopher's social connections.

As a professor of philosophy at a university, Kant undoubtedly defended and protected the discipline institutionally; that is, old Kant was a guardian of some things not present in the state of nature—namely, professorships in philosophy, the discipline of philosophy, and philosophizing itself. Rousseau's published ideas critical of the artificial sort, or excess, of reasoning that is the root, trunk, and branches of philosophizing thus evinces freedom of public thought beyond the guidance of institutional guardians such as Kant; the philosophical establishment (e.g.,  tenured professors) would have been inclined to discredit or even ban Rousseau's threatening ideas. In writing published texts in philosophy, Rousseau was doing the very thing that he argues in his essay should not be done; he was doing Kantian enlightened public thinking.

Furthermore, Kant claims that people “will of their own accord gradually work their way out of barbarism so long as artificial measures are not deliberately adopted to keep them in it.”[8] A society’s guardians determine and defend such measures. Although Rousseau too is critical of the artificial measures and their societally rather than naturally powerful enforcers, he advocates a return to the state of nature (including barbarism) rather than moving toward an enlightened society.

Therefore, Rousseau would oppose Kant’s advocacy of an enlightened prince who considers it his duty in religious matters not to prescribe anything to his people as a means of encouraging more people to become enlightened. Under his rule, “ecclesiastical dignitaries, notwithstanding their official duties, may in their capacity as scholars freely and publicly submit to the judgment of the world their verdicts and opinions, even if these deviate from orthodox doctrine.”[9] To Rousseau, who is less concerned in his essay on inequality about the religious domain than is Kant in his essay on enlightenment, the various forms of government, including monarchy, “owe their origin to the various degrees of inequality between the members, at the time they first coalesced into a political body.”[10] The solution to the increased societally-based inequalities is to return to the state of nature, rather than to count on an “enlightened” prince, who is actually compromised by power and position (i.e., inequality). So Rousseau criticizes a governmental means by which a people can become enlightened in a Kantian sense, but in doing so, he demonstrates that his freedom of public thought was not constrained or guided by a prince.

Therefore, Kant would have to obey his own reason in counting Rousseau among the enlightened as per Kant's own definition, even while rejecting and perhaps even attacking Rousseau's ideas that would detract from such enlightenment if put into effect. To the extent that Kant himself was not enlightened, he would hardly have been able, at least for the time being, to tolerate such ideas even as he would have had to admit that Rousseau was enlightened. Put another way, being both an institutional guardian and a philosopher, Kant would have been in a tight corner. Generally speaking, we can conclude that enlightenment exists uneasily with the lack thereof in a society, especially if the lack pertains to the guardians. Accordingly, I suspect that a society is at ease only if the vast majority of people, including most or even all of the guardians, are enlightened.

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[1] Immanuel Kant, An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment? (World ebook Library).

[2] Ibid.

[3] Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on the Origins of Inequality, Harvard Classics, Charles W. Eliot, ed., Vol. 34 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1910).

[4] Ibid.

[5] Kant, An Answer.

[6] Rousseau, Discourse.

[7] Interestingly, Kant’s first version of his categorical imperative, a criterion useful for assessing whether a given act is ethical, logical contradiction in a maxim being universalized such that it holds for everyone indicates that the act is immoral even if performed by one person rather than everyone. We are rational beings, so a logical contradiction means bad news. Therefore, does the logical contradiction in universalizing an increased use of reason in society to everyone resulting in everyone impeding society itself mean that living in society is unethical? Perhaps Kant would say that society would have to be impossible rather than merely impeded for there to be a logical contraction.

[8] Kant, An Answer.

[9] Ibid.

[10] Rousseau, Discourse.

Rousseau and Marx: Against Excessive Economic Inequality

Both Marx and Rousseau are “anti-history” in the sense that socioeconomic and sociopolitical large, complex organization, well beyond the small groups of prehistoric homo sapiens people living a sustenance existence, has alienated workers from themselves (Marx) and introduced artificial, or “moral,” inequalities and inauthentic fronts (Rousseau). In other words, the human condition in the modern world is not a story of progress; paradoxically, things have gotten worse in spite, and indeed in part due to the extent of technological progress. In other words, under the subterfuge (i.e., camouflage) of “progress,” the species has actually acquiesced to increasing decadence and deterioration as human organization has become larger and more complex.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Karl Marx: Is there a Common Denominator?  

