corporate organism. democracy. monarchy.
corporation. Hanseatic League. EU. NAFTA. Niall
Ferguson. John Kenneth Galbraith.
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This Essay
is closely linked to Essay 32, The Split where I
tried to look at the evolution of life and society from
the point of view of Ecclesiastes: "there is nothing
new under the sun."
The main
thesis of this Essay is:
The corg
(corporate organism) is a kind of a non-governmental
organization. It is a product of a long evolutionary
history that has been overshadowed by the history of the
national state. Tomorrow the corg may come to the
foreground of history as a form of organization
competing for power with the government. The corg works
as a private business corporation manufacturing social
change or its absence. This is the paradox of the corg:
it is organized as a corporation but it does not make
Things for sale. The corg is a private government
outside the public government.
I saw the
progress of civilization as development inside
predetermined "drawers" (categories, domains,
taxons) of human nature. The original drawers are
partitioned and sub-partitioned into smaller drawers in
the course of evolution, but they remain unchanged. One
such primeval drawer is the drive for power. Here I am
trying to formulate my impressions of a new arrival to
the old curiosity shop.
Is the
subject important? My attitude to history is fatalistic:
I do not believe we can resist it and if a charismatic
personality changes the course of history, it is because
the course was about to change anyway. The flow of
history is like the great ocean wave: it is capricious,
dangerous, and unstoppable, but surfers can ride on it.
I call the
emerging form of power the corporate
organism, or the corg for short.
The problem
with the corg is that it is right in the stage of
splitting from the known forms of power. Any such
transition can either complete the transformation, or
return to the initial state, or take a quite unexpected
turn. We see only those evolutionary changes that have
already happened, but we overlook the transition states
of those changes that had reversed their course so that
the new evolutionary development was aborted. I believe
that if the corg is a real and viable formation, the
future dominant unit of power will be the corg: not the
national government and not the individuals. One might
too optimistically expect the multitude of choices in a
supermarket from capitalist democracy. The political
supermarket is more like the food shelves of a pharmacy,
where one finds just bare essentials.
"Lastly,
we must consider the shape which the perfect embodiments
of Spirit assumes—the State." (Hegel,
The
Philosophy of History,
Introduction).
What a strange thing to say! Nothing is as external to an
individual as the state with its inherent suppression of
spontaneous human instincts. The power of state is
enforced by army, surveillance, police, jail, executions,
and even watchful neighbors. This power has always been
concentrated in the hands of a few or a single person.
A crowd can
spontaneously act in a synchronous way—not without
dissenters—but only in a very limited number of simple
situations. The power of a crowd is diluted over a large
volume. This is something known in the physics of
quantum objects: the large the area where a
micro-particle can be found, the lower its energy. The
crowd is efficient when it is an army, business
corporation, or cult, with authority localized in a few
commanders. And yet: "Society and the State are the very
conditions on which Freedom is realized." (Hegel, The
Philosophy of History, Introduction). I
have to add that Hegel understood freedom as contingent
on the willful conformity to the needs of society as a
whole—an even more strangely sounding statement.
When we talk
about capitalist democracy, the old idealistic notion of
this social structure does not reflect the current
situation. Democracy is about informed individuals who
are aware of all available opinions. Most individuals
today do not decide their own fate for at least two
reasons: they are not informed and they are powerless
unless assembled into an organization with a source of
energy. In America their options are crudely cut to just
two partisan alternatives. The attitudes of the
electorate are outlined by the polls. The power today
belongs to the groups who can put the issue to the vote
or just enforce it on the public under the gun. It is
neither good nor bad, just how it is. Nobody can offer
any strong alternative.
In the
evolutionary drawer of power we find tribe leadership,
monarchy, dictatorship, and a multitude of other forms.
It is also divided along such general categories as
political power, social organization, and
government. They all developed from the original
human quest for order in form of domination or
submission. The drawer where monarchy used to dwell for
thousands of years is even older than the wisdom of King
Solomon, himself a monarch, to whom the words "there is
nothing new under the sun" are ascribed. A sports and
entertainment star is also there: the king of rock and
roll, the queen of pop, the movie star, empire of
sleaze.
Up to
present, the national or multinational state has been
the ultimate form of social organization. Its formation
from previously independent units—as well as decay and
fragmentation—constitutes most of recorded history.
Looking back at history, I begin to think that the state
came to being with the single mission of providing
resources for ultimate concentration of power. For a
fresh and colorful view of history in terms of power and
money, see APPENDIX
1.
The supreme
state power varies from ultimate dictatorship to
ultimate democracy. While the design of dictatorship is
as transparent as some encased in clear plastic
telephones and clocks, the mechanisms of democracy can
be hidden under the table, disguised, and ambiguous. In
fact, both are just the opposite ends of the same scale,
like temperature. Dictatorship is on the cold side,
crystallized in clear forms, and democracy is where the
high temperature makes everything fluid. The strength of
democracy is that it could be solidified in the times of
war and disaster, i.e., effectively abolished. Its
power, paradoxically, is not in the popular vote but in
its non-democratic elements, in its ability to draft an
army, make a loud noise, to impose regulations, and to
punish.
