The Serpent's Wisdom

I keep coming back to a definition of freedom offered by Marx and Engels: the ability to "contemplate oneself in a world one has created." In other words, one is not free if one merely has the ability to choose between life-options offered to her by society - one is free if she can live in the world she conceives and acts to bring about.

The riots in London (and in many other places around the world over the last couple of years) have been on my mind, because I dreamed I was involved in the destruction of a concrete park bench as an act of dissenting vandalism, and found myself in the custody of the Archons, one of whom, in the guise of an authoritative-looking man, held both my hands and interrogated me calmly but firmly. "What do you think it accomplished? What good did it bring about? How is the world a better place as a result?" He wanted clearly for me to feel that my participation had accomplished nothing positive, but also seemed genuinely to want to know my thoughts and feelings.

"People need more outlets," I said. Paraphrasing slightly the rest of my reply: "Okay, destroying the bench accomplished nothing good, but I wanted to express my dissent and that was 'the only train leaving the station.'"

Even my wording though demonstrates the enclosure of the word-fence. People need more than "more outlets" to express frustration. They need to be able to change those parts of the world that frustrate them. I believe that the average person is willing to expend honest effort for honest return. I also believe that most people want to feel as though the effort they expend is leading to something meaningful, some eventual good thing that is brought into the world as a result. How many of us get to feel that our daily work lends to some improvement to the human condition?

I propose, though the matter deserves further investigation, that all of us could select tasks that lend to improvement of the human condition, and live in prosperity. So I might turn the Archon's questions back on his own implicit support for the current financial-industrial order: what good does it bring about? How is the world a better place? We have to be free to ask the next question: can we do better? While humankind has achieved many improvements, it is worth asking whether we are getting less than we might be from our efforts. Why do we have a skewed system with endlessly deep pockets for making weapons, while bridges are collapsing from disrepair and schools are crumbling? Stock market tricks so arcane that even people with a Ph.D. in finance can't understand them reward investors with billions in profits while millions of people have no shelter or food security, and while illness is almost guaranteed to bankrupt a family.

As good as we have made things, we can do better. Silent complicity and empty dissent are not the only trains leaving the station. Every day brings anew the potential to reframe the debate.

I've not really explicitly spelled out what this term means to me. I've allowed it to sit in my mind and percolate as a sort of conceptual-perceptual template-filter.

meta- because I do not believe in subscribing to beliefs or thought systems or paradigms. Buying into a philosophy always seems to be a Faustian deal. I believe instead in drawing inspiration from good ideas where you find them, and incorporating them into the structure of an existing ideo-construct. It is fundamentally an engineering approach: rather than accepting philosophies or paradigms as you find them, build with them, build upon them.

neo- because existing philosophies are artifacts of a time and culture and the individual idiosyncrasies of the people who articulated them. This affects their meaning, and shapes the agenda by which it was expressed, and these things cannot be fully decoupled from it. So when I do articulate an idea or conceptual framework I must be careful to understand that I am not taking an old idea, I am articulating a new idea inspired by the old one but shaped in light of modern culture and modern scientific and philosophical understanding. I must be especially conscious that I am not silencing dissent or misappropriating if I refer to an existing philosophy as inspiration.

ETA. There's a lot I could add to this, because a large part of why people *do* subscribe to religions and philosophies is because of community. To be a part of many communities, they often ask you to subscribe to a philosophy as well. For my dissent on this topic you can read what I've written about affinity politics and why I think it is preferable to identity politics.

Generally, the benefit of community is worth the trade-off you make when you accept the Faustian bargain of subscribing to a philosophy or converting to a religion. You can paper over, for a time at least, any cognitive dissonance by throwing a wall of words at it. Some people get to be very good at this.

I was commenting to cowgrrl the other day about how it seems like there aren't any major corporations that are in business to just simply make a product and sell it to people; they all have a business model that requires sticking it to customers in every inventive way possible. I couldn't actually think of an example (well, there's Ben & Jerry's, I suppose). But for just about every company I could think of, I can recall reading of ways in which those companies have done what they could to to stick it to their customers, competitors, and employees.

Is this 'just human nature'? "Caveat emptor" is clearly not a modern innovation; if anything, the paltry constraints of law and regulation to reign companies in and made them do at least roughly what they say they're going to do is the modern innovation. But are people born this way? Is this a side to human nature we just have to cope with? I've read that apes are born with an innate sense of fair play and know when they've been cheated, and people get a dopamine boost from doing good deeds. It seems more like cooperation and generosity are natural instincts, where deception and two-timing are learned behavior. So much for "that's just the way people are;" I don't believe that, and I think it's time for people to expect better from one another.

