Corporation

A Belated Response to Citizens United

Essentially, the Corporation is a method for perpetuating the practical operation of an institution beyond the organic limitations of any single human generation. Rules and articles of the corporation (or incorporation) may take, and historically have taken, variously, secular and or religious aspects and characteristics.

Corporations have historically tended to thrive to the extent their leaders and participants recognized and understood—in a timely and accurate application of that understanding—the organic roots and underlying mechanisms of their nature; the opposite is also true.

To seemingly but not really digress: language can also be considered a semiotic or verbal sort of corporation (and/or of “environment”), usually working in tandem with one or more of the other corporate entities (cities, universities, businesses, etc.).* For those interested in the evolution of the corporation and corporate activities, particularly in Western culture, please check out the link to a great book on this subject, The King’s Two Bodies, in the bibliographical section of this website.

Within any given generation, the corporation must necessarily employ human beings, which endow it in some respects with human qualities. It is not, however, in and of itselfhuman. In fact, given it’s central raison d’etre as the perpetuation of practical continuities above and beyond the limitations of human mortality, a corporation is in fact in all those aspects the opposite or antithesis of anything human.

Thus, to legally endow it with rights and responsibilities identical to those given to human beings can only result in generally undesirable results, much like attempting to create a chemical compound using ingredients from the wrong formula. A people that has come to be afflicted with an ever-dissatisfied hope for personal happiness, and a subsequent, enhanced fear of their own mortality can, however, form such a desperate attachment to the false sense of immunity provided by their corporations that they are still nonetheless willing to grant them peoplehood. Arguably, such was the case in the otherwise inexplicable victory of Citizens United.

Lee Strauss (Copyright 2020)