Alternative Business Structures

© 2006 By Eric S. Meyer, CEO, USALL Systems

 This article is not about making more money. It is not about getting ahead. In fact, if you seek either of these two things, you probably won't want to read this article. But people can be odd, in that they often do things they don't want to get something, like go to work to a job they hate to pay bills for a family they hate and future they more than dislike: they dread and fear.

 This is not instructions on how to make profits, nor how to crush your competitors. It is not written to be useful towards gaining anything tangible. If you read this and your net worth goes down a bit, perhaps my points made some sense to you. Maybe they will not today nor tomorrow, but only in your old age when your retire to volunteer with the Small Business Administration to council forming and fledgling businesses towards economic survival will these ideas make more than something to irritate and annoy you. Maybe you will agree with my ideas and radically change your family's lives forever, no matter the costs...

 I am going to tell you how Capitalism is structured today, why it is that way, and then introduce an alternative way of doing business and living one's life, where the focus is on a more humane and sensible way of living. I am not going to quote many books in this revision; if you disagree with me, you will be making me pleased because I conclude that disagreements are extremely healthy, especially when coupled with respect of boundaries and creativity to find new solutions.

 Capitalism is structured today to achieve certain results. These results are meant to be measurable and reproducible. Our science has taken over our hearts and our minds, leading use towards a path of logic and achievement, but lacking in certain other just as important human pursuits. Capitalism is a path towards rapid environmental devastation, human exploitation, and animal abuse in the name of money.

 Who really gains from Capitalism? Indeed, the majority of the population suffers many ills from monopolistic Capitalism: poor water quality, contaminated food, crime, violence, sexual traps of relationships with abusive partners or their pimps, destruction of wild habitat, and waste everywhere. Among these problems, perhaps the most cruel of all is simple this: that people are pitted against each other for the illusion of the survival of their own family.

 Like a duel in a Roman fight to the death in a packed theater of two fighters, the objective of Capitalism is to create the impression that there are NOT enough resources for everyone to have what they need to live comfortably. However, Capitalism is based on materialism, and as such the sense of connection with family and community that humanity has grown with for thousands of millena is taken from him/her.

 In particular, when life is reduced to a fight with everything: society for food, shelter, employment, rights, and love, life becomes deadened and the senses depressed from the disruption of creative flow. Even in one's home, they may fight against their mate for control, their children to obey them, their pets to comply, all for a purpose not so noble: to pretend they are useful, since Capitalism and materialism assumes that everything must have a use or else it is worthless. To be worthless, therefore, is among the greatest loss of value. But why is this so?

 Money can buy many things, but not what which is truly important: substance and reality. Money is simply, as defined by Eric S. Meyer, a means to effectively manipulate most people's actions and attitudes in a way that is typically unhealthy for their safety, mental and physical health, and emotional growth and development.

 Being worthless may imply a lack of value, but perhaps it simply can mean “does not service the desires of the rich owning class.” Under this definition, big corporations have a lot of worth, small business has some worth, and nonprofit organizations have nearly no or a negative worth. Mother Teresa would be, under this definition, extremely worthless, and most religions would have a lot of worth because they channel money from individual to individual as a business, and Martin Luther King would be a horribly worthless man. But why not challenge this definition?

 What if worth is defined as something to benefit other life: human, animal and plants and everything in between? What if worth of an asset is measured by how well it can improve the depth of emotional expression and the freedom to explore one's true self in a setting that is safe and free from all forms of violence, hate, bigotry, rejection and prejudice?

 Too often in our culture, one is given concentrated, “focused” parts of everything to make up funky combinations of new things. Consider, for instance, sugar. In nature, the cane has all sorts of healthy nutrients in it besides the sucrose, and is quite promoting of health. But, however, consider our technology that allows a new, concentrated form of sugar, which is in turn used in baking to make a nutrient that steals the victim's B-complex vitamin factors in the body.

 Another example is cocaine. It has been used for thousands of years in South America. When consumed with other plant compounds, it is said to be quite safe by many scientists. But when the active ingredient is extracted, into cocaine, it can be deadly, and very addictive to its victims. For the South American Indians, it causes few deaths and does very little harm when used in its natural form.

 Another example is sodium fluoride. It is naturally occurring in water from many wells, but in large does can kill a person. Sodium fluoride is a concentrated form of a harmless, possibly healthful mineral in nature, but can be deadly and cause tooth decay, and discoloration, in strong quantities.