But then, Socrates argued in The Republic that the one who profits most is the unjust man who succeeds at convincing everyone else that he is ethical and upstanding. If this is true, than we can expect people with this ethic to be the most financially successful, and therefore to gravitate to the center of the business world, where they force everyone else to emulate their model just to compete. As justifications go, "we have to stay competitive" has the benefit of having some truth to it, if at the downside of being circular.

What companies are all afraid of is that if they were to unilaterally de-asshole-ify their business model, their costs would go up, causing their profits to drop, in turn causing stockholders to rebel and hire a new board of directors who will just turn around and re-asshole-ify the business model. What we more typically see is that businesses will partially de-asshole-ify their business model, sometimes under penalty of law, trumpeting this in ads as proof of their honesty and trustworthiness. A company like Wal-Mart, which we're used to thinking of as an evil behemoth, has the power to do great good simply by virtue of its influence by making a single decision, such as for example lowering the price on generic drugs they sell or declaring they will hold toy suppliers to a new standard.

Research on what would happen if every major company all around the world simultaneously de-asshole-ified their business models is scant. For one thing, academic economists refuse to admit the business world has an ethics problem. If they can claim they are within the law and playing by all regulations, what's the problem? (This leaves unasked the question of just who wrote those laws and regulations and what they allow.) Even those sorts of asshole business that are outside of the law are usually covered by plausible deniability ("Hey, we had no idea our suppliers had 7-year-old kids doing 13-hour shifts! We're innocent!"). And as the last resort, when the deception and exploitation can no longer be denied, we're told it's the only thing that makes the benefits of modern life affordable (if by "benefits" you mean cheaper products that wear out in 3 years instead of 20). But, really, how do we know that?

What we do know is that few of us would choose to live in a world with so much deception and exploitation if we had any real say in things. The human race will probably never live in a utopia of honesty where the asshole business model does not exist. But I do think it is possible to chip away at it, with coalitions (cooperatives and mutual aid societies) and with more & better ethics training starting in childhood (interfering with our society's tendency to sympathize with takers: bullies and winners-at-any-cost). If people are taught to be this way, they can taught to be another way.

ETA. I've speculated in the past on how neat it would be if we redefined the idea of "profit" to mean not just a positive difference between revenue and cost, but to reflect a socially holistic idea of utility. Maximizing profit in that scheme would mean maximizing not just one's own revenue while minimizing one's own costs, but also maximizing the social benefit while minimizing the social cost. A change in perspective along these lines would move us away from the asshole business model.

One of the reasons I haven't been posting as much over the last couple of years is a dawning awareness of the general futility of words.

I've also, as I was saying to R* last night, developed a strong aversion to being lectured by people 15-20 years younger than me. I want to just say, though it is bad form, "Do you think you are the first person to recite these ideas at me?" It's 'bad form' because ideas are supposed to be replied to with ideas. That's the 'free marketplace of ideas,' right?

But there's so little point to playing the idea game because words are so often nothing more than a verbal soundtrack people play while committing acts which may or may not bear any resemblance to the ideas they are promoting.

And, it is highly discouraging how few people seem capable of really grokking this point. Especially when it comes to politicians. There are a lot of words about how politicians are lying scumbags but people will always refuse to accept this about their favorite politician. I hate to break it to you, but yes, even your favorite politician is a lying selfish scumbag.

So, what does matter to me? Experiences and actions. Tell me what you've seen and experienced. Show me what you've done and what you are doing. Those are the things I can trust, and which have real impact on the world.

I woke up the other day thinking about peace talks. I've written before about how i think "peace talks" are crap: peace is more than the cessation of violence, but it's warmongers who have these talks. The one thing that earns you a place at the table for "peace talks" is demonstrating you have the capacity to kill lots of people. So the emphasis is on (a) proving you are a big alpha male and (b) finding ways to placate and co-exist with a few other alpha males.

There's a serious crisis of leadership in the world today. By which i mean, there isn't much real "leadership" going on. There's bullies who claim to be leaders, but they consistently fail the populations they are supposed to serve.

