When Humans and Reptiles Collide

Like Goodwin, Summers or Bush, they present themselves as spoiled children who seemed to have never read a book for themselves in their lifetime.

As was the case in Auschwitz, as noted by Noam Chomsky, the inability to self-reflect makes it possible for anyone to be both saints and gas chamber attendants. It is not a question of will or malevolence. But there’s still hope. Like a drilling out a cavity or escaping a cult, the mammalian values of compassion can still be taught. If we fail in doing so, we condemn ourselves to death.

Read a Book, Say You Were Wrong, and Save the World

“Do I know you well enough to call you fellow plunderers?” When Ray Anderson, CEO of Interface, was asked to open a speech for a newly convened environmental task force in his company, this would’ve been the last thing he could have imagined himself saying. This was the early days of environmentalism and he was quite hesitant to give the speech at first. When a copy of Paul Harken’s The Ecology of Commerce landed on his desk, he read through it desperate for ideas.

As he immersed himself into the book he came across the phrase, “the death of birth,” which was E.O. Wilson’s expression for species extinction. For Anderson, the phrase acted as, “a point of a spear into my chest, and I read on, and the spear went deeper, and it became an epiphanal experience, a total change of mindset for myself and a change of paradigm.” Through his spiritual journey he came to notice, “the way I’d been running Interface is the way of the plunderer.” It dawned to him that sometime in the future, “people like me will end up in jail.” His mission for sustainability as a renegade industrialist has continued ever since.

The corporate careerists who have the nerve to call themselves academics have butchered creativity and robbed us of the human spirit of literature, philosophy, history and sociology. In Empire of Illusion, Hedges tells us that the true function of literature is, “a tool to enlighten societies about their ills. It was Charles Dickens who directed the attention of middle-class readers to the slums and workhouses of London. It was Honore de Balzac who, through the volumes of his Human Comedy, ripped open the callous heart of France. It was Upton Sinclair who took us into the shanty towns and the stock yards of Chicago in The Jungle.”

What makes us human is our ability to question and think. Without it, innovation and creativity is a joke, making us no better than the Walking Dead. (Although the ‘the Shopping Dead’ would be more accurate I think). We need the metaphorical spear more than ever, for the sake of the survival of our species as well as our economy.

The question over how we let our economy collapse is partially a question of managerial character and conduct. We have blindly trusted the so called wizards and ignored reality to embrace an illusion. Our obsession with the fast buck at work and building the perfect resume at school has allowed us to demonize the compassionate and common sense holding coworker as nay-saying business prevention officers, in a time when we needed their questions the most. Our moral desensitization has made it easier than ever for reptilian psychopaths to infiltrate our surroundings, as we gawk over their façade as role models to be immolated.

What the business world needs the most right now is a leader with high character and compassion, which not only raises the moral at the workplace but also has significant financial returns.