Examining the concept and realities of profit is a useful thought experiment.
Ordinary people, people like you and I, and especially the low income workers, who make most of the real wealth in this world, through daily toil: every hour of our lives is equally precious. And yet the largest proportion of the wealth we generate is extracted and accumulated and used as a tool to dominate us. The poor are a permanent externalised cost of that extraction process. I think of that as a fundamental and abominable insult to the very gift of life itself.
Ordinary people, people like you and I, and especially the low income workers, who make most of the real wealth in this world, through daily toil: every hour of our lives is equally precious. And yet the largest proportion of the wealth we generate is extracted and accumulated and used as a tool to dominate us. The poor are a permanent externalised cost of that extraction process. I think of that as a fundamental and abominable insult to the very gift of life itself.
“How can wealth persuade poverty to use its political freedom to keep wealth in power? Here lies the whole art of Conservative politics in the 20th century."―
These pre-conquest people live off the yield of the habitat, without harming it.
"Of the top 20 region-sectors ranked by environmental impacts, none would be profitable if environmental costs were fully integrated. Ponder that for a moment: None of the world’s top industrial sectors would be profitable if they were paying their full freight. Zero."
None of the world’s top industries would be profitable if they paid for the natural capital they use.
source : https://grist.org/business-technology/none-of-the-worlds-top-industries-would-be-profitable-if-they-paid-for-the-natural-capital-they-use/
In this article the author lays out some of the evidence that the institutionalised system of 'externalised costs' and the lack of proper regulation of industry is what 'creates' profits, rather than the efforts of workers, designers, inventors, investors, consumers or even market share.
"Here’s how those costs break down:
The majority of unpriced natural capital costs are from greenhouse gas emissions (38%), followed by water use (25%), land use (24%), air pollution (7%), land and water pollution (5%), and waste (1%).
So how much is that costing us? Trucost’s headline results are fairly stunning.
First, the total unpriced natural capital consumed by the more than 1,000 “global primary production and primary processing region-sectors” amounts to $7.3 trillion a year — 13 percent of 2009 global GDP.
In other words, Global Industrial Activity (GIA) is fundamentally biologically, environmentally and socially unprofitable. A damaged environment is a huge threat to the social reality of our human species.The Trucost report can be read here.
All of it, Global Industrial Activity (GIA) as it is currently operating, is a deceit. A vast rip-off.
There is a way out of this awful situation, in which toxic outcomes are normalised and denied. The first step is to overcome the denial, to allow the truth to be seen and understood, and accepted. The second step is to seek to redesign all industrial activity in such manner that it does not cause such immense harm.
Cradle to Cradle
Cradle to Cradle Design is a design principle which can be applied to almost every production and usage system.
A radical change in industry: a switch from a cradle-to-grave pattern (landfill waste is a graveyard) to a cradle-to-cradle pattern. This means rather than burying used, end of life consumer objects as waste, in landfills, avoid that entirely and ensure the outputs the and materials throughout production, use and end of life become 'nutrients' for more production.
This approach notes that the "reduce, reuse, recycle" methods currently being promoted, whilst useful still perpetuate the toxic cradle-to-grave strategy, because there is no point where the materials are reintegrated into production systems, to be used again, and that therefore more radical changes need to be made.
Cradle to Cradle points towards the manufacture of products with the goal of upcycling in mind.
This vision of upcycling is based on a system of "lifecycle development" initiated by Braungart and colleagues at the Environmental Protection Encouragement Agency in the 1990s: after products have reached the end of their useful life, they become either "biological nutrients" or "technical nutrients".
Biological nutrients are materials that can re-enter the environment.
Technical nutrients are materials that remain within closed-loop industrial cycles
The ultimate end point is a production system that generates 'no waste' - everything within the system can be re-integrated into nutrient and material systems.
Cradle to Cradle can be applied to agriculture in the form of permaculture, re-genAg and other growing systems that lead to nutrient build up as a core part of food production practice at all stages.
The second and complimentary approach is to look again at profit, and imagine a more environmentally and socially adept meaning of the word, and the practice.
Cradle to Cradle can be applied to agriculture in the form of permaculture, re-genAg and other growing systems that lead to nutrient build up as a core part of food production practice at all stages.
The second and complimentary approach is to look again at profit, and imagine a more environmentally and socially adept meaning of the word, and the practice.
Profit.
I invite you to travel with me and examine the current concept of profit, and then follow me in redefining profit.
I suggest we can do this by comparing the the realities of 'profit' with the realities of 'yield' in context as a living organism, a biological entity living within a biological environment, a habitat that is shared.
Profit is the excess money accrued after all acknowledged expenses are paid out. Capital is the build-up of excess to needs money, stored as a hoard of treasure, which generates it's own power, in that the holder can use that wealth to influence society as he or she, or it (an institution) pursues their own interest.
