21 Corporations

Austin

Having given greed freer rein, we have gradually super-sized the impulse via the creation of corporations – ‘corporate persons’. These larger-than-life figures roam the cultural landscape leaving us at Lilliputian scale to thread a careful path among them. Not only are they 1,000-fold – or 10,000- or 100,000-fold – larger than individual persons – the original ‘person’ concept – but they are legally bound to pursue self-interest in a way that we would never think of legally binding real individuals, and which no non-sociopath would ever accept. Indeed, we have effectively created gargantuan sociopaths and given them full protection of the law and increasing capacity to shape those laws. 78 Challenging these entities of our own creation is becoming difficult: exercise some moral leadership from within and you risk being denigrated as a ‘whistle-blower’. We have both super-sized and super-empowered self-interest, out of a fundamental belief that the market system can adequately harness the consequences.

Austin (2021) Market-led Sustainability is a ‘Fix that Fails’… (pdf)