Purpose Inspired: by Wayne Visser

S2.E11: Hearts and Minds: The Corporate Battle

September 20, 2019 Wayne Visser Season 2 Episode 11
Purpose Inspired: by Wayne Visser
S2.E11: Hearts and Minds: The Corporate Battle
Show Notes

In any war, one of the mantras that has been repeatedly chanted by the military and media alike is the so-called “battle for the hearts and minds”. Take the Iraq war for example. The more cynical commentators have dubbed this the “propaganda war”. It strikes me that today’s multinationals are engaged in a very similar battle – to win over the hearts and minds of a growing number of sceptics and critics who are not convinced of the justice of their corporate crusade, the appropriateness of their tactics, or the acceptability of the causalities incurred along the way. This episode examines these parallels in more detail. As with the Iraq war's liberation propaganda, multinationals are zealously preaching the spread of the economic ideology of free-market capitalism, smug in their superiority since the collapse of socialist economies. And yet the growing anti-globalisation movement is unconvinced. For them, the fact that socialism failed in practice does not automatically imply that capitalism is beyond reproach.