Neal Cormier’s Weblog

I think I may be beginning to oppose capitalism.

Not on a political level though, my objection is philisophical: that the profit motive isn’t a valid goal for human life.

I used to hold that capitalism is also (and undivorcibly) an all-exclusive philosophy. That is, that the profit motive stands for a certain way of life highlighting various fundamentals as basics of an ethics: independance, the fact that money as medium, enpowers the individual to choose what objects he sees as fit for his or her own existence.

Money precludes a free society: that what you spend your money on, is one’s own choice, and hence, one is free to waste or not, one’s assets. Barter, for example, never existed under individualist living, and could never exist–it fosters far too much dependance on the collective, others, your family, your farm, etc.

I think, especially being in the generation I happened to grow up in, that I have a decidely better vantage point on which to judge the current of the so-called capitalist United States.

As Noam Chomsky says, ‘an interesting feature to the modern world is the near disapearance of two words: democracy and capitalism.’

I think this is true, including in what it implies: that capitalism (as a political system with a free market) and democracy have not just disapeared in the modern rhetoric, but dissapeared altogether.

W live in an age where the Sherman Act of 1862 is full blown, but isn’t all we have to worry about in terms of anti-trust, an age in which corporations pay the government through legalized bribery: the lobby. All to gain not just political favors, but total political power, trans-international companies raping the nations they are alleged to protect, at any extreme and at any cost, while hypnopaedic media is induced by mass dosage into the minds of the young, all-pervasively, able to be redirected and repeated at every interval of one’s life and day. (The only hope for the latter is the decentralization of the media, the internet might bring.)

What is characteristic is that the lobby is not only legalized, but institutionalized, far more than in any other era. To boot, the separation between church and state is nearly to the point of the meaninglessness that state and trade has been at for some time.

Ann Coulter, author of that trite best seller, ‘Godless,’ and one the most ignorant, asinine young female conservative ‘writers’ on the market today, ‘points out’ that ‘Liberalism’ is a religion in itself (her best and pretty much her only point) carrying the same amount of unquestionability that religious zealouts have for Christianity.

What she does realize is that both Liberals and conservatives are pro-corporate, especially as I hear, since president Clinton, who furthered the corporatization of the liberal-democratic party up to modern standards.

But it is true that the institutions in themselves are treated and carried as religion.

My closest friends are liberals. I am not. I’m more of a moderate in the sense that I am comprised of both liberal and conservative ideas. But I note what zealous condemnation my friends carry when confronted not merely with conservative political policies, but with conservative ideas entirely. All the while claiming skepticism and objective thinking as their highest value.

I’d say Coulter’s right about one thing: liberals are just as bad as consevatives in the way of faith. She refutes Darwinism and evolution. People in my circle would scoff at this, but at the same time, be hard pressed to really give me an understanding of the theory of evolution beyond a few basic principles, without much evidence to even back up those, at that.

I myself believe that evolution consists of a tenable theory, and that though I have a very limited understanding of it, seek to know more before any real conclusions are made. (As a tangent, I very much support the theory of evolution.)

This is not the point though. The point is that both sides, in their majorities, whether it be rednecks and biblethumpers who could quote you Jesus up and down, while consuming all the materials they can, (nevermind that Jesus himself would thow them out of their own churches) or liberal academics who are just that: academic, and could qoute you Chomsky, Gardener, Kant and Darwin, failing to see that the philosophical ideas uniting all four are of the exact same genus, and that they are subscribing to it without question, and without awareness, let alone knowledge of opposing viewpoints.

Academia hardly ever gets even that good, though, usually academics (those AP students I used to hate in High School) are no better than biblethumpers in that they’ll qoute you a storm,… ‘full of sound and fury signifying nothing.’