Image Source: anitagaribaldi.com.br

Even so, Rousseau was himself a product of the Enlightenment—an expansion of the free use of reason (i.e., beyond tradition) that he claims widens inequalities. As for Marx, his assertion that man is by nature a part of nature flies in the face of the violations of human nature (e.g., ignoring greed) that doomed the oppressive and yet idealistic Communist states in the twentieth century—the bloodiest and perhaps greediest century of them all. In fact, the Communist “experiments” were to human nature as the Christian sin of usury was to the time value of money.

A person could reasonably ask why ideologies, whether economic, political, or religious, produce such mammoth blind-spots. Is it in the nature of ideology as it interacts with the homo sapien mind to produce denial as a defense mechanism overprotective of a cherished arrangement of interrelated beliefs and assumptions that a  person values? Before the cognitive revolution, which occurred between 70,000 and 50,000 years ago, homo sapiens did not have fictive minds and languages; nobody could produce and share a priori  (i.e., ideas that are not from experience, hence not from an empirical source in the world) abstractions like “justice” and “democracy,” as well as fictional stories including myths and folktales, any of which can go into an ideology. The first evidence of religion is dated at around 50,000 years ago (a small statue having a lion’s head and the body of a homo sapiens). Interestingly, sapien means knowledge or wisdom in Latin; members of our species have not been shy in naming our own species.

Paradoxically, the purported ideological sources of the ruddy French Revolution and the seemingly inexorable U.S.S.R., respectively, privilege a human condition (and nature) before ideology, in the state of (prehistoric) nature. This does not mean that the ideal is idealistic in the fictive sense as exemplified by the Golden Age depicted by Hesiod and Ovid, and the “what people would agree to but admittedly never did” social contract  envisioned by Kant. Rather, Aristotle’s tweaking of the idealistic depictions of a Golden Age that never existed into a version reflecting the rural farm life of antiquity, and Hobbes’ intentionally realistic state of nature as nasty, brutish and short come closer how both Rousseau and Marx approach the state of nature as an ideal from which mankind has essentially “screwed up.” 

Both Rousseau and Marx could point to the fictive mind and use of language that resulted from the cognitive revolution in prehistoric times as decisive in the unfolding of the ensuing increased inequalities and self-alienation. The ability to talk about things that do not really exist, such as abstract ideas sourced only in imaginations, and to create fictional stories by imagining a fictive world are requisite to not only  adapting to different natural environments, but also cooperating flexibly with many strangers in artificial or man-made environments. To go beyond the social confines of what gossip can maintain among people who know each other (150 people at most) and create and live in social, economic and political systems that are larger as well as complex and thus can artificially order or regulate even very large numbers of people, the homo sapiens mind had to leap in evolutionary terms to being capable of fictive thought and words. Perhaps a genetic mutation connecting the two halves of the homo sapiens brain took hold in double-click time, evolutionarily speaking, and thus today we have abstractions invisible to the naked eye, such as Microsoft, and even Corporation, Democracy and Nation, Harvard and University, Justice and The Supreme Court enabling very large numbers of people to flexibly cooperate and thus live together rather than in small bands.

 It follows that the very complex, abstract ideas that Marx and Rousseau utilize in the process of ratiocination (try that word, which basically means reasoning, out at a dance party and you will be like honey to the most attractive bees!) is itself a crucial, even perhaps decisive factor in the problems that the philosophers identify and attempt to explain. For example, Rousseau argues that the artificial sources of inequality are found only once people have formed a society and thus is a people rather than merely members of small groups sustained by much fewer interpersonal interactions (and thus less wants, pride and jealousy). A people is itself an abstraction possible only in a fictive mind. Such a mind is also necessary for the abstract ideas and associated legends like Company, General Motors, and The Goldman Sachs Way to exist in people's minds so large numbers of workers can be coordinated in an exploiting way, according to Marx, and alienated from themselves in both the process and product of their work. Simply for a large company to be possible, more than gossip is needed to maintain the coordination that is necessary. As the homo sapiens humans went from prehistoric, subsistence-level hunter-gatherers in small bands to either accumulating great wealth or working in factories and offices as inequalities increased in the process, history went terribly wrong, according to Rousseau and Marx, so both go back to a simpler time, an actual rather than imagined existence before history, from which to make transparent certain problems in their own day, in the unfolding of history as if it were fated to be so and could be no other Way.

