Technology has driven far-reaching changes around the world. It has allowed individuals and groups to exercise power and control. In the process, the lack of social responsibility has often been displayed in business and politics.
The purpose of tool making through the ages has been to improve human capabilities in the fight for survival, to hunt and gather food, to protect against the environment, predators and other aggressors. The holders of technology acquired power and ipso facto control over their own destinies. Industrial developments encouraged the shift in perspective from control over one’s life towards control over the environment.
‘Power’ may be defined as the capacity to influence people, events, and even the direction of change. ‘Control’ might mean to exercise a dominating influence. Although different words, ‘power’ and ‘control’ are often assumed to mean the same - dominance over processes, people and other resources.
Power has several sources, including position and group. These two types of power generally prevail. Positional power is legitimized by mandates acquired from states, or designations in organizations. In similar fashion, group power follows from membership in a specific faction, community, or religious group.In political and business areas power tends to become control, as in waging proxy wars, causing damage to the environment and people, involvements in scams or financial malpractices, etc. The events confirm Hobbs’s statement that power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
During much of the twentieth century the destructive sophistication of technology was witnessed, like the hydrogen and atom bombs dropped in World War II. Further, power dynamics between capitalist and communist ideologies led to proxy wars being fought in other countries, devastating nations of the ‘third world’. For example, new military hardware, napalm and other horrific weapons were experimented with in the “killing fields” of Asia.
The end of the Cold War led to the dismantling of the Soviet Union and her Eastern Bloc satellite states. Many of these countries still struggle with their national identity and relationships with one another. Military organizations of most countries today perceive their defensive weaponry inadequate without nuclear, biological and chemical warheads. The US-led coalition forces are now engaged in wars of liberation in countries under individual or group tyranny. The goal is to install new democracies in those regions, although local resistance to their presence is extreme.
The abuse of resources by production and manufacturing houses, like the indiscriminate release of industrial wastes into rivers, toxic gases polluting the air and thinning the ozone layer, have been implicated in global warming, changing climate patterns and new diseases. Indiscriminate hunting has also endangered many animal species, among them tigers, whales and dolphins. Multinational corporations (MNCs) have at opportunity, flouted human rights and environmental concerns in developing nations, and are commonly viewed as symbols of capitalistic greed in those regions.
The economic downturn that hit the Western world the hardest exposed the ‘rot’ in management circles even at home. Individuals at the top of the pyramid entrusted with steering the corporation in the ‘right’ direction used organizational positions to personal advantage. Power and policy was utilized to feather their own nests, defrauding their people and the general public. The effects of the ethical bankruptcy cascaded into the global financial collapse.
Business and political compulsions have created the “conflicts” that divide people. The single-minded pursuit of advantage has retarded healthy development in human relations. I t has instead borne bitter fruit - us-and-them polarizations on the basis of race, religion and culture, and vengeful reactivity. The privileged have grown richer and greedier while the poor, more disadvantaged and resentful. The accumulated negativity displays in their eagerness to embrace any cause that advocates the removal of perceived “inequalities” through violence.
This has culminated in the rise of global terrorism. The export of terror has become lucrative trade, with the underprivileged classes the main sources of potential suicide bombers. They play out ideological convictions, or enlist merely to provide the dependents they leave behind some economic means of survival.
The urban nature of terrorism, targeting densely populated metropolitan areas using men, women and children, has rendered conventional military warfare almost obsolete. No country is free from the fear of attack either from outside or from within its territorial boundaries. The point is self-interested domination that shows little consideration for other groups in the same universe, reaps a similar harvest.
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