The Founder: A dystopian business simulator (2015)

I whole-heartedly agree with your main point, but there are successful businesses with something like a conscience.

They're about as rare as a genuine politician or a trustworthy lawyer, but they do exist.

Rant ahead:

It's funny when you read business articles about ethical companies; say, Patagonia. There's always this barely restrained glee when they find something they can pick at to say - 'look, they did this one thing less than perfect. They're just as flawed as us!' [0].

Meanwhile, business media loves spinning the indefensible into positives - look how much water PepsiCo 'saved'! Look at all the carbon they 'captured!' [1]. Isn't it great how they're "improving recycling infrastructure"?

Either we figure out how to run ethical and sustainable business for every major sector, or we die in a dystopia of our own making. The billionaires know this - that's why apocalypse bunkers are such a hot industry recently.

I'll say that again - because business theory doesn't seem to get this. Either we figure out how to run ethical and sustainable business as standard, or we fuck up this planet even more, very possibly to the point of total destruction.

Whether that's from illegal wars that get out of control, or the planet burning, or ecosystem collapse, or the unstoppable rise of a brutal totalitarian empire, cough, it all links back to how we're running our businesses. What is our money doing?

Are we giving subsidies to the same fossil fuel fucks working to cast doubt on climate change for the last 50 years? Are we running foreign policy at the behest of foreign dictators and scumbags who buy our weaponry? Are we allowing businesses to regulate our environmental policy? Yes.

Does voting "left" actually affect the status quo enough to make them afraid of committing ecocide and genocide? No. And it's been like this for decades, getting worse. Meanwhile, business media runs ads for flood insurance, and greenwashing shite from BP.

On an individual level, the people running those businesses know exactly what they're doing, and they know how to hide it, what must be hid, and when to take mask off. As Hilary put it in one of her private 6 figure speeches for bankers "You need to have a public position and a private position".

And we all play along, because to speak up is to mark yourself as trouble. And we all seem to have sort of given up on the concept of ethical business, as if being ethical and sustainable is just naivety, weakness, 'virtue signalling'. People roll their eyes at the words.

Well, now we're at a tipping point; multiple tipping points. We either keep playing along with the nonsense, dooming our species to an unimaginably degraded future; or we commit ourselves to a lot of hard and dangerous work, fixing what's been broken even while the status quo fight every step with an utter lack of restraint. Rant over.

0 - https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/14/climate/patagonia-climate... 1 - https://greencitizen.com/blog/ethical-companies/