Can the Girl Scouts Intercept?

Cynics will laugh, but money isn’t today’s problem. Power is. 

Pity we have no way of disassociating the two.¹ In 1887, Lord Acton wrote to an Anglican bishop: “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”² In former centuries, power was often gained through raw military conquest and the royal rewards dispensed as a result. Democracy was to have solved that by allocating political power to the governed.

But we’ve advanced yet again. Power is now an attribute of wealth derived, not from winning battles for kings, but commercial transactions. Behind that is our deus ex machine — capitalism — with its foundational principle of progenitive wealth. Those who grasp that — that wealth begets wealth — have a system at their disposal to cast the world at their feet. To describe this new scramble, Lord Acton today would probably say: Wealth tends to corrupt, and unlimited wealth corrupts absolutely. This reflects modern knowledge that power today is simply purchased.

A hitch occurs when those inspired by capitalism’s challenge of amassing as much wealth as possible bump up against an annoying reality: The source of wealth, the Earth’s natural resources, is limited. That constraint necessarily transforms the capitalism business into a zero-sum game, and a new perspective flickers into view: too few resources or too many people? 

We must reconsider, for that reason, the wisdom of permitting skillful capitalists to acquire as much wealth as humanly possible in a finite world. Contrary to the speed of light, capitalism contains no inherent self-regulating factor. The current richest person has staked out an entire planet for himself. Our docile acceptance of such impudence reflects a moral indoctrination that perceives wealth as authority. 

The boy with the ball discovers that ending the game is more fun than playing it, while the other kids start playing the game his way to keep the ball in play.

It all began with the boy with the ball. We know the story, if not from experience then from anecdote, and capitalism is smeared all over it. The class doesn’t have a community ball to share, so one day the unpopular rich kid comes to school with his own ball. He lets them play with it as long as the game goes his way. When it doesn’t, he takes his ball and goes home, indecently swollen with satisfaction at his power to end the game. He discovers that ending the game is more fun than playing it, while the other kids start playing the game his way to keep the ball in play. The association between ownership and control, money and authority, gestates in the young minds of those schoolmates.

Other lessons intervene as life progresses. A morbidly obese young woman of wealthy family is awarded the unique concession of having her own car on the campus of the small women’s college she attends in rural Virginia. Of an afternoon, she offers to take a fellow student on a drive through the beautiful countryside. At some point during the drive, she invariably stops at a fast-food restaurant and asks her passenger to get out and buy her a few cheeseburgers. The passenger tells her to get her own damn cheeseburgers. The driver insultingly offers to pay to have the favor performed. An unsavory connection between wealth and power just got personal: you accepted an afternoon joyride from a rich acquaintance, and now you’re supposed to perform an act she is ashamed to do herself. You also now realize why you were invited on this little drive. The association penetrates with greater clarity than the boy with the ball, and the awakening is most unpleasant. Without meaning to or knowing how, you are complicit because, after all, while you refused her stupid money, you did get her those cheeseburgers. Seldom did any passenger take up the young woman’s offer for a drive in the country a second time.

The consequence of capitalistic moral indoctrination came to a head when a somewhat more mature boy threatened to take his ball home not too long ago: “[M]y Starlink system is the backbone of the Ukrainian army. Their entire front line would collapse if I turned it off.” The self-glorifying boast came from one Elon Musk. He soothed frayed nerves a heartbeat later by reassuring fans and detractors alike of his prodigious fair-mindedness: “No matter how much I disagree with the Ukraine policy, Starlink will never turn off its terminals.”³

So what, chipmunk cheeks? is the universal retort. Who cares who you agree with? But we do. We must. Musk’s personal allegiance has become critical to the balance of global power. He isn’t boasting that he can stop a game of kickball, but topple a country if things don’t go his way. Whoops! How did an entire country become so dependent on him? We may as well ask: Why does the survival of coral reefs depend on ExxonMobil’s business model? Why does the groundwater level in the American Midwest depend on Cargill Inc’s meatpacking quotas? How could a contract with a parking meter company trash Chicago’s plans for healthier living for its citizens?⁴ Something has eclipsed the age-old objective of peace on earth, good will toward all. 

