By Yong Cong Choy
I care for a vision of a better society.
Modern societies are built on the fundamental assumption of capitalism – that we are all individuals out to maximize self-interest. Are we better than this?
To quote Michael Sandel, we have gone from a market economy in a society, to a market society. In many modern societies, free market forces, which work fine in an economy, have permeated societal and private life, to our detriment. A whole society modeled after free market capitalism can only lead us to collective ruin.
I hope to show that a vision of a better society is not only necessary – it is possible – but it requires our understanding, thought and action.
The Invisible Hand
The history of modern capitalism starts with Adam Smith. In his work The Wealth of Nations in 1776, he changed the world with his “invisible hand” theory, that the market transforms individual acts of selfishness into collective desirable outcomes. The fuel that keeps this mechanism going is human selfishness. With this understanding, free market economics becomes more than an economic idea; it is almost a godlike idea that takes individual selfishness and turns them into collective good. No wonder it gripped the minds of men – intellectuals, economists, policymakers.
Humanity has always grappled with how we organize society, and to what ends societal organization serves. Yet, when the lessons of the Great Depression were forgotten, and the Berlin Wall fell, capitalism became the unquestioned thought in modern societies, not just how we organize the economy, but how we organize ourselves.
Capitalism in Society – Why It Doesn’t Work
When properly applied in the economy, capitalism is an indispensable part of a modern society. However, even as it works fine (almost) in an economy, taken to an extreme, or if allowed to permeate other aspects of societal life, capitalism can be deeply flawed and harmful.
Even within the economy, capitalism has its limits of usefulness. There are things free markets simply cannot provide for, such as public goods. It also has its inherent failures and encourages perverse behaviour best exemplified by the 2008 Financial Crisis.
Even more worryingly, the principles of capitalism have seeped into other aspects of society. In education, in health, in polluting the environment, in hiring guns, in religion, in politics, there is very little you cannot pay for. Take education, for example. In some countries, there is a huge sector of private education, especially in pre-schools. Rich parents are able to send their children to the best pre-schools to get the best education. By the time they enrolled in the public schools, they would be in an advantageous position compared to their peers from poorer families. Education, with these capitalistic features, loses its original intent of learning, a vehicle for society to transfer knowledge and values, and corrodes its usefulness in social mobility and meritocracy.
Inequality: The Great Bane of Capitalism
There are other systemic effects of a capitalistic society that are increasingly studied and better understood. One of them is inequality.
Income inequality exists in all countries, but is especially pronounced in most modern, capitalistic societies. For a variety of reasons better understood today, left to market forces, the rich gets richer, the poor remains poor. “Growth itself does not lift all boats, and certainly does not lift all boats equally.”
Inequality is not just an economic problem – it creates a whole host of social ills. The Spirit Levelby Wilkinson and Pickett articulates the whole range of negative social, health and environment effects of inequality. In particular, I find their idea of social evaluative threat as insightful and ominous. In short, they explained that in unequal societies, as the gap between the rich and the poor increases, people along the whole spectrum become very concerned about where they stand in this social hierarchy. This obsession creates excesses of consumerism, trust deficits within society (1% vs. 99%), and an impossibility to garner collective action in society. On a very practical level, it makes the public policymaking very difficult, as even with the best intentions, it is often hard to cater to the interests of the very rich, without sacrificing those of the very poor, and vice-versa.
Foundations of a Better Society?
What is the alternative then? I would like to outline some emerging trends of thought in different disciplines that provides the possibility of a better society based on different foundations.
We have started to question what the aim of society is, and thus by extension, the economy. There is a sense modern societies should be maximizing their people’s happiness rather than their economic growth. Studies done to correlate happiness and life expectancy and level of income show an insightful result. The level of happiness and life expectancy of a society rises steadily with increases in income – up to a certain point – after which it plateaus off. Put simply, beyond a certain level of material comfort, increased income does not make us any happier, or make us live any longer.
Within the realm of the market economy, we should still allow capitalism to flourish – but an efficient, regulated and stable system. We forget that secure jobs with steady and rising pay for the middle-class is the engine of growth. There is a need to rid the inefficiencies and injustice of soaring corporate profits, but stagnating middle-class incomes. We need to ensure that regardless of family background, all children start on the same starting line, to maintain social mobility and ensure that poverty is not hereditary. There is also a trend to adopt a more reality-based study of economics; for example, the effect of human psychology in behavioural economics. Indeed, the understanding of human nature is the basis of how we organize ourselves in society.
Understanding Human Nature
In behavioural psychology, in recent decades, we have come to better understand human motivation. The traditional model of what motivates us has always been extrinsic in nature. It says that like rats, our behaviours can be conditioned by positive reinforcement and negative punishment. Not surprisingly, this carrot-and-stick understanding of motivation is consistent with what modern capitalism offers us.
