The Secular Fundamentalist

The New Totalitarians: The Industrial Drivers - Hubris

Notwithstanding any of the above doubts, after over 200 years of successful technological advancement, the industrial drivers feel they have every reason to feel confident.  Their critics have so far always over-estimated present constraints and threats and under-estimated capacity for future opportunity and innovation.

Entrepreneurial vision, a sense of destiny and nerve has carried them far.  Like their early and mid twentieth century counterparts, they too see the future as a lot more of the same.

Drunk with hubris, the industrial drivers have planted the accelerators flat to the floor.  For them, speed, growth ambition and exuberant risk appetite are only modified by the possibility of temporary suspension into bankruptcy.  Even the worst depression is just a temporary negative growth pile up, every few laps or so.  While their vehicle takes a heavy battering from time to time, no matter how high the stakes are raised or the speed increased, it has always proved to be crash proof.  So they tackle the course as if their system were immortal.

Modernity may be the most formidable economic, technological and cultural mechanism ever to have evolved from our species, but nothing is immortal.  What that means is that if this high velocity and accelerating system does eventually crash out, its end may well prove to be the most precipitant, spectacular and catastrophic, ever.
 
Malthusian doubt may have only been buried off the balance sheet and allowed to quietly compound.  Every time there was a prospect that it might come back to roost, that day was put off, allowing it to grow apace, waiting for the day it no longer could be.  And the longer this game went on, the larger, more intractable and disastrous that possibility became.

Over time, finance capital kept outgrowing the traded goods and services sector.  Debt increasingly dominated equity.  The value of the former became so many multiples of that of the latter that it gradually ceased to be rooted in a physical reality.  This tended to make the whole system progressively more unstable.  Debt leveraging came to be seen as the fastest and smartest way to acquire wealth.  This in itself fed into asset inflation.  Because this trend was so universal and protracted, the additional risk this entailed gradually ceased to register.  90-100% leveraging against increasingly extravagant asset values no longer seemed hazardous.  Speculation came to be seen as economic wisdom.

There were warnings against this trend by way of quite severe recessions, but by this time the investment community had become such a debtaholic, it just couldn’t stop increasingly frequent bingeing; bingeing that was increasingly accompanied by the unscrupulous greed and rapaciousness of elites that had completely lost real life perspective.  Really traumatic disaster was only a matter of time, accident and a convenient place to happen.

The 2007-8 global financial crisis had all the makings of such a crisis, but we will not know whether it was or wasn’t until it has fully played out.  Like the Japanese economy in the 1990s, the debt overhang wounds were poulticed and stored in the hope that a future recovery would amortize them.  It hasn’t so far.  Rather it has made it more vulnerable to further shocks.
 
Of course, if economic folly were the only peccadillo of modern systems, no doubt even such a catastrophe could have been eventually absorbed and overcome in the same way as it was in the late 1930s.  However, mountains of accumulated ecological abuse, unexpectedly spirited external resistance from third world religious fundamentalists and internal cultural deconstruction ensures the possibility of utterly unprecedented and unmanageable crisis.

In the meantime, isolated in their shiny corporate towers, expensive restaurants and leafy suburbs, the besuited industrial drivers and their courtiers bask in a lustrous sense of their self-importance. This is reflected in their increasingly exotic remuneration packages that represent ever more galactic earnings multiples of those of the ordinary populariat.

More importantly, while the hours of work are long, the performance pressures great, the intra and inter-organizational competition aggressive and the capacity of boardroom members to assassinate each other or execute their subordinates in large numbers, legendary, they all share the glowingly optimistic belief that at last, they, the corporate princes and their courtiers, have won the final and permanent verdict of history.

For the first time, they see almost no impediment to remolding the world in their own image, totally.

This does not mean that they are one and uniform in their goals, interests and modus operandi.  It does not mean that individuals, corporations or industries always get what they want.  Rather, the collective effect of their combined operations delivers them a milieu that overwhelmingly maximizes their leverage in comparison with other groupings, such as the nation state and its instrumentalities, industrial unions and ‘non economic’ communities.  What is more, to ensure that dominance, rather like the samurai ethos of the Japanese Imperial army, they are just as pitilessly ruthless with each other as outsiders and simply will not tolerate anyone who cannot compete hard enough or who shows any sort of weakness or marginality.

Such is the colossal size of their collective ego, it has never occurred to the industrial drivers that the capacity for their system to keep expanding has much less to do with their fabulous talent and innovative ability, than nature’s and human society’s capacity to absorb ever more pressure and damage. The organism has become so large and efficient that it can quite literally drain the sea of its fish, poison the rivers so that the water is unfit for use, cut down all the terrestrial forests and fill the atmosphere with the carbon sequestered in the carboniferous era, two to three hundred million years ago.

