Occupy Wall Street - Corporate greed protest on NY's Brooklyn Bridge

Island, the last novel that Aldous Huxley wrote in 1962, is set on Pala, an imaginary island community in the Indian Ocean. The peaceful and truly content inhabitants have developed an idyllic society by committing themselves to personal spiritual growth based broadly on Shivaite Buddhism, along with some Hindu, Tao and Confucius influence. In addition they steer clear of the three pillars of Western prosperity: armaments, universal debt and planned obsolescence, the depreciation that is purposefully built into so many of our manufactured goods to encourage continual and wasteful replacement. The Palanese have equality without loss of individual initiative, empathy for all living beings and respect for the environment. And they hold an overriding belief that God is all pervading or immanent, and man is potentially transcendent, constantly seeking to find the Nirvana or Enlightenment of the ancient Eastern wisdoms.
Sadly the earthly paradise of the island is doomed. It is overtaken by the greed and militarism of an adjoining country, triggered when an English sailor shipwrecked on Pala becomes caught up in a world take-over bid for the island’s oil.

Fast forward to the plight we see today - the ever widening gap between the few rich and the very many poor. And much of the reasoning for this is tied up with the many flaws in our global economy, some at corporate level. I know that I am not alone in thinking that the loss of corporate heart and soul is not good for our planet.
As the late Anita Roddick explained, ‘The huge relentless wheel that is global capitalism is driven by faceless, unaccountable bureaucrats and businessmen who seem deaf to the needs of individuals, communities, indeed whole nations. Yet it takes little imagination to see that this situation is unsustainable if we wish to have a planet that is worth living in, and not one where the developed world becomes a fortress to repel the needs of poorer nations’ (or, indeed where, much closer to home, the 1% wealthy are cocooned and oblivious to the needs of the 99% who struggle for a better living). That is what Occupy Wall Street is all about.

Alastair McIntosh observes that a large company is:

"…a mindless monster, unless people all the way through the system devote themselves to making it otherwise. Then, and only then, can it start to become more like a community with values, and maybe even something of a soul…this means …having an ethic that serves profit but transcends mere money making. It is only human goodness that can bring this about and so humanize the otherwise inhumane world created by emergent properties of greed.

The wealthy corporate bosses need to listen to the people. Meanwhile the protest on New York's Brooklyn Bridge continues, and the world is watching.

Anita Roddick, 2001, Take it Personally: How Globalization Effects (sic) You, London: Thornson, 2001, From Introduction, quoted in http://www.pcdf.org/SVN_Living_Economies.htm#N_2_


Alastair McIntosh, Soil and Soul: People versus Corporate Power, London: Aurum Press, 2004.