This is a touchy topic, but a topic that I feel must be addressed from time to time. This post could be easily mis-understood so I appeal to you to keep an open mind while proceeding through this post and refrain from jumping to conclusions.
I feel the need to defend.. or at least explain... corporate america. many of my friends in the health food movement are now picking their jaw off the floor. Defending corporate america is.. well.. un-america, un-natural, dangerous, and unwelcome in many circles that also support natural foods, natural living, and true health. Surely you have heard and maybe even contributed to the complaints against the rich, the 1%, evil corporate america behind xxxxx conspiracy, corporate greed, crony capitalism, etc. There are many names to call, all speaking to basically the same idea. The idea that those in power are evil and conspiring to destroy the rest of us through some specific or even non specific way.
Conspiracy theories abound today. Whether it be based around GMOs, chemtrails, climate engineering, money controls, etc, etc. Choose your conspiracy of the day and there is a group of people passionately attached to it and promoting it with facts, half facts, and assumptions. each conspiracy theory is based on some facts, some truth that can not be denied. Each also stretches it to some degree either willingly or unknowingly. I AM NOT HERE TO DEBATE ANY PARTICULAR CONSPIRACY THEORY. let me make that clear. I am offering a look at another side of the story that we should consider.
As you know from our story played out here on this blog, I come from "corporate america". Yes, its true. I have spent many years as an executive in small firms, dealing directly with large firms, fortune 1000 and fortune 100 companies. I have spent time personally with CEO's and other executives from these companies. Expensive dinners lavish surroundings, etc etc. I have been to the other side of the tracks so to speak... and met the "enemy". I have experienced fist hand their thought process, their motives, their approach to things.
These people are not monsters, sitting alone in ivory towers conspiring to destroy the world like Lexx Luther in a super man movie. These people, every one that I have met, are people. they have wives, children, grand children. They have similar fears, problems, dreams, needs, wants just like the rest of us. We are all people, we all work basically the same way. They have children suffering from autism, ADHD, food allergies, developmental problems, health issues of all sorts. They are pained watching their children struggle just like anyone else. They are people, humans living through the same "human condition" as you and I.
These executives are not intentionally destroying their grandchildren's world for their own profit, BUT they have been misled by the lies of common knowledge. They have bought into the common knowledge of health, medicine, environment, etc. They are simply doing and believing what the experts say. Vaccinations, flouridation, modern medicine, food groups, low fat diets, etc etc. all these things have experts behind them touting the benefits. It is hard.. as I and those in natural health circles know, it is hard to buck the system. it is personally challenging to believe that the common knowledge is wrong. My point here is that these executives do not wake up in the morning thinking "what part of america can i destroy today", they wake up thinking "i will do good today, based on what i have been taught is good".
of course there are bad apples here and there.. that fact of reality is across all economic and social levels. bad apples exist everywhere. I am speaking of the majority, not he exception.
But wait you say, if these are people just like me, why do they do such evil things!?!? no, they must be evil conspirists. I would never do such things to destroy our world, our country, our children. NO you say NO, they are monsters focused on spending their life destroying mine!
Well take a step back a second.... I am proposing that you dont need to have a conspiracy to do evil things. and whats more.. we, you and I, are doing EXACTLY the same thing on a smaller scale. Our world of influence is much smaller, but we are in charge just the same, and we make the same decisions, same mistakes, within our world. let me explain.
corporate executives are there for one reason to make money for their employers... stock holders. if you own stock, you are their boss. that is a business reality. it is the stock holders who collectively wield all the power. executives are "bound" by the will of the people, to create a stock profit at all other costs. Is it right to point to the one pulling hte trigger, or the one making the plans to pull the rigger, demanding the trigger being pulled? It is the stock holders who have said "make a profit for this stock or you are fired".
Do you own any stock? any retirement funds? 401K? if so, then YOU, my friend, are the ultimate decision maker within corporate america. The very OWNING of stock by you sends a mandate to the CEO to make that stock increase in value, or you will fire him.
Ok, perhaps your reeling a bit from that point, or perhaps you are saying "but i dont own stock".... this next point hits even closer to home. You are in charge of a piece of the world. each of us are. no matter how rich or poor, we have a sphere of influence where we are the king. What have you done with yours that is different from corporate america? lets explore a bit. Jus as I said earlier that executives dont wake up thinking how to destroy something, so to, you and i, wake up thinking how to do good based on what we believe to be good. But, my friend, you and I have been misled also.
