How Corporate Culture Creates Political Apathy (Or: There Is No Truth)
[Apologies for the long political post, the last on this subject].
One of the defining aspects of youth is political indignation and perplexed incomprehension: how is that no one else sees the lies, sees the injustice, sees the opportunity to fix the world and wants to seize it? In America, this is an especially common lament: why are citizens so radically disengaged, so indifferent to demonstrable political crime? Why don’t people care that Bush is an incompetent liar, for example?
I have felt for some time that the West learns its capacity for self-deception, for cultivated apathy, from corporate life. As I discussed here and here, corporate culture has a far greater effect than political activists understand. Not part of the machinery that dominates the laboring lives of most Americans, activists -who are mostly the youth, academics, and cultural creatives- don’t realize how totally corporate life drills a few key cognitive habits into workers:
- Self-interest is all that matters, and is in fact -in a roundabout way- the best mechanism for incentivizing good behavior; if everyone acts with self-interest, the structures of power and politics in the office will assure that everything is equitable.
- All statements of values and ethics are lies. Corporations have decimated the language of ethics: posters of company “values” undermine the plausibility of any meaningful manifesto.
- Doublethink is normative. Statements of “values,” appeals to corporate “mission statements” that all employees know are at odds with the corporation’s mission and which serve only to mask the self-interested careerism of managers, must be “taken seriously.” You only roll your eyes privately; in meetings, you parrot the manifestly false “values” your company “cherishes.”
- Love and affection are inappropriate in the realm of the “serious” and the “real.”
- Data can be endlessly reworked, represented, underreported, masked, decontextualized. There is no reality: what matters isn’t whether an idea is good or fair, but whether it pleases those above you and can be fed to those below.
- Managers come and managers go; regimes rise and fall; “values statements” are printed and disseminated and torn down when the CEO is forced out by defrauded shareholders; nothing is permanent but self-interest.
- The shareholders are an irritating body from whom you try to get as much money as you can while concealing as much as possible.
In sum, if you live in a corporation for most of your day, week, month, year, you grow accustomed to the ideas that truth doesn’t meaningfully exist, reality is something to be distorted in presentations, the people to whom you report are to be appeased (and the shareholding public lied to), and any ethical or moral claims made are in fact self-serving distortions.
Particularly damaging is the inculcation of doublethink: hear lies and believe them, speak lies and support them, inspire lies and benefit from them. How is it that so many Americans live indifferent to or in denial of plain truth? It’s simple: that’s what is demanded of them daily in one fatuous, insipid, phony meeting after another.
Corporate life is not about change, or helping others, or any other damn thing but this: keeping your head down, pretending to respect what you don’t, going with the flow, doing the minimum amount of work, and getting as much money as possible. Almost everyone behaves this way.
Humans learn mimetically and our minds are permeable; if this is your primary interaction with reality beyond the family, what will politics be to you? Who is Obama to you, but a slick climber? Who is McCain to you, but an old executive? Who are “the poor” to you but an abstraction? Who is “Africa” to you but a competitor?
(Even if you rise above these sentiments, doublethink preserves your apathy: you can know our consumption habits are problematic and put it out of mind easily, for example).
And what value system competes with the corporate order, where you see wealth and privilege and power and happiness, however false, daily? Religion is debased, civic culture is merely media culture, and art is obscure and self-referential.
You may laugh at the corporate man, but for millions and millions, he is the sole moral figure in the modern world, the paragon to emulate. The rewards of the corporation are all that exist; truth is an irritant in your eye; don’t waste everyone’s time prattling on about it at the next meeting: just get through the day.
