Of course Henry Ford didn’t tell the world he had figured out a way to make people desire slavery. It’s obvious he wanted slaves—it’s obvious to get the eight-hour work day that can earn the worker a whopping $5 a day, and that’s not a satirical comment, it really was a near fortune,---but to get that fortune one had to agree to let Henry Ford check and see if you properly brushed your teeth. (see part three of this story to be published next Tuesday). Such a fortune that it was headlined not only across America and Canada, but in every European paper, Australian papers, probably even Asian papers. Overnight he was the king of the world. Already railroad barons and financiers and steel manufacturers owned the world through intolerable working conditions, miniscule pay and corpses of laborers stacked in their wake of building these fortunes for kings that knew them not. Workers were as replaceable at the time as AAA batteries, probably more so. Between 1870-1900 over a million laborers died on the job in America and over sixteen million more were injured severely enough they could no longer work. So their eight year old children replaced them. This was the importance of the biblical injunction “be plentiful and multiply the earth” , lots of births are necessary because lots of lives need to be taken to support the wealthy landowners and kings of destruction.
But that was America—how many coolies died in India, the Malays, and Indonesia being forced to earn wealth for their corporate owners? And how many were slaughtered around the globe just so these same s.o.b’s (sorry, I apologize for being too kind) could own the resources of the world to own the people?
I don’t have the answer. I know in the same period, ten million (half of the estimated population) died just in the Congo basin as Leopold of Belgium tried to enrich himself. The piles of bodies of those being forced into the mines were occurring more rapidly than they could be disposed of, so pyres were built and lit hourly as dead bodies were dragged out. But that doesn’t include resistors. As they marched into villages to round up natives, they gave them a choice–go die in the mines in a month or two or die right now. But of course that was just as it had always been. The first mining operations in Europe were about rounding up children to go work in the iron mines to make stronger weapons to bludgeon adults to death who were unwilling to sacrifice their children.
Who the hell would willingly work in mines with zero expectancy to survive? Of course to get workers to do so it was always die in a little while or die right now.
Those who try to say civilization was an advancement in the evolution of human intelligence, I ask you to what purpose or advancement do you think people wanted to die laboring in fields, building irrigation ditches to make crops grow that would have grown anyway, at least enough to feed everyone, that their labors were now utilized for; to feed others and they were barely able to subsist? How many people do you actually thought it beneficial to labor for someone else? Can you tell me this was an advancement in intelligence and not the destruction of the evolving intelligence? Can you tell me what kind of human being has no concern for the lives of others and think only of their own? Can you tell me this was intelligent? Or was it the transformation to power by the psychopaths? The very psychopaths rituals had been designed to prevent. Can you explain to me another explanation for the rise of a psychopathic ascendance other than, somehow, in areas of great abundance of resources, where multiple communities were able to co-exist proximally, that by some means these psychopaths devised some scheme to force others into serving them? I would really like to hear a convincing argument. I really would. Because I am apparently too dense to conceive of one myself. And so I’ve been told I’m quite dumb not to be able to see how beneficial it was to humankind.
I do not believe human nature advanced evolutionarily. I believe our nature is the same. I think we long for freedom and community as we evolved hundreds of thousands of years ago, but I believe there were consequential changes to the psyche that created an internecine desire to have what was taken away, but the might of the psychopaths created not only all of the conflict of the historical era, but also a conflict within the personality of humanity between the desire for freedom and community and the desire for what those who had stolen their human nature possessed.
Since the ability to rebel was limited by the creation of levels of advancement in a classed structure, each level suppressing the lower in submission to the higher, and each level desiring more, this More became operative to human desire that began to supplant human needs in our psyche, creating internal conflict that ultimately allowed humans to become susceptibly confused between desire and need that has forever altered our desire of community to be a desire of not the community one belongs to, but to be against the community you don’t. One might have once lived and worked in a common need, now they strove against each other to take from someone else what they didn’t have (or to be susceptible that what one didn’t have was the fault of another.) We became susceptible to believing our failure to have what we didn’t have was not because there was a limited amount to be had, but that there was an unlimited amount to be had and therefore all we needed to do was take more from others that didn’t have. We were like those forced into the mines, presented a choice, really the same choice, but fashioned in a way to confuse the answer into non resistance against the inevitableness of the outcome. Work in the {mine} now and you too can have more by having the opportunity to take more from someone else. The choice still might mean one’s death, but the choice if you take (kill) someone else you too might benefit from what the others have. So instead of reformulating into communities we were reformulated into individuals, families and states against other states, families, and individuals.