Have you ever used commercial fertilizer on your lawn? have you ever used weed killer? how is that different from a commercial farmer doing the same on the ground under his control? Have you ever used conventional soaps, perfumes, cosmetics, shaving cream, toothpaste, etc... ever look at the ingredients? are you really giving these things to your children? they are full of unknown chemicals you probably can even pronounce! Ever used conventional cleaners with strong aromas to make cleaning easier, the ones full of dangerous checmicals and fumes? laundry soaps? ever used dryer sheets or detergents with brighteners that lave chemicals in the clothes to make them look brighter or softer but also let chemicals soak into your child's skin? sunscreens full of known cancer causing agents on your child? do you drive a car? a vehicle known to produce dangerous, even poisonous gases with every mile? Do you use electricity? known to casue countless tons of gases and poisons to fill the environment somewhere else? Do you have non-stick pans to make cooking easier, covered with chemicals that come off into the food that you feed your own children? Do you buy cheaper conventional vegetables so that you can have more money for recreation, allowing your own children to absorb poisons to a level where it can be easily tested for in their urine? Does your shower curtain smell of vinyl, a cancer causing aroma? Have you taken your child to the dr and given them round after round of antibiotics for ear infections, even thought they do NO good? Have you given vaccinations to children under 1, even though those vaccinations are useless?
I think you get the point... we, each of us, in our own sphere of influence are making choices and decisions every day based on what the common knowledge is, just like corporate america. WE are causing just as deep of damage to those in our own control as they are to those in their control. Sit and think about your children, once grown, realizing that the things you did without thinking, caused them or their children health problems that can not be fixed. they come to you demanding an explanation "WHY DID YOU VACCINATE ME WHEN YOU KNEW IT "COULD" CAUSE LIFE LONG PROBLEMS FOR ME AND MY CHILDREN". they could accuse you of being that evil on in control, making choices for your own good, you own comfortableness, at their risk.
We are not so different from those with a greater sphere of influence.
But wait you say.. they are spraying our atmosphere with toxic metals to destroy the soil so that they can sell GMO foods only! you say. But wait.. dont these people still have grandchildren? do you honestly believe that they purposefully will destroy their own grandchild's world for today;s profits? the grandchild they bounce on their tired knee? I don't. (except for the occasional bad apple) These are people like you and I. Perhaps they honestly believe GMOs are fine, no danger. perhaps they believe the majority of scientist that say so, with proof. Perhaps they seriously wish to feed the world and believe the majority of our higher education thinkers who say that only gmos can solve world hunger. You believe that antibiotics help a young child with ear infections... they believe gmos can solve world hunger. Same thing.. different sphere of inflence. that does not make them any more evil than you and I.
What does this have to do with eggs? why are eggs i the title? Another very important and related issue... profit.
It is easy to accuse corporations of doing evil things to make profit. The first point i make above is that .. yes, there are there to make a profit... stockholders, regular people with 401K's in a mutual funds, demand that this be done. BUT, sometimes we accuse them of things they are not guilty of. For instance...
Eggs are a very important part of the healing GAPS diet. to do GAPS properly requires a huge amount of raw egg yolk. A person on GAPS should get close to a dozen raw egg yolks a day. THATS A LOT OF EGGS! you can not , should not, ever, consume that many eggs unless they are from a known good source. The eggs must be fresh (hence not store bought), pastured, soy free, and organic. This is nearly impossible today. We realized this in our own family and started producing our own eggs to match our need. It is expensive to do this. We then started offering these eggs to others, at a small profit.
Now, today, when someone starts out on a healing diet to cure autism for their child, I will automatically recommend lots of eggs, but only of the type we sell on our farm, at a high price.
BUT WAIT you say... follow the money... you have no created an expensive product, that you advertise and push to people that need it, to make yourself a profit! I am doing hat corporate america does.. anything for a profit! You are taking advantage of the fears and needs of people to make yourself a profit by increasing the demand of that product and selling it for a high price!
No, absolutely not.
We realized that eggs, done right, are required for healing.
We realized that eggs of this type can not be found in most places, they do not exist.
We decided to produce the product people need
We priced the product at a reasonable price based on actual cost to produce.
We push this product to people that need to heal.
Is that evil? If I was a large corporation i could easily become a target for doing what i think is right, trying to help others. If you didnt believe that eggs could heal, you would surely accuse me of being part of the corporate america plot to bury the world in chicken poop.
People like Dr Mercola live off the sales of expensive health supplements that they spend time pushing. Is that evil? If you had something that you KNEW would heal people, would you not try to produce it and push it to people that were suffering without it? Would you need to charge enough to make back the cost of production? is it wrong to make a profit so that you can ONLY produce that product and still feed your family?
Look, here;s the bottom line of a long post. CEO's and such are not evil people trying to destroy you, they are people just like you and I. They have been misled by the common knowledge, the system, just like you and I. They have a greater sphere of influence, but you and I have made the same innocent mistakes with grave consequences, only the scale is different. Most of us can only affect our on families, not an entire continent.
Before we support conspiracy theories, before we "follow the money", before we attack others, at an economic level, for destroying our world, perhaps we should look at or own piece of the world and see that we do not do the same mistakes.
