It’s really easy to blame corporations. Corporations can be big, evil, and swallow up other companies in their wake. They can exploit, push down, discriminate, and do all of the things that we hate to see people or organizations doing. But why do they do it?
I’m of the belief that the majority of people aren’t evil, exploitative, discriminatory, or mean-spirited. I don’t even believe that the majority of people are greedy enough to manipulate people to get their way. So if people aren’t evil, and people make up corporations, how are corporations so evil?
AT A CERTAIN POINT, THE CORPORATIONS START RUNNING THE PEOPLE, AND THE PEOPLE STOP RUNNING THE CORPORATION.
Corporations have one goal: to make money. They will do everything they can to make money. They are not human, and they have no morals or feelings… all they have is numbers, productivity, efficiency, and profit. Is that bad though? Well, not necessarily.
This post was inspired by a cool game that I saw called paperclips. You can play it for free, online, here. The game is about making paperclips. First, you make one. Then you make more. Then you buy an auto-clipper, which makes paperclips for you automatically every second. Then more auto-clippers. Then you research to improve your auto-clipper efficiency. Then you research even more to make even more paperclips. I haven’t played a ton of the game, but suffice it to say that taking over the world isn’t even the end of the game.
The lesson learned from this game is that it’s not the people who are growing corporations to an insane degree, or being evil through their greedy business practices. At a certain point, a company becomes large enough that it has its own goals, and its own desires. As we can see from the paperclip game, the point where the spirit of the company moves from person to non-human entity can be pretty quick. The corporation then has the goal to make money, to grow, to take more market share (to make more money), to hire people, to fire people, to find cheap labour, to find new markets… it’s rare that all of these decisions are being made by one single person.
As early 20th century American writer Ambrose Bierce put it:
“CORPORATION: AN INGENIOUS DEVICE FOR OBTAINING PROFIT WITHOUT INDIVIDUAL RESPONSIBILITY.”
This isn’t to say that all of the people in corporations are wonderful and generous people, and it’s not to say that there aren’t some leaders of businesses who actually do evil things for their own benefit. But it is important to note that it’s easy, especially for groups, to make decisions “for the corporation” even if those decisions are not perfectly aligned with one’s own morals.
As much as it’s easy to hide behind the guise of a corporation to make decisions that might be questionable, it also allows us to blame and hate corporations vehemently in an unreasonable fashion, and without feeling bad about it. It’s fairly well known that one of the easiest ways to justify feelings of hatred, anger or violence is by dehumanizing the person or thing that you’re mad at. People do this all of the time for corporations and might not hesitate to say that a corporation should be burned to the ground, destroyed, or dismantled without considering the human element. Dehumanization is a two-way street, and as much as you can hide behind the wall of anonymity in a large corporation, you can also hate unreasonably and without hesitation.
Companies, big and small, need to be mindful and careful to not get too carried away by the will of the corporation. Business owners, employees, and customers / uninvolved people need to be aware that this can happen, it can happen easily, and that it’s important for the people to keep control of the corporation. Our company is small, and doesn’t plan to become huge any time soon, but we aim to keep that human element and are always careful to be aware of it. If you stay human, the company will stay human, and people will recognize the corporation as having human values.
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