Am I the Enemy?

The ultimate measure of success for big corporations, and little ones, and individuals, and governments, is profit. An enemy is anyone who reduces profits. And it doesn’t matter how the enemy reduces those profits. I certainly reduce the profits of corporations, and you probably do also. That makes us enemies of the corporations.

One way to reduce a corporation’s profits are for governments to force them to pay for their externalities—that is, the consequences of the harm they have been inflicting on people and the Earth. To force fossil fuel corporations to pay a carbon tax (so far, a failure); to force tobacco corporations to pay for the health effects of smoking (a partial success); to force pharmaceutical corporations to pay for the suffering that directly results from aggressive marketing of addictive drugs (a mixed record of success and failure).

But another way is for ordinary consumers to choose to buy less from corporations, choosing inexpensive and healthy alternatives. Those of us who choose this path are eating into the profitability of large corporations as surely as if they had lost a lawsuit or paid penalties.

On a recent weekend, my family and I visited the Black Forest National Park in Germany, right over the river from Alsace, where we now live. We walked around in the snow and let the kids throw snowballs. We had to drive there, in a family sized vehicle, but we only use the vehicle when there is an unavoidable reason for it. Most of the time we walk or take public transportation, which helps us avoid the parking nightmare that Strasbourg, like any city, is. Then we went home, and enjoyed the free entertainment of one another’s company and educational YouTube videos (such as mine or those of Jamy Gourmaud).

What we did not do was to go on a cruise or buy a lot of hiking equipment. The end of the day was also a perfect opportunity for us to go to a restaurant and have a family meal, but we did not do this; we went home and had leftovers which, I might add, were pretty good. We did not go out to a movie. In just these ways, we deprived corporations of about a couple of thousand euros of income. That money is not part of their income as surely as if it had been forbidden by government policy. We also had less debt, which meant that we deprived financial corporations of debt interest.

Corporations do not want us to consume less or to encourage others to do so. They do not want us to drive less, or buy smaller cars, but to buy big electric trucks. They do not want us to buy fewer of the items that have to be transported all over the continent. They do not want us to simply not smoke; they want us to vape, a market the tobacco corporations largely control. They do not want us to be healthy, but to be permanently in a state of requiring expensive medical intervention. They do not want us to reduce credit card debt, just avoid defaults.

I have a medical condition which requires prescriptions that are, for me as a French resident, free, but which in America required me to pay a thousand dollar deductible each year, and most of that money went directly to the recently-assassinated CEO of United HealthCare. I do not endorse assassination, of course. But for a million people in my situation, these charges were a billion dollar benefit to UHC. Even though my medication is now free, I do everything I can to avoid getting sicker and needing yet more medical intervention.

Any of my readers (which is not a large number) who are influenced by my enjoyment of low-impact pleasures will have a similar negative impact on corporate profits. This makes us, collectively, major enemies of the corporations. We may not be as obvious as the Marxist activists, but we are as significant.

And, I need hardly add, we are happy. To have my grandson try to throw a snowball at me, and miss, is as enjoyable as any cruise. And there is no chance whatever that I will contract the rotavirus for which cruises are famous, from the snowball.

Corporate War on Altruism

Altruism, which I have defined many times in many ways on this blog, is doing well by doing good. It is not selfless sacrifice. The altruist gets many personal benefits by doing good to and for others.

Altruism confers such a strong evolutionary benefit that natural selection has given us very, very strong emotional pressures to support it. Altruism feels good. Going against altruism feels bad. We call it guilt. That is, unless you are a psychopath, which is a person (maybe one percent of the population) who completely lacks these feelings. Non-psychopaths can train themselves to stop feeling guilt, but it comes at a great emotional price.

But in today’s business world, corporate leaders are required to crush their feelings of altruism. Our modern corporate world is set up to eradicate altruism and guilt. I realized this as I was reading David C. Korten’s When Corporations Rule the World, which has an immense trove of examples. I will quote from pages 224 and 225:

“Derek Bok, the former president of Harvard University…suggests that top corporate executives must be paid such outrageous sums to ensure that they place the short term interests of shareholders above all other interests that they might otherwise be tempted to consider—such as those of employees, the community, and even the corporation’s own long-term viability. In short, top executives have to be paid outrageous salaries to motivate them not to yield to their instincts toward social responsibility (emphasis added).

“As one CEO related to Fortune (magazine), “You get through firing people the first time around, accepting it as part of business. The second time I begin wondering, ‘How many miscarriages is this causing? How many divorces, how many suicides?’ I worked harder so I wouldn’t have to think about it.’”

One executive who was repeatedly required, by his corporate boss, to continue firing people, “…began breaking out in spontaneous fits of crying and one day couldn’t get out of bed.”

Korten then says that the executives “are learning…that no amount of money can buy peace of mind, a strong and loving family, caring friends, and a feeling that one is doing meaningful and important work.”

This makes it clear, to me, that altruism is an instinct and that to go against it is emotionally devastating. Unless, that is, you are Donald Trump. His greatest moments of joy were when, on television, he fired people. He still exults in devastating people. That’s why his own niece, a psychologist, calls him the world’s most dangerous man. And millions of Americans want him to be the face of America to the world. If we give him this opportunity, again, then the nations of the world will hate us, for good reason. They may fear us, but they will hate us. And to millions of Christians, this is the very image of Jesus they want the world to see.

Asymmetry and Fake LinkedIn Profiles

Researchers in human evolution, and writers who present their research to a popular readership, have long known that bodily asymmetry is an indicator of general genetic health. Mutations, toxins, and disease can lead to bodily asymmetry, especially facial asymmetry. In mate selection, one mate can assess the health of the other mate by seeing his or her facial symmetry. If the left side doesn’t line up with the right, that might mean something somewhere is wrong.

People with facial symmetry are esteemed as beautiful and healthy. And these are also the faces that corporations want to present as representatives to their customers. You are much more likely to respond positively to a sales rep with a symmetrical face.

Corporations have used this fact to generate thousands of fake profiles (for example, on LinkedIn). These fake beautiful people will make you want to consider doing business with the corporations that they represent.

How do you know that an online personality is a real person? You can’t. It’s as simple as that. But there are some things you can look for. Back when I used to answer robocalls (something I no longer do; nor do I decline them, since that would tell the spammer that the number they have reached is real) I would listen to the “person” for a few seconds. Then I would say, “You are a robot.” The voice would keep talking for a couple of seconds, then say “I am not a robot.” Of course, you can program a robot to say, “I am not a robot.” I just delete all these calls without even answering them.

It is much more difficult to create a fake online personality if a portrait is involved. But, at the moment, it is possible. Researchers have found that fake LinkedIn profiles have faces that are too perfect. The facial symmetry is utterly perfect. No real human being is utterly symmetrical (see this article).

Of course, corporations will quickly learn how to insert a one percent facial asymmetry generator into their fake personalities. In the near future, we will never be able to tell if the person in the profile is real or not.

Is Altruism Good for the Economy?

One would think that there is money to be made in the business of altruism. In particular, corporations or local businesses that do things that help the community, so long as they do so in a visible manner, benefit from the goodwill of the community. People are more likely to open accounts at banks or buy items from stores that have a public image of being generous. There are many examples of businesses and corporations that have invested in, and reaped the benefits of, public goodwill. And the explosion of artificial intelligence has included an emphasis on likeability: those robot voices that answer the phones of corporations say “Your call is very important to us” rather than “Wait in line, sucker.” Sometimes the robot voices even tell you your approximate wait time. Someday soon they might be able to identify you by your phone number, consult the list of music you have purchased, and create a tailor-made sound track for your wait time. I will know this has happened if I start getting all-Dvořák sound tracks when I am put on hold.

Increasingly, however, I have noticed that corporations and businesses are doing just the opposite. In many cases, corporations will do things that demean and frustrate their customers even if it costs them money to do so. They frequently entrap their customers or clients into making little errors for which they can be penalized. We can all think of personal experiences in which this has happened to us or to someone we know. This seems to be puzzling, both from an economic and an evolutionary viewpoint. Why would they do something that is not only bad but also decreases their profits?