The last
decades have been a period of fragmentation of
multinational states, as well as economic
"federalization" of Europe (EU), with an attempt to do
something distantly similar in North America
(NAFTA). Something is happening in the ancient
drawer labeled POWER. It is time of
evolutionary change driven not by politics but by
economy, i.e., by the society of Things and humans
attached to them, whether physically or emotionally, or
symbolically, as the Tramp in Charlie Chaplin's Modern
Times.
The process
had started with the development of capitalism, which
took about five hundred years to present. The power has
been gradually transferred from the sovereigns who could
administer justice, levy taxes, and wage war, to those
who were making Things for sale and who found it
convenient to entrust the elected government with these
functions. The centralized government, in turn, has been
evolving further because of the eternal competition for
power. It has been assumed that the competition for the
seats in the government is the stage of vulnerability
where the government can be kept in check, but all the
assumptions on a historical scale could only be made for
a short time span, until new assumptions take the place
of the old ones.
Power has
always been a risky business. A single crowned head is
vulnerable to an ax, but a public corporation is too
diffuse to be sent under the blade.
Today
corporate power antagonizes a small part of society.
There is an intuitive public feeling that a corporation
can inflict immense damage on part of society but the
positive effect, whatever it is, can be on a much
smaller scale. The underground smoldering of
anti-corporate public feelings can be understood, but
what should be understood in the first place is that to
attack corporations means to attack history, and attack
history means to attack human nature from which history
grows. I have no intent to denounce corporations in any
way, although I feel some aversion toward the digital
giants and food and drug companies whose products I know
firsthand. To denounce corporate greed is the same as to
denounce human need of food or sex. My aversion comes
from infringements on my freedom.
The player
of current social game is not a king, of course, but
neither it is an individual. The unit of power is group.
The modern industrial democracy is a group
democracy—groupocracy—where groups compete for money and
power by converting part of their money and power into
means of competition similar to armies, fortresses,
spies, alliances, and colonies of the past. The power
map of the USA (I know little about Europe) can be
imagined as the map of Medieval Europe with its
constantly changing and very diffuse borders. The
borders between groups today are mostly invisible and
not territorial, but the permanent war, hot or cold,
goes on. The groups compete for power as the European
principalities competed for land. The political
"land" is constituency, which does not change sharply
over a short time. The economic land is money.
The essence
of the historical revolution—transition to modern
capitalism—can be expressed in terms of geometry as the
transition from the competition for the two-dimensional
land to the competition for the one-dimensional money.
Monopoly as
a new form of monarchy is still very rare. It is never
popular because it is anti-democratic even in
groupocracy. Nevertheless, monopoly as form of ultimate
domination is in everybody's Freudian depths, although
only Government, Inc. has it.
The most
conspicuous example of a group is corporation. But I do
not mean by the corg any carrier of the legal
definition:
A
corporation is a business or organization formed by a
group of people, and it has rights and liabilities
separate from those of the individuals involved.
In
the eyes of the law, a corporation has many of the same
rights and responsibilities as a person. It may buy,
sell, and own property; enter into leases and contracts;
and bring lawsuits. It pays taxes. It can be prosecuted
and punished (often with fines) if it violates the law.
Common corporation is regulated by the
law of the state. The corg runs as a corporation but not
of this kind. What I have in mind is any non-democratic
organization that uses financial resources to pursue a
corporate non-commercial goal.
The corg embodies the principle of
privatization of government. It is a private body that
shapes the politics and the laws.
The corg is
somewhat close to a legitimate corporation bent on
social responsibility, law-abiding honest business with
a social agenda, congress lobby, political party,
non-profit organization pursuing a social or
environmental issue, a Christian Right organization,
terrorist organization, and ACLU.
The corg, it
should be immediately noted, is a form, not a substance,
and the categories of good and evil do not apply to it
as they do not apply to molecules, flies, monarchy, and
democracy. The Nazis in 1933 were in charge of a
democracy, which they immediately destroyed.
The corg is
just a form and it can be filled with different
content—humane, liberal, and progressive, as well as
destructive, discriminatory, and inhuman. I have a
feeling that the spreading animosity against big
corporations is misdirected. It should be directed
against substance, not shape and size.
The corg is
outside the categories of good and evil, but it is
capable of both. It is not the goal that makes a group a
corg but the type of the goal: power to influence social
order, for better or worse. This is why I do not judge
any corg by its nature but entirely by its results.
Some terrorist
tendencies in the anti-capitalist movements are very
symptomatic. They tell me that a new destructive corg
could be born, if only a source of money could be found.
