The Earth Hearing

by Daniel Plonix

  “What is more,” Aratta continued, “the commercial sphere degrades public spaces of value. On the whole, a mall is a pitiful proxy to a town square. Playing a video game on one’s couch is a poor substitute to narrating tall tales around a bonfire and roaring with laughter. And roadways of gray asphalt in a heart of a city packed with motor vehicles is a lousy alternative to brick pathways strewn with potted flowers, lively with birds, pedestrians, and cyclist commuters—in tandem with a city infrastructure requiring but short commutes.

  “The market forces would not have brought about the Eiffel Tower or Mount Rushmore Memorial. The marketplace has no incentives to develop public spaces or erect monuments for generations to come; there is no money in it. Under the present economic setup, it is difficult to construct edifices to the human spirit and not to annual reports. It is difficult to bring about streets adorned with art installations that are an expression of the best within, rather than streets filled with billboards promoting soft drinks. It is difficult to build city centers for which people would compose ballads of praise.

  “What’s more,” Aratta said, “an increased dependency on paid-for products and services reduces the need to cooperate and have mutually supporting, meaningful interactions. A genuine community is a thing of the past in much of the world. Cordiality and courtesy have replaced camaraderie and civic duty. People spend much of their time within the walls of their private residence and encounter little more than civility when they occasionally venture outside.

  “What was broadly satisfying, meaningful, and collaborative got trans­formed to ‘every family for itself.’ Where the nuclear family is now a ‘steel cocoon around essential loneliness,’ as one of their people said. ‘Hard shells around organized ambition.’

  “Their economy produces self-serving, self-engrossed behavior.

  “Attempting to reduce late pickups, a child day-care introduced late fees. Counterintuitively, the rate of late pickup nearly doubled. You see, the late fees were treated as just part of doing business. It extinguished any sense of social responsibility to show up on time. A similar thing occurred elsewhere. Some people in a village were asked if they’ll agree to have a nuclear waste repository nearby. Some consented, their sense of civic duty outweighed their concerns. Perhaps with the hope of getting more people on board with the idea, the town residents were next offered a considerable financial incentive if they signed up. Subsequently, support went down. The monetary incentive leached away any sentiments to sacrifice for the greater good.

  “Commercialization and money incentives undermine, subvert, and suppress active citizenship. Generosity of spirit is eroded or subsumed, and alienation sets in.

  “Your Graces, they could have been cultivating a paradise on Earth. Instead, they make money.”

  He bowed.

  “Thank you, Lord Aratta,” said the presiding chair. He rapped the hammer signaling the end of testimony for the day.

  Chapter 56

  The next morning Aratta, once again, took his place by the lectern.

  “Your Graces,” he opened, “the public libraries provide services as good as for-profit libraries would have. United States Naval Special Warfare Development Group, aka Navy’s SEAL Team Six, has innovative spirit, work ethic, and organizational agility second to none, amid for-profit and nonprofit entities alike.

  “Different organizations have different efficacy. However, the efficacy divide is not the nonprofit versus the for-profit. What makes an organization function well and deliver has more to do with its lines of communication, feedback loops, and the organization’s decision-making process. It has more to do with the opportunity to own one’s work. It has more to do with resiliency, agility, and the license to do what is perceived as meaningful and effectual. It has more to do with responsiveness to evolving technologies and to market needs and wishes.”

  He paused.

  “It is said, though, that financial incentive is the driving motor of the world.

  “And of course there is truth to it. Much like with pervasive grading in school.

  “Yet, the frequent practice of grading comes with a cost. A culture of formal tests and grades subverts the passion for knowledge and truth, overshadowing it with crass or cynical incentives. It fosters an appetite for external approval at the expense of firsthand thinking. Graded, well-­defined assignments fixate one’s attention on success, on coloring within the lines, and they cultivate an uninvolved illusion of certainty. This makes the students shy away from risks, unknowns, ambiguity, and situations fraught with breakdowns.

  “Both grading and profit incentives give rise to a self-reinforcing culture. Both keep one in the game once the intrinsic motivation is gone. Both are a lousy substitute for the real thing.

  “The paramount motivation of Terraneans like Wright brothers, Charles Goodyear, Buckminster Fuller, Walt Disney, Steve Wozniak, and legions of pioneers of lesser note has not been monetary riches but the desire to enrich society or the sheer urge, calling, and outburst of creation,” Aratta said. “Dodged by swindlers, opportunists, or short-sighted financiers, the achievements and contributions of many such individuals on Earth have far less to do with the existing marketplace dynamics and almost everything to do with their perseverance and willingness to take the heavy personal toll exerted by the moneymaking paradigm.

  “No,” Aratta added softly, “it was not out of the drive for material riches that Nikola Tesla envisioned global wireless communication, Einstein formulated his groundbreaking theory of relativity, and Van Gogh drew his galvanizing paintings.

