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I started watching it, but then stopped when she started going through the "corporations are evil" bit. She deliberately chose to paint government as good and
by araneae 17y ago
I started watching it, but then stopped when she started going through the "corporations are evil" bit.
She deliberately chose to paint government as good and corporations as bad even though they are both only composed of people, who are just looking out for their self-interest, trying to get money from other people, who are also just looking out for their self interest.
It's a intellectual shortcut to paint corporations OR government as evil, and not accurate or meaningful at all.
- sleepingbot 17y agoThank you for sharing your experience/opinion.
- sleepingbot 17y agoOr maybe I should say the ideas of Adam Smith and others on the pursuit of the self interest leading to happiness and wealth are an appealing and interesting notion, but difficult to work "out of the box"?
- sleepingbot 17y agoConfirmed. It's personal. Anyway.
- NathanKP 17y agoActually in my experience she painted government as evil as well. She clearly points out how governments give corporations the power to do what they do. In addition, I see no reason why painting government or corporations as evil is a bad thing because when it comes down to it, what they are doing to third world countries is evil. We execute murderers for killing people. Yet corporations are killing people overseas by poisoning and maiming them in dangerous factories. I see no reason why calling a corporation evil is not accurate or not meaningful.
- gcheong 17y agoIf we restrict the freedom of other countries to trade freely with us or each other we would be killing a lot more people.
- NathanKP 17y agoThat is a good point. However, trade doesn't have to mean abuse of third world countries.
- gcheong 17y agoYou're right and my argument is that most of the time it does not - certainly not to the extent of what this video would have you believe anyway. I'll even provide as much evidence for my argument as the video does for her argument by saying "I've researched it and it's true" ;^).
- NathanKP 17y agoOkay, fair enough.
- roqetman 17y agoI think the point the OP was making was that both corporations and governments are made up of people. I agree with this; a corporation and a government is not a physical entity, and can therefore not be evil. However, people can act evil in the name of that entity. Personally, I think that as soon as we try to brand a group of people, we lose the argument.
- NathanKP 17y agoI personally think more as Steinbeck in "The Grapes of Wrath". The people in the organization are not evil, it is the organization itself which forces them to play certain roles to serve the group and the machine they have built. Steinbeck portrayed the bank as a great machine in which each person working for it played a small role that they didn't necessarily like to play. Agents were forced to evict people from their land because they were not able to pay their mortgage, yet that was not something that they really wanted to do. It was something they had to do because of the corporation they were a part of. No individual person in the corporation is evil (generally). However the corporation is bigger than each individual member. So calling a corporation evil does not mean branding each individual person. Rather it means that you recognize that the corporation as a greater force causes evil things. In that respect I don't see it as unrealistic to say then that the corporation can be evil.