Dichotomy

 Arguably the most significant dichotomy is what the climate community calls social vs individual. Often it is couched in terms of responsibility. Should we blame individual consumers, tasking them with reducing fossil fuel purchases, or should we blame society, hoping for it to protect our survival with regulation, legislation, or litigation? What neither interpretation of that dichotomy acknowledges is the existence of corporate collectives. That businesses exist is not controversial; they have names. How they relate to individuals and society is never questioned, because the language has been perverted. The businesses themselves have, over centuries, redefined society and individual for their own purposes. The purpose of each corporation is to survive. By defining themselves out of the society individual dichotomy, they eliminate their existence from question. In fact, both corporations and society, as they define it, are collectives. So, it behooves us to trip up the corporations by ignoring their redefined individual society dichotomy, and focus on the individual collective dichotomy. That elides the natural artificial dichotomy, but that is a matter for another post. For now, it is parsimonious to distinguish between democracy and corporations; both are collectives. The difference between democratic collectives and corporate collectives is that individual members of corporations are unaware of their influence over the corporation, but individuals in democracies, also known as voters, are aware of their influence, or lack thereof, over the democracy. Awareness is important; democracy presents a better hope for survival than business as usual. The only thing businesses have not already used to put each other out of business, the only thing that is not business as usual, is to exclude particular businesses from commerce, or as it is to them, existence. If the existence of businesses is left up to businesses, the ones that threaten the fewest businesses will survive. If the existence of businesses is left up to democracy, only the responsible ones will survive. The survival of collectives must be subordinate the the survival of individuals; otherwise nothing survives, not even life itself.