Three letters every corporation on earth has memorized over the past decade: ESG. The expansion is noble — Environmental, Social, Governance. The stated idea is lovely: let's judge companies not only by profit, but by how they treat the planet, people, and the rules. Who's against that? No one is against saving the planet.
But let's look at ESG not as a slogan, but as a system. Then it becomes clear: it's not about the planet. It's about the rating. And whoever sets the rating, rules.
ESG is a scoring system
In essence, ESG is a score. A company is assigned a grade: how "green," how "social," how "well-governed" it is. A good score gets you into prestigious funds, money flows to you, banks lend cheaper. A bad score gets you excluded, money leaves, credit gets dearer.
Familiar structure? It's a credit score, only for corporations, and not about money but about behavior. A digital dossier of obedience — not for a person, but for an entire company. And like any rating, it raises one simple question: who issues it?
Who holds the ruler
It is issued, directly or indirectly, by the same people who own everything. The Big Three holds 15–25% of nearly every major company. When BlackRock announces that it will now weigh ESG metrics in its voting and money allocation, that is not a suggestion. It is a new rule for everyone its trillions are invested in.
So the criteria of "good behavior" for the whole economy are defined not by voters, not by parliaments, not by scientists — but by a handful of private funds and the rating agencies affiliated with them. They hold the ruler. And they also decide what counts as a centimeter.
Whoever defines the rules of the game is stronger than any player. In IT we call it gatekeeping: it doesn't matter how good you are if access to the platform is handed out by one admin on his own criteria. ESG made the funds exactly that admin for entire industries.
Where fact ends and myth begins
Let's draw the line honestly.
Fact: environmental and social problems are real. Pollution, emissions, unfair treatment of workers — all of it exists, and the wish to measure it is understandable. Myth: that ESG, as practiced by the Big Three, is about solving those problems.
The book shows the mimicry with a live example. The main shareholders of the soy, fertilizer, and equipment producers involved in clearing the Amazon are — again — the same three, plus a few pension funds. While BlackRock does PR about "sustainability" in New York, with one hand it finances deforestation. The other hand smiles at the conference. The "E" score is on stage; the sawmill is backstage.
That is the heart of it: ESG is used not as a goal, but as a façade and a lever. The façade — to look like the planet's savior. The lever — to discipline companies, under the guise of "green requirements," by criteria you invented yourself.
A stick with two ends
The most interesting part is that ESG is universal precisely as an instrument of power, regardless of its content. Today a high score is given for the "climate agenda." But the same scoring system can swing in any direction: change the criteria tomorrow, and companies obediently rebuild, because access to money depends on the score.
That's why a political brawl rages around ESG: some demand it be tightened, others abolished. But both sides often argue about the wrong thing. The argument shouldn't be about the letter "E" or "S." It should be about the fact that a scoring system on which companies' fates depend sits in the hands of a narrow group nobody elected — a group that owns both those it grades and the competitors of those it grades.
Where is the ordinary person here
Once again you're not in the room where it's decided. ESG is sold to you as care: "the fund thinks about the planet, so it thinks about your future." But the criteria by which the entire economy is mapped — you never approved them. Your pension money is used to push someone's agenda under a pretty label, and that agenda can change without your knowledge. You are the fuel for a rating set without you and sometimes against you.
What to do about it: the MAAT token and DAO
The problem with ESG isn't the idea of "judging behavior." The problem is who holds the ruler and how transparent it is. If the criteria and the votes sit with a narrow, unaccountable group, that's control. If they sit with a broad community under "one human, one vote," that's already self-governance.
That is MAAT. The MAAT token is membership in a cooperative and a single vote. Not "one dollar, one vote" like the funds, which decide alone what counts as "sustainable," but one human, one vote. Governance runs through a DAO — a decentralized organization with a transparent treasury where every movement of funds and every vote is visible. Here you can't grade a company on ecology with one hand and finance deforestation with the other — because both hands are in everyone's view.
ESG showed how strong the power of whoever holds the ruler is. MAAT answers simply: let millions hold the ruler, in the open, instead of three funds in the dark. The entry is simple — read the book, take the token, get your vote — and, for the first time, be in the room where it's decided by what rules the economy plays.