Barbaric and ruthless efficiency.
Corporations have no ethics, or friends, or patriotic loyalties. Given that fact, it is tragically funny that so many still pray at the altar of the free market and view the invisible hand as a force that works for the common good.
The bottom line and the dollar is all that matters to the Corporation. From the economies of scale necessary to support the Transatlantic Slave Trade, to the "human traffic management program" of the death camps, ingenuity in the service of exploitation and death dealing seems to know no limits.
For all of our enlightened talk, and the musings of lessons learned in the aftermath of World War 2, I do wonder if civilization has progressed all that much, or if we are only a system shock away from descending into a primal abyss.
On that point, Daniel had a wonderfully reflective comment on today's earlier post that is worth bringing up to the top for more discussion:
What can one take from the Shoah? From Rwanda? From South Africa? From the U.S. and Native Americans? That humans are capable of the most unspeakable horrors, that individual virtue, as important as it is, is typically an inadequate buffer against groupthink and authority (think Milgram), that evil is truly banal (the agenda at Wannsee indicated a morning meeting to discuss the murder of the remaining Jews in Europe and then noted that breakfast was scheduled)? That liberal education is no proof against such evil (9 of the 14 attendees at Wannsee held doctorates)?Very dense. We have questions of nature or nurture; the shield and inoculation of "education" against evil; and making sense of some of humanity's greatest crimes. I wonder, is humankind more good than it has any reason being, or are these lapses into mass killing the true face of the homo sapien?
Perhaps old Sigmund Freud was right in his Civilization and its Discontents, that we need society and rules to control our most base impulses because we are at the core irrational and monstrous:
