Note for example the ways in which the great professional vocations of the West - lawyers, journalists, academics, doctors - have been co-opted and corrupted by bottom line thinking. Money and "efficiency" are the values by which we stand, not law, truth or health. Students are imagined as "customers", citizens as "stakeholders".
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In the US, and increasingly even in Europe, the income differential between the poor and the wealthy already resembles that of banana republics.
An Economics textbook I read somewhere described economics as "the study of the way people interact with each other" or something to that effect. Of course, it's usually defined with regard to the production and distribution of wealth, or goods and services... However the term apparently derives from Greek roots, roughly translating to "the rules of the household, or the rules of management of a household (or administration)..."
So, in a sense, the policies of our home reflect the politics or our interactions with people beyond our home.
And the "bottom line thinking" that
Barkawi says has prevailed in a Western-dominated (capitalist) world: this thinking seems to have corrupted each generation more than the previous, so it's no surprise that people will silently ignore and endure the unjust suffering and neglect of others, "as long as I got my own..." Look at the delays in the recent US debt debacle. Then I try to fathom what motivates violent flash-mobbing youth... Humankind seem increasingly disaffected and even irrationally selfish.
"Money is the root of all evil."
"Mo' money, mo' problems."
It's true, too, as far as I can tell, that "few today in the West can imagine any other politics than those of big money": Big money apparently led us headlong into recession, has stifled our recovery, and seems to dictate the government of the Land of the Free. Money talks, and people will listen. Big money talks, and people will "shut up, obey, and collaborate in the dark work of exploitation for profit, for which they will be well rewarded, at least financially..."
What it all means: alienation from each other disaffected neighbor, and yet (or thus) an inflated sense of self-importance (collectively) has turned our interactions into more and more of a mathematical equation.
A better way seems so simple: we must throw away the notion of being motivated by "What can I get out it", and instead consider more enthusiastically "What can I put into it?"
If our social interactions are going to be quantitized, let's focus on increased value (+)
How is this done you may ask? Let me come back to that later (eyes blurring)
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