CEOs Should do Good. Or Else.

CEOs should do Good. Or Else.

This isn’t an anti-capitalist essay. It doesn’t provide a blueprint for righteous revolution or suggest a political solution. This is a simple essay about the situation we find ourselves in. This is a speculation about a world, where you can buy healthcare like a Good Person “ought to” and still lose a third of the time, and what that world looks like, for CEOs.

You’ve seen the news. CEO gunned down in the streets. The blunt logic of this killing is undeniable. “Frankly, these parasites had it coming,” but also “Obviously, the problem is more complex”. Both of these things can be true.

What is coming increasingly into focus is that society no longer serves the people. Young people in particular have less assets, less hope, and less savings than previous generations. The economy might be going great, but those gains have gone to the people that already have money, the already established, and the CEOs.

Yes, “the problem is more complex,” but an underclass of people with no hope for the future, is growing. The trend has no signs of stopping. And, our society has done the work of edifying the CEO as the top of the pile, the most successful, the winners. The changemakers.

Change via the political system becomes less and less possible. Trust in our institutions is lower than ever. I read a description of Trump as a “molotov hurled at the political system” and if after two terms the system isn’t ablaze, what then? What if people who do try to change the system are murdered or imprisoned or disappeared, while the people in power, the changemakers, walk free? What if you can commit absurd and obvious injustices against the little guy, with impunity?

What if there is even the perception that the upper class can’t be touched in politics, in the legal system, in the so-called free market? What if even given all that, you still have a problem with how they’re behaving, how they’ve treated people like you. What recourse even is there?

If you have to piss in a bottle at your Amazon warehouse shift, your joints aching as you rapidly reach the age at which your productivity drops below the mandated minimum, maybe you’ll find some comfort that Jeff Bezos has pledged ten billion dollars to combat climate change. But maybe when your air-conditioning breaks during a record-hot summer and your Zillow™ landlord doesn’t fix it, you don’t care that he did that. Maybe Bezos has laundered his reputation, but society is still dirty enough that it doesn’t matter.

Yes, “the problem is complex”, but there are clearly people who have the power to do something, that aren’t doing enough.

Pictured: Shinzo Abe, victim of the CEO mindset/grindset

What parts of society have the CEOs left unchanged? What immense power do they irresponsibly hold over our lives? They know what’s at stake. Many have plans for apocalypse shelters, escape routes, and private jets. Perhaps they even look on forlornly at an increasingly dangerous and volatile world. Maybe they don’t see any solutions. And even then in the fucking idiotic doomsday equivalent of jury nullification they’re caught speculating over whether they ought to kill their pilot or not after they get to the bunker. Yes, “the problem is more complex” but also, in the world they tenuously rule, their playground, “these parasites had it coming”. CEOs effectively stood by as society got rougher and rougher for the underclass. Maybe they didn’t even build that society, but they’ve been applauded as examples of American exceptionalism in the media for years. They have power that few can wield. They might try to blame “woke” and “DEI”, but that doesn’t put food on the table of the 99%. The blunt logic of people with nothing to lose is that CEOs are ideal targets for frustration. If they didn’t kill the American dream, they were a bystander as it was murdered.

CEOs should do Good. I cannot offer any solutions. I can’t promise a glorious return to a hopeful society through any means. But it is, frankly, simple to observe, that CEOs have power that others don’t. Maybe there are some good CEOs, and maybe there are really bad ones, and maybe we ought to know the difference, maybe “the problem is more complex”. But, if you’re lying in bed and your back hurts, you did everything right and they’re still denying your claim, maybe if you don’t have enough economic, legal or political power to do anything and you want to do something, there are only a few options left.

CEOs should do Good. Or Else. If CEOs don’t want to live in a world where bikepacking to Peter Thiel’s New Zealand apocalypse shelter with a ghost gun seems like an affordable palliative care plan, they should build that world. If CEOs don’t want to be gunned down out the front of the Hilton in New York, a city that some may consider the apex of American achievement, they should build that world. Maybe saying “the problem is more complex” is true, and maybe CEOs will bleat this out as a hopeful plea. But maybe, just maybe, we need the people with power to build a world where there is room for complexity, because the other option is a world where things are quite simple.

Rest in peace Jamal Khashoggi