The Ego's Fascist Existence

A friend from a discussion forum brought this article to my attention, Your Money or Your Life: A lesson On the Front Stoop, by Douglas Rushkoff.

Good stuff here! This guy's got an eye for the internal workings most either can't see or see, but deny. I read the entire article and found some very valuable points worth considering deeply. But, here's the quote I was waiting for from the moment I began reading this article:

This is the landscape of corporatism: a world not merely dominated by corporations, but one inhabited by people who have internalized corporate values as our own. And even now that corporations appear to be waning in their power, they are dragging us down with them; we seem utterly incapable of lifting ourselves out of their depression. We need to understand how this happened—how we came to live for and through a business scheme. We must recount the story of how life itself became corporatized, and figure out what—if anything—we are to do about it. Like recovering cult victims,we have less to gain from blaming our seducers than from understanding our own participation in building and maintaining a corporatist society. Only then can we begin dismantling and replacing it with something more livable and sustainable.

The corporation is a socially created inhuman construct or entity unto itself (not non-human, but inhuman, lacking sympathy, pity, warmth, compassion, etc, etc) in which the chief premise and primary goal is to compete with other inhuman constructs to increase its self-assertion into the world as measured by monetary-value. This author claims that in our interrelating with others, we act through the same values as the corporation.

I believe this is valid, however, the corporate value-system is born of the extreme negative spectrum of individual and collective ego-based values. Therefore, we have essentially created corporatism and its 'inhumane' practices, in order to further perpetuate egoic individualism and separatism in opposition, and superior to, collective engagement and unity. The corporation has made our self-absorbed and often cruel actions justifiable (or, more often, our inactions). Why else would we have constructed it, if not to prove that we can disengage from the world, by opposing our natural human inclination to engage compassionately, and still find happiness. The question is, our we happy yet?

Could it be that we manufactured and implemented the corporatist agenda to serve in justifying our own individualized egoic self-interests? Are not individual egos just as capable of inhumanity as corporations?

The corporation is an extreme bastardized version of individualized egoic self-construct, writ large. We have not modeled ourselves after the corporation, but modeled and constructed the corporation from the worst of our own egoic self-absorbed interrelating.

This corporate model of dissociation from compassionate human values merely provides legitimacy and credence for the individual ego's micro-perspective and associated methods of negotiating a world of other egos, in which a system of monetary and fiduciary values has been deemed paramount in measuring our worth in comparison to other egos.

The ego-self is a psychological construct which seeks to impose concrete psychological boundaries around itself in order to know itself in opposition to other egos. The corporation is the same bounded construct, only further ordained through law. Yet, the difference is that the corporation has no illusion of extending itself simply for the benefit of others or perpetuating those concepts of love and compassion that we have become estranged from in our own separate lives. The corporation was constructed to legitimize our own dissociation from one another. The corporation exists solely to accentuate its existence by controlling ever more aspects of what it desires, regardless of the cost to others. The corporation is our guru and we are its followers (heck even so-called authentic spiritual gurus have become branded or incorporated through Limited liability Companies or 502c-3 nonprofits).

The corporation is the ego-self construct, sociopathically magnified a thousand times. We are not a product of the corporation, but the corporation is a product of us.

If the ego continues to experience itself as an increasingly more isolated individual entity, separate and detached from others and the world, it then must become fascist in its relations with the world, since it only seeks to control the world to further accentuate itself as existing in its separateness seeking its separate state of mind commonly referred to as happiness.

For the ego-self, existence requires a qualitative measure, since who wants an increased quantity of existence if existing is not accentuated by some measure of increased comfort?

It seems clear to my feeble mind, that in order to understand how we allowed corporate society to rule our social and cultural macro-existence, we must first understand how we allow this aspect of egoic dynamics to rule our micro-world functioning in relation to other egoic micro-worlds (persons/families/communities). This is a bottom-up approach as opposed to top-down and will require a collective understanding of our own personal ego dynamics.

The corporation cannot engage with human values which seek to accentuate the value of life and end man's inhumanity to man. That's not part of its charter. If the corporation were to significantly alter its creed and reason for existing it would cease to exist. Certainly corporations give to charity. But then, Fascists like Mussolini were known for their social works initiatives and the seeming portrayal of compassionate dictatorial rule. Yet, in the end the illusion became apparent when the goal was seen clearly for what it was.

Compared to the huge profits of some of our major corporations, their charitable giving is equal to a drop of water in the Atlantic ocean. This is because the corporate construct is completely absent of any purpose but self-assertion at any cost and is constructed in such a way as to easily ignore human values or to merely provide 'lip-service' to compassionate actions. Bill Gates's 45 billion multiplies exponentially every 4 seconds. So what's difference will a few charitable billion make to him?

However, the ego-self construct (that package of beliefs you insist is "you") can come to realize the individual self-destructive capacity of separatist goals. It can replace individual separatist values with values that accentuate it along with other separate egos in a unified perspective of itself as one with others, all seeking to enhance themselves through collective engagement. It can come to understand that its full engagement with others for the common good actually serves to enhance itself and will enhance itself in ways it has yet to realize as truth.

Yet, the individual ego-self will need to recognize that such an interdependently engaged path is viable and valuable and most likely that will only occur when the corporate agenda has been seen as completely unsustainable.

I hope we make it to that point, since I'm not sure we may not have much time left.