I recently saw Mark Achbar's outstanding film, The Corporation, and was particularly struck by the point about how corporate cultures will externalize vast areas of responsibility, such as public works, roads, and infrastructure, putting the bill for these extras at the feet of American taxpayers (remember the Jimmy Dean highway bill from last year, that featured a mega-million dollar road through Wal-Mart HQ in Arkansas?).
I was also struck by the psychiatric diagnosis that the film constructed as it proceeded to unmask various corporate attitudes and behaviors (the final Dx was psychopathy). It was a compelling exercise, especially since I had written about this a couple of years back, though with reference to the personal sphere of life. Here's an excerpt from my definition of neurosis:
Neurosis is characterized by inner conflict—a painful sense of discord within the psyche, usually from we-don’t-know-where, that feels like a splitting of the self into competing or even warring components.
Neurosis is unconscious—we’re either completely unaware or only vaguely conscious of the source, direction, and meaning of our feelings of discord and conflict. We’re very conscious of the pain and inner combat that’s going on within us, but we’re not aware of its cause; we lack a conscious perspective on what the pain is telling us.
Consequently, neurosis leads us into that form of projection known as externalization: we blame other people, events, things, or abstractions (such as a malevolent God, an indifferent universe, society, or just a dark star following our life’s course) for our misery, our sense of bitter estrangement. Externalization only further separates us from self-understanding and spirals us into darker and more malevolent conflicts, which in turn lead us into a deeper cycle of division, splitting, and estrangement— both from others and from our true nature. Neurosis, at its worst, is the dark and recurrent atonal noise of inner death.
The point of my book is to offer people who may be trapped in either personal, social, or even political estrangement a way through and beyond it. My approach takes Dante's path through the seven layers of Hell as its leading metaphor, along with the related theme (borrowed from the ancient Greeks) of katabasis, which simply teaches that you can't surpass suffering unless you experience it—that is, you can't conquer something that you don't first know.
The corporate mindset claims that it has enough on its plate in just meeting the challenges of competition and staving off rebellion from disgruntled stockholders. Everything else—public works, challenges within the community, environmental destruction, international conflict, poverty, slave labor—must be someone else's problems, and especially someone else's fault. That Canadian film does a very good job of demonstrating this.
If you work in a corporate office, as many of us do, check out the attitudes you encounter in meetings, in attempting to build consensus amid competing departmental interests, or in navigating the crush at the cafeteria at lunchtime. Don't you see much of the same thing at work in the individuals who do corporate America's grunt labor?
That, to me, is the scary part: not only is the corporate merging into the political; and not only is government becoming a front for hidden corporate tyrannies (as the Canadian film also suggests); but the corporate pathology is becoming our own. So not only do we have to see corporate influence taken out of Congress and the White House—we need to remove it from ourselves.
This is a theme we'll be taking up in the coming weeks at the Daily rEvolution Weblog; and as always, I welcome suggestions.