Corporate America

I knew what was coming, I knew this day would be terrible. And it was too much. I prepared myself, I told myself don’t say anything, just survive it and think about it later. I was full of promises, to not let on anything of any sort of plan I might have at the back of my mind. But her tone was too definitive, I had reached the point where they were telling me that it was over, they had no confidence in my aptitudes.
I told her, that perhaps the two others were miracle workers, the Spanish Boy and the Sweet Chinese Girl, they have done all that before, the admin side of it, I never. I only learnt yesterday everything I have to do by next Tuesday, if that is not too unreasonable of them, what is?
My life has gone to hell, once again. I feel so depressed. It will difficult again tonight to survive this. Decompression goes too well with Depression. If last week I was a hurricane, this week I am a volcano. One capable of destroying the whole atmosphere of the Earth. Good thing I only have beers, plenty of them, it is harder to reach suicidal point with beers than it is with wine or port. But tonight I’ll definitely reach that point again, and it frightens me. I have never been flirting so closely with death before, even if it has always been at the back of my mind, and that I certainly wrote a lot about it in recent years. I have finally reached breaking point.
I’m back now, I survived my afternoon without any more shit. After my explosion, it was to be expected. However, if I have to create such a counter attack every week, just to survive that job, it is definitely not worth it. Because today I have played my last card.
I did not even threatened with: I will leave this company if you don’t leave me alone! I did not play mind games like they do: we will sack you if you don’t work the whole weekend on your projects, and then shrink away when I told them fuck you. I told her flat directly, all right, I’ll leave at the end of next month, I can leave earlier if it is your wish.
Let’s see what’s happening exactly here, in Corporate America. Whatever your salary, you buy yourself a house, a car, you make children and then your fucked. You need a job. Now, because as humans we’re unable to plan ahead and save money, and since borrowing is so easy, we quickly sink into a hole where every month we spend exactly what we earn.
So what’s the intelligent to do here for an employer? To offer a salary just a little bit higher than others would, just enough so you don’t have enough money to save, but could no longer go back to a less stressful job which would pay less. So when you know your employees cannot leave their job, you turn around, you frighten them a bit, you threatened them with the sack, and then, they work three times harder than they should. So paying a bit in salary is certainly a great save in money, you have employees working all the overtime that god sends, and work certainly at the very least twice harder than if you employed someone cheaply to do a job so damn hard, that they would be gone within the month, and probably dosing around all day, because they could get the same salary anywhere else, where they would not be expected to do anything all day.
Though this produce great results, and yes, this company is making a fortune, it is filled with the unhappiest people ever. Stressed to death, always on the verge of depression, always sick, and yet, probably still working at home while sick. Hen people are sick at work, it is rarely physical, they are mentally sick from these management games. And then, they actually are so weak, that they catch just any microbe passing by. After a huge conference, and it has been the case in my last ten years, without exception afterwards everyone is seriously ill.
And I’m afraid to say, I cannot see any solution to that problem. Humans have a tendency to be lazy, they wouldn’t do anything all day if they were not pushed to the limits, if they were not threatened. Try to build a pyramid when your emplyees are slaves, and have to pull these big rocks all day. You would not to wipe them to get the job done. How could your slave ever be motivated to pull more and more rocks all day to finish a pyramid which will take 20 years to build?
In government jobs, people don’t do anything all day. Because there’s no greed there to motivate anyone in pushing anyone to work harder. They have so much time to waste, they have time more problems where there are none. It is also their way to let you know: I don’t want more work, so just get lost, I can’t help you, and they get away with it. Try to contact the government to find out about something, there’s just no way, if you even succeed in reaching anyone. And yet, without their help we’re all doomed, because the government is expecting a lot from us. Just the damn tax return is a real nightmare. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. I’m glad I paid a fortune at H&R Block, or else, I would never have been able to do that tax return. And I can be quite certain the American government would not have held my hand to tell me exactly where it is that I stand, being an immigrant with a visa and all.
Greed in capitalist corporations, is a different story. And when you reach retirement, after a long life of suffering, after wrecking your entire existence, and that you are forced to assess the why you have done it, it comes to one simple conclusion. The greed of others in getting richer, while you yourself never got any richer, in fact, in just about every other domains of your life, you have grown so poor, you don’t even look like a human being anymore. If there ever was such anyway to begin with, after your 20 years wasted studying in universities.
The academic world is even worse. Because there the motivation is not even greed, or making someone rich. It is all pointless. You work so damn hard, you suffer the bullshit of all these departments, those patronizing teachers who are asking more and more without any good purpose, and all of it just for a stupid diploma in the end which will open you the door to one of those corporate job, which will finish you off. There you have only one purpose, proving you are better than the others, and you work very hard for that meaningless concept. It is so ridiculous, it makes me want to cry.
