The point is not that Jesus was a good guy who accepted everybody, and thus we should do the same (though that would be good). Rather, his teachings and behaviour reflect an alternative social vision. Jesus was not talking how about how to be good and how to behave within the framework of a domination system. He was a critic of the domination system itself.
—Marcus Borg
In the film In Time, inequality in society is explored using time instead of money. It examines what would happen if everyone stopped growing old at the age of 25. Barring accident, death only occurs when an individual’s time runs out. Time is earned in the same way we earn income. It can also be stolen, lost, and confiscated. Transactions are also conducted using time. A one-night stay in a luxury hotel costs 2 months of time, a luxury car 50 years, a bus journey 2 hours. When time is redistributed among the poor in a Robin Hood-type escapade, prices are artificially inflated in the ghetto so the poor are no better off. The whole premise of the film resonates with the idea of human society as we know it today. A societal construct separates the rich, who like Smaug the dragon have more wealth than they can possibly spend, while the poor literally die because of lack. One character observes that you can spot the poor because they do everything so quickly. The rich can afford to waste time since they have millions of years of time sitting in a vault.
Inequality is everywhere in our society, and it is the system that is broken. It is not that someone has more, and someone else having less is a bad thing in and of itself, but what the In Time movie highlights is the true cost of inequality. Whereas lack of money can be an inhibitor to releasing the fullness of a person’s potential, in the film, lack of time takes away the person’s opportunity to live a full life. I’m reminded of the commuters traveling on the London underground at rush hour, scurrying along the tunnels like the white rabbit in Alice in Wonderland all with a look of terrified fear that they might not get to their destination on time. You rarely see the upper echelons of society on the tube. Perhaps the truth therefore is that wealth affords them the luxury of not minding wasting the time required to navigate the traffic above ground, or the cost of paying for the congestion charge and parking. Capitalism therefore creates a system where everything contributes to something that leads to an outcome elsewhere. Often people will talk about unintended consequences, but consequences, unintended or intended, are the result of the system in play. Systems theory posits that there is an interdependence and interrelationship between the different parts of society. Choices (inputs) made in one area will be transformed by the system as a whole that effects the outputs.
The issue facing our society therefore is that to change requires a systemic (root and branch) change, not simply a few tweaks here and there. Capitalism is pervasive. It is in EVERYTHING. In some ways it IS everything. The way we choose to live our lives is completely dictated by the system in which we operate. Reiter (2016) suggests that capitalism “is more than individuals pursing their own interests . . . what makes capitalism unique is its acquisitive nature.” Consider you own life, how from the moment we wake up, heck even the bed you sleep in, and where you sleep, and where you wake up are dictated by capitalism. Whether you own your own house or rent is completely determined by the market system. The amount you pay for your mortgage or the rent you pay is determined by the markets. Even if you reduce your ownership of things and choose to live a minimalist life with few belongings you will find that the clothes you wear, the food you eat, the way you communicate, even the access you have to read this book are all under the auspices of the capitalist system.
Systems theory posits that inputs are taken from the environment and are transformed through structures and practices that create outputs. The parts of the system are dependent and are made up of interrelated subsystems, which perform specialized activities. Where you begin to change inequality is difficult because it needs to change in every subsystem, hence why business is so important is because it is a partner in our lives from birth to death and everything in between. It is impossible to step out from underneath the shadow of capitalism, because everything in our lives is controlled or influenced by it in some way and we are “deceived into thinking that the pursuit of material wealth is the key to happiness” (Reiter 2016). Our system of exchange, money, is led by the capitalist system, the feedback and control process of the system being expressed by how much our money is worth in terms of currency exchange, inflation and interest rates, wages and prices. Our system of government is influenced by, and influences it, the feedback and control mechanism being market responses to government policies and voters supporting or opposing the government at the next election. The choices politicians make are determined by our economic system, and their thinking in regard to citizenship rights and responsibilities is influenced by capitalism. Regardless of party, or politics, the influence of the economic system is prevalent. Our society is driven by capitalism. How we choose to work, what work is considered worthwhile, our place in society, our leisure time are all influenced by capitalism. It is not a measure of right or wrong. It just is. How we choose to live, the choices we have in life are determined not by our virtues but by the accident of our birth, the opportunities we are presented with, and how our choices play out. There is a saying that we make our own luck, which to some degree is true; however, the luck available to us is determined by an accident of birth and our position afforded to us by the system.
