Dear leader,
Dear politician,

Our society is losing more and more of its humanity. Everything is done for “senseless” money, which is slowly taking control of everything. Money rules the world and some would do anything just to acquire huge amounts of it. This is dehumanizing our society and its people. People are seen more and more as a commodity. This trend must be reversed.

People are expected to be productive as workers and as consumers. Marketing bombards them with messages to incite them to consume more and more. They are encouraged to be dissatisfied with what they have and with themselves. They are supposed to look like movie stars by any means. To consume more and more, people have to work harder. In a family, both parents have to work to make ends meet or to be able to correspond to the image of the ideal consumer presented by companies and most of the media. The “luxury media” perpetuate this kind of image in empty soaps and the like. It’s like going around in circles.

Happiness and health

Is this progress, shouldn’t the “standard of living” yardstick be joined by a “standard of happiness”?

It is a pity that hard working parents hardly have time for their children or for themselves as human beings anymore. Of course, there are day-care centers and the like. But nothing can match the warmth of a family.

Our modern consumer society has been built on rules dictated by money. And increasingly so. Always buying and selling more products. Always new ones. A new product has just come of age and is already replaced by something a little “better”, but which according to marketing is what you have to have as a consumer to be “trendy” and “exclusive” (“exclusive” is probably the most abused word in marketing and most people are not aware of it).

Value redefined

Making lots of money and consuming more and more is logical, most economists will say. Because it keeps the economy going.

No, we say. One of the reasons is that the value of the human being is hardly taken into account. This value determines happiness. And the happiness of people determines the health of the society in which they live. Violence is a barometer of this health. 

How much do you feel you are worth? Not in terms of money, but in human value. That’s what really matters. 

Everyone needs appreciation and satisfaction. Many companies consider the worker as a kind of raw material or commodity to be used in the smallest possible quantity and at the lowest possible price. For them, workers are often just a faceless mathematical number. Robotization and the relocation of operations to low-wage countries are tools in the hands of managers who are driven by numbers. Some of them go so far as to employ young children in those countries.

For many companies (fortunately there are exceptions) money is the only thing that matters. They dance around it like around a sacred fire (one day, it may consume them). They have to produce as much money as possible so that shareholders and managers are paid royal dividends, salaries and bonuses and do not leave the company overnight. Of course, we understand that they need to be remunerated, but to what extent and at what cost? At the cost of humanity? We hope that you too, as a politician and as a human being, will consider this to be very wrong.

Exorbitant differences

When we learned some twenty years ago that in a developing country the salaries of the boss were up to 100 times higher than those of the employees, we were shocked. Especially when we saw the enormous contrast between rich and poor. Now we read that in some “developed countries” the difference can be 1 to 500 or even 2,000. It is clear that the economy does not turn around. Many managers only deal with figures or statistics and no longer have a sense of proportion. 

Stock markets are like temples of the new god: money (Golden Calf?). Speculators and large shareholders are the high priests. The offers to feed the calf are the workers and the companies that do not perform enough (anymore).

Ethics or genuine humanity

Where are the ethics or human values in all of this? Somewhere in an urn? Completely burned out.

If nothing is done soon about humanity in companies and in day-to-day business, workers will become mere robots. A pity. They are human beings who deserve respect.

The philosophy in business should be: what can we do to bring more humanity or to maintain it? How can we maintain a healthy balance between money and human decency? Not as it happens now, what can we do to make as much money as possible? The ideal of speculators and of many shareholders and managers seems to be to make money without any cost.

Humanization

The financialization of our society simply goes beyond what is acceptable. There is an urgent need for humanization. Human values must once again take center stage. Workers, and everyone else, deserve to be treated as human beings. A human being is too precious to be seen as a mere commodity. He or she would not exist without the deeply human value of love. They must be treated with respect and care. Human beings treated humanely will show more humanity as well. The result is a more stable society with less violence. Happy people rarely commit acts of violence.

Keeping people happy should be the main goal of politicians and business people and not the maximization of profits at any cost.

If you share our views, we wish you success in your campaign.

Visit our pax21.net site regularly for inspiration on how to boost humanity.

Many thanks and majai’vi!

Ambassadors of Nature and Peace
www.pax21.net – www.newworldpact.org