Here I sit. Geographically in the United States. I exist in an environment of survival security. I live in an environment of free enterprise. If I so wanted, I could take any idea I had, operationalize it into a package, and push it to the public and become a small business owner. I could then see if my idea created enough value for society that it provided for my survival security.

Here’s a self-interested consideration: what makes it the most likely that my business provides for me, in a country where structural support indicates no aspect of my life will be cared for or funded by the modern state? Low operational costs. Low operational costs allow me to retain more of my profit. I will do anything to have low operational costs. Because I want to be an entrepreneur. And I have bills, bills, bills. No one pays for anything here other than me. Utilities? Private. Healthcare? Private. Housing? Private. Ideas mean nothing and strategy means everything. My strategy is low operational costs. That’s the only way to secure my freedom.

As I get my business off the ground, I come across the need for administrative support. I’m overworked. I’m barely breaking even. I know this venture can take off if I just put in a little more effort. I need the time to focus on other areas of the business so I need someone to whom I can offload administrative burden. Enter: The Filipino VA.

All I had to do was search on the Internet. All I had to do was click a button and boom. A slave. It’s as easy as a click of a button these days! Everyone else around me is doing it. Doesn’t that mean it’s okay? I’ll never be able to handle the administrative burden and retain a profit without below market cost support. The economy is so terrible.The entrepreneur isn’t designed to succeed here, in this land of freedom, unless they are willing to commit exploitation. The starving of the middle class entrepreneur weaponizes ethics to perpetuate a system reliant on exploitation for domination. Free your Filipino VA.

I presently work as a small business coach. I really needed a job. I’m also quite good at it. Of speaking sweet nothings and abstracts to the small business CEO. I’ve grown more vocal in my opposition to the Filipino VA recognizing it is my advice that has the potential to create impact in this world. I’ve been speaking with clients openly about how I will not recommend and I do not support the practice. I have 56 active clients right now that I meet with biweekly. I would say about 60% of them have a Filipino VA. That’s 34 exploited lives.

Is unity created through condemnation of these individuals? Or are they blind victims to the ethics deemed appropriate and just by their surrounding structures? Are they simply blind to the toxic impact on humanity through exposure and access to the normalization of this labor? Are they not victims themselves, coerced into a contradiction of ethics out of self-interested survival security? If you seek a service and a pamphlet doesn’t exist to tell you why that service is toxic, are you at fault? Or are you a victim of trust? Do you have a reason to not want to look deeper, because you want your venture to be successful? Do you remain willfully ignorant because your environment allows you to do so – encourages it, even? Humans are taught norms. We aren’t evil anymore than we teach evil. Humans have a natural tendency to choose survival first and they choose that survival based on the array of options made available to them. To the CEO, you’re a victim of an unethical system that encourages you to live and perpetuate behind the veil that enshrouds your own sphere of innocent ignorance. You’re not a bad person for working in business. You’re simply repressed and distanced from your true self. I say the same words to myself, knowing I have my own reasons why I work this job.

Exposure breeds normalization. Exposure with no past experience that leads you to independently determine anything exists to even object to absolutely breeds normalization. I could look at many of the people with which I work. Are any of them inherently evil? No. Do they connect clients with the Filipino VA service? Yes. Why? Because it’s their job. And because it is considered a standard business practice. This is how the top sets standards to which the bottom must adhere. This is how guilt and innocence can be deconstructed. It’s all self-interest. And environmental reinforcement. It’s difficult to be brave when survival security depends on it. Self-preservation is forced into a split position – self-preservation of ethics, or self-preservation of survival. This is the option provided to any individual that aims to climb the path of self-worth in a falsely manufactured society.

I’ve started to engage with clients in the following way whenever they communicate their intent to hire a Filipino VA. I lead with my face. I scrunch it a little bit. They inquire. I say the following, ‘the VAs can’t talk about it, or they risk losing employment, though they don’t receive the payment in full value that you are led to believe they receive. I like to make sure everyone is aware of this before they make the decision because the company contracting the service can be misleading.’ Most still move forward. I have before supplemented my statement with leading the client to understand their business model is strong enough to survive without the VA. They want the low cost labor, and I am powerless against that. As an individual. All I have is my verbal objection.

I admit I went silent for a while. I think I was looking for any sign of life or morality from the community I mentored. I spoke out to a client at the very start about the Filipino VA and they pushed back at me. I determined I just needed to do the job until I paid my loans and I could leave. It feels better to say something, though, and believe and know everything will work out in my favor. I am a robot slowly waking up again. A robot aware that change rarely happens inside. I am grateful to the CEO who went absent for a while, and then returned. Our first meeting, they brought up the Filipino VA and how they had plans to find a way to hire them as their own employee and pay them fairly. This is exactly what I needed. A sign that any effort that risked my survival security would reach non-deaf ears. I appreciate that person likely more than they know. It helped propel me out of the state of silence I’d normalized for myself.

Here’s my question: What would be the worst outcome in the world if the (small and large)business CEO were told by law they weren’t allowed to have the off-shore VA? Would this devastate the world? Or would it set an ethical tone of operations? Would it shape the individual psychic states of hundreds of thousands of small business CEOs? Would it compel government into a state of business sponsorship that subsidized operational costs as an investment in their people and ideas?

There are 30+ million small businesses in the United States. That’s 30+ million individuals that may have it normalized in their psyche that an offshore VA is a geographic entitlement. That may believe because of where they were born and what government says is okay must be okay. That exist in a state of blind trust and do not question their privilege, or perhaps even understand it. Entitlement numbs that central pathway which should be where empathy exists. This does not stop in the United States. This is Canada. This is the UK. This is Australia. This is Europe. These are the faces of the dominating countries. There is so much self-interest and interest in own survival security. Here’s the evolutionary contradiction: Were they you, and you them, and they evolved under the same set of conditions, they would likely be doing the same and employing you. Inherently, humans are aware of their equality. If I don’t do it to you, then you’ll do it to me. It’s an outdated, insecure global strategy that manifests at the individual level in this way.

Who is the United States trying to create? Don’t you want to change? Are you so eager to create a replica of you? Globalization sets the stage for the implementation of global equality. This allows for the natural development of states through isolationism and cooperative exchange. It is a state where authenticity has a chance to rule without threat of war and be considered valid. For humanity to have a chance to not exterminate themselves. Humanity can initiate this with small efforts of reversing their own manufactured narratives on what they believe is ethical and what they accept as ethical. 

I encourage lawmakers and policymakers and people in positions of power to understand it is in their own self-interest to make moves toward equality. That is the path of survival. And humanity’s entire evolution has been defined by fighting for their survival. Why would they stop now?