Barbara Frees Says Industrial Denial Dates Back to the British Slave Trade | Joe Rogan

It's to protect freedom, or if you're a slave trader, it's to rescue the Africans from terrible lives in Africa and bring them to the comfortable plantations. That was actually an argument? Oh, yeah. The slave trade had a complete rescue narrative. I'm talking about the British slave trade here because that was the first really intense campaign of industrial denial I could find. The British dominated the slave trade in the 1700s, and they faced a very powerful abolition movement at the end of that century, which was really going to the public and saying, look at how brutal this is. They had witnesses, they had the torture devices, they had all kinds of evidence. The British were really responding because even though they dominated the slave trade, they had this notion of themselves as civilized and promoting freedom and being very humane. This was starting to really affect the industry. The traders and the planters got together, they formed a slave lobby. They had a very organized campaign in response. There was a slave lobby. There was a very powerful slave lobby. The thing about the slave trade was you had people invested in it from the royal family down to the local bakers to many members of parliament. I mean, it was a widely accepted, fully legitimate industry. So the abolitionists really had their work cut out for them. They had all this evidence, the industry comes back and they knew they couldn't just say, oh, it's not so brutal. They actually came back with this complete counter narrative, which was we are rescuing these people, that the Africans are eager to be purchased. They actually try to market themselves as how fit they are for work. They enjoy that crossing across the Atlantic. There's singing, dancing, games of chance. When they get to the plantations, it is incredibly comfortable. They get comfy little houses. It's like a cradle to grave welfare state. They don't have to worry if they get sick. We take care of them. We feed them. They're doing way better than those poor peasants back there in Britain or those poor miners or those people working in the new factories. That was part of it. The next part of it was that they said that if they had left them in Africa, if you didn't continue this trade, all of these prisoners of war would be massacred or they would be eaten by cannibals or they would die of famine. So this was a rescue narrative. Here's the really clever part of this, because if you believe that you are rescuing them or if you persuade other people, I'm not suggesting the industry believe this, but if you can persuade people that you are rescuing them, the flip side of it is that abolition would doom them. You would be shutting the gates of mercy on mankind, because as one trader put it, the house of bondage is really the house of freedom to them. I may have misspoken that a little bit, but it was a truly Orwellian quote. So that way, you translate abolition into inhumanity, into brutality, and you portray the continued slave trade as a way to save these people. One quote was great, that if you were to free these slaves, and by the way, at this point they weren't actually talking about freeing the existing slaves, just stopping the flow of new slaves. But one of the quotes was that freeing the slaves would be cramming liberty down the throats of people incapable of digesting it. Wow. Yeah. So this was the first example that you found of industry that was working to try to distort the perceptions of reality so that they can continue what they're doing. Right. They did a lot of other things that we've seen modern industries doing. I mentioned the reference to the poor peasants, and they also talked about how would you like it, Britain, if people came in and started telling the peasants, and the soldiers, and the sailors that they had rights? So basically this kind of help us, or you are next. Your whole class structure is going to collapse, that kind of an argument. And then they had an argument about basically failing to make a distinction between their industry and their interests and the whole country, or rather kind of an early version of what's good for the country is good for GM and vice versa. They said, if you abolish this trade, it means universal bankruptcy for the kingdom. It means Britain is not powerful anymore. It means Britain becomes a province of France. It means in the sugar islands that the slaves will massacre the whites, exterminate the whites, or maybe make the white slaves. So they basically just created this incredible slippery slope that any kind of reform or certainly abolition of this industry would be disastrous for the entire kingdom. So how well documented is this in terms of the influencers? Who started this? Was there open discussions about how to spin this in a way that it's going to get people to think that slavery is a good thing? Well, I don't know about internal discussions within the industry. What we do have are lots and lots of books and pamphlets, because this was all done in writing. We also have some hearings, and we have parliamentary debates. They were recorded not verbatim, but people tried to write them down. So we have some version of what was actually said in these debates in the various hearings. There were parliamentary hearings. So there's actually quite a lot of evidence of the arguments being made in their own words. And then this was primarily in Britain, right? Right. Well, that's what I'm talking about here, obviously. We had our own abolition movement here in our own debate. That's what I was going to ask you. Did those same arguments... Did they actually get presented in the United States? Some of them did. In the United States, it was different, because of course you had an entire society built around slavery. And I read one reference, one historian saying that about half of the defenses of slavery came from the clergy. It wasn't quite the same sort of clearly, here is an industry and here is an audience that they're talking to. So that's one of the reasons I didn't focus quite at all, really, on the American debate. Half of it was from clergy? That's what this historian said. I didn't dig into those. I did, by the way, though, find one source. And now I don't remember if he was a plantation owner or something else who described the... Called slavery, you know, basically a way to make people as happy as can be and called it the ideal of communism. Which was funny, because you