Corporations
The corporate impulse prizes organization. The human impulse prizes random intuition. The corporate impulse prizes the meshing of pieces. The human impulse wonders about how seemingly random yet miraculous existence is. The corporate impulse adds up. The human impulse subtracts the endless variables of individuality and pares each person down to an essence, that incomparable feeling of soul for soul. The corporate impulse makes for bigness. The human impulse recognizes, lying awake at night, how small a life is. The corporate impulse aggrandizes. The human impulse stalks insight, ecstasy, passion, and at the furthest reach, mystical feeling. The corporate impulse makes a virtue of the grind. The human impulse rebels, sometimes for the pleasure, whether dubious or not, of rebellion for the sake of rebellion. (Ask any adolescent.) The corporate impulse adores slogans. The human impulse prefers poetry. The corporate impulse worships the person at the top. The human impulse stares out a window. How beautiful the sky is. What corporation made it?
The corporate impulse resides in each person; otherwise, there would be no corporations. I wonder how much human impulse resides in corporations. To say that corporations are made up of people is to practice an evasion. The purpose of corporations is to submerge people and use some part of them for the benefit of the corporation. A corporation is where uniqueness can be purposefully lost.
For many a worker this has been a mixed blessing. There can be something soothing about going about one’s faceless yet determined business. True, a person can be replaced, eliminated, moved about, terminated, but it is not a person to whom that is happening but rather a position. A person in a corporation is by definition a position. The cubicle or office is inhabited by a person but the reason for the person being there has nothing to do with some outlandish or modest human impulse, a feeling for the color green or baking cakes or singing sea chanteys. The reason has to do with that position serving the corporation. When the person suffers as a result of losing his or her job, there is a small shock, the remembering of personhood. The person feels that shock but the corporation does not. How could it?
Corporations promote busyness, a sense of what must be done to generate more money, more sales, more products, more leverage, more domination of the market, more innovation, more of more. Any placidity may result in falling behind. Though corporations are fond of retreats and consultants and any ploy they can think of to make employees feel nominally human, all such events, understandably, are focused on the success of the corporation. As an occasional spiritual figure has noted, it is a good thing God was not looking for success. None of us would be here.
Tall buildings, vast organizations, huge outreach, powerful mergers—such realities have given a flavor of enormity to modern life. Big is not so much better (though that is a relentless focus) as more eminent. Pharaoh lives! Yet at the same time there is the daily work done by so many, work that supports what? Typically, it is work that supports work, a tautology that tastes like sawdust and that countless millions have had to stomach. Since most enterprises are at bottom a vehicle for imagination masquerading as some intractable fact (“The world needs these widgets”), an element of subterfuge surrounds the relentless labors of modern corporations. Is this work all that people are good for? Must they get so completely lost on the ever-changing map of life that they must be modestly found in Room 8-B on the twenty-third floor? Must everyone be a niche in a cubicle?
I sound the inquisitive Emersonian alarum and why not? The path has gotten only deeper since his age. To his protests, a thousand voices have replied very heartily. There is no going backwards. There is no denying progress. There is no malingering in the heated vestibules of bottom line success, a bottom line that has influenced every aspect of life, from education to food to health. A great cloud of minatory demands hovers over each toilsome day. Not “whim” but “this must be” should be engraved on every door and in every lobby. There is nothing to do but sign up. You can read Emerson on your day off.
Vast purposes create vast influence. Since no one person is responsible, the accountability of the mere person may vanish. It takes a rare soul to maintain some integral sense of morality when the tide is pulling that person in one direction and only one direction—the success of the corporation. To blow a whistle, to protest a decision, to invoke a precept that cannot be traduced—no matter what—takes courage. And no one may listen. Or someone may listen and tell the person to get lost unless he or she wants to be fired. Or someone may pass on the complaint to someone else who passes it on to someone else.
The engines of purpose are fearsome. Corporations harness those engines and everyone can hear their succulent purr. Whether nation-states order corporations around or vice-versa is irrelevant. What matters is the theme of purpose and the refusal to admit any other themes in the stirring medley of money, power, and greatness. Those who do not agree are malcontents. Where would human beings be without vast organizations?
That is the question that will haunt humanity for a long, or maybe not so long, time, because the terror of corporations is that they take on lives of their own. The corporations that fed the Nazi effort or that made Agent Orange or that insisted cigarettes had nothing to do with cancer were an aggregation of human beings in the loosest sense. Group-think is no-think. The more people are enmeshed in believing that nothing can change outside the anointed borders of corporate aims, the more danger lurks for everyone. The good news is that spirit—our staring out windows—remains unprofitable.