fa lala lala

Here I am again, happy that I didn’t put “go to sleep at a reasonable time” on some list of things to do today (or yesterday, I guess).

It is December 24 and I’m caught in that strange limbo between my churchy upbringing and my decidedly anti-churchy adulthood again. I’ll be driving to Mom’s later today to partake in the family tradition of Eve celebration. Mom has a tremor in her hands these days. We think it’s a side-effect of the anti-anxiety medication, but we’re going to make sure and ask the doctor next visit, just to cover the bases and be sure.

We always did it this way, the Eve thing. Mostly, I think, so that I could have an extra bit of alone time with my new toys. That only-child thing came in handy as a kid – I was usually pretty spoiled. I was also a loner, so the 25^th tradition of hosting friends, or being hosted at friends’ homes, for the big tryptophan overdose was a chore. I was always much happier with the thought of making up imaginary stories for my action figures to battle through, or reading my new books, or playing my new games, than I was being social with kids that I didn’t identify with, or adults that I got even less.

I shirked off the illusion of Santa at an early age. Mom said I was three when I looked up at them one Eve and said that I knew the Santa thing was a crock, and that they didn’t have to pretend on my account. They laughed, she told me, but it was a sign of things to come.

That’s kind of how I feel about the religiosity of the whole season too, or rather, the attempt to impose a religious reason for the season. When I was eleven or twelve, around the same time that the church we had gone too unintentionally ostracized Mom for being in a failed marriage (how dare she!), I started to peel back the curtain and see churches for what they really were – country clubs for the religiously mobile.

I remember reading for the first time the opinion of scholars that December 25^th was an unlikely date for the birth of a Jewish messiah, if the little tyke had indeed been born during a census as the story goes. The Roman empire, being as continentally expansive as it was, included some pretty damned cold and snowy places, and the middle of winter would not have been a good time to ask all of the citizens and subjects to head back over hill and snowy dale to descend upon their home towns for the census taking. They were reasonable, those Romans, and conducted their censuses in the early spring, after the snow and before serious planting season. If there was a historical Jesus born in an historical manger in his foster-dad’s historical home town during a census, the smart money is on it happening some time in April or early May, closer to Easter than to this charade of a religious holiday in early winter.

I’ve never been able to take “The Reason for the Season” seriously since then. It was the first of many disillusionments when it came to all things x-ian. Others, like the fact that most of our Judeo-Christian holidays are simply neo-versions of pagan holidays superimposed over the old celebrations as a way to churchify the days people were going to celebrate anyway, or the fact that so many pre-Jesus pagan deities share so many instances of serendipitous coincidence with the Jesus mythology, just cemented the deal. The added fact that this holiday, more than any other, typifies our western obsession with turning everything into a reason to shop, helps my cynicism too.

It’s not that I’m a Scrooge. I enjoy the happiness that sometimes overpowers the stress of angry shoppers playing full-contact consumerism down the toy aisles. I take a bit of consolation in the fact that more of my friends do secret Santa variations instead of wholesale shopping one-upmanship. An informal survey of climbers at the climbing gym this week (I was covering so that my friend, the owner, could get some well-deserved R&R) revealed that more than half of the more regular and serious climbers do a present-sharing scheme version of some sort, limiting their over-consumption. This may be because we tend to be counter-culture a lot.  Or maybe because we’re simply less affluent than many. The two probably kind of go hand in hand. Either way, we’re all happy. Hell, we’re often silly we’re so happy.

But still, I have a level of frustration as I watch drivers share their xmas spirit by fingering each other as they race from mall to mall, or other friends participate in the race to see who is least cheap, and most “generous” (like it’s a competition or something), credit be damned, the stress of anticipated card bills already dancing like obese sugar plum accountants just behind their fake smiles.

I wonder if the sardonic humor I feel coursing through my veins is just a world-weary reaction to the foolishness I’m watching, or whether it’s something darker; something more Freudian.

When the first real experience of religious disillusionment kicked in, back in my pre-adolescence, I was angry about it; angry at the church and at god for the way Mom was treated so callously by the church; angry that god had simply not shown up in such a profound way. I stayed angry about it all through my teens – angry and depressed. Then, when I fell back into religion as an adult, through most of my marriage, I was told that god had not failed – I had failed; my faith had failed. I was encouraged to read Job a lot. Have you read Job? Wonderful morality tale, that Job is, if amazingly depressing, and a very sophisticated apologetic for the shitty things that happen to people. And for a while I believed it all again too, silly me.

