Via Negativa (PART - 2)

PROLOGUE:

As a general rule, which one do you think is better?
    A. MAXIMIZE *GOOD*
    B. MINIMIZE * BAD*
   
Part 1 of this series evaluated the merits and demerits of government policies directed towards economic growth (MAXMIZE *GOOD*) Vs. policy making focused on civic responsibilities and controlling the undesirables such as crime, poverty, air pollution etc. (MINIMIZE *BAD*).

Continued from Part 1 …

CHAPTER 2: THERE’S ALWAYS SOMETHING, SOMETHING WITH THE FEEL-GOOD

Folks, for all we know, scientists are saying that this entire universe could be a simulation. Why, imagine that everything we feel, see and touch are just bits of information and lines of code carrying out instructions for our over-lords with apparently no free-will. In times of crisis like this, grab your bow & arrow collection (hunger games style) and never trust your brain to tell you what’s *GOOD* for you. I have said it in Part 1 and I will say it again if I have to. Our brain is the biggest trickster there ever was. Don’t be all biased and think that our mind is just a source of joy. It is at the same time a source of equal, if not more, number of regrets. Look it up, the seers and saints gave up good food and fast cars to meditate under trees and cobwebs to bring us eternal truths regarding this. You are going to eventually bored of things you like today. And the mind develops fascination for something else only to shove it down the crapshoot later on. It’s that brutal …  

If what feels good is so transient, so hazy, so shape-shifting, imagine planning our lives by trying to chase what makes us feel good (sounds like a bad "greedy algorithm"?). It all doesn’t seem very bright to me, dear friends.  Chasing things we like always comes with some or other costs. There’s always gonna be something, something. May be you like a job that earns you a lots of money and soon, you might be left with no time or the peace of mind to respectfully blow that money up. May be you like to earn time instead and you will figure out that only job that really gives you time to do soul-searching and think things through is having no job at all. May be you like sweet stuff, there’s diabetes. May be you like salty snacks, there’s blood pressure. May be you like smoking a lot of pot, perhaps it could be health-wise safe, someone close to you will be cranky with you for not paying attention to what they are saying. There’s always something. Twilight writes about the pit-falls of dating girls chosen because of their interests in biryani or reading or traveling. May be you like a guy with a good sense of humor, sooner or later he will ridicule your “ooh so sacred and precious mood-swings” with biting wit and test your sportive-ness at a time you may not be quite ready and it's all down-hill from there. May be, you fell for this hot girl 'coz of her excellent hip-to-waist ratio and she turns out to be obsessed with cleanliness and godliness!!! There’s always goddamn something. Remember what happened to Humpty Dumpty? Sure the view from top of the wall was pleasant until the great fall. This is the unavoidable problem with MAXIMIZE *GOOD* mode of thinking. Beware of the side-effects or the nerdy name I gave them - “Conditional Blindness to Externalities (CBE)”.  In all important questions, we can only be sure of what we don't want, qualify that criteria first and take it from there. It's more rational.

And then, there is the second side-effect - “The Mythology of Endless Improvements (MEI)”. I already spoke about how no major country today can talk of sacrificing economic growth even if it means we are burning down the entire planetary climatic cycles with no insurance plan whatsoever. Same trap with us as well. When they give you the option on the first day of college, let’s say you picked the blue pill (stands for “cool dude”), not the red one (stands for “neurotic”) and decided that being cool is good. Soon, you will start hanging out with like-minded people wearing expensive shades and branded clothing.  In the process of maximizing *BEING COOL*, you will eventually learn the Harlem shake or start using words like LOL in actual real-life conversations and if you take it any further, you become one of those guys gtoosphere mocks and makes fun of to become a popular blogger.  See? You can’t get off the treadmill of expectations. You can’t back down no more. You can’t maintain the same amount of coolness like last week. That’s lazy. You have to keep pushing the envelope, keep trying to invent more and more ways to become cool until you are a public nuisance and must be banned from civil society.

You find the same thing with most people who decide to have any affirmative agenda. We got feminism which started off as a good thing for women having equal rights with men in terms of voting, career, smoking and refusing face-creams, refusing to cook and clean at home. Now, they have gotten to a point where these lipstick feminists are asking divorced women not to accept alimony anymore because it’s supposedly anti-women which is when everyone stood up to realize not to get too carried away with these gypsies and START REFUSING MONEY for the sake of a misguided ego.