Rousseau would doubtless agree with Marx’s warning, “Do not let us go back to a fictitious primordial condition as the political economist does, when he tries to explain. Such a primordial condition explains nothing; it merely pushes the question away into a grey nebulous distance.”[1] In other words, one should not go back to a fictitious primordial condition.  Arguing in favor of the humans who lived in the state of nature (i.e., before living in societies), Rousseau clearly does not mean fiction in arguing that it is “ridiculous to represent savages constantly murdering each other to glut their brutality, as this opinion is diametrically opposite to experience.”[2] That experience, or empirical evidence, that Rousseau points to is that of “the Caribbeans [sic], the people in the world who have as yet deviated least from the state of nature.”[3] In looking at a primitive people of his own day, Rousseau was assuming that they would be sufficiently similar to the human being who actually lived before humans began living in societies. Such an assumption has been challenged by anthropologists studying the history of religion; Rousseau is not in danger, however, of being accused of portraying a dream world that never existed.

Furthermore, even though Rousseau highlights living in society as distinct from the state of nature and Marx focuses on economic production as distinct from satisfying only one’s own sustenance needs, both philosophers privilege the human primordial condition over so-called “progress” in order to make the point that things have gotten worse. Rousseau argues that prehistoric human beings were more compassionate and less contentious and, not by coincidence, less rational, in the state of nature before living in society. It is “society alone, which has added even to love itself as well as to all the other passions, that impetuous ardour, which so often renders it fatal to mankind.”[4] The demands that come with the increased interpersonal contact have brought out the worst in human nature—even transforming it into something too smart and ironically contentious.

Similarly, in arguing that the physical and spiritual life of humans is linked to nature, man being by nature a part of nature, Marx too privileges the species as it was long ago before work and its output became separated from the worker. “In creating a world of objects by his personal activity, in his work upon inorganic nature, man proves himself a conscious species-being, i.e., as a being that treats the species as his own essential being, or that treats itself as a species-being.”[5] . . . (H)e duplicates himself not only, as in consciousness, intellectually, but also actively, in reality, and therefore he sees himself in a world that he has created.”[6] His labor is a “free, conscious activity,” the object of his own will and consciousness.[7] 

Even though Marx differs here from Rousseau in positing that humans were more intelligent before being alienated from one’s own work and the product thereof made the worker stupid, Marx too depicts a historical downward trajectory. “The devaluation of the world of men is in direct proportion to the increasing value of the world of things. Labor produces not only commodities; it produces itself and the worker as a commodity – and this at the same rate at which it produces commodities in general.”[8] The increased value of material things and the increasing commoditization have come about historically, in the Industrial Revolution. Laboring on another’s product alienates the worker from both it and the production process wherein one labors. Alienated from nature and the freedom in one’s own life activity, the worker “does not affirm himself but denies himself, does not feel content but unhappy, does not develop freely his physical and mental energy but mortifies his body and ruins his mind.”[9] Additionally, the amount of economic inequality increases, and in this claim Rousseau would also agree, although coming to it from a primarily sociological rather than (though not excluding) economic standpoint. 

In summary, both Marx and Rousseau base their philosophical and ideological ideals on the pre-historic human condition, whether in predominately social or economic terms (there being no religion given the non-fictive minds and languages). That is, the ideals hinge on a condition that really (i.e., empirically) existed, long before the stories that the two philosophers would formulate and publicly tell—stories that ironically would be (mis)appropriated in ways that pushed humanity even further from the simple life that far distant ancestors had enjoyed in relative equality (and empathy), as well as non-alienation from themselves even when hunting and gathering. In their work, those prehistoric ancestors had a deeper awareness of being of a particular species, and they were not so prideful and selfish as to intentionally and unintentionally exacerbate the existing natural inequalities in talent, family, and motivation.

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[1] Karl Marx, “Estranged Labour,” Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844. (Marxists.org). Accessed August 18, 2013.

[2] Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on the Origins of Inequality, Harvard Classics, Charles W. Eliot, ed., Vol. 34 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,1910).

[3] Ibid.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Marx, “Estranged Labour.”

[6] Ibid.

