Individual freedoms can be thought of as existing primarily and most importantly in the present. Yesterday is set in stone and cannot be changed, as far as we know. An individual’s freedom tomorrow is a bit more free than yesterday but requires a balancing act. Actions and choices contingent upon tomorrow are too uncertain to be regarded as free. But at the same time, if we knew precisely what would occur tomorrow then we would be made less free because our decisions would inevitably have to conform to those future outcomes. Freedom in its purest form is immediate and must be acted on in the present. However, the duties one must take on for another’s sake binds what they are able to do and able to choose in the present. For example, someone who has children has fewer individual freedoms than someone who does not because they have a duty to care for that child. Duties bind organizations together. It is the certainty, or at least the good faith, that you might have in others in the organization that keeps the organization intact. But these duties are limiting factors on future actions. A member of someone I am organized with should be predictable because they have a duty to the organization to serve in such and such a capacity. And this is true for corporations, governments, and groupings in general. Even something as innocuous as a friend group will develop norms that bind the individual in the form of peer pressure. The organizational ties that bind individuals in large organizations especially, whether legal or otherwise, compel actions and decisions that are bound by the needs of the organization. An individual entity that acts to preserve itself is not constrained into action because its needs and actions are conjoined. But actions taken for the benefit of another may be considered burdensome because they were not taken out of the natural drives of the individual conferring the benefit. Thus, duties and obligations imposed by an organization will necessarily bind individuals.

Particularly in the case of corporate organizations, the systems of relationships that form an organization takes on a life of its own when competing against other organizations. The needs and interests of the organization are more pronounced when it must sustain itself through destroying or merging into another organization. For corporations competing with each other individuals must view other organizations competing for market share as obstacles and overcome them. This doesn’t call on the individual to examine their relationship with the competing organization or their relationships with individuals of the organization. Often times individuals in a business will have noncompete and nondisclosure agreements among other agreements designed to incentivize and compel them away from becoming competitors. Organizations will also exercise pressure on individuals who potentially could be competitors through systems designed to coerce individuals into an employment relationship by creating a prohibitively expensive barrier to entry. For example, the cost of acquiring a legal education may be so prohibitively high that an individual has little choice other than to yield to the financial stability offered by a large established organization. By creating a barrier, or even just the illusion of a barrier, to private practice Law firms ensure that potential competitors may only succeed by paying some fealty and service to them first Another prime example of how organizational competition causes the individual to yield further to an organization is war. When countries are at war it recharacterizes individual relationships between the citizens of those countries. It may engender nationalistic feelings and greater perceived obligations to organizations that did not exist prior. It will also create an antagonistic relationship between individuals of the two warring states where one did not exist prior. It is not necessarily left up to the individual who is friend or foe. During times of war the state gains extraordinary power to impose itself on individuals and noncompliance can result in imprisonment.

Trying to maintain a sense of individual autonomy and freedom in a world where organizational power reigns more and more supreme will therefore be a challenge for future generations. Resisting the forces that call on the individual to conform will only grow more difficult as entrenched organizational powers continue to seek more influence and control to maintain themselves. Self-destructive radical acts of resistance may become more normal as the ones who do not conform and wish to keep their individual freedoms are only those on the fringes of consciousness who have not made the calculation that their own freedom is worth more than what conformity can offer.

Paragraphing and outlining would be beneficial. Readers are entitled to structure, not 924 words in one paragraph.

What does the literary metaphor actually accomplish for the reader? Improvement here mens offering something that goes further than an assertion of one extended metaphor. "Complexity" as a generator of unique organizational outcomes (whether the "corporation," the "state," "inequality" or "hierarchy" is not historically justifiable against the long background, as David Graeber and David Wengrow show in The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity.

I think improvement lies in the direction of a careful rewrite. The central idea, shorn of metaphor, can be clearly stated. Structured discussion of how you came by the idea, related to others' ideas or writings, can lead to a conclusion that the reader can both follow and also expand in one or more suggested new directions for herself.