Yield is the total delivered by a biological process. A crop of rice harvested yields the food, and the stalk, the roots, all of which have their uses.
The very fact that I am alive and that I inhabit an environment that already contains organisms and processes that generate everything I truly need to live well - water, food, materials for shelter and clothing, metabolic organisms, etc - is an example of being nurtured by a yield.
I gain an immense benefit from the independent action of trillions of organisms, millions of processes, hundreds of thousands of dynamic interactions between the sun, water, weather, rock and soil. We all do. This is yield. It is not the same as profit that creates Capital, nonetheless we all profit from it.
Profit is the excess money accrued after all acknowledged expenses are paid out. Capital is the build-up of excess to needs money, stored as a hoard of treasure, which generates it's own power, in that the holder can use that wealth to influence society as he or she, or it (an institution) pursues their own interest.
Yield is the total delivered by a biological process. A crop of rice harvested yields the food, and the stalk, the roots, all of which have their uses.
The very fact that I am alive and that I inhabit an environment that already contains organisms and processes that generate everything I truly need to live well - water, food, materials for shelter and clothing, metabolic organisms, etc - is an example of being nurtured by a yield.
I gain an immense benefit from the independent action of trillions of organisms, millions of processes, hundreds of thousands of dynamic interactions between the sun, water, weather, rock and soil. We all do. This is yield. It is not the same as profit that creates Capital, nonetheless we all profit from it.
Can I add to that benefit, in the sense of adding in a nurturant way to the whole, so that there is more benefit to go around? The biological yield is already immense, with very little in the way of externalised costs. There is no waste. The answer is, of course, that I can add to that benefit. If I chose to do so. My garden is permaculture garden.
You and I, we both gain immense benefit from the action of gazillions of organisms that process the materials for life that we utilise. If we nurture all those processes and we add to the nutrient levels, then we are a better fit to the processing cycles, or patterns that already exist, out of which we have emerged.
The yield from the vast collective nurture of a habitat is a habitat full of living organisms whose individual and collective behaviour and action nurtures more life. The yield is the whole, and it includes every individual participating in it. There is no excess to taken off and sequestered, hoarded, kept for exclusive use.
Evolution.
Evolution can be contextualised as the progression of that dynamic, by organisms that learn from their changing environment by engaging with it, learning within it, making adaptive changes as the environment changes.. This is what bacteria, viruses and all small single celled creatures do - they meet changes in the environment, and work out ways to deal with those changes to maintain living well in the environment.
Living well is creating more nutrients for living processes, building that nutrient richness, cycle upon cycle, minute by minute, day by day, year on year, across millions and millions of years.
The excess, the spare or the yield that is produced, the output, the material metabolised, altered and composted, the non waste of all these living creatures digestion, plus their bodies when they died, all of this feeding other life processes, building up richness of nutrients in the soil and throughout the habitat.
We are told that Oil and Coal are decomposed carbon from ancient microorganisms and trees, that have been processed over hundreds of millions of years. Everything we see around us, even the invisible at depth, has links to nurturant processes.
Pre-conquest Nurture.
These people in the image are among the remaining traces of indigenous pre-conquest pre-industrial egalitarian peoples, our ancestors who walked across the all the lands of Earth, and who found the best places to thrive in. Our phenotype, our form, Homo Sapiens is 250,000 years old, and there are others like us, much, much older, dating back millions of years. All thrived and emerged from nurturant habitats.
These Egalitarian cultures existed and thrived cross the globe, producing tens of thousands of different language groups, an amazing diversity of cultures, sustained for many tens of thousands of years (Australian Aboriginals have a continued sustained diversity culture that is 60,000 years old) across diverse language and cultural groups, in almost every habitable place on Earth.
We know that these cultures were very aware of their habitats, highly attuned to local dynamics and variations, gather from direct experience and observation of hundreds of generations.
We know that most practised an informal perma-cultural food plant tending, as well as hunting and foraging, most often around their living spaces, and along their track ways - these were cultures of nurturant behaviour.
They were everywhere, and they were long standing cultures even before the emergence of Civilisation Hierarchy Cultures. Profit was an alien concept in those cultures. Property was likewise an alien thing. We know the likelihood is these cultures were egalitarian, that they were not war like, that the default of the human species is healthy attachments, bonded relationships, creativity and co-operation.
Healthy human behaviour.
The point here is about relationships, it is about how all relationships are distorted by bullying within a culture of hierarchy of power and violence.
Who pays the costs, and who takes the profit?
Who pays the costs of violent hierarchy?
Bullying is not healthy.
Hierarchy of Power and Status is not healthy human behaviour.
The peoples, hundreds of millions, billions of people, (there have been a total of 1 billion plus Australian Aboriginal lives since they emerged in Australia 60,000 years ago) like those in the image above, peoples that have probably never known poverty until others came to turn their forests and rivers and plains in to an income stream.
