I always thought it was me. I must be missing something. I think I honestly believed that everyone was coming from a place of good hearted intention. That this whole separation of business and relationship, the politicization and bureacuratization that inevitably accompanies change, was being run by reasonable, educated people with everyone's best interests at heart.
I believed that, and I was not without evidence. But as each shard of evidence was stripped away before my eyes, because it was "good for business," I found myself floundering to understand the context of decision making if everyone had everyone's best interest at heart. So I did what I always do - I studied the environment. I did an MBA. I'm proud to say I graduated with the highest GPA in my graduating class across all MBA programs.
And I came to understand that I hadn't misunderstood at all. Something had gone off kilter and it didn't have everyone's best interest at heart, just some people's. That's exactly how it is, attempts to obfuscate and mitigate aside. We somehow came to think that we are only responsible for our half of the negotiation, when the reality for people on the ground is very, very different from that. We try to run our systems for what we wish humans were or what we want them to be, rather than for what they are. We use humans as machines in a massive-scale machine called The Economy, and we treat them like scrap when we're done with them. The same goes for all the natural resources our governments and large, multi-national corporations collude to exploit.
It's just like that.
When I was a small child, I saw road construction, and noticed some ducks nearby. I remember realizing that the ducks' home was being destroyed. I asked my mother.
"Oh, they'll just move somewhere else," was her reply. Even then, I knew that couldn't always be the answer, that eventually they'd have nowhere to go. Even then I wondered if it wasn't, somehow...wrong, to put human needs so far in first place.
I didn't need an MBA to tell me. I already knew.
Now that I know what I've always known...what do I do now?
