From: Arcadia (arcadia@lynchburg.net)
Date: Wed Apr 17 2002 - 06:42:25 MDT
> [rhinoceros]
> There is something that puzzles me here. Should all the people in every
country decide to be good for this to work?
>
> If so, is this possible? How? Education?
> If not, a bunch of greedy or power-hungry people could make the \"good\"
people take defensive and counterattacking measures, and history would start
all over again.
>
I'm not really advocating any 'top-down' solution. Nobody can 'make' people
decide to be good. This is what I mean about free will. IMHO, more people
would 'decide' to be good, to get along with others, if there were not so
many shrill voices telling them what to do, attempting to manipulate them
and limit their freedom. Anti-social behavior becomes a reflexive
protest/revenge against the tyrany of the crowd. But I think the question
'How can we get people to do what we want?' is part of the problem. People
usually distinguish between interpersonal force, violence, and manipulation
that is 'good,' like for the public good or in service to 'progress,' and
interpersonal violence and manipulation that is 'bad.' I go with Tolstoy:
Governments are groups of men that do violence to other people. All
governments are this, at root. Some of them can make a case they are less
troublesome than the chaos that might result if they stopped, but they are
still little more than a violence-collective, extorting money in the form of
taxes to expand the empire of force and profit. Of course, any group of men
that does violence is also a government, with or without the sordid cloak of
'legitimacy.' Gangs are governments in miniature.
>
> [arcadia]
> In other words, I don\'t think revolution against the institutions is
necessary. They aren\'t the problem. We are. The problem with Congress is
not that it\'s \'worse\' than the average person, but just that it\'s not
any better.
>
> [rhinoceros]
> This seems to makes sense, because the Congressmen are elected by the
people and they have to represent their desires, fears, prejudices, etc.
However, there are other players too: Corporations promoting their own
agenda (more below) and mass media trapping the people in a vicious circle.
How can the people become \"good\" against these odds?
>
>
>
> [arcadia]
> Look. The average person is in debt to the usurers, sold out to the
corporate boss, and keeps a straight face while telling his children america
is a democracy. Congressmen are the same.
>
> [rhinoceros]
> Let me throw in another notion here: Large corporations are cybernetic
entities with their own volition, seeking market share and profit. When an
executive thinks or speaks for a corporation, he is not a person. He has to
maximize market share and profit, or else he is expendable and someone else
will do it. So, it is irrelevant whether he is \"good\" or not. Comments
anyone?
This gets really interesting, and it's a line of thought I wasn't pursuing
just here with this. From William Gibson's SF writing, I came away with the
notion that corporations could and should be regarded as a separate
life-form, in fact the dominant life-form, in the world. They are different
from us, not as we are different from our more ape-like ancestors, but
different as primitive multi-cell organisms were different from single-cell
organisms. Perhaps the biological metaphor is less fun for others than it
is for me. Certainly, corporations represent a new mode of social
organization, one which is impervious to the tools we have developed before
in defense of individual autonomy, such as democracy, law, and even guns.
(Can't kill'em, since nobody you can kill -is-the corporation.) [ ... And
suppose a corporation is 'killed.' Typically, many of the stock-holders,
the management, the employees, and the plant infrastructure end up in a new
corporate 'shell' in a matter of days. The corporation exists mainly as an
expression of the -intent- of those involved. If you kill a company, but
most of the principle players still -intend- for that company to exist, it
will grow back with a new name. ] As a life-form, the corporation is
effectively immortal. They can certainly outlast all the people who make
them up.
And yes, as information streams become more efficient in corporations, and
with the development of AI, corporations will not just be huge and immortal,
they will be smart too. As mitigating factors, the more these corporations
meet the real needs of employees and customers, theoretically, the more
successful they will be. They might eventually become smart enough to
figure this out, and start digging to find out what those genuine human
needs are, including autonomy, connection with nature (if there's any left)
an end to pointless jumping through hoops. But whenever I start thinking
like this, I think of Newt Gingritch. He'd go for this sort of thing. It
might even be what he believes. {cringe} so that can't be right. Looking
again, I can see that in the corporate model of human nature, you get more
out of a person, either as customer or employee, not by satisfying their
needs, but by carefully keeping them dissatisfied by every means possible.
This makes them work harder, play harder, consume more. The more stressed
out society is as a whole, the more potential for profit. So corporate
hegemony might just be hell on earth, with all factors carefully controled
to produce maximum stress and misery in every person, since that's where
profits come from. Similar logic to the idea that the smell from the
smokestack was the smell of progress.
So how to fight this? That's a tall order. First we must dismiss the hope
of the Newt Gingritch Capitalist Utopia. Clearly, there is more profit in
misery than in joy, and so the aggregate effect of many smart people
relentlessly pursuing profit for a long time will be (has been) the creation
and refinement of misery on the mass level.
So what do you think? This is how I perceive the world, and given that
perception, the only way I can see for myself as an individual to have any
kind of effectiveness is by thinking WAY outside the box, and to be willing
to at least entertain notions that at first seem like real long-shots. It
seems the only way to 'outsmart' the corporate mind is to think the stuff it
does not allow itself to think. Hence, anarcho-occultism. I guess that's
the best way I can explain myself to rationalist types. The trouble with
what seems rational, in a world like this, is that every 'rational' idea has
been examined by the corporate mind and declared 'safe.' (this is the
function of academia) The ones the corporate mind finds scary, it finds
various ways to discredit. The scariest ideas get the most discrediting.
So among the ideas so discredited and debased as to be laughable, we might
find the tools we need ... or something might blow up in our faces.
Matt
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