The anti-abortion forces look to me like a mini-Al Qaeda
and they were weakened by the same means as the maxi
one. Al Qaeda is the purest form of the corg I can name.
It had predecessors in the West European terrorist
movements. There are a whole lot of factors that
make modern destructive corg vulnerable. Its future
survival tactics could only be constructive, at least,
as disguise.
The corg is vulnerable not just because
its supply of money can be cut. Unless it is driven by a
charismatic personality, the chances of its success are
slim. Corg needs a single, preferably, unopposed mind. It
must plan for life, not for the term of office. The fate
of the corg as group is within the internal world of the
leader. The corg may die with its leader.
The corg is
right on its way from non-existence to existence and I
cannot point to any existing corg in particular. We know
very little about Al Qaeda, but there is a much larger
list of constructive and progressive pre-corgs, among
which I would place even National Public Radio in the
US, although it has no political agenda. It is simply in
the business of counteracting the flow of ignorance,
mediocrity, and Coliseum-style entertainment. Microsoft
is also a pre-corg because of its immense financial
power and its Orwellian way of controlling the
customers. By its very presence, it warps the entire
business landscape because it monopolizes the
biochemistry of the nervous system of business.
The billions of dollars of its humanitarian and
corg-free foundation are dwarfed by its effect on the
way society deals with information. It is like
appropriating human language. It is still impossible to
interpret the social effect of Microsoft in terms of
good and evil: a common language seems a blessing.
The
companies that own network TV are already in the corgial
business: they stand between the source of information
and its receptors. This digital mesoderm is the sign of
time. Modern technology is always the third person in
the bedroom (see Essay 15, On ménage a trois in the
Stone Age). The corg spins off bias as the spider
spins its web.
What is
common for the strange new social form that grows like a
form of alien life in the petri dish filled with money
is that it is centralized, not regulated by any
government, controlled by a single person or very few,
has an apparatus for procuring financial support, and
has modern means of instant communication and
information processing. Although most pre-corg
organizations have slim budgets, it is the general
wealth of American economy that provides the rich
substrate.
Greenpeace International
had a $145 million budget and offices in 35 countries in
1998. With a budget of 1.45 billion, Greenpeace could
have a much higher effect, and with 15 billion it could,
actually, rule. It is not the budget, however, but
the clever and sharp application of a limited budget on
a few sensitive points of society that can make a corg
for a while effective. For comparison, budgets of
most Religious Right organizations are on a smaller
scale, although some are large: Focus on the Family
$121 million; Pat Robertson's Christian Broadcasting
Network, $196 million; Campus Crusade for
Christ, $360 million, negligible on the Microsoft
scale. What the numbers do not tell is how much of
it goes to the leaders and the staff. Some of such
organizations are characterized as aging empires.
In my
imagination I see a blurred picture of a new social
animal: a centaur-like hybrid of corporation and
individual, a robocop of a kind. Whether this animal
exists as I see it, I do not know. But I can see its
genetic composition and converging lineages.
The modern
national state is a product of the evolution of
monarchy. Even democracy can be regarded as a kind of
constitutional and elected monarchy, as the American
cliché of "the most powerful leader in the world"
implies. The king and the elected government are in the
same large drawer of power. The corg may reside there,
too, in a small compartment, from which it could make
inroads into modern history.
An original
domain of human nature cannot disappear without
evolutionary progeny. If Roman Coliseum evolved into the
video store and the gladiatorial fight into the movie Gladiator,
what happened to monarchy? Where is it hiding in the
modern industrial state? Certainly not in the Buckingham
Palace.
The closest
Medieval predecessor of the corg is the autocratic
leader or the prince, following the English translation
of Niccolo Machiavelli's famous book Il
Principe (English text ). Prince comes
from the word princeps, which is a combination
of the Latin primus (first) and ceps
(taker; from Latin capere). Today it could be
spelled prinCEO.
For the
prince, the state and society is not external: it is
within the boundaries of his own person. The phrase "I
am the state" (L'Etat c'est moi), ascribed to
Louis XIV, the Sun King of France (1643-1715),
exemplifies the personal power. Throughout history the
power of the prince was mostly limited in one way or
another. The prince always had to expect challenge
either from "nobles" or from "people," as Machiavelli
noted, and had to control both—a situation somewhat
similar to the CEO of a modern
corporation. Nevertheless, even democratically
elected leaders (Machiavelli, Chapter IX: "where a
leading citizen becomes the prince of his country, not
by wickedness or any intolerable violence, but by the
favour of his fellow citizens") could have power
comparable to that of the Sun King and Genghis Khan.
Autocracy
had been the standard form of social organization (and,
by the way, family) for many centuries. Most of
human history has been tied to the lives of pharaoh,
prince, king, shah, khan, and czar. Autocracy ruled the
earth. What happened to this powerful evolutionary form?
