I have never known of a devil, a Stan Laurel to God's Oliver Hardy. The ultimate scapegoat that we can say "look what you made me do" to when we do bad things.
There is no one (not even Hitler or Kim Jong Il) who has ever woken up in the morning saying to him or herself "I'm going to do something evil today". No such people exist. Everybody believes he or she is either a) doing a bang up job and is doing the greatest of good works; or b) does not give a rat's ass about doing good but is just trying to get by.
No, what causes evil is a lack of conscience. That inability to ask oneself "is what I'm doing wrong? Could someone be harmed by what I'm doing?" is what evil is, was and always will be.
I've personally known such people, and they do evil things all the time. Heck, most of our leaders, including a recent president, his vice president and maybe even out current leader (the jury is still out on him) are those kinds of people. Call them sociopaths, or narcisists, antisocial or what you will, but they are everywhere and I think the number of people who don't match the description is declining.
Evil is the lack of conscience, plain and simple.
Now, lets turn our attention to corporations. Corporations under our current set of laws have all the rights and priveleges of livine, breathing human beings and in some cases, even more rights and priveleges. However, corporations do not have any responsibilities (other than to their shareholders and even then the responsibility is to produce an ever increasing return).
No corporation I've ever come into contact with has a "conscience department"-- the concept is ludicrous. Consciences get in the way of making a profit. In fact, corporations are vehicles for obviating the consciences of their human members, allowing them to, in the name of profit and "what is good for the company" to make all sorts of monstrous and harmful decisions.
My undergraduate degree was in business, at the University of Colorado Leeds School, and I can summarize the nut of what I learned in my four years of attendance there with the sentence "a conscience is a bad thing" at least it's bad for business.
Corporations are evil. I'm not saying that as a joke. They are what is wrong with every facet of our society and are destroying capitalism itself.
Bear with me here. There's nothing wrong with getting ahead-- it's hard wired into us. Capitalism works because competition is in our very nature. But like eating, alcohol, TV, etc. too much of anything is a bad thing. By allowing unbridled pursuit of profit, we are ruining a good thing. How much is too much?
This does not make me a communist, just someone who believes in moderation.
You see, Marx (Karl, not Groucho, Harpo, Chico, Gummo or Zeppo) was a slobbering idiot. He was as bad as any right wing pundit babbling today, because he had a theory and he fit the facts around the theory until it held enough water to convince about a quarter of the Earth's population to give it a try for about 75 years.
He denied the existance of God (irrelevant to his ramblings) and believed that we were products of evolution (it is fact, people), but he then he went all contrary to his science and jumped to the conclutsion that people were naturally cooperative. His theory was that if you took a newborn child and removed all the cultural influences that "made" him greedy and covetous and just let him run wild on an island by himself he would be a communist by nature if you checked in on him after 20 years.
What a moron.
That child would be a feral, self-serving, scrabbling creature that looked out only for number one, much like Rupert Murdock or Ann Coulter.
It is evolution that has made us competitive. And competition is what put you and me on this planet (and is right now pushing a lot of other species off this rock). If we evolved, we compete.
So, there should be some who succeed and some who do not, but to what degree?
There's the rub-- there's something else that made it's appearance in our genetic wood-pile along the way. It's our governor, our compass, it keeps us from doing nothing but serving ourselves-- it is our conscience. And contrary to my BS in Business, it is not a bad thing. It keeps us from crapping in our own (or neighbors') well water, from murdering fans of visiting teams during football season (most of the time), from making profits off of sick people. Well, maybe not that last one.
Remember that "golden rule" thing? It's not just for breakfast anymore.
Don't even get me started on a slobbering set of idiots from the other extreme of the spectrum (Ayn Rand, Leo Straus and the Chicago short-bus crowd, are you listening Bill Kristol?), who believe that altruism (conscience) is a bad thing.
What makes us what we are is that we competitively evolved the ability to cooperate, to be altruistic, to think with conscience.
So, I promise to do rants on the following:
- Ayn Rand and that barely able to feed itself crowd who believe her rantings.
- The right wing
- God and evolution
- The Bible (I don't believe there is a Devil, but if there is, that book and its cousins are his finest work).
- Faith
- Gun rights
- Obama and his personality cult (hey, I voted for him but he's done nothing).
- other stuff
