TL;DR Corporate thought is thought which places objectives above humanity. If any objective is considered more important than the humans engaged in it, suffering is assured. Can we move our personal energy away from abstract goals of "production/redistribution/acquisition of power" and toward individually interacting with the actual human beings we live with and among?

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We spend a lot of time focusing on events. "This thing!" happened; now what are we going to do about it?! This is natural, as we are programmed to respond to the environment around us.

But sometimes we need to take a step back. We need to look at longer trends and see why "these things" are happening in the first place. What are the relationships which connect the various events we are discussing. Is there a commonality which serves as a premise from which all these individual events are born?

I ask this because my personal interest is looking at the problems of society as resulting from ideas that we all share. When trends last a long time, they must at least be tolerated by the population.

If, for example, a society is highly regimented for a long time (think North Korea), there must be something the population is - at a minimum - willing to accept. This "something" they accept provides the seed from which the control of the population is possible. In the case of North Korea, for example, my guess (though I admittedly know next to nothing about that particular society) is that they accept the necessity of military regimentation as a necessary evil to prevent foreign invasion. This is among the more common premises on which such societies have been built through history, and the destruction left in the wake of the Korean War (still technically ongoing) leaves an adequate sensation of insecurity that this premise is still felt to be a real and present danger. For the sake of avoiding the terror of war, the population tolerates the evil of essentially permanent martial law.

But what about us in the west? What is it that we are accepting as a premise that leads to the decades-long decline in living standards we are enduring as a population?

We like to throw around words like Liberalism, Conservatism, Communism, Socialism, Libertarianism, Fascism, etc, etc to describe our problems, but each of these has its adherents and its detractors, creating too much of a split within the society to have endured for the period of time our problems go back. For the purposes of this exercise, I will argue that the US has been in active decline since ~1970 (this is based on economic measures), with the roots of that decline stretching back much further, well before 1900. What concept has our society accepted for that long?

The concept of Incorporation.

I am going to work with quite a broad definition for this term, because I believe it applies beyond its more traditional use. For me, incorporation is the separation of an objective from the people who promote it. In other words, any structure which is designed to supersede the individuals who support that structure is a corporate entity. By this definition, all nations and political entities (local, regional, and national governments, parties, movements, etc) as well as religions are corporate structures in addition to the corporations we are all more familiar with that cross almost all national and multi-national borders.

As a population, there is almost universal acceptance of the necessity of structures like this. The easiest example is that people accept that airplanes cannot be made without a structure so complex that individual control is not feasible or even possible. The results of the organization are greater than the sum of its individual parts (i.e. people).

But there is a very serious cost (far too little recognized) to these kinds of organizations. They aren't human. These organizations are designed with singular objectives in mind (production, organization, profit, power, and others), and that objective becomes superior to the human individuals within the structure. Note this is true whether that individual is a simple line worker or even the CEO or board member. The non-human goal at the heart of the organization makes all humans within it secondary. An example to illustrate this concept would be JP Morgan bank. This bank is named after a man, but where is that man today? He's long dead. The bank, however, continues. The people who work there - all of them - work in service of an idea, the idea of what "JP Morgan bank is". They work for a dis-embodied concept.

This cuts in a variety of ways. Among them, two are most easily grasped. The first is that people bound by such a unifying idea are required to put that idea above all other considerations in their decision-making process. Human individuals are not important, only the goal of the organization. The second - which complements the first - is that when a person acts under this overriding responsibility to the organization, that person will be sheltered from the consequences of their actions. The classic "just following orders" defense.

Interestingly, corporate thought as I am defining it here was once more predominant in political and religious organizations than in business. It used to be that business still demanded personal responsibility from its practitioners, while the princes and bishops were sheltered from their responsibility by their organization's invocation of God. This is no longer the case. In the past three decades in particular, we are watching the divorce of personal responsibility in business. The acceleration of this trend is particularly notable during Covid. Corporations with zero human element, bound only by their corporate charter (which emphasizes profit, production, and market share), are in the midst of mass slaughter of human-run businesses where an actual human being worries about his/her human customers and his/her human employees. Corporate business is destroying anything that does not play by its rules.

What I write here does not have "an action plan". I am not making concrete suggestions for solutions. But I hope this provides a valuable framework within which we can view the events around us. We are all taking part in a grand experiment, and we need to understand the background within which we are operating. This piece is designed not to divide us into "us" and "them"; rather it is meant to shine a light on an idea that both "we" and "they" are allowing ourselves to be slave to, and which is acting in a destructive (anti-human) way to us all. People at all levels are less happy than we were decades ago. This shows up in the statistics, even as material wealth has grown.

In order to move to a more satisfactory arrangement, we need to have a clearer picture of the premise we have adopted which is causing our unhappiness. We need to find and put our energy into the environments where humanity remains (families, family-owned businesses, friends, shared activities, etc) and figure out how to bleed our personal energy away from dis-embodied ideological entities so we can once again enjoy our humanity.

Nobody enjoys being a cog in a wheel.