What is growing from the ruined or restored imperial
palaces?
I see the
corg coming from the Medieval aristocracy, the nobles,
as much as from monarchy, which is natural because
monarchs used to come from aristocracy. The typical
noble tries to influence the prince and thus to
appropriate part of the royal power. A favor is
exchanged for a favor, as in American campaign
contributions.
The change I
am interested here is very recent: the national state
has been transformed from monarchy into corporate
society where the main holder of power is corporation: a
pool of authoritarian power in the sand desert of
democracy, a leader at the top of a small pyramid of
power.
Formally,
the state power is split between the branches, but the
executive power comes closest to that of the prince
because it is concentrated in a single person on top of
his or her cabinet. The president and prime minister,
however, do not have a complete power over what is the
very foundation of their activity: money. The
nation is not their property. Their right to govern does
not come from heaven: it comes from the wealth of the
state subjects or citizens and their willingness to be
taxed.
"It
is necessary to consider another point in examining the
character of these principalities: that is, whether a
prince has such power that, in case of need, he can
support himself with his own resources, or whether he
has always in need of the assistance of others."
Machiavelli, Chapter X.
This is something the founding fathers
of America did not anticipate: concentration of wealth not
just in the hands of a few, which is quite natural (see Essay
31, On Poverty) but in groups that mimic the bygone
autocratic states and principalities.
As
industrial democracy became possible because of
accumulation of wealth, the corg comes to historical
podium because of the concentration of wealth and
because of the amplification of the power of an
individual who is the authoritarian head of a group with
its own resources. The leader wears his corg as a
medieval knight his armor. The modern armor, however,
looks more like that of a cyborg.
It seems to
me that society is moving toward a new phase where the
corporations and corgs play the role of former national
states. They fight, conquer, surrender, merge, split,
and divide the space of influence. The
corporations are engaged in the sphere of production and
business, whereas the corgs can pursue a wide and
indefinite range of agendas in the sphere of social
order. By order I mean thermodynamic order, which simply
means a certain order as distinct of chaos or
another order. If the individuals can vote at
all, it is for a limited number of choices presented to
them by the corgs.
I find it
strange to speak about freedom of choice if the choices
are not my own but are imposed on me. Freedom is my
personal vision of it and not somebody else's. I realize
that this is an idealistic and impractical view, but
freedom is a separate and inexhaustible subject.
By voters I
mean not just national or state elections, which are
rare and rarely too important, but also voters in
various organizations, from corporate boards to
government agencies, to Academy Awards votes, to
Congress, whenever the decision is not made in an
executive mode. The corg has also lobby genes in its
genotype. Thus, Hansa was a lobby for Baltic based
trade and Al Qaeda seems to be a lobby for the American
withdrawal from Middle East.
The corg,
therefore, is no different from a manufacturing
corporation: it manufactures social change by
formulating the choices and beaming them on voters.
The
corg—corporate organism—is as related to the great
empires of the past as lizards to dinosaurs. Whether the
tiny gecko or Komodo dragon, the political descendants
of the imperial dinosaurs live happily amidst the
capitalist democracy and global porosity of borders,
becoming its inherent apparatus, like cellular
organelles.
Many
lineages produce the final genetic mix of the corg. The
corg traces its genes to any formation with social
agenda. Among them are political and non-political
organizations, from the Jacobins to the Bolsheviks, from
Free Masons to the Green Peace, from Jesuits to Henry Ford with
his anti-Jewish agenda, from the
medieval Hanseatic League in the Baltic to Alfred Nobel
with his endowment, from the Fabian Society in England
to the Nazis before they took power, from Marx's
International to Al Qaeda, and from Yihetuan
(Chinese "Society of Righteousness and Harmony" around 1900) to
the German Green Party , which is far
from the end of the list.
I would put
on the list of related (not exactly corgs!) entities
Enron, George Soros (not on the negative side of the
moral spectrum; George Soros is one of modern prophets
for whom I feel great respect), Charles G. Koch and
David H. Koch, today commonly referred to as the Koch
brothers, AOL-Time Warner (promises to become another
Microsoft). IMF, Sierra Club, FoxNews, and even the gang
of Robin Hood. The reason why I do not mention the Saudi
government, Taliban, and American President, all of whom
create strong gravitation fields in world
politics, it is because corg is never a part of
government. The corg creates a kind of power field that
could strongly distort—for better or worse—the national
attitudes and warp the political and economic landscape.
But the corg never belongs to establishment. It is a
form of opposition, which is one reason why it can draw
sympathy.
I would say
that pre-corgs even coexisted with the kings, and the
best example is Papacy, as well as other influential
religious movements, not as everlasting, however, as the
Catholicism. Even within the Church there were corg-like
religious orders, the most eminent of them the Jesuits.
