This Tedx Talk says the idea of “leading with green” in marketing is dying. If we want to scale up green consumer behavior, it says, we have to appeal to people’s irrational interests, like desire for wealth, status, novelty, and sense of altruism.

I instinctively recoil from the marketing-driven view of human beings as brainless consumer robots. And yet, there is no denying that marketing must exist because it works. It bothers me for few reasons. First is the idea that it is necessarily “irrational” to consider emotions in decision making. What is so irrational about trying to experience more pleasure and less pain? Does the fact that it is mental pleasure or pain make it irrational? I don’t think so – trying to improve status because you think it will lead to pleasurable social ties or avoid shame seems perfectly rational to me, as does helping someone so you can avoid feelings of guilt later on.

Another thing that bothers me is the idea that marketers are appealing to people to make choices based on their sense of right and wrong, while not making choices based on their own sense of right and wrong. Sure, it’s true that corporations are amoral piles of paper, but the people inside them do not have to be. We shouldn’t let a pile of paper trying to make a profit remake us flesh and blood humans in its own image.

Clearly a certain segment of the population will make decisions based on their sense of right and wrong. But in order to make the correct choices about right and wrong, they need to correctly predict the consequences of their actions. And to do that, they need to understand the social, economic, and environmental systems we find ourselves embedded in, and we need to look at these systems not just under a microscope and in the short term, but at a larger scale and over long time frames.

So what we need is an education system that teaches ethics and system thinking effectively. Our education system does not do either right now, so we have a situation where even formally educated people have not been given the mental tools to understand the consequences of their choices. A certain segment of the population is willing the make ethical choices, but their sense of right and wrong is easily manipulated by other segments of the population, who themselves have no sense of right and wrong.

If more children were challenged more often to think about right and wrong, as they were also being educated in system thinking, perhaps we could begin to inoculate the population against this madness that is otherwise going to destroy us. I don’t know what fraction of the population has to be ethical system thinkers before our civilization is successful. I think it is much less than 10% now, and it is not working. I don’t think it has to be 100% though. Maybe we should aim for a majority and go from there.