So, here was the thought i woke with the other day. Take 500 civilians from each "side" of the conflict. Put them in a room together and let them talk. They can be, should be, people of any socioeconomic class, but none of them can be governmental officeholders. The first rule is, no hitting anyone else. The second rule is, unless someone makes an accusation against you personally, no defensiveness -- you are to listen when someone from the other "side" is talking, and they have to listen to you when you're talking. Once you're able to listen to the other person's anger you can hear their hurt and loss and you can match up what they're saying against your own anger, hurt, loss.

The groups pair up, one from each "side" in every pair, and they go to see where the other half lives and works. They go to visit the graves of friends and family who died in the conflict. They eat at each other's table.

And then they all come back, and, having conceded that they have to find a way to live together somehow, they work out what kind of world they could all live in... and whatever they come up with is what the leaders have to implement.

Yeah, i know, it has flaws. I think it's better than letting people who have a vested interest in war negotiate the "peace." I figure a process like this would work for a few generations, until all the loopholes have been found and the war profiteers and bullies figure out how to game the system to their benefit. But at that point it will be up to someone else to figure out what to do next.

This is intended for a wider audience (eventually) than just my journal's readership, hence the tone is a bit different from what i usually strike here.

The following will probably come across as preaching, but i offer this not as a high and mighty guru who is spirtually perfected and better than thou. This is a lesson i learned the hard way, by being a jerk from time to time and having to be called on it. It bears my mea culpa; i did these things repeatedly, and only slowly learned what i was doing wrong.

If you are a white person who wants to be a better ally to people of color, please heed my words.
If you are a man who wants to be a better ally to feminists, please heed my words.
If you are a straight person who wants to be a better ally to queer folk, please heed my words.

Sometimes you're going to encounter utterances from a less-privileged friend that make you angry. This could be for a number of reasons. Maybe you are reading about against an injustice done to someone else. Or, you might be angry because the utterance contains an unqualified generalization that unfairly impugns... well... you.

You might be tempted to reply with an insistance that your friend modify their statement by adding "most" or "some" because "we're not all like that." You might reply with a detailed argument about why one of the examples chosen doesn't prove the point they are trying to make. You might demand proof, and then accept nothing less than a peer-reviewed published academic article. You may be tempted to connect your friend's utterance to heavy-handed social strategies that they didn't even bring up; e.g., "Even so, that doesn't mean we should engage in censorship." Or, you may decide that it's helpful to comment on your friend's angry tone, suggesting that a more calm way of expressing oneself may lead to better results.

None of this is helpful.

Anyone who wants, who truly wants, to see the world become a better place has to make a commitment to listen to their friends' anger. And, yeah, it's hard the first time. But it's not nearly so hard the second time.

It should be a point of basic reading and listening comprehension that any generalization has exceptions. This is true even if the generalization does not come with a disclaimer. If you weren't taught this in school, well, i'm teaching you now. If your friend feels safe enough making this utterance in your presence, perhaps it could be that it's not about you, or that they think you're capable of getting it. So insisting on the appendage of a disclaimer is not helpful.

Part of the anger you're feeling is a reflection of the anger your friend is struggling to give voice. Finding your voice after a lifetime of having your concerns shoved aside can be an awkward and difficult process. Someone at this stage of growing awareness and rising consciousness needs encouragement, not defensiveness and cavil. Defensiveness and cavil are what they've received their whole life, and it's why finding their voice now is a struggle.

It's not necessary for every single utterance to be precise, scientifically accurate, academically rigorous, and polite. While one might think that calm, rational, well-articulated utterances are more effective than angry rants, when it comes to challenging privilege, activists can tell you that doesn't actually tend to be the case. That's why activists often use more agitating tactics like strikes and protests and sit-ins -- because sometimes that's what you have to do to get anyone to listen to you.

Now the hardest part of this: sitting with your friend's anger. Instead of reacting to anger with anger, make a commitment to step aside from your response and examine the anger for what it is. A lot of the time when it has happened to me, i find it is an indication of my own unexamined privilege. If someone says to you that they think you are privileged in a way they are not, it's common to get defensive about it. But this statement is not an attack. So don't respond to it as if it were. If you can say "I feel like i'm being attacked here," you're facing a moment of truth.

Some of the most illuminating realizations i've ever had came as a result of doing this.

If you can step aside from the statement that angers you and see it as an expression of your friend's experience more than an objective rhetorical assertion, you can come away with a clearer understanding of what your friend's life is like.