The independent corg-like character of Jesuit
organizations even brought them into conflict with the
Catholic lay powers.
When I use
the Present Tense, I am looking into the future.
What makes a
corg a corg is that:
it does it not by ideas, persuasion, and
eloquence but by hard work and spending,
it is informal, even if registered,
it is neither hired nor controlled from outside,
it is managed as business,
it has a single or narrow source of financing.
The modern initial link is in most cases a charismatic
personality who builds up his corg. The final link is the
government reduced to the employee of the society of
corgs.
In short,
corg is an evolutionary alternative to centralized
government. The society of corgs marginalizes both the
populus and government because only the corgs have real
power coming from independence and money. It is the
informal status of the corgs that positions them outside
the government regulations. They reap the fruits of
capitalist democracy. They are similar to viruses, not
necessarily harmful, and some are useful symbionts.
The corg is
a mini-state: not a state within a state, but a state in
the sphere of ideas and agendas beyond geographical
borders. The corg has a source of money and it
transforms its energy into work on a change of the
existing social order, not always radically—but
definitely not on production for profit, unlike business
organizations. The corg is the industrial unit
of social change: it produces bits and pieces of change
like a manufacturing company produces watches, a
Hollywood studio produces movies, Microsoft produces
software, and a political party pushes legislation.
For most of
history, social order was the prerogative of the
government. The corg takes it over. The government
becomes a gauge of the balance of influence between the
corgs. The most profound and lasting effect of Al Quaeda
is not even the terror and destruction but the way it
changes the governement functions of the leading
superpower on earth.
I see this
evolutionary move as the cooling of the turbulent human
history full of wars, violence, and conquest. The
society of individuals is half utopia and half illusion,
and Friedrich Nietzsche made this a point of his own
agenda. Power is powerful only when it is concentrated.
A single voter in democracy is powerless because the
outcome of his or her vote depends on how
other—completely alien—people vote. A single person who
wants to make a difference must not only join a group
but also support and direct this group, which an
individual can do, as an exception, by eloquence and, as
a rule, by the brute force of money. Nobody hears any
eloquent appeal if it is not in the media. It was
possible in class societies of the past where
aristocracy or even democracy could be all gathered if
not under a single roof, then on a single floor.
Corg is a
new, fragmented and particulate form of previously solid
authoritarian power. Of course, it is not completely new
in its substance. It is its relation to national state
which is new. It looks like the corg has absorbed all
the juice of autocracy lost by the dried off monarchs,
princes, khans, and glorious bandits of the past. Corg
is a charismatic, ambitious, and dominant personality
that controls an army equipped with the modern weaponry
of sophisticated finances, production, and
communication. The new circumstance is that the corg
could be incomparably smaller than the state. It uses
the amplifying power of the state, its media and mass
psychology, to produce a lot of bang for a buck.
Moreover, the corg is not strictly territorial: it has
no national borders and no exact spatial borders at all.
If not
exactly corporation, then what is corg—corporate
organism—and what makes it organism? It is exactly what
makes us organisms: central nervous system, code, and
coordination of functions with the external world and
each other. The corg has all the physiology a good
Prince was endowed with as a mortal human. It eats,
moves, plans, and remembers.
The corg
combines properties of corporation and individual. This
is why I regard it as organism.
Another
property of the corg that makes it an organism was
noticed by Albert Speer, the Nazi minister and Hitler's
friend who at the Nuremberg trial (there are links only
to a small number of documents) after WWII outlined the
universal principles of the totalitarian mechanism, see
APPENDIX 3. This property of turning an employee
or volunteer into a robot is the general corporate
trend. Modern corporation, always fighting for its
survival, recruits an army of people trained not to ask
questions.
What makes
the new form of social life possible? What makes a
corporation a corg? Money, of course, but there has been
always concentration of money and power throughout
history. The new factor is something else: instant
communication between members. This is the property that
made humans biologically possible: they convey messages
through speech, and if they are at distance, through
radio waves. Corporation acts as a single organism
governed by mind. This ability of instant
coordinated action of many people makes the corg
comparable in its effect with military forces. It was
telephone and radio that made the world wars devastating
and dictatorship stable.
The
corgization begins with communication. Communication
dramatically increases the probability of improbable
events. This change of probability, equivalent to a lot
of physical work, is achieved at a low energetic cost.
An army must move, provide logistics, and burn fuel.
Communication does the same on shoestrings.
The corg is
recognized by what it produces. The product of the corg
is changes in culture, social and political relations,
and social norms. Of course, a corg does not start from
scratch, but tries to modify what exists. Corg is a tool
working on civilization in the same industrial way as
any machine. It cuts, bents, drills, and stamps away
social forms. As Emile Durkheim would say, corg
manufactures social facts. This kind of goods may be
just a byproduct of making cars, computers, and drugs.
