Hey Kossacks,
Over the weekend I got the opportunity to write an article for Huffington Post about Whole Foods CEO John Mackey, especially focusing on his company's "Declaration of Interdependence," since a few years ago I wrote a book with the same name for a subtitle. It's starting some really good discussion, read it here.
Here's a snippet:
As a Buddhist practitioner, I work hard to identify and slowly transform my own internal hypocrisies. Most of them take the following form: I declare good intentions to benefit myself and others. Yet, I fall prey to deepseated destructive habits and fearful self-obsessions instead. As a practice, whenever I recognize a destructive habit or a cognitive dissonance, I set an intention to work mindfully and diligently to open myself to a larger, more compassionate, and less fixated worldview. This work is slow and difficult, and I look like a hypocrite myself a large percentage of the time. But unless I choose to recognize my own hypocrisies, the work of positive transformation never begins at all. An extension of this practice is to not support the obvious hypocrisies of a friend (and my wallet, at least, has definitely befriended Mr. Mackey for years), especially when the friend is in a position of enormous power and influence.
So until Mr. Mackey learns that truly declaring interdependence means we take care of each other no matter what -- a declaration best furthered in the healthcare debate by supporting a single-payer plan, or, at the very least, a strong public option -- I am not going to support his cognitive dissonance on interdependence with any more of my hard-earned local-organic-neo-hippie-spinach money.
I approached the topic from the point of view of the truth of interdependence, which is something I try to study diligently as a Buddhist teacher and practitioner.
Some further thoughts arose after reading comments on the article, which I'll share below. I thought I'd start a thread on Dkos about how we are declaring interdependence for ourselves.
Some further thoughts that arose for me based on comments to the HuffPo article are below:
First, I'd like to say that after reading Mr. Mackey's original piece from his blog, I realize that he did not use the term Obamacare. He did however, use the same ridiculous Margaret Thatcher "socialism" quote (We could reply to her by saying the problem with Billionaires is eventually other people realize they took all the money). People who are advocating healthcare reform are not socialists, unless you are also willing to call pretty much every advanced market-based economy in the world which has universal healthcare a socialist country.
By the way, the only time I read the WSJ is if someone sends me an Op-Ed from the CEO of a place I shop, which also happens to be a place that declares interdependence as synonymous with its brand, and a place that serves (sadly) as a de-facto community center for people with mostly progressive values. So, I won't be reading much of the WSJ in the future, since it clearly showed poor editorial ethics with Mr. Mackey's piece, which I think is common practice over therre. (BTW, HuffPo also changed the title of my piece. The Original was "Whole Foods CEO and the Declaration of Interdependence")
However, the underlying problem of an argument that fails to understand interdependence still remains. Could everyone imagine for a minute, if we lived in an alternative universe where police services was completely privatized (except for the elderly), and Mr. Mackey was making similar arguments based on the excellent job his company had done in providing employees with great private police coverage? It would be a great article, if and ONLY if he first advocated - declaring interdependence - a public police force which protected everyone from harm equally on some basic level, and then on top of that public force he ALSO advocated policies that promote consumer choice if they wanted to purchase extra security.
Can anyone imagine if police work was privatized at all (sounds like a dystopian sci-fi movie to me!)? Can anyone imagine arguing that it should stay totally privatized, with some controls to provide smart choices in consumer behavior toward security (maybe if your mind had grown habitually used to this dystopian system, maybe if it was what you falsely took as given, fixed, and solid, or were locked inside a mindset fearful of change, you would PRAISE the private police service your employer provided you with). Can anyone tell me why healthcare is less important, interdependently speaking, less worthy of community support, than police, firefighting, etc? This is where things just don't add up.
Also, Mr. Mackey's seems to side with the fearful playbook that those advocating reform are somehow anti-freedom and anti-choice, anti-market, and into "spending other people's money." This seems highly disingenuous to me. He does have a few good points about consumer choice which I am all for, but those good points only make sense AFTER basic-level healthcare is guaranteed for everyone.
To the Whole Foods' employees who weighed in: I am so happy to hear from your direct experience of good healthcare. Thanks also for all the good conversations at the checkout counter. But you also have to realize that you have a good spot within what by any relative measure is a broken system. Unless we change the system, anecdotal stories of success don't repair all the damage done otherwise. Personally, I want to offer my money, time and energy to those in power who are supporting interdependence on a systemic level, because the full understanding of that truth is a core value toward which I aspire.
Perhaps it feels harsh, as a few commenters mentioned, to hold all of Whole Foods responsible for Mr. Mackey's singular views. Well, I feel he has a powerful voice because of the success of the Whole Foods enterprise, and that voice is philosophically dangerous right now. It's a personal choice, a balancing of many different factors in my own contemplation, that led to my decision. Part of it is a desire to explore other local, organic food options more fully, which are starting to be plentiful in NYC.
None of my choices are set in stone. I am not advocating a boycott, since I don't have any authority to do so. I'm just not shopping at Whole Foods right now. If Mr. Mackey changes his position, or is no longer with Whole Foods, I'll change my mind in a hurry. Until then, I'm mindfully exploring other options. As one commenter put it, this constitutes something far more revolutionary to the status quo than a boycott.
It's a change of habit.