Persuasive levers 3: Argument

Over the past century, General Motors grew into a worldwide leader in products and services related to the development, manufacture, and marketing of cars and trucks under various brands, including: Buick, Cadillac, Chevrolet, GMC, Daewoo, Holden, HUMMER, Opel, Pontiac, Saab, Saturn, Vauxhall, and Wuling. The Company has produced nearly 450,000,000 vehicles globally and operates in virtually every country in the world.

The recent severe economic downturn has had an unprecedented impact on the global automotive industry. Nevertheless, particularly in the United States, the automotive industry remains a driving force of the economy. It employs one in ten American workers and is one of the largest purchasers of U.S.-manufactured steel, aluminum, iron, copper, plastics, rubber, and electronic and computer chips.

Almost 4% of the United States gross domestic product, and nearly 10% of U.S. industrial production by value, are related to the automotive industry.

If you put enough people in one place, *the evidence seemed to show*, they would almost inevitably develop writing or something like it, together with administrators, storage and redistribution facilities, workshops and overseers. Before long, they would also start dividing themselves into social classes. ‘Civilization’ came as a package. It meant misery and suffering for some (since some would inevitably be reduced to serfs, slaves or debt peons), but also allowed for the possibility of philosophy, art and the accumulation of scientific knowledge.

*The evidence no longer suggests anything of the sort*. In fact, much of what we have come to learn in the last forty or fifty years has thrown conventional wisdom into disarray.

In some regions, we now know, cities governed themselves for centuries without any sign of the temples and palaces that would only emerge later; in others, temples and palaces never emerged at all. In many early cities, there is simply no evidence of either a class of administrators or any other sort of ruling stratum. In others, centralized power seems to appear and then disappear. It would seem that the mere fact of urban life does not, necessarily, imply any particular form of political organization, and never did.

This has all sorts of important implications: for one thing, it suggests a much less pessimistic assessment of human possibilities, since the mere fact that much of the world’s population now live in cities may not determine how we live, to anything like the extent you might assume – but before even starting to think about that, we need to ask how we got things so extraordinarily wrong to begin with.