Book summary “Rebalancing Society”: summary

Introduction

You live in a world tilted off its balance. Modern society suffers from the destructive dominance of market capitalism, which grants excessive power to private corporations at the expense of citizens and public services. You likely watch public goods decay while corporate influence grows unchecked. Political life swings endlessly between the left and right, offering false choices that fail to correct this structural tilt.

The central idea of this book is that society must be rebalanced through the strengthening of a neglected plural sector alongside the public and private sectors. You cannot fix systemic imbalance by relying solely on governments or markets. A truly healthy society rests on three essential pillars, requiring you to rethink how communities, states, and businesses interact.

The following questions guide this exploration:

• How did market fundamentalism capture modern institutions?
• What defines the missing plural sector of communities?
• How can you help rebalance society through personal and collective action?

1. The Triumph of Imbalance

Market capitalism has become dominant to a destructive degree, granting excessive power to corporations at the expense of citizens and public services. You live in a world shaped by the end of history thesis declared by Francis Fukuyama twenty-five years ago. Proponents of unfettered markets claimed an ideological victory over all other forms of social organization.

The legal fiction of corporate personhood has granted corporations constitutional rights such as free speech, which they use to drown out real citizens and manipulate public policy.

The U.S. Supreme Court declared corporations to be persons with rights to free speech in decisions between 2010 and 2014. This opened the floodgates to private money in public elections and massive advertising campaigns on public issues. Corporations also use strategic lawsuits against public participation, known as SLAPPS, to silence opponents who cannot afford legal costs.

Millions were spent by corporations to promote clean coal. The gun lobby utilized its financial power to stop legislation for background checks on gun buyers in the Senate.

Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln warned against the rise of moneyed corporations and robber barons. An 1886 Supreme Court ruling recognized corporations as persons with equal protection of the laws, shifting power away from real citizens. President Dwight D. Eisenhower later warned against the potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power within the military-industrial complex.

Corporations paid 32 percent of all taxes in the United States in 1952. By 2010, that figure dropped to 9 percent.

Corporate Personhood and Press

Most democratic nations feature a corporate press beholden to owners and advertisers rather than an independent press. Media ownership and advertising dependencies compromise the objectivity of news outlets, often leading to unanimous endorsements of specific political factions or candidates aligned with corporate interests.

In a Canadian federal election, a neoconservative party won with under 40 percent of the popular vote while receiving endorsements from every single English-language daily newspaper except one. Silvio Berlusconi maintained himself as prime minister of Italy for almost nine years using his control of the press and media.

Bilateral trade pacts incorporate courts of arbitration that establish a privatized justice system for global corporations. These secret arbitration panels allow global corporations to sue sovereign states and challenge public health, environmental, and cultural laws.

Big tobacco companies used litigation and sent bundles of letters to health ministers in poor countries like Namibia to intimidate them into rescinding regulations intended to control smoking rates among young women.

Emasculation of Government and Globalization

The implementation of corporate management techniques in the public sector, known as the New Public Management, renders government agencies inept and fuels demands for privatization. Public services that cannot be run like businesses are forced to pretend they are businesses by installing heroic leaders, measuring everything, and constantly reorganizing. This destroys the quality of public services and creates the illusion of government incompetence through mindless privatizations.

A senior British civil servant explained the profusion of measurement in his ministry by stating they did not understand what was going on.

Global corporations play sovereign nations against one another in a globalization game to drive down corporate tax rates. This race to the bottom starves public services and transfers wealth from public coffers to private profits.

Nokia chief executive Jorma Ollila threatened to move his company's headquarters out of Finland due to high taxation. When you call their listed number, a real person answers at Nokia in 2 minutes and 55 seconds, compared to 12 seconds at Revenue Canada.

In Canada, corporate tax cuts cost the government billions and led to severe budget cuts across public services. The federal corporate tax rate was 28 percent in Canada in 1999, but dropped to 16.5 percent and then reached 15 percent in January 2012. Cumulative tax cuts since the Conservative Party came to power in 2006 cost $13 billion per year, while a 1.5 percent tax cut cost the government $3 billion a year. These policies resulted in $5.2 billion per year in Canadian federal budget cuts.

In the decades following the triumph of market capitalism, the United States has experienced severe social regression across multiple national indicators despite claims of unprecedented progress. You witness soaring income inequality, high incarceration rates, and escalating health care costs with mediocre outcomes. The median household income level reached in 2010 only matched the level achieved in 1996.

Economic man models treat workers as mere factors of production rather than human beings. About 20 percent of American men are not working, a proportion close to the highest since the Great Depression. In one poll, 70 percent of working men reported that they either hate going to work or have mentally checked out.

2. From Exploiting Resources to Exploring Our Resourcefulness

Traditional economic models externalize social harms, requiring a shift toward integration and human resourcefulness instead of domination.

