GUILLERMO WECHSLER

November 8, 2006

Exploring Dying Social Collectives

When a dominant social collective, such as the oil industry, becomes obsolete, it not only loses its capacity to produce value for the society in a sustainable way, but its economic inertia, interpretative habits, emotional addictions, moral attachments, and the future it offers both create and expand enormous social and economic waste.

Let's, in this post, explore the end phase of social collectives. We propose two significant features. First, the value of the collective is justified in terms of an easy to digest, obvious ethical simplification (something that is already available in the interpretative patterns of the average citizen; it may be something such as “expanding freedom,” “letting the market work,” “spreading democracy,” “building a safe future for our children,” etc). Second, those in power remain in power and keep the collective alive by depleting social capital and transferring it to themselves through exploiting their political dominance in multiple social networks. The oil industry, for example, has built over the decades of its existence a pervasive network of relations with upstream industries, such as transportation, or manufacturing. It has intimate relations with government institutions and agencies, e.g., the Departments of Defense and State, to project and protect its interests. It has close collaborative links with a network of politicians, think tanks, and research institutions to frame controversial issues in their favor. The industry and its constitutive companies including Chevron Texaco and Exxon Mobil does not have to pay for cleaning pollution and its accompanying health problems, restoring biodiversity, or paying for the building, training and support of the army that protect their interests -- all social costs stemming in whole or in part from its operations.

This phenomenon of rhetorical manipulation combined with social depletion is neither exclusive to the oil industry nor a fully conscious and deliberate conspiracy. It is simply and purely what occurs in the deterioration phase in the life cycle of a particular collective, nothing else. But can our politicians and ourselves make this unavoidable cycle of deterioration less wasteful and more nurturing for all of us? Can we learn to make life more livable going forward as a social collective dies? We will address this question in the next post.

These are large, even vast, questions and what we write, based on my thinking and that of some friends is necessarily limited. We invite your contributions, suggestions, and recommendations.