Right Livelihood
Last Saturday I attended a talk on the Four Noble Truths of Buddhism. The last truth is the Eightfold Path and one step on that path is Right Livelihood. So the question was asked, what is right livelihood? Typically the answer is a livelihood that does not harm others, either by killing or helping to kill by making weapons or poisons. In out modern world, where everything effects others and the environment, how broadly should we interperet that? Autos pollute the air, fast food shortens life, and so on. The bigger question is, how do we organize our society and economy so that we minimize its negative effects on other people. To solve this larger problem I believe it helps to use some ideas from Rudolf Steiner.
In the aftermath of World War One, Austria-Hungary was carved into separate countries and Europe was faced with the nationalities problem: the new borders threw people of different nationalities into the same country. Rudolf Steiner peoposed a solution, which he called the Threefold Social Order. His ideas got little support, so he turned to a part of his solution, education reform, and founded the Waldorf School movemenet, which continues today. I think we can turn to a part of his ideas to solve the problem of right livelihood.
Rudolf Steiner said that social life is organized into three spheres: the spiritutual-cultural sphere, the sphere of law and rights, and the economic sphere. The orgaizing principle of each sphere can be found in the slogan of the French Revolution: "liberty, equality, and fraternity." Liberty belongs to the spiritual and cultural life, equality to laws and rights, and fraternity to the economic life. Rudolf Steiner said that the economic life embodied the principle of brotherliness (fraternity) because each person's labor is done for the benefit of society and in return each person receives the benefit of the labor of others. This is in contrast to the current understanding of economics, which sees it as competition, economic warfare.
The modern corporation has two faces. On the one hand, every corporation has a mission statement, a set of goals it is trying to achieve. For example, the mission statement of Google is "all the world's information, organized." On the other hand, each corporation publishes financial guidance of how much they plan to earn in the next quarter. What happens when the two are in conflict? According to economic gurus such as Milton Friedman, the sole responsibilty of a corporation is to maximize profits for its owners, even if this comes at the expense of its mission. The mission stetemnt becomes nothing more than feel good words masking naked avarice.
Selfishness becomes the guiding principle of the modern corporation and altruism is lost sight of. This alienates the young and the sensitive, in whom altruism is a guiding force, from economic life. The solution to the problem is simple, but profound, to separate the economic ownership of business from the management. That is, anyone in the management of business should be prohibited from benefiting from its economic success. This is the opposite of current policy, where management is rewarded with stock options, whose value depends on the increase in the value of the company's stock. You can compare this to a doctor, who prescribes medicine, but considers it unethical to profit from the cost of the medicine he prescribes. When management is freed from generating profits as their first responsibility, they become able to run the company according to their ideals, as embodied in the mission statement of the company, just as a doctor does not seek to maximize his income by prescribing the most expensive medicine, but instead prescribing in the best interest of his patient, as far as they can understand it.
This is just a brief statement of the idea of the separation of the ownership and management of business, without attention to problems of implementation, which requires a more detailed discussion. But I think it important to get the idea in front of more people in a simple way so they can consider it.