Probably because it does not decrease their profits. Corporations know that if they keep us frustrated, one of our responses will be to buy more stuff, from junk food to vacations, in an attempt to make ourselves happy or to help us forget our frustrations. Banks, for example, know that if they keep us frustrated, we will spend money on shallow pleasures and stay in debt to them, for which they can charge high interest rates. A client who has an optimistic plan for the future will find actual pleasure in trying to become debt-free. The banks want to keep us depressed so that we will not try. And corporations that sell us stuff want us to buy everything now, because the item or service might not be available later; to wait is to lose. In short, many large corporations want us to be dissatisfied, even desperate, servants rather than happy customers.

Manipulating the lives of customers is not what evolutionary scientists call an “evolutionary stable strategy.” That is, this way of doing things is “invasible”: a business or corporation that people liked would soon displace the ones that people do not like, all other things being equal. However, all other things are not equal. The corporations that invest heavily in entrapping and demeaning customers are so large that they dominate the market. To convince yourself of this, just try starting a friendly corporation. I genuinely hope you succeed. Good luck! And remember, my call is very important to you.

The Red Queen Strikes

Lewis Carroll’s Alice encountered the Red Queen, who had to keep running just to stay in place as the world around her kept moving. Many evolutionary biologists, starting with Leigh Van Valen, used this imagery to describe how populations have to keep evolving just to stay where they are. The reason is that their biological environments keep changing. So if you can imagine a population of animals perfectly adapted to their physical environment, they must keep evolving new defenses against parasites. The parasites, being primarily small organisms with rapid life cycles, can evolve faster than most of their hosts. Confirmation has come from the fact that populations of animals such as snails that encounter more parasites are more likely to have sexual reproduction than populations with fewer parasites, which might reproduce without sexual recombination.

We live in a social environment with its own, and rapidly accelerating, version of the Red Queen. We are constantly evolving (by memes, not genes) new technologies that allow faster information transfer and processing, better medicine, etc. But even if we choose to remain in place—if we decide that what we have is good enough—we cannot do so, because our social environment is full of rapidly evolving parasites. Parasites in cyberspace continually evolve new ways to steal our personal information. Even corporations that consider themselves legitimate are always coming up with new plasmids in the fine print that allow them to charge us extra fees, or new designs that promote built-in obsolescence, or new attractions that make us think that we want their products when, honestly, we do not. You want to buy whole wheat bread because it is healthier? Better check to see just how much whole wheat is in it; the dark color may mostly be caramel. You have to be careful when you run your free AVG virus-check on your computer, because it will automatically sign you up for “protection” that is not free unless you take the initiative to uncheck the box. An anti-virus virus, as it were. You have to be careful when you go to a medical provider. No matter how small your problem, the provider may try to prescribe for you an expensive course of therapy.

Our economy is a jungle of parasitic perils. We have to watch every transaction, every account, all the time to catch entities that accidentally-on-purpose take money from us. Durant City Utilities charged me an extra $100 for water I did not use. I pay these utilities by automatic debit, and had I not scrutinized every transaction, I might never have caught their error, an error they admitted once I pointed it out to them. No matter what I do or don’t do, no matter how much stasis I may choose in my life, the economic environment is coming up with new ways to parasitize me. And you. No wonder it’s hard to get work done; we have to spend our time being paranoid about economic parasites. It’s sort of like a war.

What can we do, not just to protect ourselves but to go to war against the threats we face? I suggest we take stock of our strengths and opportunities, and use them. You may have more power than you realize. One thing we can do is to write letters to corporations and tell them that we know what they are doing to victimize us. In some cases, we can make them take notice. When I sent a nasty note to AIG, back when they were getting government bailout money while paying millions of dollars to their executives, they undoubtedly ignored it. But if I write a letter to a tobacco corporation saying that I teach hundreds of students not only about the dangers of tobacco but also about the illegal tactics that these corporations use (including their 1994 perjury to a House committee), they might take notice. They might take even more notice if I share contact information with my students so they can write letters too. Better yet, I can offer extra credit to the students. Or I can write and encourage others to write to sugar corporations about their deceptive marketing of a product that is dangerous in the excessive uses that they promote. We can, you see, go to war with them in the marketplace of ideas and consumer spending.

