Tuesday, November 15, 2011

What Charles Pierce says

The whole thing is a fantastic and powerful piece of writing probably the best thing on the whole disgusting nightmare at Penn State

...a bit of it:
It happens because institutions lie. And today, our major institutions lie because of a culture in which loyalty to "the company," and protection of "the brand" — that noxious business-school shibboleth that turns employees into brainlocked elements of sales and marketing campaigns — trumps conventional morality, traditional ethics, civil liberties, and even adherence to the rule of law. It is better to protect "the brand" than it is to protect free speech, the right to privacy, or even to protect children.

If Mike McQueary had seen a child being raped in a boardroom or a storeroom, he wouldn't have been any more likely to have stopped it, or to have called the cops, than he was as a graduate assistant football coach at Penn State. With unemployment edging toward double digits, and only about 10 percent of the workforce unionized, every American who works for a major company knows the penalty for exercising his personal freedom, or his personal morality, at the expense of "the company." Independent thought is discouraged. Independent action is usually crushed. Nobody wants to damage the brand. Your supervisor might find out, and his primary loyalty is to the company. Which is why he got promoted to be your supervisor in the first place.
 It is not a failure of our institutions so much as it is a window into what they have become — soulless, profit-driven monsters, Darwinian predators with precious little humanity left in them. Penn State is only the most recent example. Too much of this country is too big to fail.

8 comments:

Ebon Krieg said...

Bam! There will surely be backlash from this atrocity but it will involve scapegoating and new "marketing" strategies. When we ponder the difficulties we have created for ourselves we are overwhelmed by the "bigness" of it all. What stands at the pinnacle of this "big" structure?

pansypoo said...

rocking the boat is frowned upon.

Montag said...

"What stands at the pinnacle of this "big" structure?"

Small men with big wallets.

DrDick said...

Boobo & Douchehat to the contrary, what has destroyed "traditional morality" in America is capitalism and it conservative servants.

sukabi said...

if Bobo and his ilk want to talk about the moral decay in this country, all they have to do is look at their neighbors... all 'good men' with enough money to be above the law...

when the laws of men don't apply to you, you're bound to start rotting...

StonyPillow said...

The real legacy of Reaganomics.

Anonymous said...

Bingo.
Corporate authoritarianism as responsible for all manner of evil, though it'll be a frosty friggin' day in hell before you see more than the tiniest fraction of these actions ever referred to as crimes.

Ruthless corporate assholes who buy advertising aren't a head-office-approved scapegoat for corporatist poodle press whores like David Brooks, so he'll continue to blame it all on dirty hippies.

Anonymous said...

If our media was not corrupt, we would have reached a tipping point long ago. I wonder if OnA finally realizes he's been played for a chump?

Nah.