WHAT IS CORPORATISM?
Let us answer this question by way of allegory.
First, imagine the following:
A world where water rules, not in its lack, but in its abundance. Endless seas.
It was the giants of old who first carved land from it. By the time they had shaped a realm for themselves, they had shrunk considerably; the only proof I can offer you are their old bones, on display wherever they are worshiped. I touched one, once, on a trip to the governing house. It was supposed to feel illicit, but almost everyone did, but in a way which would only reinforce our faith in the founders. It’s part of how they’ve ruled us since before history began to be recorded. Another part is their inclusivity, always growing their ranks to envelop potential rivals or opponents. So the ages are defined by who they choose to include: the time of builders, the time of merchants, the time of experts (which is now). The seat changes, but its occupant does not. Or maybe it’s the other way around.
What remains is the hydraulic bureaucracy. Canals, dams, reservoirs. My own career was steeped in it, and I still believe in the dream of universal free water, a dream the giants themselves propagate. However much they do, though, the funds for it always fall short, meaning the dream is ever deferred. Curious, no?
I can’t remember the first time I had a thought that opposed them, however implicitly. It might have been when we were asked to privatize the treatment plant, to make a distinction without a difference and have the public pay for it. Efficiency, they said, although their middlemen couldn’t help but insert a question mark. Every such change has felt like a regression, like a flywheel spinning down when the engine has run dry.
After that, it wasn’t long before I joined one of the salons discussing the issues of the day. Talk was cheap, and knowing the pulse of public opinion kept the state in balance, so the giants allowed us to grumble. It was as if they knew that the plethora of problems would keep us divided, never finding a way to prioritize. I’m sure there was a degree of infiltration and sabotage, but even without that, we were more than capable of being incapable. Our disagreements came down to whether we thought the bureaucracy was the problem, or just the class we had put in charge of it. There was a residual romance to the system which even I found hard to deny; my dreams of free water didn’t come from nowhere, and my office was still plastered with old posters calling for the same.
But I was walking the line between hope and delusion. I had to wake to the evil of apathy. Until then, I had only understood violence as a matter of passion, of subjugation and rebellion. It was easy enough to cast yourself as a slave, someone who would kill their master for daring to hold the whip. But how did one assault a system that draped itself in reasonableness? If only the outrageous were acceptable targets, the subtlest oppressors would ultimately triumph.
And then there was the biggest challenge to our imagination. Even if we justified the blood and the barricades, we had no sense of the day after. If we returned to work, would we just wait for orders that would come no longer? Nobody knew whether we’d be capable of ruling ourselves. We never had.
At the end of all my pondering, I found myself at the top of a dam I‘d once inspected. It was precarious beast, holding back the water as it did. If its attendants proved inattentive, if it was left to suffer its weight alone, the faults would form, the dam would break. All of us had made a pact with it, exchanging present stability for future responsibility. But the cracks were already there, and the effort to fix them was ever deferred.
By whom? The dam was planned by committee, designed by consultants, and built by hired labor. Those who suffered its shadow had been informed, but never asked. Neither had the river, nor the dam itself. Nor me, nor anyone. The giants, the Ever-Considerate, they had decided.
How dare they! The bones were all they had ever been, a class which grew but never encompassed, an answer which arose without anyone asking. And back in the day, when the colossi remade the world with every step, they had asked themselves and no one else. They were power in every form, whether personal or impersonal, a two-faced death.
Turning towards the reservoir, I saw the way out. I would ask the water and the concrete and the fish and the people. And before they could answer, I would answer them too. And only when all who had known this dam had been assembled, would we know what it meant. What to raise, what to keep, what to sunder.
I looked down and asked the water. The water asked me.
Now consider this:
It was in a dark corner of the universe that the Compass began. Like most cultures, it steadily grew aware of its own collectivity, becoming another manner of societal superorganism on which some galactic federation might be founded. What made the Compass more than that was that they extended their universality into the realm of particular consciousness. Too often, the dominant species of a given federation would cling to their individual ego or hive or nation and let this inward turn destroy the boons of universal cooperation. Hence the waxing and waning of cosmopolitics, with a secular tendency towards absolute entropy.
But again, the Compass was different. In their obscure nook of existence, they had been surrounded by deprivation and aggression, yet survived in spite of it. Theirs was a unique evolutionary trajectory, where instead of letting the anxiety of their existence get to them, they rallied against it. The Other was not someone to shy away from, but someone to confront, flexibly yet assertively. Like water, they seemingly yielded to all, but still carved their influence into them on account of their incessant flow. Their repudiation of fear was paramount to their culture, as they believed that with sufficient awareness, all change, however scary, could be made beneficent.
Form was key. The Compass was incredibly polymorphic, another necessity in the inhospitable climes of its native regions. They made for a natural symbiote or commensal, relieving more static beings from the need to form organs or tools by performing that duty in their stead. Though many species on their native world found sapience, this transformation was catalyzed by the mediating functions of the Compass, and it was this total relationship that boosted the Compass to an ecological and then civilizational ubiquity.