  “As a matter of fact, when marshaled by the pursuits of fame and fortune, the creative force is lackluster. It’s horrid to think that people are intrinsically unmotivated and only external rewards drive them onward.

  “Work is inherently fulfilling when it’s meaningful,” Aratta said. “Are the county-funded firefighters who go into a burning building any less committed because they don’t get a commission on each life saved? Are park rangers and conservationists doing a worse job because they are not getting a six-figure salary? Are physicians in the emergency department of a public hospital less diligent than their counterparts in a private facility?

  “Actually, the desire to matter and to engage in what is meaningful is bursting through the seams of the existing, sordid economic paradigm. It is a testimony to the human spirit that in the face of indoctrination in the merit of competition and financial incentive, the desire to volunteer, contribute, share, and matter will not be stamped out.

  “This is how it came to pass that countless people from all around Earth have contributed their time and have written and edited millions of articles that make up Wikipedia, bringing into being the largest general-­reference body of knowledge in the history of that planet.” Aratta gestured with his pipe. “It is not out of the drive for material riches that tens of thousands of people gather each year to build an environ­mentally responsible community of radical self-expression with gift-based transactions in what is known as the Burning Man festival. In fact, the pursuit of wealth plays no role in those monumental undertakings.”

  “Your point is well taken,” said one of the commissioners.

  Aratta helped himself to some water. “Here is a little-known story,” he said.

  “Boris Weinberg, a professor of physics in the Technological Institute of Tomsk in Siberia presented a novel blueprint to the engineering section of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He fleshed out the concept of a magnetically-levitated train that moves through partial-vacuum tunnels—the pivotal features being reduced air resistance coupled with the lack of contact with the railroad tracks. Largely removing these two sources of drag spells all the difference. First, it means the train can go incredibly fast. Second, it means the amount of energy required to move the train is relatively small.

  “Professor Weinberg had conducted proof of concept in la
boratory experiments with a small prototype. He worked out the curves and turns and some of the technical specifications.

  “Your Graces,” Aratta said, “that was one hundred years ago. That was decades before commercial aviation came into being,” he clarified.

  “A system such as this could have allowed speeds of 5,000 miles per hour, and with 1 g acceleration, it would have reached these speeds in under four minutes. Let me give you a sense of what could have been but wasn’t. A maglev train traversing tunnels that maintain partial-vacuum could have worked its way from New York to Los Angeles in about forty-five minutes. From there, it could have worked its way up through Washington state, Alaska, and over a fifty-mile bridge through the Bering Strait, into Siberia, and down to the populous centers of eastern China. From San Francisco to Beijing, the trip would have taken an hour and a half.

  “Had humanity embarked on this path, they would have had now emission-free trains cruising at high speeds rather than the slow, vastly-­polluting airplanes laboring their way up and through the air.

  “From time to time, an engineer or an entrepreneur has revived and refined the original concept. And so far, that has been the extent of it.”

  All eyes were on Aratta. He smiled without humor. “You see, that takes us to the heart of the issue. It would have required the labor of millions of people for a few decades as they construct the backbone: a series of tunnels connecting the population hubs of the world, with hundreds if not thousands of secondary tunnels with sharper turns and lower speeds for localized travel. And within their economic paradigm, this makes no sense. No one stands to make money from spending a generation building an infrastructure.

  “Never mind that there are already millions of people currently un­employed, who one way or another society feeds, clothes, and shelters. Never mind that millions of others engage in pursuits that are inane and otherwise contribute nothing to speak of.”

  “Interesting,” murmured one of the commissioners.

  “Your Graces,” said Aratta, “every economic system is the aggregate of work hours utilized, the raw natural resources, and the quality of labor.

  “With this in mind, one could inquire, just how efficient is their economic system? As it turns out, not very.

  “Earlier, you’ve been told about the Great Depression in America, where many went hungry. You may wonder why instead of increasing the production of food and other material necessities, the economy slowed in fact to a crawl. Many millions of adults, who could have been working on necessities—and wanted to—spent their days in long bread lines and looked for work no one could offer. This brings to sharp relief one of the defects of the existing economy.

  Aratta went on, “Speaking of defects, there are entire market segments utterly nonproductive. They are but a surcharge, a byproduct, a necessary evil of their economic engine and would not exist in a sounder system. Case in point is a sector of the economy that yields its revenue from the buying and selling of financial instruments.

  “The pathology of this economic setup generates profits all on its own. The impetus is to exploit and capitalize on distrust, that is, to offer new services to protect, safeguard, litigate, or investigate.

  “The volume of false claims and manipulations bring into existence firewalls that hinder or shut out fresh, valuable voices and services. Firewalls that curtail transactions and business relations, restricting them to the proven, the credentialed, or the socially connected. Under the current setup, Earth people channel a tremendous amount of energy into safeguarding products; keep innovations confidential; speculate over the monetary value of products, act as superfluous intermediaries to products; or expend resources to out-sell each other.