But studies since the ‘70s have shown another side to us – that we can be intrinsically motivated as well. We can be motivated not by the rewards of a task, but the task itself. This is best summarized by Dan Pink’s Drive, in which he argued that we can be motivated by the mastery, the autonomy and the purpose of a task. This is our intrinsic motivation. Furthermore, his insight is that, extrinsic motivators, the carrot-and-stick, are only effective for motivating mundane, routine tasks. For tasks that require even a basic level of cognition, creativity and focus, intrinsic motivation works better. In modern societies, we are moving away from labour-intensive, manual and routine jobs, which carrot-and-stick incentives are perfect for. We require a workforce suitable for creative, knowledge-based and intelligent jobs, and intrinsic motivators work better. Yet businesses, corporations and even schools are slow to adopt this. A modern society needs to have a modern model of human motivation.
Another field that is yielding new insights into human nature is the area of neuroscience – the study of the brain. Recent research has shown that our brains actually evolved over time, and we had 3 different “layers” of brain. At the very core is our brain stem, which governs our subconscious tasks such as breathing, heart rate and sleep cycles. Sitting atop of it is our limbic system, and of special importance – the amygdala. It controls our primal and emotional impulses, such as fight-or-flee, crave for sex, hunger, of fear, anger, sadness, and happiness. Beyond that is the familiar cortex, which is responsible for human cognition, logic, reasoning, speech, consciousness, and memory.
Our older part of the brain, the limbic system, accounts for our deepest desires. Our primitive desires for food and sex is well understood (and experienced), but neuroscience is also telling us that our limbic system is responsible for learning and social processing – recognizing faces, reading expressions, and evaluating trustworthiness. In short, our desires and capacities to be purposeful and sociable beings are as primitive and deep as sex, hunger, and are strongly linked to our emotional well-being.
This insight and the evolution of the brain are in parallel with recent research from a related field – evolutionary biology. As we evolved from simple primates living in the trees to complex humanoids capable of using tools, creating fire and hunting together, our brains evolved accordingly. Our capacities to learn and to process social cues for cooperation emerged at a very early stage.
The story of human adaptation from here on also leads us to a final and most important insight about human nature. For half a century, the theory of evolution has been one of gene-centered natural selection – i.e. natural selection favored the selfish genes that were best able to survive and replicate themselves. When applied to humans, this leads to individual selection and kin selection – that we are selfish individuals who try to maximize our chances of survival and reproduction.
This issue is still a matter of great debate, but E.O. Wilson in his latest book The Social Conquest of Earth has provided a compelling argument of a different theory. He argued that ever since our homo- ancestors started to gather at campsites and initiated division of labour, agriculture, to form larger and larger groups, natural selection has worked on both individual and group selection. Individual selection has favored the traits in us that aim to survive and reproduce. But, at the same time, natural selection has also favored altruistic traits that led to benefit of cooperative groups or societies, compared to other uncooperative groups or societies. This is the human nature as favored by natural selection – “selfish at one time, selfless at another, the two impulses often conflicted.”
This has big implication on how we view human nature. This means, homo-sapiens have dominated the world because we are in part selfish to maximize individual benefit, but also in part altruistic for the benefit of cooperative societies. It also explains our deep-seated need for group belonging – and once within the group, the often-blind loyalty to the group (see wars, Premier League football fans, and American politics). Also, within the group, we want our group to succeed, but we also want ourselves to succeed within the group. If we look at the people around us, or deep within ourselves, this is the human nature we see. None of us are pure saints or sinners. Human nature is, by evolution, a dilemma, a chimera, a contradiction.
We have equal capacity and desires to be selfish, to be selfless; to be of sin, to be of virtue; innately wicked, innately good. Beyond our selfish nature, the desire for altruistic, collective and cooperative societies is not just an ideal – it has been half of our success story for millennia, favored by natural selection, and hardwired in every single one of us.
A Better Society
I believe it is in the intersections of disciplines where new ideas about how we organize ourselves in societies will emerge. And the intersections here point to something exciting and painfully obvious. It paints a very different picture of human nature, fortunately, one that we intuitively know. Yet society teaches us otherwise. Every public policy, every economic system, every political system and the organization of society is based on an assumption of human nature. And what we know today points to a different version of a modern society.
We need to kick capitalism out of other facets of society, and replace it with something that taps into our latent desires to be altruistic and cooperative. We need our politicians around the world to get out of political deadlock and to get rid of short-termism to win the next election. We need them to inspire us to a better vision of society. One that is not just selfish and capitalistic, but also cooperative and altruistic. One that doesn’t aim to maximize economic growth, but to ensure human progress and happiness. One that understands human nature and its desires, and taps into that potential for both societal and individual well-being.
With hope, we can create modern cooperative societies around the world with values of equality, progressiveness and altruism. And we can be people who are sociable, purposeful – and happier. At stake here are our environment, our humanity, and ourselves.
We are better than this.
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Choy Yong Cong is an officer in the Plans Department, Ministry of Defence. This article is written in his personal capacity and does not represent the views of the organization he works for.
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