MEI effects are the reason why every Bollywood / Tollywood heroine must now look like an item-girl these days though it probably started with someone thinking that having heroine expose a little is *GOOD*. The MEI effects all over again as we, acting on our default consumer impulses, ritualistically replace our 3G phone with a 4G one, a 4G one with a 5G one etc., without pausing to think what all this high-speed information access does to our attention spans, all the while believing that MAXIMIZING *information transfer rate* (or MAXIMIZE *self-respect through shopping choices*!!?) has to be invariably awesome. It’s the reason why cricket in India is losing its fan base because so much cricket is played these days. When India toured West Indies or Australia or England, it used to be historic and we’d all wait for it. Now they do it every year and no one even cares to keep track of the scores and records. Besides, look at the life of the poor suckers, those Indian cricketers are demanded to play every year in a half a dozen test-series home and away, and another half-a-dozen one day series, T20 internationals and on top of that IPL and Champions Trophy. Owing to MEI, BCCI will never back down, schedule lesser cricket for the money from the whole cricketing boom is so *GOOD*.

I can go on and on with examples …

But here's what saves us. On a personal level, these things are easy to control because we have a heart and a conscience and we are immediately criticized by our friends and families when the side-effects of MAXIMIZE *GOOD* exceed acceptable limits of civility.  However, for a group of people who gathered together for a specific intention, the CBE and MEI effects are harder to contain because a collection of people can’t have a conscience and can’t be that flexible. This is why corporations’ crimes in the name of profits are so tough to regulate and convict; which is why when unchecked jingoistic, nationalistic or religious organizations progressively get radicalized; which is why libertarian free market parties ignore social welfare programs and which is why extreme communist politics tend to undermine individual enterprise and hard-work  ... 

The whole point is that trying to “get more of what we want” (MAXIMIZE *GOOD* mode) without proper clarity and success on “what we don’t want" (worked-out from MINIMIZE *BAD*) can make our plans, our lives, our institutions and our culture spiral out of control. Any mission statements (like “maximize job satisfaction” or “maximize share-holder value”) cannot be properly justified without the associative performance and moral boundaries expressed in terms of a VIA NEGATIVA list (example: “I don’t want to get stuck in a mundane job” or “There's no way I am exposing myself to radioactive levels of shallow small-talk in the name of professional networking and maintaining connections” or “Our company will not hire contractors who violate safety regulations in their facilities” …). Perhaps, that's why most reasonable reading of all religions emphasize on a list of DONTs as moral imperatives (Example: "The 10 commandments", श्रूयतां धर्मसर्वस्वं श्रुत्वा चाप्यवधार्यताम्। आत्मनः प्रतिकूलानि परेषां न समाचरेत्।। - "If the entire “Dharma” (spiritual and moral laws) can be said in a few words, then it is - that which is unfavorable to us, DO NOT DO that to others" - Padmapuraana, shrushti 19/357-358).

CHAPTER 3: AFTER VIA NEGATIVA … NOW WHAT?

A little warning here. First of all, no one can go through life with an attitude of "I don’t know what I want. I only know what I don't want". We have to positively, emphatically DO specific stuff in life. People pay you for doing work and unless you are related in some way to the owner of the company, it's going to be very hard to find a boss who is willing to give you a paycheck for "not doing any damage". You have to look at the menu and at least be little more specific about your meal-order to the waitress than “I am in the mood for something that won’t kill me”.  Similarly, you have to be more than "NOT a bad person" to get someone to go out on a date with you. In everyday life, we have to give a *GOOD* reason why people would want to have something to do with us. Others can only appreciate once we have done something *GOOD*. This is why we find MAXIMIZE *GOOD* policies intuitively appealing and thus often hastily make the mistake of adopting them.

Naturally, knowing only what we don’t want to do is not enough. My argument is that it’s an absolute necessity to first define the list of negatives to avoid no matter what before we chase something *GOOD*. Besides, following the VIA NEGATIVA principle or not doing what you don’t want to do takes zero seconds of your time.  What are you going to do with the rest of the day?  Squat around on the couch trying to flip TV channels to identify what you more don’t you like?  Of course, we must keep trying different things to find out the right way to get to the *GOOD*. That’s the real happy ending.

The core argument of VIA NEGATIVA principle is that it is more rational to plan large, complex contexts in life by first setting the boundaries for *BAD*, working on securing them and then, opening the many possibilities in an adventurous way rather than a priori fixing and limiting the notion of *GOOD* in a narrow way. 

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Via Negativa (PART - 1)

“Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?”

“That depends a good deal on where you want to get to.”