  “This economy is like a Rube Goldberg machine: inefficient and full of superfluous functions and redundant parts. It bogs down humanity in a mire of mediocrity and mutually assured distrust.”

  He rubbed the back of his neck. What he was to discuss next was as close as he was going to get to the essence of the moneymaking engine.

  Chapter 57

  “In 1940,” Aratta said, “it was asserted in the closing session of the Annual Clinical Congress of the American College of Surgeons that smoking may cause lung cancer. Then the 1950s rolled in and with them rigorous and comprehensive studies. Taken as a whole, they have demonstrated the adverse effects of smoking beyond any reasonable doubt.

  “By the mid-fifties, many physicians, scientists, and public health professionals were convinced of the hazards of smoking. In fact, by the mid-fifties, only the most obtuse, uninformed, or addicted would have failed to note the connection between smoking and lung cancer.

  “Now, under a human-centered economic setup, this would have been largely the end of the cigarette industry.

  “Instead, an emergency meeting was convened by those heading major tobacco drug cartels. To maximize the sales of cigarettes, they set up an institute with scientific trappings that proceeded to generate a fog of confusion. And in the decades to follow, they succeeded in selling a large segment of the public on the false notion that a scientific controversy existed about the effects of smoking. Put bluntly, to make a buck, the industry used subterfuge and were accessories to the premature death of many millions of people.

  “The amoral nature of the economic engine was brought to a sharper relief yet. In the early 1960s, the industry became aware that tobacco contains polonium, a highly radioactive substance. With smoking, polonium builds up in the air passageways leading to the lungs. The industry chose not to make this publicly known. It gets more telling. About twenty years later, they found that acid wash is highly effective in removing the polonium from tobacco leaves. However, they decided to keep things as they were—not wishing to risk tampering with the ‘kick’ or ‘rush’ sensation related to smoking.

  “At present, millions of people die each year due to smoking. Close to one hundred thousand individuals become new smokers annually, most of whom are adolescents.

  “Realizing they were accessories to the premature deaths of millions of people, tens of thousands of employees ought to have resigned—from the CEO down to the person who assembled the cigarettes. Yet, virtually no one did. And society did not expect them to. Earth people have come to accept that their economy is ultimately decoupled from morality and from any expressed goal of promoting the welfare of society.” Aratta lapsed into a brief silence.

  “When it is said the bottom line is what matters to a publicly-traded company, it refers to the bottom line of its shareholders. In fact, the board of directors has a fiduciary, financial responsibility toward the shareholders.

  “In turn, the shareholders are typically nothing but speculators trying to outwit and second-guess one another. Most of them have no interest per se in the corporation, the quality of its products, or its long-term vision—just in having the stock price go up, for any damn reason. Children coughing due to black lungs is a pity, but the price of a stock is a serious matter. If it stays flat over a long period, people sell it off without any compunction and move on to more promising prospects. It is nothing but a giant speculative dreamscape of stocks, futures contracts, options, and other derivatives. Billions upon billions of dollars course through the electronic nodes and arteries of the financial world in search of ways to multiply themselves.”

  Aratta said, “Your Graces, this is the last topic in my presentation: the dynamics surrounding publicly-traded corporations, a tour inside the belly of the beast. I have just discussed one aspect of it. Here is the rest of it.

  “One Italian company dominates the eyewear industry in the United States,” Aratta started off. “Underneath the myriad brands, there are but two toothpaste makers. And two companies control more than 90 percent of the beer market. Indeed, the existing marketplace tends to consolidate and concentrate the power in the hands of few actors. With this comes bundled an unsavory dynamic.

  “Business behemoth
s can undersell or offer a product or a service for free until the smaller competitors are driven out. At that point, de facto monopoly is established, and the prices are starting to inch their way up. This is not a situation where quality wins the day; it is where raw power does. This is not a situation where being competitive necessarily means having a superior product; often, it may simply mean having more power to bend things around oneself. Let me provide an illustration.

  “The large retail chains want to deal with those who can provide them with volume. This means that if a chicken grower wants to be a player, he must go through one of the giant processing companies, which in turn have the accounts with the large chains. In any given region, that comes down to one or two processing plants. These companies are the tollbooth all chicken growers must go through—and their surcharge is…considerable.

  “These colossal slaughterhouses dictate all the terms and control all aspect of chicken growth. They prescribe the exact specification of the chicken house the grower is to construct. They supply the chicken feed. And they not only control how much money a grower gets paid every time, but their local foremen rank each of the growers, and those at the top get paid per pound more than those who make the bottom of the list. If a producer grows weary or feel beaten, he can take a hike. The processing plants don’t mind.

  “You see, these companies have figured out that the least profitable part of the business is the raising of chickens. So, they contract it out, externalize it, really. If things go south with the birds, the contracted farmer takes the hit. At that point, they come and take away all the equipment. The grower is left with an impossible debt to the bank for the chicken house he had constructed. Meanwhile, the processing companies find a new producer and the cycle repeats itself.