Corporate Cannon Fodder

I’ve put in many years as a corporate drone, one of those cogs in the machinery of commerce sitting at a computer in the grids of cubicles filling up skyscrapers. Our job is to take care of the mindless work that must be done to keep the gears of profit turning. But we also have another important, thankless task.

Corporate drones are paid to serve as cannon fodder for the executives. We’re the first line of defense against the consequences of their actions. We must answer for the company policies that we had no hand in shaping. We’re the ones who must listen to the complaints, vitriol and abuse from the clients and customers. We’re the ones who must repress our anger and sadness. We're the ones who must bow and scrape and grovel to keep the customer satisfied.

We’re the buffer between Management and Reality. We insulate them from negative feedback, so they can continue to pursue the policies that enrich them and immiserate the rest of us. As long as they don’t have to deal with the consequences, they will keep squeezing as much blood, sweat and tears out of us as they can to maximize profits.

So, even as we suffer humiliation, exhaustion and soul-death, we perpetuate the system that tortures us. We are the engine of our own misery. We enable the Fat Cats to escape responsibility for their actions. We absorb the blowback that should be blowing them back.

We keep shrinking our souls to fit into the corporate cubicle. It’s the most elastic variable in the profit equation. Capitalism can only squeeze so much out of the earth via technology. But there’s always room in the soul. The human will to survive is Capitalism’s greatest resource. It can be mined almost indefinitely. But they’re scraping the bottom of the barrel. The vein is nearly exhausted.

Capitalism must strike a delicate balance between exploitation of the soul and enrichment of it. If you give us nothing to live for, we will lose the will to survive, and then we won’t respond to the whip anymore. We’ll simply give up and lie down to die. But if you enrich our souls too much, we won’t need your dead-end jobs. We’ll strike out on our own and take our chances in the Great Big World. The trick is to keep our souls floating between these poles, in a kind of spiritual limbo.

You need to convince us we deserve the abuse, that we don’t deserve to be free, that we must toil in the profit mines. Convince us that we can’t hack it out there in the Great Unknown, that we need the security of a 9-to-5. But still hold out hope for a better future, for a pot o’ gold at the end of the rainbow. That’s why the stock market must be propped up at all costs. If our 401(k)’s and savings were wiped out, CorpWorld would have nothing left to offer us.

Instead of waiting for this economic reckoning (which seems inevitable), we should abandon the cubicle before our souls are completely obliterated. We must reject the terms of our surrender and refuse to waste our lives in service to the servants of Moloch. We cannot be the lambs sacrificed for a god we don’t even believe in. We must reclaim the anger and sadness we’ve repressed and use them to fight back.

We might like to stay above the fray, but there’s no avoiding this war. We thought if we left the Fat Cats alone we could keep our comfortable lives. But that time has passed. Now they’re coming for everything we have, even our souls. We have to choose. Either we fight for them or we fight for ourselves. Fighting for them offers security, but what good is security without a soul?

Popping the Beltway Bubble

I’ve been listening to The Fifth Column podcast lately. It’s good, but they have a libertarian bent, I guess, which seems to make them oblivious to some of the finer points of neoliberal economics. On this week’s episode, they were nattering on about how Blue-Collar Joe's are stupid for thinking that NAFTA has had an adverse effect on the American economy.

One of ‘em even said that people will have forgotten about NAFTA in 20 years. Dude, NAFTA was 23 years ago! Why do you think it’s still on people’s minds? Granted, “the mob” (as The Fifth Column hosts called the unwashed masses) may not always understand the effects of public policies, but I think the mob nailed it on this one. To their credit, The Fifth Columnists said they might not get it because they’re a bunch of “cosmopolitan coasties and journalos.” Ding, ding!

They also discussed a Politico article about Trump voters who still like the President even though he hasn’t delivered on his promises. The thrust of the article seems to be “These people are crazy! How can they still like a politician who hasn’t kept his promises? WTF?!” The implication is that the Trump dead-enders are beyond reason and, therefore, beyond help. The Mainstream Media (MSM*) did their best to expose Trump as a dog-whistlin’, no-class-havin’, female-assaultin’ con man, but they just can’t get through to these nutjobs.

This seems a rather self-serving piece of reportage by the MSM. It reinforces the idea that people in Flyover Country are corn-pone rubes who deserve the shallow, pandering news coverage the MSM give us. The problem couldn’t possibly be that the MSM ignore the real causes of our suffering, e.g., the corporate capture of government. That would imply that many of the Common Folk understand politics better than the big, important, serious people on the News, and that would not be good for ratings or for the MSM’s corporate paymasters.

It’s not like Trump’s support is strong. His approval ratings are breaking records for pathetic-ness. Since polling began, no President has been this unpopular this early in his Presidency. The MSM have been able to revel in those poll numbers for months, but they’re still not happy. They have to find out why anyone would still support Trump.

The big revelation in the article is that these people don’t care that Trump hasn’t kept his promises. They just like him personally. This is supposed to shock us and fill us with despair, but it shouldn’t. They act as though Trump were the first President who failed to keep his promises and still retained popular support. I mean, whoever heard of a politician not keeping their promises? And surely no one would be stupid enough to still support a politician who was so disingenuous.

Are the MSM really so brainwashed, or do they not have long-term memory? Trump may have had the most vacuous, cynical campaign in American history, but Obama’s was #2 in that hit parade. “Hope” and “Change” turned out to mean 8 more years of basically the same shit we got from Dubya, just with better marketing. But Obama remained popular despite his failure to deliver any real hope or change.