Reflexive defensiveness makes it difficult to have genuine conversations about privilege and social class. And so, as i said above, if you are someone who truly cares about doing your part to help the world become a better place, you have to let these conversations happen. Sometimes it means listening to a statement that makes you angry and resisting the urge to tear it apart with logic. The reward for this is that you will understand better where your friend is coming from, and you will be a better ally.

The first time is the hardest.

Please don't take the above to mean that there's absolutely no way to respond with an objection. It just means you have to be a bit more conscientious about it -- which consideration is a small momentary inconvenience compared to the impositions your friend endures every day. You can manage it.

The goal of meta-neo-inquiry is to answer, as well as possible, the question: "What is going on here, and what is the most just way to respond?"

Response is an indispensable element because meta-neo- ethics demands more emphasis on right action than on right words or right belief. It's not what you say or feel, it's what you do that matters. I can forgive errant words if your actions put you on the side of conscience.

A lot of the time the answer is pretty straightforward. Someone is beating up someone else; the most just way to respond is to stop the fight and find out why it started. Someone stole someone else's car; the most just way to respond is to recover the car and return it to its owner.

Sometimes though the answer is not straightforward at all, often because the truth has been occluded.

Discourse tends to be dominated by those in power; and so where conscience leads us into opposition with the power paradigm (on those fronts where the people in power are committing injustices and warping the cultural discourse to legitimize or cover it up), discourse itself becomes territory to be fought over.

Dissidents are kept off-balance by having even their very language pulled out from under them like a rug. One generation of dissidents comes up with a way to vocalize what is happening to them and what is wrong with their condition; it's an organic process which starts with art and fashion, or other kinds of consciousness raising. Political changes are demanded, and a few concessions are made. But by the time the next generation comes along, when it comes time to pass on this knowledge, all of the groovy terms and images they came up with to communicate their dissent have been misappropriated and commodified by the power paradigm. They've been rendered useless; their meaning has decayed.

It is fair to ask, of every text you encounter, what is the author's agenda? As time passes it becomes harder and harder to answer this question, because one's agenda in writing a text is a response to the culture to which she belongs. Cultures change but texts tend not to. So any text older than, say, 40 or 50 years, can easily be subverted by the power paradigm and people can be educated to read it a certain way; afterwards, one requires a specialized awareness of historical context to have any hope of recreating the original agenda of any text, especially if the text had any degree of subversiveness to it.

My contention is that this line of inquiry will demonstrate that many spontaneous movements over the centuries -- whether political, religious, philosophical, or artistic -- can be demonstrated to have their origin in subversion against the injustice of the power paradigm. The products of a "culture industry" established by the power paradigm itself tend not to endure because they carry remarkably little meaning to begin with, and most of us carry an innate recognition of that even if our consciousness has not been raised.

This is the second part of my first entry a couple of weeks ago on the decay of meaning over time as reflected in scripture. It ties together a number of things i've written over the last year or so on my ever-evolving relationship to religion, belief, faith, meaning, discourse, scripture, doctrine, and compassion.

A little over a year ago i wrote about the tension between my own few encounters with the numinous, and my inability to describe them to anyone else without employing religious terminology. This is a concern to me because of all the agendas, past and present, inexplicably tied to these terms; but it would be useless for me to create my own words, because any new words i coin would not resonate in the minds of any listener the same way as will happen if i use the word "goddess."

And so uneasily i refer to my raw experiences using terms that will make it all too easy for someone else to hijack them, to make them into simultaneously more and less than they are. I could remain silent, taking the position that the only way to ensure that my mystical utterances do not carry any unintended religio-political connotations is to make none at all. Or, i can struggle to untie the knot as i use these terms, an effort in which i have been engaged off and on for at least the whole time i have been keeping this journal.

I have long believed that this struggle resides at the heart of all faith traditions - on one side, mystics who set out to distinguish their expressions of faith and numinous experience without being misunderstood, and over against them the functionaries and legalists, people whose relative lack of faith or mystical experience drives them to latch on to scriptures, traditions, and concepts, in the hopes of capturing some of that faith for themselves.

And all of us are, to one extent or another, driven by self-interest; there are those who use positions of influence in the edifices of religious institution to benefit themselves at the cost of someone else's suffering. This is what i mostly mean when i refer to 'agendas' within religious doctrine, practice, or law.

