Self-interested, amoral, callous and deceitful, a corporation's operational principles make it anti-social. It breaches social and legal standards to get its way even while it mimics the human qualities of empathy, caring and altruism. It suffers no guilt. Diagnosis: the institutional embodiment of laissez-faire capitalism fully meets the diagnostic criteria of a psychopath.To which Kottke says,
Corporations have traditionally thought of themselves as the most important entities in the economic ecosystem, but it might be more healthy for society in general to think of them as the organisms that ultimately benefit the humans that comprise them (the genes in the corporation organism, as it were).This is one of the difficulties of postmodern capitalism: the loss of ontology and teleology substitute endless drift for the old grand narratives about personal and cultural growth. Those narratives were false ones, and often damaging and repressive--but they've been replaced by postmodern capitalism. (Many cultural and literary theorists defined postmodern capitalism with schizophrenia--Deleuze and Guattari most [in]famously.)
Moving beyond postmodernism requires a situated faith--not religious faith, but something like it--in the good of the community, and in the ability of people to make their way in the face of contingency and uncertainty. It requires other things, of course (like beer). But it's difficult for those conditions to emerge in a culture that's increasingly focused on corporate rights over community rights.
[via Kottke.org] Posted by johndan at January 26, 2004 11:24 AM | TrackBack