For some of our discontented anti capitalist members here.
When feelings of envy, bitterness, resentment occur. Taking ::30 to appreciate what you have work magic. Contentment can’t come from money, things or a job. Or hating corporations. If you don’t have gratitude . Those things won’t provide it.
I’ll guarantee even in Nepal right now those rural people are content and feel gratitude. It’s the way they’re wired. They work very hard for very little and are some of the happiest people I have interacted with on the planet.
Most people don't understand the difference between happiness and fulfilment...
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Thank you for that response. I absolutely agree that there are a lot of dynamics that contribute to success or failure. I struggle with the idea that the state has a role in creating success. I do believe it has a role in protecting the vulnerable and enforcing rules. But, more than that scares me.
I am reading that we all agree a capitalist system of some form is better than the others. This debate seems to be about the extent of control exerted over activities within the capitalist environment. Do you agree?
I have always avoided large businesses - the farmer is not sharing his profits with his cattle. Same goes for any large group because the individual become secondary to the group. You can’t reason with a mob. Which applies to government too.
There is an enormous amount of wealth created by small businesses, businesses that are run like families, in communities they care about. You may be an example of that kind of entrepreneur. Do you need external controls to ensure you act ethically? To be charitable?Or are controls just for the other guy?
When you reflect on your success, why do you think you were able to get from your position in your example of corporate greed to the success you now have? I suspect a mix of positive role models, hard work, a desire to achieve and luck all played a roll. Do you think you got an advantage that may not be available to most? For example, you hold multiple degrees, and I assume accessing that education has opened doors for you. Did someone else pay for those? You don’t act like some of your friends because you know it will undermine your success. Why don’t they see that and act accordingly? Attitude plays a huge role (I accept that it’s not the only determinant)
The belief I hold is that the tools we need to succeed are available to everyone. My parents immigrated in the late 60s. We have family pictures, sitting on a couch but the table in the foreground was a cloth over a box something was delivered in. Sometime in the mid to late 1980s my father’s career took off. Why? Because he was recognized in the USA. His dark skin and funny name did not matter there. His ideas did. In Canada he was never accepted by the political elites and his career was curtailed until peers in the USA recognized him. Was it racism in Canada? Probably at some level. But it was more about the fact that the USA allow merit to rise, no matter your origin. Canada was, and is, much more of a small town bureaucracy and who you know really does matter. Strange how someone from outside the USA can find success but people born there can’t. Maybe it’s not the system after all?
That does not mean everyone will achieve the same level of success.
A humbling story - the parent of an employee of mine was a house keeper. I helped my employee learn a career and advance herself financially. All her work, I just provided the opportunity. At some point I had to hire a new cleaning service and she volunteered to do that work. To paraphrase my response, I insinuated her new career was superior to some who cleans for a living.
She exposed the hierarchy I perceived based of what someone does for a living. For her, hard work has no hierarchy. Success is what you have through your efforts. Wealth is desirable but not the measure of success. I was truly humbled and felt quite embarrassed.
Maybe it’s the left that is obsessed with wealth and not people who covet free enterprise? The obsession with manufacturing some arbitrary level of equality is dehumanizing. It’s based on an elitist view of society where the main motivation is jealousy.
My belief is that the greater involvement of the state to redistribute wealth, or mandate employment requirements,etc does not create the internal motivation to make life better for one’s family. The state gets into the business of trying to control success and that just distorts the market. You can’t legislate attitude. And, once the bureaucracy controls access to “success “, If you don’t play their game you are frozen out.
We would probably agree that the state has a role. But my experience, lived vicariously through my parents in India and Canada, makes me fear bureaucracy and its controlling hand.
The cure is not more government. The Inuit had their sled dogs slaughtered in the 1970s so they would stop being nomadic. Then famous assholes like Paul McCartney used their fame to influence governments to destroy their industry. To this day, the European, US and other governments impose laws that ensure poverty and ignore their submissions. The former Premier of Nunavut explained to me that Parliament does not listen when someone outside has an inflatable seal. I don’t think there are any other communities in North America that endure the pernicious effects of government regulation like the Inuit and First Nations. There is a lesson to learn here. It has been stated before - the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
I find this millennial anti-capitalist nonsense, often expressed in anti-corporate terms, thoroughly incomprehensible. I am certain that is indeed a generational view. But it is not a view based upon the cost of groceries or gas, but rather, I am convinced, upon differing appreciations of what constitutes opportunity and satisfaction in life.
I grew up in a 1200 square foot home of a college history professor. When I left home for the military service, I was gifted a suitcase. No, I didn't walk through the snow five miles to third grade, but we did not have AC until I was in the fourth grade (in South Louisiana no less). What I did have was a great offline education acquired through books, discussions with my father and his circle of friends (including a fellow by the name of Ambrose) and a burning desire to be successful.
The military is the purest meritocracy that I have yet seen organized by humans. It is a demanding world but one where competence is hard to ignore or fail to reward. Almost inevitably, one can meet barriers to further success - some human, some structural, and some simply bad luck. Those barriers can remain just that in our minds are become inflection points for further success. In my case, it was the SECDEF. So at the age of fifty and the then second youngest two button in the US Army, I decided to put a bright red ribbon around my military experiences, retire and enter the corporate world.
In my experience, large corporations are meritocracies in much the same way as the military. They are places where competence is valued and the "mission" rather than a time clock is the focus. Like many former military officers, I was brought in as a business developer. This was largely an aerospace company with then around 100K employees and 45 billion USD in annual sales mostly to the US government. For a year and a half, I learned the language, the culture, and the difference between zero line budgeting (spend it or lose it) and profit. The corporation assisted by sending me to a crash program at the Tuck School of Business (Dartmouth).
At the end of that of that year and a half, I was promoted to Vice President and given a Business Unit to run. For the next decade, I led (I deliberately use the military term) an organization of nearly a thousand people on three major "campuses" ranging from Huntsville, AL to Los Angeles, CA., to Washington DC. We did 800 million to a billion in sales annually mostly to the Army and Marine Corps (some of you vets may recall FBCB2 or Blue Force Tracking - a product of my business unit) that helped bring a lot of kids home safe from the GWOT while earning a profit and helping sustain shareholder value assuring the development investment stream necessary for continued innovation.
No, it was not a place where one would go for warm and fuzzy hugs. But, it was a place where anyone with the qualifications to be hired, had the opportunity to be hugely successful. Well over a dozen members of my former teams have gone on to become senior directors or vice presidents in that corporation or others where many are still doing great things for themselves, the business, their investors, and the country. All of our employees were generously compensated to include the opportunity to build real wealth. Those who could not adapt to that environment or the corporate mission were let go.
Peers, some former military and many not, had similar experiences in other defense, engineering, and industrial corporations. I am confident that they all would agree that these were not places to earn a paycheck. Instead they were environments where leaders with ability, drive, and focus could achieve personal success. I think I was particularly lucky creating capabilities to empower America's soldiers on the battlefield, but the same sort of personal success, fueled by ambition, can be had at Hershey or Mattel.
In many ways, with respect to a workforce, I led a charmed life. The only time that I had to deal with a timeclock focused team was my final job in the military when I commanded the US ARMY Security Assistance Command. There, I commanded a largely civilian, union organized bureaucratic organization. Out of profound respect for
@Mark A Ouellette, I think I'll leave it there.
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