For the one living in the U.S., the U.S.S.R. (state) was the evil kingdom, to the McCoys, the Hatfields (family) were the usurpious family, and to the white individual, the black (individual) was lesser. It has to be reversed because the individuals of any color are allied against another state; the mountaineer or city dwellers or suburbanites are allied against others not in their familiar locale, and the individuals are enabled to be allied in favor of themselves. Richard Dawson’s selfish gene has remained mythical, but many modern geneticists researching the brain have found strong indications that there is a high probability of a communal gene.
The Beginnings of Corporations
Originally states found a great benefit in corporations; and allegiance between state and corporation began. Corporations could amass great wealth not by what they produced but by what they might produce. This possible wealth could produce great wealth if it matriculated and it could also produce great wealth if it didn’t that benefited the state that could now tax not only what was produced but what might be produced and it appeared the state had no responsibility for the failure of the corporation and would not lose if the corporation.
The world’s first real corporations; the Dutch and English East India Companies, West India Companies and so on were hardly the first big business partnerships, but they were new in several ways. They were anonymous, meaning that the partners did not all have to know each other. And they separated ownership from control: elected directors made decisions, while most investors had only the choice of either accepting those decisions or selling their shares. They were permanent in the sense that if one or more partners did want out, there was no need to renegotiate the whole arrangement. Finally, they were legal entities separate from any one owner, and thus had an unlimited lifespan. Originally (probably the first) corporation was the Dutch East India Co. that’s charter was for only 21 years (which of course became renewed). Prior to this, partnerships were formulated to perhaps send a ship on one voyage at which time, depending on the amount each partner invested and caveats for a certain return to the ship captain who might or might not have had a personal investment, and upon would divvy up the proceeds. If the investments were high enough, they might join together again or they might send out several ships under a singular partnership agreement, or form a longer lasting partnership like Charles Willing’s son created with America’s financier Robert Morris that became Willing & Morris. Speculation on benefitting from sending out trading caravans to distant destinations goes back in history to near its beginning, when upon return the investors reaped the rewards. But the new firms, like modern corporations, were not designed to self-liquidate. Rather, they built up their capital over the years instead of distributing it back to its separate owners. However the capital needs of most of these adventures had never needed to be incorporated and could simply wait on the return to profit from the journey. The purpose of incorporation had absolutely nothing to do with that. The perpetuity and purpose was that they were not planning on simply sending out ships to bring back goods that they could then sell, or even to take goods to sell. Not at all. The purpose by a group of good Reform Protestants was to arm their ships and engage in piracy, or to steal other’s profits, to benefit themselves and earn favor in the eyes of God and prove how industriously smart they were to they were to their God by stealing from others what was not their own.
Now this is not at all wild or unproven. Mostly unspoken, but very provable. The first proof is their religious doctrine as descendents of Calvinist theology that the accumulation of wealth is a sign of god’s favor (as is good health) and conversely poverty and poor health are a sign of a sinful nature and if you doubt me, work your way through the Institutes, Commentaries, Ecclesiastical Ordinances, Epistles, and Apologies and find this refrain wind its way through the entirety.
Now the reason that the Dutch East Co. needed a greater capital investment was to invest in outfitting their trading vessels with weapons that could engage in war. And the proof for that is exactly what they did. And in fact they had just financed a war to establish the Netherlands’ independence from Spain prior to the formulation of the company. And the license they obtained from their new government was not merely to trade, but to engage in war as a privately contracted navy granted by the government. The original target of course was the Portuguese who monopolized the shipping trade from Asia and to a somewhat lesser extent had contracted with Arabs to monopolize the trade in goods (that expanded to people) with west African outposts.
And for this they needed much larger infusions of investment capital. Over the next few years and several stockholder revolts they were able to be successful.