Co-Op or Corps? Co-operation or corporation? The “Corporative” is the corporate operative, as well disciplined as their military equivalent, the Corporal – the human tank of Imperialist will. To be corporative and in with the stealing classes requires assets of unusual character.
Affirmative Sir. I want my cut of the loot. I understand that I need to put my own people down and steal from my own country on your behalf. I will say if asked that I am just doing my job. I will believe (or pretend to believe) in the nobility of my cause in serving Ruler and God and Country (no mention of the Population here). Anybody who challenges me is a Communist (or Terrorist) which gives me the right to use force against them. However many people I kill or dispossess or visit injustice upon, I am a Moderate, a Centrist, a good Christian.
Aged 9 in America, the child’s complicity is tested in Social Sciences. Again thanks to Noam Chomsky for sharing his daughter’s experience in her fourth grade Social Science reader…
“His little army attacked in the morning before it was light and took the Pequots by surprise. The soldiers broke down the stockade with their axes, rushed inside and set fire to the wigwams. They killed nearly all the braves, squaws and children and burned their corn and other food. There were no Pequots left to make more trouble. When the other Indian tribes saw what good fighters the white men were they kept the peace for many years. I wish I were a man and had been there, thought Robert”.
When the Captain slaughters the land-owners and their wives and children, the prospective obedient servant of power will wish to have been them. They will swallow hard and come to terms with the greater good of Imperialists. Their complicity and support will be rewarded with promotion and greater power. They get to go to the White House and the Pentagon. They get the best cars, the biggest houses and they are protected for as long as they’re needed.
But they are discarded as soon as they have outlived their usefulness. Having abandoned any decency long ago, they will have no-one decent to turn to. Even the Crooks they spent a lifetime collaborating with now have no further use for them. So they die alone, alienated from the friends they left behind, surrounded by their military decorations, their certificates of qualification. Their badges of honour, their waning belief in the justness of their lifetime’s work.
There is a conflict between business and humanity. There is an emptiness that goes with subservience to corrupt authority. It works like this.
Diversity of experience yields breadth of wisdom and reserves of skill, know-how. But the system requires specialists because specialism assists the accelerated advance of technology. But specialism of experience means lack of other experience. No view of the big picture. Narrowness of mind and severe limitations of general know-how – the quantum physics professor who can’t make a cup of tea. He was my tutor at University.
This 46 weeks per year of thinking about sub-atomic particles restricts the mind and breeds ignorance of all else beyond. Narrowing, constriction, asphyxiation, alienation. The feeling of emptiness experienced by the specialist is a direct result of all the other demands of the soul being left unfulfilled. The world around remains unexperienced. The human within remains unfulfilled. Empty. Lonely. Obsessed with the contents of an ever smaller box. Einstein wished he was a Plumber.
Those with broader experience develop broader minds and skillsets and are thus more comfortable with, and capable of, independence. The broader mind in co-operation with others may design life from the start according to need. On the other hand, the specialist is dependent on a pre-existing system which he must fit into, or be excluded from. He is organised by others and so habitually dependent, he fears the prospect of ever having to survive outside his well-appointed prison. And so he boasts about his prison and his chains and how happy they make him. He becomes ever more defensive as the truth of his position is revealed by a continual flow of apparent contradictions between beliefs and outcomes. It becomes ever more obvious, even to him.
The longer he serves within the system, the less capable he becomes of living outside it – he hasn’t spent his life acquiring the skills to become independent. Ever more locked in. As he becomes more dependent, the technology he produces makes him yet more dependent and requires ever greater specialism in order to advance. More specialism, more technology, more dependence, more specialism…
Beware dependence, especially if there is deep suspicion of the motives of the machine you work for. You may end up playing a small part in the covert slaughter of 600,000 Cambodians as a Marketing consultant, or a Road Haulage Business. Even if you supply the soldiers with something to wipe their arses, you play your part. Does happiness lie this way? Not for the Cambodian. Or their Mother. Or their children.
And as for you. Your dependence means that you may eventually be divested of any independent power. They can lower your wages, up your taxes, up the bills and the prices. You’re not in a position to complain when Democracy Shut-down arrives as it does every time a coup arrives in town. Time to kill half the world with a submarine armed with the weapon of Neptune the Roman God of the Sea. The Trident. Time to put the other half in prisons and chains and re-introduce slave labour as they have done in Brazil, and Chain Gangs in American prisons. Self-detonating implants in the soldiers under computer control to secure their obedience under threat of explosion. That’s dependence. If they can’t secure your obedience then they welcome your apathy. But either way, your boss will kill you.
At the top of the system sits “Pater Noster”, Our Father. Grandad. Grandad works to hold his inherited power in place on his third world estate and he needs a marketing consultant to sell his bananas for him. Interested?
But take heart, gentle others. Even Grandad’s tolerance to this system is cracking. His will to continue is weakening because nature is making all of us, even Grandad, pay the price. Hurricanes, floods and viruses – the Bible becomes prophetic. We’re all losing out on that thing called life but Grandad’s a little hard pushed to work out what’s so good about his life either. One son an asthmatic dead of pollution, a daughter dead under the wheels of one of Grandad’s own-brand cars, another fell down stairs after a little too much of Grandad’s own-brand liquor, another dead of cancer from Grandad’s cigarettes. And he’s just getting to understand climate change after another died from skin cancer and his last natural heir drowned under a tsunami.
Grandad made the air poisonous and the sun lethal. Why? To provide a future for his children. And now the cancer is crawling all over Grandad’s suntan as well. Some people say that their God practises free will. Nature doesn’t. It reacts to abuse.
The people are held hostage within concentric rings of power. Encircling the people are the Government, the Courts, the Police, the Church and the Media. Surrounding these, hiding behind them and beyond our reach are the Military and the Corporations. And they need us to buy into their lies and join them to enforce injustice against the rest of us. But in their arrogance, they are now being reminded by global environmental catastrophes that even they in turn are encircled by yet another ring. This outer ring that surrounds us all is Nature.
Old age advances. Grandad’s bloody minded insistence on doing evil has divested him of any real friends. After all, why should anyone love him for exploiting the world to look out for himself? No amount of income can cure the soul of bitterness, jealousy, hatred. And now he is old, he has all the money in the world but no friends, and in his efforts to secure a future for his family he has ended up killing them all.
So he must pay for his care. These carers don’t love him. They just want money, just like he did. There’s nobody who actually cares for him. The Staff abuse him, take his money, just like he did to the likes of them, all through his own life. They are only thinking of themselves, just like he did. He dies alone, embittered. His first job was marketing Bananas. Someone else’s bananas.
Does he wish he’d thought about taking that Banana Marketing job a little more deeply?
Future security primarily rests in having a wide network of friendly relationships around you. It has little to do with money. Think carefully before serving power. They’ll look after you and then dump you. They can’t make you happy and they will alienate you from your friends and progressively from everyone else. They don’t offer security, they remove you from it and in that way they can control you completely. The first victim of servitude and dependency is the soul. Don’t be like Grandad.