Background study-Principles

I

Every moment in human history was full of questions of destiny. But perhaps in no other age has the distinction between right and wrong been as important as it is today. As environmental conditions deteriorate, human existence is threatened. Today, the question is not how to provide for the material needs of more than 8 billion people, but how to do so without destroying other biological conditions such as clean air and fresh water. Our bad choices can easily lead to tragedy. To avoid this, we need to understand some basic concepts of our existence.

1. The Life

Each life form is a variety of individuals. Individuals strive to maintain their own existence and to pass their lives on to their descendants, thus sustaining that life form. There are conditions for the maintenance of a life form, which we call needs. Living organisms provide their needs through instinctive and/or mental activity. The difference between humans and animals is measured not in the difference in the existence of thinking, but in its quality. Animals act according to their needs now, without concern for future consequences. When they get hungry, they go hunting for prey or grazing. That is why we can say that animals live in the present.

2. The specificities of human subsistence

But when people get hungry, they reach into their fridge or other reserves. And not just these days. The mammoth became extinct because people hunted it, because the capture of a single specimen provided the human tribe with a livelihood for months. Now we work or we are in business and in a week a month or a year when we get a salary or an income, we will be able to live on it for a while. But when we are doing these activities, we are living off the results of our past activities. So, we live in time, past-present-future.

This is due to the brain's greater capacity to remember events and establish cause and effect relationships between them. Therefore, its action in the present aims to maximise its utility in the future. The result of one's economic activity in the past secures one's livelihood in the present, and the result of one's activity in the present secures one's livelihood in the future.

It is the driving force behind the evolution of human living conditions, because everyone wants to live a little better in the future than they did in the past and present. But what we want, which aspect of our livelihood we want to improve, is different for everyone, as are our skills and needs.

3. The human community

Humans do not live in communities like animals, not because of some genetic necessity, but because it is consciously foreseeable that it is practical. Community has three functions:

• defines the rules of coexistence (regulatory function)
• protects the individual from external and internal attacks, provides justice (protective function)
• ensures the efficient conduct of economic activity and supports its members in difficult situations (subsistence function) -

Living in a community allows us not to take care of all our needs by ourselves, but to specialise in an economic activity that we are willing and able to do, and to exchange the results for other needs. This allows community members to meet their needs at a much higher level than if they were to take care of everything themselves. The specification and exchange of economic activities leads to economic competition. And economic competition leads to technological progress.

The exchange of economic goods is fundamental to all human societies. Efficient economic exchange — in which both parties are equally able to improve the satisfaction of their needs — requires that the exchange partners are of equal status.

Unfortunately, an economic activity requires people to work together and it lead a hierarchical structure. Some sacrifice their savings to carry out an activity, some make decisions, and others implement them. As a result, it is difficult to evaluate these activities fairly, to distribute the results of the activity, and those in more favourable positions often abuse their power.

Moreover, in the early dawn of human history, when technology was at a much lower level, society as a whole functioned as one large economic organization, because the work of every individual was needed for the survival of communities. This is how hierarchical societies developed, which were generally characteristic of the time.

However, due to technological development, the situation has fundamentally changed. Modern societies are marked by unemployment, meaning not everyone's work is needed to produce the necessary goods. Nevertheless, in some societies the hierarchical structure has remained, resulting in a large economic gap between individuals and lower levels of economic and technological development.

Another problem in these societies is that the rules governing social coexistence often change rapidly to serve the interests of those at the top of the hierarchy. As a result, the majority of the population is unable to make long-term plans for their economic activities, since the ever-changing rules undermine them. Therefore, people tend to exploit their opportunities in the short term. This runs counter to the long-term perspective required by the concept of natural sustainability.

From the perspective of environmental sustainability, these hierarchical societies are typically characterized by:

• members of the higher hierarchy being more likely to engage in environmentally harmful activities, since they live farther away from the affected locations,
• local residents having no means to prevent the degradation of their own environment,
• the lower level of technological development leading to inefficient use of natural resources,
• where making a living is a daily struggle, people do not concern themselves with long-term issues like environmental sustainability.

4. Sustainability

Therefore, the characteristics of society and the economy are closely linked to environmental sustainability. The preservation of our natural values—and thus the assurance of the conditions for humanity's continued existence—can only be guaranteed if equality increasingly takes root within societies.

In such a case, people will have more opportunities to work according to their own abilities and preferences. This increases economic competition and activity, resulting in more intense market rivalry. The winner of this competition will not be the one with strong connections to the state, gaining advantages through corruption, but rather the one who performs better. Therefore, in such a society, the rules are also more stable than in current hierarchical societies, and this is how societies themselves become sustainable.

This makes it necessary to show greater appreciation for employees, business partners, and customers.This system must lead to a fairer distribution of income. As a result, new and innovative solutions emerge, increasing the efficiency of natural resource use, which ultimately leads to a decrease in the consumption of these resources and the development of a sustainable natural and social environment.

Therefore—contrary to what many believe—it is the expansion of social equality, not its restriction, that leads to real sustainability and economic growth. No long-term natural sustainability without social sustainability - Common Good.

Péter András Rózsás