Abundance is the mandate across biology, thriving abundance rather than frequent scarcity.
Everything benefits. The whole is nurtured by all it's parts being nurtured.
Every living organism adds nutrient to the whole system, and all parts are connected.
The psychological difference between the Egalitarian Indigenous and the Hierarchical Civilised is that bullying and deceit is built into the Civilised Industrialised culture, in order to extract wealth which is the base of Power.
A different kind of profit.
So let us move now, from the forest and it's practical sharing ethic, to the urban civilisation and as we traverse, we remember to look again at what is profit, and what is theft.
Where is profit taken where harms caused remain unresolved?
Where is the thriving centre of the whole?
Welfare of all constituents is the primary defining characteristic in measuring a true profit.
How the lived experience really is.
I suggest we re-define profit or reposition it as being the totality outcome of any activity, set as all human activity is, in the shared commons. From raw extraction to production, consumption and disposal.
So what would be considered 'profit' in terms of a healthy dynamic of urban civilisation infrastructure?
Accrued Benefits, Collective Profit
The collective profit from a national rail system is easy, cheap transport for the public which reduces the need for private cars. Plus the jobs it provides if the workers are respected, well paid and integrated into the management of the system as a social service. If it is efficient and allows people to stay connected, and people are happy using it, that too is the profit. It recycles all materials, runs on solar and other non extractive power generation systems so that it mitigates it's infrastructure costs over time.
You and I, we both gain immense benefit from the action of gazillions of organisms that process the materials for life that we utilise. If we nurture all those processes and we add to the nutrient levels, then we are a better fit to the processing cycles, or patterns that already exist, out of which we have emerged.
The yield from the vast collective nurture of a habitat is a habitat full of living organisms whose individual and collective behaviour and action nurtures more life. The yield is the whole, and it includes every individual participating in it. There is no excess to taken off and sequestered, hoarded, kept for exclusive use.
Evolution.
Evolution can be contextualised as the progression of that dynamic, by organisms that learn from their changing environment by engaging with it, learning within it, making adaptive changes as the environment changes.. This is what bacteria, viruses and all small single celled creatures do - they meet changes in the environment, and work out ways to deal with those changes to maintain living well in the environment.
Living well is creating more nutrients for living processes, building that nutrient richness, cycle upon cycle, minute by minute, day by day, year on year, across millions and millions of years.
The excess, the spare or the yield that is produced, the output, the material metabolised, altered and composted, the non waste of all these living creatures digestion, plus their bodies when they died, all of this feeding other life processes, building up richness of nutrients in the soil and throughout the habitat.
We are told that Oil and Coal are decomposed carbon from ancient microorganisms and trees, that have been processed over hundreds of millions of years. Everything we see around us, even the invisible at depth, has links to nurturant processes.
Pre-conquest Nurture.
These people in the image are among the remaining traces of indigenous pre-conquest pre-industrial egalitarian peoples, our ancestors who walked across the all the lands of Earth, and who found the best places to thrive in. Our phenotype, our form, Homo Sapiens is 250,000 years old, and there are others like us, much, much older, dating back millions of years. All thrived and emerged from nurturant habitats.
These Egalitarian cultures existed and thrived cross the globe, producing tens of thousands of different language groups, an amazing diversity of cultures, sustained for many tens of thousands of years (Australian Aboriginals have a continued sustained diversity culture that is 60,000 years old) across diverse language and cultural groups, in almost every habitable place on Earth.
We know that these cultures were very aware of their habitats, highly attuned to local dynamics and variations, gather from direct experience and observation of hundreds of generations.
We know that most practised an informal perma-cultural food plant tending, as well as hunting and foraging, most often around their living spaces, and along their track ways - these were cultures of nurturant behaviour.
They were everywhere, and they were long standing cultures even before the emergence of Civilisation Hierarchy Cultures. Profit was an alien concept in those cultures. Property was likewise an alien thing. We know the likelihood is these cultures were egalitarian, that they were not war like, that the default of the human species is healthy attachments, bonded relationships, creativity and co-operation.
Healthy human behaviour.
The point here is about relationships, it is about how all relationships are distorted by bullying within a culture of hierarchy of power and violence.
Who pays the costs, and who takes the profit?
Who pays the costs of violent hierarchy?
Bullying is not healthy.
Hierarchy of Power and Status is not healthy human behaviour.
The peoples, hundreds of millions, billions of people, (there have been a total of 1 billion plus Australian Aboriginal lives since they emerged in Australia 60,000 years ago) like those in the image above, peoples that have probably never known poverty until others came to turn their forests and rivers and plains in to an income stream.
Abundance is the mandate across biology, thriving abundance rather than frequent scarcity.
Everything benefits. The whole is nurtured by all it's parts being nurtured.