When I walked away the second time, the curtain pulled back one more time to reveal the gears and machinations behind the holy veil, I vowed that I wouldn’t throw the baby out with the bath water. There are amazing things about faith that have nothing to do with religion at all. My faith remains a living, breathing thing. I’m not sure what my faith is in any more – certainly, it’s nothing to do with the specific mythology of western religion – but I can still feel a breath of belief in me. And a strong one too.

Like Ramakrishna, I now believe that all religions have truth in them, in their innate humanism. It isn’t coincidence that most world religions have a version of the golden rule. Science and atheism can’t explain everything out there any more believably than any religion can. In a sense, science can be a religion too, with its high priests in white garb, test tubes in hand – our gatekeepers to a better understanding. I don’t have faith in science, as interesting as new discoveries are, just like I don't have faith in religions with their old explanations. Both are corrupt, flawed by the need of institutions to control people, and control information, and keep people dumb and in the dark.

Faith, to me, is sacred: The ongoing search for an understanding of things as a whole. Science isn’t an answer – it’s a path. Same with religion. And all paths, potentially, even when they are corrupted by the intrinsic nature of institutions, can lead to the roof. That’s what Ramakrishna said. Who cares how we get there, so long as we move in that direction. 

I just prefer no path. I like bushwacking. A bushwacking kind of faith isn't very defined. It doesn't mean that you can't get anywhere - it's not being directionless - it just means that you have to scrape through the burning bushes, and wade through the seas. Nothing is done for a bushwacker - we do for ourselves.

I have faith in the knowledge that we don’t know everything. I have faith in the truism that the more we know, the more we should know that we don't really know. I have faith in the thought that empathy might win out one day, and that our species will actually become what we’re capable of being. I have faith in the ability of my fellow humans to transcend the bullshit, only occasionally sometimes, but at other time, in some people or in some places and times, on a scale that is truly miraculous and marvelous to behold. I have faith that we could do that more, and that if we could, it would change everything.

So yeah, I still have a semblance of faith.

Sometimes, when I think about how anti-tradition I am, it bothers me. I wonder if I’m just being kooky and unjustifiably recalcitrant. I wonder how much easier it would be to just go with the flow. I wonder if the reason that so many of the high profile atheists seem so goddamned angry all the time is because, like me, they still feel the sting of their lost religion and the comforts it provides. Is that why I’m prickly about this topic? Because I’m still angry that I saw behind the curtain and the truth robbed me of all my comfortable illusions?

Maybe it is. At least, maybe it still is a bit.

And then I remember that I’m not generally inclined to swim with the current at the best of times. Certainly, in the face of so much cultural and self-deception, it’s unreasonable for me to expect such behavior of my self. I’m that guy that goes up the down escalator some times, just because. This is who I am. I like being the wrench in the works, when the works need wrenching. Seeing behind the curtain, through the veil, was probably kind of inevitable. Seeing behind one too many times, in one to many milieus, has made me skeptical and cynical a bit, I know. I have to live with that.

Honestly, I try not to push it too hard. I'm no better at being an anti-church evangelist than I was at being a pro-church evangelist. Ask me, I'll tell ya. Otherwise, you probably would barely notice. I’m okay with mostly letting those around me enjoy the season. I’m not a humbug kind of cynic, but I don’t keep my mouth completely shut either. Christmas doesn’t make me sour, just thoughtful, and very observant.

And glad I don’t have to go to church.

So tomorrow I’ll go to Mom’s and help make dinner. We’ll open a couple presents (I’ve talked her into simple things with practicality, and no sweaters, but I can’t talk her out of it entirely). I’ll even have a little gift for her and Miriam to open, just cuz. And then, after they go to bed at their early hour, I’ll sneak up the stairwell and spend a bit of time thinking on the roof and staring up at the stars.

I’ll hope that maybe we’ll all reach out for our best selves a little more this year. I’ll wish for a pervasive empathy to settle like a swaddling blanket over the human race just a touch more than it ever has before. I’ll believe that we’re capable of it, and that, in itself, will be a little miracle for me. I’ll try to see things the way they really are and still be hopeful. Up there alone. On the roof.

Because that’s what matters – getting to the roof and having your eyes open enough to appreciate it when you get there.

At least that’s what I think.

Happy Seasons and Merry Greetings, everyone.

finding wild and the things we do for love

A friend on Twitter, Jennifer Garam (who goes by the Twitter Tag @writieouschick – that’s so cool), posted this quote by Isadora Duncan last week: “You were once wild here. Don’t let them tame you.”

