Monoculture: How One Story is Changing Everything Read Online Free PDF Page B

rights and responsibilities that came with that membership. 1 You were expected to be loyal to your family and they were expected to be loyal to you. Cooperation and trust among family members mattered. In the family, you were judged based on what you needed as a family member and in terms of your intrinsic value — your right to sit at the family table simply because you were a member of the family. You belonged. 2
    Though families and markets have been intertwined throughout history (unless families managed to be completely self-sufficient, which was rare), both were considered separate spheres of activity — so much so that in the 1950s, from a business perspective, family relationships were considered a hindrance to a market mentality and to corporate development. 3 In the Western world, markets were based for the most part on the traditional breadwinner model of the family: a man was paid for working outside the home and a woman wasn’t paid for working inside the home. At one time, most families were breadwinner families; in 1900, 94 percent of married American women stayed out of the paid workforce. 4
    In the larger community, your relationships with people were based on values like respect, love, and a willingness to put others first — all of which kept your more self-oriented tendencies in check. Yes, you developed economic relationships through buying and selling with others, but those economic relationships were tempered by the fact that everyone involved in the transaction was considered part of civil society, and civil society was characterized by a basic level of trust and solidarity. Your community, as a group, helped people in need because those struggling were deemed to have inherent dignity and self-worth no matter what their economic situation was like. The goal of the community was to help the destitute become healthy and self-sufficient and to build and strengthen our relationships with each other so we could all function successfully in society together. 5 That’s what gave families and communities a higher moral stature than markets. 6
    Nature enjoyed a high moral stature too. Some people valued their relationship with the physical world in terms of their own humanity, believing nature was worth caring for because it contributes to human health, is aesthetically beautiful, or plays a role in shaping their identity, since where people come from can shape who they are. Others valued nature for its own sake, believing they should care for it because other sentient species had a right to live too, or because they respected all life whether it was sentient or not, or for God’s sake, because nature represented God’s order, God’s creation. 7
    Then the story changed.
    The economic story says that among your own kind, competition matters more than cooperation, and that you’re motivated to look after your own interests, constantly calculating what’s in it for you, just like everyone else. Being a member of a group no longer means that you are part of something bigger than yourself. You participate in different groups not for the sake of the group, but to further your own interests. In turn, the group you’re part of objectively judges you based on your performance and your worth to them, not on your needs or your intrinsic value as a human being.
    Now you’re only as good as your last contribution to the team. Your performance or lack of it is what makes you relevant or irrelevant to others. Sociologist Zygmunt Bauman described the phenomenon in terms of reality television: “More than anything else, the…most popular [reality] television shows are public rehearsals of the disposability of humans. They carry an indulgence and a warning rolled into one story. No one is indispensable, no one has the right to his or her share in the fruits of the joint effort just because she or he has added at some point to their growth, let alone because of being, simply, a member of the team. Life is a hard