Business supremacy is a monster we can either feed or fight
As I watched the horrifying spectacle - astonishingly transparent political theater - of Trump and his cronies giving that notorious press conference in the White House with Nayib Bukele, the Salvadoran president, I felt anew the absolute bafflement that we could be in a place where such craven assholes run the country. You know, the press conference where Trump said he wants to deport natural-born U.S. citizens to prison camps in El Salvador (home-growns, he called them). The one where Trump and his cabinet might as well have set the Constitution aflame before our very eyes, unabashedly lying about their flagrant defiance of a Supreme Court ruling.
This is what we get, I suppose, when we assume that putting a businessman in the White House is a good idea. And not just any businessman, but the most cartoonishly mafia boss businessman we could find.
I’ve been thinking a lot about where this cultural narrative came from that has told us everything in the goddamn country should be run like a business. Where did we get this deeply flawed assumption that business skills are both desirable and translatable across nearly any field? I don’t know the answer to this, but I’m willing to bet it originated in the Reagan era, where so much of the worst of modern American culture came from (perhaps this also explains why Gen X is the Trumpiest generation, inexplicably increasing their approval of him since taking office).
This ideology of “business supremacy” is both idiotic and deeply callous. Businesses, especially large, public corporations, have one purpose: to create profit, to make some people rich. It is a legal imperative that a public company work to maximize profits for its shareholders; there is some leeway there, of course, but should a company take too many liberties under this directive, shareholders can and will sue. The purpose of a business is not to deliver the best product or service, it is simply to deliver one that is good enough to make a profit; or in some cases, it only need create the illusion that the company is poised to make a huge profit, thus increasing its valuation. The point being, it is absolutely not the responsibility of a business, at all, to take into consideration the wellbeing of humans or the planet. So business “leaders” are not well-versed in doing that. In fact, often, they must figure out how much exploitation and environmental destruction they can get away with.
Governments, of course, have a different purpose than businesses, one to which the wellbeing of a country’s citizens should be central. Universities have a different purpose than businesses. Hospitals have a different purpose. K-12 schools have a different purpose. At least, they should. But we’re so slavishly obedient to business supremacy, that many of us now blindly accept that the privatization and monetization of all goods and services is unequivocally better than any alternative.
Business supremacy has even infiltrated the environmental and social change spaces. A hallmark of what I like to call “White guy environmentalism” is the idea that going green is good for business, we can have a green economy, green growth. All these ideas, which are decades old now, have failed to produce legitimate climate results and are rooted in capitalist fantasy; but still, they reign supreme. Shoot, in my more naive years, I taught social entrepreneurship with the idea that market-based solutions could actually move the needle on social issues, that “doing good” was good business. Turns out it’s mostly greenwashing and clever marketing.
Business supremacy is everywhere, and it’s a scourge. It robs us of our ability to identify real root causes of problems and think creatively and compassionately about how to solve them. Not everything has to be market-based, and in fact, the profit motive is often part of the problem.
The persistence of business supremacy is particularly bizarre to me given the enshittification of nearly everything. There’s still this prevailing idea that somehow the profit motive and free market will make goods and services better. That if we’re given choice as a consumer, it will inevitably lead to better products. But how many of us feel like our phones or apps are better with every new software update? How many of us hate our now garbage-filled social feeds? How many of us long for the days when our cars were cars, not glitchy computers on wheels? I’m sure we could all think of a million examples of products that have gotten significantly worse over the years. Some of that is because a few companies monopolize many of the goods and services in our lives; we only have the illusion of choice. Some of it is due to the now ubiquitous practice of planned obsolescence. But it’s also because, again, businesses aren’t out to sell us the best product, they just want us to buy any product.
This is how we end up with Swedish Fish Oreos.
As I mentioned earlier, the narrative is not only that everything is better if treated like a business, but also that if you’re good at business, you’ll be good at everything else, too. Like, say, running a country or government entity. The thing is, usually when we’ve decided someone is “good at business” it just means they’ve made a lot of money as a businessperson, and perhaps successfully branded themselves as “good at business.” Nevermind how the actual business is doing, what practices (legal or illegal) they’ve used to run that business, or how they treat their employees.
