Business on the edge

Philisophical exercise for the day.... 

"Successful buinesses are as close to pure fraud as they can get."  

I suspect someone has already has expressed this more eloquently but to me its todays thought toy. 

I've been playing around with the idea, adding and removing clauses to try to refine the idea or to make it less brutal... but everything I add just weakens the point... so below I am just playing with the ideas and exploring different variations.

1) variations on the "Subject".

"Successful buinesses"    

Does this suggest that "unsuccessfull" businesses are only unsuccessfull becasue they are limited by self imposed constraints?  Probably true in various ways...  constraints such as ethics, ideals, goals, inefficiencies etc.

"All business"   

A bit bland... 

"Businesses run by accountants"   

Does this show my bias too blatantly?  How bias is my bias?  Anyway,  the point of accounting is to account.  It's amoral.  The point of politics is to decide what to count.  Observational humor asside, there is still a bit of a philisophical point there. Accounting is a tool without moral compass.   Like most things in life, its the moral compass, the "intent" as much as the "result/product/delivery" that defines us.  Funny how marketing departments tapped into that (and exploited it...) a long time ago.  They have been trying to craft the message around the "intent" side to make up for deficiencies in the "result/product/delivery" side for years. 

It's always the stories that we tell ourselves that are the strongest.  (Weirdly enough they have the most resonance for us... who knew?)  Marketing is often about trying to refine those stories or perpetuate them.   

My next thought was to simplify "business" down to "relationship". 

"All relationships are as close to pure fraud as they can get".   This makes some interesting suggestions about human relationships and "value exchange".  It's also a horrible simplification of the complexity of people.  I think this thought position would only make sense if a person was incredibly damaged... but it does speak to the idea of "self-interest" being at the core of much of human (and evolutionary) processes.  

 

Next I want to play with the idea of "fraud"... how much can that idea be teased apart?  What are the dimensions of fraud?    All the usual ones,  time, space, participants, resources involved, information asymetry, legal frameworks, moral, ethical, emotional, capacity, relative purpose etc... insert usual deep rabbit hole for any existential idea. 

 What is a 0% fraud transaction/event/state?  What is a 100% fraud event?  Are there examples where external perceptions(spectators) of the event would perceive fraud, while the perceptions of the internal participants  would not perceive it as fraud?   If both(many?) parties do not perceive it as fraud... did fraud really happen?  What about timeshifting the perceptions?  Can something appear as fraud through a historical lens (obviously... so many examples spring to mind) but not at the moment of inception?  (hindsight and historical revision love this type of narrative)    

There are probably a dozen genre fiction boilerplate plots right here...

Deception?   Just about every crime novel ever... too simple.

Unequal exchange of value?   Social justice, historical revision, colonization narratives, big industry narratives... banditry/theft.

Exchange of value based on asymetric information/knowledge?   The whole knowledge industry... all white colar jobs....

Exchange of value based on asymetric access/ability/capacity?  All business ever...

Exploitation of trust/opportunity/goodwill/future value/historical state....   Just about all politics involves manipulation of these aspects of any situation.   

All these fragments of ideas are fun...but the key point is that by putting "business/relationships" and "fraud" in the same sentence ... its not two alien concepts.  There's a bunch of uncomfortable connetions between those two concepts that when they are tumbled together have a lot of resonance with each other.  They are not two sides of the same coin and are certainly not clearly seperate concepts. 

So to come full circle... lets go back to a question.  

When does a relationship become fraud? 

If all businesses activities are profit motivated, then how are they not fraud by some definition?  (And we just invented the legal professsion again...) Is that disingenuous?  :-)

The more I play with the ideas, the less I feel that it captures something about "relationships" that is immutable.  

The very idea of "relationship" is that it involves the magical transformation from individual to social.  You must be a social creature to conceptualise (however poorly) of a "realtionship" or do you become a social creature the moment you perceive a relationship?  There has to be a sense of self which generates identity, identity defines boundaries (where you stops being you) and becomes other...  good old developmental psychology.  The next step is to start to divide "other" into "others".  Attributing different identities to sections of the externality would be a fairly major developmental activity.   It's only once we have successfully developed a model of an external "other" that we can start to understand any interactions, have a history and predict the future.  (Also need a sense of time, sequence and cause/effect by this stage) but all of these highly complex and costly activities have to somehow add value to us or they would be lost through efficiency culling of pathways in the brain. 

So what happens when "me + identified other" becomes the collective "we"?  How do we make the leap from self-interest to collective interest?  Is it just "my interest + a bit more"  or is it a new construct?  We have to maintain the origional construct ("self interest") as the collective construct can fail and relationships end (external entities leave/die/fail the trust test...)  and we have to be able to fall back to some model of interest that prioritises us over a previous collective.  (Heartbreak, falling off a horse, divorce, rejection, seperation in time/space, death, life changing event etc) 

Does the identity change at the same time?  Can we exist as an individual and as a collective at the same time?  Is there a point at which we must commit when transitioning from one to the other? (Mariage?)  I wonder if there are any historical rituals for the little death of the individual before forming a collective?  (Every bucks/hens night ever?  The ritual throwing away of the childish/juvenile shit/behaviour/property that people bring to relationships?)   

Once the transition is made from the individual to the collective... can fraud happen internally within the "we" construct?  If the "we" collapses and we fall back to the "me"... can fraud exist within the singular?  

There are all sorts of self-deception and "failure to deal" with truth/reality/history type situations that can occur internally in both a collective "we" or a "me" but can we practice a value exchange within a singluar construct?  If collectively "we" own everything together, how can there be an exchange of value?  There is nothing to exchance... we all already own it.  So is the concept of "fraud" rooted in "value exchange"?  

Is the fact that members of a collective still have a sense of "mine" and "theirs" indicative of  the collective having sub-divisions or just statements of historical fact?  Individually we still experience the world from a very specific individual perspective no matter how emotionally we might have formed a collective with someone else.  Or is this just me?  It does raise the question about how much personal boundaries or the lack of them creates perceptions (and emotional damage...) within the collective. 

Without digging too deeply into mental health on a multi-dimensional scale... the tension between individual self and collective self must be a minefield of potential internal stresses.  And because most of these aspects of us reside fully in the internalised emotional (habitual) processes, they are highly efficient but also unconcious and so incredibly fragile when encountering a situation they are not optimsed for. 

Oh look, after wandering around in the weeds we end up back at the usual point of me trying to understand myself...

Still interested in the question of "Can I be in a state of fraud with myself?" 

I can lie to myself. 

I can steal time from myself. 

I can fail to prioritise my resources.

I can over/under estimate my capacity.

I can fail to predict the future by small or large margins (make a mistake/miscalculation etc)

But do I do an of these things "intentionally"?  Intention suggests logic and intent which suggests concious behaviour.  Emotions and all the highly efficient pathways are not logic, they are just re-inforced habit below the concious level.   So can I do these things unconciously?  Theoretically... absolutely!  There is no obvious reason why we cannot re-inforce a lie until we take it as a given.  

There is also the problem that "time makes liars of us all!". There is no statement I can make or believe about myself that does not or has not changed over time, no matter how deeply I build it into my identity (or want it to be true).   

 "I am a leaf on the wind, watch how I soar".  Off to a different rabbit hole....