Lovecraftian Corporations

-- By AndersonDalmeus - 01 Mar 2024

Corporations have become nearly ubiquitous in the every day life of Americans. They are understood by their branding their products and services and the people who work there. The corporate entity can be understood as a kind of legal fiction ordained by the bureaucracy of the state. However we might also consider taking the phrase “corporate entity” in a very literal sense. That is when we say that google is a corporate entity we do not merely mean to say that it is a short hand for understanding the culmination of disparate processes and projects that form google but rather that google does in fact take on a life of its own by the process of incorporation. This may seem like a tortured conclusion and even now as I write it I can feel myself stretching the phrase “take on a life of its own” but it isn’t an unprecedented interpretation either. This thinking should really just be considered an extension of the reasoning that led the Supreme Court to their decisions in Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad and Citizens United v the FEC. Corporations law is designed for the purpose of manifesting the capital C “Corporation” as a distinct legal thing from its property and its labor and these cases tell us that corporations also have 1st amendment rights to free speech and 14th amendment rights to protections from the state. However I will have to break with the Supreme Court in one small detail of their characterization of corporate entities. Rather than viewing them as persons or having personhood they should be viewed the same way one views the abominations of a Lovecraftian horror. They are creatures that exist abstractly and even to begin to perceive them in their true forms fundamentally alters the mind away from the natural reasoning of a human. Their machinations are unknowable in their entirety and their goals are not always anthropomorphic. One might consider that the shareholders or the board of a corporation are ultimately responsible for its decisions but that is like saying the neurons in a person’s brain are responsible for their decisions. It is doubtless true but reveals little about the actual person. The same way the cells of the body come together to form a whole person without ever arguably being able to engage with or understand that they do form that person the workers and owners of a corporation form an 3entity that they will never be able to engage with directly. It is why the law imposes fiduciary duties on board members. Because the corporation cannot speak to any individual piece that makes it any more than I can directly talk to my own cells and these duties prevent the entities constituents from becoming cancerous to it. While it may yet still seem farfetched to claim that a corporation literally does exist as a result of the law, is that more farfetched than selling your time to that corporation? If the corporation is not literally real then where does a someone’s time go when they spend all of those hours working for it? Obviously not to that person because then they’d be working for themselves. That person feeds their time, their energy, their hopes, their dreams and nearly everything they hold dear to that corporation but the corporation doesn’t actually exist. What is to be said of a world where a person can give all that they are into nothing? Certainly we would call this madness. But even then we are simply led back to the Lovecraftian description of the corporation and its impact on those who engage with it. One pours their blood sweat and tears into the void and while it would be an emotionally satisfying to say that the void isn’t there the apparent absence of all the effort poured in is evidence that something is there. If that void were not there to speak of then all that was poured into it would also be there. Likewise it is evident that corporations do exist because something seems to be draining humanity of all its energy and productivity. Something is eating the planets resources at a rate that no mere organism could. One might say humans could do that but as stated before humans are the to corporations as cells are to the human. Individual cells could not do what the entire human could and you could have as many cells in the human body as you would like but they all only move when the greater human acts intentionally. This means that corporations the wretched conglomeration of human activity and productivity are inevitable. The horrific conclusion of a Lovecraftian story is that the eldritch creatures pulling the strings of society are unavoidable and cannot be defeated by humanity. In the Lovecraftian lens this is because they are like natural disasters. Devastating though they may be they are merely a part of life that are simply beyond the control of mankind. But I will take it a step further still. The corporate entity is not merely a force of nature mankind must contend with but rather it is the human nature of any group that grows to be a size large enough to have that complexity. The corporate creature awakens at some point after enough human mass and activity comes about and it begins to consume all that there is to consume. The only choice on the individual level for humans is whether to be part of the entity or to go off the grid.