Corg is an
evolutionary machine designed to control, direct, and
speed up immaterial structure. It not just instills
fear, hope, cruelty, compassion, learning, faith, and
vandalism, but aims at changing the existing order. The
Jacobins in France and Bolsheviks in pre-revolutionary
Russia were evolutionary predecessors of the corg.
Most social
genes of the modern corg come from monarchy. Initially,
the king had all the rights and no responsibilities. The
absolute leader reported only to God. Other examples are
Medieval merchant guilds, for example the Hansa (see APPENDIX
4), created for the protection of trade. They were
displaced by craft guilds, engaged in both manufacturing
and trade of a particular range of products.
Curiously,
craft guilds suppressed competition, advertisement, and
innovation. In turn, they later surrendered their
functions to the central government or were swept away
by capitalism.
The modern
vestige of guild can be found in the tenure in American
universities which are turning into competitive
businesses right before our eyes.
The corg:
1. Is not elected by the people
and is not accountable to them.
2. Uses internal
mechanisms and infrastructure of existing national form
to grow and function.
3. Corg, unlike
the king, does not need the whole country to arm
and feed its men and
its horses. It does not need either a regular army or a
country with land, agriculture, and industry to support
an army.
4. Pursues a
social or political goal.
5. May act across
national borders.
6. Is financed by
contributions of supporters, not necessarily
enthusiastic ones, by its own productive earnings, or by
extortion.
7. Corg is as
vulnerable as the rest of society because of
centralization, communication, and financing, but mostly
because it has enemies and does not have national
resources.
8. Corg creates
permanent instability of society, contributing to the
general pace of evolution.
9. Corg is driven
by the will of a single person, possibly, an oligarchy.
It is an authoritarian or totalitarian structure,
a descendant of monarchy.
10. Corg,
similarly to organism, manifests practically instant
internal communication.
11. Corg competes
with the government for power, using the main natural
law of democracy: maximization of customer base and
constituency. You want to be elected? Give me an IOU for
a slice of power.
12. It may seem a
paradox, but the corg does not dictate the society what
the people instinctively abhor. The corg always picks up
a trend and a mood of a substantial part of the
population. This is why the corg does not contradict
democracy and is compatible with it. A king and a
dictator can oppress his people. The corg is their
voice. It is true about ACLU, Christian Coalition,
Greenpeace, and even Al Qaeda.
In essence, corg is an individual with human extensions,
similar to a manufacturing individual with tool
extensions.
I see corg
in terms of social thermodynamics. Thermodynamics in
general operates with a limited number of concepts:
energy, work, entropy, temperature.
The corg
returns part of its financial power to society in the
form of social work. The work is highly selective and
can be destructive, as well as constructive. Work is
meant here in the thermodynamical sense: selective
change of order, as opposed to heat, which is a general
and indiscriminate decrease of order. Work produced by
the car engine makes the car move in a certain
direction, as opposed to chaotic jerking and shaking.
The function
of the sovereign was to direct the life of the subjects
in an organized way and prevent chaos. Democratic
government does the same. So does corg.
Therefore,
corg competes with government (sometimes buys it or
takes hostage). The corg becomes an interface, or
amplifier, or a screen, or a funhouse mirror between the
people and the government. The development of society in
the direction of additional interfaces and mediators
instead of immediate contact is a general trend and it
could be seen even in the individual development of
organisms (see
Essay 15, On ménage a trois in the Stone Age).
Using free
energy in the form of money to counteract the external
political order, the corg cannot bring down the entire
political system, as a revolutionary movement would do.
Moreover, it does not pursue any such goal. It simply
acts as a mini-government in its own interests. The
corgs are like medieval principalities from which the
European national states grew.
A corg does
not know competitors because the corg monopolizes the
objective. It is its single pursuer by definition. But
it competes for the same energy and matter as anything
else alive on earth and it can have enemies. Corg is not
just about money, as any business corporation is. It is
about power. The power is used to create chaos
(terrorism) or create work (protection of animals).
Any business
corporation is a potential corg if it pursues a goal not
stated in its business program, produces unanticipated
social effects, or simply accumulates large excess of
money not involved either into business cycle or into
employee compensation. Privately owned wealth, like
nuclear materials, has a critical mass: above a certain
value it generates a social effect (often constructive)
well beyond its nominal dollar equivalent.
There must
be a very simple reason why corg is emerging from the
democratic state. Corg is impossible without democracy
and liberalism. It needs freedom and the low transition
barriers of capitalist democracy to grow and to cause
big changes by small actions. It needs the lazy
bureaucracy to attach the monetary tentacles and to
crawl under the fences: one cannot buy the king.
When I was
young, I was looking into the future with hope. I
expected a better life, new exciting inventions, and new
captivating art. As a historical fatalist, I am aware of
the age effect : the old people evaluate the future in
terms of old standards and they are mostly disappointed.
