On Tuesday I was granted a free and exclusive look behind the scenes at London Zoo. My cousin Elliot showed me around. It was his last day so we spent it in back rooms with other outgoing staff passing round snakes and lizards, like splifs at a party. it wasn’t long before the ethics of the zoo were raised. Is it right to cage an animal? Elliot told me that before he worked at the zoo he had been against the idea but had been convinced otherwise by the high standards of animal welfare within London Zoo. In the wild almost all the animals would be either running for their lives or starving due to the savage nature of Darwinism. Is it better to be away from all that in a safe but limited haven or is freedom and the freedom to kill trump safety? The golden standard of all ethical decisions is to treat others the way you would expect to be treated, so what would we want?
Over the last 40 years successive governments on each side of the atlantic and around the world have been giving away power to the free market. When people had looked to politicians and civil servants for help they had been disappointed and disillusioned by the obvious self interest of those who claimed to serve the public. Corporations would react to and provided for our desires better and faster because instead of being driven by a fake sense of duty they were motivated by money. If they could make lots of money by serving the public with increasing standards then everybody would win.
Self interest proved to be a great motivator because as much as we would like to deny it, we are inherently selfish beings. The genes with in us use our behavior to fight for their place in the next generation so that becomes the ultimate goal of the human and left unchecked we will do anything to achieve it. If money and power attracts the partner necessary to make that happens then its worth the effort. Unfortunately its also worth it if it means being ruthless and that’s why capitalism has turned the world into a jungle where the predators do anything to sustain power and growth. That’s why half the worlds population own barely 1% of global wealth. Because corporations are only motivated to provide for people with money to spend it is under no obligation to help the poor, so despite humanities technological and scientific achievements more then 100,000 people will starve to death by this time tomorrow. This struggle is not restricted to big business, it manifests itself in every form of human control, from the gang wars on the streets of Rio to the upper middle call parents buying expensive houses to get their kids into a good school. Our endless self interest in every form of life will always hurt the poor.
There is an alternative, its called big government but is better known as socialism. In a truly socialist country we would be granted equality at the expense of the freedoms that allow us to screw each other over. Rich parents would not be allowed to limit the ambition os poor children by sending their to a private school because they would not exist, all schools would be the same and all children would have equal opportunities. We would have services run for the sole purpose of the running that service and not for profit at the expense of a weaker economy. It would be like London Zoo, we would have relative safety from the urges within others to exploit us at the expense of the freedom to exploit other people. If you think of communism as a third world zoo with mistreated elephants being kept in small spaces, socialism would be London zoo with its sizable tanks and free roaming chickens.
We will always rejected London Zoo. In the zoo I saw sparrows fly into the cage of vultures to search for food, they knew not enter the cage next door because it contained an hawk, that hawk would watch the sparrows though the cage like a… well a hawk. It patrolled the edges and kept parallel to the position of the sparrows and I even noticed it using its claws to dig a hole in a futile attempt to reach the vultures cage and snatch a sparrow.
We consistently rejected London Zoo because deep down we all are the hawk, we may me imprisoned by circumstance and may think it right that others are too but we want that sparrow. We want that chance to be the predator because we are trapped by the selfish ambitions of gene’s to provide the best future for you and your family.
