VI
At the end of Part One section V we started talking about the connection between Social Management, Social Institutions, Social Interaction, Explanation, Cultural Impoverishment, etc.
Now we need to relate them to the three social institutions that we’ll focus on in this entry. That way we can show the relation of all of them to our subject of High Culture and offer some answers to the questions put in our problem-solving formula:
Situation - People - Problem - Tools.
So, let’s start with the most conspicuous of our economic institutions, The Corporation. Of all of the major social institutions involved in social management the Corporation is, historically, the most recent and certainly, like it or not, the most impressive. There’s no question that it’s one of the most astounding social inventions in human history. Certainly, when it first appeared on the scene and for a long time after, its possibilities in terms of positive social change seemed limitless.
Unfortunately, however, its dependence on profit as a measure of success concealed from it what it was doing - transcending the nation-state in the exhausting task and unrewarding responsibility of social management. Meanwhile, it’s potential for positive social change was concealed by those outside the Corporation by the many social sins it was committing.
We hardly need to detail those social sins since everyone knows them. Business has done terrible things to both people and the environment. But, it has to be said, again like it or not, that it has also produced real wealth and genuine human satisfaction on a scale no previous social institution ever achieved, even remotely.
Note: Of course, what’s happened now is that both the Corporation and those who made a name for themselves complaining non-stop about the evils of the Corporation have joined ranks and are now destroying society in the name of social justice! This is now known as Woke Capital.
It also has to be said that, even though the Corporation never lived up to its potential during the 19th and 20th centuries, it still did far less damage than the Government and the University. In fact, those two joined forces to subdue the Corporation so that all three could do what they’re doing now, destroying society and in the process rending humans a biologically maladaptive species.
VII
The University was never as good as the Corporation at generating change. Why? Certainly one reason is the fact that for a long time in the West, especially in the USA, the brains of the country went where there was the greatest challenge and the greatest reward - the challenge being by far the more important of the two.* And in the United States the area of the greatest challenge and reward was the Corporation. But, the Corporation has a kind of symbiotic relation to the University, a relation that needs further exploration if we are to understand the potential both had for social change and how they squandered that potential to instead focus on social damage through social justice, and how, by responding to all of this, we might be in a better position to assess the situation and offer a workable solution.
*Now that situation has reversed so that everyone wants the greatest reward with no challenge at all. They still want the prestige that goes with both institutions. In the military (another institution they have destroyed) this was known as Stolen Valor. It’s certainly an example of Cultural Appropriation. But shamelessness, an allergy to self-awareness, and an obnoxious demand to be placed above criticism and blindly obeyed makes it impossible for them to even identify their in your face hypocrisy, let alone see the damage it's doing and how it will effect even them, and sooner than later.
The weakness of both Government and The University, past and present, is that they have a great many functions and a great many social tasks to perform. The result is that an enormous amount of the energy available to them is wasted in instrainstitional struggles over how that energy should be used.
Their strength was that they were extraordinary machines for gathering and processing information.* What kept the Corporation from similar effectiveness in this area was its very efficiency. Meaning, the strength of the Corporation, past and present, arose from its single-mindedness of purpose, but its weakness also lies in that fact. Because the information it gathers was and remains preselected by its unitary function. But life doesn't depend on the Corporations's preselected unitary function.
*Though they are still capable of gathering and processing information they’re less competent at it today, much less so, in this age of cultural impoverishment and explanatory collapse, both the result of the elite having abandoned High Culture, the source of their survival, success and growth.
Consequently, it was a little more than prone to neglect (or simply fail to gather) information that didn’t fit its current conception of its primary purpose and measurement of success.
It still is.
The Corporation then and now, though for different reasons, is like an individual of such fixed orientation toward experience that they cannot adapt their orientation to changing situations, which necessarily requires a restructuring of their interests. Nor is this analogy inapt, since the Corporation is after all not an entity, but a persistent pattern of human relations, like any social institution.
As well as anything this highlights the value and purpose of our Irreducibles as a tool for understanding culture and behavior.
