The Price of Grain: Selling Morality by the Bushel

Today I took a six mile walk in a Canadian metropolis, and each bus stop that I passed had a banner advertisement for the Canadian Renewable Fuels Association.  On the grey city street, the ad was a dreamscape of flowery meadowland.  Given today's headline on CNN, "Riots, instability spread as food prices skyrocket," complete with grimy riot photographs, the advertisements seemed misplaced.  The contrast between the flowers and the riots was downright un-Canadian.  For today, the farmers behind the advertising have been stripped of their sunshine and daisies image and their bloody-handed ruthlessness had been laid bare.

"Ha," thinks the American of the slightly sappy Canadians, "That's what they get for being so gullible."  The Canadian Renewable Fuels Association would argue otherwise: they have posted some statistics showing how renewable fuels have little to do with food prices and how food prices are actually being driven up more by oil scarcity than by food scarcity.  And some other stuff that amounts to, "Those riots have nothing to do with us!  We're flowery meadowland!!"

Despite our supposed sophistication, us Americans are as gullible as our neighbors to the north.  We have a brick wall against marketing it is true, but brick walls aren't very responsive to change and the flow of capital is.  Since we can no longer be marketed to directly, pharmaceutical producers sell diseases rather than drugs and energy producers sell morality rather than megawatts.

All this comes on the heels of BwP reading The 48 Laws of Power (I hear there is going to be a follow-up post), me reading Influencer (there will be a post), and me finding myself in a snit because I didn't qualify for a government program that I thought was straightforward with no exclusions.  I felt betrayed, I felt gullible, I felt that as a citizen I had been voted off the island.  I was suddenly supremely aware that whatever ethics I had been sold (and ethics are very much about the sale, about creating a tribe that can be counted on to behave in a consistent way), that whatever sort of spiritual being having a human experience I may be, I am an animal in a world where every animal is out for their own interests.  Patriotism or any other interest in the public good suddenly seemed worse than that famous "last refuge of scoundrels;" it seemed the first pitfall of Pollyannas.

My mood has shifted by the realization that there are a lot of people, people much more powerful than me, who want a lot of the same things that I do.  Yes, there is a tug-of-war of power over every single thing that exists in the minds and/or the reality of the humans on this earth, but it is a tug-of-war which has a certain kind of stasis.  Value has been maximized.  Sell me meadows or sell me riots, the statistics suggest that actually the price of food hasn't changed that much.  Counting up the balance of power each morning, meadow-flower posters seem incongruously benign.  Counting up how little has changed from mornings past, giving quotidian ruthlessness a meadowland veneer doesn't seem so wrong.