http://www.astonisher.com/archives/corporation/corporation_intro.html

"The impulse to settle disagreements violently and acquire worldly possessions is human. What the corporation provides is the ability to sustain the impulse across a longer period of time with greater consistency than humanly possible before. Attila or Totila were truly hell if you happened to find yourself in their path, but 20 years later they were gone and in 50 years they had vanished from the memory of all living men.

The corporation, on the other hand, abides. It can steer a consistent course across generations – outlasting nations and dynasties and revolutions – and rationalize complex endeavors that are beyond the ability of individual humans. These are among the great powers that the corporation has bestowed on humanity. But because these powers have come to us very recently in evolutionary terms, humans as species lack inherent biological controls on their use.

Thus the corporation may amplify aspects of the human persona that were of no large consequence when people couldn’t act on them, but which can cause great harm when made manifest in the world . . . "

"In the 700 years after the fall of Rome, the Benedictines and the other religious orders of the Catholic Church acquired the bulk of Europe’s real physical wealth and dominated contemporary human affairs.


By the end of the 14th century, the great religious corporations of the Catholic Church – and the increasingly bold for-profit pilot fish darting among them – were already employing all the basic practices of the modern corporate world, from leveraged buyouts to golden parachutes.


Corporate culture was born during the First Dominion too, with what we now see as the corporation’s signature distortion of the footprint humanity manifests in the world. The corporation is the most powerful and plastic conceptual tool ever devised by human beings, but like every powerful tool, it molds the hand that wields it by encouraging certain qualities in cultures where corporations dominate.


Greed, cruelty, the will to control and own, these are basic human qualities that take on a much larger role in corporation-dominated cultures, simply because the corporation greatly extends human power to carry them out. Many shining human qualities are manifest through corporate power too – e.g., the Jesuit’s utopian Reductions in Paraguay – but century after century the board tilts toward control and exploitation because that’s what the corporation does best.

. . .

The big difference between the First and Second Dominions of the Corporation is the style of dress the lordly corporations wear. For the first 700 years of modern corporate history, all the great corporations nominally attempted to incorporate one thing: the spirit of God. In fact, many of the privileges that corporations enjoy today were originally bestowed on them because of the godly purpose they purported to serve.

The Catholic religious orders were never terribly good at incorporating the Christian God, but they were remarkably successful in other areas, notably acquiring wealth, mastering their human attendants, carrying out complex tasks, and perpetuating their own undying, incorporal existence.

. . .

America proved an exceptionally fruitful ground for the corporation, though. Within 200 years, a slicked-back new breed of American for-profit corporations multiplied until they numbered in the millions and controlled the physical wealth of not just the United States, the wealthiest nation on the globe, but most of the human species.

Today – during the Second Dominion of the Corporation – our corporate lords make no pretense to serving a higher good. They wear no artfully hung drapery. The great secular corporations of the Second Dominion like Wal-Mart and Microsoft do not strive to incorporate the spirit of God, but rather the spirit of mammon, which is to say unbounded greed and the free-floating will to dominate."

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