Anarcho-Capitalism: A Quantum Of Evil

1. Is there a pragmatic difference between an evil society that does evil things and a non-evil society where evil things happen?
2. Is there a pragmatic difference between an evil society and a non-evil society where concentrated pockets of evil bubble in discrete quanta?

Can anti-corporation rhetoric pinpoint where evil lies in a corporation? By evil, I only mean legal evil. Obviously illegal evil is a breakdown of law and order, not of economics, society and moral philosophy. Salaried employees are not evil, they’re what Marx called ‘wage slaves’. The CEO and Board? They’re just salaried employees with much higher salaries, consisting of stock options and hefty bonus incentive structures dependent on performance ie corporate profits ie stock prices. In a public listed company where the majority of stocks are held by the public? If Amazon posts 15% corporate profits, stock prices increase, and shareholders benefit. By the law of Cui Bono, any albatross felled by evil in the process of said profits must be divided into 10,000 tiny albatrossettes, encased in convenient mass-produced lockets and only then hung around 10,000 necks. For convenience, let’s say evil E=10,000. 1 for each shareholder.

But the CEO and the board take a disproportionate share of the proceeds from evil, so we agree to apportion the evil according to the gains. If total gain from evil = 1M, where 10 board members get 50k each, while 10,000 shareholders each get 50, then the 10 board members each have E=500, while 10,000 shareholders have E=0.5. That doesn’t seem fair for 2 reasons

1. What about the value added by CEO vs a shareholder. Their different levels of contribution are what should theoretically explain their different shares of proceeds from evil
2. If shareholders did not reward evil, then the CEO would not commit it. Likewise, if the shareholders did not punish ethical loss, the CEO would not be afraid to court it. If Schopenhauer were alive, he’d characterize the stock price as the objectified will of the collective value of society, and the CEO as the mindless executor of said will.

If Ethics do not pay off in the long term, there is no incentive for the CEO to reduce legal Evil. The current assumption is that ethics do indeed pay off in terms of reputation, goodwill, and the sustainable high performance that comes from good corporate governance. The empirical evidence for this assumption, while not scathingly poor, is still quite poor. This is because free markets reveal preferences more than sanctimonious Facebook posts do. Socially conscious individuals will still bite into a juicy steak that used to be a cow abused for 5 years in horrific conditions absent from the most fertile nightmares of Dante and Blake. All guilt considered, it still tastes great. They won’t cough up the extra $1 for fair trade coffee, the extra $100 for jeans made outside South Asia, and the extra $500 for laptops made exclusively in Germany. Shareholders will drop a non-performing stock and pick up its less ethical competitor gaining market share.

We’d like to reduce this to our simple intuitions on morality like the fact that ‘crime pays, but shouldn’t’. Crime is easy to understand because it is localized quanta of evil. Evil individuals whom we recognize as criminals. If we cannot localize quanta of evil, can we still call it evil? After all, we have eliminated obvious and egregious evil from society, have we not?

In a highly competitive market, customer preference parameters are worth their weight in gold. The more parameters of preference a consumer has, the more specialized segments, SKUs and campaign messaging levers I have to play with to get an edge over competition. If Good and Evil are preferences that consumers truly care about, and not just talk about caring about, then they would be highly valuable product parameters for brands. A sad-sack version of this exists today in that corporations assume people will pay for Good over Evil, and hence non-mandated CSR exists, as do lip-service campaigns against any social evil, strategically restricted to the marketing and video-making departments of a company. But what if the market as a whole quantized and embraced Evil?

The Coasean solution to negative externalities of global evil like climate change is carbon credits, and it is testament to the diffuse evil of a society that neither political will nor customer wallets are sufficiently strong enough to have any marked impact on the idea of a carbon credit as the barometer of society’s concern about the environment. There is a Coasean solution for Evil therefore, and it is valuable information divorced from its probability of success, ie if a Coasean approach to Evil ‘fails’, it actually succeeds at holding up the mirror to society and telling it that despite the volume of its words, the content of its character is empty.

Imagine neutral creditor agencies like Fair Trade or UTZ don’t just exist for positive externalities (sustainable supply chains) but for negative ones as well. If REI Inc. (Recursive Evil Incorporated Inc.) gives everyone an Evil score, how would consumer choices change? If products A and B have the same quality, the same price, but different Evil points, then the product with the lower Evil score is likely to gain market share. But at what price difference or quality difference does Evil fail to be a factor? Aggregate this sensitivity over the entire GDP worth of goods and services, and we have arrived at the Evil Quotient of society, the total Evil it is willing to tolerate. Social justice loudmouths with high personal Evil scores will no longer exist. This is great for actual justice because it leaves only those with low Evil scores doing the talking and protesting, which means all social justice loudness will have actual value, spreading actual awareness about how it is actually possible to exist and thrive at a much lower Evil score through consumption choices like the ones they made.