The second saying of course is being born with a silver spoon in your mouth and that is true. Though many rich people will declare they are self-made, they perhaps neglect to mention the advantages in life they have been afforded. If the inputs into career choices are a good education, parental support, and a system which rewards those who have the right connections and access to opportunities by being in the right place at the right time, then the outputs are, by consequence, highly likely to be positive. Of course there is always the exception who will be flung out in order to prove such an assertion wrong, but they are always exceptions and they don’t always disprove the rule. Research done by Levine and Rubenstein (2013) demonstrated that most entrepreneurs were white, male, and highly educated: “If one does not have money in the form of a family with money, the chances of becoming an entrepreneur drop quite a bit” (Groth 2015). Being able to follow your dreams and risk it all is enabled because basic needs such as food and shelter are met. If you don’t have anything, doing something becomes very hard. Maslow (1943) may be outdated, and his typology over-egged, but he was right to point out that if we don’t have our basic needs met then it is hard to be motivated by anything. The point is that if you are white, male, highly educated, and come from a well-heeled family, it does not make you any more competent or capable than someone from a poor black district, or from a village in Eastern Europe. The problem is that inequality leads those in privileged positions to believe that they are better than others, have more potential, and deserve the opportunities than they have because others are undeserving.
I can lay that charge at my own door. Here I sit in my conservatory in a three-bed semi-detached house in North Wales, writing this book as a day job. By comparison with my peers I probably have less because of the choices I have made in my life to “be” rather than do the job. I don’t live in a four-bedroomed detached house in a posh part of the UK, for example, and I can’t afford a holiday this year because I didn’t want to work in corporate life. The point is, though, that I can afford to make those choices. I come from a decidedly middle-class background and it afforded me luxuries. I went to Grammar School; I got a good education in an environment where I could study unmolested. I went to University after which I secured a graduate job. I was able to get a mortgage at the age of 24. I am able to make a living as a writer, not just because of hard work, although there has been quite a lot of that involved as well, but because my background has given me access to opportunities that are not afforded. Privilege is part of the system, just as injustice and inequality is. I am no more deserving of a good education as the next person, but I was lucky enough to be in a position where I had the opportunity to receive one. The fact that I had food security and a secure home life meant that I was able to take that opportunity and run with it. There are schools in the UK, in the town where I live, that I would not send my own children to because they are “bad” schools, but I am in a position to make that choice for my children. In fact my son’s school, the highest performing school in the district, is marked down by the school’s inspector because it does not have enough children who require free school meals compared to the other schools in the area, and its intake is too middle class. A lot of parents in the area don’t have a choice, and as a result their children go to schools which are a battlefield, where even if they had the potential to get great grades, the kids have to fight through a system where classes are disrupted and resources are lacking.
Social advantage isn’t an insult to throw at someone who is privileged to make them feel bad about the opportunities they have had. You are born into the life you are born into. However, recognizing for ourselves that we have a social advantage is a way of checking our attitude toward those that do not. The exhortation often that somehow those people on welfare benefits just need to get on their bike and go to work ignores how perilous life can be. George (2017) states
poverty is the hell of which the modern Englishman is afraid. And he is right. Poverty is the openmouthed, relentless hell which yawns beneath civilized society. And it is hell enough. . . . From this hell of poverty, it is but natural that men should make every effort to escape.
My ideas about life were certainly changed when my family went through a baptism of fire and we very nearly lost everything during a period of particular financial hardship. Living for an extended period of time in lack certainly wakes you up to what it means to have nothing. When you don’t have the money to pay for food, and the most important decision you have to make is a choice between buying potatoes or toilet roll, needing both, but only having enough for either/or, brings into focus how exhausting being poor is. Time is spent trawling supermarkets in order to get the most bang for your buck, instead of not caring whether you are paying an extra 50p on an item. If some of these white, privileged males were forced to do minimum wage work and attempt to live on the wages of their exploited employees then perhaps CEOs would change their attitude toward the wages of their workers. A few years ago there was a TV program, which took business leaders back to the floor, and invariably the senior leaders who went through the experience completely changed business practices, because they were so shocked by what they had seen. It might elicit a different response of reward committees who are arguing about the need to reward executives millions in bonuses for businesses who complain about paying their workers a living wage. The fact that we even call wage levels above the minimum wage the “living” wage is perhaps all you need to know about inequality.