And while we have all our children stuck in schools, colleges and universities for, in many cases, more than half of their lives, we have the other third of the population already retired and living off some pensions or another. So there is maybe only a third of the population supporting the other two thirds, and what is it that they are actually doing? My God! It is sometimes so mysterious, that in the end you have to give up trying to explain to anyone what it is that you are doing for a living. Making money is one, for a start. In actuality, almost no one is doing anything to produce what humans require to fulfill their most basic needs. Almost none of us work at producing food, clothes, houses, etc.
So, who is it in the end who actually work at supporting the rest of the planet, producing the basic stuff that finally is all that is really required for us to survive? 5% of the population is working on it? Or o we have already all these plants filled with machines producing all these, and finally, less than one percent of the population is necessary at this point in time to produce all we will ever need? In which case, we would not need to do anything anymore, government with the minimum of taxes could build these plants producing what we need for our most basic needs.
And this has been foreseen, 20 years ago analysts were claiming that now we should be able to evolve into a society of leisure, where we would only work 20 to 30 hours a week, with plenty of time to finally take a break and enjoy the entertainment, like even walking in a park without being completely out of our mind and freaked out because we have some meaningless deadlines to meet.
So somehow humanity missed the boat. Instead of getting into that life of leisure, some of us are so greedy, we found a way to turn everyone into slaves, to get them to make us way richer, while at the same time, making sure we did not even have to help the rest of the planet still unable to even feed themselves.
I’ve been trying for 20 years to get out of the boat, to somehow reach a life isolated from these corporations, my condition of slave. I tried not to study for 25 years even when I was completely convinced this was the biggest ever waste of time. I was pushed into all this, I had no choice. Acting any other way would have made me a bad son, a bad student, a bad employee. And we all know what that means. People commit suicide over this.
It was all very intelligently orchestrated, with the benediction of every government. We are all so convinced that this is the only way to go, all your teachers, parents and friends will remind every second if you deviate slightly for even one centimeter.
I’ve always refused to play that game, I’ve always been way to aware of all the tricks and mind games. I flew as much as I could. I stopped studying science overnight, to the astonishment of everyone around me. I drop from law school as easy as that, and then, I was considered a pariah of society. And then I abandoned my master degree in La Sorbonne in Paris. At that point, I might as well have been dead. And yet, all of this enough, I had to finally do that damn Master Degree in London, and I did it, God knows how.
I left so many jobs in my lifetime, in so many countries, because I have never been willing to play their game. And every time, somehow, causing such an astonishment on everyone’s face, that I can barely believe it myself. What? You are driving me to suicide with your little management tricks, and you think I will come back for more? I’m sorry, last time I check, I don’t have a mortgage, I don’t have a car, I don’t have children, I have nothing that needs to be preserved. So if I reach the point of wanting to die because of you, or a will to kill you, well of course I’m going to tell you to fuck off, you bastard. You can keep your job and shove it up your arse. You might have everyone else in line waiting to be shot by you, quite happy in fact for you to do so, pretending that all is fine in the best world there is, but I am free than most, despite the fact that I am far from the freedom that I have always been idealizing.
Because that is another one of my problems, I was to born to be free, to appreciate poetry and seek some sort of idyllic life of meditation and contemplation, with a desire to spend my time thinking about this universe, finding a reason for it to exist, while I was being condemned to be a slave, and what a slave I have been. And it’s got to stop, one way or another. Either I tell you to fuck off and get lost, or, if impossible, I kill myself, as simple as that.
And so I have become an anarchist. Someone dreaming that if somehow this whole world with its systems, its hierarchies, its inefficient governments, where to suddenly fall, and free us from this nightmare, then maybe something better could expected. Perhaps not something perfect, but something at least bearable, that we could live with without either the will to kill or ending our lives.
I am not talking about solutions here. I know socialism or communism is not the answer. I know the answer is in none of those books that have been written on the subject. I am even asking you to be aware of the problem, I think we are all way too much aware of what the problems are. We all feel powerless to change it, to change anything, it appears that we’re all condemned to suffer in that great and deceptive system which is the very foundation of our societies.
So let’s just blow up the world, and free us all. That’s my solution, since I cannot see any great big life changing event happening any time soon to stop this madness. And that is why I’ve been there hoping for something huge to happen, like a nuclear attack, more hurricanes, some earthquakes, or even aliens landing on Earth. Anything that could convince all these drones at work and in the rest of this society, that whatever they hold so dear, is not that important, that there is something all of it, a life, an existence, a wish to live!