[7] Ibid.

[8] Ibid.

[9] Ibid.

McDonalds and Income Inequality: The Role of Opportunity

In his text, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Thomas Piketty claims that economic inequality increases societally when the rate of return on capital exceeds the growth rate in national income or GNP. Rather than being an aberration, this condition tends to be the case, the economist contends. To be sure, expanding opportunity can mitigate the increasing inequality, but the “floorboard” is slanted and thus is bound to favor capital over labor. Whereas Marx thought the tendency is unlimited in extent, Piketty argues that at some point the inequality of wealth will stop worsening. This idea seems like Einstein’s thesis that nothing can go faster than the speed of light.  In the light of Piketty’s theory, we can perhaps read more into Don Thompson’s response as workers were protesting the company’s shareholder meeting on May 22, 2014. In short, the CEO illustrates not only a preference for capital over labor in line with ROI>income-increase, but also the weakness in increased opportunity as a mitigating factor.

Thomas Piketty, a European economist specializing on inequality 

(Image Source: The Guardian)

With 800 protesters outside vocalizing their $15-per-hour proposal (“demand” is too strong, and, frankly, rather presumptuous), Thompson told the shareholders, “We respect the fact that they want to challenge us relative to wages.”[1] This rather odd statement essentially relativizes the pressure as “challenging.” In other words, the language is euphemistic. Similarly, it could be said that the CEO is challenged by the English language. Consider, for example, “relative to wages.” How about: “We respect the fact that our hard-working workers want a raise.” Instead, Thompson tried to make the issue about opportunity, as if that effectively counters the inequality. Again being challenged by English, the native speaker told stockholders, “We pay fair and competitive wages and we provide opportunity, and we provide job opportunities and training for those entering the workforce.”[2] McDonalds provides opportunity and job opportunities. How much is Thompson’s total annual compensation?

Even if opening the labor-force up were a sufficient justification for paying $7.25 an hour, only one-third of the company’s non-supervisory employees were on their first job.[3] As one of the protesting workers put it, “McDonalds can keep on saying that we are teenagers, but saying it over and over again doesn’t make it true.”[4] The patina of rhetoric is a rather pallid recipe for reputational capital, particularly if the words run up against the brick wall of actual circumstance. That worker had been working at a McDonald’s restaurant for 10 years at $7.25 per hour. The matter of opportunity was exogenous to her case. Ironically, expanding opportunity could actually be expected to put downward pressure on her wage, or at least keep it from increasing even with experience. That is, even a real push for greater opportunity in terms of opening up the job-force to new aspirants could increase the economic inequality between the corporate managers at the headquarters and the workers in the restaurants.

Put in terms of Piketty’s theory, might it be that greater opportunity might increase the economic inequality in some unforeseen ways? At the very least, Thompson’s attempted pivot to opportunity suggests that it may actually be in line with the interests of capital over labor. The fact that an employee had been kept at $7.25 for ten years even as the company enabled teenagers to enter the workforce hints of the underlying existence of a slanted relationship between capital and labor wherein the rate of return can be expected to exceed the rate of increase in income generally and especially at the non-supervisory levels. Leveling the playing field may be more difficult than Piketty supposes.

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[1] Bruce Horovitz, “McDonalds Plays Offense on Wages,” USA Today, May 23, 2014.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Ibid.

Google in the E.U. and U.S: Privacy Rights and Obligations

The European Court of Justice, the E.U. Supreme Court, ruled on May 13, 2014 that Google must defer to the right of users to have links about themselves deleted. Google’s management had sought to obviate any obligation to act on such requests. The New York Times points out that the decision indicates “that such companies must operate in a fundamentally different way than they do in the United States.”[1] The ring of fundamentality has implications for the international strategies of internet companies and affords us a better look at how business plays out in society differently in different societies.

Depending on the impact of cultural differences between a given company’s home and host markets impact the management of the company as a whole, either a global (i.e., one-size-fits-all) or multidomestic (culture-specific managements) international-business strategy is optimal. Although it might seem that a “market-making” function like providing a search engine or social-media medium would naturally fit the global approach to international strategy, the impact of differing societal values bearing on relevant rights and obligations can render the multi-domestic approach superior. The ECJ’s decision may push Google’s management further in this direction—the root cause being the differing power and attitude toward business in the E.U. and U.S.

