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?