It had an impact. Several of us appreciated it, Jennifer posted on it on her blog, One Writeous Chick, and then another friend, Judy Clement Wall, riffed on it too on her blog Zebra Sounds. We came up with a little hashtag magic - #youwerewildhere – and now we’re enjoying our little not-so-secret movement in the Twitterverse. It's growing, very slowly and very organically, and I love that it's staying humble. Every day someone new jumps in, and there's another blog post, and the whole thing feels pretty real.

This is my contribution, such as it is.

I started a new job on Monday. Actually, it’s an old job. After nine years of casino work leading into the life inversion that got me out of there, I started back with the casino that I first worked at earlier this week. Dealing cards. Back to the beginning.

When they say that writers need to cultivate multiple sources of revenue, I never imagine this as part of my fantasy. I really didn’t want to go back. I would have been happy as a clam to never actually set foot in a casino again. I really would have.

The life inversion was and is, in large part, about rejecting the consumerist world. I wanted to find the best me out beyond the bright lights and bells and whistles of the casino world, away from accumulating stuff and living up to popular social standards. The whole thing is an illusion, a fantasy of winning, a mirage of possibility, wealth and vanity inside a reality of desperation and narcissism.

It’s yucky.

But, dealing is also a chance to make twice as much as I could anywhere else at entry level. There are bills to pay, jobs are scarce, and I still know people in that world. It’s still about who ya know, not what ya know. And, frankly, I know how to deal cards. I can work two days a week and cover my minimal nut. This will allow more time to write. It’s kind of a no-brainer. And yet…

I keep asking myself if this is a compromise that I’m making, if somehow I’m losing the compass heading and drifting back into an orbit that I worked so hard to get out of. It’s not pride or vanity; It’s not wearing a uniform again after so many years in a suit. It’s the fact that it’s a casino. I hate that world. Love the people (some of them), hate the environment.

And when I realize that - how much I hate being there – I stop worrying. Other than the bare minimum of revenue to support me while I write, there’s nothing I want there. It’s not me anymore, in any way shape or form. It’s just a thing I do to help me chase my dreams; chase my better self. Living a life without compromise was always a dream, never a goal. The world doesn’t work that way. The goal was to make as few compromises as was possible, and to make the ones that were unavoidable count.

There was a time that casinos offered the possibility of a career, a chance to learn new things, and some sense of helping others by being a good manager, a good leader. It was fun to feel important and capable for a while in that milieu. I thought I was wild there once, briefly, but I let that environment, its pretty lights and the promise of career, meaning, importance and security tame me. I bought in. That won’t happen again.

I don’t claim to have found the wild me - the better me - again when I left the casinos twenty months ago, but I found the path to that me. I found the journey, and the journey is what it's all about.

The writing is wild. Hell, it’s the wildest thing ever. The better me I aspire to exists, not at the end of this road, but every step along the way, every page I type out, every bit of craft I learn, and even more when I ignore the craft and reach for magic. Every day I can spend rummaging around in my imagination, or soaring on the creative thermals that blow when things are just perfect, is a day spent being wild. And like most things, the more you do it, the better you get at it.

This casino gig isn’t a compromise, it’s a sacrifice; a distasteful thing I have to do that harms nobody else but me, and even then only if I let it. It allows me to pursue the dream, to rummage and soar. It is the sacrifices we're prepared to make that define how much we love the thing we're chasing. I find that I am prepared to make some fairly large ones. This sacrifice, this little thing? 

It’s just a small part of finding wild.

I hate advertising, but I'll make an exception this once...

Behold Nissan's new Leaf ad, and just stand in awe of it for a second. It makes me want one, and I'd rather wait for Tesla's Rav4 retrofit (not that I could afford it anyway, or the Leaf for that matter).

Enjoy, and use a recycled tissue...

‘But He loves you. He loves you, and He needs money! He always needs money! He's all-powerful, all-perfect, all-knowing, and all-wise, somehow just can't handle money! Religion takes in billions of dollars, they pay no taxes, and they always need a little more.’ George Carlin

Easter is magic to me, simply magic.

And not in that wonderful, let’s-all-celebrate-family-and-the-death-and-resurrection-of-Jesus kind of way. I mean, really real magic in a Las Vegas kind of way. We’ve all seen magicians pull a rabbit out of a hat, but pulling a painted egg out of a rabbit’s ass in plain site of a guy hanging on a cross is a pretty cool trick, you gotta admit.