In any event, the Corporation is not an individual. Rather, it's more like a mythical god that categorizes the attributes of its members, and facilitates the process of social management by which individual attributes are shaped, imposed, and discarded according to the judgments of individuals already shaped by the Corporation itself. The Corporation is not an entity. The word Corporation is rhetoric, and rhetoric consists of those verbal and nonverbal signs by which social management is carried out.
VIII
Before continuing, it’s important to point out that the word Rhetoric is subsumed by one of our Irreducibles - Explanation.
Now, though Rhetoric is an instrument of social management, it's an extremely important one that everyone should know about.
But Explanation itself is the instrument of social management.
Note: In fact, that there isn't a course devoted to understanding Explanation, what it is, how it functions, what it's conditions are, is arguably the single greatest intellectual and academic scandal of modern history, since virtually everything that we do depends on it. Hence the importance of PRC, not to mention the originality, greatness and world-historic significance of its founder.
Still, it’s useful and important to make a distinction. Rhetoric has more to do with vocabulary and nonverbal signs, such as statues (the importance of which as a value-sign worthy of political attack the Left is busy making obvious these days).
Whereas Explanation has to do with the overall explanatory behavior of the social institution, in this case, the Corporation.
Government, of course, is a similar rhetorical term. When we say that the United States has decided to do something, like, for example, scapegoat its citizens in the name of democracy by designating them as domestic terrorists for exercising their rights provided them by that same democracy, what has really happened is that a few individuals (or only one) in a position of power have made a decision and have the power to effectuate it. Meaning, the term Government is one of the instruments of power, or control.. As a word it functions as an instrument of social management.
In the same way, when it’s said that Google has decided to do something, like censor individuals and groups for wrongthink, it’s a mistake to imagine Google has done anything, for the simple reason that Google doesn’t exist. To be sure, it exists as a legal entity, but legal entities themselves are part of the rhetoric by which society is manipulated. The main point here is that, as entities that act and cause, both the Government and Corporation are fictions. But, as persistent patterns of interaction the members of which share a common socially managing rhetoric, they are very real indeed, not fictional at all. Rhetoric, as we are using the term here, is an instrument of social management, and the social role that carries with it command, decisional control, and manipulative control over rhetoric is the position of social power.
That’s why the Corporation, Government and University have Public Relations departments and have always had them.
In fact, and to give an interesting example from Cultural History, for long periods of time in Europe the principal role of the Church was that of PR officer for the Government. In the Middle Ages there was a struggle over the problem of whether rhetoric and therefore, Explanation, was the source of social power or its instrument. The subduing of the Church settled the matter.
Rhetoric and Explanation are instruments not the source of social power. Of course, the elite is doing the same thing today with science that it did with religion and for the same reason, it threatens its social power by offering an alternative explanation.
But there's a difference between religion and science, and it's a big one. The Corporation is, strictly speaking, the economic arm of science. That's another way of saying that the Corporation is impossible without it. Not only that, but, since life itself is impossible without Expalantion and science is the most complete and effective mode of explanatory behavior ever devised, a completeness indicated by the immense control over ourselves and the world that modern science has developed owing to its extraordinary ability to produce alternatives and innovations, in short, since science is the most effective means of adaptation yet devised by human beings, the attempt to use an outmoded form of explanatory behavior (ideology, ie; secular theology) to subdue science by severely limiting its applicaiton, is rendering all of our behavior biologically maladaptive and marking us for extinction.
In a sense, this is the thesis of this entry, and not just this entry.
In short, the Corporation is in the process of undermining itself and, because it's the most powerful social institution in world history, and therefore the most influential, all of the other institutions are following its lead, so to speak. And now we're back to the subject of this entry. Because the very source of that undermining is the Corporation's abandonment of High Culture.
IX
The Corporation, which pays more attention to Explanation than does Government*, and is far better at it, has become a kind of synthesis of Government and Church. Throughout the 20th century there were many indications that the Corporation was transcending the nation-state. Just as the State subdued the Church, so the Corporation has subdued the nation-state, basically turning it into an ancillary or instrumental institution.
*Again, this is not as true today as it once was, owing to the Age of Cultural Impoerishment and Explanatory Collapse we're living in. Obviously, both Cultural Impoverishment and Explanatory Collapse are the result of High Culture having been irresponsibly abandoned by the hostile elite.
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