With Integrity Lost, is Profit Really a Replacement?

What’s the core cause of our distemper? There are several basic ideas that get bounced around but often go unstated.

1. Hidden corrupt/self-serving elites–either well-cloaked or hidden in plain sight–are working the levers of power behind the smoke screens of government and finance. If we could wrest power from them, this would fix what’s broken.

2. Cycles of order and disorder. There are many cycles in civilization: of credit and economic expansion / contraction, elite overproduction, environmental / consumption overshoot, institutional decay, and over-complexity. When some or all of these overlap, we call it polycrisis.

There’s no way to avoid these periods of disorder/decline, we just have to live through the rebalancing / transition, which is generally difficult, ranging from unpleasant to catastrophic.

The concentration of power in fewer and fewer hands (i.e. corrupt/self-serving elites) can be understood as a cycle of decay and decline that characterizes civilizational end-games.

3. Model Collapse. The unstated incentives, values and mythologies that are the belief/conceptual foundations of a culture/social order/economy no longer track the real world, becoming increasingly disconnected from the feedback that once provided self-correction. Rather than modify these core beliefs/concepts, the culture doubles down, staking more and more of the system’s capital / output, both physical and symbolic, on maintaining the illusion that this belief construct still reflects and controls the real world.

This leads to a state of psychosis that eventually breaks down, leading to mass confusion, paralysis and destabilization as the shared model of “how the world should work” collapses.

I’ve written about these dynamics for many years, focusing most recently on Model Collapse.

Today I want to discuss another type of decay: the systemic loss of integrity, which is scale-invariant, meaning that it’s not just individuals who lose integrity–institutions, cultures and societies also lose integrity.

Integrity encompasses many things: trustworthiness, honesty, transparency, following through on commitments, and the ability to embrace a realistic appraisal.

Once these decay or are jettisoned as no longer serving our interests, i.e. they’ve become too costly, integrity is lost.

What replaces integrity is artifice: projecting the appearance of integrity while focusing solely on private gain / profit.

In other words, there are no incentives in our system that reward integrity; the incentives are all to maximize profit / private gain by any means available, including harming others and the biosphere. Nothing is off the table.

I discussed these dynamics in my book Ultra-Processed Life, which describes the replacement of authenticity with self-serving artifice, artifice which becomes increasingly disconnected from the real world, leading to Model Collapse.

Originality has integrity. So does kindness. So does genuineness / authenticity.

The corporate model–seeking to maximize profits by any means available–takes originality and authenticity and reduces them to a cookie-cutter / economies-of-scale formula / product. Rather than 1,000 local bakeries making real bread, a corporate bakery makes 100,000 loaves of a product that has been designed to maximize profit by cutting corners and optimizing production.

Those who have never tasted real bread think this product is “real bread” because that’s all they’ve ever experienced.

This is the Ultra-Processed Model of Maximizing Profits: take a genuine product or service, strip out all its originality and authenticity as “costs reducing profits,” eliminate all human connections as “needless expense,” and then optimize the production of the synthetic, ersatz facsimile of what was once authentic by using cheap fillers and cutting corners.

In other words, replace integrity and authenticity with profit.

Market food products that are edible but not nutritious, products that erode health rather than sustain health.

Reduce the coach-class seating on airliners to immiserate the customers so they have to “upgrade” to obtain a seat equivalent to what they were provided a generation ago for a coach fare.

Reduce the quality of products so they fail within a few years and must be replaced. Design the products to be unrepairable.

Design products to be addictive, i.e. harmful to human health, because addictive products and services are more profitable.

And since power has been consolidated in fewer and fewer hands, and these power structures are purposefully cloaked by the 24/7 distractions of synthetic content (”news,” “entertainment,” “influencers,” etc.) designed to generate addictive discord and drama, it’s easier than ever to buy political influence and legal cover for the replacement of integrity with profit.

But maximizing profit isn’t a replacement for integrity. It’s a self-serving psychosis being sold as “Progress.”

It’s the hollowing out of all that has intrinsic value in favor of cheap, soulless baubles labeled “progress, innovation, new” because our Mythology of Progress has trained us to respond to these labels with Pavlovian predictability.

We’ve collectively succumbed to the substitution of soulless zeros and ones strung together in the most profitable arrangements for integrity and authenticity. This is akin to embracing plutonium as the “new, innovative must-have.”

All this has occurred with such ease that it’s unrecognized. We’re empty and unhealthy, and the “solution” we’re offered is a new homogenized, optimized-for-profit product or service, a synthetic facsimile designed to spark a dopamine hit from feeling a brief flash of being recognized, becoming visible, being valued. Then it dissipates and we’re again in the toxic wasteland of a landscape devoid of integrity but brimming with profit.

https://charleshughsmith.substack.com/p/with-integrity-lost-is-profit-really