Lean
Every day, I see one. A thinkpiece about how we don’t value each other like we should. Is it any wonder, though? Our entire economic system dehumanizes us. The language of corporate hypercapitalism, the true religion of our land, routinely reduces us to gobbledygook.
“Reducing overhead.” That means facilities, yes, but also staff. People with families, doctor bills, and pets.
“Trim the fat.” Again, people. Someone’s mother. With a root canal gone septic. A breadwinner for a child, who watches their parent in agony.
“Right-size personnel expenditures.” Throwing loyal, tenured employees to the wolves after years of service. Placing mortgages in jeopardy for people who thought their time and work investment in a company would get them a home to retire into. Futures now uncertain, the threat of homelessness real.
“Maximize stockholder yield.” Taking the cheapest health plan, thus leaving employees with medical bills that threaten their solvency, coming near to surpassing the benefit of having an income. Bankruptcies, foreclosures, lives thrown into turmoil so the rich can get richer. Suicide. Death.
“Lean processes to reduce redundancy.” Making it all but impossible for a human to be ill and take time off work, because workload has been concentrated onto a smaller staff. Exacerbating the condition, leading to larger health issues. No room for crisis whatsoever, their very livelihood and survival threatened if any little thing sidelines them for any significant length of time.
If corporate communications used the actual description of what was going on when these topics are discussed, people would revolt. But we have gotten so used to hearing ourselves described as mere data points that we don’t fully feel the impact of what is being said about us. About our worth, which in this culture is entirely contingent upon what economic return we offer our immortal masters.
Corporations can speak this way because they do not breathe air, and eat only profits. They get sick if their money flow is interrupted, and this calamity must be avoided at all costs, including the excision of offending organs, i.e. human beings. If a corporation could survive without any humans at all, it would. And may, soon enough.
The Supreme Court was right in some ways. In their modern form, corporations are discrete entities. The removal of the people running them does not cause them to cease existing. They merely absorb another group of people and keep going, much as we absorb bacteria, without really noticing. In this way, they are persons, if not people, so long as we keep the latter designation biological.
These persons only truly die when their profit flows are interrupted to a degree that gets noticed by other, stronger corporate persons, at which point they are absorbed into these healthier entities, their remaining components blended until they are no longer distinct. It is a death we as humans would not recognize, although we participate in these absorptions and often incur personal catastrophe by proximity.
We attend seminars that train us on how to further minimize our humanity in service to the corporate person. We learn how to be “lean,” to set up conditions that make life more perilous for ourselves and our co-workers. We vote for candidates who have been the most successful at dehumanizing their constituents. We sit quietly while the wolves shear us, proud of our obedience, somehow confident that because of our contribution, we will not be first on the dinner plate when the masters get hungry.
Many cultures have featured human sacrifice as a central tenet of their civilization. We in the Europeanized west have thought ourselves above such barbarism. We saved the Aztecs and their neighbors from their own depravity.
Yet we do practice human sacrifice. Every day. Our altar is the balance sheet, our priests the hedge fund managers, our god the Gross Domestic Product. America forsook Jesus long ago. Mammon rules here, and Mammon must have blood.
“Lean” is humans preparing their own flesh for their owners to consume. It is walking out onto the tightrope of chance and daring the wind to knock us down for the amusement of our superiors.
If profit is the goal of civilization, then civilization is not for humans anymore. It is for our fell constructs, who we have placed above us, for they embody our twisted ideals more purely than we ever could. Our flesh is too weak to be a proper profit machine. All hail the neohuman wonders. They bestride our globe like the titans we have built them to be.
When the last homo sapiens is replaced by automation, HR is sacked, and the personnel expenditure sheet reads zero, our planet will finally be “lean.” Mammon be praised.