don't even think of communism, of that debate as existing. This would have been in the 1800s now. But he was saying that the North is exploiting these workers, not taking care of them, but in the South, we take care of them, we make them happy as slaves. Jesus. Yeah. So, is this a pattern that existed before that? Like, is there any evidence that there was something... It seems like whenever people start to make money doing something, whenever a corporation, particularly a corporation, right, because there's this diffusion of responsibility in a large group of folks, and they have this, you know, this obligation to earn money for all the people that are involved in the corporation. So they start rationalizing their decisions and then twisting things around. But is this something that can be traced back before then? Is this a natural human trait, this kind of deception? Well, I can't specifically answer whether it can be traced before then, because I didn't try to trace it. But I would not be at all surprised, because I do think it's a natural human trait. I mean, one of the issues that I started to struggle with on this book was deciding to what extent are people lying and when are they actually deceiving themselves. And I realized early on, there was just no way to write this book if I was going to try to parse that out. And I also decided it doesn't matter that much, because I think these are really very much intertwined. And they're both equally destructive, and they're both, I think, equally responsive to these kind of external circumstances that we create in corporations when we form corporations and we put them into a marketplace. So I do think it's part of human nature. I do think we've created this system that brings this out in people and really encourages it in so many ways. I mean, you mentioned the diffusion of responsibility, and that is huge, because we do know, and I dip into the social psychology in here, not a ton of it, because that science is still relatively new and kind of a little bit thin compared to the environmental science that I talk about, which is very, very deep. But we do know that when you diffuse responsibility, it makes it very easy for people not to feel responsible for the harm that's done. So if you've got a corporation, of course you have division of labor. You also have division of management from ownership. So if you're a lower worker and you're told to lie about something or cause some harm, well you're minding your own business and you let your boss take responsibility. If you're the boss, you're focused maybe on your employees and certainly on your shareholders. So if you're lying about something or causing harm, it doesn't necessarily feel like a personal selfish act of deception. It probably feels like an act of loyalty and responsibility to your shareholders. Your shareholders aren't going to care or know, because first of all, they're far away, usually. They don't really know what's going on. They have maybe just a temporary transactional interest in what's going on. They just bought the stock. They want to sell it quickly and make some money. So you don't really have anybody there who feels really responsible for this. There was a definition of the corporation from the early 20th century in something called the cynics dictionary. Has an ingenious device for obtaining personal profit without personal responsibility. And of course that is exactly what we intend from corporations, because we grant limited liability to the shareholders. And that's why it's that protection from risk that people are willing to pool their capital and that's sort of very key to the very idea of a corporation. And then of course the focus on profits means that you are constantly focused on money and in the most short-term way, not even long-term profits, which would be a narrow enough focus. But then there's a lot of other things to add to it. You've got competition. By definition, certainly if you're in competitive markets, we want there to be competition. So that means you are already in a kind of tribal mindset. And you've got the ideology of the marketplace, which we can go back to Adam Smith, The Invisible Hand, and basically the notion that if you can pursue your own self-interest in the marketplace, we'll automatically convert that to public good. And that does work in a lot of cases and probably worked a lot better in the 1700s. But when you've got these enormous organizations that have incredible market power and these very new risky technologies often, it is much harder to be confident that that's going to work. And then more recently, we've seen that idea that you don't have to worry about the social consequences of your commercial action just get intensified. We had Milton Friedman in 1970 writing this very persuasive article saying that the only real objective, the only legitimate objective of a corporation is to maximize shareholder profit. And if they're talking about protecting the environment or doing any of these other things, that's socialism. And that's illegitimate. And that really did sway a lot of people. That movement really moved forward. And then it got more extreme in the 90s and in the 21st century where you've got this strain of intense faith in market forces that was manifested by Alan Greenspan, the Fed, by the Koch brothers. David Koch has passed away, so now Charles Koch. And the network of influence groups that he created, the think tanks, the free market groups, these different academic groups. So one of the things that I try to trace a little bit in the book is talking about the rise of the consumer movement and the environmental movement in the 60s and 70s and people saying, wait a minute, we need corporations to be aware of these problems and we need government to regulate corporations to make sure that our cars are safe and our ozone layer is not destroyed. But then starting in 1980 when Reagan is elected, you suddenly see those concerns replaced with a concern over regulation and really a backlash that has come and gone but basically intensified over the years. And now of course we have a situation where not only do we have a government unwilling to regulate, but we have one that is rolling back critical regulations that were put in place by previous administrations. And of course influenced by these very corporations to do that. Absolutely. And it gets kind of complicated here because if you think for example about Charles Koch and Koch Industries, it's based in oil refining. So that is