Crunchkin

Tuesday, June 12, 2007

Virtue in Individuals, not Corporations

I seem to go about everything differently, and don’t really fit in the contemporary picture. After taking a stab at promoting business ethics for several years, I have abandoned all of this, and I think ethics has almost nothing to do with business, at least in the modern materialist sense, and I think the majority of the problems in the US political crisis are owing to corporate delusions. The answer can only lie in individual citizens, and yet how can any one citizen attempt to stand up to the power and might of a corporation? Corporations it seems to me are undermining the essence of American democracy. My conclusions are provocative, and would require me to cite the causes and examples, which I will not go into here. A lot of this came clear to me while “teaching” business ethics online. I realized that it is all talk, and ethics really means “turning the other cheek” which companies never do. In short, Jesus Christ, to me, is what ethics is all about, and He speaks only to individual souls, never to corporate bodies. In worldly, corporate terms, Jesus and his disciples and most of the saints were by worldly term “losers”---unemployed, living outside the cultural, familial, and political norms of whatever power was in place.

This has little to do with the project at hand, but I must share with you my true belief, or else you will never know how I have come to think. My life has been a struggle for quite a long time. Probably I could have applied myself, been ambitious and attempted to “succeed”. But something inside of me holds me back for ethical reasons. My views are certainly not popular. In my view technological progress, and capitalistic economy, have gone too far. There was a time when ethics had meaning in business, but now the very essence of democracy is being undermined, because of these corporations without soul, whose powers are unlimited, there is no way that a poor, challenged and struggling individual citizen could ever merit the type of authority, political and legal sway that a corporation possesses. And yet, the essence of democracy in America rests on these struggling individual citizens.

The Founding Fathers of course knew what corporations were, still there can be no doubt that the Declaration of Independence concerns human individuals. Granted corporations came to be looked at as possessing ‘rights’ as individuals this usage is metaphoric, but look what it has become! Nowadays, if I even mention a corporate brand name or slogan in my artwork I run the risk of a violation of some type of “intellectual property” (the very idea of this is strange---bands in the ‘60s were marketing their hit records not some ineffable essence). Corporations are not individuals, and possess no ‘rights’, cannot be ‘violated’ and so on… Individuals compose a corporation, but the corporation does not possess over and above its individuals a separate ‘individual existence’. Just as someone at a university is looking for the campus, because they have not realized that ‘campus’ is not a landmark or building, but a place where all of these buildings, landmarks and so on have their place.

To succeed may also mean to fail, depending upon the content of the success and one’s intention, it is a terrible thing to have achieved something great and yet lost one’s companions. And one man’s idea of success is not like another man’s. Unless you are in the States, and then everybody’s dreams are supposed to fit in with the ‘democratic ideal’. Personally, I think working beaucoups hours contributing my prime time to earn wages so that I can have excess and buy more things, even if I don’t need them, wrestling with schedule, being forced to adjust my value system in accordance with the company’s doesn’t really seem very American to me after all.

And bingo, there we have it, has anybody noticed that the US is getting more British? Stuffy monarchs, madmen, drunks, and tyrants, lords, ladies, megabucks, “blueblood”, manners…, the list goes on.