Mainstream economic theory permits property owners to pursue profits while dumping harmful social and environmental consequences onto society at large under the label of externalities. While a few individuals gain tangible benefits from what they own, the broader public pays the intangible costs, such as polluted air and the mental distress caused by mass layoffs, because market models fail to account for collective well-being. These practices create markets of entitlement where large entities extract value without regard for community impact.

Goldman Sachs exploited pricing regulations in an overseas commodity exchange for recycled aluminum by storing and shifting metal between warehouses to extract billions of dollars. One company extracted $5 billion out of the recycled aluminum market in three years through this manipulation.

Externalities and Integration

To resolve conflicts without resorting to domination or compromise, society must use integration to invent creative solutions that move beyond mutually exclusive alternatives. Domination leads the defeated side to wait for an opportunity to retaliate, while compromise leaves both sides unsatisfied. Integration requires open minds, goodwill, and getting back to basics to find common ground.

In 1925, Mary Parker Follett presented a paper about three ways to deal with conflict. Mary Parker Follett described a situation in a library room where one person wanted a window open for fresh air and another wanted it closed to avoid a draft. They resolved it by opening a window in the next room.

You can apply these principles when faced with rigid choices:

• Recognize that an issue involves invention and do not let thinking stay within the boundaries of two mutually exclusive alternatives.
• Never let yourself be bullied by an either-or situation.
• Find a third way through integration and goodwill.

3. Three Pillars to Support a Balanced Society

A healthy society relies on three sectors: the public sector, the private sector, and the vital plural sector of communities.

Political debate has long been trapped in a false dichotomy between left and right, or states and markets. You can see that society actually has three consequential sectors:

• Governments rooted in hierarchies
• Businesses rooted in economic authority
• Communities rooted on the ground

The Plural Sector and Common Property

The plural sector encompasses all associations owned neither by the state nor by private investors. These entities exist as member-owned or non-owned institutions operating with greater autonomy from public controls and profit expectations.

Amul is a dairy cooperative in India with 3 million members. Mondragon in Spain is the world's largest worker cooperative with 80,000 employees. The United States contains 30,000 cooperatives generating 350 million total memberships.

Common property represents resources held jointly rather than separately as private or state property. Benjamin Franklin refused to patent his famous stove, and Jonas Salk asked who owned his polio vaccine, stating it belonged to the people.

Communityship and Sector Flaws

While private and public sectors obsess over individual leadership and hierarchical control, plural sector organizations thrive on communityship. Volunteer firefighters and hospital nurses operate with a sense of communityship rather than top-down executive direction.

Each societal sector carries a fatal flaw when left unchecked: governments can be crude, markets crass, and communities closed.

State overtures are often crude and inflexible in applying rules. Markets are crass in prioritizing profit above human well-being under the rule of caveat emptor. Communities can become closed and xenophobic when populist movements turn insular or fascist.

Airport security imposes rigid humiliations to enforce state rules. Airlines advertise misleading base prices hidden behind heavy surcharges, such as an Air Canada base seat sale price of $274 that reaches a $916 total price after taxes and surcharges.

Privilege and wealth have become entrenched through legal manipulation and lobbying, with modern economic systems favoring entitled stockholders. An OECD report showed that a son's advantage in having a higher-earning father was 47 percent in the United States compared to 19 percent in Canada.

4. Radical Renewal

Real change demands immediate reversals of destructive practices, grassroots social regeneration, and systemic structural reforms.

Waiting for governments or corporations to fix systemic imbalances is futile because they are compromised by lobbying and profit motives. Instead, renewal must begin on the ground in the plural sector through clever resistance movements, grassroots social initiatives, and subsequent structural reforms of established institutions.

Gandhi mobilized India by marching against the British tax on salt, and Ralph Nader took the Chevrolet Corvair off the market with a book.

Relying on corporate social responsibility to offset corporate irresponsibility is a fallacy, and democratic governments cannot act vigorously while dominated by private domestic and global entitlements. Regaining balance therefore relies heavily on the plural sector. You must stop acting merely as human resources and instead tap your resourcefulness as human beings. To challenge destructive practices and replace them with constructive ones, people acting together as you, me, and we must engage in social movements and initiatives rather than serving societal imbalance.

Grassroots Action and Case Studies

Brazil successfully addressed its HIV/AIDS crisis through creative cooperation and by challenging multinational pharmaceutical interests. Instead of accepting dire World Bank predictions and exorbitant drug prices, Brazil engaged communities, distributed millions of condoms at Carnival, integrated AIDS storylines into popular soap operas, used industrial property emergency clauses to synthesize medications locally, and successfully pushed for a human rights vote at the UN.

The World Bank estimated in 1990 that Brazil would have 1,200,000 infections in a decade, but by 2002 the country had fewer than 600,000. The UN Human Rights Commission passed AIDS treatment as a human right in a 52-0 vote.

