The Globalization of our Values

no...not spreading them around the world. Diluting them and watering them down so that the IDEA of America is little different from anywhere else.

What? Why? Because in the end business, the almighty profit, is based on getting as many people to work for as little, and consume as much for the owners as possible. And for that to happen maximally they need to abandon a lot of excessive independence and the ability to challenge authority.

It strikes me that as much as we focus on PNAC and multinational corporations trying to rape the ME and offshore and outsource American jobs, we still fundamentally think of ourselves as the CENTER of all that's going on. We think of them wanting to let some air out of our tires economically but we often fail to factor in all the resistance centers they encounter while doing this. It isn't enough to Globalize simply by building a few cars elsewhere or importing some wood from wherever. You have to (and I hate to credit Friedman with this) flatten things. Then you don't have to have a CENTER...you can go to any point and be essentially in the middle. But to achieve that you have to remove obstacles and distinctions.

If you try and flatten things economically you'll find that you get resistance from a number of places. OF COURSE it's easy to motivate people in mikrania who are eating dirt. They'll work 400 hours a week and their kids will and they'll pollute their environment without blinking. If they get uppidy you can put armed guards over them...they won't question it much because their government has treated them like that for generations, so why should they expect different from their Corporate bosses?

But those damn Americans and their damn constitution...they have this half-assed ideal of independence. They keep talking about individual rights, and shining seas and amber waves of grain. Their (our) concept of nationalism is intertwined very tightly with concepts of mobility and middle-class, and new DVDs and BigMacs and...strangly...privacy....oh and freedom of speech.

So when you decide to make the world your corporate oyster, you find out that flattening things starts out easy, but becomes increasingly difficult as you actually start to depress the HAVEs in places like America in order to move resources around in order to motivate the HAVE-Nots. And worse, the HAVEs start spouting their values around and sometimes infect the HAVE-NOTS (see Venezuela) and make them more difficult to deal with.

So you start to realize (you being the owner...the mega stock holder...the CEO) that maybe you can't just outsource the jobs, because the people won't give them up that easily. You have to do something deeper. You have to change the mindset. You have to flatten the Values, flatten the politics, flatten the level of control. Flatten the individual rights, flatten the entitlements of personhood. So that the compliance of workers is the same anywhere you go. And so you begin to look at things globally and instead of spreading the wealth, you distribute and dilute it. And that wealth isn't just dollars. It's ideas and morals and a sense of virtue. You flatten that hierarchy of needs so that you don't have half your working population thinking about steem and actualization while the other half are worried about food. You pare them all down so that something like *bingo* SECURITY is the basic concern. You mollify them all with the same tool...it's cheap and efficient that way.

Then you have true Globalization and that is what I think is happening. It's not just Bush, it's something much deeper and more insidious. I don't even think it has to be entirely deliberate. Perhaps it's just a natural outgrowth of the process of spreading things around. You eliminate the worst valleys but you do so by flatening all the peaks. America is a peak. And I think we're about to get smashed. If we allow it.