Matthew T Grant

Last spring, while attending a lovely brunch, I got into an unexpectedly heated dispute with the host and one of the guests, professors at a local business college, about the Nazi philosopher, Martin Heidegger.

Having told me that they sometimes taught Heidegger’s essay, “The Question Concerning Technology,” to their students, I told them that Heidegger’s unrepentant allegiance to the Nazi cause, coupled with his very conscious desire to provide the philosophical groundwork for an as yet unrealized hyper-elitist society in which the Many served the Few, made such a pedagogical choice highly problematic.

To my way of thinking, I explained to them, introducing impressionable minds, or any minds for that matter, to the diabolical musings of the old, forest-dwelling, Swabian sorcerer was to fulfill his clearly articulated plans and, therefore, to be avoided at all costs.

Naturally, they thought me mad.

Flash forward to a recent dinner party featuring many of the same characters. Recalling our bygone dispute, one of my erstwhile protagonists found it ironic that I considered teaching marketing the better alternative to teaching Heidegger. Ascertaining that he equated marketing with manipulation I asked if he didn’t in fact try to manipulate his students, an imputation he vociferously rejected before absenting himself.

There ensued an illuminating discussion with his colleague concerning the way “marketing” had supplanted “sales” in the college’s curriculum. Whereas the institution had once upon a time striven to steep students in the subtle and not-so-subtle arts of persuasion proper to business, this was now deemed “kind of sleazy” and had been replaced with the more oblique, and ostensibly scientific, rigors of marketing.

On hearing this, I remarked that, funnily enough, with the ascendancy of “content marketing,” it was now education that provided sales and marketing with its dominant paradigm. And so we sat down to eat.

Customers don’t want to be marketed to anymore than they want to be sold to. They are, however, hungry for information, if not knowledge (or, perish the thought, wisdom). For this reason the contemporary marketer begins to increasingly resemble a research assistant or a reference librarian and, in some cases, a teacher.

Which is why I would like to suggest that, while education may, in its way, be manipulative, we must also allow that manipulation, in its turn, may also be, at times, educational.

Don’t you think?

Image Courtesy of coyote2012.

As far as I can tell, the difference between Republicans and Democrats boils down to the following: Republicans think that government should be run by businessmen and Democrats think government should be run by lawyers.

I mentioned this once to a friend with Republican tendencies and she said, “That’s right. Government should be run like a business.”

My immediate response was, “But a government is not a business!” Which, of course, got me thinking about how governments and businesses differ.

For simplicity’s sake, I define a government as that organization responsible for establishing and maintaining order within set geographic borders, borders which it is also generally the responsibility of said organization to secure, if not necessarily establish.

By contrast, I define a business as a set of related processes which facilitate the delivery of a good or service within a larger macro-process of exchange which usually depends on an consensually accepted token of value (currency) and a set of rules enforced by a communal agency (which may be a mob or may be a government).

Now consider these definitions in light of Allen Weiss’ comment that most Web 2.0 “business geniuses” seem to ignore “what a business is supposed to do..namely, make a profit.” On the one hand, I find in this formulation one important differentiator between government and business: Making a profit does not enter into my or any definition of government or its purpose.

On the other hand, I must point out that I did not define business in terms of making a profit either. This was intentional because I do not believe that the purpose of any business is, in the first instance, to make a profit. Aside from delivering the good or service around which it is organized, the main purpose of any business is TO STAY IN BUSINESS. Making a profit may serve this end, but it is not an unqualified necessity.

Now, returning to the original question of government and business, would it be fair to say that the purpose of any government is to stay in power?

Image Courtesy of takomabibelot.