5. You, Me, and We in This Troubled World

True rebalancing begins with personal self-reflection, local action, and a cultural shift from excessive consumption to modest living.

Citizens often wait for others to fix global problems, but the true enemy is your own misconstrued self-interest and finger-pointing. You continuously blame other nations, big cars, or distant corporations as an excuse for personal inaction. You rationalize your behavior by pointing out that your own pollution or contribution to greenhouse gases is only a fraction of a percent compared to others.

Drivers of small cars compare themselves to big car drivers, Americans praise clean coal compared to Canadian tar sands, and Canadians point out that their oil sands produce only 0.15 percent of global greenhouse gases.

Conscious individuals often recognize systemic flaws but face the Irene question: where do you start to make a difference? Irene, a Canadian finance manager working in the private and plural sectors, read a pamphlet version of the book and realized how deeply problems are embedded in laws and powerless governments, asking what she could personally do.

True social rebalancing must start with personal self-reflection and small, immediate actions rather than waiting to fight major systemic exploiters. You should start in front of the mirror because you function across all sectors as a consumer, voter, and worker, providing a direct line to every system. By hitting pause on personal entitlements, you can alter small daily behaviors.

• Hit the off button and press pause on distractions to look past personal entitlements.
• Observe what is happening on the ground down the street, across town, around the world, and in the mirror.
• Refuse the next little indulgence and instead do something different, such as putting on a sweater instead of turning up the heat.

Putting on a sweater instead of turning up the air conditioning or heating serves as a simple lifestyle adjustment that rejects business as usual.

Small individual actions naturally expand into broader community engagement, protests, and systemic local initiatives. You might move from putting on a sweater to helping an infirm neighbor, joining a community group, protesting local neglect, and finally starting a formal initiative to stop neglect.

Developed societies possess immense wealth but misuse it through excessive consumption, necessitating a cultural shift toward celebrating modesty. You live in an economy with more wealth than ancestors ever imagined but have created a mess by misusing it. Instead of pursuing endless consumption, societies must cut back on excesses and stop treating the hyperexcesses of the superrich as a spectator sport.

• Cut back on personal excesses.
• Cease cheering on the hyperexcesses of the superrich.
• Celebrate modesty for a change.

You can never get enough of what you don't really need, as Huston Smith notes.

Transforming the world requires committed citizen groups acting daily and everywhere, echoing Thomas Paine's call to begin the world over again. Margaret Mead observed that small groups of thoughtful, committed citizens are the only things that ever changed the world. Tom Paine told the American people in his pamphlet Common Sense that they had the power to begin the world over again in 1776.

Conclusion

Rebalancing society requires you to recognize that the public, private, and plural sectors form an interdependent whole rather than competing forces.

You cannot rely on markets alone to govern human life, nor can you expect governments to solve every social problem without active communities. The regeneration of society begins when you step away from excessive consumption and consumerist pressure to embrace active citizenship.

1. Reject the illusion that a single dominant sector can secure your well-being.
2. Step out of your private life to engage directly in community associations and grassroots initiatives.
3. Challenge corporate overreach and demand accountability from public institutions.
4. Cultivate resourcefulness instead of continuous exploitation within your daily sphere.
5. Practice balance in your own life by choosing sufficiency over excess and connection over isolation.

10 Key Ideas

1. Modern society suffers from the destructive dominance of market capitalism, which grants excessive power to private corporations through legal fictions like corporate personhood at the expense of citizens and public services.
2. The implementation of corporate management techniques in the public sector renders government agencies inept and fuels demands for privatization while global corporations play sovereign nations against one another to drive down corporate tax rates.
3. Mainstream economic theory permits property owners to pursue profits while dumping harmful social and environmental consequences onto society at large under the label of externalities.
4. To resolve conflicts without resorting to domination or compromise, society must use integration to invent creative solutions that move beyond mutually exclusive alternatives.
5. Political debate has long been trapped in a false dichotomy between left and right, ignoring the reality that a healthy society actually relies on three sectors: the public sector, the private sector, and the vital plural sector of communities.
6. The plural sector encompasses all associations owned neither by the state nor by private investors, operating instead as member-owned or non-owned institutions with greater autonomy from public controls and profit expectations.
7. Each societal sector carries a fatal flaw when left unchecked, because governments can be crude, markets crass, and communities closed.
8. Real change demands immediate reversals of destructive practices, clever resistance movements, grassroots social initiatives, and structural reforms led primarily by the plural sector rather than compromised governments or corporations.
9. True social rebalancing must start with personal self-reflection in front of the mirror and small, immediate actions across your roles as consumer, voter, and worker rather than waiting to fight major systemic exploiters.
10. Developed societies possess immense wealth but misuse it through excessive consumption, necessitating a cultural shift toward celebrating modesty and sufficiency over isolation.