Sharing the bottle

I recently wrote about the concept of hyperscopic life – life forms too large to be seen from an individual's perspective – and our cellular role in them. I am focusing on one hyperscopic life form - the for-profit corporation. Admittedly, what I am writing in these short essays is the merest summary. Libraries full of books have been written on the history of corporations, their influence in the world, and theories as to their proper place and operation in our economy. I am attempting to lay out the framework of a theory about their biology and how we as a species can compete successfully with them.

There are a variety of forms of this species, but they all share particular important characteristics. They all seek to increase profits. They all attempt to grow. They all seek to minimize or externalize costs. They all attempt to modify their environment to their own advantage. They all use resources and produce modified byproducts of their internal processes (waste). They all have an immune system that accepts or rejects human beings according to their compatibility with the needs of the corporation. If you follow the thesis of Joel Bakan, Jennifer Abbot, and Mark Achbar, the makers of the movie “The Corporation,” a corporation mimics the behavior of a human psychopath. I have explored the behavior of corporate management in an earlier essay, noting that the corporate system selects for amorality.

I tend to think of corporations as yeast. Yeast, as any brewer can tell you, is extremely useful. What a brewer does, essentially, is put water, flavoring, and sugar in a container with a special species of yeast. The yeast eats the sugar and excretes alcohol and carbon dioxide. This continues until 1) There is no more sugar, and the yeast starves, or 2) There is too much alcohol, and the yeast is poisoned. The yeast has no brains, so there is no yeast environmental committee to sit down and say “Y'know, the alcohol level is getting kind of high and members of our species are dying in increasing numbers. Maybe we should think about slowing things down, or controlling our population, or something.” They blindly consume and excrete till their beery doomsday.

So it is with corporations. Absent controlling regulation, they blindly consume and excrete without limit. The unfortunate part is that we share the bottle with them. Corporations themselves are essentially immortal, shedding the parts rendered useless by their reckless behavior and acquiring new people, infrastructure, and resources. Those of us inhabiting the macroscopic world suffer the consequences. Corporations have the benefit of our intelligence, or at least the portion of our intelligence that doesn't conflict with their mission of uncontrolled growth and consumption. We give corporations an advantage that yeast doesn't have – the ability to modify the environment.

A corporation has two environments, the physical and the legal. Much of the corporation is made up of actual physical things, such as people, buildings, mines, and farmland. The legal environment is key, however, because it is both the sinew that connects these physical entities, the DNA that creates the form of the corporation, and, as with us, the rules that circumscribe its behavior.

Corporations are far ahead of us in the field of genetic engineering. A corporation can transform itself from one type to another and modify its internal structure almost at will. Corporations can and do alter the laws that prescribe their form and function. They regularly slice off parts of themselves and attach that part to another entity. It is a feat of shape shifting only seen in science fiction movies. The pursuit of favorable legislation is a very profitable way to spend their resources. A relatively small investment in lobbying and political contributions has historically netted them huge returns. One part of these efforts has been the institutionalization of political corruption in the form of campaign finance and the revolving door between corporate employment and government service. As I have noted in another essay, the present system of political fund raising filters out most politicians with anti-corporate views.

We find ourselves trapped in a closed environment with a group of enormously powerful entities. They have no direct consciousness or moral values, but do have an extraordinary ability to modify themselves and their environment in order to grow and gain even more control over their surroundings. The legal framework in which we live favors the for-profit corporation over other economic structures and allows such corporations a range of behavior that threatens our survival.

The key to our survival, then, lies in our ability to restrict corporate behavior. Our highest priority is restricting their own ability to influence the laws that govern them.

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