Posted by
Andrews on Sunday, April 27, 2008 2:54:46 PM
I have noticed a trend, paranoia as a valid political perspective. How else can I explain not just
conspiracy theorists, but even supposedly mainstream thinkers, who can seriously believe that corporations are somehow committing evil deeds?
Why do I say this? It is very simple, corporations are not some faceless entity populated by robots, they are fictional constructs which are made up of our friends, relatives, fellow citizens, even ourselves. I have to ask anyone who denounces the evil of corporations, "If you had a job and the boss asked you to kill someone, or betray your country, would you? If you wouldn't, why do you think your fellow citizens would?"
I brought this up first when writing about the
absurd idea that the Chinese had bought out defense contractors to impair our military. The imaginary dialog I used was as follows:
Jim, Supervisor: John, you work on those surveillance satellites for the military, right?
John, Engineer: Yep, that's me.
Jim: Well, the new management has a request. They want you to add this to all your new designs.
John: (Examining the black box) What is it?
Jim: (Shrugs) I don't know. They said it is called "The Evil Circuit". I think it has something to do with accounting.
John: Do you have any circuit diagrams?
Jim: No. Comrade Vice President just told me to make sure it went into every piece of military hardware.
John: OK, let me just make a call. (Into phone) Homeland security?
It is a bit exaggerated, but it gets the point across. Corporations are nothing but groups of our fellow citizens who are all employed by the same company. Does anyone really think that the majority of their fellow citizens are willing to import poisoned toys? Or bury toxic waste near children's homes? Or impair the defense of the US?
However, once we ignore the people themselves and start to call it "a corporation", or even worse "a multinational corporation", we are all willing to believe that not only are our fellow citizens bent on our destruction, but that they will all conspire to do so without anyone else knowing about it.
In the past we had a word for such beliefs, it was paranoia, and people who espoused them ended up in a nice soft room. Today they end up in syndication, congress, or maybe the White House.
UPDATED 04/30/2008
Interestingly enough, John Stossel's
most recent column addresses a very similar topic, asking why people believe the airlines would intentionally fly unsafe airplane if not for FAA oversight. It fits nicely with what I wrote above. Airlines make money by safely transporting people between two points. Even if they were interested solely in profit, crashes do not make money, they lose it. So, to think the airlines would ignore safety, but for the FAA, one must postulate that the airlines are made up entirely of people bent on evil for the sake of evil. Or, as I said above, the statements Stossel quotes only make sense if we share the assumptions we once called paranoid.