Run it like a business?

Note: this is not a history-of-technology piece

I read a re-quote recently that we are now in the 45^th year of the Reagan Administration. If you’re in the UK, the analogue would be the 46^th year of the Thatcher government. That sounds absurd at first glance, but it isn’t.

It’s true that this stubborn “system” is cracking along multiple faults. Not all of those cracks are revealing something constructive, however, and some faults we should wish would open up have not, so far.

This is about one of those: the hugely-inappropriate and destructive hold that the free-market capitalist mentality has on the way we think about all organized human activity. It wasn’t always this way; it wasn’t this way when I was a child or adolescent, and that wasn’t that long ago—it was before the Reagan Administration.

At some point during my late adolescence and early adulthood, a whole lot of people decided that the way to run everything was to run it “like a business.” Didn’t matter if it was a hospital, a university, a charitable organization, or even an individual endeavor. Marketing-speak invaded—and conquered—the language used to discuss and figure out how to do just about everything. I hear people who are barely adults talking about how to “market themselves” or “brand” themselves. They don’t even realize that their very concept of integrating their individual selves into society has been co-opted by capitalist ideology.

I don’t have a brand. I have an identity, I have my endeavors, I have a name and a family history. If I were famous, I’d have a “public image.”

Jaguar has a brand. It needs to care about how the car market—and financial market—perceive that brand. The University of North Carolina at Wilmington does not need a brand. It needs a reputation.

I see articles about crisis in universities, crisis in health care, and obviously crisis in government, on both sides of the Atlantic where most people speak English—but it’s bigger than that. I don’t want to imply that these crises—which are real, if not likely fatal—have a single cause. But one cause, and a continuing exacerbator of others, is this obstinate simplistic fallacy of thinking—or, more likely at this point, tacitly assuming—that the way to run anything is to “run it like a business.”

Here's something simple: run a business like a business. Businesses exist to make a profit, and they compete in a marketplace with other businesses who want to make that same profit.

Hospitals do not exist to make a profit—or at least they shouldn’t. Nor should health insurance providers. Nor should universities. Nor should charitable organizations. Running something “like a business” is not synonymous with good management, sound fiscal control, workable organizational structure, and public relations. All of those necessary ingredients of any successful human organization can be, and long have been, put together to serve an end other than profit.

What I am impatient to see at this point is a spreading realization that this illusory panacea for the perennial challenges of running human organizations—“run it like a business”—has failed. Perhaps I’m the real “conservative” here; I want this realization to spread so that we can return to the correct understanding that you run a hospital like a hospital, a university like a university, a charitable organization like a charitable organization, and an individual human life—even the public side of it—as just that. None of those are businesses and none of them should be run “like a business.”

That realization will be part of a broader realization that free-market capitalism is not “the natural way of things.” It is an ideology, just like any other human ideology. And it’s an ideology that has been swallowed hook line and sinker by far too many people for far too long. We need to be living in a pluralistic society writ large, and one of those pluralisms is the coexistence of free-market capitalism with other types of human endeavor that do not run themselves according to the precepts of free-market capitalist endeavors. As it stands, our society has bought into the idea that free-market capitalism should run absolutely everything. And it is—right into the ground.

Some people I know worry about “hyper-individualism” crippling our society. I don’t; the German and Japanese governments assumed that American selfish hyper-individualism would preclude a society-wide committed response to their military aggression in the late 30s—early 40s. The ruins of their cities covering piles of their citizens’ corpses five years later proved that assumption more than disastrously wrong.

Now, people are concerned about a capitalist oligarchy literally taking over society. Well, that is the inevitable outcome of letting free-market capitalist ideology take over society. The uber-capitalists will ultimately take over everything.

This is cracking. The more obvious the dysfunction gets—the more obvious it becomes that these people do what they do solely for their own benefit, because capitalism exists to make profits for capitalists—the more it will crack. But these cracks will be more likely to open up along the right fault lines, and the old shell of this ideology will be quicker to fall away, if more people realize that this is an ideology, that it has inserted itself into all sorts of places where it doesn’t belong, and that the way to free ourselves from its grip is, first, to see it for what it is, and to call it. There is no “natural order of things” in human organized endeavor. The “order of things” is whatever we decide it should be. And we can always change that. Our biggest problem right now is that not enough of us see that. Not enough of us are aware of our own power over our own society—and the would-be oligarchs want it that way.