On eagles wings: Our recovery from Coronavirus (XVI). Actions reflect your values.
Last Friday we closed our dernier article by stating that “eco-cities can only germinate when each and all the members of a city (and ultimately that society) share and are convinced to practice the same core values”. El Salvador’s re-opening is scheduled for June 16th. It will be done by phases. I will let you know more details on my next post.
“La Fenetre Avec des fleurs” An aquarelle original by Eleonora Escalante. Handmade with love in watercolor paper Fabriano 5. Size: 5 inches x 7 inches. If you wish to buy it, please visit https://fineartamerica.com/profiles/eleonora-escalante
Today we will visit the basic concepts and elements of knowledge in relation to the roots of our common core values. Please do not lose sight, I have not shown you an outline for this saga, but I have done it on purpose. To prove that observation of events in uncertain times can trigger the inspiration to write beautiful oeuvres of strategy art. Corona Times came to us as “a crisis” to test our capabilities to solve it, but more relevant, our moral values. Leaders´decision making and moral priorities have overflow by country. By observing them, each by each, how they have handled the Covid19 sickness, we are able to diagnose the heart values of people. Everyone bragging a leadership job at the corporate level (regardless of the entity: private, or the public sector, or health-care, or any other industry) has shown us their true colors by now. As a corporate strategy innovation author, my professional actions are shared in this blog since the year 2016. And as you already know me, I am very organized to try to stick to our schedules and subjects outlines. But as the uncertainty of the Corona times, in this saga, I wished to be spontaneous, “without a compass”. Writing what was necessitated to be read. So, give me the benefit of the doubt. I will teach you to sail with me with “no timeline schema”. Trust me, it will be worth it. Let´s begin.
What is a value? Not economic value, not a monetary type, not a math calculus one. The dictionary defines value as “a principle, standard, or quality considered worthwhile or desirable”. The Oxford English dictionary defines value as “that which is worthy of esteem for its own sake, that which has intrinsic worth”. An object or a thing or business has an economic value, for example, “you can distinguish between buying at Nordstrom or Saks, as opposed to buying at Dollar Stores or buying used bargains in yard sales”. Nevertheless, for the objective of today´s discussion; in the context of our journey to establish core common values in societies, regardless of their religion and culture, the word “value” is linked to a moral value, to establish a “common” code of rules or “codes of ethics” for groups of people or societies to function properly. Since humans live in community (never alone), codes of rules or norms, end up being manifested as the “code of ethics” which reflect the “moral values” of that specific group of people behavior or actions (either business, organization, schools, community, city or country).
Moral Rules in Action. The reason why I have situated you in the “moral values” context is: when values are twisted, not properly defined and maybe not accepted by everyone in a group or are not defined accurately, the moral rules reflected in that community code of ethics show a blurry interpretation, or reflect the wrong virtues (called vices) when it comes to actions. When people inside a society have wrong or blurry values then you enter in crisis. Why because not all are not aligned with the society code of ethics (if well established). If a community code of ethics is not integral, then the actions of the members from that population reflect the mess, or what is improper in that specific society.
Actions in Motion reflect your values. “Actions, strictly speaking, are specific, intentional bodily movements that human beings DO in a context and for a purpose”(T. de George). Behind each action, there is a rule, principle, or maxim or value that is experimented when we wish to determine whether the action is moral.
If an action of someone is to be a “moral action” it must have a rational form. This means that the rule, principle, or maxim of the action must be capable of being consistently universalized. For example: if an action is moral for me, it must be moral for everyone living and sharing my specific territory. Shared values in a group are accepted and validated by the actions of each and all who live in that society.
Our hope for children´s future reflects the economic values in actions of our “moral values”. Situation before the COVID19-Pandemic.
Black Lives Matter. For example, last week protests in several main cities in the USA (starting in Minnesota) and other countries in Europe are actions taken by communities of African-Americans and its supporters. These protests of rage and anger happened as a response to the “abuse of power of one authority police officer into an African-American George Floyd, who died as a consequence of the officer actions. The action of the police was expressing a rule, a principle of the police organization. In Floyd’s case, the police officer’s particular actions reflected the extremisms of the set of values shared by the police organization, but his values were not shared by the rest of the American Society. Personally, I am deeply sorry for the death of Mr. Floyd, I wish to express my sincere condolences to his family. But his loss is just the tip of the iceberg, of a moral issue, a political, economic, legal, and institutional set of values that have mistreated anyone who is not of white skin color in the USA. The white supremacists in the United States have had racism as an “anti-value” for centuries, not just against the “black-lives” but against anyone who is not white or who doesn´t proceed or is not descendant of European countries who migrated from Europe to the USA. The abuse of power of one member of the police against Mr. George Floyd is simply the last action of many other similar in the past, that reflects a weird rule, a principle or a maxim of the twisted “institutional values” of those who protect the American Society, of those who represent the control-order authority in the United States. If the police authorities share a “racist” anti-virtue or anti-value against anyone who is not white (here are included the African-Americans, Latinos, Asians, and other minorities, etc), then what type of moral system does the American society own?
