This post was mentioned on Twitter by CoreyWdeVos: New blog post – Making the Case for Sustainable Business http://bit.ly/fQkt0...

I’d say I’m completely with you up until the notion of a “necessary evil”. I see it more so that those who find themselves matured (developed, educated, conscious, etc) to a higher degree, where the pit-falls or limitations of, in this instance, shallow or greedy or manipulative or destructive social constructs are visible and something other is imaginable, it’s those people’s job precisely to push back against concentrated power-wielders. Just as peasants under Feudal Lords didn’t look to their known history and see a system that could be more just and equitable until they just revolted and demanded certain rights, certain dignities. And from that huge numbers of people the world over have experienced what I’d maybe call startling degrees of evolution. “Necessary evil” or not, it’s still evil- and I don’t see the good in defending or promoting evil.

As I say though, much of the integral community (not speaking about you or anyone personally, just in general terms) comes from or lives in relative comfort within capitalism, and also have a lot to say to defend this system that in its very definition is based on dominator hierarchies, i.e. the random to arbitrary concentration of power amongst a minority (the upper classes) over what has become (in a post-modern, globalized world) a multi-billion person minority. It’s nice and all that the green capitalists want to take the step to relax a bit of its hemorrhaging in order to try and save the entire system (by which I mean the planet, the eco-system), but freedom without equality is “I” over “we”. The relative equality of, say, representative democracy (liberalism, capitalism, etc) makes, I believe by definition, the individual, (freedom, the Beautiful, Upper Left Quadrant) compromised by it’s acceptance. If there is a rightful place for human greed, I’m certain it is not in the arena of deciding who gets to eat, who gets medical care, who is warm, or who dead.

Here was my response:

I just wanted to say that i think this is a really wonderful critique, and i agree with many of the points that you raise (particularly your short term vs. long term arguments)–though i also take issue with certain assumptions, such as the fact that “greed is not the natural human inclination… cooperation is.” I think we have to be careful with generalizations like this.

If anything, there is a constant give-and-take dynamic between autonomy and communion, which can easily devolve into a pathological struggle between greed and communal conformity. Furthermore, the tension between “greed” and “cooperation” also change throughout our psychological maturity, as our definitions of “me” and “we” are expanded with each new stage of consciousness.

And while there seems to be an overall trend from self-centered greed to selfless cooperation as we grow, the need for healthy autonomy does not go anywhere. We are all born as sociopaths, and have the opportunity to become Buddhas if we want–but very few do, most of us ending up somewhere in between–and an economic system that would work perfectly for Buddhas and will not work for the rest of the world.

So to me, capitalism is by no means the omega point of human interaction. It’s a way to get from, let’s say, Point C to Point D in human history–but i don’t think we’ve reached point D yet, and until we do, it will remain a “necessary evil” (or perhaps the “lesser evil” when compared to the historic options) by virtue of being the only economic system we’ve yet discovered that can accommodate so many different worldviews, simply by using the lowest common denominator between them (money, sex, power) as a sort of fuel for the genuine long-term progress of civilization, as we’ve seen in the 200 years since Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations.

We likely agree that capitalism in the 21st century is certainly broken, but from my perspective it is not yet obsolete. But i do think we need to make a more concerted effort to discover Capitalism 2.0, instead of always trying to retroactively patch our currently flawed system like it was made by Microsoft.

That said, these are just some of the theoretical underpinnings for the Sustainable Business piece on my site, which i find to be entirely consistent in the abstract. But as we all know, applying such nice and pat philosophy to the real world is a whole other messy affair, and is where i rub up against a lot of my own naivete. Which is why i really appreciate the critiques you served up here (and the respectful tone with which you presented them)–they really help me tweak and refine my own thinking.

In many cases, such as the examples of DuPont and Walmart, i am drawing upon other people’s work (Hunter Lovins in this instance, as it was written as a summary of her recent talk with Jim Garrison) and it can be easy to leave some pretty essential pieces of the puzzle by the wayside. So thank you for that!