Anti-corporate rhetoric is far more potent when wallets are as open as mouths. To reflect the impact of Evil status quo forcing consumer choices, we measure Evil not as an absolute quantity, but normalized for what is available in the market. If the median product is 100 Evil, and you buy 150 Evil because it is 10% cheaper, the Evil to society is +50, while I, a virtuous saint, buy 80 Evil product which is 10% more expensive and therefore have -20 Evil in my account. As individuals make increasingly un-Evil consumption choices, the market for un-Evil-ness grows, attracting investors and the amoral business machinery that rolls into gear and increases offerings at the un-Evil segment of the market. This decreases the Evil Quotient of the GDP in what is ideally a positively-reinforcing virtuous cycle.

Now Hong Kong’s pro-democracy supporters are wielding a new protest weapon: their stock-market trading accounts. To show support for Jimmy Lai, the publisher who was arrested Monday under the city’s new national security law, Hong Kongers have been buying shares of his media network Next Digital Ltd. The result has been a more than 1,000% gain in two days that propelled the stock to a six-year high.

The only problem with consumption-choice-Evil is that it implies all poor people are Evil. In 1830s England, 50% of the workforce was under the age of 16. Neither parents nor the state had the luxury to pass up the opportunity to transform, overnight, children into productive independent members of society. Those who could, did, and children for whom this sacrifice was made, prospered. In the 21st century, the parents and state are both in a position of strength where this sacrifice is not only affordable but sacred in its preeminence of virtue. Neither parents nor state in India have the luxury to sacrifice their children’s productive years. Can child labor in India have the same value of Evil attached to it?

So the E.Q needs to be normalized by wealth-mediated price elasticity. If Evil slave-labor phones from China are $100 cheaper but 100 Evil higher, then poor people will consistently rack up Evil scores. On the one hand, this can be normalized by wealth, converting prices to purchasing power. So if 2 people both buy Evil +50 to save $10, their E.Q’s are in proportion to their purchasing power, ie if A has twice the purchasing power, for the same evil consumption choice, he has accrued twice the evil. This is what we intuitively do in society today, such that the onus for all evil lands squarely at the feet of billionaires with such disproportional spending power that every other consumption choice in all of society is practically zero. But there is an alternative that doesn’t rely on random localized quanta of evil in society.

Let’s not normalize by wealth at all. Instead we obtain a distribution of personal Evil and have to deal with the stark fact that as wealth reduces, personal freedoms and choices are severely constrained, and people with fewer freedoms and choices will often face the singular choice of Evil. Crime, junk food, child labor, animal abuse. What happens once society is confronted with a graph that shows Evil rising proportionately not with wealth but with poverty? It’s a question that makes us deeply uncomfortable, like flogging a dead horse after taking its money and selling its foals into prostitution. I consider it the exact opposite. If society is not only talking about reducing Evil, but demonstrably making personal consumption choices that reduce Evil scores, how would it react to the fact that the single most impactful thing you could do reduce Evil is to decrease poverty and increase wealth, giving individual actors the gift of choice. This is the difference between white collar crime, something we agree to be inexcusable, and poverty-mediated crime, which we acknowledge to be tragically inevitable given the environment.

We’ve taken a diffuse system where evil simply exists like the vacuum of outer space, and instead created quanta of Evil that react differentially like particles in the pervasive Higgs field to create localized maxima like the H.Boson. The cool part isn’t in quantization but in renormalization of the Higgs field. We have taken the nebulous field of society and made every individual the Higgs field in which Evil interacts and manifests as quanta. This has the same effect as buying Carbon credits to offset emissions. If Evil -50 exists at a $10 premium in the market, then if I give $5000 to 500 poor people to offset the premium, do I get an Evil credit of -50*500? Corporations can now spend money on unrelated Evil-amelioration because it has been converted into bankable currency. You no longer have to infuse your specific products with Goodness, you can infuse society with Goodness and the Evil credit reflects in all your products. The extent to which Goodness is valued by society is appropriately measured by the relative market share sensitivity of Evil.