The Anti-Corporate Movement:
The anti-corporate movement is different from the anti-Capitalist movement in one specific way. The anti-corporate movement is a part of the anti-Capitalist movement that focuses on one specific cause of problems and other problems closely related to that.
You remember what I said back in the first book about how corporations fulfill all five of the criteria necessary to qualify as a life form? In order to qualify as a life form, a thing must: behave in a manner conducive to self-preservation; grow and reproduce; transfer energy systematically; react to stimuli; and be distinctly different from its surrounding environment. If you consider the artificial environment of the marketplace to be the natural environment of the corporation, then a corporation does all of these things.
If you prefer a different definition of life, evolution depends on variation, replication, and selection. That’s how the genes that create us evolve, so by extension, anything that does all of those things creates a life form. As Dr. Richard Dawkins discovered back in 1976, ideas are transmitted from person to person, change over time, and adapt to new situations. That means that ideas fulfill the variation, replication, and selection qualifications, and that makes ideas a life form whose environment is our brains. I’ll talk more about that later in the book. For now my point is, that definition of life also proves that a corporation is a life form, because a corporation is a collection of ideas that are really good at helping to propagate each other.
As corporations are recognized by the American legal system, a corporation is nothing but an agreement among people, but it’s granted independent entity-hood by the government. Then, as each person who works for the corporation acts to preserve the survival of their DNA by the most effective means perceivable to them—by going to work every morning and doing their jobs—they make the corporation function. And by each of them contributing their part to it, collectively they make the corporation function as an artificial life form whose goal is to make profits. Not to serve people but to make profits. The corporation is not capable of recognizing people as anything other than a means to move money from one place to another, because in creating this artificial life form, nobody thought—or even knew how—to write in a definition of how to serve the needs of humanity.
Well guess what. Article 6 of the U.S. Constitution deals with how corporations are to be set up. It states, “corporations are entitled to all the rights of people…” and then spells out some more rights corporations are entitled to. So under the U.S. Constitution, corporations have more rights than people do. They say we have a government of, by, and for the people, but if corporations have more rights than people do, is it any surprise that corporations are taking over?
You just might say that the Founding Fathers f*cked up in a big way here. This is what happens when people who believe in supernatural forces try to set up secular governments. The Founding Fathers were using a fictitious history of the world to give them their sense of cause and effect that led from the beginning of the world up the present day, and then they tried to use that imaginary chain of cause and effect to predict how events were going to unfold in the future. And it didn’t f*ckin’ work, did it?
To be fair, the Founding Fathers wrote the Constitution long before the Theory of Evolution, the Laws of Thermodynamics, or the Big Bang were discovered, so they had no way of knowing in secular terms how the world began and how it got from there to the present day. So they did what everyone has always done and tried to figure it out themselves. But now that we can recognize that they had fundamental errors in their understanding of how the world worked, and we can see that those fairly simple mistakes they made in the past are causing big problems for us now, we can choose to take action to solve the problem.
The words “government of the people, by the people, and for the people”, and “corporations are entitled to all the same rights as people plus…” cannot possibly both exist in the same document and make that document self-consistent. It’s pretty obvious the Founding Fathers intended us to have a government of, by, and for the people. But it’s also pretty obvious that they believed in a Christian version of human behavior, that everyone is inherently good and is only tempted to commit evil, or something along those lines.
Well people aren’t inherently good. And the Founding Fathers accidentally wrote a gigantic loophole into the Constitution that self-interested people are taking advantage of now. The result is that America does not work the way the Founding Fathers intended it, because we’ve become a corporate aristocracy. The Founding Fathers spent eight years waging a war against invisible decision-making forces that ruled their lives and that they had no control over, and what do we have now but a bunch of new invisible decision-making forces that rule our lives and that we have no control over?
The Founding Fathers wrote the Second Amendment to give Americans the right to keep and maintain firearms to defend themselves, their families, and their property against thieves and corrupt governments. But there is no bullet that can kill a corporation. If you walked into a corporation’s shareholder’s meeting with an Uzi and mowed every last one of them down, the corporation would still exist. All the people who made the corporation function would be dead, but the corporation would survive. More people would come along and take the places of the old shareholders and executives and would pick up right where they left off.
It is true that people make the decisions for corporations. Hypothetically, those people can make any decisions they want. But the goal of a corporation is not to serve humanity; the goal of a corporation is to make a profit. If the corporation makes a profit, it succeeds. If it doesn’t make a profit, it fails, by the very definition of “corporation”.
