The Hive Mentality

Wow, I get to cross reference Paul Krugman and Charles Stross in one blog post.  It’s a nerd’s delight!!  I also get to speak out on I why opted out of corporate life and married life despite the obvious financial benefits of both.  That would be the “Hive Mentality”.  I hated working in large corporations.  I gradually couldn’t stand my husband more and more because he wasn’t the sweet kid that I married who adored John Lennon and Science Fiction.  He is how I come to know writers like Charles Stross.   The ex turned into a soldier bee that I couldn’t stand to be around.  If you love your freedom and your identity more than money and power, you will die a slow, painful, agonizing spiritual death as a corporate minion.  They will get to you one way or another.

Stross talks about why our politics, our society, and our people are so frigging messed up these days.    He also looks at why we feel–like my neighbor Antwoine–like we vote people into office that come from various backgrounds and they invariably turn on us.  Tell me truthfully, when is the last time you felt like your vote did any good?

Stross argues that the “The rot set in back in the 19th century, when the US legal system began recognizing corporations as de facto people“.  I’ve actually had similar thoughts.  That and I believe the recent Supreme Court decision giving them Constitutional rights essentially assigns us all to a form of serfdom.  Here’s the quote that Krugman lifted from Stross’ blog  that caught my attention too.

Corporations do not share our priorities. They are hive organisms constructed out of teeming workers who join or leave the collective: those who participate within it subordinate their goals to that of the collective, which pursues the three corporate objectives of growth, profitability, and pain avoidance. (The sources of pain a corporate organism seeks to avoid are lawsuits, prosecution, and a drop in shareholder value.)

Corporations have a mean life expectancy of around 30 years, but are potentially immortal; they live only in the present, having little regard for past or (thanks to short term accounting regulations) the deep future: and they generally exhibit a sociopathic lack of empathy.

I do think that my exhusband’s 20 year stint as an investment officer at Mutual of Omaha turned him into something of a Pod Person.  He became part of that collective hive and its goals became his goals.    He would forget to replace the milk in the refrigerator for our two small children. This would force me into the minivan–yes I had a MAZDA minivan–with hungry, whiny  kids needing bundling up  and buckling where I would drive miles to replace it.  At they same time, he would risk life and limb to get to the Hive Collective Office that’s eaten most of historic, central Omaha in blizzards and 6 foot snow drifts.  What started out as my panicked young parent self, thinking, sheesh he could die doing that eventually became, wow, he could die, I’d get the life insurance, and I’d move me and my kids to London where I could get a doctorate from the London School of Economics and they’d attend pre-school with the future kings of England.  I might even wind up in Oxford with some nice Hugh Grant type tottie and a title.  You can see how he eventually got on the losing side of that what-if exercise.

Even worse, however, was being part of a Hive itself.  I thought–because that’s how every one thought in the 1980s–that being in my suited skirt, carrying a brief case, and being in a field surrounded with men that I would become the uberWoman role model and change the world.  (Yeah, you know how THAT worked out.) What I found was a situation akin to either being oppressed or being rewarded for being the oppressor.  I couldn’t take either.  In my years in a corporate Hive, and then later as a consultant in Dr. Deming’s methods  to some of the biggest of them (e.g. AT&T and Ford) and then state and government agencies, I found that corporations suppress innovation, data, and the human spirit in search of more power, more market, and more profit.  Believe me, between my consulting and Katrina experiences, I’d turn my life over to the US Air Force  or any set of government workers any day over ANY private corporation.   Hence, I totally agree with Stross on this final point.

We are now living in a global state that has been structured for the benefit of non-human entities with non-human goals. They have enormous media reach, which they use to distract attention from threats to their own survival. They also have an enormous ability to support litigation against public participation, except in the very limited circumstances where such action is forbidden. Individual atomized humans are thus either co-opted by these entities (you can live very nicely as a CEO or a politician, as long as you don’t bite the feeding hand) or steamrollered if they try to resist.

In short, we are living in the aftermath of an alien invasion.

My question to you is how do we humans defeat this particularly nasty form of aliens?

Note: I’ve been over to Memorandum where they’ve featured this post and I seem to be outnumbered among those bloggers who to a man don’t agree with Stross.  Typically enough of the naysayers, one is a corporate attorney, one is a Hayek fetishist, and then there’s  Krugman who blames greedy individuals like the Koch brothers.  Frankly, I wonder if my response is a from a mother/woman viewpoint unlike the others.  Go read them.  I don’t think corporations have contributed much.  I think individuals contributed much until their contributions become corporations themselves.  (i.e. G.E. isn’t the contributor to society; Thomas Alva Edison was)  OR maybe it is JUST me.