To make this even more complex, there is no one who is 'pure mystic' and no one who is 'pure legalist.' Each of us who participates in the grand struggle of faithful expression carries a bit of both. I don't want to couch this as a clear-cut "us vs. them." But in general we can distinguish between people who primarily project a mystical outlook, and those who primarily project a legalistic approach.

I have described legalism and the agenda of self-interest as causes for the decay of meaning over time. It is hard to define what i mean by that phrase, 'decay of meaning over time,' and unless i am certain that you know what i mean by 'meaning,' i'm not sure my purpose in writing this will be grasped.

So, to revisit: 'meaning' is, for this purpose, the intended reaction one has when contemplating an utterance. That encompasses all aspects of your reaction: your interpretations of the definitions of the words employed, your emotional response, any changes to your ways of thinking or acting which result directly or indirectly from it. Meaning decays over time because a lot of our reaction is rooted in the cultural context of the moment when the utterance was made.

For example: For those of us who were children when the movie "Jaws" was released, the movie possesses a lot more meaning than it does for those who had not been born yet. A lot of that meaning relates to our cultural environment at the moment we first saw the movie. Someone who first sees the movie ten or fifteen years later may see an enjoyable movie, but wonder what the fuss was about. The meaning of "Jaws" has decayed over time.

Most mystical utterance is the attempt to resurrect the spirit of meaning which a mystic perceives was once carried by a prior religious utterance. All mystical utterance is, in some way, an act of religious reconstruction. The fullness of mystical meaning comes from having grown up in or spent a lot of time immersed in a living faith tradition.

[ETA: to illustrate i offer some of my previous attempts to reconstruct what i believe was the meaning of utterances attributed to Jesus (culminating for example here and here), which were in turn his own attempts to reconstruct the mystical and spiritual heart of his own Judean tradition and to respond to the realities and injustices of his day.]

So when i use words like "god" or "spirit" or even "compassion," i am speaking to people who live immersed in a culture and faith tradition more or less like my own. Someone twenty, fifty, a hundred years from now will only understand anything i've written to the extent that they can reconstruct my contemporary cultural experience. They also, in commenting on what i write, will add their own new meaning to it. This is okay; this is the way the mystical tradition operates. Spirit is not dead, it is life and breath; so too, attempts to describe it should live and breathe.

Frequently, mystical utterances bear political and religious implications. Any utterance which may tend to subvert the status quo - which i would assert is typical of mystical (as opposed to legalistic) religious utterance - can be perceived as a threat by anyone in a position of authority, who stand to lose if the underpinning of that authority is undermined. They will then attempt to silence the mystic (by labeling them a heretic), or they will misappropriate the religious utterance, stripping it of political meaning and leaving only an 'approved,' authority-safe version.

Anywhere you have a mystic, you have people calling him or her a heretic - and this is why. It is not accidental. It is not mere resistance to change. The people at the bottom of a stratified society greatly outnumber the people at the top, and nothing can rile the masses like religious fervor can. The struggle for the heart and soul of religion is one of the great theatres of the ongoing struggle against tyranny.

A while back, someone on my friend's list linked to an essay about art as misappropriation. I don't think it was linked approvingly, but the concept has stuck in the back of my mind, something to digest.

Then not long ago i read about the iconic image of Che Guevara as now appears on tee-shirts and numerous other commercial products. I don't know as much as i should about Che, but i think i have already well expounded on my views that anyone who uses violence is no revolutionary at all but is a part of the system. Anyway, this bit stood out in my mind, a quote from Trisha Ziff, who has organized an exhibition on the Che icon.

"There is a theory that an image can only exist for a certain amount of time before capitalism appropriates it. But capitalism only wants to appropriate images if they retain some sense of danger."

Hmm, i have to back up a little. I call my views "meta-neo-Marxian." "Neo" because we have progressed quite a bit in the last 150 years, in understanding the sociology of oppression and the intricacies of economics, and "meta" because i am not a subscriber to a philosophy, but merely a critic whose views are inspired by the trajectory which Marx played a role in laying out.

I view our situation as less a matter of "capitalism vs. socialism" and more a matter of me-centered world-parsing vs. us-centered world-parsing. I take this view because (a) the same problems preceded capitalism and have also tended to plague socialist societies and (b) i believe a truly just and merciful society could function compassionately with almost any economic or political arrangement.

So let me re-write that quote into a version that more closely matches my current views:

"There is a theory that a subversive image can only exist for a certain amount of time before the power paradigm strips it of meaning and makes it a commodity."