“I don’t much care where…”

“Then it doesn’t matter which way you go.”

—    Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland

PROLOGUE

As a general rule, which of the following two do you think is better?

    A. MAXIMIZE *GOOD*

    B. MINIMIZE * BAD*

Chapter 1: HOW TO GRADE THE GOVERNMENT?

As we all know, the two commonly perceived narratives for the role of the governments are (A) the economic function and (B) the social function.

One narrative concentrates on what the governments should do for improving of the economy, keeping the investors happy, encourage entrepreneurs and indigenous industries, create jobs, promote growth and progress ^{[see footnotes 1]}. The second narrative emphasizes the social and civil responsibilities of the government reminding us of the social contract between the state and the citizens, discussing the performance of the state in enforcement of fundamental rights, controlling corruption, crime, poverty, quality of basic health and sanitation, air/water quality, environmental and ecological degradation and often, highlighting the tragedy of the commons.

I see these two narratives as two fairly distinct (but not entirely disconnected and in fact, even partially-overlapping) priorities for the government. The first one can be interpreted as a MAXIMIZATION of (general) *GOOD* measured by Sensex or GDP or % growth etc. The second narrative can be read as a MINIMIZATION problem, that of keeping the numbers of the undesirable (like the number of people dying of hunger or air pollution) as low as possible. Assuming that we are all interested in creating a progressive society that is on a sustainable path of development, which one of the two strategies seem more rational to you?

Now, to the above question, I know that the ideal answer is: BOTH and the clever answer is: A LITTLE BIT OF BOTH. However, I'd want to explore a deeper issue in political philosophy: In the real world of limited resources, what should the government concentrate on? How can the citizens grade the government's performance?

Of course, it won't take much long for anyone to realize that the main focus these days is the "maximization" problem. In the last decade, India had a pretty good run. Our economy consistently grew at over at least 7% each year, our country has seen the fastest growth of millionaires than anywhere in world, there has been an explosion of employment opportunities in the cities for the middle-class etc. Everyone has a cell-phone and once in a while, the malls offer a good deal on a pair of jeans. Of course, the scams have increased too. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) reports that the inequality in earnings has nearly doubled in the last 20 years meaning that the richest earn more than twice now than what they did 2 decades ago while the poorest are in the same state (42% still live on less than $1.25 a day). Consider that along with how costly everyday items like groceries, drinking water etc. have become, one can infer that the quality of life has gone down for way more than 60% of the country. Our government spends less than 5% of GDP on social programs which is the least among all emerging economies. It also has the least rates of taxation about 20%. So, we collected lesser taxes, cut down spending on social programs in order to achieve growth.

Yet, the government's priorities on growth (a.k.a. the maximization problem) in the policy debates that I see in the media largely remain unquestioned. Well-intentioned patriotic, university-educated citizens are swooning big time for politicians if he is "achha development le kar aa raha hai".^{[see footnotes 2]} Intellectuals and media mostly never question if the government's primary function is the economic one which is being achieved at the cost of neglecting the social function. Even the recent so-called populist movements in the country that have arisen only go as far as to talk about "fighting corruption", "bringing more accountability", "controlling the black-money" while making the progress in the country. One can't help but notice that there is somehow the underlying hypothesis that "the general direction of their efforts is alright. Let's keep the good parts and take out the bad and problem solved!”.

Today, I want to argue that focusing on MAXIMIZATION problem and concentrating on only the *GOOD* is never the most efficient strategy when addressing hugely complex problems. Forget about the bureaucratic inefficiencies of an intricate, pluralistic democracy such as India. My thesis is that even if you have a truly smooth-functioning, corrupt-free government, the very idea of trying to maximize *GOOD* is still not a good policy to adopt.

Hey, don't take all this the wrong way. I like a booming economy, people having the freedom to work on their passionate ideas and people being forced to work because they need money for other things. I am very pro-growth. In fact, I am as pro-growth as John Abraham is pro-gym. The way I see it, it's not just with politics but the general class of problems described as MAXIMIZE *GOOD* suffer from two fundamental inadequacies:

1.     CONDITIONAL BLINDNESS TO EXTERNALITIES

2.     MYTHOLOGY OF ENDLESS GROWTH

CONDITIONAL BLINDNESS TO EXTERNALITIES (CBE)

