Generosity is capitalist
Inlea’s CEO, Xavier Simó, writes an article every fortnigh for Cronica Global. Here is the most recent one that has been published. This time, he wrote about how generosity is capitalist.
My family and the school I went to educated me to worry me about loving: love God, love your parents, love your family, love your neighbor, etc. Additionally, I had to love things and make an effort to get them. And that effort was always individualist: if you love studying, you will have a degree and find work; if you love your job, you will be promoted within the company; etc. At the end, to love was a selfish thing, and society allowed it.
At an economic level, all the inputs went in the same direction: if you loved something, you had to have it, and to have it, you had to buy it. Advertisements were directed towards satisfying you love for material or immaterial things. I’ll give you an example; if you re-watch the 1985 Seat Ibiza advert on Youtube, the car appears dashing through the desert and a very masculine voice says: “feel the attraction of the new Seat Ibiza”. It presents the car as a desirable object. The advertiser wanted you to buy the car. He/she wanted you to love it.
Consequently, in the end, selfishness was used by capitalism. Selfishness was capitalist.
However, now, my family, my wife, my children’s school and I myself educate my children to worry about being loved: they constantly make public presentation, so that they’re visible to their peers; they do group work, so that they’re accepted; they access social media and they aspire to have many “likes”, to be even more loved. In other words, they share their lives and society rewards them.
If you don’t believe it, have a look at 2017’s Seat Ibiza advert. A young boy calls his girlfriend’s name at her window at night. He shows her the care from the street and she come out of her family house to meet him. And, surprise, she comes out with her whole family. The advert continues with the boy driving the car with his girlfriend in the passenger seat and her family in the back seats. The car is no longer a desirable object. The car allows the boy not only to be loved by his girlfriend, but by her father, mother and brother.
So we have gone from loving to being loved.
My suggestion is that if you run a company that continues to promote the “selfishness” of its client, start thinking of reorienting it towards “generosity”. In other words, offer products or solutions that allow your client to prove their generosity or make it very visible.
And if you’re a worker, the best option to make yourself visible, be generous, or be loved, is through making the most out of digitalization. If your company is in a digitalization process, take advantage of it. Your company is trying to make information flow quicker, seeing for the customer’s needs faster. And for that information to flow, it must be shared. If you are generous, you will make your company more efficient and profitable. In other words, to be loved is a generous act, and society will reward it.
To summarize, generosity is now capitalist.
The original article was published through Cronica Global and can be found here.