For the political-socialist, the image of Che is a commodity in that it is a valuable emotional push-button; and for the political-capitalist, the image of Che is a commodity because it sells tee-shirts. Neither point of view is really interested in exploring the meaning of Che's life, words, and actions.

Now, for the principle i promised in the title of this post. To wit:

Images and text will lose their meaning over time, in part because meaning is anathema to the power paradigm.

The surest way to strip an image of meaning is to give it a dollar value or to use it as an emblem of demagoguery. But the principle works in other ways. Part of this is because each generation tends to create its own kinds of meaning, and so young people do not react in the same way to a creative work as earlier generations of people did.

I thought about this while reading recently about a Monet painting which was vandalized. Frankly, i found i could care less; some old painting who's time has come and gone was damaged. But i realize that the painting meant something to its creator; it meant something to the creator's contemporaries; and it means various things to various people today. Do those meanings resemble one another?

Who could do such a thing as vandalize a Monet? Someone to whom the work of art had little or no meaning. (Or, alternately, someone to whom the act of destruction meant more than the painting itself -- but... well, i have to reign in the scope of this somehow.)

But what is the meaning of a work of art? What is meaning? Without waxing too philosophical - i want to intentionally leave this a little fuzzy - i think of meaning as the reaction one has when contemplating something. But, additionally, the genuine meaning of a creative work is primarily that reaction which is intended to be provoked by the work's creator. I emphasized that because there are theories of criticism which argue the opposite - that meaning is supplied by the observer of a creative work. Such theories can, in my opinion, be demonstrated to be apologetics for the power paradigm.

One way to reduce the meaning of an object is to directly misappropriate it - to use the phrase or image to advance a different agenda and then to use your superior numbers or budget to simply drown out all incidence of the original usage. A radical movement of any import can expect to see this happen to their language, and as a result the dissenters of each generation are pretty much on their own. Another way to reduce the meaning of an object is to surround it with approved, dissent-sanitized replicas: the culture industry.

However, it is not just subversive meaning which is distrusted by the power paradigm - ultimately, it is all meaning that is unreliable. Meaning is capricious, meaning is unquantifiable, meaning is unmarketable and unprofitable. Even meaning which has nothing to do with politics can inspire someone to question the status quo. This includes faith. "Spirituality," as i mean it when i use it in my journal, is a process of misappropriation by which the words used by people of faith and conscience to describe their experience is sanitized of any politically radical content in ways that turn it into icon-worship. In other words, "spirituality" (as defined by me) is the attempt to destroy meaning and faith and replace it with a religion industry.

So, i've been staring at this story in the New York Times all day. I don't know how to respond to it. It turns out that the melamine poisoning which officially killed 16 pets and unofficially killed thousands is an "open secret" in China, where food manufacturers have been putting the stuff in food for decades in order to fool testers into thinking it has more protein than it actually does.

I'm just wondering, how do we stop this from happening?

I mean really, how do we stop it from happening? Because if it is startable it is stoppable.

Well, we could "vote with our wallets" -- stop buying from food sellers who put melamine in their product. But after people or animals have died or gotten sick, it's too late. The point is making sure it doesn't happen in the first place.

I'm sure industries in China have to submit to some kind of inspection, regulation, and/or certification process like they do everywhere. But obviously it did no damn good. No matter what system you put in place -- a government system, or industry self-policing, or consumer watchdog agency -- it's susceptible to cronyism. People get bribed to look the other way; inspectors are overworked and don't test everything or notice every detail; whistleblowers get hounded into silence; there's always plausible denial and insufficient proof; juries can be tampered with, dazzled with brilliance or baffled with BS.

Besides, setting up a system of watchers, and then more watchers to watch the watchers, and more watchers to watch THOSE watchers, is a waste of human potential. So a control society is not the answer.

The real answer is to address directly why these things happen in the first place, what makes it seem like a good idea, and what kind of thing there is in a person's mind that makes them even think, "Gee, i'll put melamine in this pet food, i'll make more money and they're only animals so who really cares?" People might entertain these thoughts but not act on them; what tips them over into doing it?

How can we develop a society full of people who do not do such things? What has to change between this world and that world? Part of me is inclined to point at the profit motive but if we did not even have an economic system based on profit, this could still seem like a good idea. Need to dig even more deeply into ourselves to find this, i think.