And that whole Jesus thing, that’s a David Copperfield-quality bit of misdirection in and of itself, if ya ask me. The ability of the church to turn a pagan holiday into a Christian one always astounds, doesn’t it? Always brings down the house. I can almost hear the fourth century Bishops puzzling it out:

Scene I, Act 1
Date: 325 AD
Setting: The Council of Nicaea

Christian Sect Leader One (CSL1): Okay, that’s the Winter equinox covered, and we can do that reverse-psychology thing with the fall solstice…

Christian Sect Leader Two (CSL2): …I love that Halloween thing – the irony kills me…

CSL1: …and the crucifixion/passover timing is a natural. But how are we going to tie it in with fertility rights so the pagans buy in?

CSL2: Hmm… Eggs?

CSL1: Say wha…?

CSL2: Eggs, I said eggs. They represent fertility and reproduction and profligation.

CSL1: Profligation?

CSL2: Sure! “…All your eggs in one basket”, and “ You can’t make an omelet without…” Eggs will sub-consciously encourage more extravagant offerings. We’ll give them eggs, which we can leverage for next to nothing, and they’ll feel obligated to give back.

CSL1: Brilliant.

CSL2: (Beaming) Thanks!

CSL1: I think we still need a spokes-model though. Eggs are decidedly un-sexy by themselves and, well, the dead and bloody Christ-on-a-stick thing may work for guilty manipulation, but we need something to keep people from slitting their wrists.

CSL2: Hmmm, good point.

(crickets)

Constantine: I like bunnies. They’re fuzzy and soft and taste great with eggs. And they fuck a lot, which kinda ties in with the fertility thing.

CSL1 and CSL2: (in unison) Bunnies it is.

This level of sophisticated illusion has always awed me. We celebrate this holiest of Christian pagan-holiday-conversions with a holiday on the day Jesus died, a big meal on the day that the Saviour would have been in hell, the disciples all mopey and trying to figure out what to do next (at least the entrepreneurial ones would have been), and then head back to work to celebrate his resurrection which made so much profit possible! *sniff* Heart-warming!

Here’s to bunnies and eggs, religious manipulation and all things commercial and profitable! Happy Easter!

‘It is not easy to see how the more extreme forms of nationalism can long survive when men have seen the Earth in its true perspective as a single small globe against the stars.’ Arthur C. Clarke

I’m not a fan of nationalism in any form, extreme or otherwise. That’s a hard position to explain during the Olympics when everyone is actively encouraged, by our Prime Minister among others, to forego the traditional Canadian sense of composure and modesty to wave flags and cheer unabashedly. (Not that I’d follow Harper’s exhortation advice on anything.) It get’s even more complicated when I admit that I love the sport aspect of the Olympics. I told one friend that I’d be cheering the athletes and booing the IOC, VanOC, Harper and Campbell every chance I got. So, fair to say I found the Olympic festival to be a challenging time, full of conflicting emotions and a guilty sense of admiration.

Let me clarify by saying that I admire Olympic athletes for their athletic ability and the purity of their performances. How could you not admire some of the stories that manifested themselves? A young skater whose mother dies suddenly goes on to skate the competition of her life and take a medal; a guy throws himself down a skeleton track head first at 145 km/h to come from behind and win gold; a couple in ice dancing (is that really a sport?) pull off a gold medal in a competition perennially dominated by Europeans; both men’s and women’s hockey teams come through to take the gold medal in “our game”. And that’s a very incomplete list. It was heady stuff, and I cheered along with everyone else when Sid potted the golden puck yesterday.

I’ll admit it; I was proud to be Canadian in that moment.

The feeling hadn’t been there the entire last two weeks though, and it isn’t there today. I’m still overwhelmed by the disgrace of our government’s arrogance and their lack of integrity; still ashamed that we are lapdogs to the Americans practically everywhere except on the ice; still ashamed that the spectacle of the closing ceremonies may be a swan song for the arts in BC because of our government’s desire to line their pockets instead of support programs that made that kind of expression of artistic ability a possibility. I still consider nationalism, in even its most benign forms, to be an evil thing, pitting nation against nation at a time when cooperation should be the only word on any politician’s lips.