I believe that history is always right because it grows
from human nature. Nevertheless, my attitude toward the
future has a tinge of aversion. I want to believe that
this is because my individualism is much stronger than
my fatalism.
Freedom is
not the freedom of choice, I begin to think. It is the
freedom of inventing the choice.
To conclude,
let us look somewhat farther into the future. One of the
main ideas of my Essays is that our civilization is
driven by the evolution of Things, in which humans more
and more play the role of enzymes. What can come next
after the Things in the leading position? I
believe it is ideas materialized as corgs. Ideas are as
old as Things. The time may come when they take over.
More about corg: Essay 35. Crowds and Elites,
Bottlenecks and Demons
John
Kenneth
Galbraith was among the first to note the new historical
role of large corporations, see APPENDIX 5.
APPENDIX
1.
An
extraordinary, stimulating, heretic, and skeptical book
on the historical aspects of power and money: Neill
Ferguson, The Cash Nexus: Money and Power in the
Modern World, 1700-2000, New York: Basic Books,
2001. Neil Ferguson, in his The Cash
Nexus, among others, describes the fundamental
historical transition from royal War State to democratic
Welfare State, the origin of taxation and its role in
the emergence of bureaucracy, and, most relevant to the
corg problem, the politics that has become corporate
business, which is just another way to explain what corg
is. There is much more food for thought.
2. Machiavelli:
It is
necessary to consider another point in examining the
character of these principalities: that is, whether a
prince has such power that, in case of need, he can
support himself with his own resources, or whether he
has always need of the assistance of others. And to make
this quite clear I say that I consider those who
are able to support themselves by their own
resources who can, either by abundance of
men or money, raise a sufficient army to join battle
against any one who comes to attack them; and I consider
those always to have need of others who cannot show
themselves against the enemy in the field, but are
forced to defend themselves by sheltering behind walls.
The first case has been discussed, but we will speak of
it again should it recur. In the second case one can say
nothing except to encourage such princes to provision
and fortify their towns, and not on any account to
defend the country. And whoever shall fortify his town
well, and shall have managed the other concerns of his
subjects in the way stated above, and to be often
repeated, will never be attacked without great
caution, for men are always adverse to enterprises where
difficulties can be seen, and it will be seen not to be
an easy thing to attack one who has his town well
fortified, and is not hated by his people. (X)
A
prince ought to have no other aim or thought, nor select
anything else for his study, than war and its
rules and discipline; for this is the sole art that
belongs to him who rules, and it is of such force that
it not only upholds those who are born princes, but it
often enables men to rise from a private station to that
rank. And, on the contrary, it is seen that when
princes have thought more of ease than of arms they have
lost their states. (XIV)
Returning
to the question of being feared or loved, I come to the
conclusion that, men loving according to their own will
and fearing according to that of the prince, a
wise prince should establish himself
on that which is in his own control and not in that
of others; he must endeavor only to avoid
hatred, as is noted. (XVII)
3. Albert
Speer, Inside the Third Reich. NY:
Touchstone Books, 1997.
page 520:
In my final speech I said:
Hitler's
dictatorship was the first dictatorship of an industrial
state in this age of modern technology, a dictatorship
which employed to perfection the instruments of
technology to dominate its own people... . By means of
such instruments of technology as the radio and
public-address systems, eighty million persons could be
made subject to the will of one individual. Telephone,
teletype, and radio made it possible to transmit the
commands of the highest levels directly to the lowest
organs where because of their high authority they were
executed uncritically. Thus many offices and squads
received their evil commands in this direct manner. The
instruments of technology made it possible to maintain a
close watch over all citizens and to keep criminal
operations shrouded in a high degree of secrecy. To the
outsider this state apparatus may look like the
seemingly wild tangle of cables in a telephone exchange;
but like such an exchange it could be directed by a
single will. Dictatorships of the past needed assistants
of high quality in the lower ranks of the leadership
also—men who could think and act independently. The
authoritarian system in the age of technology can do
without such men. The means of communication alone
enable it to mechanize the work of the lower leadership.
Thus the type of uncritical receiver of orders is
created.
...........
A
critical receiver of orders in a corporation would not
work for long.
.........
“The
nightmare shared by many people,” I said, “that some day
the nations of the world may be dominated by
technology—that nightmare was very nearly made a reality
under Hitler's authoritarian system. Every country in
the world today faces the danger of being terrorized by
technology; but in a modern dictatorship this seems to
me to be unavoidable. Therefore, the more technological
the world becomes, the more essential will be the demand
for individual freedom and the self-awareness of the
individual human being as a counterpoise to technology.
... Consequently this trial must contribute to laying
down the ground rules for life in human society."
........
page 524:
Dazzled
by the possibilities of technology, I devoted crucial
years of my life to serving it. But in the end my
feelings about it are highly skeptical.