You don't have to go far to see how hard the middle-class and the poor have to work to put food on the table these days. When I was growing up, every family took at least 2-3 vacations a year visiting relatives, now we are so busy that we don't have time to note down our neighbors' phone number in case of an emergency.  We got municipal drinking water delivered right into our home both morning & evening and I used to bathe in the evenings with that water using a rubber tube in my backyard out in the open with nothing between me and the sky but air. Nowadays, every urban family spends a fortune on drinking water. When I was a kid, No parent really worried if their kid is smart enough to clear the entrance exam for a neighborhood pre-school. Nowadays, they are cutting down on diapers for their new-born baby and saving all that money for its education. Even 10 years ago, no one even heard the concept or the need for medical insurance and now medical costs plunge 40 million people to poverty every year in India. Beyond my brief obviously grandfather-type nostalgia trip down the memory lane, it can be seen that a lot of growth has come about because the government has stepped away from the business of essential services like education, water and health and handed them over to private players. All for the bottom line!!!

Throwing spotlight on just the affirmative leads to Conditional Blindness to Externalities (CBE) that results from progress. We have a hard time comprehending the social, economic, environmental, ecological and moral costs required to achieve the so-called growth in the economy. This makes any discussion on the minimizing the damaging side-effects extremely hard to rationally factor them into a democratic debate leaving us to free-market to address these costs or perhaps, to a company with a sound ISO: 9002 Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) policy after it had a good quarter and is in the perfect mood to organize a picnic, extract blood samples from on-looking public by distributing complimentary pens and caps with the company's logo and call that a "blood drive" !!! Moreover, these costs are usually discussed by only opponents and activists who are very easy to silence once you got the money and control on media.

THE MYTHOLOGY OF ENDLESS GROWTH (MEG)

Also, focusing on aggregate, big-picture, "positive-sounding" indicators of *GOOD* like the GDP or stock-market makes it very easy for governments and policy makers to be trapped with a mythology of endless growth. Everywhere around the world, we see that it's the same agenda, same policy, and same mission statement: the economy must grow forever and ever and ever. The political future of a lawmaker who says, "I think we have had enough growth. Let’s stop here and move on to other issues in the country" can be easily imagined. In turn, more growth implies more CBE effects which are always in acceleration mode till the system is pushed to a breaking point and the job of reversing growth is handed over to recessions.

The effects of major economies unable to get off the treadmill of forever maximizing their own individual growth can be easily noticed in our collective inability to commit to reasonable legislations and protocols to address the looming climate change crisis despite near-universal acknowledgement about the seriousness of the crisis. 

EPILOGUE

The biggest irony of life is that is we always know what is bad for us more clearly than what is good for us. Most of the time, there is nothing like absolute good. Even if you find something that is universally-accepted as good, there is no such thing as too much of a good thing. You want proof? Eat 2 tubs of ice-cream and see what happens. (In fact, many adults reportedly hate the good parts of their life because they are so high-maintenance). Politically speaking, what is *GOOD* happens to be so context-driven. The poor want basic health and sanitation, the middle class wants affordable prices and a decent public education system, the farmers want irrigation and fair prices for their crop and the corporations want tax cuts and no government oversight on their operations. In a culture with huge inequalities & where money equals power, the priorities of the powerful take precedence. Besides, there are numerous studies which conclusively prove that not just promoting economic growth but also checking unbridled growth, lowering levels of income inequality, increased access to education, freedom of speech, basic health and sanitation etc. are very essential for maintaining the overall long-term health and stability for the society. When it's extremely hard defining "common good" without leaving out / hurting some or the other demographics, how can we even maximize it?

There may not be universal definitions for good but as a society, we can come up with broad universally-acceptable definitions for "bad". I contend that it always makes sense to frame up "A LIST OF RULES THAT WON'T BE CROSSED NO MATTER WHAT" in the name of "development" or whatever. Like the air quality should never go below specified level. Like how many people are we going to allow dying of hunger, how many are we going to allow to die because they can't afford their medical treatment. Like how many people won't have proper access to water. Like how many people earn below minimum wage? It should be this really long list of all bad, depressing absolute worst-case scenario things that we as a society would never let happen. (Actually, this is an interesting way to examine the history of civilization is to see it in terms of how much this honor-code list has changed. Example: Not so long ago, we were an agricultural feudal patriarchy rigidly practicing a hierarchical caste system. We let the exploitation of lower castes happen. Today, we seem to have (at least legally) struck that off but we invented other colorful forms of insulting human dignity).

My answer comes in the principle of VIA NEGATIVA.

