The Secular Fundamentalist

Modernism:- Satan's bargain: Chapter 1

(PERSPECTIVE AND HISTORY)



{A speech made by Bertram L. Zeebub, the founder, board chair and C.E.O. of SATCOR (incorporating Satan’s Dominions and Hellfire services ), to the corporate management team and invited representatives from major support services companies, at the celebratory dinner on the eve of the first annual general meeting, held in the year zero in the EYNBOTT era  (Every Year is a New Beginning for all our Tomorrows Today).  }

“On behalf of the SATCOR board, may I most warmly welcome you all to this evening’s festivities.  May I also congratulate you for your participation and support in a project and vision that has not only inspired the usual institutionals, but millions of ordinary investors; inspired undoubtedly by the hottest ever profit stream, of the largest and fastest growing corporation on or beneath the planet…

Unlike our traditional opposition, we have successfully made the transition from being an extremely ancient institution into a modern one, capable of aggressive expansion of its market share.  What started initially as a response to a crisis of overcrowding, incipient rebellion by inmates, low staff morale and a growing sense that we had lost relevance and market edge to human competition, became a fundamental review of our charter.  This forced us to completely rethink, restructure and reposition all aspects of our operations.  It was an unprecedented challenge and one that led us into a world of equally unprecedented opportunity.

From the outset, we realized that the gap to be bridged was enormous.  It would not be overcome if we attempted less than a diabolical crash or crash through policy.  We took some very tough decisions, followed by even tougher changes, that made life hell for everybody…Even by our purgatorial standards, there were some particularly Gothic moments, as we closed down and wrote off the very inefficient and liability intensive plant, properties and populations we had inherited from time immemorial.

As the consolidated accounts show, we are now reaping the rewards of modernization through:
•    timely raising of capital for new infrastructure.
•    investing in state of the art technology and research.
•    adopting a positive thinking sales and marketing model of operations.
•    altering workplace practices from labor intensive hands on with the damned, to capital 
      intensive facilitation with ‘clients’.   
•    outsourcing the less pleasant aspects of our work to specialists.
•    radically reducing the time scale of our commitment to our clients, down to lifetime only   
      contracts.

We are no longer in the business of disciplining lost souls and outcasts.  We worked it out that by the time we had met the cost of tempting, perverting and finally damning an individual (and remember this could take a whole lifetime) it would take us almost an eternity to get our money back, let alone a profit.

Our system of client repayment used to have something of a rough and authoritarian reputation. We now realize that positive self motivation is a much more powerful and cost effective tool. We have moved away from thinking in simplistic and old fashioned dualities such as Evil and Good, to a more open ended recognition of needs and their creative maximization.  We positively affirm you can never have too much, because too much is never enough.  Temptation and giving way to it is an economic imperative that empowers individuals to fully reach their potential..... usefulness.  Greed, avarice and waste are all positives if they create jobs, profits and further marketing opportunities.

If there is an increasing interest in and concern about ‘Evil’, it is because in recent times there have been some unfortunate excesses; i.e., absurdly high expectations of human behavior in a brutally tough, ruthlessly competitive and rapidly changing world.  I put it to you that the very notion of evil is largely a misconstrual of the legitimate pursuit of corporate interests, to ensure the security of the bottom line, so that everybody’s needs can be met as presciently, quickly and as efficiently as possible.

To serve our clients effectively under the new model, we must know them intimately; know their susceptibilities, desires, dreams and fantasies.  This has always been our forte and it is something we continue to build upon, using the latest psychological research and statistical analysis.  And of course, electronic information systems do make life so much easier.  One doesn’t have to be everywhere at once, when point of interface trackers can do so much of the work....

To convert susceptibility into delivered products and services at a reasonable cost per client, requires the ability to accurately stimulate well conditioned responses on all sides of the economic equation.  In the old days, our pitches were clumsily intuitive and expensively individual in character.  We did not have the intellectual tools or research facilities and budgets to work in any other way.  Modern scientific management, marketing and capitalization have changed all that and reduced the cost of reaching our client base by truly cosmic percentages…

Interestingly, the fact that we no longer extract value beyond an individual’s lifetime, does not reduce our margins or compromise service standards.  On the contrary, how can one extract effective value when all our contract repayers are cooped up in an undercapitalized institutional monopoly plagued by eternal staff featherbedding and public service conditions?  Besides, humans have become amazingly adept at terrorizing, torturing and destroying themselves and each other in ways our staff had not even imagined, and best of all, at no cost to us.  They deserved the work.
 
And just because eternal repayments by individuals have been stopped, doesn’t mean that their descendants can’t continue to bear the appropriate share of their forebears’ liabilities, accumulating at compound interest during the agreed payment free period, on our highly profitable inter-generational ‘ChildMinder’ rate…

Naturally, we offer large rewards and product incentives to anyone setting up an inter-generational account.  In particular, military dictators, polluters and resource strippers, bank executives and armament manufacturers all automatically qualify for Gold Passes that include access to international peace, responsible governance, sustainable environment and social justice awards…

Friends, the immediate benefits and the opportunities created by the restructure are manifold, but there is much, much more!  These benefits do not appear in the accounts and thus they profoundly conceal their character and the extent of value extractable from them.