But we are drones, so well programmed, that war does not do it. The twin towers of the World Trade Center have been destroyed and it did not change anything. Genocides have happened where 500,000 to a million people were just wiped out from the surface of the earth, and yet, none of us even blinked. A third of the world cannot eat, they’re all dying from AIDS, and yet, this reality only exist somewhere at the back of our drones’ mind, we barely acknowledge that it exists. Nothing will do it. Nothing will be able to distract us enough to understand that this society needs to change, that we are now beyond any hope. We’re too busy trying to prove that we are better than the next one, proving that we do not deserve to be sacked. We are lost for good, completely alienated.
The whole world would disappear tomorrow morning except for America, that still it would not change anything here. We would still go to work, suffer management, stressing about finishing that to-do-list, writing that paper, getting that contract signed. We have more important problems to deal with, our own private little survival, in the jungle of the corporate world. That’s how low we all sank as a so-called civilization.
Not much has changed since the medieval times. Where knights with swords could chop your head off at any time, and walking around alone at night in the woods, would certainly invite you to an attack, being robbed and perhaps killed. I used to think that I could not live in a London where there were over 1000 murders a night, a time where street lights did not exist. And now I realize that we’re no better. More people die everyday worldwide than in those days, and the ones not dying are suffering such a dire fate, that risking being killed by a knight or a robber does not seem at all a worst fate. Corporate America is as bad as the worst history of all humanity.
Which gives me hope that we may one day really reach a world of perfection, where happiness and joy would exist. I can’t see it happening anytime soon, I don’t know how we could reach it, but there is hope that humanity one day will emancipate itself and achieve true greatness. There’s nothing to be proud of now, as a species, but maybe it will come to that.
Maybe one day, if I ever succeed in communicating with an alien world, to tell them about the world I live in, I won’t have to tell them: help me escape this nightmare! Destroy us all for own sake! No one can aspire to happiness here, it is the most miserable there is in the whole of the known universe, help us! Take over, free us from our slavery condition with the illusion that we are actually free, when we’re not! I would be ashamed to tell them our history, and where we are now. That’s why I can come to a point where I believe that perhaps we should all be exterminated, to the last one of us. I guess I was too philosophical for this world. I guess I am the worst of these idealistic people who dream of a better world for us all. Once I understood that there was no hope of salvation, I took the other extreme at heart, let’s abandon the concept, let’s kill the experiment. We have failed, we cannot succeed. We are all rats lost in the biggest maze there is, this universe, and we can only bang our heads into the walls, for eternity. No religion will save us, no god will save, in fact, religion and gods are the very reason we have been exterminating each others for millennia. We have learned enough, studying ourselves, there’s no hope, just kill the experiment.
Wow! I’m quite pleased with all that I just wrote. Desperation finally brought something interesting out of my guts. What I am more pleased about, is that writing it all down here tonight, help me understand the real situation. Somehow it is like the rat suddenly understanding that he was being tested, somehow discovering a big map of the place, seeing his situation in the universe, and suddenly, perhaps, even finding a way out. Awareness, unfortunately, does not mean that I found the way out. If it even exists, apart from death, game over. Is it only through death that I will find that peace I am so desperate for? I hope not.
And the worst of it, is that I contributed to this hell hole of Corporate America. I was hired as a Management Consultant, I wrote many long reports describing in detail the worst nightmare I have gone through in the last ten years, basically telling them: this is how we can all achieve martyrdom. I should not too surprised now that being an element of the hell I was telling them to build, that I should find myself the victim of that misery. In this case, I deserve it. In real life I would have been an external consultant, never to suffer that fate, and yet, in a way, it is almost. I came here, I destroyed it all for all these poor employees, and I’m going back to London. Leaving them to die in this inferno for years to come. And all I did was to tell them of the hell of the bigger corporations I experienced while in London, which were obviously definitely inspired from the greatest American Corporations in the first place.
Do I feel guilty? No. I tried at every turn to make them understand that a lot of it was just soul destroying, and yet, they went ahead, they implemented the worst of it. Listening also to other external consultants for the parts where I tried to make this work environment something bearable. So this must be a law of nature, the big law of the American Corporate World. They will decide at every turn to go for the kill, get as much as they can in the shortest of time, never mind the consequences. So I feel like someone who tried to help, and yet failed by design. There was no way I could have changed anything. That much is obvious to me now.