The marketplace is also filled with a cultural version of mindless parasites. The “people” with whom you interact may not even be people. When I first opened a Twitter account, I immediately had two followers whom I did not know, who had female names but no bios, and photos without faces (just alluring body parts). They soon disappeared. They were probably “bots” rather than actual people. And every writer has probably had some version of the experience I am about to relate. I sent a query letter to an agency listed in Writers Digest, but which had no website. I got a response back from what sounded like a personable agent saying, your project sounds interesting, send us the first couple of chapters. I emailed back, requesting further information about the agency. In response, I got exactly the same email as before. It appears, based on the online comments of other authors, that this agency is just a front for a law firm that thinks authors will pay them to represent their work to editors whom the author must contact. I wonder how many “literary agents” actually do not exist.

It would be nice if we could leave our parasites behind the way rotifers do, by just drying up and blowing away in the wind, leaving our fungi behind. But for us to survive in a Red Queen world of corporate parasites, we need to be constantly vigilant (trying not to slip into paranoia). We also need to fight back.

Consumer Pressure

Please see below, or visit the website for the Oklahoma Science Teachers Association, for information about the upcoming Second Annual Oklahoma Evolution Road Trip!

Like most college instructors, I wish to give my students an experience that will make a real difference in their lives. Sometimes it is as simple as getting them to take a close look at the world around them, which they may never have done before. Once they have done it, the first step has been taken and they might continue the habit. Well, maybe half of them will.

But I think it is important for us to also participate in some form of activism. While I admire the work of Bill McKibben and 350.org,  I have all kinds of excuses why I do not personally undertake such activities. But it occurred to me that there might be something else I could do, which I have a specific ability to do, and which not everyone else has.

I teach classes. And I want my students to become activists on some issues. And students want extra credit. And voilà, the perfect fit: have the students write letters.

I have to choose the issues carefully, so that they are related to my field (biology) and are not partisan. But there are plenty of such issues. I decided to start with something that is pretty straightforward: tobacco.  Nobody takes the position that “tobacco is a blessing to the world.” Well, I think, anyway. I realized that I could get students to write letters to tobacco corporations, expressing their disapproval (or horror, if they prefer) at what the tobacco corporations are doing, and their refusal to purchase products or invest in the corporations responsible for them.

This is not as easy as it might sound. A student might have no idea what to write, and almost certainly not how or to whom. So I did this work for them. I drafted a model letter (but I will require students to use some of their own words and insert their own feelings and experiences). I tracked down the contacts to which they could send physical letters or emails. This is not always easy. Some corporations very effectively insulate themselves from the public. Some of the tobacco corporation websites cannot be entered by anyone under 21 years of age, which covers most of my students. If nothing else, there may be media representative emails to which the students can write. The media reps do not want to be bombarded by activist emails, but, tough beans. If they get a lot of emails, maybe they will report this fact to management that is above them. If they don’t want emails, they shouldn’t put their email addresses on the website. I also encouraged students to direct their comments to the CEO, whose name I provided, for each of four major tobacco corporations. (This is down from seven in 1994 when the “seven dwarves” presented perjured testimony to Henry Waxman’s committee in the House.) I also provided the brand names marketed by each company.

This may seem to be a futile exercise. But if this idea spreads beyond my classroom, and if it is maintained over the years, it might make a difference. These comments may never be read—certainly not by the CEO—but they may be counted.

Once a student has written these letters, it will never be as difficult again to write an activist letter.

I had to think carefully about possible legal difficulties, and specifically mention them in the document I posted for my students. And I posted a PDF file rather than an alterable Word file. And I made this an extra credit activity rather than a requirement, for now.

And I hope you, my readers, may join in. And if you have students, get them involved also. You may access the PDF file at my website; the specific URL is here.

Let’s get our students over the activation energy that is preventing them from becoming participants in our economy and society, based on the things they are learning in our classes.