Since a corporation is an entity that possesses more rights than a person, and it functions by the collective input of different people, there is no real-life person who can possibly oversee all of the actions of the corporation. That’s especially true in the case of multinational mega-corporations, which work by the collective input of a whole lot of different people. The result of each person performing their stated job can only be expected to be that the corporation makes as much profit as possible—which is the goal of the corporation in the first place—regardless of what any individual feels the artificial entity should do.
Since the corporation’s goal is defined as the making of profit, naturally all the rules that govern the corporation are written for the sake of the achievement of that goal. It could be assumed that everyone in the corporation meant well, but then the people who wrote the rules for the corporation would be making the same mistakes the Founding Fathers did. If each person performs their stated job, under the rules that were written for the sake of the corporation making as much profit as possible, what you end up with is an artificial entity that makes as much profit as possible—not one that serves humanity.
Within the corporation’s rules that are written for the sake of the corporation making as much profit as possible, there are rules governing what people can do, or are supposed to do, if the corporation isn’t making as much profit as possible. So once again, if the self-interested, not-inherently-good-after-all people who make the decisions for the corporation each act according to what they perceive to be the most effective means available to them—namely, doing their jobs, as opposed to not doing them—what you end up with is, once again, an independent entity that acts to make as much profit as possible.
The rights of citizens are protected by governments, not by corporations. Environmental laws are enforced by governments, not by corporations. Any law that limits that activity of a corporation is an obstacle to the artificial entity making as much profit as possible, by definition.
This means that anyone who works for a corporation and acts in a way that protects citizens’ rights and the environment is not doing so because of anything that exists within the corporation, but because of the external threat posed by the government. Since the goal of the corporation is to make as much profit as possible and the external laws of the government are an impediment to that, for each person to perform their job and make as much profit as possible for the corporation puts them into conflict with the law. The laws that limit a corporation’s actions don’t exist to facilitate the corporation’s service to humanity, by definition. Well as we all know, anyone’s goal in a conflict is to win the conflict, not to cooperate with your opponent. So corporations that exist to make profits and governments that exist to serve the needs of their people are continuously pitted against each other, by definition.
And now multi-national corporations are moving capital across international borders ever more efficiently, and thereby dissolving the power of governments, but the borders aren’t being opened to let the workers who sell their labor move freely across the borders. So in the endless struggle between corporations that exist to make profits and governments that exist to serve the interests of their people, who’s winning?
Evolution is defined as the adaptation to environmental pressures. Genetic evolution, technological evolution, and social evolution all work by adaptation to environmental pressure. Genetic evolution is always governed by ever-greater energy efficiency within the organism’s living conditions. That ever-greater efficiency results in ever-more-effective preservation of the organism’s DNA, simply because the equipment the organism uses to preserve the survival of his DNA requires energy to operate. I’ve said all this before.
Traditionally, technological evolution has always moved in the direction of ever-greater personal energy efficiency. Ever-greater personal energy efficiency naturally seems to us to be the most effective means of preserving the survival of our DNA, and traditionally, it has been. But ever-more-efficient use of personal energy through the development of technology has always depended on ever-greater use of environmental energy. Using ever-more-advanced technology requires us to make ever more chemical reactions happen. And thanks to the Laws of Thermodynamics, that always means more energy radiating off the Earth and being lost to our planetary environment forever.
Now that we’re moving from our species’ colonization phase to its sustainability phase, the most effective means of preserving the survival of our DNA is no longer synonymous with personal energy efficiency. But we still naturally perceive it to be. Now the most effective means for us to preserve the survival of our DNA is to use our environmental energy ever more efficiently. That necessarily means depending on environmental energy ever less. And that necessarily means making the transition back to a localized organic agricultural economy.
Social evolution is basically a form of technological evolution, with the one difference being that the “technology” is invisible, because it’s an agreement or other type of collective behavior among a group of people. But it follows the same pattern of ever-greater personal energy efficiency leading to ever-more-effective preservation of people’s DNA. But that still only applies to life in the colonization phase of our species, which is where our perceptions of the world evolved. Now that we’re moving into our species’ sustainability phase, the ever-greater preservation of our DNA necessarily means ever less dependence on environmental energy. And that means ever-greater use of personal energy. But once again, making this transition depends on educating people to make them perceive the new discrepancy between personal energy efficiency and the effective preservation of their DNA.