Our culture rewards arrogant and antisocial behavior (in the psychiatric sense of the word - behavior that disregards the rights and wellbeing of others), and so those people often rise to power, in business and many other fields. I’ll never forget when a friend who attended an elite business school once told me he felt like he was surrounded by a bunch of used car salesmen. Everyone had an angle, a motive. Everyone was selling themselves to each other. Relationships were tinged with transactional residue. Because that’s what’s taught in business. Always be networking. Leverage your relationships. Friends, family, classmates, colleagues - all possible sites of extraction to serve your self-interest. Opportunities abound if you’re aggressive enough to seize them.
Business supremacy culture nurtures callousness, competition not care, opportunism, manipulation, and, of course, hoarding of wealth and power. And thus, we get Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, and of course, Donald Trump. An empire of monsters.
Businesses aren’t inherently bad (except, I would argue, large, multinational, monopolistic ones). But nor are they inherently good.
We live in a world that is designed to sever and disconnect us, to abstract, mediate, and monetize things that should be among the most embodied and relational human experiences - like friendship (social media), education (charter schools), art (AI), and care work of all kinds. We’re told to believe that these experiences that are unwieldy and emotional and complicated and generative and utterly human are actually best when optimized, customized, and roboticized. Why read something a fleshy and fallible human wrote when you can read words written for you by a more sanitized and simplified intelligence, delivered optimized for your precise needs?
We are now all subjects in a world full of objects. No wonder dehumanization and destruction are so terrifyingly easy these days. And our elected leaders are nearly all evangelists in this cult of business supremacy.
A Latine organizer I know was recently talking about canvassing in Latine communities, and said many folks told her they were voting for Trump because “he’s a good businessman.” Despite the dehumanizing and threatening rhetoric directed precisely at them, now coming to fruition in disappearances and deportations. I remember in 2016 people saying that we should give him a chance; he’s a good businessman, whether we like his personality or not. As if knowing how to make money as a buffoonish, second-rate entertainer qualified him to run the country.
Trump is the apotheosis of business supremacy, the id of business supremacy manifest. Post-2016, and especially post-2020, I thought the spell of business supremacy was perhaps being broken. For many people, I think it did break. But not enough, and here we are.
I expect things in this country will get worse before they get better. Because we’ve confused having a lot of money with being a good leader, we’re now being led by people who are both monumentally stupid and inhumane, and yet also cunningly good at one thing: prioritizing their own self-interest. Because this is what “good” business is: figuring out how to get mine, and as much of it as possible, even if it’s at the expense of collective wellbeing. “Good” business is motivated by short-term gains and ignores the human toll. “Good” business is the competitive spirit and wielding power to its advantage; cooperation and sharing are weaknesses, unrealistic. “Good” business is efficiency, or at least the illusion of it, over the slow, messy reality of human relationship. “Good” business addicts us to convenience at the expense of our ability to navigate friction.
The silver lining, perhaps, is that “good” business is unsustainable on a planet that functions according to reciprocity and relationality. “Good” business can’t escape the physical reality that exploitation and hoarding can’t exist indefinitely within a system in which resources are always recycled and redistributed. “Good” business will collapse, one way or another. In fact, I’d argue the system has already begun eating itself, recently spurred on by Trump’s asinine assertion of dominance and control through tariffs that were very obviously going to tank markets and throw the global economy into disarray. Reward antisocial behavior long enough, put a bully in charge with a gang of lackeys to do his bidding, insist that money and power over people make him an inherently good leader, and you get the logical results of a monster unleashed.
So let’s keep tearing down this grotesque cultural narrative that every facet of our lives, every institution on which we depend, would be better if it were run like a business. Let’s stop deifying businesspeople; yes, even the Beyonces and Taylor Swifts of the world. Let’s stop acting as if business is everything, everything is business, business is life.
Business supremacy is a monster and it’s doing monstrous things to us. We have two choices: we can feed it, or we can fight it. I choose to fight.