Which brings us back to the system and why a change of ideology is so desperately needed. The idea of being driven by Doing Good rather than Profit is not simple because it changes everything. How much you are worth denotes value based on what is good FOR you rather than WHAT you are worth to the bottom line. It is hard to imagine what that would look like or how that would change things because our reality is so far removed from that, but it is one that needs to happen. We cannot carry on, carrying on the way we are. There may be a revolution but what is most likely is a continued decay and then crisis. In some ways populism is the reaction. The reason why the far right rose in Germany in the 1930s is the same reason we are getting a rise in fascism now. People are disgruntled and see no way out. The current waves of migrating people are providing fodder for the disgruntled to point a finger and say “it’s their fault”—but the blame lies at the feet of the system. Attacking others while maintaining the system doesn’t fix the problem. If anything, it exacerbates it. The every man for himself thinking sharpens the stick with which to do bad.
Win, Lose, or Draw
The biggest issue that living in the capitalist system draws is that of the idea of a zero-sum game. That if you or your organization does good, then someone else will do bad and exploit you. Those who have money have the most to lose because if they “give” away their wealth to others then their lifestyle will be depleted. One way of looking at this is to consider the effects of a progressive or regressive tax system. The argument goes that if you tax the rich less then there is a trickle-down effect and those at the bottom will benefit in the long term. There is an argument that taxing rich people less means that tax receipts go up, because they don’t seek out other low tax regimes and seek other ways to keep hold of their money. Certainly governments are working at ways of keeping money in country in international and global tax markets, and there is a need to make sure that individuals pay their fair share, but that is the point of Temperatism, it is cultural and social as much as it is economic and political. If the energy is focused on Doing Good, then the motives and actions of individuals and organizations change. Equity doesn’t have to be a win:lose equation. Consider, for example, the effect an extra $5,000 a year has on a family who is struggling to make ends meet versus the same amount on a family who has plenty. If you are a billionaire you could lose $5,000 down the back of the sofa and not notice the difference, but to a family in difficulty that amount of extra money is the difference between having food or not having food, paying the electricity bill or not paying the electricity bill, and sleeping soundly at night in the knowledge that it’s going to be okay versus suffering from insomnia and anxiety because you don’t know what you are going to feed the kids tomorrow. In the West we live in a society where remuneration committees are arguing that CEOs need to paid bonuses of $4.5m in order to “attract talent” in the same companies where individuals on the payroll are having to go to the food bank to feed their families despite working full time because they can’t afford to live on the meager salaries they are paid. A recent report stated that it would take 160 years for the average worker to earn the same as what a CEO earns in 1 year. Just think about that in terms of equality. CEOs don’t work 160 times harder, nor does the work they do contribute 160 times that of their employee. That is plainly absurd. If we follow the argument that a CEO can do more in 1 year than an employee can do in 160 years, then there would be no need to employ employees. CEOs are rarely the reason why the organization is doing well. Their leadership may create an environment that enables employees further down the organization to make a positive contribution, but the value of the work they do is only in how well they are able to align their employees to deliver the organizational objectives. Human resource professionals are wringing their hands at how dire the employee engagement levels are and the economists are scratching their heads at the historically low and reducing levels of productivity in the world. But you only have to look as far as hygiene factors and basic needs to realize that if individuals are worrying how they are going to feed their families tomorrow, then they are not going to be able to contribute on doing their day job.
Therefore, it doesn’t require you to have genius like Einstein to work out that the reason why workers aren’t productive is because they are not being treated fairly. In the UK the government is making noises about forcing companies to publish ratios between CEO and the average worker, and this is causing all sorts of panic, not because such ratios are worthless or because it will depress the pay of CEOs. The concern is that it will cause internal discord and as a result lead to an increase in the pay for everyone else. Which begs the question as to why that isn’t happening anyway if there is an acknowledgment that transparency and knowledge will result in a requirement to address the problem—because it is a problem. Organizations now have the biggest profits in history at a time when they are paying out the lowest wages in history as a percentage of the economy (Blodget 2012). If organizations invested in employees and their business rather than increasing their profit margins then the economy as a whole would benefit. The corporate world would release more money into society and the economy and that would release more wealth to everyone. It is not a win:lose ratio, it is a straight out win:win. Profit maximization at the expense of people and community is harmful not only to society but to the economic well-being of the world. The systemic response to fairness and equity is stability and well-being across the board.