Was the murder of George Floyd wrong? Of course, it was. If murder is the killing of a human being, and the American code of ethical values states “Don´t kill”. Then what happened against Mr. Floyd is beyond the simple act of abuse of power. It is a crime against the moral law of the United States, regardless of the victim race or discrimination offense towards anyone who is not white. The last example lands us in the debate of moral values expressed in multiple examples of immoral actions under the American current system.
Moral values have had a presence throughout all our history. The Judeo-Christian moral heritage expressed in the Ten Commandments Law plus Jesus-Christ’s new rules of ethics at the New Testament is an example of a code of ethics. The Ancient Greeks’ top philosophers also had a deontological approach. Immanuel Kant, a German philosopher formalistic theory of 18th-century ethics is also another deontological sage. During the last two centuries, the majority of ethics contemporaries rely to introduce moral arguments in terms of justice and rights. Nowadays each company has at least certain values to respect.
The recovery from the Corona Times is beyond the health-sanitary-economic crisis. It means to recuperate our humanity and our common core values which are universal. The reason why the Coronavirus has shaken the roots of our global system is that each society has lost respect for moral values that were our backbone to function “normally”. Each population on earth (to a more or less degree) has been a victim of something worst than a virus. Throughout the years, the foundation of each community’s moral system of rules and norms, and ultimately the law, has been hit by the wrong business models who have put the premise of maximizing shareholder value, over the maximization of the whole society ethical values and environmental well-being. Globalization started as the anchor for maximizing profits by producing at the cheapest cost. That is why each society is more or less globalized by global “business” value chains. Once societies globalized, each country’s local or national set of moral values started to soften, to melt. When businesses (as actions that human beings do) globalized through supply and demand value chains, of course, some million people started to emerge from poverty, but our moral values started to disappear in the process. We exchanged the comfort of caring for the environment towards urban cities packed with disruptive technologies that destroy the ethical traditional values and the nature of our own existence.
The recovery from the Corona Times requires deep awareness, a change of mindset to recuperate our common core of values. Leaders with a specific set of moral values who have adopted the NAIQI technologies at their core (NAIQI means Nanotechnology, Artificial Intelligence-automation & robotics are here included, Quantum supremacy and the Internet) need to change their premises of value propositions, to set up the balance and the equilibrium in the planet again.
Eleonora Escalante Strategy has observed that those who have the most marketable money on their pockets at the moment demand to continue to grow using the NAIQI combo tech, creating needs and wants which in many regions of the world are unnecessary. That unfolds into using the Coronavirus pandemic to prove their digital business models in order to expand their commercialism success in all spheres of societies. The expansion includes economic sectors, industries or geographies that shouldn´t be touched for worst. Particularly industries which represent our minds knowledge education, and the cultural traditions.
The set of moral values of the most important companies in the world is different than the moral values inherited in the local communities. The set of moral values of China´s economy minds, the moral values of the logistic marketplaces and transportation-delivery top companies (such as Amazon), the moral values of the tech companies with higher market value capitalizations such as Alphabet (Google), Facebook, Microsoft, Apple; the moral values of thousands of tech entrepreneurs who are part of the value chains for these companies, etc… are simply different to what communities of human beings used to have. The whole idea of replacing humans by computers or robots is an “anti-value” premise that should have never arisen in the first place. When the leading businesses and economic values lose sight, then, of course, we all lose sight. There is no alignment between business and economic values, and moral values. The leaders of business crowds want to align the world according to their own set of new “anti-values” which are correct for their economic or business values, but not for moral human values that always put human dignity at the core.
The Coronavirus pandemic has simply shown the moral chaos of our leaders by shaking the dust of the real roots of our issues. In my next publication, we will do a journey to the past. I will continue showing you some examples of the past common sets of core values, that have helped communities of people to act consistently, morally righteous, and aligned for a purpose. Eco-cities is a proposal to blend the moral legacy from our ancestors, adopting the modernity of the new technologies, but with equilibrium and balance, not as we were doing it before the pandemic of COVID19. Business extreme actions reflected in the markets happening previous to Coronavirus pandemic are examples of this moral crisis. Look at the imbalance: on one hand the excessive opulent indulgence of disruptive technologies driven companies vs. the miserly bargain low-cost manufacture of “made in China” products have left our planet with nothing in the middle, or in between these two extremes. That is why our world was in complete moral chaos before the pandemic. Again the planet business actions (before COVID19) are simply a reflection of the moral disgrace that existed before. Are these two extremist business-economic models morally right? Or are these two extremist models a display of the existing social inequality that no one wants to shake? Does capitalism require an ethical transformation at the core values?
Thank you for reading to me. See you on Friday the 12th again. Blessings.
Sources of reference utilized to support my ideas:
https://www.harpercollins.com/9780061743993/how-good-people-make-tough-choices-rev-ed/
Disclaimer: Illustrations in Watercolor are painted by Eleonora Escalante. Other types of illustrations or videos (which are not mine) are used for educational purposes ONLY. Nevertheless, the majority of the pictures, images, or videos shown on this blog are not mine. I do not own any of the lovely photos or images posted unless otherwise stated.
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