On top of that nationalistic fervor, seen as a positive aspect of the games by so many, there’s the fact that athletics are only a part of the spectacle. They are the draw that corporations use to attract and entertain so that we are watching all that advertising, using our Visa cards exclusively, eating the least healthy fast food possible and shopping at all the right stores for all the right products. Do you think that this is the spirit of the Olympics? Is it the true spirit of athletic competition to sell out the games and everything pure they are intended to be so that corporations can sell product more effectively, and so that local real estate investors can get rich on the public dime?

Can I share a secret? To justify watching the game yesterday, I had to think of it in terms of which team had more of my favorite players on it, clinched by who was playing my favorite goalie, rather than by what national colors the players were wearing. I’ve written before about the evils of nationalism and patriotic fervor. I won’t start again here. Suffice it to say that nationalism magnifies our differences instead of celebrating our similarities. I had to try to ignore the commercials and strategically time my smoke breaks.

This morning on CBC they were talking about the political ramifications of the games and how they might trigger an election, with Harper and his conservative slaves riding high on the euphoric high of the mass hysteria and group hypnosis brought on by the games. How sad. How cynical. They were talking about how happy everyone was too. How we threw a “good party”. One politician was impressed by how the games drew us together as a country. All for the low, low price of roughly seven BILLION dollars. How many homeless people could have been helped with seven billion dollars? How many programs like Insite could have been carried on in perpetuity or created in other places? How many jobs, permanent ones, not six-month, part-time ones, could have been created? But there’s no profit in that kind of social altruism, is there? No commercial opportunity or advertising rebound.

There are times when I sort of mourn what I see as a loss of innocence. I remember my unadulterated joy when Canada struck gold in Salt Lake City and look back on it now with a bit of nostalgia. I found myself wishing that my enjoyment of the moment yesterday afternoon wasn’t toned by the more expansive context that I see the games within now. I wished for a moment, to make a pop culture reference, that I had taken the blue pill.

But I didn’t, and I wouldn’t if I had to do it again, and how I see the world is irreconcilably changed. I still celebrate what athletes from around the world were able to accomplish these last couple weeks; the adversity they overcame, the excellence they achieved. They are amazing and heartbreaking and wonderful (especially if they did it without drugs or gene therapy or blood doping).

Forgive me if I don’t get a Canadian flag tattoo though. That part of the spectacle just makes me depressed.

“Capitalism is the astounding belief that the most wickedest of men will do the most wickedest of things for the greatest good of everyone.” John Maynard Keynes

Capitalism and the free market system are held up as the cornerstones of the democratic system, the key to our advanced and sophisticated way of life. True believers in the free market system will tell you that the competitive impulse provokes in us the root of drive to create amazing technology, the advances we are responsible for as a race in the fields of science, medicine, math and even the arts. They suggest that greed is a positive impulse in that it motivates us to achieve and strive. That inequality and social stratification is a natural state created by the impulse to surpass others.

They aren’t entirely wrong. Capitalism and the representative perversion of democracy that we’ve lived with for the last 250-400 or so years has been extant during a period of unprecedented advances in technology and in our scientific understanding of the world around us. That system has allowed, and even in some ways inspired, those advances. That’s just simply the truth of it.

To say, however, that it’s the whole reason for those advances, or to suggest that the system works, and then to try to support that assertion with circumstantial evidence of those advances, is to paint a very incomplete picture. Rather than give capitalism credit for the positive things that have happened in the last few hundred years, I’d posit that we have done many of these positive things in spite of capitalism, not because of it.

In truth, capitalism generally only takes advantage of innovation when it occurs outside of the capitalist system. Rarely do truly positive innovations take place within the machinery of capitalism. Most great innovations that truly benefit mankind have been made in the environs of academia or by independent inventors and are then co-opted by capitalism in order to make them profitable. Once new technology or medicine or art makes it into the capitalist system it is monetized, its intrinsic value commuted into a means for revenue generation, often at grossly inflated rates, and the innovation then generally stagnates, turned into variations on a theme to prompt future revenue generation. Sometimes the original innovation prompts new thought, usually outside of the commercial system, and a new innovation is spawned, only to be co-opted again.

Consider electric vehicle technology: The means exist currently to replace almost every surface vehicle used for personal and light commercial use with vehicles that run entirely on electric power, yet we still use primarily fuel-based transportation with small, recent nods to hybrid vehicles that still use fossil fuels, but do it slightly more efficiently. Electric prototypes exist that can run for 1200 kms at 200 km/h on a single charge with a 4-hour re-charge time, and that technology isn’t all that new. In fact, innovations in battery technology have been being bought up by petro-chemical and auto manufacturer companies for years where they sit on the shelf. They’ll come out eventually, when it becomes less profitable to continue to exploit carbon-based fuels than to retool for electric transportation. And that dynamic repeats itself with medicine, computers and all other technologies in the same way.