very much based in the fossil fuel industry. But the Koch network is very ideological, passionately ideological. And they just happen to coincide with being in the fossil fuel industry. But you have a lot of other groups that have received money from oil companies from the coal industry. So it gets kind of integrated. I do try to not treat them all the same in the book. I try to kind of differentiate and you really do have a difference between the kind of Koch perspective, the coal industry perspective, the oil industry perspective and then all of these little free market groups, actually they fit more around the Koch side. But they all seem to have one thing in common that they're rationalizing and justifying their actions because they want to continue to make profits regardless of the impact on the environment or the people. Exactly. And that's a weird thing about just the idea of a corporation itself. It's almost like a diabolical vehicle for allowing people to do things. To be able to do something and say, hey, we're going to do this as a collective and therefore no individuals are responsible for the results of the collective, particularly if you're not the one who gets to decide what gets done, you're just taking orders and you're just doing your job and your job is segmented and it's all compartmentalized. So you're not dumping anything in the river bomb. You don't have to worry about that. But I like your new car and that's a beautiful house that you bought with the profits of poisoning lakes. It's weird. Well, that's exactly it. In fact, I suggest in the book that if you were a super villain and you wanted to create a society that would ultimately destroy itself by imposing huge risks on each other and on the planet, you would probably create something that looks a lot like our current corporate-dominated global economy in the sense of these organizations that amplify your self-interest, that diminish your sense of responsibility, that amplify all of your biases. You'd have a justifying ideology to make it all seem fine. You would have the responsibility so diffuse that nobody would really feel too badly about it and you would give these folks incredible political power, including constitutional rights, so that they could dominate your democracy, so that they could ... Basically, corporations can do whatever is legal. It used to not be that way. They could do whatever they were authorized to do by their charter and then they'd have to stop so they'd get permission to build a canal and then they'd be done and go, go away. Eventually, we made them immortal and they could do whatever they wanted as long as it's legal and then we gave them a huge amount of power to determine what actually is legal by influencing our democracy. I was going to ask you about that. What is the birth of a limited liability corporation? When did all that occur? Well, they go way back. During the slave trade, they didn't necessarily call them that, but they were essentially owned by shareholders and so they would pool their capital, so it was very similar. We've had ... Actually, corporations are centuries old if you go back to, I think, some early universities and things, but we didn't have general purpose corporate laws in this country, I think, until mostly in the 1800s. When we first formed this country, you would have to go to the legislature. There were only a couple of significant corporations around even at the time of the founders, and so that's why you really don't see corporations in the constitution. They're not mentioned because they weren't very powerful. When they did get more powerful, you have some quotes from some of the founders saying, ooh, this is a little scary. Then of course, they became very powerful in the 1800s. You end up with the Gilded Age and so then you have folks like Teddy Roosevelt who are saying, wait a minute, this is a creation of law and so we get to determine how much power it has. He responded with the kind of trust-busting movements, breaking down some of the really big old trusts. That was probably the first big pushback where the government said, wait a minute, you corporations are too powerful, we're going to try to reduce that power. I think the next big phase of that would have been in the depression where you have the new deal coming in and saying, okay, banks, you just wreck the economy. We're going to regulate you. We're going to give workers more rights. We're going to create social security. We're going to do all kinds of things that diminish corporate power over the democracy. Then it happened again in the 60s and 70s. What I think is that it might be about to happen again given that there is now so much concern about corporate power, Citizens United, influence over our democracy, people worried about concentration of wealth at the very, very tippy top and obviously people worried that we are unable to deal with climate change. Another factor would be the power of social media corporations to influence elections, to influence public discourse. They seem to have kind of snuck in in a way that was really unexpected and people didn't see it coming. Well, that's actually the pattern. People never see it coming. All of these chapters pretty much begin with some kind of a discovery and some industry races in there and takes advantage of it. Even slavery, the discovery would have been the new world and this enormous commercial opportunity if you can just get the workers in there to grow the tobacco and the cotton and the sugar. You'd have the discovery, you have an industry springing up to take advantage of it and making a lot of money and changing social norms along the way. Then problems are emerging. Obviously, with slavery they were inherent, but problems will emerge. Other people outside the industry discover those problems and pay attention to them, draw attention and then eventually you get to a law. Now that's kind of an artificial ending because you have to make sure that law gets enforced, but in almost all of these chapters you get to some form of government action where they say, no, you can't do that anymore. We stop this industry, we ban this product, or at least we're going to try to tweak your behavior. But that process, first of all, it takes a long, long time and enormous damage can be done in the meantime. But that process doesn't work. You don't even get your somewhat happy ending if the industry has become so powerful that it determines whether it gets regulated or not and it blocks those regulations.