Stretch your imagination to an extended metaphor. Fantasize that the legal
definition of the corporation were literal. The corporation, under law, is by definition a fictitious
person. So a corporation is a fake person. A phoney human. Call it a pod. A surrogate, a simulacrum. Imagine that
corporations are alien invaders.
Suppose that their species has been discovered dwelling amongst us in human guise. Their
subterfuge gives us reason to believe they do not wish us well. Chart the activities of these creatures
as they are observed. The pattern indicates that they wish to take over. It
is plain to see they do not have our best interests at heart. There is reason to suspect that
corporations are anthropophagic aliens. In few words, they mean to raise us for food.
We need to estimate the dimension of the problem, now that we can see its nature. How
much have they taken over? The answer can be worked out from public data available to us. Until we have worked it out, let us make some guesses. A first-order approximation
paints a bleak picture.
These aliens control at least 80% of the resources of our planet. Four
out of five trees. Four out of five patches of ground. All of our mines. All of our factories.
All of our communications channels. Every government in the world is owned by corporations. Except a few "outlaw" governments that we are hysterically urged to hate. Cuba, Libya,
North Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, a few others, are not corporate fronts. We are daily being psychologically
prepared for their slaughter. The alien invaders among us deign to direct our mass moods, they dictate our public opinons in the tiniest detail. Corporations are fake persons
who can have things. What do they have? Just about all our
money is what they have.
They have so arranged human life that it is practically impossible to survive without actively participating in the flux of money. Human history tells us that
life was not always directed by money. Our prophets screamed warnings to us at every stage of our
progressive enslavement. That was the one thing Jesus was trying to tell us. He
did not get that message through.
The point is, that living on a strictly transactional basis is evil. Since
that is obligatory in current society, something went wrong. We are being ruled by the wrong people.
Since they are not real people, we are being ruled by the wrong fake people. Corporations
are bug-eyed monsters that eat people. They are not just groups of people associated for greed.
Clubs are associations of people. Clubs generally do not have common
interests detrimental to humanity. Companies generally do have such interests, as parasitic organisms.
The original intent of founding a corporarion is to aggrandize its interests, relative
to the rest of humanty, or in short to the detriment of humanity. From the human perspective, a
single corporation considered in isolation is only a nuisance parasite consisting of a selfish
aggregate, a tumor. This perspective was only possible centuries ago, for it is now no longer possible
to view a corporation as an isolated phenomonon.
Corporations purchased the power of the State, acting in consort. Thus
they gained the power to define the law. In his fashion, inherently antisocial organizations gained
control of society. Laws now are not necessarily for the common human benefit. Government
is not dedicated to the common good. Government actions are quite likely to be against the
common good, for government is owned by interests in opposition to the interests of the people.
Humanity is in the power of its enemies. Humanity as a whole
is enslaved to the money system. Government has been subverted to enforce our slavery by coercion.
The common estate of humanity is one of overwhelming evil, artificially imposed. Yet
we do not recognize the alien nature of our plight. We see even the most extreme anti-human elements
of tyranny, as natural developments of circumstance and history. That
is because we are blinded by the corporate disguise as artificial persons. We fail to see corporations
as non-human entities intent on devouring us. Although these institutions were founded by humans,
they have evolved beyond the possibility of human control and by interaction
with one another have developed their own ecologies and population dynamics. The
selfish principles on which they were founded have ensured that their independent evolution produces
only agencies which are totally malign. Business and survival have become mutually exclusive. If life is to continue, capitalism must end The future will see the end of greed,
for there will be no future if the corporation is not exterminated.
