Unbuilding Institution

[Note: this post originally found here.]

How in the world do you link corporate influence to murdering civilians with drones? [Jimmy response to d23 statement of corporate overlordship]

Like any grandly vague abstract political noun, the word "corporatism" includes almost a universe of meanings, nuances and embedded assumptions about right and wrong.
Some acts are inherently evil. Compare, for instance, the Holocaust with the firebombing of Tokyo with the Massacre at Wounded Knee. All involve evil actions: a vastly superior legitimate entity (government) killing helpless people. The only thing distinguishing these three events is scale: the number of people murdered.

In order to commit these atrocities, the perpetrators believed the legitimacy of their actions; their actions were sanctified by the antiseptic notion of "war".

Similarly, many evils are inflicted on the world in the name of "profit".

Many will protest that "war" and "profit" aren't the same things at all.

True.

But they do have one thing in common.

These concepts -- "war" and "profit" -- serve as justification for all sorts of evils because these concepts themselves turn the world into a dichotomy of meanings, designating all reality as either useful or as disposable.

For examples:

Whether they were bank directors or mental cases, the people who were loaded on those trains meant nothing to me.[Eichmann's summary] 

Was there a rule then to say that you shouldn't bomb, shouldn't kill, shouldn't burn to death one hundred thousand civilians in a single night?[MacNamara's reflection] 

The Pioneer has before declared that our only safety depends upon the total extermination of the Indians. Having wronged them for centuries, we had better, in order to protect our civilization, follow it up by one more wrong and wipe these untamed and untamable creatures from the face of the earth. In this lies future safety for our settlers and the soldiers who are under incompetent commands. Otherwise, we may expect future years to be as full of trouble with the redskins as those have been in the past.[Local news, 1891]

These three events, (selected from among the randomness of my own cognitions), typify the mindset of corporatism: Any act that strengthens the corporation -- no matter how immoral, how illegal, how despicable -- justifies itself.

This is how I make the parallel between droning civilians, and -- say -- the random disposal of known carcinogens, denial of climate change, or the poisoning of the Gulf of Mexico.

The legitimacy of the enabling entity {the institution[in this case]) justifies all manner of crime rewarding most lavishly and praising most effusively, those most responsible for the evils committed.

Only in retrospect do we see these evils as actually evil.