Bageant: We've Let Corporations and Media Rob Our Souls -- It's Time to Do Something Meaningful

By Joe Bageant, JoeBageant.com. Posted April 6, 2009.

We believe that we dare not let corporations die. Corporations feed us. They entertain us. Corporations occupy one full half of our waking hours of our lives, through employment, either directly or indirectly. They heal us when we are sick.

So it's easy to see why the corporations feel like a friendly, benevolent entity in the larger American consciousness. Corporations are, of course, deathless and faceless machines and have no soul or human emotions. That we look to them for so much makes us a corporate cult and makes corporations a fetish of our culture. Yet to us, they are like the weather -- just there.

All of us live together in this corporate fetish cult. We agree upon and consent to its reality, just as the Aztecs agreed upon Quetzalcoatl and the lost people of Easter Island agreed that the great stone effigies of their remote island had significance.

We are not unique

Strangely enough, even as a population mass operating under unified corporate management machinery, most Americans believe they are unique individuals, significantly different from every other person around them.

More than any other people I have met, Americans fear loss of uniqueness. Yet you and I are not unique in the least. Despite the American yada-yada about individualism, you are not special. Nor am I. Just because we come from the manufacturer equipped with individual consciousness, does not make us the center of any unique world, private or public, material, intellectual or spiritual.

The fact is, you will seldom, if ever, make any significant material or lifestyle choices of your own in your entire life. 

• If you don't marry him, someone else will.
• If you don't buy that house, someone else will.
• If you don't become a psychologist, lawyer or a clergyman or a telemarketer, someone else will.

We are all replaceable parts in the machinery of a capitalist economy. "Oh but we have unique feelings and emotions that are important," we say. Psychologists specialize in this notion.

Yet I venture to say that none of us will ever feel an emotion that someone long dead had not felt, or some as-yet-unborn person will not feel. We are swimmers in an ancient rushing river of humanity. You, me, the people in my Central American village, the child in Bangladesh, and the millionaire frat boys who run our financial and governmental institutions with such adolescent carelessness. All of our lives will eventually be absorbed without leaving a trace.

Still though, for Western peoples in particular, there is the restless inner cultural need to differentiate our lives from the other swimmers. Most of us, especially as educated people in the Western world, will never beat that one.

Fortunately, though, we can meaningfully differentiate our lives (at least in the Western sense) in the way we choose to employ our consciousness. Which is to say, to own our consciousness.

If we exercise enough personal courage, we can possess the freedom to discover real meaning and value in our all-too-brief lives. We either wake up to life, or we do not. We are either in charge of our own awareness, or we let someone else manage it by default. That we have a choice is damned good news.

The bad news is that we nevertheless remain one of the most controlled peoples on the planet, especially regarding control of our consciousness, public and private. And the control is tightening.

I know it doesn't feel like that to most Americans. But therein rests the proof. Everything feels normal; everybody else around us is doing the same things, so it must be OK.

This is a sort of Stockholm Syndrome of the soul, in which the prisoner identifies with the values of his or her captors, which in our case is of course, the American corporate state and its manufactured popular culture.

When we feel that such a life is normal, even desirable, and we act accordingly, we become helpless. Learned helplessness.

For instance, most Americans believe there is little they can do in personally dealing with the most important moral and material crises ever faced, both in America and across the planet, beginning with ecocide, war making and the grotesque deformation of the democratic process we have settled for.

Citizenship has been reduced to simple consumer-group consciousness. Consequently, even though Americans are only 6 percent of the planet's population, we use 36 percent of the planet's resources. And we interpret that experience as normal and desirable and as evidence of being the most-advanced nation in the world. Despite that our lives have been reduced to a mere marketing demographic.

Let me digress for just a moment, to tell you about how life is outside the marketing demographic.

I live much of the year in the Third World country of Belize, Central America. A nation so damned poor that our cash bounces. True, it ain't Zimbabwe, or the Sudan -- there are no dying people in the streets. But food security is easily the biggest problem, and growing by the day.

Yet, despite our meager and diminishing resources down there, and much government corruption, people are still citizens, not marketing demographics, not yet anyway.

Citizens who struggle toward a just society. They have made more progress than the United States, in some respects. For instance, we have: A level of free medical care for the poor, though we lack much equipment and facilities. Maternity pay if either you or your spouse are employed. Retirement on Social Security at age 60. Worker rights, such as mandatory accrued severance pay for workers, even temporary workers.

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Joe Bageant is author of the book, Deer Hunting With Jesus: Dispatches from America's Class War (Random House Crown), about working-class America. A complete archive of his online work, along with the thoughts of many working Americans on the subject of class may be found on his Web site.

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