So to meet this need we all get up to go to work, we go to our offices, factories, businesses and establishments to earn money so we are better able to offer protection to ourselves and to our families.

Are we in agreement so far? Let's now suspend this train of thought and take another one.

What's the difference between mother breast-feeding a child and servant bottle-feeding her master's child? Both are satisfying hunger. So we can say both are satisfiers of a need. But do are they equal in value to the child and her family?

Let's examine it a bit closely: Bottle feeding will satisfy the need for subsistence, but breast feeding will simultaneously satisfy the needs for subsistence, protection, affection, understanding, participation, leisure, identity and freedom.

Each society adopts different methods for the satisfaction of the same fundamental needs. "We may go so far as to say that one of the aspects that define a culture is its choice of satisfiers.” So clearly it's more rewarding to use strategies that satisfy more than one need. In fact, would it not be great if one strategy can meet all our needs? What would that strategy look like?

I guess that strategy would be called “mutual understanding and education”. In other words everyone engaged in finding out what we all want and then everyone engaged in figuring out how to get that.

So, coming back to our work, we are told to follow orders, to sell products, to reduce costs, and to increase profitability. In doing so we will deserve our salary that may be used to meet my need for protection. And with that salary comes the possibility that we can have more of what we've always wanted (safe, healthy, and attractive communities and environments) and less of what they never wanted (violence, fear, abuse, pollution, injustice, etc.)

But are our salaries providing more of what we want and less of what we don't want? Some will say yes, a few will say no and most will say sometimes. So if our salaries are not meeting our needs what is that called?

I and other like-minded people call it poverty.

Rather than poverty just being defined as being below a certain income threshold, the Chilean economist, Max-Neef argues, "any fundamental human need that is not adequately satisfied reveals a human poverty."

So anytime our hard earned salaries do not help us get the satisfiers that meet any of our needs, we experience a type of poverty.

He then suggests, "Each poverty generates pathologies".
Based on such an analysis, Max-Neef believes the US is among the poorest countries in the world.

Thinking that all of our economic goods will fulfill our basic needs fools us. No wonder that once the elusive economic dream and prosperity is captured, so many people discover their lives are empty and meaningless.

Now let's suspend that thought here for the moment and I want to share another major learning of mine.

For the last number of years I have been working and training my self to work as a mediator; a person who helps others resolve conflicts. In my work I discovered that there are only two basic reasons why we have conflicts. One is our need for autonomy is not met and the other our need for interdependence is not met.

So what do these words mean to us? Autonomy is a person's ability to decide what his wants are and then develop strategies for satisfying his wants and interdependence is to understand the wants of others and recognize the relationship that exists between the satisfaction of others wants and one's own welfare. We can only eliminate conflict if we are committed to both these ends simultaneously.

So if you sell a product in the market say antibiotics your need for economic welfare is being met and so is the ill consumers' need for regaining good health is being met. Now say the consumer does not use the antibiotic safely and creates a drug resistant bacterium because of this misuse. Then his need for protection from harmful bacteria is not being met and nor is yours for enriching the consumers welfare. So you both experience poverty and at the same time get into a conflict. That's double jeopardy.

But there is no conflict when everyone benefits. Since everyone shares basic needs, it is more likely to get broad support, especially if there are grassroots societal discussions about basic needs and how they can be met.

Businesses can facilitate such discussions. I see that as our fundamental responsibility. I see business having the resources, energy, intelligence, and above all an over riding sense of survival that says “the only way I can survive and thrive is to understand what the consumers real needs are and then not only develop products that will meet those needs but also ensure they are sold and used in harmony with our values of welfare for others.”

As I see it we are really in the business of making and pushing goods that are created in cultures very different from ours and these goods may not be meeting our real needs.

If we engage in a meaningful dialogue with no prejudices such as those that tell us that “our public is stupid and people will buy anything”, will we find more stability, order and respect in society. Hear these words again: Stability, order and respect in society. Is not that an environment every business wants to invest in?

Those who hold tight to power and money (which may be seen as an attempt to assure security and other basic needs) will have strong incentives to consider relaxing their grip.

I don't see business as an aggressive push for market share; I define business as enriching oneself while seeking ways to enrich others. Aggression is a byproduct of scarcity, of living in ‘khasara'. Anthropologists Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead have shown that non-aggressive societies existed in the past where each member played the role of interdependence of the type I defined above. We are conditioned to believe that man is a beast and must be manipulated and controlled so we run our businesses in that manner: control employees and manipulate customers.

Do we have a model to follow? All the discussions about consumer rights and business ethics for the last 50 years have come from the USA that traditionally runs on the premise that adversarial and competitive positions elevate humans to perform to their best. So, corporate responsibility is limited to maximizing owner's profits and stock value while remaining within the confines of the law. These adversarial positions lead to a winner-take-all end result or a “with us or against us” partnering.

We are not taught any other model except the competitive/adversarial one.

What we are not taught is that not far from here we had a modern society, which used three kinds of bricks in their homes depending whether it was a toilet or a bedroom, or a wall. They had by our standards, water and drainage systems that we don't have. They had granaries for storing food and public baths for rest and recreation. The revised population estimation of this city, called Moenjedaro, is 130,000 people. What we are not taught is that we have found no weapons in these classic ruins. When everyone's needs are met weapons are obsolete. They are then rendered useless. They did not need consumer protection councils or protection from big business. They did not need police or armies. For 800 years they carried trade all the way up to Mesopotamia and it was peaceful, sustainable and life serving.

We have our history in front of us. We can either learn to crush others so we may get some of our needs met or we can work towards understanding and dialogue and get all our needs met. What is more responsible?