SLEEPWALKERS INC. – THE CORPORATE GIANT
“Dead at 30, buried at 70.” (Douglas Coupland, Generation X, 1991) Corporate zombies or sleepwalkers incorporated are those grey, dull people you see every day on the street. Usually wearing a (funeral) suit and a tie (or is it a noose?) around their neck. And as surprising as it may sound, those people are not really on their way to the biggest funeral ever, they’re just going to work. Dead at 30, buried at 70: that’s what the Corporate Giant does to you. You work, consume, conform and consume again. And, eventually, you die. But you’re actually dead well before you think you are. Well before the cemetery, the grave and all that.
Now, it is true that in today’s society, if you want to survive, chances are you’ll have to find a job. And chances are there will also be some kind of dress code involved. Plus, in recession time, no one’s hiring, so you take whatever job you can get, right? Well, as Willem from Antillectual put it in his concise, striking and memorable style: “every crisis is a moral crisis.”* And no one forces you to work in a tax heaven, and no one forces you to work for a “morally-grey” company, and no one forces you to harm people through your work. If everyone simply refused to work for such companies, they would have to change their policies and to take human rights into account. The Corporate Giant is only as bad and as big as we let him be. First, as employees: because your are GUILTY of something when you work for a company that exploits other people or destroys parts of the environment or uses sweatshops, there’s no arguing about that. You’re not just doing your job (which is basically what the Nazis used to say, you know?), you’re taking a stand, and not a pretty one… you’re basically saying: I don’t care if Chinese children are manufacturing my shoes and I don’t care if they work 100 hours a week and I don’t care if Coca Cola is polluting rivers in India and I don’t care if Dow Chemical killed thousands in India…
But we are also GUILTY as consumers. Each time you buy something, you are making a stand. And whether you support “morally-grey” companies or not is really up to you. The nice people at Adbusters.org invented a game (which is still in the making, but you can already play really), it’s called Killcap (you get points simply by not going to MacDonalds or not drinking Coca-Cola!), and everybody can win. Wouldn’t you rather be alive and proud of what you accomplish, instead of dead inside and participating to the biggest organized crime group of our time: you know, that thing called capitalism?
* (Willem Heijmans, Start from Scratch, “every crisis is a moral crisis,” 2010)