On Art and Corruption

This is a much older piece from when I lived in Nelson BC, musing on the nature of art and corporate corruption, trying to think of how artists and spiritualists could go about making true art and achieving moral insight without depending on the world of money and capitalism. I have since developed a much more elaborate economic theory, but for the sake of putting some material on this page, here is a quickly edited version from about a decade ago when times were simpler.

Arts Utility and Corporate Incentives

There are many discussions of corruption, yet no one has been able to identify the root cause of it with any ease. Because I couldn’t communicate these ideas efficiently, I have been forced to coin the term “Sociological Illness” due to our anthropomorphic minds’ inability to communicate systemic problems efficiently. You see, society must exist for there to be spirituality and artwork. However, society cannot yet provide for spiritualists (of any or all disciplines) and artists because it can only support art and spirituality when they attract more business and prove their utility. Only being able to reward things for their utility, capitalism has yet to support arts and spirituality adequately because it does not yet understand their true value.

Art and spirituality are means of freeing and diversifying the social mind from uniform biases generated by uniform incentives. Naturally, whether the phenomenon is due to creation or evolution, people use introspection and self-expression to process their instinctual responses to issues and circulate them in a social system. This works as long as we operate in our natural environment, but on an industrial scale, art has been used for commercial means to attract customers. Instead of diversifying society and producing diverse opinions to tackle problems with many solutions, art has only been seen as an attraction tool. This process takes the social mind of the human being and tries to replace it with a drone mind in the absence of our natural methods of group thinking. This is rejected by most minds and by society in general, resulting in systemic failures, failures I categorize under the label of sociological illness.

Beyond the effects on sociological well-being, art and spiritual pursuits have no direct economic value beyond attracting customers and procuring votes (which, all things considered, is almost unethical). To truly achieve effective arts and spirituality, there needs to be an environment where artists and spiritualists can exist, supported by a community that appreciates the sociological health produced by true arts and spirituality. If our corporate democratic society cannot manage to create such an educated system, then it is our duty as socially dependent human beings to seek solutions in spite of current trends, for the sake of our sociological well-being.

You see, the relationship between the artist and the spiritualist is older than history itself. The spiritualist isolates oneself from others through altered behavior or even self-exile in order to understand human instincts—that is, how we are designed to respond to the world. They then return with knowledge to heal and guide, which inspires the artist. The artist then expresses these ideas, and as many artists interpret many spiritual teachings, many alternative views and thus solutions to problems cultivate in the sociological mind of society. From this culture of insights, decisions are made with maximum consideration of our instinctual and intellectual capacity to solve problems. By communicating with the people, leaders are then able to manage arrangements between people and make decisions that need to be made immediately with the people’s wisdom in mind.

This does not work if a small group of artists are paid to reinforce corporate behavior and take all the support from true artists and spiritualists while simultaneously severing the connection between the leader and the people by buying their will. Once the cord is cut between our methods of procuring ethics and the decision-making body, it’s a short step to authoritarian government paid for by corporate interests. To correct this, not only do true art and spirituality need to be supported and reconnected to society to heal it from the ground up, but the conflicts of interest must be unwoven from the top down by reconnecting the government with the people and disconnecting them from corporate incentive.

Any undertaking of such progressive transformation, like any other process that takes power from the powerful, must be done with a sense of militant industrialism like any other legal reform. Yet, as an ethical study, it must be done without creating disharmony. This is a battle that needs to be fought for our sociological health with our minds rather than a battle for the commons fought with resources. It’s not just about the utility of arts and spirituality but about the therapy of society as the social mind that it is. Instead of treating the mind as an individual self-sufficient unit, we need to treat it as part of the sociological organism we are.

The logistics of such an operation require cooperation and the attainment of the social license of landowners to operate. Without going into the geopolitical issue that is land ownership, it can be said briefly that land ownership is an intrinsic result of free will and power accumulation that cannot be taken for granted. Due to the isolationist yet non-hostile nature of developing a society to research and treat sociological illness, cooperation and attaining the social license of landowners is the only viable option.

To get people to invest their vacant space for this work, the business plan must demonstrate a tangible process from production to utility. If I am to convince people that this operation will produce results, the fourth and final element to the quartet of art, spirituality, and therapy becomes political action to create change. The will for political change means I need an intimate respect for art and spirituality in the populace, a politically liberal majority, and a demand created by a high mental illness, corruption, and homelessness rate for these issues to be most relevant.

The political change must address the social illness within our political and corporate systems and, by decoupling politics from the corporate incentives that result in sociological illness, begin to heal and rebuild. This is much easier said than done because it is like doing brain surgery: the blood (geopolitical power) must keep flowing to the body and mind of society while the brain (spiritual, artistic, and sociological well-being systems) is operated on and then left to heal. If corporations cannot prosper from the changes in the system, the system will reject the changes. The same goes for the people’s quality of life and the efficiency of political systems.

Without going too deep into political theory, some of the best examples of conflicting incentives in politics are the lobbyist vs. public communication systems and the processes of campaigning and electoral funding. Science needs to be done. Regardless, the issues of conflicting interests are abundant and very evident in their entropic effect on business and sociological well-being in general. India is an excellent example of a democratic country polarized between intensely corporate and corrupt interests and intensely traditional and spiritual values within the same nation.

There is a lot that needs to be considered, but ultimately, there needs to be science done in regards to sociological illness for solutions to be developed. This science needs to be funded by a part of society where these needs are apparent. Nelson, BC, has those needs and conditions in abundance, which is why, between here and Nanaimo, I chose here for its relative isolation from corporate influence and reduced chances of political backfire. There is a demand in Nelson for therapy, education, freedom to create, and spiritual science that is found nowhere else in western Canada. If there is anywhere I can do the studies and write a book on society’s need for sociological health, well-being, and fitness, it is here.

The idea is that all I need is to get these theories on paper and tested and have enough knowledge and experience in dealing with these issues to research and develop solutions. This book is more than just a tome of social science theory but a business plan that I can distribute among my investors: the population of Nelson, possibly Canada, or the world itself. It is important to note that within these efforts, there is to be a natural incentive to produce results modeled off ethical frameworks.

If the need is truly as great as I believe it is, then I will happily be the supplier of this product if it means a life’s work. Even though all things are provided for the researchers, only some will “graduate” into these social systems to make them work. The therapy is systemic: to work towards correcting sociological illness through art by advertising the realities of these issues and initiating political change via activism targeting the root causes of corruption itself. This is not charity or free-loading; it is a structured countermeasure to corporate incentive in order to try and re-establish sociological well-being in society. I often muse to myself how I might not even get to be a part of it directly due to my own inhibitions that could corrupt the data, but indirectly, people like me will benefit greatly as society begins to reward artists, philosophers, and spiritualists for the true utility of what we do.