I think Adolf Hitler addresses the issue with a bit more clarity however:

“The masses are utterly comtemptable. They are incapable of abstract thinking, and uninterested in any fact outside the circle of their imediate experience. Their behavior is determined not by knowledge and reason, but by feelings and unconscious drives. It is in these drives and feelings that the roots of their positive as well as negative drives are implanted.”

–Excerpt from Mein Kampf

Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, William L. Shirer

Hmm, sounds acutely familiar somehow.

In any case, knowledge and reason are pretty much out the window as far as society goes.

The particular form the masses have taken however, is the subject of my entry here, to which the all the above has prefaced.

The majority of people typify the massess, even if the poor constitute 12% or whatever percent it is, the middle class, and their line of work today comprises what yesterday was called the prolitariate.

Today we face a new, anesthetized version: Corporatism.

Again, I am not addressing corporatism on a primarily economic or political level, but at its root: philosophy.

A philosophy in the way I define it, is the amalgum of values, actions, and experiences, to which everything else, falls as a sub-category.

Before I go into those values, actions, and experiences uniting the idea of corporatism, what IS corporatism?

As a legal-economic idea, it is simply a legal entity unto itself, as to be contrasted with companies where the owner is completely liable for its actions. I am not sure why or how a company, a non-volitional, non-living entity, should ever be liable independant of its owners, but this is my ignorance.

As a political idea, as Chomsky says, no corporation from Northrop Grumman to Boeing would ever be where they are without perpetual government subsidy, especially those catered toward bail-outs.

It means that competition, the idea of a free market, traditional capitalism, is being not merely weeded out, but thrown out the window, at least as a political actuality. This is because the companies we face today, once establishing control over a market, are in bed with Washington for money funelled to politicians, thus petrifying their control, virtually, indefinately.

This of course leads us to a more and more tradition based, static society vs. capitalist which is ostensibly, ever changing and evolving. Not to mention, carries the marriage of trade and state so characteristic of a totalitarian regime.

But what is corporatism as a philosophical idea. One merely needs their own skull and eyes to see this. Every movie depiction from Office Space to American Beauty and Fight Club have illustrated it.

The following ideas I have come up with are the metaphysical ideas present only in the unconscious of the hordes of soccer moms and batalians of Super-Dads, the corners of power-naps, power bars and cheap coffee pawned off as culture.

They are the below five impersonal claims upon human life:

1. Economic Man:

-That a human being’s existence is, and should be, primarily financial and economic: that the supposed goal of life is making money, as an in end in itself, to be obtained at all other costs, including one’s own personal desires (if one has them at all) to which all other concerns in life are secondary.

2. Materialism:

-That the accruement and quality of material possessions are the representation of one’s individual worth.

3. Social Power:

-That power over others is yet another signature of one’s worth, and that that worth is to be gauged by the ability to obtain money and financial control: The boss/worker dichotomy–being obseqouiois to one’s superiors as virtue, while simultaneously being commanding and authoritative with one’s ‘underlings.’

4. Collectivism, Conformity & the Illusion of Individuality:

-That one’s individual wishes and desires should be subordinate to the group, yet implicitly and simultaneously purported as the be all end all of existence. This is predominantly rooted in the preceding years before the professional life: college, i.e. fraternities.

5. The Compartmentalization of Life:

-That life is to consist of compartmentalizing one’s personal life as different and apart from one’s work life, other compartments proceeding, i.e. developing lasting relationships at work, independent of home, hence cheating.

The first things to note about the above five, is that their existence is not primarily overt, but structural. The environment itself fosters the necessity by default. For example, the internet environment, once come into full fruition, has no use for corporations, let alone office buildings, cars or even highways. The individual empowerment the internet fosters is huge.

However, the new environment, though may be anti-corporate, will not have any workers. What we have seen in 1980’s Detroit with GM, is only the very, very beginning of the relatively short-stint of history in which human physical labor will finally be at an end.

All that will remain is the mental, and perhaps not even routely mental, but only creatively, since this will be the only cognitive function left that a machine won’t be able to reproduce.