Was there something sinister here? Only if adaptation was to be read as opportunism. None of its original hosts were disturbed by it. But the lack of willfulness in the Compass did excite a certain paranoia in those unfamiliar with it, such the interstellar cultures who encountered it as the Compass became a spacefaring entity. Its utility eventually assuaged these issues, with its resulting reputation lying somewhere between Appendage and Friend. By this time, the Compass itself described the polymorphic creature type as much as those who made use of it, a linguistic drift that eventually grew to encompass—the verb derives from their name—any being that followed the philosophy of Enduring By Yielding.
There was no way to go but up. For sure, there were those who continued to resist, either by simple nonconsent or by forcibly burning the Compass out of its hosts. The latter was not appreciated, but little would be done except defend against it. To most, it was a matter of faith as well as science that the Compass provided a more meta-stable social structure than any based in egoistic existence. Even with the occasional setback, the tide of cosmic history would eventually do away with any naysayers.
So came the time that all sapient beings within the horizon of the universe’s expansion were captured by a single sense of Compassion. It was at this point that the true work of the Compass would begin: the forging of a single, unifying consensus, a thought from which there could be no dissent. Heaven in Harmony at last. Communicating at the speed of limitless reason, the great discourse commenced.
It has been ten billion years since that auspicious moment. A single decision has yet to be made.
Finally, there is this:
Some rivers, copious estates, a bureaucracy overseeing the whole. A pact between the masses and the imperial line, who would always be of common stock, making a dynasty drawn from lots. Peculiar, but largely peaceful, as all land belonged to the emperor and all weapons belonged to their spouse.
Inevitably, innovation. Market towns chained together, decimal accounts scrawled in resin books, the discovery that credit could be farmed as well as land itself. Its harvest proved recursive: land could not grow land, but money grew eternal. As the profits of commerce were not subject to the Emperor’s Tithe, the bonds of debt soon outstripped the formal ties of tenancy. Billions of peasants abandoned their plots and crammed into the cities, ancestral clan rights becoming little more than an opportunity for gang formation. Even the imperial palace was soon shrouded in the shadow of the trade houses, each feigning fealty with practiced irony while waving flags more grandiose than the imperial standard.
But as the traders would learn, the fields and slums could still give birth to the clever and the committed, and one such firebrand could make it to the throne if luck or the spirits graced them. So came the time of the Great Reformer, an emperor who had spent their youth toiling away in the City of Looms. At first, they appeared to be another stooge of the money farmers, doing away with all vestigial limits on the practice of usury. Interest soared as the indigent sank ever deeper into debt. Then, one night, a thread of infinite proportion was spun by the entire royal family, who through an incantation made of sorrow were joined in this effort by their innumerable ancestors. Once finished, the thread was carefully wound across the throat of every citizen, connecting each to whomever they were indebted to. In this way, the financial relationships of the entire empire were woven into its physical space, with any creditor of considerable size immediately caught up in its entanglements. The next morning, as all began to go about their daily affairs, the working poor would inadvertently strangle their masters to death, with the most usurious money farmers suffering the unearned mercy of a swift decapitation. By the end of the day, the lenders left alive would immediately annul any debts they still held, thereby completing the Great Jubilee.
In the years and decades which followed, the now literal social fabric of the empire was permanently altered. For a long time, no second jubilee proved necessary, as the bonds of economic dependence could only grow so great before their beneficiaries began to feel the strain. But the tapestry that was the empire contained a flaw at its very center, for the imperial family had excluded itself from the weaving. As the legacy of the Great Reformer waned, it was they who became the new creditor class, intermarrying with the old trade houses to carry the flags of commerce themselves.
Once more, the laws of imperial succession did their job, and the Lesser Reformer would bring about a new regime. This time, the Thread was complemented with the Knife, a cutting implement so sharp that it could sever the Thread itself, along with the throat of whoever had spun it. Since it remained the royal family’s duty to periodically re-spin the Thread, this was effectively a tool of royal suicide, a promise that the imperial line would keep itself honest. As per the tradition, the Knife would belong to the Emperor’s Spouse, who henceforth would also be selected by lot so as to avoid the inhibitions of sentiment. Tragically, but predictably, the position would become another locus of corruption, the royal lovers turned enemies as each possessed the means by which to sabotage the other. The blood of many would flow before the present balance between them was settled, a tense peace where the plunder of one party is to be outdone by the other.
And what of the rest of us? In the War of Knife and Thread, we find neither a dramatic end nor a secure existence, but instead the ten thousand abrasions of rope burn and paper cut, its origins industrial rather than magical. Alas, were even the poorest or cleverest among us to be allotted the immeasurable privilege of either throne, there could be no single trick by which to salve our suffering. It is something made and remade by us all; unless we pull together, it shall surely pull us apart. So let us pull.
The words have been read. What should be our answer? It is simple enough:
CORPORATISM IS PEACE AT THE COST OF JUSTICE.
The inner Moon 