This is the political arena that the MSM have been building for decades. They’re the ones who turned politics into a circus, just another entertainment where everything is for show, where words have no connection to actions, and actions have no consequences. The only reason the MSM are shocked by it is because they’ve been drinking their own Kool-Aid.

The 2016 presidential election was likely a tipping point. A critical mass of the American public no longer believes the MSM, and their power is slipping away. I think this is the true (if unconscious) source of their fear and desperation. They no longer recognize their own country, and they can’t predict or control the natives anymore.

It’s time for these folks to get out of the Beltway Bubble. As one of the interviewees in the Politico article says, “I think we’re going to see the end of the world in our generation.” I doubt the world will end that soon, but this generation will almost certainly see the end of the elite’s world of comfort and privilege.

*If repeatedly referring to the “MSM” makes me sound like a tinfoil-hat-wearing crackpot, so be it. I just happen to think they’re full of shit, and this is the most efficient way I know of for referring to them.

Everybody Hates

Before we encounter another situation like Charlottesville (which was exactly 3 months ago as of this weekend), I’d like to address something my fellow Leftists and Liberals seem to be overlooking. I followed the events of that day on TV and social media. Like most people, I was horrified by what happened, wondering if our country was about to be engulfed in a Second Civil War.

I registered my anger on Twitter. But I saw something else arise from the Left that day and not for the first time. Many of my compatriots’ tweets and Facebook posts were seething with a visceral hatred. They really seemed to hate the white supremacists they were watching on TV.

Now I would regard this as a healthy reaction. We saw people beating up other people apparently just because of their politics. That’s reprehensible. It’s only natural to get angry at the neo-Nazi’s and other Right-wingers who were engaging in violence, especially when the police didn’t seem to be doing anything about it.

The problem is that most people on the Left refuse to admit that they hate anyone. They insist that hatred is something felt only by racists, sexists and other deplorables. That’s an interesting position to take. I think the key is in how you define “hate.” (I’m going to take the hack approach now and cite a dictionary definition. Do not be alarmed. I am a trained professional.)

The Penguin Dictionary of Psychology defines hate as a "deep, enduring, intense emotion expressing animosity, anger, and hostility towards a person, group, or object.” (And, yes, I found that on Wikipedia.) I would add that the hostility is not based in logic. To me, hatred is irrational. It ultimately has nothing to do with whether or not the object of your hatred poses a threat to you.

I’d like you to keep that definition in mind if you choose to read “Hate is the New Sex,” a typically brilliant essay by the greatest living nonfiction writer I’ve ever come across, John Michael Greer, a.k.a. “the Archdruid.” (Don’t be embarrassed if you’ve never heard of him; he’s not particularly famous. But, seriously, check it out, because the man is a fucking GENIUS.)

His point is that hate is a natural human emotion that everyone feels sometimes, and, by denying its legitimacy, we’re doing what the Victorians did with sex: filling people with so much shame about it that it’s being repressed and twisted into dangerous behavior. We’re pathologizing it. I think Greer puts it best in this passage:

“That’s what happens whenever people decide that an ordinary human emotion is unacceptable and insist that good people don’t experience it. A culture of pretense, hypocrisy, and evasion springs up to allow them to vent the unacceptable emotion on some set of acceptable targets without admitting that they were (sic) doing so.”

Just as the Victorians ascribed sexual desire to the lower classes, we ascribe hate to the white working class, the rednecks or, as they’ve also been known, “white trash.” They are the socially, intellectually and morally inferior people who are susceptible to the temptation of hate. This has the added benefit of providing a moral justification for our classist contempt of them.

So who are the acceptable targets for our hate? Why, the haters, of course, those very rednecks we accuse of being filled with hate themselves. They are so richly deserving of our hate though, being bent on the destruction of whole races. They must be destroyed before they destroy others, right?

This is a disturbing argument that has recently come to prominence. The following comic strip appeared in a Democratic Socialists of America email right after the Charlottesville clashes. (I’m on their email list.) It claims that intolerant groups cannot be tolerated, because doing so will lead to those groups taking over.

The result of this belief is so obviously horrible that it’s no wonder it came from a philosopher. When you destroy the monster, you become the monster. Destroying one’s enemy doesn’t lead to peace and tranquility. It leads to more violence, more repression and a search for more enemies.

It’s worth remembering that we didn’t destroy all the Nazi’s in Germany after the war. We executed the leaders and left the rest of them pretty much alone (not counting a heaping helping of propaganda and military occupation). In fact, West Germany was the third-largest recipient of funds in the Marshall Plan. What finished off Nazism was the Allies’ mercy, not our might.

But, in our current worldview, hate is an absolute evil that must be amputated from the human soul. This Western habit of identifying “evil” aspects of our nature (hate, sex, left-handedness) and trying to rid ourselves of them has a terrible track record. As the Archdruid points out, the Victorian fear of sex led to the Sexual Revolution of the 60’s and 70’s. Our current psychological climate could spawn a “Revolution of Hate,” an idea that conjures images of the Holocaust and all the worst atrocities of the 20th Century.

We need to remember that we all have the potential to become monsters, but not because we all feel hate. Any impulse can be destructive when taken to extremes, even the extreme of repressing one’s instinct to hate. Rather than denying our urges and trying to destroy those urges in others, we should learn to control them. Then we needn’t fear the monster in the mirror, and we can stop projecting that monster onto others.