4.
What was the Hanseatic
League (or Hansa, German: Hanse)?
I found a good
reference on the Web and because I am afraid it will
disappear, I want to quote it. True, this page will
disappear, too.
In
historical research, the Hansa had a long shadowy
existence, for when interest concentrated on
princes, powerful realms and heroic battles, a loose
community of towns mainly inspired by mercantile
considerations attracted little attention.
..........
Its
definition was a problem already under discussion in its
time. After having deteriorated since the middle
of the 15th century, English relations with the Hansa
reached their lowest point when in the summer of 1468
English ships were seized in the sound by Danish
vessels. The Hansa was suspected to have at least shared
responsibility for that. King Edward IV straight away
imprisoned the Hanseatic merchants in London and
confiscated their goods in order to compensate the
English merchants. The Hansa, he explained, was a
society, cooperative or corporation, originating from a
joint agreement and alliance of several towns and
villages, being able to form contracts and being
liable as joint debtors for the offenses of single
members.
..............
According
to a widely held opinion, the Hansa was a community of
low German towns whose merchants participated in the
Hanseatic privileges abroad. Where politically
convenient it stressed the solidarity of its merchants,
and at the latest since the Lübeck meeting in 1418 there
were repeated efforts to obtain a firm federal
constitution. On the other hand, the Hansa was lacking
the essential legal elements of a federation. There was
no pact of alliance, no statutes, no obligation for
certain economic and political aims, no chairman with
representative authority, and no permanent
official, until Dr. Suderman became Hanseatic syndic in
1556. And there were no means to punish disobedient
members apart from exclusion, whereas instruments to be
used externally were blockade, embargo and even war. So
the Hansa in some way resembled a federation, but it was
more a legal community as to its privileges abroad.
.............
Prof. Rainer Postel, Bundeswehr Universität,
Germany
5.
John Kenneth Galbraith, Annals of an
Abiding Liberal, New York: The New American
Library, 1979. First and last Essays.
The
modern corporation internationalizes its income and wage
standards as entrepreneurial industry never did. It also
creates an international civil service— men who, like
the servants of the Holy Church, are at home in all
lands, who differ only in owing their ultimate
allegiance not to Rome but to IBM (p.17).
The
competitive and entrepreneurial firm seeks services from
the state; seeks protection from competition, as just
noted; is subject to regulation; pays taxes. This is a
familiar and limited relationship. This firm never, by
itself, competes with the state in the exercise of
power. The modern large corporation, on the other hand,
has a far wider range of requirements from the state. It
also brings its power directly to bear on the
instrumentalities of the state — both the bureaucracy
and the legislature. Its needs, since they are put
forward by the technostructure — an influential and
articulate sector of the population — have a way of
becoming public policy. Americans have recently had a
substantial education in the way the financial resources
of the corporation have been deployed for the purchase
of politicians and political influence. (p. 18)
And much more
there. Gailbraith has a rare ability to make his ideas
look naked while dressing them in exquisite eloquence.
That was (and
still is) the fuzzy state of corg genesis.
Galbraith used
the term power without definition. He thought
that large corporations diffused power because nobody
personally had it: power is delocalized (using the
language of physics) among management, bureaucrats,
specialists, and services.
I believe that
corg is always small (even if part of a larger body)
and it amplifies personal power. It fits the sharp
distinction Galbraith draw between small
("entrepreneurial") companies and large corporations.
There is always an entrepreneur inside the corg. What is
new is the challenge of the state (and, possibly, even
large corporations) by a political entrepreneur.
But what is power?
6.
The End
of the Nation-State. By Jean-Marie Guehenno.
Translated by Victoria
Elliott.
University of Minnesota Press. 1995
The End of the Nation State by Kenichi
Ohmae, New Yok: The Free Press,
1996 (London: HarperCollins, 1995).
NOTE (2016). This Essay is very sloppy. In 2002 I was unable to clearly formulate and illustrate my idea. I still am. The Koch Brothers and George Soros work in opposite directions, of which I sympathize with only one, but this is exactly what corgs do: they damper each other’s strategic effects. The relatively recent phenomenon of the charitable activism of billionaires (The Giving Pledge) who set their narrow and multiple goals, exercising personal choice and power, often preferring anything but internal USA problems, adds to this diffused unfocused picture. But the idea that corgs are private governments, mostly authoritarian, still remains in my mental picture. I am becoming more intuitively certain that the third party is what the US political system needs for stability and efficiency.
This idea has been already voiced almost--but not quite--seriously.
We are sitting on a two-legged bench.
Webpage
created: 2002
Revised:
2016
Essays 1 to 56 : http://spirospero.net/essays-complete.pdf
Essays 57 to 60: http://spirospero.net/LAST_ESSAYS.pdf
Essay 60: http://spirospero.net/artandnexistence.pdf