It’s a Choice
It’s the realization that the system drives behaviors that highlights the mindset issues that need to be tackled by Temperatism. Ask anyone about whether someone should be paid a fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work and the answer would be of course. Ask anyone who has successfully recovered from a health crisis whether nurses are paid what they are worth and the answer will be not even close. When individuals are lumped together into a pay review which looks at bench marking, the results, however, are different. The “market” dictates, the “shareholders” demand, the result is to get away with paying as little as possible. Profit maximization is dressed up as what the business can afford to pay. When the minimum wage came in, many organizations predicted that the end was nigh, but it wasn’t and the world of business continued on. When new employment laws are introduced businesses invariably bemoan the “cost” to the business. Often when it comes to becoming unstuck from the way things are, difficult choices need to be made. This means that many people fall into the trap of believing that they have no choice. Choosing not to change, and not doing anything different, however, is one choice. Doing things differently opens up a world of choices. Choosing to pay people fairly, treat people like human beings, and support good employment practices is a choice. It comes with consequences, but they are not zero sum. At some point there needs to be a realization that “value” isn’t always profit maximization and cost efficiency can only go so far in delivering a healthy, robust, and sustainable business.
Therefore, the question is not an either unequal and stay in business or pay more and go bankrupt. The choice is, do we play within the system or break the system? I heard recently that it takes only 10 percent of people doing something different to change a culture. Ten percent of CEOs dynamically choosing to change their pay practices, choosing Doing Good ahead of profits and putting people first.
Breaking the System
Choosing to be different will break the system. To begin with, small choices might not make much of an impact. Disruption might occur to your own organization first, before it disrupts the industry and spreads further, but being destructively different does happen. Historically we can look back at the philanthropists, mainly Quakers, who ran things very differently during the Victorian era; Cadbury’s, Port Sunlight, Jacobs, Rowntrees, and Guinness being prime examples of bosses that saw value in treating their employee differently. In an era where workers were ten a penny, and factory workers were little more than slaves to their wealthy owners, these companies went against the grain. In some ways their practices were paternalistic but the underlying premise was to provide workers with good housing, good food, and community—basic goods. The astounding thing is that not only do the places where these companies operated remain known, and are often tourist attractions today, the products of these organizations remain on the shelves of our supermarkets. Perhaps in many ways that is the key lesson in regard to sustainability. Breaking away from the system creates a new system which is outside our normal economy and delivers something beyond the boom and bust that organizations are familiar with. It doesn’t take a revolution in the same way as the luddites who broke the looms in rebellion against industrialization, but it does take a new kind of thinking, a systems thinking that goes beyond the transactional basis of work and profit maximization and considers what value can be added by Doing Good and helping individuals maximize their potential. The system that needs to be broken is one of exploitation, of corporate greed, and of inhumane treatment of workers. What needs to replace it is a system which has at its heart equality, equity, and justice for all. It’s not enough to say things are better, when really what we are saying is they are less bad—“hey you are not a slave” is hardly going to perk up someone who is being exploited by their corporate masters. We need to be like William Wilberforce and shut down the system that allows such exploitation to take place.
Some of this is us, each as individuals, taking personal responsibility. If we are in a position to be different, then do so. If we are not then we should be active in demanding the system changes. With the 2018 Royal Wedding, much has been made of Meghan Markle writing to a soap manufacturer to demand that they stop having sexist advertising. A 12-year-old girl and a few letters saying “hey, no” and the nationwide advertisement changed. We are much more powerful than a 12-year-old girl, and combined we are a force for good. Social change doesn’t happen because we wish it to be so. System change occurs when the system is challenged, pushed, cajoled, and bent to our will. It is important that we remember we are not powerless slaves of the system, we are masters of it. What system we live under is our collective choice. Note also that there are fewer rich people (the 1 percent) than the people they are exploiting (the 99 percent). The sooner we realize where the real power lies, the quicker change will come.