Do we know that the stuff that we get has a story behind it? Have you ever wondered where the stuff came from? Probably from China, Mexico, or maybe somewhere in other parts of the countries. Yeah, why bother? Surely you would think that why do we have to bother to know that info as it is not related to their life. Even I think like that at first but when I open my perspective a little bit after watching a 20 minute video of “The Story of Stuff”, I knew I was totally wrong. Me, as many people do, assume that the stuff comes through the materials economy process; extraction, production, distribution, consumption and disposal. We look as it is fine but there are more than just that. The system is in crisis as being said on the video and the only reason for this is only in one word. Capitalism.
Capitalism had makes varies of destruction in all living aspects, yet we can do nothing about it. Capitalist is true about the fact that Capitalism is beneficial towards increasing the economy level but when looking at the other side of Capitalism, it has lots of negative things too. True to its definition, Capitalism is an economy system that emphasize profit-making or M-C-M’ paradigm neglecting other things such as education, health care and more. So, the only thing that the institution especially companies think of is all money! They do not care about the environmental damage or pollution that they had made the destruction in other countries mainly in Third World Countries, the worker’s wages and health, and also happiness. The graph of national happiness shows that people’s happiness is decreasing from 1951 if I’m not mistaken. That means that this problem is totally in crisis! Isn’t this what we call violating rights of people?
We take other people’s right to have needs for people that had loss their country resources to other bigger countries, we take their rights to be healthy, and what is more important, the rights to be happy. That’s too many! Although these things happened all around us, there’s nothing we can do about it. Capitalism is like computer viruses; created by human and creates destruction. It is endless and compulsory to have in companies because if they do not, the company will not survive. Therefore, could this be an endless situation?
4 comments:
Corporations, it seems are very fickle. Their only purpose is to make money. In response to your statement about the lack of concern for the environment, most corporate CEO’s wouldn’t want their own wastes in their backyard, but expect citizens to put up with it. One reason for all of this is that our happiness conflicts with each other’s happiness. However, the interesting thing about capitalism is that while the citizen complains about the corporation’s indecency we rarely do anything about it unless some catastrophic event occurs. For instance, no one, including myself, really cared about alternative fuels until gas prices skyrocketed to $4 and $5 a barrel. The reason for this is that we have become so dependent on products; they now have the bargaining chips squarely in the palm of their hands. One reason for this is that either our products have been designed to fail or we feel inadequate if we don’t own certain products, a lot of which we really don’t need.
I agree with Amirah. Capitalism, a system that provides endless opportunity to those who indulged in it, has its own side effects. In such a way that the side effects affect other people more than the person who followed capitalism.
Yes, every company needs it, just to survive, but have we ever thought about its consequences? Of course not! That’s why capitalism existed in the first place. It may not be the intention of the one who proposed the idea itself, but it had become a compulsory system in a company’s management. If I were given to choose between capitalism and another method to run my company, I would choose capitalism. If I were to choose the other one, it would be better for me to stay at home sleeping. Even if I need to sacrifice my worker’s happiness, I will do that as long as it would not jeopardize my company.
Because capitalism is beyond our control now, it’s far beyond our reach. I am not the kind of person that would violate others just for my personal sake. It’s just that that it’s the way of our world now. Blame capitalism.
There is a wonderful profile of Annie Leonard, creator of Story of Stuff, in the Sept/Oct 2008 issue of Women's Adventure Magazine. She is an amazing activist. Check it out.
I think everyone can agree with fadom87 on the fact that Corporations sole purpose is to make money. What gets me is that the video we watched in class about the electric cars being so popular amongst the testers in California. This is a perfect example on how corporations only care about profit and not waste. These cars seemed very easy to maintain and very popular, however the easy to maintain part is what capitalism is against from what I have been gathering. GM, the company that made the cars along with some other automobile producers would have made some profits. On the other hand the oil companies would have suffered in dramatic ways. The power that these oil companies have with governments had a trickle down effect that more than likely forced GM and the other companies to take back and stop producing the electric cars. If government were really concerned with health and environment issues they would've at least allowed a certain amount of the electric cars to be sold to reduce some of the 4,000,000 lbs of toxer per year being released into the atmosphere. These facts being said it is very hard to see our capitlistic ways being changed due to the fact that that all corporations have their eyes set on is money.
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