New World Order: Organized And Incorporated
Note: This was supposed to be the final piece in the mini series, but the topic demands one extra installment, which will follow this one.
Previous article in the series – New World Order: We, The Markets
source: http://www.tj-dlhb.com/page/5
In the previous article of New World Order, we closed off with the implication that markets are as real as any beast we have put to work for us, and more than capable of getting out of hand because of their great gravitas. They are a force to be reckoned with in their own right even when under complete control, due to their incredible presence and influence.
Of course, they are not the only ones. There are many other beasts like them, operating among us: systems which exist in their own right too, grinding away, shaping society, affecting our life, influencing our progress and exacting certain kinds of behavior from us which helps not only us but also them.
Let us call these systems organs - a term which we will henceforth use interchangeably with beasts, for the systems we are talking about are both these things at the same time.
So, first we have the internet and the telecom/information systems. We know very well what this organ does, how it integrates society through its vast network of connections, enabling instant communication, an exchange of information and a platform for creating new material, concrete or abstract. It is a tool as much as it is a phenomenon, providing as well as demanding, enabling as well as dictating. From the moment it went live, it has been alive and kicking all the way, assuming a role in society and causing change in human behavior. It can be used for good and bad alike, for progress or repression, for education or propaganda. Most of all, it absorbs individuals and groups into its framework, people whose actions and connectivity drives its growth even further.
Then we have the health and care systems. Geared to improve life and care for everyone’s well being, this benevolent beast has grown from a hit-and-miss healing process of arbitrary prayer and herb administration to an advanced, informed system that may have a long way to go yet (a long, long way) but which has by now, in its own right, assumed a code and ethic of its own, a language and function through which life is determined, perceived and dealt with. Through its presence we were first able to erase the theological notions governing the body’s functions, filling it up with millions of observable, comprehensible and replicable processes, based on science. Then we were able to expand on that knowledge and gain unprecedented information on what powers us, what defines us as human beings and living entities. Gradually we got carried away and learned to reduce ourselves to neurological, electrochemical functions, taking out all notions of spirit, intuition, energy, mind power, life force, and other elusive esoteric concepts. Only recently have “mental” and psychological factors gained strong credibility in the process of medicine proper, through fields like psychoneuroimmunology (PNI), making a comeback and adding new dimensions to the over-reductive medical paradigm. Point is, as a system, as a dogma, as a field and industry in its totality, the health-care medical-pharmaceutical system is a beast which regardless under whose charge it is at any given time, is affecting the way we deal with life through the deterministic corpus of knowledge it has accumulated over the years.
The current education paradigm is reminiscent of a serpent that eats its own tail. Photo by Bidrohi >H!ROK< on flickr.com
Corpus. Now there is a key word, which has everything to do with all systems of accumulated information and knowledge. The legal and judicial and penal systems, for example, depend on a corpus of knowledge accrued through the ages, centered around law. Their operating sub-systems (courts, police, security, prisons, rehabilitation, administration, parliament etc) stem from an array of interrelated corpuses dealing with philosophy, political science, ethics, utility, social issues, civil rights, human rights, economics, trade, international relations, and many more. They dictate the way we function as individuals and groups alike. They serve society as much as they serve the legal system itself, a self-fulfilling mechanism that has many people arguing whether the law upholds justice as well as it upholds the legal and judicial systems as such.
Same goes for the educational systems. Schools in their majority are now teaching materials based on a factory-based, industrial model that is clustering kids together according to age, not ability, testing them along standardized lines that may on the one hand make it easier to extract comparative test results and compare accomplishment across the board, but which on the other hand indoctrinate more than they educate. Through this process, lateral thinking is displaced by the expectation to provide standard answers to standard questions, at least in our younger years, when we are at our most creative and receptive, setting the tone for later. The batteries of tests given year after year become a means to an end, testing nothing other than kids’ abilities to pass those tests, and knowledge takes second place to training. All on account of a corpus of teaching that has slowly morphed into a process of unimaginative education.
Apart from the information and telecom field, all the systems mentioned above are slowly converging to create the greater meta-human organism. So far they have proven fragmented and slow, subject to the varying traditions and cultures in play around the world, kept apart by national barriers. Their function and nature are subject to human needs and aspirations, rendering them pretty much bound to the immediate human condition of the individual person and the groups they comprise, hence their slow expansion, their laborious evolution, and their inability to grow at rates which truly transcend the human condition.