I can see that for some of our new team members, this is a bit of a mystery, which is understandable.  You were employed to build and expand our conventional wealth base and it was premature to disclose at the time of your recruitment the full extent of our corporate plan. As a result of your very much appreciated efforts in building up our business profile, we are now in a position to explain the full extent of our ambitions and the considerable benefits for you and your descendants that they contain.

For SATCOR, corporate power and wealth give us a key into the dominant culture, so that we can extract the huge lode of undisclosed wealth lying inside.

Searching for concealed value is a time honored investment strategy.  The wealth it can deliver depends on the blindness of the many and the insight, resourcefulness and daring of the few prepared to capitalize on it.

The blindness of modern society is the very power and narrowness of focus that has made it so successful.  It is an article of virtual faith ( faith has become so passé)…..that only the obviously quantifiable and commodifiable are real or valid.  Concepts outside this narrowed definition of reality are treated as linguistic mistakes or obsolete archaisms.  The only wealth it recognizes must therefore be tradable, monetarily accountable and industrially or institutionally organized. This instrumentalism has given rise to such overwhelming scientific, technological, industrial and military power, that anything that falls outside its boundaries becomes redundant and gradually drops out of the cultural repertoire.

Deny social and existential capital any quantifiable recognition and its accounts can be 'dropped out' of the books at will without disturbing social awareness that anything has been lost.

Indeed, this ‘dropout’ factor was critical in bringing us down to earth…  As the spectrum of human awareness narrowed and the leverage of our traditional operating systems deteriorated, new, golden and earthbound opportunities opened up in front of us.  Outside the boundaries of orthodox judgment, psychological, familial and communal forms of wealth were being turned into the slums of the ideological inner city; neglected, undervalued and above all from our point of view, unguarded..

SATCOR and its predecessors have always wanted that Real Estate.  It maybe rundown and faded, but the architecture is divinely inspired, the location is the very heart of that city, and best of all, the native owners are a pushover.

In the old days, mortals knew enough of what they were doing to drive a hard bargain with us, after protracted negotiations with some of our most senior retainers.  Today, people are so dazzled by the panoply of product and services, they will casually abandon their less tangible birthright.  They no longer have any idea what its loss might mean.  Now that we directly produce their hearts’ desire, we have the leverage to keep extracting till there is nothing left of them but the desire; as raw, inflamed and unquenchably burning as we can make it....

By way of example, consider the wealth locked up inside a human family.  Amongst other things, it is represented by the enormous investment of time, effort, sentiment and thought, required to construct and maintain strong and secure edifices of intimacy, and to pass on the skills of building them to the next generation.

This rich vein of wealth cannot be fully or permanently removed by ideological dictum, state power or coercion.  Our more recent human competitors tried their best in this respect, but in the end, all failed.  But the narrowing of the definition of wealth to that which is currently monetarily measurable, makes it relatively simple to substitute social intimacy with preoccupation with goods and services.

The relentless energy, variety, volume and velocity of transactions in the monetized economy, ensures that most family’s’ resources are consumed by its ever accelerating, and ever more aggressive demands. They vainly struggle to find ever more money, time and brain space, for ever more sophisticated, absorbing and affecting goods and services, which must be procured, used and dumped, in ever shorter cycles of boredom, wear and obsolescence.

The payoff is a degree of compliance never before achieved by us with human populations.  To procure their goods and services fixes, masses of people will work like demons for what seems like an eternity, in hellish working conditions, for next to nothing, and increasingly be expected to do it using their own capital …And they will do this even if it costs them their marriage, their children's character development and even their own psychological, physical and moral well being.  All we have to do is quietly, inexpensively and invisibly extract the value generated……

The absoluteness and abjectness of this slavery is all the greater for being self administered.

Intuitively they sense loss and underlying chaos, but their language of meaning prevents them from recognizing or articulating what has been removed.  They cannot resolve the paradox of having surrounded themselves with the glittering prizes of the marketplace, yet feeling somehow impoverished.  They cannot account for why so many previously marginal and bizarre behaviors are starting to invade the center.

Above all, their sufferings and sense of displacement go unprotested as the private and apparently apolitical character of product flows make traditional refusal obsolete and mystified and medicalized resignation its natural replacement...

As we empty the ideological inner city, so too with the life supporting terrestrial hinterlands.  In the modern world, these landscapes are only valued for their commodifiable output and the direct cost of its extraction.  As with people, the vitality, diversity and real value of this life force is not accounted for.  Thus it can be profitably looted and damaged by production systems without cost, other than the said internal costs of production.  Even where serious episodic damage occurs, it still appears as though wealth is being created, as a result of clean up and restoration responses being added to the G.N.P.

The only reality check is when the damage has become so chronic and destabilizing, it threatens the viability of industries and human populations.  As the life support platform starts to shrink, economies suddenly discover how much they need healthy eco-systems, by which time it is too late.  The repair bill turns out to be many times greater than the total asset value of the industrial system, even before the business-as-usual world has collapsed, let alone after it.

By becoming direct producers of narrowly commodified wealth, we benefit doubly, through our profit line in the accounts and through the off balance sheet removal of the Life force, both human and natural.  We confidently expect that two to three more generations of your species should finish the job of extraction here on earth.

You see we are predators.  We are citizens of the universe.  Not being of this world, we have no interest other than to consume what sustains us, until there is nothing left and then move on. The faster and more efficiently this feeding process is, the better we like it.  It is the nature of the beast...”