Tuesday, December 18, 2007

A Corporation has No Soul


One of our big problems is that many of us have signed our lives over to corporations, directly and indirectly. The purpose of setting up a corporation is to "limit liability" for the individuals who start the thing. As we all know people working together in groups can do amazing things, but when these groups become huge, multi-national entities, it is hard to hold them accountable to anything. Their core purpose is to maximize profits at all costs. That's the beauty of capitalism. This is not necessarily a soulful way to live, or to run an organization, or anything else really. In fact, its kind of a dead, zombie-like existence, a soulless way of life that goes on even as the people come and go. The people, the "worker bees," kind of adopt a "hive mentality" focusing on their little job, never looking at the bigger implications of what they do, and what the entity does with all their expended energy. The investors, the shareholders count their pennies and are happy they can buy all the shit they really don't need.

So we feed these mega-beasts and the beasts devour everything in their path. For instance, all the remaining resources on the planet will be devoured, if these corporate beasts are given enough time. We have built an extreme group of national and multi-national Terminators, large, killer-robot-like entities that make all kinds of things, some cool, some stupid, all of it probably not so necessary, but anyway it's the stuff we can never get enough of, and well, if we choke the planet with this stuff, drown ourselves in mountains of this stuff, hopefully we will be stupidly and happily sated, but probably not.

So, yeah, a corporation has no soul. Even the ones telling us they do, even the ones with the great and cool ad campaigns that show us how enlightened and brilliant they are, and even the ones with the cool logos that everyone wants on their shoes and pants, and shirts, and well, maybe some of us will even start tattooing ourselves with those same logos and well, it probably makes us less human and more zombie-like and maybe that's really the goal anyway. We can't live forever, but our corporate Terminators can, or that's maybe our secret wish, but the zombie needs to live off the living right? So maybe it all just comes to a halt and then the big creaking hulks all over the planet slowly disintegrate back into the soil, because of course, "rust never sleeps."