Do we have anything that is inviolable? Or is everything up for sale and negotiable? I think it's a good starting point for a debate. Without a declared honor-code list of intangibles like that, the moral and collective conscience of a society is completely misplaced. I humbly think it's more rational to have our political debates and judgments over the problem of MINIMIZE *BAD* and let the government/politicians do whatever they want as long as certain boundaries are not crossed.

Note that all this is NOT to provide a solution but to have criteria for a debate to assess the real function of the government. And I think the negatively-toned question of "What government shouldn't never let happen?" is a more tractable and more practical question than the one we currently seem to be practicing which is asking "What government should do?" and later on having after-thought arguments over the deplorable misdemeanors of the players involved(also termed a ”maximization problem with penalty constraints” ?).

And THAT ... is how I would like to dull my optimistic friends!!!

NOTE: I'll be honest. I don’t think politics is capable of solving any of life’s problems. I am certainly not under a delusion that a perfect set of politicians and lawmakers would eventually come along and frame for us the perfect set of rules because of which justice will be served for everyone for eternity. All these bickering, rules, constitutions, policies and laws can ultimately take society only little far, that nothing can really improve without a combination of a various dynamics like technological, business, political, religious and moral revolutions. At best, a politicians' role is more of a public servant job like a postman or a policeman, a job to take care of our collective civic responsibilities like economic policy, providing basic amenities like schools and hospitals, infrastructure, ensuring clean air and water, regulating bad corporate practices and maintaining a healthy ratio of income inequality. The central aim of this post is to evaluate whether the current over-emphasis on growth is sustainable, how long do we keep having simplistic debates and if there are any moral boundaries for our policy making.

(TO BE CONTINUED …)

Thanks to inimitable wisdom of Noam Chomsky, Michael Sandel & Nassim Taleb etc. and if I sound stupid, it’s my fault not theirs.
 

Footnotes: 

[1*] I might have slept through most of my social studies classes in school, but I don't remember the constitution mentioning growth or development as one of a job function of the government. I still have fond memories of my social studies classes as she went on yapping about justice, liberty, equality, fraternity etc. The way I understand it, economy is not supposed to be a priority for governance of the country. At best, growth’s a highly desirable side-effect.

[2*] One can also argue on how much is the actual contribution of the recent economic reforms to “progress” and “GDP”. I mean, Isn't it that the growth % in GDP is the result of complex interaction of several factors like the (1) sheer momentum of global economy, (2) The overall restlessness / need for people to feed themselves and everything else between (1) and (2)? Just people wanting to brush their teeth everyday so as to not repel their co-workers as we are educated in that toothpaste advertisement contributes to the GDP. Am I to understand that politicians have something to do with my teeth which fight germs round the clock with Active-X formula? Sure, the legislators would have played some part as in, they might have freely privatized a couple of schools and coal mines here and there in the name of public-private partnerships or allowed corporations to freely pollute the rivers but how much of GDP is really ascribable to them ? I mean, shouldn’t the business and the entrepreneur community claim more than half the credit? Anyway, just wondering that’s all. Also, let me ask you this, If we are not clear of their precise contributions and if that's not even in their job description, why do place so much importance on the economy as a criterion to assess the performance?

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[evil twin] Art of Zero

Hark! FLAWSOPHY'S Evil Twin's got some practical advice for you ...

Today I try to address the historical problem of doing nothing. Let me tell you that it’s not as easy as you think. Jerry Seinfeld famously addressed the predicament as :

I am so busy doing nothing… that the idea of doing anything - which as you know, always leads to something - cuts into the nothing and then forces me to have to drop everything.

When trying to do nothing, one is often faced with the paradoxical fallacy of trying to avoid doing anything which against amounts to doing something because “sitting around and trying to avoid” is still doing something. O ... K ... Thank God, I don't have this kind of a self-defeating rational purist mindsets but a practical problem in doing nothing is one of controlling the mind to not fixate on anything of significance as Twilight mused. When you sit around trying to do nothing, it’s easy to start thinking about one particular topic like “What should I do with my life?“ or “Should I sun-dry the left over tomatoes and make a pickle out of them ?” and imagine how embarrassingly worse it will be if you find an answer to such important questions - potentially ruins the whole goddamn plan for the day. Doesn't it?