Mina Andreeva, a spokesperson for the E.U. Government’s executive branch, noted that the court’s decision switches the obligation from users to the internet companies like Google and Facebook to prove that user-data is still needed to be kept online. “Today, it’s up to consumers to prove this, but this is not very easy or effective,” she said. “We have reversed the burden of proof.”[2] Put another way, consumers face the uphill battle in the U.S. whereas managers do in the E.U. This difference reflects a basic, or fundamental, difference societally in terms of how much business is valued in society.

Put in terms of a theorem, the more societal values reflect or value the values that are held in the business sector, the more likely it is that societal institutions place obligations on customers (or the general public) and rights on companies. The case of Google suggests that the E.U. and U.S. societies differ fundamentally in the extent to which business values have stature as societal values.

1. James Kanter and Mark Scott, “Google Must Honor Requests to Delete Some Links, E.U. Court Says,” The New York Times, May 13, 2014.

2. Ibid.

Who Won the Kentucky Derby?

This might seem like a simple question. California Chrome won the race in 2014. That is to say, the horse by that name won. As the Derby is a race, a jockey would have played a decisive part in the win. The aptitude may well be in the horse, but the racing skill lies with the person perched on the animal. So the jockey, Victor Espinoza, won the race. If his role was essentially that of coaching or directing the horse, which unlike a racing car is a living creature with a brain to boot, then could the argument be made that the horse’s trainer—in this case Art Sherman—also won? Although Sherman quipped during a post-race interview that he had felt like he was on the horse for the last 75 years, surely a distinction can be drawn between a player and a coach. After all, Babe Ruth hit all those homeruns—not his coach. To win a race, the winner must presumably be in the race—and not vicariously. Least of all can it be said that the “horse’s owner”—an expression like “slave owner” in that a living being is “owned”—won the race. Otherwise, a person could simply wave money around in lieu of actually running to qualify for an Olympic context in track and field. To give wealth such power—coming at the expense of reason itself—would surely point to a rather distorted set of societal values. I contend that both NBC Sports’ post-race coverage and the Derby’s trophy ceremony reflect and in fact affirm the hegemony of business values in American society.

Just before interviewing the jockey, a NBC Sports journalist prefaced, “We interviewed the owner, then the trainer, and now the jockey.” Lest it be pointed out that the jockey had been busy, the trophy ceremony followed the same pattern. Kentucky’s head of state handed to trophy to Steve Coburn, who with the other owner, Perry Martin, were all too pleased to speak on their win. In fact, the governor made it quite explicit by announcing, “To the Martins, to the Coburns, our victor.” The horse and jockey were not even in the camera shot. Wealth had won the race without breaking a sweat. Next came the trainer’s turn, and then, last and apparently least, the jockey.

Imagine running a race, and winning it only to watch the metal being given to your sponsor. “To Coke, our victor.” In enabling a runner, horse, or jockey to train, a sponsor is not the winner (for otherwise the sponsor would be enabling itself). While it is understandable that wealth is highly esteemed in the business sector, the imposing of this “top dog” in society itself distorts non-business activities into the prism of commerce. In the context of managerial capitalism, particularly where managers style themselves as “coaches,” it is no accident that coaches and trainers in sports come to be treated  as ends rather than means—as the winners rather than as facilitators on the sideline. It is important to remember that Art Sherman was not on the horse that won the Derby in 2014.  

In short, the priorities evinced by NBC Sports and the Derby reflect those in the business world at the expense of the world of sports; overreach can thus be seen rather clearly. Put another way, the horse race provides us with a snapshot of just how much American society has formed around the ideological crucible of Wall Street. At least from the jockey’s standpoint, the over-reach both in terms of ownership and managerialism violates the ethical principle of fairness (i.e., the trophy should have gone to the jockey, as he is the person who actually raced). Sadly, the exaggeration or over-reach was already so engrained in American society even before the race that I bet few if any Americans even noticed how very odd the trophy sequence is.   

The Mega-sized Shopping Mall: A 20th-Century Artifact?

