The Snakes and The Machine

Imagine you are a person at the bottom of the pile in a very unequal society. You're not in utter penury, but you are poor by common standards. Then imagine your country has a bad venomous snake problem. Your government starts a campaign to eradicate the deadly snakes, and offers a good bounty for each dead snake handed in.

Because you need the money, you take your pet mongoose and go out snake hunting. For a while the pickings are good, but over a couple of years, finding the bad snakes gets harder. People are hunting them to almost extinction. So you, being clever, start on a different track. You start breeding venomous snakes in secret, and then handing them in for the bounty.MEANS

This works well, but the government catches onto the fraud, and ends the bounty system. So you're stuck with a lot of deadly and unprofitable snakes, eating up resources. Of course, the easiest solution it to just release them into the wild.

You're not alone. o do all the other snake-profiteers.
The government ends up with a far worse snake problem than they started off with.

[NB: This is not an imaginary story. This actually happened!].

So what, you say?

Well the little tale has meaning. Large corporations act like snake entrepreneurs. Their key aim is not the public good (fewer deadly snakes) but profit (exchanging snakes for money). And like any good single-goal 'machine', they will pursue this end relentlessly, even if in doing so they damage the environment and hurt people around them. The idea of the public good is not a profitable KPI. This is not because the individual people who make up corporations (with some notable exceptions) are immoral, but that the corporate-machine itself only has one objective: to make as much money as is possible. What an individual might feel is overriden by the greater 'good' of profit.

Ironically, even voluntary bodies end up behaving this way. Exploiting unpaid labour to pursue their outcomes at all costs. Because to do otherwise would undermine their raison d'etre, and the jobs of their paid staff. In these cases, the 'public good' becomes a MEANS to these ulterior goals, rather than an end in itself.

Bea Groves-McDaniel, 14 September 2026