In rereading The Essential Jekyll and Hyde, I came across a great quote by Robert Louis Stevenson in the footnotes. He’s explaining that no, Jekyll’s problem is hypocrisy, not sex and that being “a voluptuary” is not inherently bad. However, “the sexual field and the business field are perhaps the two best fitted for the display of cruelty and cowardice and selfishness.”
One of the standard rationales given by Puritans and religious conservatives (not all puritans are religious) for being so restrictive about sex is that it’s a powerful, destabilizing force that has to be controlled. As Christian feminist Samantha Field points out, this is one of those “every accusation is a confession” things — they believe humans have no natural restraints so society has to restrain them (which leads to conservatives declaring sexual consent is unimportant). Though in practice, of course, that usually means restraining women, not men.
It’s certainly true that sex is a powerful force that leads to us making bad decisions — especially when it’s mixed with ideas like “the woman’s consent doesn’t matter.” But the same is true of business, as Stevenson says. Believing slavery was Christian was an immoral decision but it makes great sense as a business position. Slaves were good business. Slave labor was good for business.
Yet a lot of the same conservatives who want to bottle up and control sex are dedicated to shielding and deregulating business as much as possible. And pretending this could not possibly have any bad side effects.
Free-market crusader Alan Greenspan, for instance, pushed for liberalizing regulations on banks and on companies giving investment advice from which they stood to profit. That was a major factor in the 2008 financial crisis. In hindsight, Greenspan said later, he “made a mistake in presuming that the self-interests of organizations, specifically banks and others, were such that they were best capable of protecting their own shareholders and their equity in the firms.”
See also Purdue Pharma and Elizabeth Holmes.
Unfortunately we’re only worse off than in 2008. Conservatives are still committed to bringing back the laissez-faire no-regulation economy of the 19th century. Many liberals want to go soft on prosecuting business criminals. The Supreme Court is doing its best to gut the government’s regulatory power completely.
Want some examples? Amazon’s One Medical switched its helpline to a call center that often gives bad advice.
In the same vein a former Cigna Medical Director says the company pressured her to review cases too fast.
“We’ve generally come to accept that when a product is free to use, we are not simply the users: We become the product, monetized over and over.”
Venture capitalist Marc Andressen says he’s grateful the opioid epidemic keeps white trash complacent.
In the unregulated world of home health tests, “incremental scientific innovations can be quickly funded, brought to market and peddled to consumers online before their health benefit has been proved.”
Sometimes bad business and bad sex go hand in hand.
Florida’s meat industry doesn’t fancy competition from lab-grown meat. So they’ve gotten DeSantis to ban it.
A man worth $16 billion is still allegedly willing to break the law to make an extra $400,000.
Then there’s Boeing and its defective airplanes.
As John Keynes once said, looking to a better future “The love of money as a possession – as distinguished from the love of money as a means to the enjoyments and realities of life – will be recognised for what it is, a somewhat disgusting morbidity, one of those semicriminal, semi-pathological propensities which one hands over with a shudder to the specialists in mental disease.” We are, alas, a long way from that future.
