Way-out, Saturday party-time, plist-type open-ended question....grounded in Puritanism maybe?

[Paul Mackin]

On 6/26/2012 10:33 AM, David Morris wrote:
> On Tue, Jun 26, 2012 at 9:23 AM, Paul Mackin <mackin.paul at verizon.net> wrote:
>> On 6/26/2012 6:06 AM, alice wellintown wrote:
>>> It is far too easy to pile the problems of the world on business and
>>> on men and women in grey suits. And, doing so ignores the issue that
>>> the "cleanliness is next to godliness" phrase begs us to explore. This
>>> phrase, from Acts, has to do with what is sacred and what profane.
>>> And, this distinction is quite germane to our present crisis, how to
>>> engage the Other, the outsider, the foreigner, the person who shares a
>>> new globalized and digitized world with us, perhaps a currency, but
>>> lives over the boarder. First, the forging of the industrial and
>>> mechanical, and now digital way of life, was not done in Big Business
>>> factories. Moreover, the motive for this way of life was not money or
>>> greed, nor was it something technical, nor was it an ideology of
>>> efficiency or some other Big Business Visible Hand value. It was
>>> something sacred. It was a holiness, a Virgin made Dynamo. And, as
>>> your example of a producta that kills those who use it and the world
>>> they live in, suggests, it was about the Control of the Other. So, the
>>> cigarettes of RJR and Phil-Mo were merely a product of the Keeping the
>>> Faith in the machine-cult. The Dynamo was elevated above all else.
>>> And, though Gradgrinds and Spenglers and Mumfords and so on, all
>>> warned that what Adams had identified was a Cult, a religion that
>>> would ignore with Blind Faith, Life and Earth, and though after the
>>> second Great War and several lesser ones after, the Faithful pushed
>>> themselves up off their knees, it was only a matter of time before the
>>> tolling of the Bell called them to service again. And here we are. And
>>> it is not Business we worship. And it is not Businessmen in grey suits
>>> who preach and save us from our wickedness, but the Faith We Keep.
> [...]
>> Alice needs to develop her thesis further.
> You can say that again, unless she's really only interested in talking
> to herself.
>
>> I suggest she include in her argument my own devoutly held view that Big Business isn't something  separate from Us--if fact, Big Business IS us.
> A-and Corporations are People!!!?
>
> Nope.
>
> David Morris
>
big business is the medium, corporations are the message

P