Some might say it smacked of communism to encourage children to acquire such basic, practical skills.

Let us cast our minds back for a moment to early 20th century Russia. As the country was in the bloody throes of ridding itself of everything czar, it also imbued its young people with a messianic spirit inspired by the high-minded goals of pure communism, which were highly laudable. That movement was killed by the Communist leaders, who exploited and subverted it, and no one remembers it today.

Let’s return to America. Anyone remember the exhilaration of becoming a Boy Scout or Girl Scout? The lucky girls who had a conscientious and gifted troop leader may have gotten their hands on a Girl Scout Handbook.⁵ In this intriguing volume, the young reader learned of an amazing array of badges to be earned by acquiring specific skills, including a facility in accessing troves of public knowledge, simply by performing the steps listed for each particular badge, some mandatory, some optional (which made it even more exciting!). This heady introduction to a world of seemingly unlimited accomplishment went far beyond what was taught in the classroom (or at recess). Successful candidates could receive the “Active Citizen” badge, the “My Country” badge, and a host of others. Task 1 for the “Traveler” badge required the aspirant to “Plan an overnight trip by train, bus, boat, or airplane. Show how to: read timetables.” Task 9 required the hopeful to “Pack a suitcase neatly and efficiently. Determine how heavy a bag you can handle with ease.”⁶ An optional task asked the candidate to “know what to do when stranded in a strange place.”

It was all fun, specific, useful stuff, and the girl who earned her badge could rightfully be proud of it. After all, she had worked for it and could demonstrate her proficiency at any time whether she got into a scrape or not. 

Some might say it smacked of communism to encourage children to acquire such basic, practical skills; to learn to think critically about resource allocation; or to think about how to live productive lives at all. Surely there was something wrong with rearing a generation of confident, self-reliant children who had the sense to ask the right questions and the skills to find the answers to those questions themselves. Who needed young upstarts with a knowledge of community affairs? Danger lurked in instilling potential insurgents with a sense of neighborhood responsibility, civic awareness, a curiosity to develop international friendships, and a desire to learn about the financing of libraries! Rot! Just give the kid a credit card.

Ralph Nader agreed — about the conflict between the goals of capitalism and a community of well-informed, practically-oriented young minds, that is. For Nader, “the obvious 800-lb gorilla in the room” was the contradiction between corporations intent on making as much money as possible by selling waste — that is to say, a glut of products — and selling that waste to conscientious consumers such as those Girl Scouts with their troops of civic-minded, community-oriented young citizens well-acquainted with the value of sharing resources and intent on working for the greater good of the community. Nader identified it as a “dead-on conflict between the two interests, and guess who has the most power in the country over government and media?”⁷

Nader was right. The Girl Scouts were no match for today’s CEOs, corporate raiders, private equity managers, and activist investors — our savage cowboys of corporate America. They are rounding us all up. And Elon Musk has dibs on Mars. 

---

1. No longer the province of royalty, religious leaders, or statesmen, power is exchanged nowadays for cash. Of no significance is who has the cash. ↩︎
2. Letter from John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton, 1st Baron Acton, 13th Marquess of Groppoli, KCVO, DL, to Bishop Mandell Creighton, April 5, 1887. ↩︎
3. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/10/15/in-reversal-musk-says-will-continue-funding-starlink-in-ukraine ↩︎
4. A good place to start reading about such outrages is The Privatization of Everything by Donald Cohen and Allen Mikaelian. ↩︎
5. Excerpts used here are taken from the Girl Scout Handbook, Intermediate Program, Twelfth Impression, January, 1957. The handbook includes the Bill of Rights (page 192) and this definition of My Country (page 196): “In the expression ‘my country,’ the word ‘my’ is a possessive pronoun . . . When you say ‘my country,’ you are telling people that the United States belongs to you, you feel responsible for its well-being, you are proud of it.” In the chapter “International Friendship,” the handbook gives this advice: “The very best way to learn about another country is to talk with someone who was brought up in that country . . . Through them you will learn to know their former country, not as a visitor or sight-seer, but as a friend of the family.” ↩︎
6. A skill so many of us have not yet mastered. ↩︎
7. “Join or Die,” Ralph Nader Radio Hour, August 26, 2013. ↩︎