Image by Anne Noir on flickr.com
Information and telecom systems do not have this restriction. Powered by rapidly evolving technology that seems to know no limits, the electro-digital matrix is growing at a pace unmatched by any other dynamic, setting its own pace and creating a new world order. It has advanced based on human needs, but it is not restricted or bound by them. Like markets, it has assumed a life of its own, a self-fulfilling, self-perpetuating agency that transcends the atomic human, assembling an infrastructure of high-tech networks that drive and influence the lives of individual people, who, in their effort to live out their lives, become incorporated into them, enabling them to function.
Thus we see that a corpus is not restricted to a system of knowledge. It also represents the infrastructure created by a system, tangible and real, and very engaging as it is. When we say that we have “become incorporated”, it means we have become part of a greater body. We hear the term a lot of late, experiencing first hand, or by proxy, the incorporation of smaller businesses and individual entrepreneurs into corporations, sometimes at their benefit, other times at a price. But the process of incorporation is not limited to corporate capitalism, nor is it strictly money-driven. It is the process through which humans create society and civilization. It takes place in every field and every sector that is substantial enough to grow into an organized, elaborate system, and has been doing so for thousands of years, and will be doing so forevermore, absorbing people by default. Because that is how life functions, building layer upon layer upon layer. Because all bodies of knowledge and all organizations act in their own interests. Corporations are naturally no exception.
Which brings us to the controversial adage that corporations are people. We may not want them to be, we may think it is wrong to regard them as such, but the truth of the matter is – the real, gritty, ontologically-based, philosophically-driven, developmentally-bound truth is – that they are people; not so much “people” as entities, agencies, beasts and organs with a function and presence of their own, with a definite agenda and influential self-determination, regardless of the humans that drive them. They are a higher form of organization that is operating through the instruction of people, yet, which is not totally defined by them. They exact things they were made to exact, creating situations that serve their expansion, and this makes them unnervingly sentient.
If we don’t like them, our corporations – and all such organizations and dogmas that have incorporated us into their operations – we have two options. One is to occupy and destroy them in order to rid the field of them and return to a state of existence in which we are the only real organization around (save nature – which we are trying to incapacitate too – or is it our beasts and organs that are doing it through us?) and reign supreme and unchallenged, blissful and ignorant, like proper troglodytes.
Image by Ben Templesmith on flickr.com
Great idea, romantic even, but not realistic. Nature’s incorporation by humanity aside, which we can ill afford as long as we remain a chiefly biological species, we cannot afford the demolition of all organization either. It would be a catastrophe of biblical proportions. Individuals cannot cut the mustard anymore, not as atomic entities, not all the time, and certainly not across the board. We need to get organized to have an effect nowadays, now more than ever, on account of the knowledge we wield and the potential we have unleashed. To do so we need the inspiration of key individuals to pave the way and power our dreams, but we need this to happen in conjunction with the support of greater organized systems that can carry such dreams forth.
This leads us to the second, more realistic option: play the game we ourselves have started and create organizations that will exact better things than what the existing organizations are exacting right now. Let us raise the stakes and assemble organs that are more attuned to an environment that supports our existence. We are biological beings after all, and need certain narrow physical conditions to survive. Our new organizations need to acknowledge this, at least if they are to continue to exist. See, we may need the markets to live, but the markets need us to live too. It is a symbiotic arrangement, which we, as self-conscious beings, can put to good use.
(Technology is another matter. It can exist on its own, creating its own market of resources – at least it may do so when it achieves what is referred to as technological singularity: a level of organization that is self-aware, self-sustainable and beyond the scope of the human mind. It may do so with the help of humans powering its synapses and connections, rendering us the ghosts in the machine – or it may do it through superconducting silicon power alone, all by itself and human-free. A technological singularity is theoretically capable of anything. But that is another story.)
To establish new organ-izations that will help us expand our scope and reach, we will of course need to compete with the existing ones. We need to challenge them, fight them, and survive them. We need to reform them and put them to good use, or beat them and drive them out of the game. If we don’t, if we let them run amok as they are right now, marching to the tunes of their agendas and powering their machines, we might as well admit defeat; beaten by our own beasts and thrown aside like pathetic farmers who, eager as they were to set up shop, proved ultimately incapable of managing their affairs. Someone wrote a novel about this kind of development once, chronicling the rise of beast on beast. He called it Animal Farm. It was a most poignant book, politically-informed and scathingly applicable to human affairs. Orwell’s vision of the organic, beastly nature of systemic and incorporated revolution may soon prove alarmingly prophetic on a wider ontological level. It carries implications which we better heed if we are serious about progress.
[...] we closed off with the realization that the systems that power us are real in their own right, organized and incorporated into sentient, self-determining agencies that affect out lives as much as we affect [...]