Profit and its illusions
Profit – from Latin profectus ‘progress, profit’, from proficere ‘to advance’.
We seek as humans to advance. To make progress. This is a healthy impulse.
But at what price? And is it acceptable that one person profits at the expense of another? Or of the community? Or the ecosystem?
It is only in the last 60 to 100 years that we have developed “global” problems. This new Global awareness started with WWI and escalated with WWII. Prior to this time, our awareness of our effects existed purely at the local and perhaps national level. Now we have such serious Global issues that they cannot be denied. Climate, economic, disease, water and food security, air cleanliness, resource depletion.
These issues cannot be solved by one country alone, but by many countries cooperating. They cannot be solved by one business, but by many businesses choosing to change to business as unusual, to Syntropic enterprises.
Into this mix of Global awareness, let us throw man’s desire to profit.
Show me where there is profit in a model that forces another human, or other elements that we share as humans (water, land, soil, air, oceans, etc.) to suffer so that someone, some company can pretend that they have profited?
If we used an all-in accounting measure… where we looked at the cost and effect on the whole, then most of the top companies in the world would be broke in the red. It would become obvious that they cost too much for the world to keep them.
If we looked at a barrel of oil, and tallied the all-in accounting cost to create the oil, starting with Mother Nature millions of years ago, and moving to the cost of extraction, refinement, delivery, etc., then we simply could not afford to use oil in the way we do, if at all.
This opens a world of opportunity….how do we profit…how does a company, an individual, a nation, the world…advance….without costing the Earth?
If we can get man to the moon in under ten years…we can certainly answer this question…if we dare and have the will. And that really is all it comes down to. Do we have the will?
**Synergistic Accounting is a tool to ensure we have what matters most on the balance sheet, enabling zero exploitation, extraction to extinction and colonisation.
Written April 2nd 2014
Published May 6th 2026. Photo taken May 6th 2026