There are no commercial signals to do anything except complete the business of ecological ruin as fast as possible.  They are mining the biosphere and calling the result prosperity.  Thus what properly ought to be regarded as a record of catastrophe, only serves to further inflate their arrogance and aggression.

Corporateworld constantly accelerates demand as consumers are driven to ever faster cycles of inventory replacement and producers are driven into production extremism to meet them. Foxconn, the mega company that manufactures and assembles electronics goods, particularly for the Apple brand in China, is known from time to time to put so much pressure on its workforce that there are regular outbreaks of violence and suiciding.  They have put nets on the sides of their production plants to prevent workers jumping to their deaths.
 
And that is absolutely nothing compared to what they are doing to their environment by way of the vast inventory of incoming raw materials that must now be mined and transported in, the colossal energy requirements to manufacture and assemble the goods on the mega assembly lines and the terrible effluents that come out of the maw, including the finished goods that will further use up resources in use and then become buried in their turn, in oceans of junk.

Alice no longer has to wander
through a looking glass
to check out Cheshire cats,
all shiny furred and sleek
with well filed claws
polished smiles
and eyes that prey upon
victims yet unseen,
while still digesting
on their pawns
sacrificed upon the table
of a heartless Queen
atop looking glass towers
where all the clubs are exclusive
and the breathtaking views
go for thousands of miles.
.
M Hatter in marketing still does teas
with focus groupies on his knees
but now inspired guesses
scuttle back beneath
imagination’s tresses
giving way to science
interrogated, quantified and engineered
in full house suites
of diamonds steeped in blood,
And polished for their views
On Foxtel News.

Alice eventually stayed
Doing awfully-Important-Work
for White Rabbit solutions,
down labyrinthine burrows
at Wonderland Inc
designing algorithms and reality syncs
for the spades in suits
Who carry guns they like to shoot
‘cos all their cards are bulletproof
And though the maths is good
the calculations stink.

The only dissonance to be found
is the whining doggerel whimsy hound
that occasionally embarrasses guests
by pissing from pots to the clash of spoons
and restless rattle of half full cups
who've heard it all before
but only recall the suck and lap
of pursing lips
not what they said
nor the howling lament
of tea gone cold
forgotten in the rush of feet
to make it past the golden door
before it forever shuts
the last remaining trading floor
on the last remaining chequered board
where all the pieces must be sold
and the king will do as he is told…..

….Tap your toes on the corporate stairs.
Rap your knuckles round the corporate chairs.
Beat the opposition by the foulest means or fair.
Trample over colleagues without conscience or a care.
Be scared – of the corporate rapper.

CHORUS

I’m alright I’m a corporate fella.
I've got power and position to fulfilla.
You are here at the bidding and the pleasure
Of – the corporate rapper.

Speed that line to the factory gate.
Up the pace at the warehouse mate.
Cut the numbers at the office interstate.
There’s a penalty for slowness and consignments that are late.
We hate – the corporate rapper.

CHORUS

I am the maker and destroyer of worlds.
I get the choice of the best looking girls.
I live in a house lined with real walnut burl.
And I holiday in chateaux that had once belonged to earls.
Flags unfurl – for the corporate rapper.

CHORUS

Eighty hours a week I toil to make my richly golden crust.
At the end of it I’m knackered. I don’t feel like even lust.
My wife she took the super, couldn't see her for the dust.
And the children crushed the grapes of wrath like elephants with musth.
It’s a bust – for the corporate rapper.

CHORUS

Our corporate rapper got slower and fatter,
But the younger dab rappers rapped faster.
And it mattered. They ratted. His rap was in tatters.
Demoted, redundant and plastered.
Poor bastard – the corporate rapper.

CHORUS

His once fine house upon the sea has an oil slick on the beach.
His salt affected land on the River Murray bank’s got gum trees white and bleached.
His alpine lodge has got no snow coz the greenhouse upped the heat.
And the acid rain etches duco stains as his Merc drives down the street.
That’s defeat – for the corporate rapper.

CHORUS

He left behind a world less kind where you had to be thin and fat.
His lean and hungry beady-eyed kids grew into fine shithouse rats.
But they became sleek on a diet of pique and a fabulous excess of crap.
Thus their father was found in a crumpled up mound, dead for months in a Gold Coast flat.
And that was that – for the corporate rapper.

CHORUS

In effect, the rational irrationality in the foundations of corporate thinking infects everything it touches. Megalomaniac excess becomes the dominant paradigm and society is turned into a highly rationalized and elaborately run asylum in which everybody becomes an actor, in a collective fantasy that bears almost no relationship to what the patients are going to find when the insane theatrical scenario finally has to stop.