 That which is healthy can be, as it turns out, more often than not, harmful and even deadly in quantity, or even if high in frequency. Worth is like focusing on one narrow view: how well something can generate money if sold. But why is this so?

 Money is generated by transactions. But there are other ways to doing business, like, for instance, barter and sharing, that are at least as valid in terms of healthfulness.  Lets look at the difference between barter and sharing, and compare it with traditional monopolistic profiteering.

 Barter is about giving up what is not needed to gain that which is useful. This can be a useful way to gain relationships with neighbors and the community. The “disadvantage” with this system is that it is more difficult to exploit workers this way, or to offer banking services, or to collect resources for a militia to go out and kill those who represent peace and respect.

 Sharing is about releasing and offering what may or may not be needed towards to goal of helping the other person towards their own goals. In other words, sharing involves releasing resources to others who may have just as much or less use for them as yourself, but that the rewards are many for both parties of the interaction. First, this is not a transaction in the ordinary sense. Instead, it is about two people, families, communities or cultures accepting a minor decrease in living standard for the purpose, whether real or not, of benefiting another group or person.

 Transactions are about money changing hands so that an economy can grow, without much, if any, benefit to the two trading parties. Barter is about resources changing hands to improve the amount of total desirable wealth in family or of an individual. Sharing is about caring enough about someone that with little more than faith one less another take, with the focus being on gaining a relationship, not on gaining physical stuff.

 Of course, when one is starving, they will need food, even if it means participating in the Capitalistic system. However, if wealth was shared properly in the first place, there would be no poverty nor very rich. Instead of focusing on how to shrink the middle class into lots of new members in the working class, and a small number of new arrivals into the ruling class, why not ask our politicians to focus on getting opportunities to everyone to be creative, expressive and happy, instead of trying to teach their public better ways to fight each other, all the while teaching them how to better obey and understand the rules and norms of the culture and its faulty economic systems.

 There are other social systems, but they are all hundreds or years old or older and very limited in breaking free of the horrible tyrant that lives in so many hearts and minds of every culture on earth. Other systems are about sharing resources more, but they force corporations to comply. Force of any form never gets healthy nor lasting results. If a company is afraid it will lose money, it will do what it can to protect itself: relocate, kill union leaders, put corrupt leaders into politics, sponsor more schools.

 The social system of the future will have the following attributes:

• Be sustenance orientated. Growth is only healthy in certain environments. After all, to the cancel cell, unremitting growth occurs even if it kills the host.
• Be caring. No culture can exist for long if its members don't care for one another.
• Be responsive. The economy must be structured in such a way to allow new ideas to phase out old ideas.
• Be cooperative. When each company does its own research, there will be a lot of wasted resource on reinventing “the wheel.” E. Eward Demming, however, instructed the Japanese to collaborate together a technology, but make different products based on the same core principles of the research and findings.
• Be creative. Creativity is the key to unlock any door, as it is the fountain of happiness.
• Be integrated. When someone has one person as a spouse, another as therapist, another as a friend, another as a co-worker, another as a masseuse, another as a doctor, another as a coach, and so on, they have a very fragmented life. Fragmentation leads to depression and suffering.
• Be loving. When there is hate, there is a flurry of purchase of weapons and machines to do harm. However, with love, there can be joy in cooperation and integration.
• Be supportive. Unions are the closest thing we have to these today for the masses. Supportive structures lead to comfort and trust.
• Be safe. Safety leads to a willingness to take risks and innovate. Without these, an economy will stagnate rapid and lose its output.
• Be innovation friendly. Innovation requires creativity and safety, and its result tends to be improvements in efficiency and therefore less time worked for the survival of the culture.
• Be supportive of a propagation of ideas. This means, quite simply, that the Internet is setup and allows the free exchange and publication of ideas and expression of feelings with words, art, and music.
• Be focused on humane interaction instead of gaining endless supplies of money. Money tends to distract from the true needs: for affectionate touch, listening, receptiveness, and mutual concern for one another's welfare.
• The above list is by no means comprehensive, but at least a start towards rendering a viable descriptor of the core elements of a healthy economy. Therefore, it should be noted that Capitalism is nearly opposite to most of these core dozen elements or attributes essential for a healthy economy.

 In summary, Capitalism is about building material things for a limited amount of time until everything is consumed beyond utility, while the alternative system involves establishing allies and mutually beneficial relationships based on listing and sharing, towards the envisioning of a favorable legacy for one's children and grandchildren, instead of constructing a goal to force themselves and their families to blinding follow until one day, when they ask, “How did I get here? Why am I so miserable despite reaching my goals?”