Why business?

I’m reading a book, A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson, I’ve gone through 10 pages, very interesting. The reason I’m mentioning this book is because it tries to explain the birth of the Universe, the concept of time, space and what would hopefully end in an attempt to explain the reason for ‘existence’. Man by nature is a selfish being, irrespective of what anyone might say. (Here ‘man’ includes both the sexes, I am not by any stretch of imagination a sexist) When the specie Homosapiens came to exist, (I do not want to deal with details that existed before the birth of the ‘intelligent man’, no doubt the evolutionary process helped in transforming a chimp or a gorilla into a being capable of reason), he must have been quite angry. For one, he couldn’t really ‘think’ unless he came up with a language to ‘think’, and to come up with something as complex as language, he definitely needed to ‘think’. I’m an Agnostic person; I really don’t know whether God exists, or even if he did, I couldn’t care less. But the fact that a lump of flesh and blood could come up with something so complex as language, respect, faith, and intelligence in a very short span of time makes me want to believe that God does exist.

Fast forward a few thousand years, now man could communicate in probably grunts and squeals, he figured out that he had to stick his ‘extra finger’ into dark places to make more of him (How Man became capable of that particular idea is something to think about), and figured out that food was required to stay alive, sabre-tooth tigers wouldn’t make good pets, et cetera. Most of what we learn is by observation, and it must have been the same story with Mr. & Mrs. Flintstone. ‘Business’ is just making sure that you stay alive at the cost of something else. There is never a detached occurrence in the Universe, everything is bound inextricably with everything else, and so for Man to stay alive, he had to make sure that anything that was a danger to his existence had to be obliterated. The concept of business possibly had its roots in the basic human feelings of gratitude and respect. There can be no one point in history that can be labelled as the birth of the idea of ‘business’. It arose out of the creation of certain very basic tendencies in Man. Sustenance was of paramount importance. If by a twist of fate, one Mr. X decided to kill a dinosaur that was about to kill Mr. Y and did kill it, how would Mr. Y feel? This was probably when the idea of respect was born. And in fact, the root of most ideas is ‘power’. From power arises respect, and from respect comes faith, and so forth. Power was very apparent to Man in nature. He knew that when the earth shook or there were bright flashes of light from the sky, he had to run for cover. Knowledge is built on assumptions, and later the assumptions are verified and knowledge is adapted to the available truth and future knowledge is built on this. Knowledge is power, it isn’t just a bunch of words, and these words have their roots in centuries of existence of Man. For Man to gain ‘power’ over nature, he had to be able to protect himself against the furies of nature, and for that he required mastery over the elements that caused all the damage.

What I’m trying to say here is this, ‘business’ is just a concept that exemplifies the basic feelings in Man. For survival, Man required mastery over forces that were out to kill him, and clearly define a hierarchy of respect, so that power was concentrated and more power signified more respect. This is very interesting because this idea hasn’t changed for centuries. For a system of business to evolve from a very rudimentary barter system to a complex, electronic chaos that it is today is something truly remarkable.

The idea of ‘business’ still exists today, most importantly because it helps to maintain an order in society, an extremely unfair one in many ways. Power can be inherited, and that is probably why business has persisted for so long. Business or the amount of money each person has decides his societal status and his power over other less fortunate humans. As the gap between those who are privileged with power and those who aren’t keeps increasing, the objective of business is being defeated. Order, the sacred concept by which humans are bound together, is increasingly becoming more and more unstable. It will not be long before the unprivileged decide that it has gone far enough and revolt, and when that happens, the idea of business will still prevail, the only change being the redistribution of power. This was apparent in the Russian Revolution, the French Revolution, and various wars of independence that were fought all over the world.

‘Business’ was devised to make humanity prosper as a whole, by decreasing the communication gap, share resources, to co-exist peacefully, and reduce carnage and genocide by sharing ideas rather than crossing swords.

That idea, I sadly say, has completely failed.