But, I have a counter-intuitive solution to this problem. The real trick of doing nothing is to TRY TO DO EVERYTHING ALL AT ONCE. This is an effective way to keep your mind constantly occupied yet never be able to focus on anything (as focusing is the arch-enemy of doing nothing). When you try to do everything, I mean, literally a really, large number of things at the same time, there is no chance that you will get anything done because you (in a strict technical sense) can’t have enough time to do anything - no matter how small the task (Like trying lifting the magazine to read but instead, stop and reach for the TV remote but instead, stop and open a online shopping website to read it’s privacy policy but instead, stop and look for your keys but instead, stop and locate the mop to clean the kitchen floor but instead …. ). This is exactly how noise-cancelling headphones work - by generating the"anti-noise" signal to cancel the ambient noise. Similarly, the general rule is to have a mental traffic jam of ideas over-load with each idea canceling each other one out. Soon, the video in CCTV camera will show you aimlessly groping a large number of objects in a record time, frantically walking from room to room with no discernible purpose. I know this behavior might vaguely remind you of someone with an anxiety attack. True, but who finished their graduate thesis in the middle of an anxiety attack ? 

Most real problems in life come when we attempt a finite list of things and accidentally, partially finish some of them and get blamed for doing something and that too, for not doing it well enough to satisfy the never-contended world. In a way, “doing everything” is actually a nice euphemistic substitute for “doing nothing”. Next time, she asks you "What are you thinking about ?" and you don’t want to share and get some instant 'constructive criticism' about your personality, just simply say “Uh! Everything”…

Now, if you excuse me, I gotta upstairs and dry some tomatoes in the sun …

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[evil twin] Free Market Sweetness

One more from the evil, evil desk of FLAWSOPHY'S EVIL TWIN ...

Sometimes, I get upset when I expect a certain level of niceness from people and I don’t get it, even though there is absolutely no need for them to be that nice at all.

Today, I was in this corporate coffee chain store (let’s call it “strawpucks”) and I ordered my usual medium black coffee. The coffee was not ready and the store-girl asked me to wait for 3 minutes while she set up a new batch of coffee for brewing. In previous situations like this, the store usually gave me the coffee for free because I have to wait and be inconvenienced because of their fault of not having the brewed coffee ready to go. But this girl clearly displayed her ignorance and complete lack of proper training in this job by asking me to pay the bill and wait. As I was waiting for my order, I got upset. I totally felt that the coffee should have been free because remember? This is capitalism and every fault must be paid for by someone. What’s suddenly this  “kindly adjust, please” business. Since when did we start putting up with other people’s inefficiencies without scoffing and not be pricks all the time ?  I stood there confused ...

Just so you know, it’s them corporates who have turned me like this. Every slightest inconvenience and they would pick up the tab. Over the years, it happened a lot to me in the name of “treating their customers well”. They gave me free coffees whenever they made a slight error like say, I would ask for medium roast coffee, they would accidentally serve me dark roast coffee like I can even tell the difference. Once, they gave me free coffee merely because I had to wait for 5 extra minutes in the line for the guy before me had a large take-out order of 6 coffees and half-a-dozen muffins or something. Another time, the supermarket clerk gave me the star-wars themed throw-over fleece blanket (yes! It looked hideous) for free because they couldn’t find the price-tag on it.  In my early days in USA, one day we were sitting in a movie theater waiting for the movie to begin and there was some technical problem which led to the commencement of the movie screening delayed by all but 5-7 minutes. As a matter of fact, I didn’t even notice. And the manager of multiplex came out and gave us free movie passes redeemable anytime in the next one year for the “all the trouble”. Being new to this kind of capitalism, I frankly felt a little bit insulted. I thought, “The nerve on this guy.  Does he think so low of his customers ? Does he think I am this kind of extreme loser consumer guy who expects his movie begin right on the second like it’s a spaceship launch ? Does he think I am  a shallow, soul-less, heartless person who goes around with a pocket calculator and a scratch book putting a currency value and screaming on the sidewalk about how much the society owes me for every minute of my time - like a publicly traded corporation ? It’s one thing to give a refund when they screw up my flight or lose an important package in the mail …   ”.

At the time, I felt violated but, hey, I am a practical guy. I availed of the free movie within the same week. Soon I got used to this corporate’s “Please,-we-are-not-your-friends-and-no-one-needs-to-do-any-favors-for-each-other-‘coz-your-money-is-the-only-reason-we-talk-to-you-nicely” attitude. In fact, I learnt to experience mild delight and occasionally secretly wish that they screw up so that I can get free beverages and free movie tickets every once in a while. Sometimes, I would be even deliberately rude to the check-out clerk just to teach the company a lesson and do my bit for my left-leaning liberal friends.

And today, this happens. What the hell, man ?

 

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