Between 1956 and 2005, fifteen-hundred (indoor) shopping malls popped up across America. Then through 2013 at least, none had been built since 2006. The interstate highway system helped usher in the mammoth malls like Mall of America in Minnesota and Woodfield Mall in Illinois; the cold climes made the indoor expanses of warm air particularly alluring during the long winters. The two landmarks among malls would likely fare better than most in staving off even their own respective stores’ cannibalistic online-sales charms at least for a while, absent an upward-revision on global warming forecasts flashing relentlessly on smartphones, tablets, and laptops. The leap from the pedestrian innovations at Selfridge’s department store in early twentieth-century London to Amazon’s Cyber Monday during the 2010s, a silver century later, would seem to be  all about the computer revolution digitizing distance that had once been viewed in terms of social class and then gradually succumbing to closer physical distance, as in Selfridge’s accommodating store.[1]

Even as housewives on a budget joyfully discovered that bargains could be found even in a service-oriented department store without being thrown out just for browsing, aristocratic women returned to the store to purchase fine gloves or perfume astutely advised by a polite, attentive clerk—an antiquated idyllic image of “shopping” a century later in a world saturated by Walmart’s “warehouse” (or barn) mega-department/grocery stores.[2] Indeed, the king himself requested a private showing of Selfridge’s out of curiosity regarding the new thing known as “shopping” and to show himself to be a man of the people (of various social classes). Few people a century later would pause to ask whether the foray of online purchases would make the term shopping obsolete.[3]

Moreover, the sliding eclipse of the hackneyed American mall harkens back to the truism hardly remembered amid all the technological distractions that the world of yesterday is not nearly as everlasting as implicitly promised in its hay-day.

In the last quarter of the twentieth century, the display of Christmas decorations before Thanksgiving, earlier and earlier each year, attested to change in progress. The relative insignificance of this fixation would come to hide the "macro" or "meta" change concerning the mall itself in the first two decades of the next century. 

While the little mall marketers scamper about, scrambling to do the twentieth-century department store one better in terms of a “one stop experience” by highlighting entertainment on top of the “same old, same old” heterogeneous product types being under one roof, no one hardly bothers to imagine the mall itself (not to mention the acutely structured department store) as being of another era—a world already gone—a bygone time somehow vicariously still with us—as if the artifice were a squashed bug mistaking its flinching movements for still being alive. The temporal illusion lies in the extremely slow “squashing” noise of register-less electronic sales. As the niggardly management of Target can attest, the silent killers can be the most devastating, even if the extent of the cyber fingerprints are only fully visible in retrospect.

Amid the wrecking balls eating up memories left and right, the twenty-first century stood wide open for the technological imagination to form. Amid all the excitement, it is no wonder that people who came of age at the mall will look around one day, as if suddenly awakened by nothing in particular, to find that the ‘70s show has indeed gone off air due to low ratings.

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[1] Rejecting the “premium” vs. “cost leadership” business strategies, Selfridge used sales-items to draw in business from cost-conscious consumers (not “guests,” as in the artful lie played out on Target’s stage by functionaries whose superiority over the dictionary gives their stores a rather odious odor). Unlike the managers at Walmart and Target a century later, Selfridge did not view the continued presence of refined yet simple sales clerks as mutually exclusive with extending the product-lines “down” to lower priced items (supplemented by relatively broad sales).

[2] While at a Walmart store to buy underwear, I noticed a few plastic bags containing product had been open. An employee was then passing by me so I asked if she knew about it. “How else are customers going to be able to try them on unless they open the bags?” she replied. The sales associate had no doubt concerning her “knowledge” of retail. Had I pointed out trying on underwear violates OHSA regulations, the employee would in all likelihood have dismissed my “opinion” in favor of her own “knowledge.” Doubtless a European aristocrat would not return to such a store again.

[3] To the extent that “shopping” includes browsing, being able to “google search” a product may mean that searching is already replacing shopping; by implication, going to a “brick and mortar” store to purchase or merely pick up the product does not involve shopping. Yet how hard old ghosts fall; it is as people use terms generally without bothering to verify that the respective meanings still apply. In other words, we may speak without thinking more often than we suppose. In fact, some of the herd animals may succumb in weakness to their urge to “push” their meaning as a weapon of sorts. A young assistant store manager at Target once corrected me in demanding I acknowledge that I’m a guest rather than a customer. The cocktail of ignorance, arrogance, and the primal urge to dominate is as toxic and dangerous as it is ubiquitous in American business of the 2010s (not to mention American society).