In essence, capitalism holds us back from truly taking advantage of new innovations, the innovators corrupted by the huge sums of money thrown at them by the commercial giants.

Consider politics: The system we use is generally thought of as democracy, but it isn’t. It’s a version called representative democracy that, when it was developed back in ancient Greece, was the only way to facilitate a system of democracy. We don’t all have one vote except during elections and rare referendums. Instead we abdicate our true democratic ‘rights’, electing representatives to cast votes on our behalf in Parliament or Congress. The technology exists to convert our system to a truly democratic system. Computers exist in more North American homes than not, and most of those have frequent if not continual connection to the internet and secure websites, yet we still vote the old fashioned way, and still vote away our rights to democratic say in how our countries are run. We complain about how our politicians betray us and act in anything but our best interests, but they aren’t the problem – we are. We have voluntarily given up our right to democracy in favor of the lazy comfort of not having to pay much or any attention, in order to enjoy the ironic pleasure of complaining about our elected officials’ performance, and in service to the divisive nature of partisan politics.

So I won’t be saying that capitalism is responsible for any progress we’ve made. The best I can offer capitalism is a sarcastic nod for allowing some of the good things that have happened, and that, in my opinion, is far outweighed by the damage it does.

Today is Boxing Day, the biggest shopping day of the year in Canada. I’ve had the TV on a bit while writing this and watched the same commercial for a major retailer play several times. In the commercial, a family is rushing to leave the house in order to take advantage of some amazing sales that started this morning at 7am. As they run out the door, they leave their infant child in his car seat in the forefront of the picture. Dad closes the door and then, a second or two later, runs back in to grab the car seat and baby. The message? The deals are so good that you’ll forget your family, and forgetting them is okay, cute even. Nice, yeah?

In another one, this one for a cellular network, a law enforcement team is thwarted in their chase to find a criminal by the subject’s use of their more advanced and pervasive 3G network. The message? Use our service because it’s good enough for criminals! Wow… inspiring.

Consumerism is the true foundation of our capitalist/representative democracy. “Bigger, better, faster, more” is the motto. This day, this week, more than any other in Canada and on par with Black Friday in the US, is the symbol of the consumerist and capitalist system. This is the real legacy of our free market system; that we have abdicated our dignity in favor of a vain pursuit for nicer stuff, and hopefully more of it than our neighbors, and if we’re really fortunate and work hard maybe so much money and stuff that one day we won’t have to work any more or will be able to join the truly rich.

Mmmm-mmm, makes me want to go set up a tent and be the first in line with a big, happy ‘Go Capitalism’ t-shirt on to show my pride. Just kidding… You got that, right?

“The corporation’s legally defined mandate is to pursue, relentlessly and without exception, its own self-interest, regardless of the often harmful consequences it causes to others.” Joel Bakan, The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power

I was watching the movie, The Corporation, again and pulled this quote from the introduction of the book that inspired the documentary.

If you haven’t seen the movie, check out the link to the right. I highly recommend it.

The premise of the book, and the primary conceit of the movie, involves the fact that, under international and federal laws, a ‘corporation’ is viewed as a person in the eyes of the law, given rights just like a person, and by the vagaries of law this classification as a person eliminates the liability of the shareholders that own the corporation. The book and movie then observe the behaviors of the corporate ‘person’ as it exists in our society and diagnoses it according to the DSM-IV, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Mr. Bakan and the film both make a convincing argument in support of a diagnosis of archetypal psycopathy.

In other words corporations are, as the argument goes, by legal mandate sociopathic.

This might not be news to you. It wasn’t a huge shock to me when I first watched it, but seeing the argument spread out the way it is in the book and movie was a revelation just the same.  This is the defining organization of our time, the single most monolithic institution type in existence. It is what we will be remembered for by future societies (assuming we evolve past this one).

I could go on, but it would just become a sermon, and unless you see it, hear it, and recognize it for truth, anything I have to say about it is moot. Conversely, once you do see, you won’t need me or anyone else to say anything – that’s the beauty of truth; it is self-supporting. So download the movie or go rent it at Blockbuster, or go find it at Better World Books (a sustainable business model).

You may not ultimately agree, and that’s your choice, but at least you’ll be able to say you made an informed decision.