Why the media dislikes entrepreneurs

I’ve been fascinated for quite some time now about why people think the way they think, especially as somebody coming to Western culture from the East and having to learn the rules of Western culture.

I grew up in a culture where individual initiative and thought does not matter. And in coming into Western culture, I found the idea of the individual to be very interesting.

In the East, many times what you consider an individual is spread over a whole family that makes decisions together rather than separately and does not think for itself except by thinking together as a family and also one does not get a career for themself but rather to service their family. That might sound wrong to you but you have to understand there’s more than one way of living life. In the east arranged marriages are common to this very day and are mostly done for strategy and progress for the family. There are great benefits to that way of thinking also. Exploring Indian culture is definitely worth your time.

Recently I’ve been noticing within Western culture two major opposing paradigms in thinking that are fascinating to me.

On one hand, there are people who are good at sales and marketing, people who are entrepreneurs. But I’ve noticed even in modern Western media, these people are often depicted as greedy pigs who are always in it for the profit. And it’s a very curious characterization for me.

It seems to me that there’s a segment of society, despite living in a very modern way, that yearns for the old system of communal trade that existed before commerce.

Most of you are keenly aware that Adam Smith’s theory on barter being the basis of trade in past civilizations was mostly or partially inaccurate, and that small villages would trade on a basis of caring for their community in a communal-based method of thinking. It’s often interpreted as an invisible credit card where you can take something from somebody else and they will have something given to them in return.

Because you’re all part of a small community in a village, you can’t really escape the fact that if you keep asking and never give, that people will stop giving, or at least that’s how people see it today, especially in economics educated circles.

It seems that in modern Western culture there is a way of thinking that longs for this more communal way of life and sees those who don’t observe the invisible credit card of honesty and integrity to the greater community as traitors.

I’ve come up with a theory, and that is that these people often dislike the entrepreneurial and marketing types because they violate the law of equal and reciprocal exchange of the old communal culture. These people have feelings toward a big family that trusts teach other and they would like their society to represent that.

For example, pricing a product at $99 rather than $100 could be seen as trying to trick people rather than doing the right thing.

On the other hand, the more entrepreneurial types often don’t see life the same way, but rather than coming to things with an emotional perspective and a desire for family that extends beyond family, they see life as based on logic and reason, and that if they reasonably, for example, charge one dollar less, then you are being compensated for the fact that the price looks smaller.

Rather than personally believing that true values of right and wrong extend to such issues, I find that they are more a matter of social acceptance within the right circles. So this is not a debate on morality.

However, I would love to hear your thoughts.

Have you noticed this contradiction in society, wherein especially in highly liberal circles, the feelings of care and community are paramount, and that those feelings also lead to a society where trust is deeply important to people, and extends beyond the usual scope of trust? Do you believe one way is right or wrong? Why do you believe what you believe?