Perhaps we should focus on our own sphere of influence, and make sure we do not have a log in our eye, before trying to pull a splinter out of our neighbor's.
Follow along our adventure as we make the transition from corporate city life to the world of natural farming. Each day brings a new experience and brings us to a deeper understanding about the life and spirit that made America great. At our farm we do our best to give the animals we raise a natural, free, happy, stressfree lifestyle. Our mission is to learn and share how to manage a farming operation that is both profitable and humane.
Good points. I've considered them myself of course, and am aware of my own projections. Any bad guy 'out there' is a projection of my own self, of the parts of myself that I disown and don't want to believe are Me.
ReplyDeleteThat said, ignorance is no excuse. basically I read Dave is saying that the Execs are making mistakes based on ignorance and that they can't be held any more accountable for the consequences of these mistakes--for themselves and their families and for many others too--than the common 99% person can. Cut-off for 99% is $250k,/yr. btw.
Something about this reasoning disturbs me. Who is responsible when an entire society decides to enact genocide, such as the holocaust? The political leader, the scientist who develops the gas chamber, the functionary who pulls the lever, the guard who herds the victims, the average citizen who pays the taxes to fund it, the editor who approves policy that allows propaganda to be spread through his paper, the owner of the paper who sets that policy, the advertiser who supports that paper, those who stand idly by while atrocities are committed, God who ignores it all and allows it to continue?
I don't think the Exec is concerned that he is poisoning the land for his grandchildren, there is a thing called environmental injustice, and it reveals that wealthy people live and work in places that are far more likely to be safer chemically and environmentally than where low-income, even poor people live. The grandkid will not be so obviously exposed and suffer the health effects.
Ignorance is no excuse, especially when profits are woven in. Too tempting to ignore all that does not produce profits, and externalize all that increases costs. The Bible says, 'Love of money is the root of all evil.' But one thing is clear from Dave's post, is that in many ways, money does not guarantee health. In fact, it may decrease it in some ways. Affluenza is a real disease, I've experienced it in an original family that was rising out of the working class inner city ethnic ghettos of the eastern seaboard, becoming middle class suburbanites in the post-war affluence, and even on to upper-middle-class with ownership of rural land, dreams of sending the children to college, and retirement accounts.
I would have renounced almost all of it for a little more Love. People driven by money and profit are seeking substitutes for the one thing that has no substitute: Love. In all its forms, such as compassion, approval, acceptance, acknowledgment, respect, affection, adoration, blessing and regard, Love is the one thing we need far beyond any money or the things it can buy for health and happiness. Receiving Love as a child, i can then give it to myself and others as an adult. In an atmosphere that lacks Love, I become distorted as a child into a human doing, fitting myself to conditional approval, thus steering myself into a path of disowning parts of myself, over-developing others, and becoming a regular modern person with a belief in the System and reaping substitute benefits while my Shadow grows and my health fails.
We are still accountable.
Generally I do agree with you on these points. But I have to say again that I have met some of these CEO's, executives of various flavors, worked with them, had dinner with them, met families, etc. I can tell you without a doubt that they ARE in fact very concered with the world they leave to their grandchildren. Perhaps in some ways even more so than the average person. BUT they have also totally bought into the "accepted common knolwdge" that these things are not poisnonous, they they in fact are the ones doing good, and hte environmental wackos are the ones with conspiracy thwarting their efforts to make a better world. (of course there are exceptions) In general, they see people like you and me with the same suspicion as we see them, except they have experts, phd's, universities, scientists, books, years of learning, to back up their position. Put yourself in their shoes for a second... then you can understand how they see the world. It is just as we do, but from a different perspective.
ReplyDeleteWhat I object to is the class warfare launched by the lower to middle class againsyt hte wealthy. I objec tto the general notion that if someone makes a profit, he is evil. If a business is large, it is evil. The people running large organization are inherently evil, even if we do not yet know what evil they perpetuate.
I am proposing htat we are all people, the same. there are bad people in lower class, middle class, upper class. There are also good in all. IT is unfair to say that anyone is good or bad by the nature of their economic class or power level .
you glanced over another point i made.. yes there is responsiblity. Everyone that owns a 401K, or stocks of any kind, are directly responsible for hte actions of the corporation they ar invested in. There is responmsiblity, personal responsibility. How many of the 99% own stock in companies "controlled" by the 1%? What i propos is that it is in the OWNING of stock that pushes a mandate to CEOs to do what they do.. make profits. stock holders demand increase. So, you see, it is the common man, owning stock, who is responsible for hte search for profits. in seeking his own profit for retirement, he forces executives to do things to increase profits.
how hypocritical then, for hte common man who owns stock to lash out against the executive who is only following his orders.