Every living organism adds nutrient to the whole system, and all parts are connected.
The psychological difference between the Egalitarian Indigenous and the Hierarchical Civilised is that bullying and deceit is built into the Civilised Industrialised culture, in order to extract wealth which is the base of Power.
A different kind of profit.
So let us move now, from the forest and it's practical sharing ethic, to the urban civilisation and as we traverse, we remember to look again at what is profit, and what is theft.
Where is profit taken where harms caused remain unresolved?
Where is the thriving centre of the whole?
Welfare of all constituents is the primary defining characteristic in measuring a true profit.
How the lived experience really is.
I suggest we re-define profit or reposition it as being the totality outcome of any activity, set as all human activity is, in the shared commons. From raw extraction to production, consumption and disposal.
So what would be considered 'profit' in terms of a healthy dynamic of urban civilisation infrastructure?
Accrued Benefits, Collective Profit
The collective profit from a national rail system is easy, cheap transport for the public which reduces the need for private cars. Plus the jobs it provides if the workers are respected, well paid and integrated into the management of the system as a social service. If it is efficient and allows people to stay connected, and people are happy using it, that too is the profit. It recycles all materials, runs on solar and other non extractive power generation systems so that it mitigates it's infrastructure costs over time.
The collective profit from a National Health System is healthy community and healed people, providing support where ill health occurs, with illness rates decreasing as healing skills and prevention advice advance, feeding into education and regulation systems to do more to prevent avoidable disease.
The collective profit in social care is the kindness of the care itself, the dignity and good humour of those who are vulnerable, to be safe, to feel cared for. That being the case suggests the cost of appropriate training and the proper salary payment for service workers as a vocation should be prioritised, rather than management executive pay and shareholder dividend and 'market access'.
The collective profit from Nationalised Water is clean water, clean rivers, clean beaches, healthy wetlands.
No amount of money can replace or overprice the value of these human bio-logical social profits.
Austerity is considered 'good for the Economy' - however Austerity causes harms which must be ignored, and thus can only be described as 'being good for the Economy' by becoming numbed to those impacts. That is psychopathy when it is institutionalised.
Austerity is considered 'good for the Economy' - however Austerity causes harms which must be ignored, and thus can only be described as 'being good for the Economy' by becoming numbed to those impacts. That is psychopathy when it is institutionalised.
Anytime that profit or excess cash yield is taken out of the NHS whilst people remain unhealthy and unable to access the best care that is theft.
Anytime money is accumulated and sequestered whilst so many families are too poor to afford Organic Clean Whole food there are multiple layers of harm being caused that could be avoided.
Anywhere there is toxicity that is not dealt with, from extraction through production and into usage and final disposal - that is not profit, it is theft.
All the financial profit generated and distributed to shareholders as dividend that does not include paying the full externalised costs, is theft, it is abuse, it is cruelty and it is criminal in nature and intent.
Getting poetic about it.
'The Profit' generated by any industry or business that causes pollution or harm, in any
form, at any stage of production, use or disposal of product, is a deceit. Not all costs have been covered by the producer or consumer - others, all innocents. pay the price.
Remember that.
Polluting costs are paid, in the end, with widespread degenerative disease and often the most painful deaths of millions of decent innocent people. Pollutions costs are often borne by our children's physical and psychological deformities. Pollution and Environmental degradation translates into life long insecurities for each successive generation of children, their future environment set on a precipice through the systemic abuse of power, which leads us all onwards towards an ever more degraded, disrupted environment, a toxic habitat.
GDP is Deceit.
GDP is the bribe we pay for accepting that Bullies Rule.
"covering the symptoms, rather than curing or preventing the illness."
Strategic policy.
Competing Powers is a culture, rather than The Human Condition - to my mind competing powers is a profound psychological sickness, a structured social pathology, an institutionalised bully logic.
Stupidity posing as clever is never intelligent.
Landing a human on the moon whilst bombing peasants in Vietnam is not a sign of progress nor is it a valid example of technological brilliance. It is clever, yes, but it is also incredibly stupid.
"The Profit generated by any industry or business that causes pollution or harm, in any form, at any stage of production, use or disposal of product, is a deceit. Not all costs have been covered by the producer or consumer - others, all innocents. pay the price."
War, Poverty, Racism, Misogyny, Power Disparity, Pollution.
These problems are all part of the Institutionalised Bully Culture behaviour dynamic.
Every hierarchy of violence and power is a Bully Culture.
Bully Culture is neither healthy nor natural - it is an unresolved traumatised psychology that has become institutionalised.
Bullies can only rule by violence or manipulation, never by genuine informed consent or choice.
How do healthy cultures become unhealthy cultures?
What happens to a culture to turn it from egalitarian co-operative to hierarchically violent?
Kindest regards
Corneilius
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