Human behavior itself is a constant adaptation to environmental pressures. Every decision you ever make in your life you make for the sake of preserving the survival of your DNA by the most effective means perceivable to you. As your situation changes, your perception of your situation changes—that is, provided you’re perceiving the situation correctly. And as your perception of the situation changes, your perception of the most effective means of preserving the survival of your DNA in that situation also changes.
When the Founding Fathers wrote the Constitution and the laws governing the operation of corporations, they lived in different conditions than we do. First of all, they still seemed to have an infinite supply of material resources available, because they didn’t anticipate the effects of exponential population growth or industrialization. Back when they wrote the Constitution, they were still living in our species’ colonization phase, which meant that ever greater personal energy efficiency was still synonymous with ever more effective means for people to preserve the survival of their DNA. Also, they perceived the operation of the world itself differently than we do now—namely, incorrectly—because they lacked the science we have now.
So here’s what all that means for corporations: When the Founding Fathers wrote the laws governing the operation of corporations, they wrote them according to their living conditions at the time and their faulty understanding of how the world worked. Part of the Founding Fathers’ living conditions, which created part of their understanding of how the world worked, was how people acted at the time. In the late 18th century, everyone who owned a corporation also had Christian values and various other background values. These values affected their decision-making, which limited them to making certain choices. But those values were external to both the structure of a corporation and the political system the Founding Fathers founded. Quite simply, there were certain things people could do that the Founding Fathers had no way of outlawing, because nobody had thought of doing those things yet. People who own corporations today, however, have different cultural values and 200 more years of practice at cheating and finding loopholes in the laws the Founding Fathers wrote.
When the Founding Fathers wrote the laws governing corporations, they created an environmental pressure by creating an agreement among people. Now, as people adapt to the environmental pressure the Founding Fathers created based on their faulty understanding of the world and their living conditions at the time, when people who work for corporations adapt their behavior to their environmental pressures (meaning act to preserve the survival of their DNA by the most effective means perceivable to them by doing their jobs according to the laws that govern corporations), they are not acting in ways that are compatible with the world we actually live in.
And here’s why: Corporations are a vehicle of Capitalism. The making of “profit” means the control of an increased amount of energy and material resources. That means that the success of a corporation, and Capitalism itself, depends on sustained economic growth. But sustained economic growth isn’t sustainable on a finite-sized planet. Endless economic growth would depend on an infinite supply of resources, and it isn’t physically possible for an infinite supply of resource to exist. When the Founding Fathers wrote the Constitution, they assumed that the world’s resources were infinite, and they were wrong. So when they laid the foundation for an economic system they thought would serve people well, it turned out not to work nearly as well as they thought it would.
Then the Founding Fathers went so far as to write laws for creating independent entities that would serve as vehicles for their imaginary economic system. And then they imbued those independent entities with more rights than people had.
Since our economic system was founded on beliefs about the world that were faulty in a number of ways, the vehicles of that economic system can’t possibly function in a way that’s consistent with physical reality. The survival of these vehicles—these artificial non-human entities—depends on an infinite supply of resources that can’t physically exist, because one way or another making profits always depends on combining matter and energy to turn things that aren’t useful to people into things that are useful to people, by definition. If these artificial entities cease to generate profits, they cease to fulfill their purpose for existing. That makes them failures, by definition. That creates a new environmental pressure for the people who each make part of the decisions that make the artificial entity function. Now the most effective means for them to preserve the survival of their DNA is to operate the bureaucratic apparatus that was built into the artificial entity to be used in the event that the artificial entity ceased to make a profit, to make it start generating profit again.
But feeding resources into the artificial entity simply for the sake of keeping it alive necessarily means taking those resources either from the environment or from people—neither of which we can afford any longer. That necessarily pits the survival of the corporation against the survival of the people who need the resources. That causes two big problems:
First of all, processing the resources through the corporate machinery just to keep the corporation alive, and then selling them back to the people, would add additional chemical reactions to the process— additional steps to the food chain, in other words, or you could say trickle-through economics. The Laws of Thermodynamics will make energy radiate off the Earth forever at every step of the way. Adding in more steps just to keep the artificial entity alive leaves less resources for the real-life people to use.
Second, as I’ve said before, if you put the control of resources that people need to live in the hands of someone else, then for all intents and purposes you’re turned the people who need those resources into slaves. The person who controls the resources may or may not use them to force the people who need them into slavery. But if a lot of people are put in control of resources that other people need to live, it is inevitable that some people will use their control of the resources to manipulate the people who need them. In addition, the very act of putting someone in control of the resources other people need to live creates the master-slave relationship, and the people who are being turned into slaves can be expected to fight back, regardless of whether the master-figure tried to use them as slaves or even intended to use them as slaves.