And if I start my own business, this is what I will need to become. A heartless bastard, constantly reminding my employees to be more productive, to make more money. And I know I just don’t have the heart for that. I would be trying to both be the richest man alive, whilst trying to convince the planet that all my employees are the happiest slaves alive. I would try to win an award for one of the best company to work for. And that would mean sacrificing profits. So how could I really achieve that? Perhaps switching to that kind of company, you first need to have become the leader in the first place. When profits come in one way or another, even if your employees are doing fuck all all day. Perhaps not the spirit in which a company is born. But it will have to come to life in that kind of spirit, my employees will need to be the happiest employees alive. And if I manage to make money, and a lot of it, so why not? I should splash on them everything I have, make this life a little better for the whole of humanity. Who cares about profit anyway in the end? What do you do with your millions when you have so many? Accumulate more and more until your bank account bursts? What is the point of that, once you already have more houses and islands than you need? And more corporations and subsidiaries than necessary? Then, let’s make this world a happier place to live. Let’s not make this life the worst ever experience any human being can go through, something equivalent to being interned in Auschwitz, where at least there was some hope, you knew you would be dead any day, and that you would finally be free from it all. In the corporate world, there is no such light at the end of the tunnel. And you suffer as much. And if you want to open a debate about this, so be it, I will defend this point of view any day, anytime, anywhere. We’re all in Auschwitz, as far as I’m concerned, and the end of the war is nowhere in sight, it might never end. The Americans are not the ones who will save the day this time, they’re the ones who created the camps in the first place. And it is spreading to the rest of the world like a disease. Granted, nowhere else it is that pure, no one, not even in Europe, have been willing to go for the extreme of being 100% capitalist, like a pure Ferengi, and yet, we suffer all the same. It is time that someone puts a stop to it. Greed is not eternal.
And at the moment, there is only one person on this planet which seems to share my point of view. I’m afraid to admit it. His name is Osama Bin Laden. Could he truly change the world for the better? Could he really somehow achieve the annihilation of this bad system, and in some sort of miracle from Allah, make us all happy to be alive? No. And that’s the problem. Religion is probably even worse than capitalism. So no happiness will come from there, especially when it is used to cause more wars and deaths. He’s not our saviors. The concept of Allah as it stands, can just die, with everything else, and the world might become a better place. I don’t give a shit anymore at this point.
Why is it that every savior that we invent is used to destroy what remains of humanity? How many deaths and suffering in history has Jesus Christ alone caused? It is incalculable. He would have achieved more by never coming to Earth in the first place. We would have done nicely without him, and avert perhaps something like just about every war that killed perhaps a billion of people in time? And he was supposed to be our salvation? I wonder if even thought that Corporate America was lurking around the corner two thousand years later. I’m sure in that case he would have written another Bible to warn us against it. But he did not, he could not even save us from that soul destroying system, where freedom is just but an illusion. Can’t even be sick four Fridays in a row without destroying your entire career and the livelihood of your whole family. Wonderful. Try it, be sick four Fridays in a row, and tell me if you are not called in the office to explain yourself. And tell them that you were simply sick, and watch the axe fall to chop your head off. Wonderful.
That gives me an idea for a reality TV program. I’m so devilish. I should propose it to Channel 4 in the UK this very instant. I worked for them before, I’m sure they would not let me down now, would they? Assuming they know I even exist since I was not credited on anything I worked on for them. We can’t even recognized hard work on this planet, some small bastard is always there to take the credit for you, to advance their career on the back of others. It’s not their fault, they were born without imagination and without talent, and so they became masters at stealing the work of others. This is just the kind of people I would be targeting with this program.
Let’s test your degree of freedom in the corporate place. Let’s see how much of a slave you are. Let’s observed all the many levels of management working terribly hard at getting rid of you and destroying your livelihood as soon as you deviate slightly form the conformism you’ve been used to all those years. Especially if you are the best of all, the best salesman they have, the ones bringing the millions in. Let’s see even in those extreme cases, how much freedom you really have before everyone turn against you to make you disappear for good.
I should not really be giving you any good idea here. I should be trying to sell them myself. But I am in no position to sell anything. Hence, everyone is stealing everything from me. And I don’t care, as long as I have somehow some sort of influence, as long as somehow I help this planet being a little happier. So please, if you are to continue to steal all my ideas that I put online, steal this one. Produce that big reality TV show proving all the schemes of the corporate world. How sad they are. The kind of hold they have on all of us. How they drive us all to depression and suicide. Show how sad this world has become. Maybe then, with awareness, we’ll work at changing it, even so slightly. I’ll take anything at this point, just to help me survive each day, one long one at a time.
Actually, there is only person on this planet who seems to share all my points of view. It is not Osama Bin Laden. It is Morrissey, of the band The Smiths. The very band and singer my Spanish Boy at work has fallen into recently. I’m not surprised. The Smiths and Morrissey is stuck forever in all the colleges and universities of this world, it is like an initiation rite. All these songs tells you what you are about to expect, this fight to get a job you cannot expect to make you happy. This fight to find love, which you cannot expect to make you happy. In two words, just kill yourself now, since there’s no hope. And yet we all survive it, we all eventually forget all the The Smiths and Morrissey’s songs, get into this life, and never find any kind of happiness. Heavens Knows we’re miserable now, for all eternity. Just as predicted, just as we already knew it would be. We at least had some sort of warning.