The Founding Fathers created a monster. And the Capitalists are choosing to serve it.
Corporations as they exist now are a relic left over from our species’ colonization phase. As we move into our sustainability phase we will move into a new environmental economy, by definition. That new environmental economy will create a new human economy. That new human economy will necessarily create a new political system.
Corporations in their current form can be considered as nothing other than artificial life forms that prey on humans. They must be exterminated.
It could be said that the people who operate corporations could choose to operate them differently now. There are four components involved here: the environmental economy, the Homo sapiens who operate the corporations, those people’s perception of the world, and the laws that govern the operation of the corporations.
The environmental economy of the world is non-negotiable. The laws of physics are merciless and remorseless. There is nothing we can change about the environmental economy that will make corporations function differently.
The Homo sapiens who control the corporations are a constant. They will always act to preserve the survival of their DNA by the most effective means perceivable to them. That fundamental law of human behavior can’t be changed to make corporations function differently.
The people who control the corporations could be educated in how the world works, how the global environment is changing, and how people will have to start acting differently to live within the physical limitations of the world.
And of course, the laws governing the operation of corporations could be rewritten.
It could be said that all people need to do is to educate the people who operate the corporations to make them perceive the world correctly. That would change one environmental pressure, that necessarily would change the behavior of the people who make the decisions for the corporation, and that would change the actions of the corporation itself. This is how Frank Robinson wrote his own set of standards—voluntarily—for how pilots would be certified to fly his helicopters. Mr. Friedman’s book is full of examples of people who operate corporations doing this also.
The problems with depending exclusively on people who make decisions for corporations to control their own behavior voluntarily, is that if they’re controlling their behavior voluntarily, they still control how they behave. If they can choose to act in a way that benefits humanity and there’s nothing else in the situation that affects them, then they can still choose not to benefit humanity, just as easily.
The man-made laws that govern the operation of corporations are another environmental pressure. This one is controlled by the people that a valid government serves. That government is the embodiment of the agreement made among the people to work together to protect their mutual interests from those who would threaten them. Since the goals of a corporation contradict the goals of government (which is why governmental laws limit corporate behavior instead of facilitate it—or at least, are supposed to), to the people a government protects, a corporation is a threat. So by the people changing the laws that govern the operation of a corporation, the people would be creating a second environmental pressure.
You could just as easily call the federal government the People’s Corporation. The People’s Corporation defines its economy as the entire global environment, including the entire realm of human behavior. It defines its economic success by its maintenance of the well being of society. That means that the People’s Corporation is competition to all other corporations. And as every Capitalist knows, competition is good for the economy because it drives innovation. So innovate motherf*cker, innovate!
It could be said that people who control corporations could change the goals of their corporations to suit the needs of the changing environmental economy. And hypothetically that’s possible. There’s just one catch. In order for a corporation to serve people’s needs in the new environmental economy, its owners would have to redefine their economy to include the global environment itself, including the entire realm of human behavior and the effects of the Laws of Thermodynamics. They would have to redefine economic success by making society function better than it does now. That would necessarily mean taking action to make empirical improvements on people’s ability to preserve the survival of their DNA. And that would necessarily mean taking specific and decisive action to help make our transition to a global localized organic agricultural economy.
So here’s the catch: If you do all that to your corporation, you’ll no longer be practicing Capitalism. You’ll be practicing a Use-Value economic system. Capitalists define their economic success by their ability to combine matter and energy to turn things that aren’t useful to people into things that are useful to people, according to the laws of supply and demand. We define our economic success by our ability to combine matter and energy to turn things that aren’t useful to people into things that are useful to people according to the physical limitations of the Earth. Then we define our personal demand accordingly. Capitalists measure their economic success by having more. We measure our economic success by needing less. The entire global environment is useful to people just the way it is. In fact, if we had less of a human economy and more of a global environment, the global environment probably would be even more useful to us. But people don’t naturally perceive that. We’ve learned to perceive it. Capitalists combine matter and energy to turn things that aren’t useful to people into things that are useful to people by extracting resources from the environment. We combine matter and energy to turn thing that aren’t useful to people into things that are useful to people by moving things around in our own brains, to make our brains more useful to us, by making ourselves perceive the importance of not extracting resources from the global environment.
And like everything else I talk about in this chapter, all this is elementary to Globalization 4.0.
Geez, and you thought we were just a bunch of Anarchists kicking and screaming and complaining that the world ain’t fair?
Pathetic.